by Maggie Wadey
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4. In all, Catherine’s father did pay towards her maintenance for two years. After that he failed to do so, citing his father’s death and consequently his own responsibility for his mother and younger siblings..
5. And remained so until 1985.
5
When David asked to see Agnes again after their first date she said, ‘Yes, so long as we don’t go to another dance.’
When he asked her to marry him she said ‘No’. She admitted to being some years older than he, a fact David insisted was of no interest to him. But my mother had already had the best part of ten years out in the world, and she was actively looking for ‘a better life’, something I imagine she hadn’t defined all that clearly but felt she’d recognise when she saw it. On the face of it, David may not have looked all that promising. My father was only just setting out on life and, professionally, he was still in the foothills. The fact that he was living on the £1 a week allowance Henderson paid him can hardly have been in his favour. When my parents began courting, all David could afford to buy his sweetheart was a weekly packet of ten Craven ‘A’, price 6d. Anyway, Agnes refused even engagement for one whole year.
So that’s how it was: on New Year’s Eve 1938, exactly a year after they had first met, they became engaged. By this time, not only had my father’s income risen to the enviable sum of two pounds a week – paid by the council – but it was clear that, when he completed his Articles, he had the prospect of a secure and successful professional career. My mother was certainly not materialistic, but nor was she a romantic fool. Prospects were important. My father had a future. Just as importantly, he had no past. And – no small matter this – he wasn’t checked or weighted with religion. You can’t get much fainter on the religious spectrum than lapsed Church of England.
Agnes often said the reason she married David was because she could trust him – she who had never trusted anything in trousers. Except, that is, for Jim Cooney. But of course there was more to it than that. Perhaps, in spite of his youth and penniless condition, she recognised in this decent and handsome young man a willing and worthy collaborator in her not-quite-imagined but expansive future. In Sussex they went on the motorbike together along green lanes to Glyndebourne where they heard Mozart for the first time – the beginning of a lifelong love of opera. Their tickets were 10s each and admitted them to the dress rehearsal, for which no evening dress – which, naturally, they didn’t possess – was required. In the interval they sat on my father’s raincoat on the lawn eating watercress sandwiches amongst the toffs, laughing secretly at the braying voices and fancy clothes. And on her night off, David would always be there waiting to meet Agnes on the lane from the big house. She had no light on her bike but he could see her coming in the dark by the pulsing red glow of her cigarette, hear the swish of her skirt, the hum of her wheels. It was a romance. Each was the other’s adventure.
Enclosed in a box of memorabilia for these years are some notes of Dorothy’s. They end with the following paragraph:
For a couple of years, Mother was with a family named Whittington, supposedly descended from the famous Dick. From there she heard about the job as cook at Collyer’s School. She was there for nearly twenty years and that’s where you come in, Margaret, and I’m sure that you remember those school years and why we were all thrown together. I came home during the war, as you know, because my marriage had gone and I had Elizabeth to rear on my own and no one would rent a house to me without me producing a man! David had meanwhile met Agnes – she had taken mother’s position with the Whittingtons – and he was afraid that with the war she would be sent back to Ireland.6 So the school was the answer for us all.
At the door to the register office in Chichester there were posted two signs: ‘All illegitimate children must be registered’ and ‘No spitting – fine five pounds.’ Marriage, of course, required my mother’s papers, a birth certificate at the very least. None was forthcoming. It was at this point my mother claimed that her birth certificate had been destroyed in a fire in Dublin.7 The problem was solved by the acquisition of a temporary passport. My father’s old mentor, the Collyer’s School teacher, Mr Henderson, verified that a photograph was indeed a true likeness of Agnes Kavanagh and obligingly fibbed about the length of time he’d known her. My mother travelled with Dorothy and David’s older brother, Charles, on the train from Horsham to Chichester where my father – in the first wave of men to be called up – was stationed. She sat all the way on her handbag in order to protect her pale coat. She wore a lilac-coloured hat of fine straw and matching lilac gloves. She turned and turned the engagement ring on her finger and only relaxed, as abruptly as if she’d inhaled Valium, when she saw David was there on the platform, waiting for her, and his warm hand took hers, shaking a little, but strong.
