visit. A new rag rug was in front of the shining fender and the mantelshelf was dotted with plaster ornaments each side of the large wooden clock in the centre. Above the mantelpiece was the familiar picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and to the side of the fire was an alcove, which housed the wireless. Bridie remembered how Mary had written home in such excitement about it.
We have to have something called an accumulator to get it to work and have it charged at the garage on Bristol Street. However, really it’s no problem and grand altogether to have music on or even a play to listen to now and again.
‘We have a new gas cooker too now,’ Mary said proudly. ‘We used to cook on the fire when we first came here.’
Bridie had noticed the hooks on the chimney wall, reminiscent of her own home, and she now turned to look at the large, squat, gas cooker positioned between the table on one side and the door to the scullery on the other. There was also a press, which Mary called a sideboard, with more ornaments on it. ‘I keep good plates and glasses and such in there,’ Mary said as she tipped water from a lidded bucket into the kettle. ‘I don’t keep anything of importance in the scullery, the walls run with water in the winter.’
Bridie had a peep inside and could see, even on this summer’s day, what Mary meant. There was little there, just three shelves, housing a variety of odd plates and cups, a stone sink and steps leading to the coal cellar. There was no tap, but Bridie had expected none as Mary had already told her family when she wrote to them that they got their water from a tap in the yard that often froze altogether in the winter. ‘Shall I take my case up first and get settled in?’ she asked.
Mary nodded. ‘Aye, if you like. I’ll have a cup of tea waiting for you when you come down. I’d best start the tea or Eddie will be in on top of us and not a bite ready.’
‘Where am I to sleep?’
‘In the attic, pet,’ Mary said. ‘We’ve borrowed a mattress for you, but the sheets and blankets are my own. The bed’s made up for you, but you can put your things in the cupboard. There’s a hook if you want to hang anything up, unless it’s anything special like your clothes for Mass – I’ll put those in my wardrobe. Leave them down on my bed and I’ll see to them.’
In the attic another rag rug had been placed between the mattress laid on the floor and the cupboard, covering the bare boards. There was no other furniture and the room was dim with the only light coming from a dusty skylight.
Having put her belongings away, Bridie was glad to return to the living room. Mary had drawn the curtains and lit the gaslights which now popped and spluttered. She’d lit the fire too and it danced merrily in the hearth and Bridie was glad of it, for the evening had turned chilly. She had to admit that it all looked rather cosy. Mary handed her a cup of tea while she lit the gas beneath a pan of potatoes and another of cabbage.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘I don’t have to do the bacon for a while yet, so take the weight off your feet and tell me the news from home.’
What Bridie found particularly hardest to cope with in those early days in Birmingham was the noise. Inside the cottage in Ireland, it was often so quiet you could hear the peat settling into the grate, the ticking of the mantle clock, or her father puffing on his pipe.
Outside, she might hear the gentle lowing of the cows and the clucking of the hens, or the sweet singing of the birds. She’d hear the wind setting, the trees swaying and the soft swishing sound as the breeze rippled through the long grass, or the river rumbling as it ran across its stony bed.
There was nothing to prepare her for this crush of humanity, the walls so thin every sound the neighbours made could be heard. She hated the shrieking of the children in the street just outside the window and the cackling laughter and shouting of the women doing their washing in the brewhouse. She hated the tramp of hobnail boots on the cobbles as the men made their way to work and the factory hooters slicing into the quiet of early morning.
But most of all she hated the traffic: the clanking trams and rumbling omnibuses, the roar of petrol-drawn lorries and vans and cars. Even the dull clop of horses’ hooves disturbed her. These city horses were as unlike those at home as it was possible to be. They were tired and sad-looking. And why wouldn’t they be, Bridie thought, with hard roads beneath their feet day in, day out. She wondered where they were stabled because there was precious little grass to be found. She guessed the horses saw as little of it as the people.
And that was another thing, the people. They unnerved her. She supposed they were kind enough, but their voices grated on her and she could barely understand what they said anyway, their accents were so alien. She couldn’t seem to get away anywhere to be alone, to have a bit of privacy, and she wondered if Rosalyn would have made a better fist of it than she was doing. Frowning, she admitted she probably would.
She couldn’t say any of this to Mary though. How could she? Mary had chosen to make her home in this hateful place and so Bridie couldn’t go around moaning and complaining. But she was incredibly homesick and eventually felt if she didn’t tell someone how she felt she would burst and so, without mentioning a word to Mary, she poured her heart out to her mother in a letter, telling her everything that she hated about the city her sister lived in. She told her parents of something else too. She’d wondered when she’d arrived why there were so many idle men about. They lolled on street corners, hands usually in their pockets and flat caps on their head. Back home in Ireland, she’d seldom seen a man idle in the middle of the day, unless it was a Fair Day, and she’d asked Mary about it, revealing all to her parents in a letter home:
Mary said the men have been that way since they were demobbed from the army. There is no work for them and many of the families are starving. I know she’s right, for you only have to see the children, with pinched-in faces like old people’s and so thin they’re just skin and bone. They have arms like sticks and quite a few have running sores on their body. Most of them are clothed in rags and many are barefoot. Aunt Ellen said even in the dead of winter it’s just the same.
Bridie was no stranger to running barefoot. In her mind, to cast off her shoes and run across the springy turf and leap the streams was linked to the freedom of summer – few children back home wore shoes then. However, in September, before she returned to school, along with the schoolbooks and jotters her parents bought her, there would be a pair of shoes. They mightn’t be new, but they would be freshly soled and heeled, and there would be stockings too to keep her from freezing altogether.
She looked at the children around the streets and hanging around the Bull Ring when she went there with Mary and wondered if many of them had ever had shoes. She doubted that when the winter chill came they’d have thicker clothes to wear either, or a good, warm coat and hats, gloves and scarves to keep the life in them.
It’s awful, Mammy, is surely is to see so many people living like this, she wrote.
There had been poverty at home in Ireland, of course there had, and people with large families they could barely feed used to get food vouchers from the St Vincent de Paul fund. The nuns there would find clothes for the children to wear, but here it was the sheer numbers of poor that overwhelmed her.
It bothered Sarah too when she read Bridie’s letter. ‘Fancy not having shoes for the winter,’ she remarked. ‘Although I shouldn’t think it’s pleasant running barefoot through city streets at any time.’
‘It’s the men out of work that I feel sorry for,’ Jimmy said. ‘God, what that would do to a man, not being able to provide for his family. Seems to me Ireland wasn’t the only one betrayed by that damned war. “Land fit for heroes” and they can’t earn a bite to put in their families’ mouths.’
