The Ballymara Road

by Nadine Dorries

  ‘Besmina!’ Both Aideen and Agnes looked at one another in shocked surprise.

  ‘That’s right. I think she worked in the kitchens here, before her grandmother brought her to me to give her work at the hospital. When I was a district midwife, I delivered Besmina at her grandmother’s house in Dublin.’

  Aideen smiled, knowingly.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, miss. She worked in the kitchens,’ said Aideen slowly.

  The three women now began to help Kitty to her feet. Dehydrated and with a dangerously high temperature, she was mumbling incoherently as though delirious. Rosie knew Kitty could have a febrile fit at any moment. God only knew how she would cope with that, here in this godforsaken place.

  Rosie was eager to get Kitty to hospital. Out in the country, in the rural farms and on the bogs, she had seen girls develop serious infections after giving birth. By the time Rosie reached them, peritonitis had often fatally set in. She would do everything in her power to ensure that did not happen to this child.

  Moving as softly as they could, Aideen and Agnes helped Kitty down the stairs. When they reached the bottom step, Agnes suddenly froze.

  A ghostlike shadow upon the wall announced that the imposing form of Sister Assumpta was gliding silently towards them, the Persian silk runner absorbing the sound of her inescapable approach.

  They were trapped. Motionless, they stood as if turned to stone whilst her shadow turned the corner and enveloped them.

  Her mouth dry with fear and her knees turning to jelly, Agnes clung onto Kitty’s arm, holding her upright in the process.

  She had felt bold, sneaking away to see the midwife, passing on the details of the birth and helping the poor girl. They had guessed by her accent, she must have come from Liverpool and that for some reason she had told no one her story. They had all guessed that Kitty held a secret.

  ‘God knows, don’t we all have our own,’ Aideen had said to Agnes.

  But now, with the wrath of Sister Assumpta bearing down upon them, their boldness fled.

  Jeez, we are mad, thought Aideen. What had seemed like a brave idea only an hour ago now appeared reckless and foolish. They had broken every rule in the Abbey, including having spoken to Rosie and each other. Agnes felt as though she would wet herself in fear at the consequences.

  Sister Assumpta stood before them, not speaking a word, staring first at Rosie and then at both girls.

  ‘And what, may I ask, are you both doing in the main house at this time of day? Why are you not in the laundry?’

  Rigid with terror, neither girl could utter a word of response. Aideen tried, but her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth in dread.

  ‘Speak!’ Even the mice shook at the sound of Sister Assumpta’s anger.

  Neither girl could have responded even if her life had depended upon it. Agnes began to shake.

  ‘Sister Celia!’

  Sister Assumpta’s voice boomed out again, although her lips appeared not to move, nor her glare to leave the girls. However, she needn’t have wasted her breath because Sister Celia almost immediately waddled into view, carrying the leather holdall Kitty had brought with her on the day she had arrived. It contained her own clothes, which had not been seen in months.

  ‘Take these girls into my room immediately and search them, please, Sister.’

  With no grace and even less kindness, Sister Celia dropped Kitty’s holdall on the floor. Grabbing Aideen and Agnes each by the arm, she marched them both away down the corridor. As Kitty began to slip to the floor, unsupported, Rosie had to move swiftly, placing her arm under her shoulders and round her back.

  Sister Assumpta said to Rosie, ‘I told them on the day they brought this – this girl,’ she almost spat out the words; she had wanted to use a very different term but she had eighty pounds owing to her, and was not going to put the payment in jeopardy, ‘that many of the girls here are penitents, placed here into my care by the government. I have a job to do here, midwife, and, as I told you, I would prefer you not to speak to the girls for any reason at all.’

  Rosie was not easily intimidated, and she had no intention of apologizing, but right now she just wanted to be out of the Abbey and on the road to Dublin. Stooping to pick up the holdall she shuffled Kitty towards the door.

  Sensing the sister’s hot breath on her neck, Rosie gave way to rising panic. When she finally managed to open the door, she took a deep breath of the chilled, rejuvenating air. She was nearly there.

