The burst of applause and the roar of voices when the band stopped playing made it clear to Ellie and George that the small, wooden hall with its galvanised roof and peeling green paintwork, built some ten years earlier to accommodate a newly-formed Orange Lodge, was packed to capacity. Through the open door and the thrown-up sash windows, the beat of dance music throbbed out again into the evening quiet of the surrounding fields and lanes.
Close to the hall, against every convenient bush, tree and gatepost, bicycles were propped up. Released from the shafts of their traps, a few ponies tethered along the boundary hedge munched away quietly. At the entrance to the weed-grown and neglected field surrounding the hall itself, two motors were parked one behind the other almost blocking the narrow country lane.
Ellie had never been on a motor-bike before and she’d caught her breath as the warm evening air raced past. It felt as chill as a winter gale, whipped her hair backwards and forwards across her face, gusted and swirled round her bare legs and plucked at the full skirt of her pretty, floral-patterned summer dress as George speeded along the twisty lanes through Ballybrannan, round the foot of Cannon Hill and on to Mullanisilla.
She’d clung tightly to his tweed jacket for warmth as well as safety, but when they came to a standstill and she climbed stiffly off the pillion and stepped on to the stony path leading away from the field-gate, she found she was shivering uncontrollably. As soon as she got her feet on the ground George left her and strode off, pushing, not his brother’s borrowed bike, but his own new bike, his one thought the need to find a safe parking place.
Well at least it will be warm inside, she thought to herself, as she watched him go. She dabbed her dripping nose, ran her fingers through her tangled hair and shivered fiercely. Well, you live and learn, she said to herself, hearing her father’s voice. She smiled ruefully, wrapped her arms round herself, covered up the expanse of goose-pimpled skin exposed by her scooped neckline and rubbed her arms vigorously to see if she could generate a little warmth in them while she waited.
Minutes passed. When George still failed to appear, she moved a little further in the direction he’d taken and found him eyeing a drainpipe at the side of the building. She watched as he took a chain from his pocket, attached one end to the drainpipe and fed the other through the spokes of the motorcycle before attaching a small padlock. He turned a key in the lock, tested it several times, then put the key carefully back in his top pocket. He stared all around him to see if there was any hazard he might have overlooked. Satisfied at last that no harm could come to his new possession he glanced towards her.
‘That should be all right now,’ he said, a bright smile on his face. ‘Don’t want anyone pinching MY new bike.’
He took a final look over his shoulder as she came up to him, dropped an arm round her, marched her up to the door of the hall and produced his two half crowns for the pair of men guarding it, so large they almost filled the entrance.
When they moved marginally apart to allow them to pass between them, she followed him as he elbowed his way towards the crowded dance floor, an indeterminate area between a deep line of girls on one side and a less deep line of men on the other. Here couples were entwined, if not actually able to dance. He turned to her, put his arms round her and used his superior height and weight to propel them round the floor.
The band stopped. The applause was enthusiastic.
‘Big crowd,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, fishing in her pocket for her hanky and dabbing her nose, now dripping even more vigorously than it had outside.
She was warming up now, for the atmosphere was like a warm blanket, but was much less pleasant. From somewhere nearby, there was an overpowering smell of cheap perfume and sweat. All around her, men with shiny foreheads were mopping their brows and girls with light dresses had patches of damp under each arm.
The floor was so packed, there was little opportunity for George to demonstrate his dancing skills. As the band grew more enthusiastic, encouraged no doubt by a crate of beer parked in the tiny kitchen behind their raised platform, Ellie gave up the attempt to make conversation and find out what George could possibly mean by talking about his new motorbike.
She exchanged smiles with girls she’d known since working in Armagh. Others she’d known from childhood and the years they’d spent together in the school room just inside the gates of the greytowered parish church built on Church Hill. There was a new school now, down in Ballybrannan which had only been open a year. It had a separate entrance for Boys and Girls and even separate flush toilets.
