In Derry a woman came knocking on the doors of her neighbours to announce that her daughter was six months pregnant. The neighbours, bound to tactful silence until the woman should speak, were freed to offer help and commiseration. All over the world, people are constrained from mentioning the noises that come from next door. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear is the title of a book about wife-battering. The right word, at the wrong time, is construed as interference.
A son leaves his home town, his wife and his children, in search of work. He comes home once a year and the family doesn’t ask what he’s doing over there, not his wife, not his parents, not his friends. Twenty years he’s been away, but no one wants to know the details. He lives with a man. Officially he’s got a wife and children over here. Jesus help us all should he die and there’s a competing crowd around the grave. Maybe he’ll get buried over there and we’ll all be too old to travel or care.
A pregnant unmarried woman announces that she has got a job in England, and goes to live in secret in a convent somewhere in Ireland. CURA, the confidential catholic service for such women, has booked her into the convent and also arranged a postal address in England. The woman’s letters home, and the family’s letters to her, are routed through the English address. The government praises the work of CURA.
These things are done in the name of love. It depends what you mean by love. ‘If your wife knew,’ Martin Kennedy asked the psychologist Brian McCaffrey, ‘that you have decided in the interests of your family to purchase a new house, and you know that she knows, though you haven’t spoken to her – is it important that you have not exchanged confidences?’
‘I wouldn’t lay that much emphasis on it,’ came the reply.
For two weeks before the guards arrived, said the judge, the whole family knew about the birth and sat around behaving normally. Kathleen had just told him that she ‘presumed’ and ‘supposed’ that the others knew what she strongly suspected, in fact was sure of – that Joanne had had a baby.
Kathleen never discussed her suspicious certainty with Joanne. ‘I was waiting for her to bring it up,’ was how she described the sleepless night the two sisters had spent together in the room after Joanne came in from the field. Joanne lay on the bed, Kathleen lay on the mattress on the floor, Yvonne lay in her cot, and not a word was said.
And if Joanne had never brought it up, she was asked?
‘I would have remained silent about it for ever.’
Sister Aquinas described to the tribunal how the family members communicated with each other. They seldom discussed anything. It was not that they refused to speak, but ‘to me discussion is different. It is different to general conversation.’
A thing would happen, and be mentioned and, if there was nothing to be done, or the thing was very painful, they moved on to other matters. Abbeydorney was as far removed from Californian consciousness-raising as it was possible to be.
There was, in any case, a delicate and natural hierarchy within the family, unspoken but observed, established by custom, practice and predilection.
Aquinas and Joan Fuller were, at the end of the day, only the aunts. Mary Hayes might be the titular head, as mother, but Joanne was of age, well over age, when their troubles began, twenty-two at the start, twenty-four by the time she arrived in the police station. Mike and Ned led lives that were not home-centred, Mike concentrating on his cows, Ned leading a life virtually apart in the second dwelling up the road.
‘I wouldn’t ask Ned. I would ask Kathleen or the mother,’ is how Aunt Joan explained to the tribunal she would broach family matters. She wouldn’t ask Joanne. ‘I never asked her those questions about her private life, especially in things as sad as that.’ Nor did she probe into the sad things. When Kathleen gave her sad, sparse information, ‘I took it as she gave it to me. I left it at that.’
The brothers presumed Kathleen would tell them anything they ought to know and didn’t go looking for information. They relied on her to do what was necessary in any given situation. Everybody relied on Kathleen, who virtually ran the home, while her sister worked in the sports complex, her mother’s health declined with years and her Aunt Bridie withdrew from reality. On the day the police called, it was Kathleen who saw to the dinner and the changing of Yvonne’s nappy; when the dead baby was found, it was Kathleen who went in to tell Patrick Mann, while Ned waited outside in the car; it was Kathleen who went in to tell Guard Liam Moloney, while Ned waited outside in the car; it was Kathleen who took the police to the pool, while Ned went up the road to his cottage and Mike milked the cows.
