Strawberry Fields (46 page)
But there was no point. Mam had never protected them from her bullying, baby-beating husband, had stood by and watched them being battered with an impassive face, so there had been no love lost. Grace knew that none of the kids felt any affection for the woman who had given birth to them and ignored them ever after. It would have been nice to have seen their father taken away by the law, but the truth was, they dreaded the workhouse. Da made sure they dreaded it – he said the workhouse had made him what he was today, and told them terrifying stories of unbelievable cruelties. And when he wasn’t scaring the wits out of them he bullied them, screamed and shouted at them, took the food they brought in and any money they were unwise enough to have about their persons, and generally mistreated them, with the inevitable result.
They went. One by one, silently, a child would slip out of the door in the morning and not slip back in at night. At first the child would be gone a few days, but then it slid into weeks, months. And Stan Carbery bellowed that he’d kill ’em if he ever laid hands on ’em and bore down even harder on the ones that were left. Then he brought a fancy woman back and Grace, who had stuck it longest, slung her hook as well.
They became street children, dodging the scuffers and kindly but interfering adults, running like the wind the moment anyone in a uniform appeared on the street, begging, stealing, living from hand to mouth. They slept in the parks, in any public place left unlocked, under steps, in areas. If the wind was in the right direction Grace often scraped together a pile of cardboard boxes and newspapers and slept in a sheltered jigger.
There were eight of them when their mam died. The only other girl beside Grace, Addy, had left home a good deal earlier and after their mam’s death Grace guessed she’d moved right away from the Pool. She’d had a feller . . . she’d had several fellers. She’d be with one of them, Grace supposed, and wished she could have gone with the older girl.
Then their da decided he could do with fewer kids and put the four youngest into the Father Berry Orphan Asylum, where doubtless they were a good deal better off than those still at home. Grace sometimes wondered why he hadn’t got rid of them all to the orphanage, but imagined she and her three brothers were probably too old to be taken in. You four can work so you’re workhouse fodder, their father had said gloatingly, when any one of them looked especially like rebelling. And he made them work for him, Grace toiling in their dirty rooms, the boys selling papers, nicking fruit, going messages. They never saw the money they earned, of course, and very soon realised that their only chance of staying alive was to escape, get out and stay out. And now, of the four who had deserted their father and kept out of institutions, Grace saw only her older brother Sid from time to time, and the truth was she didn’t like him much. He was growing too like their father – a bullying lout of a lad quicker with a cuff than a kiss.
She avoided the second brother, too. Solly was smaller, not so aggressive, but he was a sharp, secretive kid. He did well on the streets, Grace was certain. He had joined a gang of hooligans who battened on anyone weaker than themselves, and Grace kept out of their way.
She hadn’t seen All for a long time, probably more than a year. He was next to her in age, a sickly, whining boy. Grace thought he was probably either in hospital or dead. But there was nothing she could do about it; she had no means of finding out about Alf and, in any case, could not have helped him. It was all she could do to keep herself alive – and out of her father’s way.
He wanted her back. She was a useful slave, a punch-bag, someone to send on messages and then to beat up if something went wrong. She feared him from the bottom of her heart and never went near the noisome court where he and his latest lady-friend drank and screamed at one another . . . and probably fought, Grace thought, knowing her father.
So no wonder she remembered with affection and gentleness the man who had saved her life at the expense of his own! She could still remember the look on his face, the feel of the hands which had seized and flung her to safety. She knew his name, too, because when she’d led the men back one of them had exclaimed: ‘Dear God in Heaven, it’s Peader O’Brady! He’s dead, for sure.’
She’d run away then, unable to bear the guilt. She had as good as killed him – the scuffers would be after her, she’d been trespassing on railway property, she’d be in awful trouble, imprisoned, flogged . . . sent to the workhouse.
