by Anne Doughty
‘You haven’t been down for the milk, have you?’ he asked quietly, as they sat down together.
‘No, but I’ve got plenty of milk from yesterday if you’d like some.’
‘Tea’s fine. I just wanted to be sure you hadn’t been talking to Mary Cook.’
She put down the sandwich she’d just picked up and looked at him sharply.
‘Alex, will you just tell me what’s wrong before we go any further.’
‘There were a series of bombs at Millbrook,’ he began. ‘One went off in the engine house and caused a fire. Two were placed in the main work areas. Two more were placed under the main staircases and timed to go off five minutes after the others when people were trying to get out. No amateur job like Ballievy.’
‘Alex,’ she exclaimed. ‘What happened? Were many hurt? Don’t tell me anyone was killed.’
‘We were lucky,’ he said reassuringly. ‘We could have lost quite a few, including Robert Anderson, if he hadn’t been so sharp. He went into the engine house on a routine check and saw something on the floor. It was only a tiny, wee scrap of paper, but it shouldn’t have been there. He was sure that floor was spotless at the end of maintenance last evening and none of the night watchmen would have dropped anything on their inspections. When he listened he could hear something too. He ran over to my office and we phoned the police and the army bomb disposal. But the engine-house went up while we were phoning.
‘Oh Alex,’ she gasped, catching a hand to her mouth. ‘What did you do then?’
‘Got everybody out of the mill. That went very well. Broke our own best record,’ he added with a little smile. ‘Everybody thought it was the usual fire-drill till they got outside and smelt the smoke and heard our fire-engine coming round from the back. Then the police and army arrived and went all over the building.’
‘But they could have been killed too,’ she protested.
‘They could, but that’s their job and they did seem to know what they were looking for and where to look. They found all four devices, as they call them, and made them safe. In fact, there is some good news. They think they know who’s behind it. But that is absolutely confidential,’ he warned, raising his eyebrows. ‘Apparently, if you’re an expert in this sort of thing you can tell by the way a device is made who actually made it. They even questioned Robert in detail about that wee bit of paper and said he’d been a great help.’
‘Is Robert all right?’
‘Right as rain, as the saying is.’
‘Maybe it hasn’t hit him yet,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘If he’d gone in there a bit later he’d have been killed and you might not have known it was a bomb, so you wouldn’t have cleared the mill …’
‘Now, Emily, don’t think what might have happened,’ he said, pausing to demolish a sandwich. ‘Just be grateful for good people like Robert,’ he went on, reaching for his mug of tea. ‘He deserves a medal and I’ll certainly be putting it to the other Directors that he’s saved more than a few lives and weeks of production.’
‘But what about the engine house?’
‘That’s not as big a problem as structural damage to the mill would have been, given our American friends up the road. Don’t forget we have the auxiliaries we’ve been using when we run three shifts in twenty-four hours, but we might be able to use electricity from the grid instead of generating our own for the time being. I’ll be asking Chris what he thinks when I see him,’ he continued as he mopped up the last sandwich. ‘I’ve spoken to him on the phone, but we can do nothing till the police and the army finish their work. I’m heartily glad security is not my job, for there’ll have to be changes at all the mills after this. We just have to find out why, when the mill was working and there were two night watchmen with dogs outside, it wasn’t enough.
‘Have to go, love,’ he said finishing his tea in a long swallow and standing up, the familiar lines of concentration now marked upon his face after the brief respite. ‘Let me know tonight what version you get from Mary Cook when you go down for the milk.’
‘Thanks for coming up, Alex,’ she said, walking out to the car with him. ‘I try not to worry, but you know I do. Do you think all women are the same?’
‘Can’t say. Never paid any attention to any of them bar you and the girls,’ he replied, his face breaking into a great, beaming smile.
There was another cup of tea in the pot and she was glad to sit down again and drink it as she went over again all Alex had told her. She thought of Robert Anderson’s wife and their three young children and of all the wives and mothers working on the spinning floors.
Given there was so much to give thanks for, why did the grim possibilities come to her so easily? Why did she always see the potential for loss and despair?
She wondered what Rose Hamilton would have said if she’d put the question to her. As a girl and young woman it was to her she’d always turned when troubled or confused. Her aunt was a kind and good-natured woman who had given her a home without question, but she was not a thoughtful person and was always uneasy if she should ask a question that didn’t have a known and practical answer.
As she sat, the quiet and warmth soothing her, she remembered some of the things Rose said most often. She had come to the conclusion that some of our earliest experiences left us vulnerable to what happened to us later in life. After what had happened when her own family were evicted, she confessed she’d always feared being homeless, though in fact on the one occasion when it did happen, she’d coped quite well.
Maybe, if Rose were here, she would remind her that she’d lost both her father and her mother and with them the homes and life of her childhood. Her father had been a sudden loss, hitting his head as he was swept overboard from the lifeboat during a rescue, so that he was unconscious as he struck the water. With a heavy sea running the attempts to save him didn’t stand a chance.
Though a delicate woman herself, her mother had coped for a time, then she’d lost heart and became ill. Emily and her sister had looked after her for months, knowing all the while she’d given up and had no real wish to live.
