by Anne Bennett
‘We were and still are good friends,’ Molly said. ‘The McEvoys and Uncle Tom saved my sanity when I was sent to live in Buncrana after my parents died. Nellie was a substitute mother to me when I was in great need of one.’
A shadow passed over Molly’s face as she remembered that sad period in her life and then it was gone as she went on, with a glance at her husband, ‘If I can ever convince that man of mine to take some time off I would like to go back to Buncrana for a little holiday and see them all again.’
‘That would be a grand idea, Molly,’ Tom said approvingly.
‘Yeah, it would help lay some ghosts and be a chance to show Nuala off.’
‘She’s well worth showing off,’ Bridgette said. ‘She is very beautiful.’
‘She is,’ Aggie said. ‘But then so is your son with those big dark eyes.’
‘All I can say is that we are very pleased to know you at last,’ Tom said to Bridgette. ‘You and your son both.’
‘I echo that,’ Joe added. ‘I’m very glad you found us in the end. As Tom said, you are very welcome. My name is Joe and this is my wife, Isobel, and my son, Ben.’
Bridgette was puzzled for surely Molly had told her that Joe had been married to someone called Gloria. Isobel’s greeted Bridgette warmly, but her eyes were on Finn and she exclaimed, ‘Aggie is right, he is a beautiful baby.’ She poked him gently in the stomach and said, ‘And I know one thing, Finn Laurent, you will break hearts one day with those dark eyes.’
‘His father’s were dark like that?’
‘And did he have those incredibly long lashes as well?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Bridgette said with a laugh. ‘Doesn’t seem fair, does it?’
Finn was passed from one to the other, as all exclaimed about his dark eyes, and the sociable baby waved his arms and giggled and thoroughly enjoyed the attention. Little Nuala watched it all with a furrowed frown between her eyes and Molly laughed and said, ‘Do her good to have a bit of competition.’
Ben, though, had noticed Bridgette’s confusion when she had been introduced to Isobel and he said to her, ‘Isobel isn’t my mom, though I call her mom sometimes, and other times I call her Izzy. My mother’s name was Gloria and she went to live in America with an American sailor. Dad says this summer I can go and see her for a whole month, and Kevin’s coming too. I’ve got a baby sister called Rebecca, almost the same age as Nuala.’
Bridgette was shocked at Ben’s words, but she just said, ‘That will be wonderful. You must miss your mother very much.’
Ben nodded. ‘I used to miss her loads, but I’m used to it now, and Izzy is nearly as good as a proper mom.’ And then a cheeky grin spread over his face as he saw Molly approach and he added, ‘Kevin’s only got Molly. I’d rather have Izzy any day. She’s not half as strict as Molly.’
‘You, my lad, will get your ears boxed if you’re not careful,’ Molly said in mock indignation.
Ben gave Bridgette a wink and said, ‘See what I mean?’ and Bridgette had to bite on her bottom lip to prevent her smile.
‘He’s a cheeky monkey, all right,’ Molly said, watching Ben cross the room. ‘But to tell the truth, it’s nice to see him like that. He was once a very confused and unhappy boy.’
‘He said his mother lives in America,’ Bridgette said.
‘She does,’ Molly said. ‘When they were living in Buncrana, she fell for an American petty officer at the nearby naval base. Remember I said how much she hated Buncrana?’
‘Yes, but hating something doesn’t mean that you can go to America and leave your son behind,’ Bridgette said, appalled.
‘Ben was adamant that he didn’t want to go with her,’ Molly said. ‘He was actually on the ship that would take them to New York and he jumped off before it sailed. He told Kevin that he couldn’t leave his dad behind, and knew that he had made the right decision, but he was angry that he had to make any decision at all. I don’t think he realised just how much he would miss his mother. Kevin, having lost his own mother at an even earlier age, helped him cope with that in the end. Anyway, now Joe has met Isobel and Ben thinks the world of her. They will be married when Joe is a free man and meanwhile they live together in a bungalow in Walmley, Sutton Coldfield.’ And then she added with a smile, ‘Shocking really what the older generation get up to. Come and meet Paul and Aggie.’
