A Sister's Promise (18 page)

In January 1938, Biddy had news of her son Joe, from America. His mother-in-law had finally died and as soon as arrangements were finalised, Joe would be leaving.

‘Is he coming here?’ Molly asked Tom that evening as they milked the cows.

Tom smiled and shook his head. ‘Joe left here with big ideas. Told everyone he was off to the New World to make a fortune, that he would come back with gold dripping from his fingers, and he can’t face coming back here with his tail between his legs.’

‘So what is he going to do?’

‘He intends making for England as soon as he can, only the winter is not the best time to be travelling the Atlantic. He is looking to the spring to sail. I offered to send him the fare, for I know things have been tough for some time and the funeral must have been expensive, but he said he has some pride left. Gloria intends selling her mother’s rings to raise the money, apparently. Hers have already gone the same way to keep them alive this far. Anyway, he has a job of sorts now that keeps them just about surviving until they are ready to leave.’

‘What will he do in England?’

‘Anything he can turn his hand to,’ Tom said. ‘One thing neither myself nor Joe is afraid of is hard work. Once he is in England, I shall cease worrying so much about him.’

Biddy didn’t see it that way, of course. ‘Going to England is madness!’ she declared. ‘Why England, when he has a place ready and waiting for him here? He belongs here. They can have Molly’s room and she can sleep in the barn.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Molly commented sarcastically.

‘And it is more, far more, than you deserve,’ Biddy snapped. ‘Write and tell him, Tom.’

‘I will do no such thing, Mammy,’ Tom said. ‘Joe is a grown man and knows he can come back here and welcome at any time, and without relegating Molly to the barn either. But he has made the decision to make for England.’

‘I might have known I couldn’t count on you,’ Biddy snarled. ‘I will write to him myself and demand he comes here. I haven’t seen him in years and I am getting no younger. Joe will be home before long, mark my words.’

‘Will he, do you think?’ Molly asked Tom later.

He shook his head. ‘I doubt it, unless his character is changed totally. I told you, he never leaped to do Mammy’s bidding like muggins here did.’

Joe and his family arrived in England in early March where they found lodgings in Tottenham in London, and Joe soon got a job in the docks.

Biddy, of course, blamed Gloria for Joe’s staying away. ‘Thinks we are not good enough, that’s what it is,’ she said. ‘Don’t know why he had to take up with a Yankee trollop in the first place.’

‘She is Joe’s choice,’ Tom said quietly, ‘and that is good enough for me.’

But not apparently for Biddy. Watching her, Molly gave a shiver of apprehension for the unknown American woman. She knew Biddy would always blame her for their decision to stay in England, and the longer time passed, the greater her bitterness would be. She sincerely hoped the two never got to meet.

As Molly passed her sixteenth birthday, she remembered the promise she had made to Kevin that she come back when she was sixteen, but as the time drew near she was hesitant to do this. Part of the reason was money, for although Paul Simmons had been more than generous, and a postal order had come every week, most of which she deposited in the post office, she knew she would be in need of a fair bit when she set off back to Birmingham. There were the fares,
for one thing, and perhaps lodgings and money enough to keep her until she got a job, because there was no way that she was going to live off her granddad.

Then Nellie told her that she thought Biddy might well have the right to bring her back if she was under the age of eighteen. ‘I mean, she will hardly agree to you going back and consorting with the people she sees as heathens,’ she said to Molly.

Molly gave a wry smile. ‘I wasn’t thinking of telling her, Nellie,’ she said. ‘I was going to slip away without a word. I know she wouldn’t agree to it, and not just for the religious aspect of it either. She has had me skivvying in that house and farm since the day I arrived. When I do leave here and she has to do some of these things herself she is going to have one almighty shock.’

‘So,’ Nellie said, ‘wouldn’t it be better to put off leaving for a while until you are older and she will have no more jurisdiction over you? She could easily get the police to help her trace a runaway, especially a girl. When you leave here, you don’t want to think that that old besom has any sort of right at all to haul you back again.’

And wouldn’t she make me suffer for that act of defiance if she did? Molly thought, and a shiver ran through her. ‘It would give me a chance to save more,’ she conceded. ‘But … well, eighteen is another two years away and there is that promise I made to Kevin.’

