by Anne Bennett
A strong friendship grew between them, and it had been Elsie’s hand that Maeve had clung to as her son, Kevin, was born in November 1931, while Brendan went on a drinking binge and disappeared for two days. He returned looking like death, without a word of explanation or apology and took no notice of his infant son.
In fact Brendan’s indifference towards Kevin seemed to be echoed among all his family, and even Maeve’s uncle and aunt. Letters of congratulation from Ireland were all well and good, but not the same as her family visiting and taking delight in the child. So Maeve was glad of Elsie’s support. She knew she’d get little from Brendan and she thanked God that she had such a kind and caring neighbour.
THREE
Brendan hated the child who’d supplanted him. One day, being unused to the demands of a young baby, Maeve hadn’t quite finished feeding Kevin when Brendan walked in the door. He watched his son tugging at his wife’s breasts and was so consumed by jealousy that he shook.
He strode across the room and dragged the child so roughly from Maeve that he began to wail, and Maeve got to her feet, terrified Brendan would hurt him. Not that he didn’t want to, for he knew Maeve preferred the child over him. But in the end he almost threw him back to Maeve and told her to put him in the bedroom out of the bloody road.
Another night he came home to find no dinner ready because, she said, ‘the baby wouldn’t settle’. The resultant punch he gave her was to make sure that that never happened again.
‘You look after me before any squalling brat,’ he yelled, as Maeve wiped the blood oozing from her nose and her split lip. ‘Maybe you’ll remember that in future.’
No longer was Maeve so eager for him each night either, and would often turn from him if Kevin made a murmur, holding the baby in her arms and crooning while her husband grew hot with impatience and frustration. He never spoke of his feelings and fears, but instead grew moodier than ever, and often gave Maeve the odd punch or clout if he felt she was annoying him in some way.
Maeve didn’t really understand what had happened to the husband that she still loved, who’d courted her with such consideration and professed his devotion to her often. She sometimes remembered with a pang of nostalgia how they used to laugh together over something silly, or the hours and hours they used to talk and never tire of one another, or the way she used to yearn for his hands on her body. Now such intimacy seemed to have slunk away from them.
Brendan worked hard, there was no denying that, and in the early days of their marriage he’d talked about his work and the sweltering heat he toiled under, turning copper and zinc into molten metal in white-hot furnaces so that they could be poured into crucibles. The sweat ran from him so freely that often the shirt he wore was still damp when he arrived home.
Maeve had witnessed the weariness on his face when he came in the door and saw the lines on his brow rimed with dirt, and the grime streaking his cheeks. She’d seen his cracked, calloused hands encrusted with black, and smelt the sour sweat of him. She’d often felt sorry for him, and because of it, had forgiven him his temper.
Then she’d always had the kettle on the boil for Brendan’s wash. He said he always felt better with the muck sluiced off him and clean, dry clothes on, but since Kevin’s birth all that had stopped. Now he was prepared to sit down at the table unwashed, reeking from stale sweat and with filthy hands and nails, and would shovel in his food as though he was a pig at a trough.
Because Maeve knew beer inflamed Brendan’s temper, she tried talking to him after his meal when he was more rational and at least sober. She tried, as she’d done before, asking him what she was doing that so enraged him that he felt he had to raise his hand to her. Brendan never had an answer to give her. He felt she needed no explanation and the fact that she seemed to expect one angered him further. His mother would never have questioned his father.
When she tried to talk to him about the money he gave her, which was woefully inadequate, Brendan flew into such a temper Maeve was terrified. She produced a list of things she had to buy, or pay for each week, thinking it might help, and he tore it from her hands, ripped it into pieces and threw them into the fire.
The back of his hand sliced across Maeve’s cheek as he hissed, ‘All the bloody same, women, nag, nag, nag, and always about bloody money. Well, you’ll just have to manage on what I give you, for you’ll get no more.’
Maeve had been stunned by both the blow and Brendan’s reaction. After that she didn’t say anything more to him about the son of whom he seemed to take no notice. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Elsie Phillips next door, who took as much delight in the child as she did herself, Maeve might have become seriously depressed.
