by Kim Kelly
With that little bit of respectability, though, came a higher price in bigotry and the strife such thinking brings. It’s strange how that happens, isn’t it? With a little bit of ease in one thing comes a little bit more difficulty in another. At least that’s the way it usually is for the poor. Brigid Kennedy, in leaving a neighbourhood where everyone fairly much sat at the bottom of the barrel, suddenly found herself in a place where the snipes and nasty whispers down the back lane moved up to the front fences of the street and could do real and terrible harm. Most of their neighbours now, in the bigger terraces of Crown Street near where it crossed Cleveland, were Protestants, while the Kennedys, of course, remained as Roman Catholic as they ever were. As Brigid was quite bigoted herself, she didn’t mind all that much on her own account whatever they might have said as she passed by on her way to the grocer or to the butcher. Any person of intelligence must respect an adversary to pay their judgement any heed, mustn’t they? What she did mind was her children being subject to any prejudice, especially from those she considered to be godless heathens, and whenever it occurred, as it did now with some regularity, it would send her into a fury.
All of the little ones still at school – that was the second twins, Sean and Martin, then Eddie, Tom, Jack and little Nell – had to run the gauntlet home through enemy territory every afternoon from the corner of Devonshire Street, where their school sat. The first block along Crown Street was all right, but the second, after Lansdowne Street, was where the trouble began. The Upton children at number 636, and the Boyles at 640, would lie in wait for the Kennedys, pelting rocks at them as they passed on their way to number 654. Inevitably, one little Kennedy would bound in the door bawling and Brigid would bound out, banging on one of those neighbours’ doors: ‘I know you’re in there Johnny Upton – you come out now and try throwing your rocks at me!’ She’d only get one of their mothers opening the door to say: ‘My little Johnny has been indoors practising the piano all afternoon.’
Brigid Kennedy would want to throw a piano at that other mother, and if she’d have had one handy, she might have.
The only one who never came home bawling was little Nell. She might have been younger and smaller than all her brothers except for the baby, Lucky Pete, she might have been only seven then, but she gave as good as she got. She would get mad as her mad red hair and yell back at the Uptons or the Boyles, or the whole lot of them: ‘Catholics, Catholics ring the bell, Protestants, Protestants go to hell!’ If they made fun of the farm-girl County Kerry way she spoke, she would make fun of the way they did, too: ‘Go back to Belfast – you mouldy orange heads,’ or to the Boyles in particular: ‘Go and burst yourselves.’ She would pull faces and stick her tongue out and tell them the Devil would take their brains out through their noses in the night with a long needle – and it would be easy work as their brains were so tiny and slippery. She would light up one of her older brothers’ cigarettes and blow smoke in their faces right through their front gate. But there was one thing Nell Kennedy would never do: she would never, ever throw a rock, or a stick, or a stone at anyone. You might take their eye out, mightn’t you, and she didn’t want anything like that on her conscience.
A couple of years rolled on, and the rocks thrown by the Protestants only got worse: rocks coming right through Catholics’ windows now with a Great War in Europe begun between Britain and France on one side, and Germany and who knew who else on the other, all a world away. Sinn Feiners – republican traitors – that’s what they called every Irish Catholic now in Surry Hills, and if they could have invented a law to lock them all up in Darlinghurst Gaol just for being themselves, they would have. As it was, they sent the Child Welfare people to Brigid Kennedy’s door on a bogus charge of head lice – bogus because no lice would be brave enough or foolish enough to resist her fine-tooth comb. But of greater and more serious importance, they finally got the police to close down the elder Kennedys’ betting shop in Elizabeth Lane. The lads put their hands up immediately on this one, though. They’d had a good run of it; they’d had remarkably good relations with the police up until this time as well, but that’s another story, too.