She smiled to herself. Very different from the old school-room, where she and George were taught by Master Ebbitt and Miss Taylor. The visiting Inspector complained every year in his report that there was but one office, the earth privy used by both boys and girls. Probably it was the privy that had closed the school in the end. These days there were new regulations for shops and schools and places of work. Why, even her own boss, who paid as little attention as possible to such things, had had to provide seats for all his shop assistants even if they never had time to sit on them.
‘Will we go out for a wee breath of air?’ George asked, bending down to her ear to make himself heard.
She nodded and followed his tweed jacket as he carved his way back through the somewhat narrower lines of girls and out into the grassy area surrounding the hall. All around them couples were entwining their arms and setting off in search of a grassy bank or a low wall to sit on.
‘There’s a bench outside the smithy over there,’ he said, pointing to a low, whitewashed building a couple of fields away. ‘It’s not far. I have something to tell you. It’ll be worth the extra wee walk on up the lane,’ he added, looking unusually pleased with himself.
George smiled a lot. He always had. Even when they were wee things together at school, he was known for his good-nature. Nothing ever seemed to bother him. He was on good terms with everyone. He was two years older than she was and he’d had a notion of Ellie since she was twelve or thirteen. Given they lived next door to each other, it had always been assumed they’d make a match. As their teenage years passed neither of them had objected to this assumption. Their only problem was the one faced by all their contemporaries. Where were they to get the money to get married?
To be able to get married you needed a job that paid enough to rent a house and support a wife and family. Jobs that paid well were few and far between and houses were scarce even if you could afford the rent. It made no difference that George was the second son of Tom Robinson, a fair-sized farmer for these parts of North Armagh. Still in his late forties, Tom had no though whatever of retiring and even when he did, he’d made it clear he had no intention at all of splitting up the farm his father and grandfather had managed to put together. The land would pass intact to the eldest son, young Tommy.
Meantime, George was working on the land with his brother. He had his keep, his clothes and ten shillings a week in his pocket. The motorbike was a present from his Uncle George, the Director of a Canadian timber company, well enough off to come home every seven years or so to see his brother and his family. He’d been in residence next door for nearly two weeks of his usual three week visit.
Ellie and George walked along the lane swinging their clasped hands. The May evening was still warm. After the stuffiness and overpowering smells of the hall, Ellie was more than usually grateful for its freshness. There were wild roses in the hedge, pale pink petals freshly unfurled, the first she’d seen that year.
‘Aye indeed, sure they’re early enough,’ he replied agreeably to her comment. ‘It’s an early season altogether. Ah hope to goodness we don’t get frost.’
‘So do I. I still have my geraniums on the window sill. I’m waiting till after the full moon to plant them out.’
‘Are ye now?’
He turned towards her for the first time that evening and looked her up and down, from the crown of her still tousled fair hair to her neat little feet and the shoes with their lattice work pattern her sister Florence had sent her from London.
They sat down together and he drew her into his arms, kissed her vigorously and then took her hand.
‘I have some great news for you, Ellie,’ he began. ‘You know how we’ve been talkin’ and plannin’ and wonderin’ how we could manage to find a wee house and get married. Well, I have the answer,’ he announced, pausing for effect.
‘My goodness, George, what’s happened?’ she cried, her grey eyes sparkling with excitement.
‘I’ve been offered a great job. Ye’d hardly believe how much money I’ll be earnin’. I’ll have saved up for a house in no time an’ I’ll be able to send out for ye.’
Ellie’s smile faded. Her mouth, half open to ask about the great new job, closed again as she put together the clues in what he’d said. There were no jobs with big money in Armagh or anywhere else in Ireland. Or if there were, they were not for the likes of George.
She could see he was waiting for her to tell him how pleased she was with his news. She pushed her unease to the back of her mind and asked the obvious question.
‘Is it your Uncle George’s business?’
‘How did ye guess?’
Not exactly difficult, she thought to herself, when he’d talked about nothing but Uncle George for the last fortnight. Out loud she asked quietly what the job was and whereabouts in Canada it was.