It was Kathleen who stayed up until Joanne came in from the field that night, Kathleen who went to fetch help for her a day later, Kathleen whom Joanne told about the location of the baby. Kathleen had a lot to carry within the family. Sometimes, though, the others got involved in decision-making. They did so, as Aquinas pointed out, with the minimum of discussion. That’s the way they were.
For instance, Aquinas had a fairly good idea that Joanne was pregnant with Yvonne, but ‘I kept my suspicions to myself. I was waiting for them at home to tell me.’ She had been on a visit to the farm and, as she stood out on the road waiting for a lift back to the convent, Joanne came home from work, and Aquinas felt sure from the look of her that her niece was expecting. That was in March 1983.
In April, the family saw Aquinas coming up the path and ‘Bridie came and met me outside the door. She said “We are in great trouble here. Joanne is pregnant and there won’t be a marriage because he is a married man.”’
She went inside and found Mary Hayes and Kathleen crying. ‘They knew that I knew, and I knew that they knew.’ Few words were said. ‘There was no great discussion, because when the man was married there wasn’t much that could be done.’ Adoption was mentioned, but they felt that ‘Joanne would have the last word’. Joanne was out late that night. In the morning Aquinas went to see her in the bedroom. ‘I said to her that they had told me about her condition and she cried and was upset.’ The aunt held her niece in her arms and nothing more was said. Days later Sister Aquinas wrote to Joanne recommending adoption, but Joanne refused and that was that.
Aunt Joan had to be told. She came down for Easter and Mary Hayes, driven to the station by Ned, told her in the car on the way out to the farm. ‘They told me he was a married man. That is the only objection I had to him. I did not say that to Joanne.’
Aunt Joan, like Aquinas, waited until she had returned to Newbridge before broaching the matter, in a letter, to her niece. She also recommended adoption. Receiving no reply, the aunt sent a second letter that painfully acknowledged her place in the family. ‘I am not your mother. I hope you haven’t taken offence. Let us carry on as we always have carried on.’
Yvonne was born in May. The family had not faced up to her arrival until the seventh month of pregnancy.
What happened the second time round, though, the tribunal wanted to know? One by one, out of each other’s sight, in full sight of the public, they were made to account for their own and each other’s attitude the second time round. One by one they said they had not noticed she was pregnant, except for Kathleen.
Kathleen, unable to deny the evidence of her own eyes, unable to discuss it with a family that did not mention it, unable to discuss it certainly with Joanne, who had met her query with an outright ‘No’, went finally to her cousin’s house and said that which was difficult to say, that Joanne was pregnant again. The cousin said she had noticed. They watched Hill Street Blues together. Joanne was then in the eighth month of pregnancy, within twenty-four hours of premature birth.
The protestations of Mary Hayes, her sons Mike and Ned and Aunts Joan and Aquinas that they did not know were met with scorn and abuse and jeers. ‘Didn’t the dogs in the street know?’ asked Kevin O’Higgins. ‘Half the countryside knew,’ declared Anthony Kennedy. It was a well-known fact among her co-workers at Christmas, the tribunal said.
All she had noticed at Christmas, said Aunt Joan, wa
s that her sister Mary had emphysema and blood pressure, which the doctor said might necessitate hospitalisation. She would prove, she said, that she had not noticed in Christmas 1983 that Joanne was pregnant again by telling them about Christmas 1982, when Joanne was expecting Yvonne. That Christmas she had gone down home for her seasonal two-day holiday. Mary Hayes had given her a turkey, as she did every Christmas, to bring back to her employers, ‘my priests’. Joan Fuller felt she was ‘getting a bit beyond the stage of dragging turkeys up and down on trains’, especially crowded ones, so Joanne was roped in to help. Joanne spent all her summer holidays up in the priests’ house, and was welcome there, so she got on board the train with her aunt, ‘came up with me with the turkey and the next thing I discovered the baby was born in May’.
