by Maggie Wadey
Seamus still pined for his home county, Cork, for his family, and for the old life. In ’52, moving against the tide, the couple returned to Ireland. Seamus had ambitions. Within ten years, he had established his own taxi company, and Catherine had given birth to two more healthy children. For a while during the last years of her life Mrs Hogan lived with them. She taught Catherine’s daughter to walk.
Aged thirty-five, Catherine returned to Dublin and took the first step in a search to find her real mother. At the Four Courts she obtained a copy of her birth certificate. On it were just two pieces of information: her mother’s name, Annie (as Nancy had been baptised) Kavanagh, of Nenagh, Tipperary, and Catherine’s date and place of birth: March 1931, at 18 Capel Street, Dublin. 18 Capel Street was a Protestant Bethany Home for unmarried women and their children. So this is the ‘Bird’s Nest’ she’d come from. But why? And who was her father?
It was many years before Catherine – against her husband’s advice – found the courage to trace her mother to Knigh and to learn that she, Nancy, was the youngest daughter of John and Kate Kavanagh. It became her habit once a year to come here to where she had been told her grandparents – our grandparents – were buried. She came to be known locally by her smart expensive cars, a new one every couple of years or so. It was on one of these visits she had met and, in due course, been befriended by Joan Cleary. Soon she learned that when Nancy was fourteen she’d gone to work as housemaid for the Protestant minister, Reverend Burroughs, at his home near Puckaun. This was the job my mother so disapproved of her doing. Catherine became convinced that this man was her father. Certainly it was then, whilst working in the Burroughs’ household, that Nancy became pregnant.
This is the sum of Catherine’s information on the circumstances of her conception and birth. But this is about to change. On a recent trip to Dublin she visited the Catholic Society . They have undertaken to forward copies of the records of Catherine’s birth and fostering to her here, at Knigh.
Before we part I give Catherine an edited version of what I know about Nancy’s life.
I tell her that Nancy married an Englishman in 1935, had three children, and died some time in the ’60s. I’m ashamed not to remember the exact date because I had known and loved Nancy, but at that time I was in the full spate of my own young life. When I tell Catherine that Nancy had suffered badly from arthritis, that it was, indeed, the drugs for arthritis that finally killed her, Catherine confirms that she, too, suffers from arthritis. When I mention that our grandmother had agoraphobia, Catherine exclaims that she, too, for a period when the children had grown up and left home, had suffered from agoraphobia. This does surprise me. Catherine has a strong presence, a good mind and a quick sense of humour. Agoraphobia suggests hidden conflict, but clearly there are good reasons why I shouldn’t be surprised by that.
Whilst Catherine has been speaking I’ve tried to fit these new pieces of information into the pattern of dates and events as I know them. The burning question for me is, Did my mother know? Did she know at the time? She must have done. She was still here in Ireland in 1931, and weren’t she and Nancy ‘like that’?
As Catherine tells me her story, as she tilts her head back to rest it on the back of the chair, I can’t take my eyes off her face which seems to metamorphose under my gaze, manipulated by memory and apprehension: I see no likeness to Nancy, except the blue eyes and, of course, the arthritis. But I can see some kind of ‘family resemblances’ emerging like the build-up of an identikit image on a plasma screen, and they are all to Aunt Bridie. Or to my mother. Mouth. Gestures. Something in those long limbs, the width at the cheekbones, the emphatic, dark hairline. The longer I look, the stronger the resemblance to my mother becomes. So the question I’m really asking myself is this: was ‘Annie’ in fact Agnes Kavanagh? Is the woman I’ve just met my half-sister? It would explain several features of my mother’s own story: the slightly odd chronology I’ve already puzzled over, the somehow unsatisfactory explanation for her flight to England. Her silences.
Yes, there are baby-shaped gaps in the account I’ve put together, and the ‘appendix operation’ could have been a cover – as it often was – for a quite different reason necessitating a visit to Dublin.