Dan, Mick and Pat were given a quiet choice by the authorities: Darlinghurst Gaol or the army – the Australian Imperial Forces. Either way, their mother was in a fury of all furies. She had worn only black since her husband had died, and black she would only ever wear: how dare her boys tempt further mourning: if she lost one of her children now, she would have to paint her soul black. For the time being, she threw her rolling pin at Mick and got him right in the middle of his forehead. But, as always, violence makes no difference to anything other than to make a bad situation worse. Brigid felt just dreadful for braining Mick, while Lucky Pete, who was now not yet four, cried and carried on for seeing it too, and her three eldest boys were set to leave her regardless. In the end the lads decided, for various practical reasons, that the army was the only sensible course. They thought that the food and the six shillings a day offered at Victoria Barracks in Paddington would be the better offer than nothing but cold porridge at Darlinghurst Gaol. And it was: they couldn’t believe how well they’d landed when they got their soldiering kits: three caps, two pairs of boots, three pairs of socks, three pairs of breeches, two flannel shirts, two warm jackets and a great coat – each! As well as a toothbrush. Most of all, though, they thought they might bring some peace to the neighbourhood by going to war for England, too, to prove that not all poor and Irish Catholic boys were nought but Fenian thugs.
Off they marched to Circular Quay, so tall and handsome in their uniforms, with a brass band playing over a thousand mothers’ tears and streamers streaming from the ship as it steamed away. Then afterwards, back at Crown Street, Frankie and Chris were soon moaning that they wanted to go, too, and their mother looked over at her rolling pin but, thinking the better of it, she told those younger boys outright that she would take her own life, commit the sin of all sins, if they ever did any such thing.
Despite all this, despite three sons off fighting a battle that wasn’t theirs to fight, despite this noble sacrifice, peace did not come to Surry Hills, nor for the Kennedys.
One afternoon, not a fortnight since Dan and Mick and Pat had left, Nell came yelling up the hall from the front door: ‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’ She was holding her hand to the side of her head and blood was streaming from a wound.
‘My girl! What have you done!’ was Brigid’s first response, for Nell being Nell, and ever more recklessly ten years old now, her mother has assumed she’d hit her head on the step while doing a cartwheel or something silly like that.
‘Johnny Upton!’ Nell shouted the house down as she ran into her mother’s arms: ‘That Johnny Upton! He got me with the biggest rock! I’ll kill him one day!’
Brigid Kennedy stood there for a moment in shock: both that Johnny Upton had been so wicked as to injure another child in this way, and that her own daughter had expressed such a murderous desire for revenge. But then, with Nell’s blood flowing all down her little face and streaking across her rosy, freckled cheek, and seeping into her mother’s apron, which was dark grey rather than black from so much washing, and was now taking on a terrible stain, Brigid Kennedy was prompted to action. She lunged for her damp dusting cloth and held it against the wound, yelling to whomever would hear it first: ‘Fetch my sewing basket!’
‘No! Mum, no! You’re not going to sew up my head!’ cried Nell.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, girl. I only want a piece of clean cloth,’ her mother roused at her and yelled again down the hall: ‘Fetch my sewing basket!’
In all the ruckus and fuss, neither Brigid nor Nell, nor any brother who’d run in off the street after her noticed that Lucky Pete had left the kitchen. Away from the clatter of boots and shoving of elbows and knees and Nell’s determination to yell and curse so that she wouldn’t cry, little Pete stole away, pinching a box of matches from beside the range as he went.
At not quite four years old and rather coddled
, Pete was still a baby in some of the things he did, but he was also too old to be at home alone with only his mum all day, even if it meant he was the plumpest little boy that ever was. He was often bored, and now he was resentful: his biggest brothers, who’d always spoiled him the most, were gone; he’d also just been told by his mother only a matter of an hour ago that he would not be going to school next year but the year after. This last seemed the worse injustice to him. How could it be that he would have to wait so long to go to school? The school was even called Saint Peter’s. It was his school. It wasn’t fair! And now Nell had come home in some kind of trouble again. Nell was always coming home in some kind of trouble, and Pete was getting fearfully jealous about that, too.
