The English Daughter

by Maggie Wadey

  Only then did he say, in an almost tender voice, that the woman had done the right thing in coming to him. Stepping back from her he told her he’d decided what best to do: he would refer the whole distasteful business to the higher authority of Monsignor Quinn of Drumcondra, Dublin. And so he did.

  One summer morning, I see my mother, as thin and pale as a flayed bone, slip out of the house and away towards an anonymous letter box in Nenagh with two letters in her hand. One is to Nancy, explaining what she has done, and giving her the address of the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society in Dublin. One – the result of hours of writing and rewriting – is a letter to Monsignor Quinn thanking him in the most abject terms for his kind intervention – he had indeed been both kind and prompt – putting pressure on the Protestant Bethany Home and then, crucially, writing to the Catholic Society itself, standing witness to the decency of the Kavanagh family and to Nancy’s lifelong Catholic devotion. The CPRS wrote its terrible letter to Mrs Kavanagh, my mother replied, and the Society declared itself ‘ready to take charge of the little child’, adding, ‘but of course it will have to be paid for’.

  Soon Jim Casey received the following letter from a worker at the Society:

  Annie Kavanagh has informed me that you are the father of her child and the girl’s sister has written to the same effect. My committee wishes to state that you will have to pay for the maintenance of the said child that would be 30 shillings per month while the child is being nursed out by the society. The committee do not wish to report the matter to your superiors unless you refuse to admit your responsibility and then they shall have to take a very serious view of the matter.

  Jim Casey replied a few days later, saying, ‘I will meet responsibilities as they become due. Thanking you for any trouble you now have taken in the matter.’

  He enclosed the first thirty shillings. Within just a couple of days, the Society had Catherine settled with Mrs Hogan in Monasterevin and Nancy, having been sent her fare by Agnes, was on her way home. The Kavanagh women had achieved what they wanted: a Catholic home for the child and not a whisper of the matter having reached their menfolk.

  Catherine had always believed her mother couldn’t possibly have gone home. But she did. There is a letter she wrote to the Society from Knigh in December:

  ‘...to enquire for little Catherine. Please God I hope to see her after Christmas. I expect she is a very big girl now and a bold girl. Of course in the country people are always busy and then mother not being well all this time [Kate had been in and out of hospital all through this unhappy year] and I am attending the doctor myself nearly since I came home [not surprising that eight months in the Bethany had undermined Nancy’s health too] I am sending her a little frock and cap and little overalls. I thought to get her a little pair of shoes but I don’t know really what size would fit her as I am sure she has a big foot now. Sending my best love to my own little pet.’

  The following spring, the Society informed Nancy that Catherine’s father had stopped sending the agreed thirty shillings. Nancy replied that she would try to contact him herself but that she wanted ‘to give him a chance and find out his reason for failing to pay’4. I feel that Nancy’s protective concern for her one-time lover needs an explanation, but I don’t have one unless it was just the sweetness of her own nature. And I doubt if she ever did get to see her baby who was a world away in County Kildare and, coming to the point, what useful purpose could it serve but to open painful wounds? I’m sure that time in the Bethany was the only time my mother ever set eyes on her little niece. And now it occurs to me that the occasion when the sisters sat side by side on a hospital bed, in silence mostly, hand in hand, was there in the Bethany, and not – as my mother had recalled – when she was rushed to Dublin to have her appendix out. No wonder seeing Nancy hadn’t cheered my mother up much. ‘Why was that?’ I had asked. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Her shrug. ‘Seeing one another like that. So far from home.’

  Abandoned children is a recurrent theme in the Kavanagh story. Mary Rose’s son, Sean. Nancy’s daughter, Catherine. Pat’s children ‘taken into care’ in Nenagh. Even Katherine, my aunt Cathleen’s only child, was abandoned when Cathleen died of self-neglect following her husband’s death at sea in World War Two.

  Even as Nancy had gone running out to meet her lover on those sweet May evenings, the Carrigan Committee was gathering information to report on immorality in the Free State.