A digression – if that’s what it is: a couple of years before my mother died she was rushed into Kingston Hospital with stomach pain. This resulted in her having her appendix removed at the age of eighty-five. This was how I came to discover that she had not, in fact, had her appendix removed as a young woman in Dublin. My father, naturally, thought it was all ‘very Irish’ but there was a perfectly good medical explanation for her scar and her long hospitalization: peritonitis requires a long draining of the poison before an operation is considered safe, and the doctors in Dublin may well have felt it remained unsafe, or even unnecessary, to proceed.
Eventually, the papers Catherine has been expecting arrive. They include her ‘long’ birth certificate, and a dozen or so letters. First amongst the letters we devour is one written to our grandmother in August 1931, from the Catholic Protection and Rescue Agency in Dublin:
Dear Mrs Kavanagh,
I am writing to you about your daughter Annie. She was brought to this office on Saturday by one of the officials from Bethany where she has been since her child was born. The little child, who is five months old, was baptised this morning and your daughter is waiting to hear from you and wants you to send her fare.
Your daughter informs me that her own sister (Joanna) [my aunt Josie’s baptismal name] put her into the Home and I am very surprised to hear that you left your daughter there and risked losing her soul and the soul of her little child. I certainly think it was you or your people’s duty to have come to Dublin and taken her out immediately. I want the address of your daughter who is responsible for doing this dreadful act.
It was Agnes who, by return of post, replied to this terrible letter. She must have been trembling, because the wobble is clear in the first few lines, her hand immature yet shockingly familiar:
...your letter to hand this morning. I am Annie’s sister and as my mother is very delicate I could not let her see your letter as dear mother is such a good mother to us. I have to keep any bad news from her as she is in bed very ill. As regards to the Protestant Home where my sister’s baby was born I knew it was a Protestant Home but I did not tell my dear mother as she is so easily worried. Father nor brothers know anything about it at all. None of them knows about her. It is hard to tell a lie but it had to be. If my father knew about Annie we would all be killed. At the time poor Annie went away we were so worried and it is keep a secret that we did not know what to do. I cannot sleep or work only worrying but I trust in God to save her.
This letter established beyond doubt who Catherine’s mother was.
It surely can’t have been later than August or September of the previous year that Agnes came to know her sister was pregnant. Perhaps she saw her from far off. Maybe she saw Nancy come dawdling up the hill from work, saw the outline of her sister’s body and knew, she just KNEW, there was a baby in there. I can imagine Nancy denying it at first. Stormy-faced. Denying the possibility of it. Denial was the only plan she’d come up with so far and if she denied it for long enough, maybe it would go away? Agnes’s first question must have been, ‘Who is the father? WHO IS he? He must be made to marry you! Is he willing? How could you think so little of yourself?’
Quite what occurred next, and why, I don’t know, only that there was no wedding. And Agnes gave up any ideas she’d had of moving on. Across the years I can feel my mother’s shame, her fear and her fury. Pity only came later, much later, when she felt she could afford it. Now she had to act. But what? How? Agnes had never been to Dublin, never made a telephone call, never addressed an envelope or bought stamps. She only knew Nancy must be got away before the men realised what had happened. So the sisters wrote to Josie in Dublin. Or did they ask, face to face, that time when Josie and Bridie were home for a visit with Dublin writ
ten all over them, carrying umbrellas, and Bridie wearing a golden hat the size of a bicycle wheel? This would be the time my grandmother’s eagerly planned trip to Dublin did not take place and my mother stopped dancing.
