LIFE IN
THE
DREADED
WORKHOUSE
by
Danny McFaul
Copyright 2014 Danny McFaul,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2395-1
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual person living or dead or of events and locales is entirely coincidental.
Ireland was once part of the Workhouse system and conditions there were often dire. In the 1890s inmates were made to queue in line to eat porridge from a communal trough.
Introduction
The First World War ended in 1918. There was joy in the streets despite the fact that almost all essential goods were in short supply. The country had endured a horrific loss of lives. Trench warfare involved bombardment of enemy lines followed by infantry attacks. Soldiers leapt out of the trenches into machine-gun fire, gaining only a few yards of territory, or dying where they fell.
The prime minister had promised a country, ‘Fit for heroes to live in.’ But the four million servicemen who returned to civilian life found little glory. Food shortages and limited coal supplies for heating lowered the resistance to an influenza epidemic which caused the death of 150,000 people nationwide. Soldiers returned home to find little support or little chance of finding work. Some of the veterans were reduced to selling matches on street corners to earn a living. It was also a particularly blustery day that ended the Great War as it was called. ‘The War to end all Wars!’ they said, but it had also ended so many other things as social structures collapsed, women had become emancipated, governments fell, and some nations had changed their borders whilst others had changed their old loyalties and allegiances. The soldiers who were in the trenches came home. Everyone had their fill of death. They wanted to live in peace now. Yet all the stark reminders of the war remained. The maimed victims had to be cared for, the wounded were still dying and the shell-shocked creatures from the trenches still went mad, or wrote Poetry, well after the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 Great Britain.
But life still went on as Vera Roberts with the flaming red hair was born to parents who were jolted out of the traditional pattern of their lives in the Northern Irish Town of Larne. When the Great War ended, the whole country was full of young men like Vera’s father Kenneth who were looking for jobs. Lots of them were also painfully aware that they had wasted the best years of their lives in the service of their country. The country was also full of young women like Vera’s mother Mini Johnston, who had previously been living haphazardly with friends and relatives, only occasionally snatching a day or a weekend of fun whenever their husbands or boyfriends could get some time off. It was during one of these periods that Vera had been conceived and now at twenty-three years of age, she met a young man at the local grocery store. She fell in love and married the young man Kirk Hansen who was attending college in order to gain a degree. Fate was not kind to Kirk and Vera and despite having a lovely daughter Charlotte, the marriage ended in divorce. Vera never remarried, but Kirk eventually became the husband of an old army pals widow, Janice Hopkins, who one day decided to organise a re-union party for her husband to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. Janice sets out to find his old army pals and schoolmates to invite to the reunion.
But the more Janice delved, the more confused she became as things about her husband’s past life didn’t fit in with what she was led to believe. Suspicion and doubt clouded her mind as she tried to uncover a past that it seemed had never existed. As time passed her problems had grown no lighter. It was as though she herself bore the guilt for her husband’s past. Janice was torn between the new husband that she loved and wanted to keep and the stranger that he was becoming, as she began to wonder ‘Who is this man.’
The Life
and
Death of
Kirk Hansen
A Man
Haunted by Stigma
and Guilt
CHAPTER 1
Kirk’s Early Years
Among the public buildings in a certain town I shall refrain from naming, for several reasons. I shall instead assign to it the fictitious name of Larne. In the Victorian Era there were buildings that were common to most towns, great or small, they were called Workhouses. And in the Larne Workhouse was born a male child by the name of Kirk Hansen. For some time after he was born into this world with little help from the Parish doctor, it remained a matter of considerable doubt that the child would survive to bear any name at all. That is not to say that I am insinuating that being born in a Workhouse is in itself the most unfortunate circumstance that can possibly befall a human being. But I do mean to say that in this particular instance, it was the best thing for Kirk Hansen that could have happened. The fact is that there were complications as Kirk lay gasping on a dirty flock mattress drifting between this world and the next. If the time had been in the late 1900s he would have been surrounded by grandparents, anxious aunts, cousins, experienced nurses and doctors. But this was Victorian times when places like a Workhouse didn’t have Doctors with profound wisdom and when, but for the grace of God, Kirk could have been killed in no time; there being nobody close at hand but a toothless old pauper woman, who was an ex prostitute and acting as a nurse. She was rendered rather misty eyed by a certain amount of beer. She was assisting the parish doctor at the birth and he only carried out such matters on a contract basis. It was a tossup between Kirk and Nature as to who would win the battle for survival between them. The result was that after a few struggles Kirk breathed, sneezed, and proceeded to announce to the other inmates of the Workhouse the fact that a new burden has been imposed upon the parish, by letting out a long loud cry. The doctor had been sitting by the fire warming his hands as Kirk’s young mother spoke in a very faint tone. The doctor rose and advanced to the bed’s head. ‘You will be fine’ he told the young mother. ‘We will have you out of here in no time dear’ interposed the so called nurse, after replacing a glass bottle in her apron pocket. The patient shook her head and stretched out a hand towards her child as the doctor deposited Kirk into her arms. She kissed her new born baby boy with her cold white lips passionately on his forehead; passed her hands over her face; gazed round; fell back and died. They tried in vain to revive her. ‘Ah poor dear’ said the prostitute, picking up the cork of the glass bottle, which had fallen on to the bed as she stooped to take up the child. The doctor now considered that he had done his job as he said to his assistant‘. Give me a call if the child cries