  By immorality the committee overwhelmingly meant illegitimacy (though by European standards, the rate in Ireland was low) and prostitution. Violence, abuse, the mistreatment of children and the old were apparently lesser matters. In the mind of the committee, both unlicensed dance halls and the car were seen as great facilitators of moral decline – which no doubt they were. The Carrigan Committee

  Report might at least have provoked an airing of these social problems. Instead, the report was suppressed. ‘Any chance that, for example, child abuse or contraception (the sale and importation of contraceptives was banned in Eire in 1935)5 would be debated in Ireland was buried with the censoring of that report.’

  The spread of VD – in so far as the committee could bring itself to recognise it as a public health issue at all – was, of course, largely blamed on women, though a distinction was made between those ‘relatively unchaste’ and those considered ‘irredeemable’, meaning professional prostitutes and women born out of wedlock. ‘Irredeemable’. In 1985 it was still possible for a journalist in the magazine Magill to observe that ‘the unmarried mother is still a pariah and her child is still a bastard, because there is only one sin in Ireland and only women can commit it’.

  The treatment endured by women and children in the Magdalene Laundries, the industrial schools – and, as I now know, in the Protestant homes, too – is something I hardly need enumerate. Starvation, neglect and abuse were common. Children born outside marriage were five times more likely to die prematurely. Nancy, however, wrote of the kindness ‘shown to myself and little Catherine by Nurse Farrell’ at the Society’s nursing home. And Catherine herself says that though her mother would have been made to work in the Catholic Home – hard, punishing work at that – ‘Who but the Church would have taken us in?’

  Ireland has traditionally been depicted as a woman – romantic, irrational, vanquished. But the men of Ireland must themselves take some responsibility for the mass emigration of their young women who, the nation’s newly won freedom notwithstanding, continued to leave, alone, and in greater numbers than ever – the six Kavanagh sisters amongst them. Speaking in the senate on censorship in 1928, the writer Oliver St John Gogarty said, ‘It is high time that the people of this country find some other way of loving God than by hating women.’

  When Agnes went to Busherstown, the young men of Moneygall knew better than to approach her. They reckoned she must have had some kind of bad experience, and Mrs Minchin sensed Agnes was troubled but would resist the comfort of intimacy. I never knew my aunt Nancy well enough to imagine, retrospectively, what it all did to her. I believe hers was the more resilient nature. Wasn’t Nancy the one who had no common sense, the one inclined to bend with the moment? Wasn’t Nancy forgetful and trusting? Careless. Where our perception of character is concerned, I’m less resistant to the idea: ‘It all depends.’ Even, especially, our most intimate understanding of ourselves may have to bow to the judgement of others. We have a sense of ourselves, but others have a sense of us, too, often very much at odds with our own estimation and, to make matters worse, each person’s view may be at odds with another’s.

  My mother had an expression: ‘I speak as I find.’ I, of course, can’t ‘find’. I never met my mother or Nancy when they were girls. I decide to visit someone who did: Annie O’Brien.

  Finding her alone, I’m able to ask her frankly if she ever heard of Nancy having a baby when she was still very young and she immediately says, Yes, she had. It was in the winter of 1930.

  ‘I was only twelve,’ she tells me. ‘Wh
at did I know? Except that Nancy had gone to Dublin too early for her mother’s liking.’

  When she was a little older, however, Annie understood what had really happened. Indeed, she had to confess that Nancy was held up as an example to be at all costs avoided. Not that anyone would dare to admit that to Mrs Kavanagh’s face! Can you imagine it? Someone did once make some kind of sly reference to Nancy being the youngest ‘and isn’t it the youngest give you the most to worry about?’ My grandmother had turned on him like a viper. ‘I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head!’ she hissed. As to the father? It was the Reverend Burroughs. How did she hear that? I ask.

  ‘Sure, ‘twas well known.’

  I am at least able now, so many years later, to set the record straight on that particular issue.

  ‘But you didn’t tell me any of this before,’ I point out.

