one

Cheshire

In four days I had learned to answer to Paddy, Cock, Chuck, Kid and, occasionally, Cloth-ears. To dress and undress before twenty-three strangers. To make my bed on biscuits: to unmake and barrack it. To sleep in a room almost devoid of furniture, curtainless and cheerless. To eat for breakfast steamed fish, grey in colour, surrounded on the plate by equally grey water; leathery sausages with tasteless insides; reconstituted eggs, pallid and, whether served scrambled or as omelettes, flavourless and of a rubbery consistency; to drink hot, sweet tea brewed in urns as big as a washday boiler. Tea rumoured to be strengthened with washing soda and spiked with bromide to lull our sexual urges.

I had left my home in Dublin, gone to Belfast and from there sailed across the Irish Sea in a force nine gale, transferred to a packed train suffocated almost by smoke and smuts, then ridden in the back of an army vehicle and eventually arrived at my destination. At an army barracks in a Cheshire town to be trained as a woman soldier.

In Belfast I took the King’s shilling, signed on for two years and became a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service. All this I did for love. Not for King and country but for the love of a man. A man I adored with all the love of my seventeen-year-old heart … my first and only love who could send shivers up my spine, make me feel faint, blush, tremble, lose my appetite and light candles to the patron saint of hopeless causes. For if ever there was a hopeless cause my love affair was one.

The object of my passion, hopes and dejection wasn’t aware of my existence. I loved from across the street, from glimpses in the chip shop, across aisles in mass. I watched him in the dance halls tangoing, fox-trotting in the arms of expert glamorous dancers.

I walked miles around the city hoping for a sight of him. Found where he lived and haunted the street. And on occasions when I saw him pretended great interest in the nearest shop window. Through it I saw how tall he was. How well built. His trench coat and soft hat … Like Humphrey Bogart only handsomer. Humphrey Bogart had an ugly face. My love looked like Victor Mature. I’d seen the flash of his white teeth, his big brown eyes.

In work I talked about him to anyone who would listen. I dreamt about him, wakening just as he was about to kiss me, declare his love. Closed my eyes and tried to sleep again, to recapture the dream. My mother said she thought I was run down. I might need a tonic. Or maybe I was costive. There followed an inquisition about my bowels. She promised a dose of opening medicine.

Sometimes, often, studying myself in the mirror I saw the reason why I didn’t attract him. I was tall for my age, lumpy, my nose was too long, my eyes too small, my hair lank brown, straight and cut as if a pudding basin had covered it while the shearing took place. And my breasts bobbed inside my jumpers. My mother promised to buy me a brassière. But like many of her promises it never materialized.

And then one day in a magazine the solution as to how I could captivate my love stared me in the face. I would go to England. Join the ATS. I was looking at a recruiting advertisement for the Women’s Service. Looking at the girl in her uniform. Tall and elegant, sleek blonde hair crowned by a perky little cap. Wearing an expertly cut tunic in fine barathea the colour of sand with the sun on it.

I would join up. The uniform would transform me. I’d come back to Dublin wearing it. I would meet him in my uniform the colour of pale golden sand. He would notice me for the first time. He wouldn’t be able to resist me. How could he? How could any man resist the look-alike girl in the recruiting poster.

My mind was made up. Nothing would be allowed to stand in my way. But because when I reached my decision I wasn’t eighteen, I needed my mother’s consent to join the forces. She reared up when I asked for it. ‘Go to England, that den of iniquity, well indeed you won’t put the fur of your foot near it. Women are being raped and murdered every day of the week over there. Given drugged drinks and cigarettes and sold into the white slave traffic. And that’s apart from the bombs showering down on them blowing them to smithereens. What put that idea into your head?’

She wouldn’t understand or sympathize with unrequited love. So I pleaded lack of job satisfaction. ‘I hate tailoring. I’m fed up day in day out machining sleeve linings.’

‘Who likes their work?’ she retorted. ‘You think of no one but yourself … I moved out of the scheme after your daddy died to make life easier for you. We’re back in the street. I’m just getting back on my feet and you want to clear off … Well you’re not and that’s that.’

