Danny Boy (36 page)

Ida said nothing. She knew few children got new boots, but Rosie thought nothing too good for her daughter. Rosie had seen enough barefoot, ragged children about the doors, their begrimed feet blue with cold and shivering in their thin, threadbare clothes. She’d rather do without food and walk barefoot herself than bring that fate on Bernadette.

However, she had no objection to Ida taking her out and was glad her daughter was well out of the way when the griping pains became stronger. She had thought she didn’t want anyone near her when her contractions started, none to notice her shame when yet another child was stillborn, yet she thought now, as she prepared the bed for herself, she’d value company.

But there was no-one about and so she went back downstairs and waited as the contractions grew stronger.

She remembered Ida telling her about the woman who lived in Upper Thomas Street who’d helped out at numerous births and she wondered now if she should fetch her, in case Ida wasn’t back. She’d never spoken to her herself, though she knew the woman and knew she lived at number 59. She sank down on a chair suddenly as another pain took hold of her, clutching her stomach protectively, and felt the familiar stickiness and saw the blood staining her bloomers.

The pain intensified quite suddenly and as one contraction followed another, Rosie moaned in agony. She knew she needed
help and panic clawed at her as she struggled up to her feet intent on getting to the street and maybe sending a child for the woman.

The room spun and tilted as Rosie stood holding on to the mantelshelf. She waited anxiously for her head to stop spinning, knowing she had to get help before another pain could overwhelm her. But even as she thought this, the rush of water took her unawares, and as the next pain began she felt a blackness descend on her. She didn’t feel herself falling onto the sodden rug before the range, nor the crack of her head as it smacked into the fender.

She was semi-roused from her unconscious state by the contractions and she shuddered with the pain of it and then sank back into oblivion. And that is what Rita saw as she popped in to see Rosie on her way home from work.

Rita thought at first she was dead and sprang across the room just as another contraction began. Then she saw Rosie’s face grimace in pain and the trembling of her limbs and knew what was happening.

But what had rendered her unconscious? ‘Rosie,’ she cried, shaking her gently, and then she saw the cut on her head and the blood seeping from it onto the floor. ‘Dear Almighty Christ,’ she cried, sinking to her knees over the inert form. The floor and rag rug were soaking and she knew if Rosie was to get through this she needed help and fast.

She raced up the entry and looked up and down the street. A group of little boys were playing marbles in the gutter and she pulled on the sleeve of the eldest one, who was about eight. ‘D’you want to earn tuppence?’ The boy’s eyes widened. ‘Yeah, missus,’ he said, thinking, who wouldn’t?

‘You need to go and get the doctor,’ she said. ‘He’ll probably be at his surgery in the Lichfield Road. Doctor Patterson, you know him?’

The boy nodded. ‘My ma had to have him when our Maggie, Colin and Dougie was dying of TB.’

Of course, Rita hadn’t recognised the boy, but she knew him as one of the Murrays. The whole area had supported the boy’s mother when she had had three of her children die of TB the previous year, and her a widow after her man had been killed at Wipers in 1915. It had been a tragedy, and yet if she didn’t soon get help, Rosie might add to the death toll of the street. She said to the child, ‘If he is out, ask where he is, you understand?’

He nodded.

‘Tell him Rosie Walsh has need of him. Say she is having her baby and she’s in trouble. Can you do that?’

‘’Course I can, missus.’

Rita opened her purse. She had two pennies in her hand, but she dropped them back and extracted a silver sixpence instead. The boy’s eyes opened wide in disbelief as Rita pressed the coin into his hand. ‘A tanner,’ he breathed. He’d never had a tanner in the whole of his young life and already he was wondering whether he should buy a little treat for his mother to take the sadness from her eyes for a minute, or give the whole sixpence into her hand. But that was a decision he could make later. ‘Don’t you worry, missus, I’ll bring the doctor,’ he told Rita firmly. ‘I’ll find him wherever he is and make him come.’

Rita returned to Rosie. She had to get her more comfortable and at least try and ease the rug from beneath her. But when she returned it was to see Rosie twisting her head from side to side, her face contorted in pain, though her eyes were still shut. Rita was afraid to do anything that might add to her distress. Instead, she positioned herself at her head and took one of her cold hands in hers and began to stroke it gently. ‘Come on, Rosie. Hold on there. You’ll be fine, the doctor will be here in a minute,’ she said over and over.