  Annie raises both hands in a suggestive gesture. Then she adds another memory of her own: in the winter of 1930, when she was twelve years old, Annie was sent up to the Kavanaghs’ for an old coat of Nancy’s which my grandmother had offered to cut down for her. This was the time, she recalled, that my grandmother had given up on the idea of going to Dublin in her new hat. Annie took with her a bag of sweet-smelling cherrywood kindling. They stood in the in the kitchen, very quiet and easy, and the neat, spacious house was empty around them. There was a clock ticking, a beautiful old grandmother clock that had come from Mary Dunne. Mrs Kavanagh was pleased with the results of her sewing. She told Annie the blue coat suited her fair hair. She never made the child feel in any way looked down on, not even when she came to collect milk or butter – Annie stresses this fact – there was no superiority in my grandmother’s way of giving. But on that day, the child noticed that Mrs Kavanagh seemed troubled and, when she went down on her knees to pin the hem, Annie thought she heard her murmur through heavy sighs, ‘Poor Annie, poor Annie!’ which was strange and disturbing, even though she d Mrs Kavanagh must be referring to her own daughter. ‘I was only twelve,’ says Annie, ‘what did I know? Except that Nancy had left school too early for her mother’s liking. We all knew Mrs Kavanagh was a great believer in education, for her girls as much as the boys. “Stay at school” she told me. “It’ll be the crowning of you.”’ Annie laughs. ‘Well I stayed, and it wasn’t. But without it I’d never have had the confidence to go to America. No one else ever said anything like that to me.’

  It was maybe a year or so later, after Nancy had been away for some time – ‘working in Dublin’ as her mother said – Annie remembers her coming there to the O’Briens’ gate on her bicycle, and stopping to have a chat with Annie’s mother. Annie remembers her mother seemed a little – what would she say – not distant with the girl, no, not one bit, but shy, a little awkward, and Nancy was just her old self, laughing, with a cigarette in her hand. Just the same except for her hair, which was red.

  Ah yes! I have a photo of Nancy sitting in a garden somewhere – it could well be here, at Knigh – with a melodeon on her lap and her thick hair is coloured in red. Why had she done that, I wonder? Was it an act of defiance? Red hair being associated with a wild, dangerous nature. With sex. Perhaps it was part of a process of recreating herself. Two years later she was gone to a new life.

  By September 1935, Nancy was in England and married to an Englishman. The chronology I’ve puzzled over is beginning to fall into place. When I check the date of Pat’s shotgun wedding I see that it was in August 1933, which means that when my mother went home to convalesce, Pat must already have been living there with his eighteen-year-old wife, Anastasia, and their first child. And things had already gone badly wrong. Pat was drinking, there were outbursts of domestic violence and constant squabbling between Kate and her slovenly daughter-in-law. Sometimes, as Billy Foley related, Anastasia ran down the hill to take refuge with the Foleys. One day my grandmother locked them into their room to prevent them shaming her in such a way. Occasionally, Pat, Anastasia and the baby took off back to her family in Nenagh where Pat’s behaviour deteriorated even further until he crawled back home again.

  Anastasia is remembered for saying, ‘Paddy’s mother thinks the sun shines out of his arse, well, if she knew him as I know him, she’d have many a dark day.’

  So, home during this period would have been Agnes’s idea of hell on earth. Pity for her mother would have been mixed with a good deal of impatience, yet surely a powerful sense of responsibility, too? Who knows which way the scales might have tipped but for one thing. As I’m leaving, Annie comes to the door with me. She remarks on the fact it was hardly surprising if, by now, even Mrs Kavanagh had the priest come up to the house to see her.

  ‘Do you remember that?’ she asks. I say I do. She hesitates. ‘It was Jim reminded me last night: there were fireworks up there at Knigh over the priest’s visits.’

  ‘How do you mean, “fireworks”?’

  ‘Agnes didn’t like it. You see, it wasn’t Father O’Meara, I was wrong there. It was Father O’Donnel, and your mother had taken against him.’

  Here it is, then, the last missing piece, dropped light as a feather into my hand.

  The priest who climbed down from his newly painted sidecar that bitter morning at Knigh was the man who had humiliated my mother when she appealed to him in her sister’s cause. Monsignor Quinn, having interceded on Nancy’s behalf, had then extended the hand of the Church to Mrs Kavanagh in the form of Father O’Donnel. When Agnes saw him, she dropped the armful of peat she was about to carry into the house and flitted away out of sight. That her mother should be reconciled to any priest nauseated her, but that it should be this priest, this man whose hand her mother kissed, before whom she knelt to confess her sins and ask forgiveness, sent a whirlwind of pain and anger through her. Later, when she came in chilled to the bone, her mother said lightly, ‘Shame on you! Father O’Donnel knew you were there.’