  ‘Thank you, Reverend Mother. The girls have been very helpful. I am sure I will have messages of thanks to deliver to them, from the family, when I return with the payment. I hope to see them again.’

  As she walked out, she knew that Sister Assumpta still stood in the doorway, rooted to the spot, observing her every step.

  And she also knew that she would not be allowed to see Aideen and Agnes ever again.

  With an effort, she laid Kitty down on the back seat of her Hillman Hunter. As she closed the car door on her and placed her holdall into the boot, she heard the sound of stifled cries. Rosie felt sick at the thought of the girls being beaten, only a few yards away, but right now she had a sick girl only forty-eight hours post-partum with a temperature of 104, lying on the back seat of her car. She prayed that her contact details were not found in the hem of Aideen’s calico knickers, and quickly checked that the letters were safely in her handbag before placing it on the passenger seat beside her.

  The sky was darkening rapidly as Rosie left the Abbey. When she pulled away, she was aware that her retreating car lights were being followed: from behind the twitching, heavy curtains by disapproving nuns’ eyes downstairs, and by grateful waves from unknown girls through the cold, uncurtained windows of the top floor and the laundry.

  As she looked across the vast lawn towards the trees, in the bright moonlight she noticed a gravestone. Rosie shuddered. Each one of those girls in the graveyard would have died terrified, screaming in agony, feeling unloved and alone. Rosie crossed herself as she pulled out of the gate and sped, as fast as the icy road would allow her, on to Dublin.

  In less than ten minutes, she realized she would never make it. An abandoned bus completely blocked the road. Rosie left her car and shouted up into the driver’s cab, but there was no one inside. The door was locked and footsteps leading away, lightly covered by fresh snowfall, told her that the driver and passengers had long since left.

  Kitty slept fitfully on the back seat with Rosie’s spare sheepskin jacket laid over her and an Aran picnic blanket rolled up under her head for a pillow. There had been no tea or cake for Kitty. Rosie knew she was weak and in danger. The Kitty she had known before the delivery had been a bright girl. Now she was without the energy even to cry. The only words she had spoken, as the car had pulled away from the Abbey, were, ‘Rosie, fetch the baby, fetch John,’ before sleep possessed her.

  Rosie made a decision there and then. She would drive as quickly as possible – in the opposite direction, to Maeve and Liam’s farmhouse on the Ballymara Road.

  She would pass the doctor’s house on the way and would collect some antibiotics and ask him to put up a drip that Rosie could look after whilst she nursed Kitty at Maeve’s. The doctor would trust her. She could provide him with an entirely false name for Kitty and, if he pushed, she would make him aware that no further information would be forthcoming. Not even a doctor would push for information regarding a young girl, with no baby to show for her pains.

  The drive to Bangornevin was tortuous. With the coming of night, the temperature had plummeted and what had earlier been the soft snow, during the day, had frozen into solid ice along the narrow country lanes. The road, which was not easy to drive on at the best of times, now felt to Rosie as unyielding as iron.

  She knew the route well, but the fog and mist that had rolled down and onto the fields confused her. Every few yards or so, a cow in search of warmth loomed up from the mist in the dim yellow headlights as a ghostly spectre, causing Rosie to yelp with frigh
t.

  The moon was full, and the sky ahead appeared to go on forever, an inky-black carpet of glittering stars, interspersed with heavy clouds full of snow. Rosie gave thanks, more than once, for the ethereal, sparkling light, which reflected from the ice, transforming the road into a frosted satin ribbon, winding its way along the riverbank, leading them on.

  The moon kept with her all the way, refected in the fast-flowing river beside her, watching and guiding her. Even in her gloves, Rosie’s hands were near frozen and the heater struggled to make any difference whatsoever to the temperature inside the car.

  On a number of bends, Rosie missed the road entirely when the car jolted frighteningly against the roadside scrub and stones. At one point, she had to get out of the car and push the tyres out of a shallow dip. By the time she was back in the driver’s seat, wet and chilled to the bone, she had to scrape the ice from the inside of the windscreen before she could safely continue on her journey.

  They had not passed a single car along the way. She felt gripped with terror when she realized that if anything did happen to the car, both she and Kitty would surely freeze to death before they were discovered. She was glad that Kitty was sleeping and unaware of their danger.