Again Bridgette was confused, and as she took Aggie’s hand she said, ‘Finn told my mother that you had disappeared when he was just a boy.’
‘And he was right,’ Aggie said. ‘All the family know my story. Even Ben has been told now and so it’s only right that you should too. I was forced to leave home because when I was fifteen I had been raped by a man called McAllister and was having his baby.’
‘I don’t know how it is in France,’ Molly said, ‘but in Ireland, the greatest sin in all the world is to be having a baby without a husband. And somehow it’s always the woman’s fault. This was 1901, and I imagine things were even worse then.’
‘It’s the same in France,’ Bridgette told her, and knew she had been sensible not to tell the truth about Finn’s father. It would be sure to be viewed in a bad light because she was old enough to know what she was doing. She was, though, full of sympathy for the young Aggie as she suddenly remembered that Georges had nearly raped her when she was just a year older. ‘What a terrible thing to happen to you,’ she cried. ‘You were little more than a child. Wasn’t there anyone you could have confided in?’
‘He said if I told anyone he would say that I had instigated it, that I was more than willing.’
‘What a rat!’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Aggie said. ‘And the dreadful thing is he would have been believed as well. Tom was the only one in the house when I came home that time and he helped me and we agreed to tell no one. But when I found out that I was pregnant I confronted McAllister and he sent me to his sister in Birmingham, who he said would sort me out. I was terrified because I’d never left home before, but I was even more scared of staying.’
Tom snorted. ‘I wasn’t scared. I was raging angry, especially when I realised that McAllister was going to get away scot-free. Then after Aggie disappeared, I saw McAllister riding out to one of the farms and, wanting to teach him a lesson, I stretched wire across trees where I knew the horse would run into it as he made his way home.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Oh yes, and far too well,’ Tom said. ‘McAllister was thrown from his horse. He went sailing through the air and he hit his head on a tree and the blow killed him. McAllister’s wife had followed me and when I told her what her husband had done, she said Aggie wasn’t the first girl he had taken down, and so she helped me cover up the crime. Then, before the funeral, she wrote to his sister in Birmingham, informing her of her brother’s death but the letter was returned with “Not known at this address” written across it. I was so worried for I had no idea what had happened to Aggie.’
‘I obviously knew nothing of this,’ Aggie said. ‘But there was no one at the address when I arrived because the sister had moved.’
‘Oh God, what did you do?’
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ Aggie said. ‘I was desperate. I would have probably died had it not been for prostitutes who took me in and looked after me, particularly when I lost the baby. Living there, though, sealed my fate, and for years and years. I sank into their world of prostitution, because I couldn’t apply for anything more respectable without references and I owed the prostitutes loyalty and in time I took the drugs and drink they plied me with because it blurred the edges of what I was forced to do.’
‘It’s a dreadful tale,’ Bridgette said. ‘And I feel sorry for you too, Uncle Tom, having to carry such a burden.’
‘Yes,’ Molly said. ‘And one that prevented him marrying anyone. Uncle Tom, being the man he is, holds himself totally responsible for McAllister’s death. So he has never even allowed himself to get close to anyone.’
‘It was safer tha
t way,’ Tom said. ‘How could I risk the tale getting out? And yet I couldn’t keep such a thing from any woman I wished to marry. If it became known, the sacrifice Aggie made to save the family shame by leaving home before her pregnancy should be noticed would have been in vain. McAllister’s wife would have been in trouble too and if, because of my age at the time, I was spared the hangman’s noose, I would probably have been transported.’
‘This is awful,’ Bridgette said. She turned again to Aggie. ‘How did you escape in the end?’
‘I wasn’t on the streets straightaway,’ Aggie said. ‘I was taken as a paramour by one of the bosses of a club. They called it that, but really it was a posh name for a whore house. The manager wanted to marry me, but he was killed by an evil man called Finch. When I tried to break out of prostitution, he abducted me and forced me back into it. By the time I accidently bumped into Tom I was drink-sodden and addicted to the drugs Finch supplied me with. Tom weaned me off the drugs and hid me from those who were out to harm me.’