I pleaded and coaxed, ranted and raved. She countered all my tactics with gruesome accounts of atrocities committed in England. Charles Peace, Burke and Hare, Buck Ruxton and when the list of ordinary murderers ran out, there was Henry VIII, his daughter Elizabeth and Cromwell.

‘Prostitutes, whore masters, murderers and pagans the lot of them, you’re not going and that’s that.’

‘My daddy was English.’

‘The Lord have mercy on him, his mother was Irish and a Catholic.’

‘And in any case in two months I’ll be eighteen and won’t need your letter,’ I said when she stopped for breath. For a moment she was at a loss for words. But only for a moment. Then back she came, ‘You always were a self-willed little bitch. I haven’t forgotten when you bought a coat unknownst to me.’ My beautiful heliotrope-coloured coat. We seldom had a row that she didn’t remind me of the deception I had practised to get it. ‘No thought for anyone but yourself,’ she continued, soothing a brown paper bag. She smoothed and saved brown paper bags and bits of string. ‘How am I going to manage without your £1 a week coming in, answer me that?’

‘You’re a widow. You’ll get a dependant’s allowance. It says so in the forms.’ I’d slipped up.

She pounced. ‘What forms?’ Her eyes bored into me. Before their gimlet gaze I couldn’t lie.

‘I sent for them. It’s all there about the allowance in black and white.’ Black and white was a favourite phrase of hers. She had great faith in the written word.

Putting on her Woolworth’s glasses many times reinforced with other wire, she took the forms I produced. ‘They write in Double-Dutch,’ she said as she perused the paragraph dealing with allowances. Her lips formed each word silently as she read.

I watched her filled with elation as I did so. I was free. I was escaping. Then suddenly I was deflated. What was I doing? What was I letting myself in for? Why was I leaving home?

‘To escape from her,’ I told myself. ‘No more rows, no more nagging. Come and go as I pleased. Make new friends, see new places.’

Her lips were still working over the letter’s official jargon. She appeared to have shrunk. She looked like an old woman. Seeing her like that I remembered the day after my father’s funeral when I came home from work and she was sitting at the table looking like an old shrunken woman despite the black mourning clothes suiting her. Huddled and dejected fingering the pound notes spread on the table.

‘Every undertaker’s yard in the city collected for your daddy. He was very well liked. Lord have mercy on him—the comfort I could have given him with half of that. D’ye know what I was doing when you came in?’

‘No.’

‘l was just thinking—I have everything. Everything I ever wanted. A house and all that money. Everything I ever wished for. Everything—and I’ve nothing for I haven’t got him.’

That day three years ago I sat and cried with her. Not for long. She never cried for long and in any case there was my dinner to dish up. Instead she reminisced about when she’d first met my father. The handsomest, smartest soldier in the British Army, and after the Treaty when he transferred to the Free State Army the smartest one in that.

‘People,’ she said as she teemed the potatoes into the slop bucket, ‘used to stop to look after him in the street.’ She put the pot back over a low flame and continued talking, shaking the pot as she did so. ‘They’re nice and dry now. What was I saying? Ah, yes, about how smart he was. He was a great horseman as well. Could ride from when he was child, his grandfather in Horsham kept horses.

Sometimes in between jobs in the undertakers he’d get work in the riding school up in the Park. Bridie in the Iveagh Market used to keep the breeches and leggings for me. He liked to knock about with the horsy crowd in Queen Street. D’ye remember him in the breeches and leggings?’

‘Yes,’ I said, my voice choked with tears I was trying to repress.

Choked with sadness and the guilt of a day’s memory a few years before he died. I must have been about eleven then. I was coming out of school as the 83 bus stopped at the terminus on Cashel Road. And my father stepped down from the platform. He was drunk and I tried to avoid him spotting me. But he did and whistled his melodious whistle to attract my attention.

He was staggering slightly and his bowler hat pushed to the back of his head. I prayed silently for the ground to open and swallow him up before any of my pals would see him. It didn’t and he came to me and embraced me. Asked as he always did how I had got on in school. Had a treat in his pocket for me—a penny bar of chocolate.