It is September 23rd 1939, just a few weeks after an IRA bombing in Coventry that killed five people. My mother is making her own statement of loyalty by marrying an English soldier. My father is wearing the uniform of a private in the 4th Battalion of the Royal Sussex.
They’d intended to buy the wedding ring there, in town, at one of the classy jewellers, but it was a Wednesday afternoon, early closing, and all the shops were closed. They walked a while through the sun-filled, oddly deserted streets. From an open window came the sound of someone’s wireless playing American jazz. Then, at three o’clock, they were married – using my father’s signet ring – by a man with such a pronounced stutter it was difficult to understand him and therefore difficult to know when to respond. They laughed afterwards saying God only knew what they’d let themselves in for since they might have been saying ‘I will’ to anything and what a poor show, wasn’t it? to have such an unsuitable man for the job. Agnes said she didn’t care – she would have been happy to be married by a donkey so long as it was all legal and above board. They parted from the others and shyly walked away alone, hand in hand, towards their hotel.
I have, naturally, seen a copy of my parents’ marriage certificate. On it, my mother maintains her lie about her age – such a little lie, shaving just a couple of years off her age – and describes her father as a farmer. But most interesting is the fact that my mother’s marriage was not Catholic. It was an English register office wedding. Agnes Wadey was, it seems, perfectly happy to have her soul look after itself.
My parents had just the one night together, then my father was back to barracks. For a few months these were at Chichester Racecourse, then in Dorset, at Long Burton. The men were on active war training until the battalion went to France in February 1940. In that time he had just three two-day leaves. My father, made desperate by this particularly torturous form of separation from his bride, took seriously to cards. He played pontoon and solo whist. After the war he progressed to bridge, at which he turned out to have some skill. He played for money, hour after hour, with a fag at the corner of his mouth, his right foot tap-tapping under the table. Harder to imagine is my mother being a camp follower, but on a couple of occasions that’s what she had to be, walking the gauntlet of the envious grins and whistles of the other soldiers before she could close the door on privacy with her man.
As Dorothy said, the war years had thrown her and my mother and my English grandmother together. This family tie was never broken. On the sixth anniversary of my mother’s death, Aunt Dorothy wrote me the following letter:
I still see her by David’s side when he comes to Horsham and I go to New Malden, my dear companion of those dreary war years, which had to be lived without our ‘men’ and how after the war, when we moved to Farthings and on the day of the move she came to the cottage and pushed Anne8 in her pram to my new ‘home’ with Bob’s mother and the tongue lashing she gave me on my pitiful future with another baby and no permanent roof over my head!! Well – I had many other scathing remarks from others too – but I was young and it didn’t seem insurmountable and really wasn’t!
But I knew that sort of life wasn’t for her, I was in a different l
eague, but admired her muchly all her life and if it wasn’t for it being in black and white I find it hard to believe it has been all of six years today. Thinking of you. The weather is surely against a trip to Shere. However – it doesn’t stop, the thinking about her I mean.
Much, much love Dorothy.
More than her mixed feelings for my mother, Dorothy’s letter reveals the essentials of her character: her remarkable generosity, her capacity (especially in old age) for veiled spite, her undeserved self-deprecation. The letter is, in fact, a good example of her style: her memories, her most casual remarks, were frequently spiked, laced with a dash or two of arsenic, odourless, tasteless until you felt its effects in your bloodstream. My mother’s style was very different – plainer, both less composed and much less communicative. She either exercised rigid censorship – like her parents, she rarely spoke ill of anyone – or she told alarming, blistering truths. Poison or the stiletto might have been Dorothy’s murder weapons. My mother’s would have been a gun.