It was Elsie’s advice that Maeve sought one sunny morning in September 1932. Elsie listened and then said, ‘You’ll have to tell him, girl. For God’s sake, pregnancy is one thing you can’t hide.’
‘Elsie, I’m scared.’
‘It’s his baby as much as yours, Maeve. You didn’t do it on your own.’
‘You don’t know him, Elsie. He’ll go mad.’
‘Better you tell him than let him find out for himself,’ Elsie said. But she spoke cautiously because she’d known for some time that Maeve’s husband smacked her about a bit. The construction of the houses was not conducive to any degree of privacy, and she’d heard some of the blows Maeve had received, and seen the evidence with her own eyes the next day. But Maeve had not mentioned the violence so neither had Elsie.
Still, Maeve knew Elsie was right. Brendan had to know that she was three months gone with another child. When Maeve told him that night after tea, he flew into a temper and shouted and screamed so much, Elsie was tempted to go in, but Alf told her to mind her own business. She didn’t breathe easy till she heard Maeve’s door slam and knew Brendan had taken himself off to the pub.
All evening Brendan brooded, over the many pints he ordered, on the news he’d received that day. There would be a baby every bloody year, just as he’d imagined it, till Maeve hadn’t a moment to bid him the time of day, and he hadn’t two halfpennies to call his own. Every penny would go to feed and clothe bleeding kids he had never wanted. Some bloody gift from God!
That night Brendan staggered home from the pub consumed with the unfairness of it. It was Maeve’s fault, tempting him like all women tempted men, trapping him into marriage by not letting him do what he wanted until she had the ring on her finger. Bloody bitches, all women. Maeve most of all, and it was about time she was taught a lesson she’d not forget in a hurry.
The next morning, when Brendan saw the mess he’d made of Maeve’s face and hazily remembered what he’d done to her the night before, he felt guilty and ashamed, and angry with himself for feeling that way. He told himself she’d asked for it. He growled at her to get his breakfast and, alarmed and afraid, Maeve, without a word, eased herself painfully from the bed and went to do his bidding.
She was glad when he went to work, for only then did her limbs stop trembling, but when Kevin awoke and began to cry, she groaned as she mounted the stairs, for she was stiff and sore, and every part of her seemed to ache. She wanted to hide from the world, at least until her face was back to normal, she felt so ashamed.
She finished feeding Kevin, changed him and then rocked him in her arms until his eyelids drooped and eventually closed. She laid him in the pram and went into the bedroom, where she painfully dressed herself. Then, wrapping her shawl around her head and shoulders, pulling it well over her face, she made her way to the outdoor lavatory.
Outside the autumn sun penetrated the court in dusty shafts, and small children played around the doorways. Two women stood keeping an eye on them and having a chat and both looked curiously at Maeve. She muttered a greeting, but kept her head down and hurried past.
When she returned the women had gone, though the children still played on, and she was grateful that they took no notice of her. As she reached her door, she heard Kevin’s plaintive cry, and she struggled with the latch,
anxious to get in and see to him. She lost her grip on the shawl and it slipped from her just as Elsie Phillips’s door opened. She stared at Maeve’s face with a look of dismay and shock.
So she’d been right, she thought to herself. The brute had been smacking her about, but it was more than the odd slap or punch this time. ‘You poor sod,’ she said with feeling, and the sympathy started the tears in Maeve’s eyes.
She stumbled through the door, the tears almost blinding her. Elsie stood undecided, not sure whether to follow her into the house or go out to the shops, as she’d intended, and mind her own business. But then, she reminded herself, the girl had no one belonging to her, except a sour-faced old cow of an aunt. She’d seen her just the once at Kevin’s christening and couldn’t take to her, nor her milksop, henpecked husband, who seemed to think the sun shone out of Brendan Hogan’s arse.
