The Ballymara Road (20 page)

Ben often wandered into his brother’s bedroom. The telegram, which his mother had received from the War Office, lay folded on the top of the dresser she polished every Friday morning, ready for the weekend, during which nothing of any significance ever took place.

Ben often picked up the envelope, faded to a tea-coloured brown by the bright sunlight that still on occasion slipped into the room, and he read the black ticker-tape words over and over again. It had lain there, in the same place, propped up against the dark mahogany-framed mirror. It was as though his mother had placed the telegram on the dresser to inform any ghostly relative who might pop into Matthew’s room that he was dead, that he had joined them already and that he would not be returning to lay his earthly head on his feather pillow with its crisp linen cover. No point hovering here. Matthew has gone. We know this. Read the telegram.

Ben hobbled into the kitchen, ducking his head under the narrow doorway at the bottom of the stairs, and winced, as always, as he managed the last two steps. His mother pretended not to notice.

‘What important meetings do you have this morning then?’ she asked.

Benjamin worked at the City Corporation offices and was responsible for managing the fund the government had poured into Liverpool. It had taken them almost twenty years after the war, but at last they were building new houses, roads, libraries, nurseries and schools.

Liverpool was about to benefit from a growth spurt and, as the new estates sprang up, private landlords would lose their grip on the poor with their extortionate rents for squalid houses.

‘It’s a meeting at the Priory of St Mary’s, down at the docks, about the new nursery and library we are building. The church want to have a say in running both.’

‘And is that possible?’ asked his mother. ‘St Mary’s? Isn’t that the church where the priest was murdered? I’m sure it was. Dear me, Ben, you had better take care down there. I would quite like you home in one piece.’

‘You’re right, Mother. It was that church. Well remembered. If I’m honest, I had forgotten. It was my secretary who pointed that out to me. There is a new priest now, apparently. He is very new school, very nineteen-sixties. He wants the Church to reach out and become more involved in the community. That is why they have asked me to attend the meeting. It is something I am happy to discuss. The more the Church helps, the less it costs the council, but I’m very nervous about the library. We want more than bibles for people to read and that will be a stumbling block.’

‘Quite right,’ replied his mother with a hint of relief in her voice. ‘Don’t let the papists take over everything, because they would if given half the chance, Benjamin. That’s how they work. It is all about power and control. The more pies they have their fingers stuck in, the more influence they can wield. I’m not saying they are all bad. The Pope seems quite nice as a matter of fact, but they just have too much say in what happens everywhere in this city, if you ask me. This isn’t Dublin. It’s Liverpool, a different country entirely.’

‘Have you finished?’ asked Ben with a grin, buttering himself a slice of toast . ‘You say exactly the same thing about the Jews. You didn’t stop to draw breath there. Anyone would think you ran up the frocks for the Orange Order on march day.’

‘Don’t be cheeky, Ben. I don’t like any religion. They are all trouble, as far as I am concerned. I go to my Church of England service on Easter Sunday and Christmas morning, and that is all that is required from any respectable Christian. All that God bothering. I can’t be doing with it. If God existed, he would make sure there were no wars and I would still have my son and…’

Her voice trailed away. She wanted to say that Ben wouldn’t have been injured and he would have a wife and she would have grandchildren and her husband would still be alive and she would make a Sunday lunch for them all and present it on the ten-place dinner service she and Ben’s father had bought with love and care for just that day. It had been wished for and spoken about, even longed for. This was not the life they had foreseen in the heady first years of their marriage.

But she didn’t say a word. She knew Ben didn’t like it when she raised the subject of marriage, even though that didn’t always stop her.

She placed in front of Ben his breakfast of black pudding, sausages and fried eggs.

‘They’ve taken over Everton, you know, the Irish,’ she said and poured them both tea before sitting down at the table herself, as she did so sliding towards Ben the Royal Albert marmalade pot with its dinky silver spoon popping out from under the lid. ‘You can’t move for the Irish and Catholics anywhere on the brow now. They even have their own things in the shops.’