‘That’s one answer for you, Emily’, she said aloud, as she finished the last tepid mouthful of tea.
Rose would certainly tell her she’d got to keep up the will to live, whatever the circumstances. Hope was necessary, not just for her own sake, but for her family. She needed to think what her loss might mean to her children. She’d been fortunate in the new home her aunt gave her, but that might not have been so. The loss of her mother could have brought loneliness and misfortune when she was still too young to have the experience or maturity to cope with it.
She sat for a little longer watching the sun begin its descent on the short winter day, and then, thinking it a pity not to make use of the warmth from the stove, she decided against finishing the work on the stairs and turned back to the small sheaf of letters she’d hoped to reply to in the course of the day. She sorted them out into a new pile and picked out a large, heavy envelope postmarked Dublin. It contained a letter and a manuscript. The letter she’d read back in January, but the wedge of flimsy sheets of a carbon copy with its somewhat erratic blue print she had yet to read.
The letter itself was from Brendan, a vigorous scrawl on invoice paper, all he’d had to hand on a cold, January day when no one appeared to be interested in buying books.
She began to re-read it, remembering with pleasure his reference back to their meeting of last April. Of the rest of the letter, she had only the vaguest idea, for it had arrived along with the news of Cathy’s sudden collapse and Brian’s desperate attempts to get back to Cheshire to see her. She had set it aside to re-read later. Only now did she realize how much later.
My dear Emily,
Sometimes the well-rubbed phrases of common exchange do serve our purposes precisely. I have had good cause to thank the ill-wind, or more precisely, the Army lorry that did me a mischief last April and was the means of bringing me to your hospitable fireside. Not only do I refle
ct with pleasure on that happy evening spent under your roof, but your letters through out the year have cheered many a dull hour.
I am seldom guilty of such foresight as when I asked you if you’d be so kind as to keep in touch with me re the activities of the Hamiltons, especially those of the next generation with whom I am only slightly acquainted, but I am now exceedingly glad that I did. An entirely selfish demand on someone who has so many demands upon her time, let me at least say how much it is appreciated.
By way of some recompense for your efforts, though I know your generous nature requires none, I have been continuing my researches into the mysterious origins of my cousin Alex. Whatever they may prove to be, I assure you I will insist on retaining the rights of cousinhood on grounds similar to those put forward by a sitting tenant.
Emily put the letter down, smiled and realised that she really must not read in the fading light without her spectacles. She fetched them from the sitting-room, and sat down again, reluctant to switch on the electric light till the last possible moment.
The sky was a pale yellow on the horizon, shading into blue if she looked up into the arch overhead and was completely cloudless. There would most certainly be frost tonight. When she moved the paraffin stove into the hall at dusk she’d have to leave the little bowl-fire lit for the geraniums.
‘They’d get a shock if I didn’t,’ she thought to herself, as she settled back to Brendan’s letter again.
Now, you will remember that only weeks after our meeting, I came across a box containing a correspondence with a gentleman named Andrew Doyle who it seems was commissioned in 1875 to investigate the whole question of child emigration to Canada.
It is, of course, a rather curious thing to have only one side of an on-going correspondence, but it certainly stimulated my interest in a subject of which I knew nothing. A strange thing to say, from one whose own country has poured streams of people across all the oceans of the world to populate some of the remotest corners of the globe.
Naturally, 1875 is some twenty years before our good Alex was despatched, but it seems that the general situation of emigrant children was established by this time and despite ‘the highly critical report’ which my correspondent refers to when commenting on Andrew Doyle’s activity, later letters show that, while some changes were made in an attempt to improve the situation of the children, the abuses which Andrew Doyle outlined were only partly addressed and only in some areas.
None of this, my dear Emily, would appear to tell us anything about Alex that we didn’t already know, but by an even stranger coincidence than acquiring the box of letters, when I mentioned the subject to my much older friend and partner, Sean Henessey, I found I had started a deluge.
To begin with, a relative of his was active in the founding of the Fairbridge Child Emigration Society of 1909. He overwhelmed me with facts and figures, though the only one I can at present remember is 100,000. That was the number of children sent to Canada alone between 1869 and 1935. When you add on America, Australia and New Zealand, the exodus of the Irish Famine seems to shrink before one’s very eyes.
However, I digress. Sean is delighted by your interest in his subject and has copied out the most relevant parts of a book he is currently researching on the subject of child emigrants and the people who were responsible for despatching them. It may well be that your sharp eyes will pick out something in the text that I have missed, a hint that might lead us forward in discovering Alex’s past.
What Sean assures me is that copious records do exist. After 1865, it was obligatory for ships to have manifests that recorded all passengers, including escorted groups of children. He himself has obtained copies of some passenger lists as illustrations for the points he is making, so, with patience and time, we might well be able to find one Alexander Hamilton. If we did, Sean assures me, we would also find his age, destination, place of future residence or employment, together with his place of origin and his sponsoring organization.
I am quite overwhelmed by this impressive bureaucracy which I myself would have thought entirely an innovation of the twentieth century.
