Till the Sun Shines Through. Anne Bennett
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at will.
The sun had turned the rivers running down the mountainsides into silver snakes and a tributary of one of those rivers ran beside the farm. Bridie could see it in the distance and she remembered playing in there as a child and how the boys had learned to swim where it ran deeper behind the rocky waterfall. She gave a sigh of pleasure at the memory as she turned to face her cousin. ‘I’d never want to leave here, Rosalyn. I love it all. What more could you want? It’s beautiful!’
‘Aye. Beautiful and dull, deadly dull,’ Rosalyn replied contemptuously. ‘But you at least can get away from it. If Mary’s place doesn’t take your fancy, haven’t you two fine brothers in New York?’
Bridie knew she had. They were shadowy figures she could barely remember, who sent weekly letters to her mother Sarah with dollars folded inside them.
‘I can’t remember either Seamus or Johnnie,’ Bridie protested. ‘I was only five when they left in 1919, and before that they’d been at the Great War for three years.’
Rosalyn, a year older than Bridie, remembered how happy everyone was that Bridie’s older brothers had escaped injury in the Great War that had killed so many and arrived home, if not totally fit and well, at least in one piece.
Their happiness was short-lived though, for in the early spring of 1919, two weeks after the boys had come home, they’d both contracted Spanish flu.
Bridie had crept about the house of sickness on tiptoe, listening to the adults talk. She didn’t understand much of it, but knew her brothers were very sick, and with the rest of her family she’d said prayers and attended Masses though she barely knew them.
The two boys had rallied and began on the long road to full recovery when, despite Sarah’s efforts to isolate them during their illness, their young brother and sister, Robert and Nuala, then aged seven and nine, caught the flu too. Sarah was worried, but she told herself that the children had previously been fit and healthy, and they’d surely have more resistance than their brothers who’d spent years fighting a war from an open trench they’d shared with ice and mud and rats. However, Sarah had underestimated the speed with which the illness could take hold. Neither Sarah’s stringent nursing care, the masses said, novenas begun nor rosaries recited in many neighbouring houses could save the young children who died just two weeks after the onset of the disease.
Bridie had been beside herself with grief, unable to understand how children fit and healthy one day could just up and die in no time at all. Robert and Nuala, the siblings nearest to Bridie’s age, had been her playmates, together with Rosalyn and her brother Frank, and Bridie missed them dreadfully. Rosalyn had been almost as badly affected and they’d often crept away together to escape the grief.
It was usually Mary who found and comforted the two wee girls. Sarah and Jimmy were too racked with sadness, Johnnie and Seamus were riven with guilt from bringing the disease into the family, and Terry was busy trying to keep everything ticking over, although he was stunned with sorrow himself.
Then, with the family coming to terms with their loss, Seamus and Johnnie, unable to stand the guilt any longer, suggested going to their uncle Connor in New York in the autumn of 1919. Ireland was on the brink of civil war at the time and Bridie remembered her mother saying the boys had survived the war, as well as pulled round from the Spanish flu, and she didn’t want a British Tommy gun to end their lives and so she’d made no objection to them going and trying their luck in America.
Although Bridie barely remembered the two brothers she still got that blood was thicker than water when all was said and done and a brother was a brother. ‘I’m sure they’d be delighted if you were to join them,’ Rosalyn told Bridie. ‘They’d hardly refuse now, would they?’
‘Probably not,’ Bridie said, considering it. ‘But I don’t think I’d like America, not from what they say in their letters anyway. I’m not like you, Rosalyn, I’m happy here and Mammy and Daddy would hate me to leave.’
Rosalyn knew that was true. Bridie had been pampered all her life, being the baby of the family. After the deaths of Robert and Nuala, Sarah had taken even greater care of her youngest child. She was slight, very small, and Sarah thought she hadn’t the constitution or physique of the children she had left to rear.
She appeared incredibly frail, yet Bridie never sickened for anything. After Robert and Nuala died, Sarah worried constantly about her. The choicest cuts of meat were hers and there was always a newly laid egg and fresh milk whenever she wanted it. She was expected to do little in the house: Sarah said she did enough at school and encouraged her to go out into the sunshine, or sit by the fire to rest herself.
Rosalyn often resented the way Bridie was treated. Apart from her elder brother Frank, there were also four much younger weans at home: her mother had suffered a series of miscarriages after her birth and so she’d been eight when Declan was born, followed by Nora, Connie and Martin. She seldom had a minute to call her own and yet Bridie could swan around the place, being petted by everyone because she looked so sweet.
And she did, that was the very devil of it. She was elfin-looking with large, expressive, deepbrown eyes, ringed with long black lashes, which showed up against her creamy-coloured skin, and just a hint of pink dusted across her cheeks. Her nose was like a little button, and her mouth a perfect rosebud above a slightly pointed chin that showed how stubborn she could be at times, not that she was thwarted in many things she wanted. Bridie’s shining glory though was her hair. It was thick, the colour of deep mahogany, and hung in natural waves which were tied back with a ribbon, curling tendrils escaping and framing her pretty little face.
She was well loved, Bridie. Her parents were fair besotted by her and seemed to find it amazing that they had given life to this beautiful, fine-boned child and Mary and Terry petted and spoilt her too. She was also a favourite in Rosalyn’s own home and even Frank was gentle with her.
Yes, Bridie had a fine life, Rosalyn thought. Why ever would she want to leave? Yet a restlessness had begun to stir in Rosalyn and she knew Barnes More, which was just three miles away from Donegal Town in neighbouring Northern Ireland, would not be able to hold her for long. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I intend to go as soon as the opportunity arises. Mammy’s brother Aiden keeps talking about trying his luck in the States, but he hasn’t done anything about it yet. He’s sweet on Maria Flanagan and that’s what holding him, Mammy says. I don’t intend to get sweet on anyone over here. There are men galore in America. I’ll chance my arm there.’
‘It’s not your arm they’ll be looking at I’m thinking,’ Bridie said with a broad grin.
‘Bridie McCarthy,’ Rosalyn shrieked in mock indignation. ‘I’ll …’
But Bridie never found out what Rosalyn was going to say because just at that moment they heard Aunt Delia’s voice in the yard. ‘Rosalyn! You, Rosalyn!’
‘Oh, Dear God, now I’ll catch it,’ Rosalyn said with a groan, catching sight of her mother’s angry stance from the barn window as she stood in the yard below them.
Bridie watched her cousin run across the yard to her mother, feeling sorry for her. She had hardly any time to herself. Once, Bridie had asked her mother whether she thought her aunt Delia was unfair on Rosalyn.
‘Well, she has her hands full with four wee ones and all,’ Sarah had said. ‘And,’ she’d added, ‘Francis isn’t always easy. ’Course, your father won’t hear a word said against him.’
Bridie was familiar with the story of how her father Jimmy and his wee brother Francis were the only ones left after cholera had swept through their family. Female relations had arrived in droves to claim wee Francis who was but five. Jimmy had been twenty years old then and refused to let him go. Instead, he had farmed the land and reared the boy himself.
Jimmy had married Sarah when she was just seventeen and she helped in the rearing of Francis, who was by then twelve years old. Later, as a grown man, he had met and married Delia and Jimmy had helped him buy the farm beside them when it became vacant. Because of all this there was a special feeling between the brothers, though they were