4
The fashionable dressmaker for whom Josie and Bridie worked drew her clients from the Protestant gentry. Amongst them was a philanthropic lady, a lay evangelist and a member of the managing committee of the Bethany. It was Josie, the more driven of the sisters, who finally plucked up the nerve to ask this lady, Would the Bethany take a respectable Catholic girl who found herself in trouble? It seemed it would. The obvious advantage to the sisters of such an arrangement was that, in removing Nancy from the Catholic network, they hid her away as if she’d never been. There would be no communication with the Kavanaghs’ family priest back in Puckaun. Who knew if a priest could be relied on not to inform the girl’s father? The Reverend Burroughs appears to have played no part in any of this. In due course, a letter came back from Josie to say a refuge had been found for Nancy – no doubt adding that Nancy should thank God first and her sisters second for scouring the charities of Dublin and humiliating and shaming themselves in the process and who would ever believe they were decent girls from a decent family. And so on.
It was most likely Agnes who went shopping for Nancy. She was the one who would have been able to draw her raincoat belt tight round her slim waist and look the shopkeeper in the eye as she chose a nightdress and a pair of slippers. Handing over the money she caught a brief, inquisitive glint in the draper’s eye which he extinguished with the wipe of a nicotine-stained hand over his brow. I see her roll the nightdress around two pairs of clean knickers and a new flesh-coloured brassiere and put them into a bag for Nancy who sits on the bed behind her, chewing the ends of her hair. ‘And for the love of God,’ Agnes says bitterly, without turning, ‘will you remember to darn your stockings and keep yourself clean.’
The men and women who made up the managing committee of the Bethany were obliged to sign a ‘doctrinal pledge’ proclaiming amongst other things ‘the utter depravity of human nature…and the eternal punishment of the wicked’. The nurses hired were explicitly enlisted as evangelical and ‘missionary-minded’. Internally, the Home was known as ‘the Mission’. The Protestant Church of Ireland, it turns out, was as zealous as the Catholic in getting and keeping possession of its own. In its passion to save souls the Bethany appears to have neglected the health of mothers and babies in its care. In Mount Jerome Cemetery are several unmarked common graves for the many children who died there. They died of convulsions, heart failure, wasting disease, pneumonia, meningitis. When the State (the newly independent Catholic state of Ireland) intervened, it too showed itself more concerned with the religious issues than with the physical welfare of mothers and babies.
In November, more than six months pregnant, Nancy travelled, alone, by train from Nenagh to Dublin. There she hung about in the cold, looking in the shop windows on Grafton Street until it was dark before walking to number 24 Marlborough Street, where Josie and Bridie lodged. Josie gave her a cup of tea, then the two of them cut across O’Connell Street and walked along the river, past the smart south-facing houses and the Four Courts, a long walk to a poorer part of town, to the Bethany, Protestant home for fallen women, which took her in.
For over two months there was silence. Josie and Bridie were already gone away to Canada, chasing the man Josie would eventually marry, abandoning Nancy and her baby to their fate. In Nenagh, Agnes was stacking shelves in the Brophys’ grocery when Pat appeared at the door. He had a letter come for her from Nancy. He took a drink at the bar then threw his leg over his old bike and left. Agnes ran out to the back and opened a letter that put the responsibility for everything on to her powerless nineteen-year-old shoulders: secrecy, her mother’s health, her sister’s salvation, and the baby’s future. I think this must be the time Agnes recalled having to rush from the Brophys’ to Dublin.
Nancy wrote that during her labour, and in terror of death, she had been denied the Catholic rites. She had been told she must have the baby baptised in the Protestant faith or the Home would not undertake to have it fostered and, in six months, she’d be put back out on the street. If nowhere could be found for her, wouldn’t she just turn up on the Home doorstep with the baby in her arms? Only she didn’t have the fare. Only by then, she and the baby would most likely be dead.
In fact, 1931 was a ‘lucky’ year at the Bethany. In 1936 twenty-nine babies died, but in 1931 it was fewer than five. Agnes found her sister easily enough in the stinking little dormitory because she could never mistake Nancy’s eyes for anyone else’s. With no source of heating other than the bodies it contained, the room was cold and damp. On all sides, babies lay in dirty nappies, screaming, and their mothers either screamed back or sat sunk in a stupor. Some attempted to air damp clothes against their own bodies. There appeared to be no one in charge, no one to offer care or relief. Agnes, with the shilling she’d put aside for lunch, went out and bought zinc ointment for the baby’s head.