  Rosie had no idea that since her baby boy had been born and taken away from her on Christmas morning, Kitty had lain awake, day and night, yearning for Rosie to arrive. She had barely moved her gaze from the window, watching for the car headlights. Kitty was now in the deepest sleep. With her pain controlled by the pethedine, her body had surrendered.

  Although she was cold, Rosie was sweating with fear and praying out loud.

  ‘Thank you, Lord, for bringing me here. Now, could you just take me a little further, please God.’

  Rosie prayed to every saint a day was named after, to every angel whose name she could remember and to the Holy Mother. She barely stopped to draw breath as she did so. She knew that if she stopped to think about their predicament, she might lose her resolve. Rosie was tough, having seen and dealt with most things. Now, however, she was alone. Her ability to reach help was at the mercy of the elements and she had never before felt so out of control, or been so afraid.

  Irish winters were harsh and the locals in Bangornevin still spoke sadly of the two brothers who had been discovered in their farmhouse, snowed in and frozen to death, in 1947, as though it had happened only yesterday.

  Rosie reached over to the back seat to place her hand on Kitty’s forehead. The girl appeared to be more unconscious than asleep. Despite the cold, Rosie knew, with heightened concern, that Kitty was burning up.

  ‘Oh, God in heaven, no. Please, not peritonitis, Lord, please, no,’ Rosie whispered to the heavens, putting her foot down and trying in vain to drive faster and more safely.

  ‘God in heaven, help us,’ she whispered, crossing herself, as she followed the river round to Castlefeale. Tears of fear filled her eyes, as she began to shiver violently with the cold.

  Rosie thought about her husband and their animals on the farm. Maybe he had been right. Maybe she should have listened to him. ‘That would be a first if ever there was one, eh, Kitty,’ she said aloud and laughed nervously. What she wouldn’t give now to have her husband here, giving out to her for not listening to him.

  ‘Ye always think ye knows best, Rosie, but ye don’t, not always!’ How many times had he said that to her and she had scoffed in his face, right back at him.

  Talking out loud to Kitty, albeit it with a trembling voice, helped to calm her fear and made her feel less alone.

  ‘What I wouldn’t give right now for you, Kitty, to sit up on the back seat and tell me you are feeling much better. God in heaven, I would gladly give away everything I owned, if that would happen just now.’

  But there was no response to her frantic gabbling. Not a sound.

  She leant over the steering wheel to scrape away the ice, yet again, from the inside of her windscreen. She could see her breath before her, forming into soft grey clouds. She blew hard on the glass, hoping it would make some difference.

  Never in her life had she known a night as cold as this. Never.

  As she rounded the bend into Castlefeale, turning away from the river, Rosie’s heart sank further. They had lost the moon.

  ‘Well, there goes the moon, so we are on our own now, Kitty. At least it kept us from driving straight into the river, thanks be to God.’

  She was talking faster as her fear mounted.

  The road became dark as the mountains rose up on either side, casting their shadows, obscuring the torch of the moon that had illuminated their route, but then suddenly, as though in answer to her prayers, it slipped out from between the two mountains and illuminated the way ahead.

  ‘Oh, thank you, Lord,’ Rosie now sobbed in relief as once again she scraped furiously at the windscreen.

  After what seemed like hours, they passed through Bellgarett and Rosie gave a huge sigh of relief. They were heading towards civilization, such as it was in this part of the world. As she drove past the post office she noticed that they had been spotted. Her husband would now be telephoned and told she had passed safely through. She wound down the window and waved feebly before quickly drawing her arm back inside.

  ‘We’ve been clocked, Kitty,’ she said. ‘They will be ringing on ahead now so that they will be watching out for us in Bangornevin. By the time we arrive in Ballymara, they will be waiting for us with a smashing dinner. Won’t that be grand?’

  As she reached the doctor’s house she pulled up sharply in front of the gates but her heart sank. The building was in darkness and the gates were firmly locked. Shaking her head, she quickly slipped back behind the wheel and carried on towards Bangornevin, heading through to Ballymara.