Her mind made up, she put down her bag, took off her coat, closed her own door and went to Maeve’s. The girl still cried, even as she held the baby, and Elsie’s heart was smitten with pity for her. She knew the pattern Maeve’s life would take from now on, for she believed once a man started beating his wife he would always do so, and she also knew Maeve would not get a lot of sympathy from anyone because of it either.
She took the baby from Maeve and sat him up in the pram, where he could watch what was going on, and pressed his mother down into a chair.
‘I’m going to make us a cup of tea,’ Elsie said, ‘and then see if I can do summat about your face. After that if you need any shopping I’ll get it for you. You’ll not want to go out much for a day or two, I’d say.’
Maeve marvelled that Elsie seemed to know just how she felt and was very glad of the older woman’s presence. For the first time she didn’t feel so isolated.
Elsie had been right. Maeve’s life took on a pattern from that first real beating, the first one that Brendan hadn’t apologised for. She realised whatever she did or didn’t do, however she pleaded, begged or tried to talk to Brendan, he would treat her as he saw fit. In his eyes that was grudgingly giving her money he could spare her after his booze, fags and bets had been accounted for, however inadequate it was, and clouting her whenever he felt like it.
‘Write and tell your mother,’ Elsie advised one day in early spring 1933.
‘Tell her what?’ Maeve demanded harshly, wincing, for she was recovering from another few hefty clouts which she had been given not long after her daughter, Grace, was born on 9 February. ‘Tell her my husband doesn’t give me enough money either to feed us or keep us warm, and beats me? What the hell could she do about it, but worry herself into an early grave?’
A further worry was nagging at Maeve’s mind at this time and that was Brendan’s treatment of Kevin. The child was fifteen months old when his sister was born, no longer a wee baby to be rocked to sleep, but an active toddler.
Maeve knew Brendan had to come first in everything and she’d learnt to accept that. Maeve made dinner for him every night, even if she lived on bread and scrape herself, or sometimes nothing at all, because it was healthier to do so. And while he ate, he wanted the children out of sight, but now Kevin was not always in bed when he came in and that seemed to enrage him, even if the child was doing nothing wrong.
She tried to protect him as much as she was able, but his father often gave him a hefty slap on the legs, or a swipe across the head for no reason that Maeve could see except that he wanted to do it. Remonstrating with him and protesting that Kevin was only a wee boy did no good at all. In fact all she usually got for her efforts was a slap herself. That wouldn’t have stopped her if it hadn’t been for the fact that she was afraid to protest too much in case the child got the brunt of it and she tried to keep them apart as much as possible.
Maeve herself got used to the way life was for her. She lived day to day, interested only in getting enough to eat for herself and Kevin each day. She fed Grace herself and Elsie complained she should be eating wholesome meals to do it properly. Maeve thought that was easy to say. Now she was a regular at the pawnshop, yet the first time she’d gone there she’d nearly died of shame. Ballyglen did not sport a pawnshop or anything like it. Poor people there could apply to the St Vincent de Paul for tokens to spend in the shops for groceries only. You were considered the lowest of the low to apply to them, but often Maeve would have welcomed something to put food in her mouth and her son’s that Brendan could not convert to beer money.
The winter was the hardest, often with no money for either coal or gas, and little enough for food. They would have surely perished but for the odd shovelful of coal from Elsie, or the bit of stew or soup she said she had over. Maeve knew full well she’d done extra on purpose, but was often too hungry and dispirited to care.
‘Elsie, I can see this life stretching out before me for years and years,’ Maeve complained to her friend one day.
Elsie could see it too, but thought it wouldn’t be helpful to say so.
‘I’ve tried talking to him, but it does no good,’ Maeve went on. ‘Surely he can see how we live, what I’m left to eat, and the weans. Dear God, Elsie, if you’d known the type of man he was when we were courting, or even just married . . .’ Maeve shook her head sorrowfully. ‘He’s not the same at all.’
Elsie had heard the story more than once and she still said nothing. She did all she could for Maeve, but to go between man and wife – that was something she shrank from, and her Alf said she was not to get involved. He said Maeve had an uncle she could appeal to, or failing that she could go home to her mother.