The tribunal advanced reasons why the family members did not know, or admit to themselves, or discuss openly the fact that Joanne Hayes was pregnant once more. Addressing each other, or the judge, or the witnesses, the lawyers drew an imaginative portrait of pregnancy outside marriage and its effects on family and society in post-amendment Ireland.
Surely, Anthony Kennedy suggested, Kathleen was self-conscious about what the local community would think. The pregnancy was a reflection on her, a source of embarrassment and shame about what people would say to her when she went outside the house.
He invited Kathleen to agree with him that she faced a bleak and frustrating future, her hopes of getting married or getting a job destroyed should Joanne have a second ‘illegitimate’ child and she ‘be stuck minding the two of them’. Kathleen, at thirty, was ‘not getting any younger’, Martin Kennedy offered.
The situation must have been, said Anthony Kennedy, ‘an absolute scandal’. In a rural area like Abbeydorney, suggested Brian Curtin, the situation was worsened by the fact that the father of the second illegitimate child was the same married man. Here was a family with a nun in it and a priests’ housekeeper. Highly respected, amplified Brendan Grogan, and ‘suddenly Joanne is flaunting the fact that she was pregnant. She had no shame.’ This would be a cause of resentment and coldness in the house.
That would eventually cause a breakdown in communication, speculated Brian Curtin. ‘It would not be discussed as openly as the first pregnancy?’ Nevertheless, the tribunal wanted the family to account for the time of the actual birth in the early hours of Friday morning 13 April.
14. Birth on the Farm
On Thursday 12 April 1984 Joanne Hayes had a scheduled day off work. So far she’d had a lousy month. After inviting her to take maternity leave, her employers had taken out an advertisement in the paper on 6 April announcing that her regraded job was open to public competition. The examination for the clerk-typist grade 2 position would pose no problems, since she had long ago got her secretarial certificate from college, but the advertisement said that applicants would have to do an interview as well.
The examination and interview were scheduled for the middle of May, just around the time her baby was due. The interview would be with John Falvey, chief education officer of the Vocational Education Committee. He had interviewed her before, about her relationship with Jeremiah Locke, and she had denied it.
Joanne Hayes spent her day off work getting in and out of bed, complaining of stomach pains. Mike spent that day with the cows, went to a neighbour’s house in the evening, came home around eleven, held Yvonne while Kathleen fetched her nappy for a last change, and then Mike went to bed. He shared his room with his mother, who had been occupying the spare bed for some weeks now, stricken with a bout of heavy flu. It was easier for her to stay all the time in the farmhouse during her illness than to sleep overnight in the cottage and trek the daily hundred yards back to where the food and heat and people were.
Ned spent that Thursday putting new windows into the cottage. When he and the man who was helping him came down to the farmhouse for their midday meal, Joanne did not come to the table. She had a pain in her stomach, his mother told him.
That evening Ned went to a neighbour to finalise plans for the football match on Friday night, collected the jerseys for the team, called to a petrol pump and went for a pint in the Silver Dollar. He drove home, left the keys of the car in the farmhouse, said goodnight and went up to the cottage of which he was now sole occupant. Kathleen, too, had moved down to the farmhouse, to take care of her mother. Ned read part of The Great Hunger before going to sleep.
Kathleen spent that day running the farmhouse as usual. In the evening, while Joanne and her mother watched television, she went to a neighbour’s house to get her hair done. When she came home towards midnight, she found Ned already gone to the cottage and her mother and Mike in the kitchen getting ready to retire. Aunt Bridie, true to her nocturnal habits, was asleep in her room. She was not due to get up until the others had left the kitchen. Joanne, too, was in bed in her own room and Yvonne was in the cot beside her. Kathleen went to see them. Joanne asked Kathleen to change Yvonne’s nappy.
Kathleen remembers asking Mike to hold Yvonne while she fetched the nappy things and then, she says, Mike went on into bed. Kathleen changed Yvonne and brought her back to Joanne’s bedroom. Joanne said she was going to go outside for a breath of fresh air; she was feeling hot and had been stuck inside all day and it might do her good.