‘Oh, really,’ said Ben, already sounding exasperated. ‘Like what?’

‘Well, in the butcher’s, he has changed the sign from “bacon” to “rashers”. It’s just the start, Ben. They were all supposed to go back after the famine. It’s about time you stopped worrying about all those Irish and concentrated on finding yourself a wife. I will be in a wheelchair by the time I have grandchildren.’

Suddenly, it was as though an icy blast had shot through their little kitchen on Queens Drive. She had uttered the words guaranteed to ruin Ben’s day.

For the first five years following his discharge, Ben’s mother ceaselessly harped on about his finding a wife until suddenly, without any warning, one day when his leg was particularly painful, Ben had exploded. It was the one and only time he had ever shouted at his mother and now, here she was, poking at his wound once more. Not the one she could see, the visible wound that made her heart ache for the physical discomfort etched on his face when he returned home from a long day at work, but the invisible wound. The raw, lonely, aching wound Ben carried inside.

‘Please don’t, Mother.’ His voice was calm but cold as steel. ‘You know the terrible row we had last time you brought this up. Nothing has altered. I don’t want a wife.’

Mrs Manning put both of her elbows on the table and leant forward earnestly, nursing her teacup in both hands and speaking across the rim.

‘Ben, I will soon have had my threescore year and ten. How can I die a happy woman, knowing you will be all alone?’

Ben carefully returned the marmalade spoon to the pot, replaced the lid and kept his eyes focused on his toast.

‘No woman wants to marry a cripple, Mother. It would be a hugely unfair thing to ask anyone and, besides, no self-respecting woman would look twice at this contraption.’ He glanced down at his leg.

He no longer felt like eating his breakfast and slowly, with the aid of his stick, rose from the table.

‘I have to leave. The meeting at St Mary’s Priory begins at nine-thirty. I had better start out now as I need to change buses at the Pier Head and make my way down to Nelson Street.’

‘Nelson Street? Heavens above, you are right in the middle of them all down there at the docks. You can’t move for bog jumpers.’

‘Mother.’ Ben’s voice rose sharply in condemnation, even though he had heard the expression so many times. It was commonly used amongst those who were not of Irish descent.

Ben took down his coat from the hook on the hall dresser that stood adjacent to the front door. His mother scooped up his plate from the table with annoyance and banged it down on the draining board next to the kitchen sink.

‘We need to be a bit less welcoming, if you ask me, and then maybe a few more of them would go back home,’ she shouted from the kitchen.

‘No wonder the Irish stick together if they have to face comments like that. What would you do in their shoes? I feel obliged now to let the church have whatever they want with the nursery and the library.’

Once outside, Ben let out a long breath. He had closed the front door with unaccustomed force. He hadn’t realized how much his mother irritated him when she was mean about others and harped on about their taboo subject, his finding a wife.

‘That is never going to happen,’ he whispered to himself, leaning on his stick as he began his walk to the bus stop.

‘
WATCH THE ROAD
now, Mr Curtis, ’tis a good stretch from here to Dublin. A few hours and you will be safe, back home with your good wife. I am delighted, so I am, that all was in order and you will come again, will you? We will be looking forward to it, won’t we, Sister Celia? And be sure to give us plenty of notice now as we wouldn’t want you to travel all this way and be hungry, not even for a second, would we, Sister Celia?’

Sister Assumpta was bidding farewell to the visiting councillors and do-gooders who had called to inspect the laundry and the mother and baby home.

‘Watch the vans on that road, will you. The boys driving the delivery vans from the village are just demons, the way they speed along that road. They can drive at forty miles an hour, some of them, so the man who delivers the laundry from the hotel in Galway told me, and he is a good Catholic, he never misses mass and would never tell a lie, isn’t that so, Sister Celia?’

And the car doors slammed. One. After. The. Other.

At the sound of the car engine starting up, she waved to the retreating boot of a Ford Cortina.

Sister Assumpta and Sister Celia were both rather too enthusiastically waving goodbye to the councillors who were visiting from the county offices.