But Elsie knew no such course was open to Maeve. On the rare occasions her uncle had braved his wife’s wrath to visit his niece, he always had his kids with him. And her predicament was hardly a subject Maeve could bring up in their hearing. Anyhow, he’d never hear a word said against Brendan and still thought him a fine figure of a man.
As for her mother, Elsie knew she’d been told nothing, for even if she had, as Maeve said, there was little she could do. Maeve wouldn’t leave Brendan unless something desperate happened altogether. She was a good Catholic girl and knew only too well that marriage was for life and you married for better or worse. Anyroad, Elsie thought, even if Maeve wanted to go to her mammy for a wee holiday, a break from the brute, how, when she barely had two halfpennies to bless herself with, would she find the money for the fare?
She didn’t bother saying any of this. Her Alf was a good man, and a good provider. He’d never lifted his hand to her all their married life, and she knew if things had been different he would have been a good father to their children. Well, that was not to be and Elsie had faced that fact years before, but she often wondered what she would have done had Maeve been her daughter.
Would she have stood by just because of some words said at an altar and watched Maeve and her children being terrorised or half starved and frozen to death? No, by God, she wouldn’t, and as Maeve hadn’t her mother and father to stand up for her Elsie was determined to do all she could.
Maeve knew she couldn’t have coped so well if it hadn’t been for Elsie. Getting the children clothes and even some for herself had been a real headache. All the baby necessities had been bought from Maeve’s wages when she worked at the café, but as the children grew problems arose. Elsie took her to jumble sales where for a few hoarded pennies she could buy jumpers and cardigans to be unravelled and knitted up again, or skirts that could be cut up to make something for the children, and then sometimes Elsie would bring a similar load from the rag market.
Maeve had been taught to sew and her mother had a treadle sewing machine similar to Elsie’s, so Maeve knew all about cutting out and tacking together for Elsie to go over seams and hemming neatly. Knitting she’d never been shown, but she soon picked it up. ‘Born of necessity,’ Maeve said when Elsie commented on the speed Maeve was able to knit after just a couple of weeks. ‘Anyway, it gives me pleasure to have the children dressed respectable. I only wish I could knit shoes like the booties they had as bab
ies.’
Shoes were the very devil to get. There were adult shoes sometimes, and Maeve had got herself a pair at a jumble sale when her others had literally fallen off her feet, though the second-hand ones were a size too big. Any children’s shoes were, in the main, worn through, the toes kicked in or the soles hanging off.
She remembered how she’d run barefoot all through the spring and summer of her Irish childhood and delighted in it, leaping over the spring turf and never feeling the pebbles in the dusty farm tracks. She thought there wouldn’t be the same pleasure on the cobbles of the courts or the hard dirty pavements of the streets, but barefoot Kevin and little Grace often had to go.
Before school every September, Maeve and her brothers and sisters had all been fitted out with shoes. Sometimes they were handed down from an older child, but newly soled and heeled, and they all had new clothes made by their mother during the holidays. Maeve had little hope of finding a pair of shoes for each child that weren’t too worn before the cold of winter, but if she was lucky she could sometimes get a ragged pair of plimsolls, the canvas worn and ripped and with paper-thin soles that she’d line with cardboard.
The spring that Grace turned two years old and Kevin was three, Maeve again missed a second period. She was terrified of telling Brendan. She didn’t know why he appeared surprised by it and acted as if it was her fault. Surely to God he must have realised that what he did most nights was bound to lead to pregnancy in the end. She’d never complained or refused because she knew it was her duty to submit to her husband.
The little sexual forays and fondling that she’d enjoyed in courtship when she’d longed for Brendan to continue had stopped in the early months of her marriage, once she’d told him of her pregnancy. Brendan had seen no need after that to bring Maeve to the point of excitement and longing. He didn’t really expect her to enjoy it and didn’t really care whether she did or not. In the marriage service she’d promised to obey him and that’s what she had to do.