‘You didn’t know the set-up of the place when you made that promise, Molly,’ Nellie reminded her. ‘Nor just how bad your grandmother could be. Write to the child and give him some reason why you can’t come just yet.’

Knowing that Nellie spoke good sense, Molly wrote to her brother that very night, but because she had never told them in Birmingham how bad her grandmother was, she just said she hadn’t enough money saved to leave Ireland yet, but she would be with him as soon as she possibly could. That night, she lay in bed and went over
the letter in her mind, knowing she had made the right decision.

One of the first things she had to do when she left this place was buy new clothes, for she had grown out of those she had brought with her. She now had definite breasts developing, though she would never have the figure of the more voluptuous Cathy. This, together with the muscles in her back, which had been strengthened by the work on the farm, had made her dresses for Mass very tight, and her coat she struggled to fasten at all. She had also grown taller, so that the dresses she had brought with her three years before were several inches above her knee and she could barely walk in her shoes that pinched her feet so badly.

Eventually and begrudgingly, Biddy declared she needed new clothes. Molly was as pleased as any other young girl at the thought of new things and she thanked her grandmother, not something she was wont to do often. It was as she saw her grandmother’s lips curl as if in amusement that she felt the first tingling of apprehension.

Buncrana was well served with dress shops, but Biddy marched past them all and instead took Molly into the drapers. Molly’s heart sank when Biddy selected cloth in the dullest of grey and navy blue for the dressmaker to make up into two dresses for Molly. She didn’t hear what was discussed, for she was sent outside the shop after the dressmaker had measured her, so she didn’t see the dressmaker trying to remonstrate with Biddy and try to change her mind.

‘After all, I have a reputation to keep up,’ she told Nellie later. ‘What that woman wants me to do is not something I approve of at all, at all. She wants no decoration, not even shiny buttons, or a collar and cuff of a contrasting colour. And what in God’s name is the point of it? It’s like throwing some old bag over a beautiful flower. I tell you, Nellie, I thought of refusing to make the dresses at all, but,’ and
here she gave a shrug, ‘times are tough. I can’t really afford to turn business away.’

The following week, when Molly saw the dresses, her heart sank. There was no adornment of any sort about them and they went right up to the neck and down to the wrist and ended halfway down her calf.

‘Ah God, Nellie, if you could have seen the look in that poor girl’s eyes when she looked at herself in the mirror,’ the dressmaker said to Nellie afterwards. ‘And the grandmother enjoying it, so she was.’

‘Yes,’ Nellie said with a grimace. ‘She would be.’

In fact, Biddy was far from finished. She bought Molly a couple of liberty bodices too. Molly had worn these before as a child for extra warmth in the winter, but they were nothing like these ones, which pressed her breasts down uncomfortably and had suspenders attached to them. Biddy bought thick black stockings to attach to them and voluminous knickers.

‘Take that look off your face, girl,’ Biddy said, as they left the shop. ‘This is what you are getting. Like it or lump it, it makes no odds to me. Now for the coat and boots.’

The boots were second-hand, a pair the cobbler had left on his hands after repairing them. ‘They are more a boy’s boot than a girl’s,’ he told Biddy doubtfully.

‘A boot’s a boot, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but these are hobnailed to make them hard-wearing. That’s why the mothers buy them for the boys.’

‘They look just fine to me,’ Biddy said. She turned to Molly and said, ‘Try them on. If they fit you, we will take them.’

Molly thought of the ugly clothes and the ugly underwear and now the ugly boots, and she wanted to weep, especially when she remembered the pretty clothes her mother had bought her, which she took such pleasure in wearing, and the patent shoes that she could almost see her face in.

However, she knew her grandmother was already enjoying her discomfort and would be delighted to see tears. She would not give her that satisfaction. She lifted her head at this resolve. The movement was barely perceptible, but Biddy spotted it and it enraged her. By God, she thought, I will knock that pride out of her if it is the last thing I do. The shabby black coat she bought in the second-hand shop was one the proprietor thought he would never get rid of. It was far too big for Molly too, and so long she knew it would reach the top of her boots, but Biddy told him to wrap it up, they would take it.

