A Strong Hand to Hold. Anne Bennett
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to be careful with it.’
She knew her mother wouldn’t believe her. The war was now fourteen months old, and despite Norah having four sons and a son-in-law in the fighting line, she still seemed to think a world war shouldn’t affect her life at all. Before Norah was able to make a reply, Jenny’s grandmother Eileen Gillespie came in from the kitchen.
‘Shouldn’t you be on your way?’ she snapped at Jenny. ‘Go on, I’ll see to your mother.’
But suddenly there was a knock on the door. Jenny raised her eyes to the ceiling. Who on earth would call at this hour? They weren’t expecting any parcels.
When Jenny saw the telegraph boy with the buff telegram in his outstretched hand, for a moment she couldn’t move. Her head swam and she fought against the nausea that rose in her throat. She had the urge to thrust it back at the boy, refuse to accept it, as if not to read that one of her brothers was killed or missing would mean it was untrue – a mistake.
Instead, she found herself not only taking it from him, but thanking him before she shut the door. She stood with the thing in her hand, shaking so much she couldn’t open it. Her grandmother, coming into the hall to see who’d knocked, found Jenny sitting on the stairs, arms around her legs while shudders ran through her whole body.
Eileen’s face blanched white at the sight of the crumpled telegram in Jenny’s hand and she grasped the door jamb for support as she said, almost in a whisper, ‘Who?’
Jenny shook her head mutely and Eileen grabbed the telegram from her and ripped it open. ‘Dear God!’ she wailed. ‘It’s Anthony!’
‘Missing?’ Jenny asked, and she silently cried out to the Almighty to give her some vestige of hope.
But her grandmother shook her head and went into the living room to break the news to her daughter. A howl of agony escaped from Jenny. A hard knot settled in her heart and sent spasms of pain through every part of her body; and although she cried out at the acuteness of it, her eyes stayed dry and she wondered, bleakly, how she’d get through the rest of her life without her beloved brother.
She hardly felt the cold of the hall seeping into her as she sat on the stairs, hugging her knees and listening to her mother’s sobs from the living room and trying to come to terms with the devastating news. Anthony had been in the RAF for just five months, as he’d joined on his eighteenth birthday in mid-June. By then, the true cost of lives lost in Dunkirk was common knowledge and most people knew that just a small stretch of water separated the UK from German armies, and for the first time in many years, the British faced the possibility of invasion and subsequent defeat.
Anthony had been desperate to join up. Knowing the fight to protect Britain would come from the air, he’d soon tired of the Home Guard which he’d joined when war was declared, and where he’d trained with broomsticks, with just a black armband to show he was in any official capacity at all.
Jenny remembered it so well, the day he’d got his wish; he’d stood before her in Air Force blue, his hat at a jaunty angle and the light of excitement dancing in his eyes. And though Jenny was bursting with pride, her stomach had contracted in fear for his safety.
For just a few short weeks, all the time the RAF could spare to train their fighter pilots, Anthony was stationed with the 605 Squadron in Castle Bromwich, not so far away. Meanwhile ‘The Battle of Britain’ had raged in the skies. Jenny read all the news reports. The papers used the number of enemy planes lost in comparison to the British as if it were a score at rugby. Nineteen to four, or fifteen to seven, they’d claim. She doubted the accuracy of the British losses and presumed it was done to boost morale, which she found distasteful. War was no game and every pilot lost belonged to someone.
And far, far too soon, Anthony had become a part of it, stationed in a unspecified airfield in the South. Now Jenny began to pray in earnest for her youngest brother, for while she worried and prayed about the rest of her family, she knew that her younger brother in particular faced mortal danger on a daily basis.
However, by the end of September, ‘The Battle of Britain’ was over, the Allies were victorious and Britain safe once more from invasion. Anthony had been home on leave for a few days. Now, just two short months later, he was dead. Jenny let out a long, shuddering groan.
She got to her feet, shivering, and went into the living room, where her mother seemed awash with tears; Eileen Gillespie held her daughter pressed to her breast. Jenny would have welcomed comforting arms around her, but she knew that would never happen. Anyway, there were practical things to do, and she seemed the only one able to deal with them. She first had to phone the Dunlop where she worked as a typist, and then see her sister Geraldine and her sister-in-law Jan, the wife of her eldest brother Seamus, to tell them the tragic news.
She didn’t want to see the priest – she felt God had let her down – but her grandmother said Norah needed him to visit and so she made herself go that afternoon. Geraldine and her small son Jamie were installed in the house by then, for Geraldine said she was worried how the news of Anthony’s death would affect Mother with her delicate state of health.
As Jenny went down Holly Lane to the priest’s house, she wondered for the thousandth time why the whole family went on with the pretence that her mother was some sort of invalid. Norah O’Leary was nothing of the sort, and if she knew so must they – but Jenny had only ever spoken about it with Anthony. For years it had been the same, and Norah had kept her husband Dermot dancing attendance on her because of it.
When he’d breathed his last, in the spring of 1939, Jenny had known with fearful trepidation that she, as the only unmarried daughter, would be expected to take over from her father. The prospect filled her with dread, for she knew her mother didn’t like her that much – and to be truthful, she wasn’t that keen on her mother either!
She had hoped the war might postpone the grim prospect she saw before her, but when she suggested giving up her job and joining the WAAFs, the family were loud in their condemnation. Only Anthony told her to go for it. More than once, he and Jenny had glimpsed their mother through the window walking around with no apparent stiffness and without her sticks, and yet when they entered the house later, they would see her sitting in her chair, covered with a blanket, complaining of the agony she was in.
Norah O’Leary was a fraud, and both her younger children knew it. Jenny remembered how Anthony had told her to drop the charade the others practised. ‘For God’s sake,’ he’d said, ‘stand up to Mother before it’s too late.’
‘Oh, it’s all right for you,’ Jenny had cried. ‘You’re a man. You’ll soon be out of it.’
‘So could you be,’ Anthony had pointed out. ‘Join up, if that’s what you want. Mother’s not helpless and Geraldine only lives up the road.’
But it had been no good. Jenny had been unable to withstand them all telling her how selfish and inconsiderate she was and how she should know where her duty lay. She supposed she’d scored a minor victory though in refusing to give up her job when Geraldine had suggested it.
‘How will you cope?’ her elder sister had asked.
True, in the beginning it had been hard dealing with her mother and the housework as well as her job. Previously her father had seen to many of Norah’s needs; now there was just Jenny to do everything. She’d been glad Anthony was too young to join up with his elder brothers straight away, for she’d depended on him a lot and they’d grown closer still. Yet however hard it had been, and still was, Jenny knew that if she’d been with her mother day in, day out, she’d not have been able to stand it.
And how in God’s name was she to stand this latest blow? she thought, as she turned up the garden path of the Presbytery. Who would she confide in now and tell her hopes and dreams to? Who now would deflect her mother’s anger and comfort Jenny when Norah had reduced her to tears yet again. Jenny’s eyes misted over with misery, but she refused to let any tears fall. She had an idea that once she began crying, she’d never stop – and she had to talk to the priest.
Father O’Malley