Doctor Patterson was on his rounds of the back-to-back houses when he was accosted by the little boy. While everybody about knew Rosie Walsh was pregnant, they also knew
she’d actually told few people and didn’t want to discuss it, and could quite understand that after losing two babbies. Doctor Patterson had no idea she was even expecting. He’d had no occasion to visit the street or neighbouring courts for some months and so hadn’t caught sight of Rosie, so he said to the child, ‘Rosie Walsh? Are you sure that was the name?’ For there were other women he knew to be near their time.

‘That’s what her said,’ the boy stated. ‘Rosie Walsh, and her said she were in trouble and needs you like and quick.’

‘I’m on my way,’ Doctor Patterson said.

The boy ran beside him as they hurried along, as if to assure himself the doctor would go straight to the Walshes’. The doctor wondered how far gone Rosie was this time and if she’d give birth to another dead baby. Christ Almighty, life was a bugger all right.

The husband must be an insensitive brute to put her through this again, he thought. He barely remembered when he’d last touched his wife intimately and at times he burned with frustration, but Rosie’s husband must have known what he was doing and what she would go through. The times he’d met Rosie, he’d liked and admired her.

So when he saw her laid out comatose on the saturated floor with blood still trickling from a head wound and her face contorted in pain, he thought for a moment he might have been sent for too late.

‘She’s in a bad way, isn’t she?’ Rita said after the doctor’s brief examination.

He nodded. ‘She needs to go to hospital,’ he said. ‘I’d feel happier. Don’t worry, I’ll go along with her. Can you stay with her a while, while I arrange it?’

‘As long as you like,’ Rita said.

Doctor Patterson raced up the entry to where the boy still stood. ‘Can you go down to the surgery?’ he said. ‘Tell the woman behind the desk to telephone for an ambulance to come here. Can you do that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Here’s sixpence for your trouble,’ Doctor Patterson said, drawing it from his pocket.

The boy, who would have walked across hot coals for half as much, thought this an easy way to make money. He supposed he was sorry Rosie Walsh was sick and all, but his mam always said not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and so he pocketed the money, hearing it jangle against the tanner already there, and began to run.

‘How is she, Doctor?’ Danny asked Doctor Patterson, leaping from the hard bench where he’d sat for hours supported by Rita and Ida. Doctor Patterson, who’d also hung about in the hospital for some time, heedless of the patients probably waiting for him at evening surgery, looked at Danny in distaste. Here was the brute who’d put Rosie through this. ‘Your wife is very poorly indeed,’ he said. ‘She has had to have a caesarean section, but is now out of immediate danger, and you have a son.’

He didn’t add that he didn’t know how long the child would survive, for he was very small and puny-looking and the doctor didn’t think much of his chances. But the baby didn’t concern him as much as Rosie, and what would happen to her if this baby died as well. God, it was a hard life for some of these people.

Danny didn’t understand the doctor’s attitude, but then thought it mattered little how he was spoken to, it was Rosie he was concerned about and he barely registered what he’d said about the baby. ‘Can I see her?’ he asked.

‘There is little point, she’s still unconscious and will be for some time yet. Maybe you can look through the window?’

Danny thought he’d never get over the sight of Rosie lying there, so still and as white as the bandage that encircled her head. He noticed how her thinness had semi-disguised her pregnancy and now he noted her sunken cheeks and her hands
so thin that even from the window he could see the prominent veins.

The nurse was at the door. ‘Are you the husband?’ she said to Danny.

Danny gave a brief nod. ‘Aye. Will she…Will she be all right?’

‘Oh yes,’ the nurse said. ‘She’s in no immediate danger now. Do you want to see your son?’

The baby barely mattered to Danny and as he peered through the nursery window he could see little of the child anyway, swaddled as he was and laid in a cradle filled with cotton wool and with a light shining down on him for warmth.

He heard Rita and Ida both gasp. ‘D’you think he’s going to make it?’ Rita whispered to Ida.

‘I bloody well hope so,’ Ida answered grimly. ‘Rosie will go off her rocker altogether if she loses this nipper and all.’

‘He needs to be baptised quickly,’ Danny said. ‘But we haven’t even discussed names.’

Ida and Rita knew that. ‘You choose summat then,’ Ida said.