Once started there was no stopping him. The words tripped over each other as he told her all the details he’d gleaned from his uncle since his arrival. She already knew Uncle George had a timber business. Now he told her its headquarters was in a place called Peterborough. Ellie had never heard of Peterborough and George himself seemed vague as to its whereabouts, but he was quite clear the timber came from some distance away. There were logging camps in the northern forest where men worked cutting timber till the snow fell. Then they used sledges to move it out to the bigger rivers and have it ready to float down to the sawmills in the spring. As Uncle George had said, you needed to be strong and very fit.
It wasn’t hard to see why Uncle George had made his proposal, Ellie thought to herself. His nephew looked the part. Tall and broad, sun-tanned and easy going. What she couldn’t see was why George thought this plan would solve their problem. The more he talked about the camps, the chuck wagons that cooked their food and the paymasters who brought their dollars every week, the more she felt that something dreadful was happening. Instead of being pleased and happy, she grew more and more anxious.
‘But where would we live George?’ she broke in, unable to listen to any more of his excited account.
‘Oh we’d live in Peterborough,’ he said firmly. ‘Or one of the smaller places with a sawmill. But that wouldn’t be for a wee while. I’d have to learn the job out at the camps before I could be given a supervising job in one of the mills or an office job in one of the retail warehouses.’
‘And where would I be when you were up in the forest with the other men and the bears?’ she asked, a tremor threatening to break up her carefully chosen words.
‘Ach, ye needn’t worry about me an’ the bears. I shoulden’ have told ye about them at all,’ he said, drawing her close and patting her bare arm. ‘You’ll be safe here till I’ve saved up to send for you. Sure we can get married out there as well as here,’ he went on reassuringly.
Ellie shivered. Even this late in the evening, there was still no chill in the air, but the thought of going out to Canada to marry George was so different from anything they’d ever planned, she just didn’t know where or how she’d find the courage to go through with it.
‘How long do you think it might be before I could come out to you?’
‘Ach, not long. A couple of years or so. Sure you’ll not know the time goin’ an’ you can go on savin’ up a wee bit too,’ he said encouragingly.
‘What happens if you find someone else to marry, George?’ she asked, determined to get him to focus his mind on them rather than on all the things his uncle had told him.
‘Ach sure there’ll be no women up at the camps. Ye can rest easy there,’ he said with a grin, as he pulled a strand of her long hair.
‘And what happens if I find someone else that wants to marry me and stay here?’ she asked quietly, looking him straight in the eye.
‘Now don’t be sayin’ things like that, Ellie,’ he replied quickly. ‘Haven’t you and I been goin’ out together since the time you left school? Aren’t we made for each other?’ he went on, his deep voice rising somewhat as he made his point. ‘Sure we can talk it all over next week. Our Tommy’s startin’ a man on the farm, so he won’t be short-handed when I go, so I’ll be able to take you out every evenin’. We could go to the pictures in Armagh one night and maybe the Friday dance in the City Hall. They say it has a great floor and it’s never crowded like these wee places,’ he added, nodding his dark head towards the distant sound of music.
‘So when are you thinking of going?’ she blurted out, as the implications of what he’d just said dawned upon her.
‘Uncle wants me to travel back with him. It’s too good an opportunity to miss havin’ someone to go with that knows their way about,’ he explained quickly. ‘He’s booked us on the Liverpool boat for tomorrow week and we’ll pick up the Canadian Pacific ship on the Monday. It sails that evening for Quebec. So he says.’
As Ellie climbed into her large, cold bed a couple of hours later, she wondered how she’d ever managed to keep from crying through the rest of the long, long evening. Now she need try no more. Tears came instantly, running silently down her face, sinking into the crisp, white pillowcase with the decoration of pink daisies she’d embroidered in her last year at school.
She felt her head in such a turmoil, she didn’t even know where to begin to make sense of things. Between the morning and the evening of an unexceptional day, her world had changed completely. George, who had been there all her life, her fiancé in all but name, was going away. In just over a week, he’d be setting off from Armagh Station and by this day fortnight he’d be on a ship on his way to Canada. He’d even told her the name of the vessel and how they’d get off at Quebec and not Montreal, because that was the quickest way to travel to Peterborough. And within the month he’d be up in his camp with the lumberjacks and the chuck wagon.