‘And what happened to the man Finch?’ Bridgette asked. ‘Was he ever brought to trial?’
‘Not through the official channels, no,’ Tom said with a slight smile.
‘I knew nothing of this until it was all over,’ Aggie said. ‘My brothers took matters into their own hands.’
‘We had to,’ Tom said. ‘Finch was rich and influential, and Aggie would be known as a street woman. If the police had agreed to take the case on, it would be laughed out of court. Anyway, she was too frightened of the man to testify.’
‘So?’
‘So, Joe and I tracked Finch down and Joe beat him up on a canal towpath.’
‘No more than he deserved,’ Bridgette said. ‘Did he kill him?’
‘No,’ Tom said. ‘He left him unconscious but alive on the towpath, but we had gone no distance when we heard a splash and running feet, and went back. Someone had heaved him into the canal and we watched him sink under the murky waters.’
‘I would say that he was no loss,’ Bridgette sighed.
‘I agree,’ Aggie said.
‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘And when we told Aggie that the man was finally dead, I saw the fear fall from her like she was shedding a skin she had lived with for years.’
‘And then she met Paul?’
‘Well, yes,’ Tom said. ‘Though Paul knew our family for some years before he met Aggie.’
‘He was an officer my father saved in the Great War,’ Molly said. ‘And Dad went to work with him afterwards. And then when Mum and Dad died I was taken to Buncrana to live.’
‘But your brother stayed here?’
Molly nodded. ‘He was too ill, the doctors said, and so he was left with our grandfather.’
Bridgette, remembering what the Donahue brothers told her, said, ‘I heard all this and I thought it a shame to part you both.’
‘I agree with you,’ Molly said, ‘we should both have been left in Birmingham with Granddad. I used to wish that when I was going through it with my vindictive and spiteful grandmother. But I would have hated Kevin to go through what I did.’
Bridgette remembered that that was what Pat and Mick Donahue had said too and she looked across at Tom and he nodded as he said. ‘Every word Molly said is true, for my mother gave her one hell of a life. She had done the same to me since I had been a boy and had me near scared half to death, and I had never bothered standing up for myself. When Molly came, she was such a sad and troubled young girl I had to take a grip on myself for her sake.’
‘But why was she like that?’ Bridgette asked.
‘It was basically because my mother married a non-Catholic,’ Molly said. ‘She was determined that I would pay for that.’ When she went on to chronicle some of the abuse and cruelty that she had suffered at the hands of her grandmother Bridgette was shocked to the core.
‘Yet,’ Molly continued, ‘if I hadn’t gone to Buncrana then I’d probably never have met Uncle Tom or Joe or Aunt Aggie or you either, so I can’t totally wish that I had never been sent there.’
‘So how did you track us down in the end?’ Joe wanted to know.
‘I didn’t know what to do at first,’ Bridgette told them of her assumption that Boldmere was a small place and the fruitless searching she had done after the two men from Donegal had arrived at her door.
‘But how come you are living in Orphanage Road now?’ Tom asked.
‘It’s the taxi driver’s mother’s house,’ Bridgette said. ‘He was concerned about me when I said I had nowhere to stay. I asked him if he knew of a hotel and he said in a place as bombed to bits as Birmingham, decent hotels and guest houses would all be full and the only ones likely to have rooms free would probably be in places that wouldn’t be safe for me.’
‘I can say from experience that he was probably right.’ Molly said with a shiver.
Bridgette raised her eyebrows, but Molly shook her head, ‘My tale will keep for another time. This is your story.’
It isn’t a lodging house or anything, just a house, but Ada, the taxi driver’s mother, is lovely. She had the room and agreed to take me in. Ada has been trying to help me find where you all were, although I imagine sometimes she must have thought it hopeless. I know I was beginning to. It was she who suggested that I try Paget Road School and they gave your address as Kingsbury Road.’
‘Of course, the Salingers’ house.’ Molly said. ‘Terry is in partnership with Mark at the garage. Apparently his sisters liked the quiet life and they went back to the place they had been living in all through the war and put their house on the market.’