But weapons were never drawn. My mother had a sense of her own worth. Dorothy never really did. My mother, more confident and more ambitious, took control of her own life. My aunt never moved more than thirty miles from the village where she was born and she never fulfilled her obvious potential. After her death, a stash of her own poems was found in the drawers of her dresser. But these two women, so very different, never did less than support and co-operate with one another. They were the strongly contrasting guardian spirits who presided over my childhood.
On at least a couple of occasions during the war my mother took me to stay with her sister Nancy in Hanwell. I was in her arms, about to be laid between pillows at the foot of her bed, when a passing doodlebug fell silent and drifted past the window to cause murder and mayhem half a mile away. On a later visit, I remember my mother’s white-lipped fury at Dan coming there and showing off a great wad of notes and not giving a penny to Nancy who was kept on such tight money by her husband, as Dan well knew. As Dan had foreseen, and was certainly not above saying so. I don’t remember any of the other Kavanagh sisters being there, though Nancy always remained in touch with them. There may have been bad feeling between my mother and Bridie and Josie. It may have been returned: my mother, after all, had not just married an Englishman, she had left the Church and the Irish community, which Nancy most certainly had not.
At this stage, in the late ‘forties, Nancy was still a healthy young woman, with three children. The two women were still very close and, in a childish way, I was very aware of it. The comforting, seductive intimacy of their voices in the kitchen whilst the children and I played in the garden, the blind ease of their body language. Something quite different in my mother from when she was around the Wadeys. I was aware, too, of that very particular sadness in my mother’s feelings for Nancy, a sadness which increased through the years of Nancy’s troubled marriage and illness.
I only recall this being made explicit once. We were in the kitchen one day, laughing at Nancy’s two-year-old son’s comic attempts to stand, all of which ended with him plumping down on his bottom. Suddenly Nancy said, ‘There’s something wrong with him.’ There was. Soon the child was diagnosed with a genetically inherited disease, inherited only through the male line. Nancy was told her son would become progressively more crippled. Telling my father this, my mother broke down.
But did they really talk of nothing but husbands and children, of how to beat post-war austerity or deal with their mothers-in-law? Did they, in fact, talk of any of that? Mostly I remember Nancy’s laughter, and wreathing conspiratorially around their dark heads, clouds of cigarette smoke out of which Nancy’s hot blue eyes flashed their unquenchable mischief. Still. In spite of everything. So, did my mother and her sister ever look at one another and ask, Where is she now?
On April 5th, 1947, the sixteen-year-old Catherine Kavanagh sat down at Monasterevin and wrote the following letter to the Catholic Rescue Society in Dublin:
…it is so long since I wrote you will be forgetting me. I hope not. I was in Athy with the Sisters to get my training as a nurse. Everyone was very kind but the work was hard and I fell ill with glandular fever. As soon as I am better I plan to go over to England to finish my training properly.
But in the second half of her letter, begging forgiveness for her ‘impertinence’, Catherine asked to be told where she had been born. Sometimes she was asked, for the census, or by the doctors, and she could only tell them ‘Dublin’. Also, she wanted to know her mother’s name, and, ‘Do I have a father? Please don’t think I am taking a liberty. There is no one else I can ask and it is only my natural curiosity makes me ask. I remain, Catherine Kavanagh.’
The agency replied to say they were glad Catherine was hoping to finish her training and enclosing a pound towards her expenses. They wrote, ‘…but we do not know anything about your mother as we have never seen her since she handed you over to the society. I don’t think you need worry about that.’ Shortly after receiving this letter, Catherine left for Liverpool.