At the thought of the immense distance opening up between them, the tears flowed faster. For as long as she could remember, he’d been next door, a minute or two’s walk down the shortcut from her own house, past his father’s barns, along the front of the substantial two-storey dwelling and into the farmyard. And if she couldn’t see him anywhere, or hear his voice echoing from stable or byre, she’d only to go to his mother in the dairy or the scullery, or even in to old Granny Robinson sitting by the fire in the big kitchen and ask them where he was.
What was she going to do?
She turned restlessly in the large bed, big enough to have taken all four sisters together when they were still small. If only she wasn’t on her own with all her brothers and sisters gone. Mary, it’s true, was always so bound up in her own affairs, she’d seldom been any help, but Florence was only a little older than herself and always sorry if something had upset her little sister. Although she might not be very good at giving advice she would always listen. She’d try to encourage her and remind her things were never as bad as one thought and often she’d been right.
It was Polly she needed now, but her eldest and dearest sister, was in Toronto with a husband, two small boys and a little one and a load of worries of her own. Not that Polly would ever let her own problems get in the way. If you asked her something, you could always be sure she’d pay attention. She had a way of looking at you as if she was hearing more than you were telling her. When you’d finished, she’d say not what would comfort you, or what she thought you wanted to hear, and certainly not what she herself would do, but what might actually help you to see your way.
If only there were more time, she could write and ask her what she thought of George’s plan and what she herself should do. But even though letters took only five or six days each way, there still wasn’t time to get an answer back before he went. She’d just have to manage by herself.
Tired out, she fell asleep at last, her face wet with tears. It felt like only minutes later that she woke suddenly, her whole body rigid with tension. A large brown bear had been staring at her and as she wondered whatever she was going to do, it began to lumber towards her. Her eyes flew open in the dim room and the whole evening with George unrolled before her once again.
She knew he loved her and indeed she had loved him for as long as she could remember. He certainly wasn’t the first young man to go away, work hard for a year or two and send for his sweetheart. It happened all the time. But the whole thing had been so sudden. They’d never even considered it themselves. Maybe if he’d told her what Uncle George was proposing, or asked her what she thought before everything was settled, it would be easier. But then, he was doing his best, thinking of how they might be together. If he was the one who had to go she could hardly say ‘don’t go’ when going was to give them the future together they’d planned.
But all the time, she felt something was wrong. Try as she would, she couldn’t see what it was, except that she just didn’t know how she could go on living at home and working in Freeburns with no George and no one but girlfriends to talk to. The very thought of it brought the tears streaming down her cheeks again until the pillow was so wet she had to turn it over before she made another attempt to go to sleep.
‘Ellie, are ye up?’
She jerked awake at the sound of her father’s voice.
Brilliant light was streaming through the dust-streaked windows and making bright patches on the linoleum. She knew without looking at her clock she’d overslept. She, who always woke early and lay, warm and comfortable, till she heard her father raking out the stove.
‘Just coming,’ she replied, jumping out of bed and pouring water from the jug into her wash basin.
The water was icy on her face and warm body but she moved so quickly she hardly noticed. Within minutes, she was dressed in her black skirt and white, shop assistant’s blouse. She brushed her hair while pushing her feet into her everyday shoes, closed her bedroom door firmly on the unmade bed and the chair with her floral dress still draped over it, and hurried across the small entrance hall to the open kitchen door.
Her father was frying soda bread in the heavy griddle, the smoke rising already from the over-hot fat, the smell of burning just beginning to taint the air.
‘Can I do that for you, Da?’
‘Aye. Yer a better han’ at it than me. Yer Ma says she’s not well.’
‘Would she like a cup of tea?’
He flicked his eyes upwards and tightened his lips. He’d forgotten to ask and he knew as well as Ellie neither of them would hear the end of it until the day was out or some better opportunity for complaint turned up.
‘You’d better,’ she replied, her back to him as she bent over the pan, drawing it away from the heat and tipping it gently to redistribute the melted suet.