Why he did what he did next, though, no-one can explain. Sometimes little ones just do the strangest things, perhaps at the bidding of angels or imps – whichever, it’s certain we’ll never understand the reason.
Why Pete took that box of matches upstairs to his mother’s room and, getting his small self comfortable on her big, high bed, began striking those matches one by one is a mystery for the ages.
As he struck the matches, he looked over at his little cot across from the end of the bed, where he still slept, with his ted and his clown doll, and he didn’t want to be a baby anymore.
He wanted to be a big boy; he wanted attention.
He would get the latter soon enough, for he very quickly set his mother’s bed on fire.
At first, there were no flames, only a little circle of smouldering linen and curly white smoke floating up from the bed as the fire spread downwards through to the mattress. And then whoosh the flames shot up from the coir.
And Pete went running back down the stairs, screaming and waving his fat little arms: ‘Mum! Mummy! There’s fie on the bed! Fie on the bed! There’s a fie on your big bed!’
Little Pete, being still so little, had not yet mastered his r’s. For him, red was still wed, and right was wight – and fire was fie.
His mother, who was now bandaging Nell’s poor head, turned to him and told him wearily: ‘Well, go and shoo it off.’
She had thought, of course, that he had said there was a fly on her bed. If the truth of her heart be told, she was becoming fairly bored with Pete, too. Sweet as he was, the unbroken company of an almost four-year-old, day in, day out, can test any mother’s patience. So many questions, so many complaints, so many desires to toss your beloved child out the nearest window.
‘No – Mummy!’ he wailed like a banshee. ‘A FIE. THERE’S A FIE ON THE BED!’
At which his mother finally heard him, and then she smelt the evidence of it even as she could barely believe it. And then she blasphemed: ‘Oh my God!’
Brigid Kennedy ran then for her life, for the lives of every child in the house and indeed for every life on their side of the street – for if her own terrace house were to go up, it would cause an inferno to race right down the whole line.
By the time she reached the room, bounding up the stairs two by two, it was full of smoke, and the flames were crackling, flickering, tongues of orange and gold licking up towards the ceiling.
She fought her way through the choking air for the balcony doors that overlooked the street and wrenched them open, as terror and wonder fuelled her nerve to do what she knew she must do next.
The only thing she could do.
Now, Brigid Kennedy was no delicate flower. Even when she’d been a girl, she’d never been small and spry like Nell. Brigid was a broad-shouldered and sturdy woman and, with all the strength of her body and her will combined, she picked up that mattress and, without it touching floor, or wall or curtain, she hoped to throw it out of those balcony doors and into the street.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Crown Street was packed with carts going both ways: fruit and vegetables heading south, up from Paddy’s at the Haymarket for next day’s selling in all the cheaper grocers, and fruit and vegetables heading in from the countryside, from the Alexandria railhead, for selling at Paddy’s tomorrow. There were dogs barking, children playing on the footpaths, a man on a bicycle weaving his way, and Mrs Upton carrying her basket from the shops. It all swirled round and down and round for Brigid Kennedy as she sought what to do with the flaming mattress in her arms.
For the barest of moments she rested the mattress on the edge of the balcony rail; for the barest of seconds she might have considered dropping it on Mrs Upton’s head, but she didn’t. She shouted out so that the furthest reaches of heaven and hell would hear her: ‘Look out! Fire! Look out!’ And with all her might she heaved that burning mattress over the rail and hurled it so that it hit nothing and no-one but the footpath below the balcony.
The man on the bicycle stopped at the sound of that great lump of a thing hitting the ground, but he was the only one on the busy street who noticed that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.