But the days passed, and the weeks, and nothing happened. If people stared at her in the street it was because of the state she was in. Unwashed, ragged, half-starved, cold even in warm weather, she was not a pretty sight. But a scavenging child must keep on the move or it will be taken into custody, and Grace dreaded that. She had no idea what the scuffers or the priests or the teachers did to kids who lived on the streets, who begged and stole, but it would be something unpleasant, she knew that all right. In her whole life, nothing that had happened to Grace Carbery had led her to expect fair treatment at the hands of adults. The only love she had ever received had been from her sister Jess . . . and Jess had died so long ago that Grace could scarcely remember her face, save that its expression had been sweet.
So now Grace had a new hero. Peader O’Brady, who had cared so much for a girl he did not even know that he had risked – lost – his life to save her. Grace had carried a heavy basket of shopping all the way from the Great Homer Street market to Wilbraham Street, a considerable distance, and the threepenny joe thus earned had been spent on a candle, which she had lit for Peader O’Brady. Grace knew nothing of purgatory, sin, the life hereafter; how could she? No one had ever taught her. But she knew folk lit candles when someone they loved died, or when they were grateful for something, and she loved Peader O’Brady, and was grateful for what he had done for her. Lighting a candle with money which would otherwise have been spent on food seemed a small enough price to pay. It never occurred to Grace for one moment that the people who came in and out of the church, telling beads, genuflecting, putting their money in the box and lighting up their candles, had none of them paid, penny for penny, anywhere near as much as she.
Because Grace Carbery, who had so little, had willingly given her all for that candle.
Brogan sat by the bed and held his daddy’s hand and talked soothingly into his daddy’s ear. Mrs Burt had let him have the small front bedroom so he could be near his mammy and he spent every hour that he was not working sitting by his father and talking to him.
Summer was upon them now, with its long, light evenings and warmer days. And Brogan had moved back to Liverpool. First as a fireman and only recently as a driver, he had learned the road between Crewe and Rugby, and then he had done his time on the road between Crewe and Liverpool until he knew every inch of the track, every light, every signal, every bump in the rails, indeed. And now, when he needed so desperately to be back in Liverpool, the Powers that Be on the LMSR line had put him to learning the Liverpool to Southport road, which meant, of course, that the move back to living, once more, in Liverpool was a natural one. It just showed that prayer worked, Brogan’s mammy said triumphantly, when he told her he’d be staying in Liverpool now. She’d lit candles and prayed for her son’s support and presence, and she had got it.
And now, by Peader’s bed, his son continued his monologue.
‘So then, Daddy, I walked along by the pier head and breathed in the good salt air of the sea, and thought about Dublin. Daddy, you know Mammy’s here wit’ you, longin’ for you to be better? Well, it means the kids is by themselves so they are, and you know Polly’s only a spalpeen, a baby almost. When you’re better, Mammy will take you home . . . oh, Daddy, can you not hear a word I say?’
‘Talk to him,’ the doctor had said. ‘His body has healed but his mind’s wheeling out there in limbo somewhere, waiting for something, or someone, to call him back. So talk, argue, laugh, cry, but keep doing it, and one day, he’ll respond.’
Brogan picked up his father’s hand, once so huge and gnarled, now so thin and white and pathetic somehow. He squeezed it.
‘Daddy, I’m worried over Polly so I am! Can ye not hear me? She’s only a little girl and she’s tryin’ her best to keep the family together whiles Mammy and I . . .’ For a second Brogan’s voice failed him; his father’s eyelids had flickered and a slight frown had gathered on his pale brow! ‘Daddy! Can ye hear me, Daddy?’
‘A little gorl . . .’ the words were whispered so faintly that Brogan could barely catch them. ‘A little gorl . . .’
He had spoken and his words had made sense, for hadn’t Brogan been talking about Polly and his worries concerning her only seconds before?
‘That’s right, Daddy, she’s just a little girl,’ he said excitedly. ‘Can you take a drink now? There’s a glass of barley water by your bed . . .’
‘A little gorl . . .’ the whisper faded to nothing but even as Brogan watched, he saw his father’s lips frame the three words again.
A passing nurse found herself grabbed and hustled over to Peader’s bed by his handsome young son who did not even seem to know he was handsome – nor to take any notice of even the prettiest and most forth-coming nurse.