‘That was the end of the road for me,’ Bridgette said. ‘When I wandered into the park this afternoon and by chance met Molly I was feeling so dispirited and low. I had written to the post office at Buncrana by then, but I thought it highly unlikely that they would help me.’
‘They did in a way,’ Tom said. ‘Nellie forwarded your letter to me and it had the address where you are staying in Orphanage Road. I was only alerting the family before going to call on you. And we all came to tell Molly and found you had already met.’
‘It was totally amazing how that happened,’ Molly said with a smile. ‘I will write to Nellie and explain everything.’
‘I can only imagine what it was like to lose both parents so suddenly and so tragically,’ Bridgette said. ‘The Donahue brothers told me what happened to you.’
‘It was a bad time,’ Molly agreed. ‘For all of us. But something nearly as bad happened to me when I first arrived in Birmingham.’
She stopped and Bridgette urged, ‘Go on.’
Molly took a deep breath. ‘When I was in Ireland Kevin and my grandfather used to write to me every week, but in October 1940 the letters stopped. When I had heard nothing for three weeks, knowing the pounding that Birmingham was having, I decided to go there myself and find out what had happened to them. As I stepped on to the platform at New Street Station, the sirens screamed to warn us all of a terrifying raid that scared me rigid and two men offered to look after me. That’s why I said what I did about the taxi driver. People are not always what they seem. I thought these two men were kind. They took me to a shelter, shared their food and when the raid was over, offered me an empty flat they knew of to spend what was left of that night. But I soon found out those men were anything but kind. I was soon pumped full of drugs while I was being preened for the whore house.’
Bridgette was so shocked her mouth had dropped agape. ‘You too,’ she gasped out. ‘I can scarcely believe it.’
‘Eventually, I was rescued by a lovely man called Will Mason,’ Molly continued, ‘who put his whole family at risk by doing that and then also harbouring me. But they tracked me down and made another attack on my life.’
‘My God! Molly, how dreadful!’ Bridgette cried.
Molly smiled wryly. ‘It would have been far worse if it had succeeded. As it was, that’s how I got together with Mark because in hospital I met his sister, Lynne. Mark came to visit his sister
and through him I got a job on the airbase. So you see, every cloud has a silver lining. Then later I testified against the men who abused me and many others, and I had the pleasure of seeing them gaoled for many years,’
‘You are incredibly brave, Molly,’ Bridgette said with a sigh. ‘I am so glad that I have met up with all of you.’
‘Yes, but I fear we probably won’t see that much of each other,’ Molly said, ‘because you will have to return to Paris sometime.’
Bridgette shook her head. ‘My dear aunt and uncle offered me a home straightaway when they knew my mother was dying, and Paris is lovely to visit, but I have been unable to settle there. Anyway, their elder son is now back home with his fiancée. They were parted from both boys for many years and I think need time to be together as a family.’
‘Would you like to go back to the other place then?’ Tom asked. ‘St-Omer, wasn’t it?’
Bridgette imagined the violence of the mob that would have attacked the bakery to drag her from it, and their frustration when she wasn’t there causing them to set fire to her home. Just thinking about it brought a bad taste to her mouth and she knew that she could never live among such people.
She could share none of this with Tom and Molly, but they had seen her shiver of distaste as she said, ‘I definitely don’t want to return to St-Omer.’
‘Too many bad memories, I suppose?’ Molly said, and Bridgette just nodded.
‘You could do worse than stay here with us,’ Tom said. ‘It can’t be that bad, as we have all settled around here, and you would have the support of us all. I should imagine widowhood is a lonely route to travel without family support.’
‘Uncle Tom has a point,’ Molly said. ‘But you’d hardly know what the place is like because you’ve seen nothing yet. Mind you,’ she added, ‘we can soon remedy that.’
Bridgette was not able to make any reply as just then Kevin came in, holding her shoulder bag in his hand. He said, ‘That Ada is really nice and she has packed a few things for the baby in case you want to stay the night.’