Apart from Mrs Upton. She had seen this drama unfold from the moment the mattress appeared teetering on the edge of the balcony. She saw the flames reaching towards the awning of the roof of number 654; she saw the strength with which Mrs Kennedy steered the unwieldy heap of coir so that any tragedy was averted. She saw the selflessness of her neighbour; she saw the power of unthinking, ordinary courage. It was as if Mrs Upton had stuck her head out of her own house and looked up at the blueness of the sunny sky for the first time in her life. She saw what might have happened otherwise: the flames raging through every stick of Crown Street right down to Saint Peter’s church, her little Johnny consumed in the blaze. She’d have crossed herself, had she been a Catholic.
As it was, the whispers, privy to privy, spoke only of deliverance, and no-one said too much of a bad word ever about Mrs Kennedy after that. They would not have dared.
Brigid herself had little time to consider it. Pete was at the door of the bedroom now, standing there sobbing: ‘Mummy! Mummy! I’m sorry!’
Her Lucky Pete, her little Peter Daniel. His fat little cheeks so red and raw and sore with grief and shame. Her heart was still thumping from the exertion and excitement just past, and when she grabbed up her boy now and crushed him to that heart, she felt the force of all it was to be alive: his fear and his love thumping against her own.
She said: ‘Shush now, Petey bub, it’s all right.’
He only sobbed, on and on. He was only almost four after all, but although he couldn’t tell his mother in words to make it plain, he knew what a terrible, frightening thing he’d done.
And she continued to hold him to her breast; she sat with him in her room on the edge of the frame of the bed till he ran out of sobs and she ran out of disbelief at what she had just done, too, and when he was quiet and calming she said to him: ‘Oh my Pete, don’t you worry, things could have been worse.’
Little Lucky Pete looked up at his mother from inside her arms. He looked at her with his great big blue eyes, and he reached out his hand and lightly touched her cheek, in that way we all do when we’re testing that our miracles are real, and he asked his mother, wondering at the word and the world: ‘Worse? What’s worse?’
Brigid Kennedy smiled down at her son, and she answered him: ‘Well, at least you’re not our Nell.’
‘Nellie hurt her head,’ the little boy said with all his remorse, and his chin began to tremble again that he’d ever had a bad thought for his sister, who was still downstairs in the kitchen, holding the bandage to her head and, like her brothers there with her, none the wiser as to all that had gone on upstairs just now.
‘Never mind our Nell.’ Pete’s mother squeezed him tight. ‘Don’t you remember the story of the little milkmaid, little Nell of Ballymacyarn?’
The little boy turned in her arms, in her smile: he knew the story. It was Mum’s best story ever. He always laughed until his belly hurt when he heard it.
She nodded: ‘You remember – our Nell with them skinny legs she’s got?’
He nodded back at her, tears forgotten, waiting for her to begin, one of her t
ales from before he was born, a tale from where he came from.
But she didn’t begin now as he had remembered she always did; she said to him over a sigh, closing her eyes: ‘Worse, my lad? We all had to leave Ireland because of what Nell did.’
And that was at least half true.
THE LITTLE MILKMAID
Ellen Mary Kennedy – otherwise known as Nell, Nellie, Hell’s Nell, or Stick Legs – was born on New Year’s Day, squawking into the dawn of 1906, so loud she brought a ton of snow crashing from the roof. She’d come early, in every way, and so was skinny as a rake from that very first minute of her life. No matter what her mother Brigid fed her, it never stuck to her bones.
And when Nell was small, there was always plenty to eat, even if there weren’t too many coins in any pockets. Her family lived in Ballymacyarn, a small village seven miles to the south-west of Tralee towards Dingle and had done ever since anyone could remember. The village sat on a hillside at the foot of the Slieve Mish Mountains, as green as Erin could ever be, and rolled towards a rocky cliff-top that overlooked the grey Atlantic. There, the Kennedys had three milking cows, never less than twenty-three chickens, and an old stag-pig called Stanley, who’d come to them for his retirement. They ate mackerel three times a week, straight from the sea. They grew potatoes and parsnips and spinach – and carrots all summer, too.