She had asked for her parents’ names. They did not give her her father’s. Her mother’s took several forms, only the first of which Catherine knew. On her birth certificate she is a simple Anne Kavanagh; on her marriage certificate she is Nancy Teresa Kavanagh, and on her death certificate she is Nancy Mary Tanner. Nancy’s death certificate makes unhappy reading. The first cause of death is clearly stated: acute renal failure. In the family it was always said that Nancy’s kidneys were destroyed by the drugs she was given to cope with arthritis. But the death certificate tells a more complicated story than that. The second cause of death given is systemic lupus erythematosus. Lupus is an autoimmune disease which can be difficult to diagnose and can lead to both arthritis and kidney failure. It would also explain the sad change in Nancy’s appearance in her later years – she died aged fifty-two – when her face was puffy and covered in red patches. The disease is still incurable and, apart from a possible genetic factor, its causes are uncertain. Stress, smoking and sunlight play some part. Ninety per cent of cases are women. It was side by side on a hospital bed the sisters last saw one another.
There’s one last footnote to my mother’s relationship with Nancy. Bill lived on until 1983 and it was my parents who nursed him through his final illness and death. To do so, they stayed several nights a week in his little flat, which meant sleeping on a mattress on the floor, exhausting themselves – my mother was over seventy. The whole episode infuriated me. Knowing what I did about Nancy’s marriage, and knowing that my parents knew, I couldn’t bear the idea of them giving her husband their blessing – as it seemed to me. My view was, he’d been unkind to Nancy, who had loved him. Let him rot.
It was my husband who said they wanted precisely to do it for Nancy. My father has reminded me that Nancy’s son was still living at home and could not possibly have looked after his father: it was for him, too, for Nancy’s care of him, that they were there. Perhaps there’s an echo in their kindness of the Graces’ kindness to my uncle Pat? Still, I wasn’t entirely convinced. Not quite. But then I’m part of the ‘me’ generation, the generation whose idealism quickly turned to self-centred individualism, a creed that knows no community, nor austerity, nor self-sacrifice. I remember dropping my parents once at Heathrow to take a flight to Italy for their summer holidays. There was some kind of delay. Looking back from the exit I was touched to see them waiting hand in hand, looking up at the departures board, patient and cheerful.
Three years after the war was over we were living in a timber-built ‘hut’ near the gasworks in Spalding, Lincolnshire. This took us far away from the family, just us three and our cat Tibbles, who went ahead with my father in the sidecar of his motorbike. The hut which was to be a temporary arrangement, was quite well fitted out, but it can hardly have been part of my mother’s dreams for our post-war life. My father’s welcome home from the war had been a drop in income. Still articled to the council, he was obliged to fulfil a six-month contract or risk bein
g called back into the army. When the six months were up he had immediately applied for work as an architectural assistant in Spalding and here, with some misgivings, we were. Not surprisingly, my father’s temper suffered. I was bumptious, confident, curious. I didn’t mind battling my way back across the estate to defend my position as the only kid whose school uniform included a panama hat. But my mother wept as she swept the floors of our prefab and I got the occasional ‘clip around the ear’. Within six months, however, we’d been moved into the house we had been promised, a newly completed house on a council estate.
In springtime the nearby fields were gaudy with ranks of tulips that marched out to the horizon, their stiff foliage squeaking in the wind. My father owned a motorbike and sidecar and when he set off for work on dark mornings the dogs on the estate chased after him, barking, an annoyance he dealt with by dealing out hefty kicks to the muzzle. At night he studied to sit the exams he had missed to go soldiering. My mother was a full-time housewife and mother, and had no ambitions to be anything else. It was a post-war dream, and, for the time being at least – David was thirty-one – it had to be good enough for my father. A much-repeated family story tells how, when lucky enough to be in charge of a stone quarry in Italy for the last two years of the war, David never troubled to walk the two miles into Pisa, not even to marvel at the leaning tower, which might have interested the engineer in him. But my father is shameless. Teased, he will only shrug and remark cheerfully, ‘I’m a simple chap. It’s the way my mother put my hat on.’ The family speculation was that David was wary of a foreign town, of the pickpockets and – above all – the prostitutes? On this last score my mother was confident, saying, ‘One thing I do know, David would never pay for it.’