It was only as she heard a muffled step behind her that the confused dark shadows she’d brought from sleep finally came together in her head. George was going to Canada. There’d be no wedding after the harvest, this year or next. She had no idea how she would tell either her father or the woman who now limped across the kitchen in her bare feet and subsided with a heavy sigh on the wooden settle by the fire.
‘I was dying of thirst,’ she said, addressing no one in particular. ‘I just hadta make mysel’ get up, I was that parched.’
‘I could bring you some breakfast to bed if you want to go back,’ said Ellie, knowing perfectly well the offer would be refused.
‘Ach, I haven’t the energy to walk that far without a bite in me.’
‘Well it won’t be long now,’ Ellie responded, glancing round at her.
Her mother’s hair had been grey for years, but now, though she was only in her early fifties, it had gone both thin and white. Once she had worn it in a plait, curved round and pinned up in a bun, but these days she let it hang lank and loose round her wrinkled face in a tattered curtain that brushed against her dull skin and her too-bright, red cheeks.
‘Ye’ll have to bring me water from the well afore ye go to work, Ellie, for I’m not fit for it today.’
‘Sure I’ll get the water. Hasn’t Ellie to go to her work for half past eight?’ Robert asked crossly.
‘Sit over, Da, it’s ready,’ said Ellie, moving between them with the teapot in one hand and a dish of fried bread in the other. ‘Will you have yours there, Ma?’
‘Aye, if I can eat a bit at all. Sure I hardly slept a wink last night.’
Robert pulled his wooden armchair up to the table and sat with his eyes on his plate as he munched the crisp pieces of soda bread and drank deep from a large mug of tea. Ellie brought a plate and cup across to her mother where she sat round-shouldered and slack on the wooden settle, her pale, watery eyes peering at the tiny bright points of flame dancing and flickering beyond the open front of the stove.
She appeared not to notice the cup of tea and the plate of fried bread Ellie placed beside her, but that was nothing new. She would only eat if no one were looking at her, as if by avoiding their gaze she could pretend she hadn’t eaten at all.
Ellie drew up her own chair to the table. She knew she was thirsty but eating was going to be an effort. She would have to do her best, for her father would notice if she left anything on her plate. She’d always been slim and sometimes when she was tired or very busy at work, she lost weight quite quickly. He always noticed and she knew it worried him. As if he didn’t have worries enough.
He never knew what tale of woe he’d hear when he came up from the forge. Sometimes it was just a string of complaints about trivial things, so he’d just fetch water, or make tea, or see to the breadman. Other times, she was lying down. If she was on the settle in the big, dark kitchen, then it wasn’t too bad. If she retired to the sofa in the sitting-room, it meant he’d have to fend for himself and try to find out what she wanted. If she went back to bed, he’d have to decide if she really was ill this time and whether or not he ought to send for the doctor.
She had a chest complaint common to spinners, a legacy of the days before her marriage when she worked at Drumcairn mill. She also had what she called ‘bad legs’, a rheumatic condition which varied with the season, usually made worse by cold and damp. But most of all Ellen Scott suffered from a condition that lacked a medical name. She had neither hope, joy, nor enthusiasm. In their place, she put dissatisfaction, anxiety and despair. Nothing in her life was right. It never had been. It never would be.
Ellie had often puzzled over her mother’s endless complaints and had come to the conclusion many years ago that the only thing her mother enjoyed was feeding her hens. Standing outside her front door, a dirty apron over her oldest dress, her carpet slippers still on her feet, she would chatter and call, laughing in a strange, high-pitched voice, addressing them by name, throwing pieces of broken bread to her favourites, crowing with pleasure as they argued and squabbled over the scraps.
That was the only time Ellie recalled ever seeing her mother smile. For her husband and family, there had never been word of warmth or comfort.
Only the thought of wheeling her bicycle down the lane and leaving the dark, stuffy kitchen behind her helped her get through the morning routine. But not for one minute was she able to put out of mind that this kitchen and this woman would to be her life for as long as it took for George to make his way in Canada and send for her.
If ever he did.