Child on the Doorstep. Anne Bennett
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purpose. She said there is a tidy sum in the post office now.’
‘Is your granny for it too then?’
Angela shook her head. ‘Granny thinks no good comes of stepping out of your class.’
‘Yeah, my mother thinks that too,’ Sarah said. ‘I mean, we live here in a back-to-back house and when we marry it will likely be to someone from round here. And, as my mother says, where will your fine education get you then? And my father says there’s little point in teaching girls any more than the basics because they only get married. He said they should spend less time at school and more with their mothers learning to keep house and cook and rear babies.’
‘I can see that those things might be useful,’ Connie said. ‘But we sort of learn to do those things anyway, don’t we? And I like school.’
‘I know you do,’ Sarah said. ‘Everyone thinks you’re crazy, especially the boys.’
‘Huh, as if anyone gives a jot about what boys think or say.’
‘One day we might care a great deal,’ Sarah said, smiling broadly.
‘Maybe we will, but we’ll be older then and so will they, so it might make better sense,’ Connie said. ‘But for now I wouldn’t give tuppence for their opinion.’
‘All right but your opinion should matter,’ Sarah said. ‘Tell your mother how you feel.’
‘I can’t,’ Connie said. ‘She’d be so upset.’
She remembered how her grandmother told her how her mother would go to put more money in the post office.
‘It was all she thought about. Granny said she was even worse when she found out about the death of Barry. Mammy said the physical loss of him was one thing but she would make sure his daughter did not suffer educationally. She said she owed it to Barry to give me the best start she could. What the teacher said cemented that feeling really.’
How then could Connie throw all the plans she had made in her face? Connie was well aware of the special place she had in her mother’s heart and for that reason she couldn’t bear to hurt her. She knew she had a special place in her grandmother’s heart too and it pained her to see her growing frailer with every passing month.
‘I really don’t know what I’ll do when she’s not there any more,’ she confided to Sarah one day as they walked home from school together.
It was mid-June and the days were becoming warmer and Sarah said, ‘She is bound to rally a little now the summer is here. The winter was a long one and a bone-chilling one and, as my mother says, enough to put years on anyone.’
Connie smiled because Sarah’s mother was a great one for her sayings.
‘And she is oldish, isn’t she?’ Sarah put in.
Connie nodded. ‘Sixty-five.’
‘Well, that’s a good age.’
‘I know, but that doesn’t help,’ Connie lamented. ‘She has been here all my life and very near all Mammy’s life too. The pair of us will be lost without her.’
‘You’ll have to help one another.’
‘Mmm,’ she said, knowing Sarah probably didn’t understand the closeness between her and her granny because both her grandparents had died when she was just young. It wasn’t just closeness either; she could tell her grandmother anything, more than she could share with her mother. She loved the special times they shared when her mother worked in the evening in the pub. Her granny liked nothing better than to talk about days gone by, which Connie sometimes called ‘the olden days’ to tease Mary, and Connie loved to hear about how life was years ago. It was the only way she got to know anything, for her mother seemed to have no interest in how things had been.
‘What’s past is past, Connie, and there is no point in raking it all up again,’ Angela had said.
That was all very well, but now she was thirteen Connie wanted to know how it came about that Mary had brought her mother up from when she was a toddler. That bit of information she had gleaned. She knew her mother’s mammy had died in Ireland, but didn’t know when, or anything else really.
Mary knew why Angela didn’t want to talk or even think about the past and the dreadful decision she had been forced to make. Connie didn’t know that, however, and Mary thought she had a point when she said, ‘Mammy thinks that what has passed isn’t important because she has lived it and doesn’t want to remember, but I haven’t and I want to know.’
Mary thought that only natural. The child didn’t need to know everything, but it was understandable that she wanted to know where she came from.
‘I’ll tell you, when we have some quiet time together, just you and I,’ Mary promised and she did, the following day, which was a Friday night. With Angela off to work and the dishes washed, Connie sat in front of the fire opposite her granny with her bedtime mug of cocoa and learned about the disease that killed every member of her mother’s family. Angela had survived only because she had been taken to Mary McClusky before the disease had really taken hold.
‘Your dear grandmother was distracted,’ Mary said. ‘She didn’t want to leave Angela, but the first child with TB had contracted it at the school and your namesake, Connie, knew she had little chance of protecting the other children from it because they were all at school too. But Angela had a chance if she was sent away.’
‘Did she know they were all going to die?’
‘No, of course she didn’t know, but she knew TB was a killer, still is a killer, we all knew. Angela’s family, who were called Kennedy, were not the first family wiped out with the same thing.’
‘And only my mammy survived,’ Connie mused. ‘Did you mind looking after her?’
‘Lord bless you, love, of course I didn’t,’ Mary said. ‘I would take in any child in similar circumstances, but Angela was the daughter of my dear friend and, as your grandfather, Matt, often said to me, the boot could have been on the other foot, for our children were at the same school. To tell you the truth, I was proper cut up about the death of your other grandparents and their wee weans, but looking after your mammy meant I had to take a grip on myself. I knew that by looking after Angela the best way I could I was doing what my friend would want and it was the only thing I could do to help her. It helped me cope, because I was low after Maeve’s death. She was followed by her husband who was too downhearted to fight the disease that he had seen take his wife and family one by one.’
‘What part of Ireland was this?’
‘It was Donegal,’ Mary said. ‘We came to England in 1900 when your mother was four. It wasn’t really a choice because the farm had failed, the animals died and the crops took a blight, and with one thing and another we had to leave the farm.’
‘So you came here?’
‘Not just like that we didn’t,’ Mary said. ‘We first had to sell the farm to get the money to come. Once here, we had nowhere to live, but luckily for us, our old neighbours in Ireland, the Dohertys, had come to England years before. You know Norah and Mick Doherty?’
‘Yes, they live in Grant Street.’
‘Well, they put us up till we could find this place,’ Mary said. ‘It was kind of them because it was a squash for all of us. In fact, there was so little space my four eldest had to sleep next door.’
‘Next door?’
‘Well, two doors down with a lovely man called Stan Bishop and his wife Kate who had an empty attic and the boys slept there.’
Connie wrinkled her nose and said, ‘I don’t know anyone called Bishop.’
‘No one there of that name,’ Mary said a little sadly. ‘Stan’s wife died and then he enlisted in the army and was killed like your daddy and many more besides,’ Mary finished, deciding