The next morning, Tom could hardly believe her eyes when Molly came out of her room dressed in her new clothes for Mass. He understood now why she hadn’t been excited at getting new things like Nuala had always been. She would be showing him this and that in the cart even, and once home insist on putting the new things on and parading in front of them all, his mother looking on dotingly at her darling child.

His eyes slid to his mother’s now and he saw the gleam of satisfaction there. He thought her a malicious old cow and he knew the best thing to do was not to mention the clothes at all.

So he smiled at Molly and said, ‘You ready then?’

Molly was grateful to Tom and when she got to the church no one commented either, but Molly couldn’t altogether ignore the looks of pity that were shot her way. She didn’t want pity. It was no earthly use to anyone. She had money of her own now to buy what clothes she wanted. The five shillings had grown over the two years, especially as most weeks Tom remembered to give her sixpence, which she usually saved to pay for stationery and stamps. But she would not touch a penny piece of that money. It was to be her gateway to freedom, when she would be able to dress in any way she chose.

* * *

Just after they had news of Joe’s safe arrival in England, Molly heard of Germany’s invasion of Austria.

‘Uncle Tom, you don’t just march into another person’s country and take it over,’ Molly said as they walked home from the McEvoys’ one Sunday evening.

‘Well, that’s what Hitler did all right.’

‘And they just let him?’

‘That’s about the strength of it,’ Tom said. ‘Course, he was Austrian by birth. That’s maybe why. Anyway, they say without a shot fired he is now in charge of Austria. They call it the Anschluss. It means joining up, I suppose, like a merger.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ Molly said. ‘I mean, why did he want Austria? Isn’t Germany enough for him?’

‘Ah, Molly! If it was just Austria.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that I think this is the tip of a very big iceberg.’

‘But it doesn’t have to be,’ Molly said. ‘If Hitler wants Austria for some reason, and Austria doesn’t mind, then let him have the damned place if it matters much to him.’

‘I think, Molly, that that is what the world will be forced to do,’ said Tom.

Then in late September of that same year the Prime Minister of Britain, Neville Chamberlain, had gone to see Hitler in Munich and worked out a deal, and there was a picture of him on the front pages of the paper waving the piece of paper and declaring, ‘I believe it is peace for our time.’

Molly, as usual, followed the news stories at Cathy’s house. ‘That’s good news, at any rate,’ she said.

‘Um, I suppose,’ Cathy replied.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Well, it’s just that Daddy said that Chamberlain had to give Hitler a piece of Czechoslovakia to get him to agree.’

Molly pondered this for a moment and then she said, ‘Well, I don’t see that that is right. I know what problems there are taking away part of a country, and Ireland knows
that maybe better than many. I also don’t see what gave Britain the authority to take land from one country and give it to another just because they wanted it, and I have no idea how the Czechoslovakian government or its people feel about it either. But I can’t help feeling if the alternative was war they would probably agree anyway.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ Cathy said. ‘It is what anyone with any sense would want. Anyway, I’m grateful that all the fretting and anxiety is out of the way. Maybe now everyone can stop going around with doleful faces.’

‘Oh God, Cathy,’ Molly cried with a smile, ‘do you really think that is likely? It is adults we are talking about here, and the age of miracles is past long ago.’

‘Cathy says her father thinks Chamberlain a fool,’ Molly told her uncle one Sunday evening in early February 1939, as they walked home from the McEvoys’.

‘He does,’ Tom said, ‘and so do I if he actually trusts Hitler and believes that bit of paper he was shaking so importantly has any credence at all. I don’t want a war, Molly – no one in their right mind would – but somehow we seem to be balanced on a knife-edge, like we are waiting for something.’

They hadn’t long to wait, because the following month, though the Spanish Civil War eventually drew to a close, the dictator Franco was the victor and the leader of the country, and that same month Hitler’s armies marched into Czechoslovakia.

In May, Joe wrote to tell them of the Territorial Army recalled and mobilised, and the call-up begun of young men of twenty and twenty-one years. For the first time, Molly faced the fact that Britain at least was walking the path to war, and she wrote an impassioned letter to her grandfather and Hilda, telling them to look after themselves and keep safe at all costs.