‘Sister, Sister, he spoke, me daddy spoke! I was talkin’ about me little sister, and me daddy said
A little girl
! Honest to God, Sister, he spoke!’
A little girl
! Honest to God, Sister, he spoke!’
‘Talk about your sister some more, Mr O’Brady,’ the nurse said, almost as excited as he. Peader had been gradually regaining his physical strength for weeks now. His wounds had healed up well, but his mind had refused to recognise any stimuli which had been offered. If only they could interest him, bring him back!
But though Brogan continued to talk to his father until the nurses on the night-shift turned him out, not another word passed his lips.
Everyone knew, soon enough, that Peader had spoken. Deirdre spent hours in church, on her knees, thanking God – and then demanding a repeat performance when she herself was present. She was a little hurt that Peader had responded to talk of Polly and not of herself but what did it really matter, after all? What mattered was that he had spoken, was on the road to recovery.
‘Bring Polly in,’ the doctor said next day when the incident was related to him. ‘He’s clearly very fond of the little girl; she must visit him, talk to him.’
‘She’s in Dublin . . . but I could go back, bring her over,’ Brogan said excitedly. ‘Oh, Mammy, we should have thought – Daddy always responded well to Polly.’
But there was no need, because that very same night, Peader spoke again. Deirdre and Brogan were by his bed, getting ready to say goodnight to him because the night-shift wanted them out. Deirdre bent over, kissed him on the brow and then, on impulse, recited a bit of a poem she sometimes said to the children.
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
The bed be blest that I lie on,
Four angels to my bed,
Four angels round my head,
One to watch and one to pray
And two to bear my soul away.
The bed be blest that I lie on,
Four angels to my bed,
Four angels round my head,
One to watch and one to pray
And two to bear my soul away.
Deirdre was turning away from the bed, Brogan was taking her elbow, when Peader moved his head restlessly on the pillow, and spoke, his voice slow and rusty from disuse.
‘That little gorl – is she an angel?’ Peader said.
Meanwhile, things had reached a parlous state in the O’Brady place in Dublin. Mammy wrote regularly, Brogan intermittently, but the children hardly ever wrote back. Polly had decided that work must be evenly divided and drove poor Ivan into screaming fits by sitting him down with a bowl of spuds and telling him to ‘scrub the dirt off that lot or I’ll not let you play out for a week, young feller’.
The rooms were dirty, untidy, unwelcoming. Polly did more than her share but it seemed to Donal and Bevin that she spent an awful lot of time making them do household tasks which, they felt, were unsuited to the superior sex. And then the priest came round.
‘How are ye managing?’ he said jovially, entering the living room without knocking, the priests naturally having little respect for a handful of kids, Polly thought to herself, glancing hastily round the room. ‘Oh, Mother of Jesus!’
Polly knew what had called forth the exclamation – but he didn’t know how hard it was to manage when you were only just ten and hadn’t ever been taught housekeeping skills. And then for a moment she saw the room through a stranger’s eyes and was ashamed. Dust everywhere, food lying about waiting to be eaten, dirty clothing scuffed into corners, clean clothing in rumpled, unironed heaps. And the hens.
Mammy would never have stood for the hens, but then she didn’t have Polly’s problems, and Tad had given her the hens, anyway. She had never asked where he’d got them because she suspected she might not like the answer . . . but she liked the hens. They got on well with Lionel the ginger tom-cat, with the tortoiseshell stray which Polly had lately acquired, and with Delilah the dog, though Delilah got angry when he found the hens pecking away at his half-chewed bones. And Lionel teased them sometimes by hiding on top of the dining table and then leaping on to a passing feathered back, which Tad said – and he, as the donor of the hens, should know – did not help egg production.
The eggs were lovely, though. You couldn’t go into the country to collect eggs, but you could go and collect corn, and with the corn plus any old bits of rotting fruit or vegetables which the stallholders in Francis Street threw out at the end of the day, you fed the hens.
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