Good luck with your researches. I shall continue my random pursuits here in the brightly-lit capital where some Northerners at least come to find food, drink and solace from the woes of war. I do hope you and yours fare well. At least it looks as if we ‘neutrals’ are not now to be invaded by our current enemy or our traditional one, apart, of course, from local excursions back and forth across the border where the smuggling of everything from milk cattle to packets of Rinso at least provides some entertainment amid the gloomy realities of the time.
My loving good wishes to both you and Alex and my greetings to all the members of my extended family.
Brendan.
Hungry, dirty and ill-treated children were nothing new to Emily. She was old enough to remember the crowded cabins in Galway, followed by those of Ballyshannon, Derry and Donaghadee, the ports where her father had served, and she knew that she and her sister were fortunate to have beds to sleep in, food to eat, and parents who neither drank nor abused them. But reading about the gangs of street children in London and the big cities of England who survived by stealing, the children beaten to death by harsh masters or left to die when they became ill, deeply shocked her. She had known it was bad, but had never imagined it was quite as bad as this.
Sean Hennessy had begun his work with an account of two women, Maria Rye and Annie McPherson, each driven by a fierce commitment to remove children from the destitution in which they were found, but even more from the moral corruption which they perceived. Following the stories of both women, Emily found herself admiring the zeal with which they pursued their objectives, but wondered if they looked at the children themselves.
It came as an even greater shock to discover that many of the children sent to ‘grow in moral strength in the unpolluted air of Canada’ were not orphans at all, but children of poor parents who could not afford to feed them and had been forced in despair to bring them to the workhouse.
As Sean Hennessy pointed out, it was easy to show how unfortunate the circumstances of these children were, but what was not pointed out was what the ‘bright, new open-air life’ might actually mean for a child adjusted to the city streets, to poverty and to the company of its own people.
The more Emily read of the true situation of many of the emigrants, the more she agreed with Brendan’s Andrew Doyle. After 11,000 miles travelling round Canada to see what had happened to at least some of those sent out, no wonder his criticisms were so severe. Children as young as one year old carried off from the ship at Quebec by unknown people, boys and girls from the same family separated by the width of Canada, girls abused and then returned pregnant and in disgrace to the orphanage for punishment …
Emily had to stop. She could not bear to think of what the reality had been behind all the pious words, the fund-raising, the support by members of the government and the aristocracy. Children raised to be slaves, badly fed, badly housed, but expected to be grateful for this new life an ocean away from any familiar face or well known place.
No wonder Alex had never talked about what had happened to him. Apart from the story about him going in a ship across a grey sea with a label on his coat collar that irritated him, in all their years together she had gleaned from him only the merest fragments.
He’d spoken of a woman who was kind to him, a young woman with an old husband. He used to bring her flowers from the meadow or the riverbank, but he had to be careful not to get caught in the little garden where she used to sit. If he was, he’d be beaten and sent back to his work, or kept working half the night when his companions were let go to their beds in the straw.
The light had gone now and Emily could read no more without putting on the light. But still she didn’t move. He must have been five or six when he went to Canada, but by the time he was eight he was speaking French and had ‘forgotten’ his English. And then he had learnt German. And where exactly was this p
lace called German Township where he had met Sam McGinley?
She gathered up the letters, the blue carbon copy of Sean’s manuscript and Brendan’s letter, stepped back into the kitchen and laid them on the table. She drew the blind, pulled across the blackout and switched on the light. As it spilt down on the bare, scrubbed table, she saw that Brendan had added a P.S. to his letter on a separate sheet which she hadn’t seen.
She took it up and read it twice through in quick succession, not able to grasp it the first time.
P. S. Talking about Alex the other day, Sean made a suggestion I hadn’t thought of. But then, that’s hardly surprising as he is much more familiar with the location of all the orphanages in Canada.
He said that it was possible the label Alex wore was not actually his name, but his Christian name and his destination i.e. Alex to Hamilton. (Hamilton, Ontario).
She paused, put the paper down and thought about it. Given all she’d read about the collecting and the despatching, it was a real possibility.
My poor love, to have nothing of your own but the one short word, Alex. To have done what you’ve done. Perhaps you deserve a medal as much as Robert Anderson.
CHAPTER NINE
The wild March wind caught Emily in the face as she came round the gable of Cook’s farm, crossed the cobbled yard and stepped out onto the empty road leading back up to Rathdrum. The wind was boisterous, but not cold, the glints of sun had real warmth in them and the hawthorn hedges were already sprayed with new green leaves. She took a deep breath of the fresh air and smiled as she saw little swirls of dust run across the tarmac in front of her and disappear into the dry grass of the rough roadside verges.
She was heartily glad to be on her way home, the milk, butter and eggs for the next few days safely packed in her shopping bag, her returned copies of Woman and Woman’s Own carefully wedged to stop the bottles from rattling. The last thing she wanted on her way up the hill was to listen to the chink of bottles when in all the hedges the birds were active, singing their hearts out to mark their territory or fluttering and scuffling amid the branches as they began to build their nests.