Kathleen doesn’t remember at what exact stage in these proceedings her mother went to bed. She remembers that after Joanne went out there was nobody in the kitchen.
Kathleen stayed a while in the bedroom with Yvonne and then she went to the empty kitchen. She opened the front door, peered into the darkness, saw nothing, called out to her sister and heard Joanne’s reply from a distance that she would be in in a minute. Kathleen went back to the bedroom. Immediately she heard Joanne come in she returned to the kitchen, which divides the bedrooms from the parlour and bathroom beyond.
Joanne had continued on to the bathroom. Kathleen saw drops of blood on the kitchen floor leading from the front door to the hot press and then from the hot press to the door that led to the bathroom.
Joanne came down that bathroom corridor now and appeared in the kitchen in a short-sleeved nightie. Over her arm was a blood-soaked nightdress. She said she’d had a heavy period and asked Kathleen if there were any sanitary towels. Kathleen said she hadn’t any. Joanne went on through the kitchen and down the other corridor to her bedroom. Kathleen followed her. Joanne found sanitary towels in the wardrobe.
The two sisters lay down, Joanne on the bed, Kathleen on the mattress on the floor. She waited in the darkness for Joanne to speak, for Joanne to confirm what she suspected, that she had just had a baby. Joanne said nothing. There was silence, and eventually Kathleen fell asleep.
Joanne says she got up towards dawn, around half past five, and went out to where her now dead baby lay. It was in a pile of hay, about fifty yards from the house, close to the place where she had given birth. She saw, for the first time, that she had had a boy. She placed the baby in a brown paper bag and then in a plastic shopping bag, went down to the bedstead that acted as a gate, climbed over it and into another field, went to the end of that field to where the river was and hid the body of her child under a bramble ditch, near the river, in a pool of water that had overflowed.
She returned to bed and fell asleep.
When Kathleen woke up on that Friday morning, around eight o’clock, she went and helped Mike in the milking parlour. Then she woke her mother with a cup of tea. She told her mother that Joanne had had a miscarriage during the night, out in the field.
Kathleen brought Joanne a cup of tea. Joanne got up around ten o’clock. Kathleen saw her take a pair of tongs from the range and go out of the house. She stood at the front door and watched her go down the field and out of sight.
Kathleen went down the field a little, too. ‘I did not know what I would find there, but I said I would go down and maybe I would find something.’ She found two pools of blood in the grass. Under the hay nearby, she saw a plastic bag. She lifted the hay and the bag wit
h her foot, and gravel poured out of the burst bag. ‘I got afraid and I went up home.’ She was afraid she’d see a baby. Joanne’s mother got up and saw the drops of blood on the floor. She spoke to her daughter. Joanne said she had had a heavy period.
There was no discussion.
Words mean what you want them to mean.
Joanne haemorrhaged through that day and Kathleen went that night to her cousin for help. Joanne had words with her cousin, then with the doctor and then with the authorities in the hospital to which she was brought for treatment. She was sent home after seven days and nobody in authority said she’d had a baby.
The authorities said nothing at all to the family about it, whatever it was, and whatever it was was done with now. Their silence was an official sanction, and the family did not speak of whatever it was that had happened in the early hours of 13 April.
Nobody in the tribunal asked Joanne or Kathleen, during their long days of testimony, where Bridie Fuller was during the early hours of 13 April. She would have been due to get up around 1 am to keep nocturnal vigil, as she did every night in the kitchen. She would have been there when Joanne came in from the field in a blood-stained nightie dripping blood. Certainly she would have been there at dawn when Joanne got up to go back out to the field.
Bridie would surely have noticed something, and the failure of the tribunal to ask Joanne and Kathleen about her was a startling one, but then the tribunal had other things on its mind. Public outrage about the nature of all the other questions put to Joanne Hayes had mounted to boiling point and the tribunal was under siege.
A Woman to Blame Page 11