and tell your mother,’ Elsie advised one day in early spring 1933.
‘Tell her what?’ Maeve demanded harshly, wincing, for she was recovering from another few hefty clouts which she had been given not long after her daughter, Grace, was born on 9 February. ‘Tell her my husband doesn’t give me enough money either to feed us or keep us warm, and beats me? What the hell could she do about it, but worry herself into an early grave?’
A further worry was nagging at Maeve’s mind at this time and that was Brendan’s treatment of Kevin. The child was fifteen months old when his sister was born, no longer a wee baby to be rocked to sleep, but an active toddler.
Maeve knew Brendan had to come first in everything and she’d learnt to accept that. Maeve made dinner for him every night, even if she lived on bread and scrape herself, or sometimes nothing at all, because it was healthier to do so. And while he ate, he wanted the children out of sight, but now Kevin was not always in bed when he came in and that seemed to enrage him, even if the child was doing nothing wrong.
She tried to protect him as much as she was able, but his father often gave him a hefty slap on the legs, or a swipe across the head for no reason that Maeve could see except that he wanted to do it. Remonstrating with him and protesting that Kevin was only a wee boy did no good at all. In fact all she usually got for her efforts was a slap herself. That wouldn’t have stopped her if it hadn’t been for the fact that she was afraid to protest too much in case the child got the brunt of it and she tried to keep them apart as much as possible.
Maeve herself got used to the way life was for her. She lived day to day, interested only in getting enough to eat for herself and Kevin each day. She fed Grace herself and Elsie complained she should be eating wholesome meals to do it properly. Maeve thought that was easy to say. Now she was a regular at the pawnshop, yet the first time she’d gone there she’d nearly died of shame. Ballyglen did not sport a pawnshop or anything like it. Poor people there could apply to the St Vincent de Paul for tokens to spend in the shops for groceries only. You were considered the lowest of the low to apply to them, but often Maeve would have welcomed something to put food in her mouth and her son’s that Brendan could not convert to beer money.
The winter was the hardest, often with no money for either coal or gas, and little enough for food. They would have surely perished but for the odd shovelful of coal from Elsie, or the bit of stew or soup she said she had over. Maeve knew full well she’d done extra on purpose, but was often too hungry and dispirited to care.
‘Elsie, I can see this life stretching out before me for years and years,’ Maeve complained to her friend one day.
Elsie could see it too, but thought it wouldn’t be helpful to say so.
‘I’ve tried talking to him, but it does no good,’ Maeve went on. ‘Surely he can see how we live, what I’m left to eat, and the weans. Dear God, Elsie, if you’d known the type of man he was when we were courting, or even just married . . .’ Maeve shook her head sorrowfully. ‘He’s not the same at all.’
Elsie had heard the story more than once and she still said nothing. She did all she could for Maeve, but to go between man and wife – that was something she shrank from, and her Alf said she was not to get involved. He said Maeve had an uncle she could appeal to, or failing that she could go home to her mother.
But Elsie knew no such course was open to Maeve. On the rare occasions her uncle had braved his wife’s wrath to visit his niece, he always had his kids with him. And her predicament was hardly a subject Maeve could bring up in their hearing. Anyhow, he’d never hear a word said against Brendan and still thought him a fine figure of a man.
As for her mother, Elsie knew she’d been told nothing, for even if she had, as Maeve said, there was little she could do. Maeve wouldn’t leave Brendan unless something desperate happened altogether. She was a good Catholic girl and knew only too well that marriage was for life and you married for better or worse. Anyroad, Elsie thought, even if Maeve wanted to go to her mammy for a wee holiday, a break from the brute, how, when she barely had two halfpennies to bless herself with, would she find the money for the fare?
She didn’t bother saying any of this. Her Alf was a good man, and a good provider. He’d never lifted his hand to her all their married life, and she knew if things had been different he would have been a good father to their children. Well, that was not to be and Elsie had faced that fact years before, but she often wondered what she would have done had Maeve been her daughter.
Would she have stood by just because of some words said at an altar and watched Maeve and her children being terrorised or half starved and frozen to death? No, by God, she wouldn’t, and as Maeve hadn’t her mother and father to stand up for her Elsie was determined to do all she could.
Maeve knew she couldn’t have coped so well if it hadn’t been for Elsie. Getting the children clothes and even some for herself had been a real headache. All the baby necessities had been bought from Maeve’s wages when she worked at the café, but as the children grew problems arose. Elsie took her to jumble sales where for a few hoarded pennies she could buy jumpers and cardigans to be unravelled and knitted up again, or skirts that could be cut up to make something for the children, and then sometimes Elsie would bring a similar load from the rag market.
Maeve had been taught to sew and her mother had a treadle sewing machine similar to Elsie’s, so Maeve knew all about cutting out and tacking together for Elsie to go over seams and hemming neatly. Knitting she’d never been shown, but she soon picked it up. ‘Born of necessity,’ Maeve said when Elsie commented on the speed Maeve was able to knit after just a couple of weeks. ‘Anyway, it gives me pleasure to have the children dressed respectable. I only wish I could knit shoes like the booties they had as babies.’
Shoes were the very devil to get. There were adult shoes sometimes, and Maeve had got herself a pair at a jumble sale when her others had literally fallen off her feet, though the second-hand ones were a size too big. Any children’s shoes were, in the main, worn through, the toes kicked in or the soles hanging off.
She remembered how she’d run barefoot all through the spring and summer of her Irish childhood and delighted in it, leaping over the spring turf and never feeling the pebbles in the dusty farm tracks. She thought there wouldn’t be the same pleasure on the cobbles of the courts or the hard dirty pavements of the streets, but barefoot Kevin and little Grace often had to go.
Before school every September, Maeve and her brothers and sisters had all been fitted out with shoes. Sometimes they were handed down from an older child, but newly soled and heeled, and they all had new clothes made by their mother during the holidays. Maeve had little hope of finding a pair of shoes for each child that weren’t too worn before the cold of winter, but if she was lucky she could sometimes get a ragged pair of plimsolls, the canvas worn and ripped and with paper-thin soles that she’d line with cardboard.
The spring that Grace turned two years old and Kevin was three, Maeve again missed a second period. She was terrified of telling Brendan. She didn’t know why he appeared surprised by it and acted as if it was her fault. Surely to God he must have realised that what he did most nights was bound to lead to pregnancy in the end. She’d never complained or refused because she knew it was her duty to submit to her husband.
The little sexual forays and fondling that she’d enjoyed in courtship when she’d longed for Brendan to continue had stopped in the early months of her marriage, once she’d told him of her pregnancy. Brendan had seen no need after that to bring Maeve to the point of excitement and longing. He didn’t really expect her to enjoy it and didn’t really care whether she did or not. In the marriage service she’d promised to obey him and that’s what she had to do.
At