‘I don’t know,’ Danny said. ‘Rosie’s been funny about this baby all the way through. I’d like her to have some say in what we call him.’

‘Well, you can’t ask her.’

And Danny knew he couldn’t hang about, the child might not survive the night. ‘I must go for the priest anyway,’ he said. ‘Maybe he’ll think of something. Will you see to Bernadette for me?’

‘Of course,’ Ida said. ‘Don’t give it a thought. I must make my way home myself. I left Jack minding all of them and our Billy plays him up shocking sometimes.’

They took the tram together up the Victoria Road, but while the two women got off at Upper Thomas Street, Danny stayed on to the next stop where the road crossed the Lichfield Road and it was there he ran into Doctor Patterson leaving
his surgery. ‘Not many in tonight,’ he remarked to Danny. ‘I was so late beginning evening surgery, those not in immediate danger of dying got fed up waiting and went home.’

‘Is that because you stayed on at the hospital?’

‘Yes, I was concerned about your wife,’ the doctor said curtly. ‘That head wound looked nasty and I had no idea she was pregnant again, and with her history of miscarriage and stillbirth, I was worried about her.’

‘I know,’ Danny said. ‘She didn’t want to go through it again. It…it was my fault. Came about through me taking a drop too much at Christmas.’

The doctor looked at Danny and saw the worry etched on his face. His hair stood on end as if he had run his fingers through it in agitation and he knew that this man would rather cut off his right arm than willingly hurt his wife. It took a big man to admit he had been in the wrong so openly. ‘Don’t fret too much,’ he said, ‘though I know it’s easy to say that, but what’s done is done and your wife and son are in the right place now at least. These things happen.’

‘It shouldn’t have happened, not to Rosie,’ Danny said morosely. ‘I knew how she felt, she’d told me and I’d agreed. I didn’t want her to go through this sort of thing again. If anything happens to the baby, I’ll never forgive myself.’

‘He’s alive at the moment,’ the doctor said. ‘Cling on to that. If he survives tonight, he’ll have a better chance of making it. Where are you making for now? Can I drop you anywhere?’

‘No, thanks all the same,’ Danny said. ‘I’m going for the priest and the presbytery is just along the way here. I should like the baby baptised tonight – just in case, you know. Point is, we never discussed names – Rosie wouldn’t, thought the child wouldn’t survive, see?’

The doctor nodded. He could quite understand that.

‘Point is,’ Danny said, ‘she was against using family names for all it is the custom, that’s why we called our daughter Bernadette. Rosie’s parents are…Let’s just say they are not
people I could take to and they led Rosie one hell of a life. She definitely wouldn’t call a child after them and they would expect it if we’d say called our daughter Constance after my mother. Of course, that was decided when we thought we’d be biding in Ireland all our days and have a host of children with no problems. But still, she might be angry with me if she comes round and I’ve called the wee child Matthew after my own father.’ He thought for a minute and then asked. ‘What’s your name, Doctor Patterson, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘Not at all,’ the doctor said, pleased, thinking with Susie not liking ‘that kind of thing’ it was the only namesake he was ever likely to have. ‘I’d be honoured. My name is Anthony, Anthony Luke.’

‘Anthony Luke Walsh,’ Danny said, and repeated it with satisfaction. ‘I like it. It sounds good. I’d like to ask Rosie if she’s agreeable but we can’t risk waiting any longer than we have to.’

Rosie couldn’t be told or asked anything till the next day and then she showed little emotion. ‘It’s the doctor’s names,’ Danny said. ‘Do you like them?’

Rosie shrugged. ‘They’re all right. I don’t care really, I’m surprised he’s still alive.’

‘He’s lovely, Rosie. I could take you in a wheelchair to the nursery to see him. The nurses said I could.’

‘No,’ Rosie said. ‘I don’t want that. I told you, I feel nothing for this child.’

Danny thought that she might just be protecting herself in case the child should die, but she was the same a few days later when there was cautious optimism that the child might make it. She refused to see him or hold him or feed him, and Ida and Rita weren’t surprised that Danny was worried for they had all thought she would be fine once the baby was born.

‘Maybe we’re being too hard on her, though,’ Ida told Danny. ‘After all, the baby might still die. I mean, what if
she really took to him like and he was to be snatched away again?’