A Strong Hand to Hold. Anne Bennett
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brothers and sisters in both looks and build, and saw the sorrow in her eyes. He knew, as many did, how close the two younger O’Leary children were, for there was a largish gap between them and the others. Now the girl must be twenty or so. He remembered the time before her birth when Norah had come to see him and asked him to speak to her husband, who she’d said had forced himself upon her. She was pregnant again because of it and she didn’t want the child: Francis her youngest had been six and she’d thought four children enough for anyone.
Of course he could do nothing for the woman, but tell her firmly that she had to be grateful for any children that God sent her. He also said that it was not a woman’s place to refuse the husband to whom she had promised obedience in the marriage ceremony. Dermot, he’d said, had rights. And he must have insisted upon them – for Anthony had been born just two years after Jenny. Altogether the priest thought Norah O’Leary had had little to moan about in those days, with a fine handsome family and Dermot able and willing to work all the hours God sent to provide for them and not spend it all in the pub. Not all women were as lucky. Of course, her disability would have been hard to bear, he could understand that, and then to lose Dermot had been a big blow. Her children would have been a fine consolation for her, if the damned war hadn’t taken the young men of the family away. Thank God, he thought, she still had the girls – and Geraldine, now married, was still near at hand.
Father O’Malley had liked young Anthony. He’d been a fine boy, like his brothers before him. As mischievous as the next, though – not averse to taking the odd sip of Communion wine when he was serving on the altar, or filling his water pistol with holy water, as he recalled. But that was boys for you. The priest sighed. He’d have to go up and see Norah and try to offer the poor woman some comfort.
On the way home, Jenny decided to go to her Gran O’Leary’s, for she knew no one else would bother to tell the old lady about Anthony. Norah herself hated her mother-in-law. Not that she was a great one for liking people generally, but she really seemed to loathe Maureen O’Leary. She called her fat and common, and said she’d only put up with her on sufferance while her husband was alive, and now that Dermot was dead, she refused to have anything more to do with her.
Jenny didn’t care if her Gran O’Leary was common, but the woman her mother described scathingly as ‘fat’ Jenny herself would have called ‘cuddly’. Her lap was just the right size for a child to snuggle into, in order to lean against her soft and very ample breasts, while her plump arms were the most comfortable and comforting pillow Jenny had ever known. Maureen O’Leary always had an apron tied around her waist and her feet were encased in men’s socks, especially during the winter, with downtrodden slippers or old boots on top. Jenny didn’t care either that her gran cursed and swore a bit and hadn’t had the benefit of a decent education, Gran O’Leary was the only woman who’d ever shown her any love in her young life. She could never remember her own mother giving her a cuddle, or tucking her up in bed at night.
But then, as her Gran said, you couldn’t make people what they were not and she had to accept that. Jenny knew her Gran had loved Anthony, and it was right that she should be informed about his death; the four eldest O’Leary children had little or nothing to do with old Mrs O’Leary, because Norah had wanted it that way. Jenny thought it a shame, especially as she’d had so much to do with them all when they’d been small, but Maureen had never complained – at least not to Jenny. She’d once told her that Dermot had had very little influence over his elder children because he’d been away so much. First the Great War had claimed him, and then, once they’d come to England, he’d had to find work and money enough to support his mother’s family as well as his own.
Dermot had become a driver in the armament factory his uncle worked in, and had taken on any number of contracts to earn the money he needed. Maureen told Jenny that once he’d left the house, he might not come back into it for a week. That was how it came about that Norah and her mother, Eileen Gillespie, had the rearing and ruination of Jenny’s older brothers and sister.
However, it was all water under the bridge, now. Her brothers and sister were grown up and could make their own decisions – yet they never went to see their gran though she lived but two streets away, in Westmead Crescent.
That afternoon, Maureen O’Leary took one look at the anguished eyes of her granddaughter and drew her into her arms. She wept as Jenny gave her the news. She cursed Hitler and the whole German army and the German nation, and Jenny lay against her and wondered why she still couldn’t cry.
Even her gran’s lodger Peggy McAllister was upset when she heard of Anthony’s death. The McAllisters were friends of her gran who lived in Ward End and when the family had been bombed out in August, Maureen offered their eldest girl Peggy a temporary home with her. Since then Peggy had become friendly with Jenny, and she had even met Anthony when he’d visited his gran on his short leave in late September.
‘It could have been our Mick,’ she said to Jenny. ‘He’s desperate to join the RAF and he’s eighteen just after Christmas. It’ll break Mammy’s heart if anything happens to him.’
‘It isn’t only the servicemen though, is it?’ Maureen said, dabbing her eyes. ‘I mean, your whole family could have been killed in the raid that blew up your house. Those poor Londoners are getting it every night, and hundreds killed there.’
‘It’s happening all over the country,’ Jenny said. ‘And the Coventry raid five days ago that killed over fifteen hundred people and injured many more will at least put paid to the stupid people who think being two hundred miles from the coast is some sort of deterrent. I think, and so do many more, that we will be next. All our defences have been stepped up. I’m on duty tonight, as it happens.’
‘Och, girl, they’ll understand if you go down and explain,’ Maureen said tearfully. ‘They’d not expect you in tonight if you tell them about Anthony.’
Jenny shook her head. ‘I’d rather not just sit and think,’ she said. ‘God knows, there’ll be time enough for that – and Anthony wouldn’t want me to stay away, especially if there should be a heavy raid tonight.’
Maureen didn’t press her granddaughter further, but Jenny knew it wouldn’t be so easy for her to convince the ones at home. ‘I’ll have to be going anyway,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘They’ll all be sitting there waiting for me to make their tea.’
‘I must be away too,’ Peggy said, ‘or they’ll be handing me my cards.’
Peggy worked the night shift at BSA – Birmingham Small Arms – in Armoury Road, making Browning guns for Spitfires, and it was one hell of a trek from Pype Hayes out there every evening. Maureen secretly thought the reason she stayed on with them and didn’t look for something nearer, was because she was sweet on her son Gerry, and Gerry certainly more than liked her. In fact, Maureen thought, Peggy would be hard to dislike as she was lovely to look at with her thick hair so dark it was nearly black, and eyes to match, and her full mouth in her heart-shaped face. But best of all was her kindly nature and sense of humour. Maureen would welcome the girl as a daughter-in-law, for Gerry was thirty-three and a fine age to marry, but he was too shy to speak his mind to the girl. Maureen thought him a fool and hoped he wouldn’t dally too long, or someone else would snap the girl up.
Jenny knew what was in her gran’s mind, but her own was still full of her brother, and as she made her way back to the house, she wondered why she didn’t look in the least bit like him. Like his three brothers and Geraldine too, Anthony had had deep brown eyes and hair, a nice-shaped nose and mouth, and flawless skin. The boys were all acknowledged as handsome and Geraldine known as a stunner.
Jenny’s face was longer than theirs and went to a point at her chin, and though her eyes were brown, they were much lighter than the other O’Learys’. Her nose had no shape to it at all and was powdered with hideous freckles, and her mouth was too big and her lips too thick. But worst of all was the mop of auburn curls that refused to lie flat, or be tamed in any way. She was plain if not downright ugly – and if she’d had any doubts about it, Norah O’Leary would have dispelled them, for all the years of her growing up, she’d told her how ugly she was.
Not,