  And Agnes cried out, ‘How could you let that man into the house?’ Her mother turned towards her and her face was suddenly very white. ‘A man who treated your own daughter like she was something he’d brought in on his shoes!’

  ‘Who are you to speak of a man of God in that tone?’

  Mrs Kavanagh brought one of her pans down on the stove with such ferocity it struck sparks. ‘Is there no decency left in you?’

  The air between them was solid with anger. Kate reeled slightly. Then, as if stepping back from a blaze, she held up both hands, turned away, and said in a quiet voice, ‘It comforts me to have him here. Isn’t it the only comfort I have?’

  ‘It is now!’ Agnes cried bitterly.

  As she pulled open the door a cold blast came into the kitchen. Kate’s maternal authority was shocked back into action. In a steely voice she commanded Agnes to get outside and feed the geese, a job which properly fell to Pat. Scarcely aware of what she was doing, Agnes took the feed from the bin in the outhouse and, ignoring the mould all over it, she heated it up, then lugged the steaming bucket out on to the icy hillside. A few hours later the geese lay scattered across the twilit field, as white, as dead as pillows.

  In the morning Agnes went to Busherstown to say goodbye to Mrs Minchin, and the following day her father took her in the pony trap to Nenagh Station. She was gone.

  When my parents and I visited Ireland together in 1994, our tour ended in Dublin. Sitting across the lounge in the Shelbourne Hotel that afternoon was a table of black-frocked priests. Like us, they were taking tea. My mother watched them – to be honest, she stared – and several times she nodded towards them with a little grin. Then, somewhat wistfully, she said, ‘It must be a wonderful thing to believe. To have faith.’

  She emphasised the word ‘faith’ both with her voice and with a strong, meaningful glance at my father. There then followed one of those conversations I remembered so well from my childhood. My father agreed that religion wasn’t a bad thing, indeed it was necessary for civilization – ‘Or rather,’ he corrected himself ‘for the civilizing of mankind’ – it was just somet
hing civilization should grow out of. My mother’s eyes glazed over. ‘Spirituality’ wasn’t a word she ever used but, if she had expressed herself here, I think she would have argued that what my father was recommending was the very worst aspect of religion: its dogma and repression, its rules, its HYPOCRISY. Buttering some scones energetically as he spoke, my father went on to suggest that, just as toys are necessary to children, so religion is necessary to growing minds. Two red spots appeared high on my mother’s cheeks.

  ‘Are toys necessary?’ she demanded furiously and, in terms of the logic of my father’s argument, apparently beside the point. ‘Most children have to get by without toys.’

  The priests finished their tea and the maître d’hôtel graciously accompanied them to the door.

  It was the following day, on the ferry boat coming back to England, that I asked my mother how she had felt all those years ago, as a young woman leaving Ireland.

  ‘My feelings about leaving Ireland were mixed.’ She had shot me a look. ‘You know what mixed feelings are, don’t you?’

  *

  I have the photograph in front of me now, my mother as a grown woman on the arm of a handsome young man, a younger man as is obvious even in this full-length snapshot of them standing in an English garden facing the camera – I don’t know whose – which has somehow, even in this still image of a still moment, captured movement, the movement of affection and desire, showing them already confident and familiar enough to touch, shoulder to hip. I like to think I’m there, part of the laughter, even though I’ve still got a few years to wait. My parents are too absorbed in one another to be more than glancingly self-conscious. Maybe she has an Irish look about her, maybe she hasn’t. Yes, with that glossy black hair and white skin I imagine you might guess she’s Irish, and probably her voice would still give her away but, though she will speak of home and family if asked, she doesn’t volunteer such information. She is as newly minted as Venus risen from the waves. She has arrived. She is her own woman. To judge from my mother’s hairstyle, I guess it’s the late 1930s. Yes, it must be the autumn of ’39, shortly before their wedding. Here in the first photo I have of her, my mother looks disconcertingly mature. Not matronly, she’s too slender and fine-featured for that, but certainly a good deal more mature than the young man whose arm she holds and who’s only just had his twenty-first birthday. My father who – did I say? – is wearing the uniform of a private in the British Army, and is about to have six of his best young years consumed by the war.