  Rosie wondered what reason Maeve and Julia would have given to Mrs Doyle, the nosiest postmistress in all of Ireland, for this visit on the coldest night of the year. She told herself that no one would notice Kitty, lying on the back seat. They would think something was up at the farmhouse for Rosie to be so mad as to drive on a night like this.

  ‘A good meal in your insides is what we need next, eh, Kitty. Sure, we must be the only people in all of Ireland not indoors.’

  Rosie could not hear a sound from the back seat. Not even the faintest breathing.

  But her fear began to subside as she felt the watching eyes of the home villages, following them on their way. At last, they were safe. No harm would come to them now. The hardest part of Rosie’s journey was yet to come: the mile and a half down the bumpy terrain of the Ballymara Road. Although she was used to being in charge during difficult, even life-threatening situations, she felt a huge relief to see Maeve and her sister-in-law Julia running out to meet them when she finally drew up outside the farmhouse.

  Through the doorway, a warm light radiated onto the road. She could see the welcoming flames of the peat fire licking up the chimney; she could smell the freshly baked bread wafting towards her. Rosie felt as though she had driven into heaven.

  The skies were darker over Ballymara and as Rosie opened the back door of the Hillman Hunter, the flakes began to fall thick and heavy.

  ‘God in heaven,’ said Maeve as she saw Kitty asleep on the back seat. ‘Julia, get Liam out here now.’

  Within seconds, Liam was at her side and between them they slipped Kitty out through the car door. Liam carried her into their kitchen and laid her down on the padded settle in front of the fire.

  ‘She hardly looks like the same girl we dropped off at the Abbey,’ he said, with more than a hint of anger in his voice.

  ‘She looks desperate, Rosie,’ said Maeve.

  ‘Well now, I’ll not hide the truth from you in your own home. It is desperate,’ said Rosie. ‘I think she may be developing an infection. I called into the doctor’s house when I passed through Bangornevin, but there were no lights on.’

  ‘They have gone back to her mother’s house in Liverpool for Christmas,’ said Maeve. ‘They won’t be back until after the new
year. And even if they were there, no one can know about this. What in God’s name do we do?’

  ‘Well, right now I want to give her a proper clean-up and check the stitches I rushed to put in at the Abbey. Have you any chicken stock to get down her, Maeve? It’s the next best thing to penicillin. The Abbey girls told me the poor kid has lived off next to nothing for months. It’s a wonder she had the strength to give birth to her baby at all. We need to pray hard, ladies. This child is as sick as sick can be. Frankly, if she was on one of my wards I wouldn’t give much for her chances, never mind out here in the country without a doctor or a hospital for miles.’

  Julia crossed herself. ‘I need to drive to the post office and telephone Kathleen in Liverpool so that she can break the news to Maura and Tommy.’

  ‘No,’ Rosie said sharply. ‘There is nothing they can do. They couldn’t even travel here in this weather. Let’s leave it for a day. I need a chance to nurse her back to health, if I can.’

  ‘Well, ye don’t need to do that alone, Rosie. Mrs McGuffey has the cure for this. Liam, Liam!’ Julia shouted, rushing through the kitchen to the back porch, where she knew Liam would be. ‘Can ye get the van out and get to the McGuffeys’ in Gisala?’

  ‘Aye, I can do me best,’ said Liam.

  Within minutes, they saw the van lights disappearing slowly along Rosie’s fresh tracks in the snow, up the Ballymara Road.

  Maeve, who was forty and childless, was filled with sadness at Kitty’s return to the farmhouse, alone, without her baby. Maeve would have loved to have adopted Kitty’s child, but Liam wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘We still have time for our own yet,’ he had whispered to her in the dark when they were lying in bed. Maeve had used every trick in the book known to woman. If she couldn’t persuade Liam to let them adopt the baby, when he had a belly full of Guinness in the moments just after sex and before sleep, she knew she never would.

  Julia came in to set down a bowl of hot water and a pile of clean, warm towels.

  Rosie said, ‘God, it is better facilities here than it is in the Abbey, I can tell ye, Maeve.’