Only now – so it emerges from the later three-way correspondence between the sisters and the Rescue Society – with the prospect of being turfed out looming over her, did Nancy confess: the father of her baby was Jim Casey, the young surveyor who’d come there last summer surveying the roads for the county council, come like a bird and gone away again, the one Nancy had pretended not to care for, the one whom their mother had marked down for Agnes, the nice one with the brown eyes. Jim knew and had promised to pay for all, only Nancy had thought to get by without him.
Before leaving the Bethany, Agnes spoke to a large pale-eyed woman called Miss Lettie Cullen who stared the way one small child stares at another and told Agnes that her ‘only aim in life was to bring sinners back to Christ’. Matron didn’t have time to say anything at all as she was ‘busy attending the sick babies’, though Agnes had seen no sign of her.
Agnes stood a moment trembling on the doorstep. Then she ran to the nearest Catholic church and there in the transept she found the address of a Catholic agency called Saint Patrick’s Guild. Returning home, she told her mother only that Nancy was perfectly well. In secret she then wrote to the matron of the Bethany, asking her to discharge Nancy into the care of Saint Patrick’s Guild. She wrote to the secretary of the guild, asking them to rescue Nancy. These were the first real letters Agnes had ever written to anyone other than her sisters, though she had, of course, been taught at the convent the correct way to go about it: Dear Sir/Madam, writing the address on the right, date on the left, and signing Yours faithfully with her full name. She received no reply. Nor did her letter to the surveyor, care of his company in Limerick, provoke a response.
Agnes prayed to Mary Mother of God to save Nancy and her baby. Images of her sister’s shrunken face and of the baby with its red weeping eyes haunted her nights and took away her sleep. She remained convinced that if her father and brother got to know what had happened, they would all be killed. In a family who weren’t great talkers perhaps secrecy was easier, but the physical symptoms of intense anxiety are difficult to hide. Sometimes on her nightlong vigils Agnes saw her father go outside to block the foxholes for the hunt – because of course she’d known for a long time that that was what he was doing. Even under these circumstances, and terrified in case Nancy did something foolish – she recalled stories of desperate girls throwing both their babies and themselves into the river – still it was a couple of weeks before Agnes was ready to go to a priest.
In the presbytery of the Church of Saint Mary of the Rosary, in Nenagh, Agnes went down on her knees before Father O’Donnel, a priest previously unknown to her. She asked politely, in a voice so low as to be almost inaudible, for the church’s help in this, her sister’s hour of need. Father O’Donnel was experienced in these matters. He knew all the deceptions, denials and panics of young – and not so young – women caught in these circumstances. Rather than admit their own shame, their most common manoeuvre was to na
me a friend, or sister, as the one in trouble. Having listened patiently to the supplicant, it was Father O’Donnell’s habit to pinch the girl’s chin between finger and thumb and turn her blank face up to his. ‘Why would I be helping a young woman who is not only wicked but a liar, too? Eh? Tell me that.’ In the face of such injustice, every nerve in my mother’s body dictated silence. Yet, as the silence was prolonged, her heart must have flooded with terrible self-knowledge: she’d rather die than be found guilty of the same filthy crime as her beloved sister. Father O’Donnel proceeded in his usual manner: shoving her head down, he demanded she bow to the Lord God and pray that through the merciful intercession of the Virgin Mary she might be forgiven her sins, whether of commission or of omission, that is to say, if nothing else, for what she, the elder, had failed to do: to be the guide and shield of Nancy’s innocence. The word ‘innocence’ would have been too much. Where speech would not come, tears did, hot and wet, the mark of her submission, the price of the priest’s mercy.