They had asked far too many questions for the Reverend Mother’s liking.

She stomped back down the corridor to her office, Sister Celia bustling behind in her wake, struggling to keep up.

‘The nerve of them,’ she ranted, once she had closed the big double wooden doors behind them. ‘Fancy asking me to make sure all
my
tracks are covered. Can you believe they used those words? You would not believe the nerve of them, would you now?’

‘No, Reverend Mother,’ Sister Celia gasped. Unused to moving so quickly, she was already puffing and red in the face. It had been a hard day, what with visitors probing around her ovens and making her nerves jangle. ‘I’ve felt like a mad woman all day, trying to keep the surliest of those ungrateful girls out of the way. God alone knows, the moon would crack itself if one of them smiled. They were no sight for visitors, so they weren’t, and ye just never know when one of them might try something on, like turning on the waterworks.’

‘You were right, Sister Celia. This visit must have something to do with the cut of that interfering woman, Rosie O’Grady, that busybody of a matron. She has never stopped asking questions and probing into our business since her family brought that girl here from Liverpool.’

‘Well, they did say that their next visit was St Vincent’s, so she must have reported them too. Did they say what we have to do?’ asked Sister Celia, aware that after such an important visit, there must at least be something required of them in terms of how they functioned. The officials had taken lots of notes.

‘We have to make sure that our own records don’t reflect the bank transactions, nor identify which payments come from which government departments, nor for which girls the payments are made. We have to keep everything confidential. As if we didn’t already. They must think we came down with the last shower. Why do they think we change everyone’s names the minute they arrive?’

‘Are we still claiming for the two girls who escaped? Aideen and Agnes?’ asked Sister Celia.

‘We are that,’ Sister Assumpta threw Sister Celia a sharp look, ‘but we have to be careful. If you ask me, ’tis no coincidence at all that they became very friendly with the midwife and it was they who delivered the baby of the midwife’s girl, Cissy. As sure as God is true, I know she has had something to do with their escape. Not for one minute would she admit it, though. Someone outside the Abbey helped those girls get away. They could not have done it without help. There must have been a car at the very least.’

‘Maybe someone on the road gave them a lift if they got through the gates?’

‘You know, that could be true. Maybe we need to employ a gate man as St Vincent’s have done. We can do without runaways and that’s the truth.’

Sister Assumpta flopped into her office chair with little grace and began opening her mail. The official visit had put her a day behind and had thrown the Abbey routine into disarray. In preparation, the areas shown to the visitors had been scrubbed spick and span. Many of the girls with children in the nursery would not see their babies for a week, as a result of the extra work made necessary by the visit.

‘It will soon be time for lunch, Sister Celia. I shall have mine whilst I see to the bills in the post. ‘I will eat in the office today, but first, to prayers.’

Both women bustled off towards the chapel as the sound of bells called them to prayer.

Sister Assumpta, although disturbed and made bad-tempered by the visit, breathed a sigh of relief. They had survived. The officials hadn’t asked to see any further than the first few sinks in the laundry.

They had, however, undertaken a very detailed examination of the kitchens. Sister Assumpta was well aware that the councillors had assumed the food being prepared for the nuns was also for the girls. It wasn’t for her to disabuse them of that notion.

‘Sure, do they think girls eat beef stew when they are steeped in sin?’ asked Sister Celia, running along beside her as they walked to mass. ‘Do they not understand the job we have here, to keep these girls under control? If we fed them what we ate, they would think they were forgiven and become impossible to manage. For the sake of heaven, why would they think they know better than we?’

The visitors had, in fact, been extremely impressed with Sister Assumpta’s facilities and soul-saving discipline. It served them no purpose to agree with the complaints made by Dublin’s most senior midwife. Who did she think would look after such wayward girls if the holy nuns didn’t, and at what cost?

‘Sure, God alone knows the money these nuns save us and the good they do,’ one councillor had whispered to another as they surveyed the spotless kitchens where a rich beef stew was being stirred by a smiling nun.

The officials had understood the need for cleanliness and obedience.