‘What has you in bad humour—that’s not like you,’ he said, taking my hand in his. I mumbled an excuse and we walked on, me imagining everyone from school watching us and nudging each other. ‘Look at her oul’ fella, mouldy drunk,’ they’d be saying. During the walk home for the first time in my life I hated and was ashamed of him. But at the same time would have scrawbed the face off anyone who dared to pass a remark on him.

The dinner was ready. I sat to the table for it. And only referred to remembering well my father in his riding breeches. Putting the lamb chop on top of the cabbage so the meat juices would flavour it I my mother said, God help him, he worked for six years dying on his feet. His chest, you know, it was always delicate.’

Even after having seen his death certificate and numerous doctors confirming the diagnoses of tuberculosis, she would never admit that’s what he had. There was a powerful stigma attached to the disease. You were often shunned. As AIDs sufferers are today.

She continued to reminisce. ‘Months before he died he volunteered to go into Our Lady’s Hospice for the Dying. He did that,’ she said, ‘for our sake. So the bit of food would go further and his cough wouldn’t disturb us during the night.’

Then her memory switched to happier times. And she and I recalled him dancing a jig, tapping out tunes on the oven door and asking us to guess what they were. Planting his garden. Robbing the granite doorstep from the budding site and with superhuman strength lifting it onto the baby’s go-car. Getting it back to the house, even up the steps, and into the back garden. It was to have been used to make a rockery. But his strength was used up then and forever. The granite could not be broken and the step remained where it had been dumped and was used as a seat.

My mother’s moods changed like quicksilver. Suddenly the pleasant reminiscences were done with. ‘D’ye know,’ she said, ‘you’re a bloody little bitch. I searched high and low for my scissors all day and couldn’t find it. Where did you put it?’

She could go on for hours like this if I didn’t produce the scissors. Which I couldn’t. And now there was no daddy to either defuse or deflect her. These were the times when I missed him so much.

I was only fifteen. Life outside the house beckoned me. I promised I’d search for the scissors when I came back but first I had to call to a friend’s house. I wouldn’t be a minute.

‘Have a cup of tea before you go,’ she said. There was neither spite nor vengeance in her nature. I was never what is now called grounded, never confined to my bedroom, never deprived of food. All only talk, talk, and idle threats to kill, cut the legs from under you or break your neck.

When I came back she was as likely to be telling or reading my sister a story, having a row with my brother, or one of her women friends might be there consoling and crying with her, or giving out yards about the next-door neighbour.

That’s how our life was. The three years since my father’s death hadn’t altered it. He was missed and cried over, laughed over and never for a day completely forgotten. It was a house of warmth and forgiveness. A house of love and safety. A house where although you might consider yourself grown up my mother would still lash out with her hand. And later in the night when you were just falling asleep, she’d tiptoe into your room, adjust the bedcovers and sprinkle you with Holy Water while she murmured prayers to bring you safely through the night. More often than not the water fell on your face and woke you up.

And here I was now eighteen and about to leave it all. The abiding love, the security. A mother who was always there for you. Who’d stick up for you. ‘My child’, as she said about each of us in turn, ‘wouldn’t do such a thing.’ But if you were in the wrong you’d be chastised. Who above all was so forgiving. Who forgave my father when he confessed he had been unfaithful to her. Who tracked down his paramour and put an end to their affair. And forgave him when he discovered that she had visited his lover and beat my mother up.

My mother who was the cranky, joyous spirit of our home and hearts. Who nursed my father until he went into the Hospice. Who walked there in hail, rain and snow. The piece of cardboard covering the hole in the sole of her shoe sodden and squelching. Who had three children as volatile a strong-willed as she was and fought her every inch of the way when her mood was quarrelsome. Though looking back now I suppose it was the response she wanted.

How could I leave all this? Go amongst strangers? Enter a world I knew nothing about? Who would slip a hot jar beside my feet when they were cold? Draw a boil to a head with the heated neck of a bottle? Make me thin gruel with a teaspoon of whiskey in it when I had a cold? Make me a ‘guggie in a cup’ if I was off my food?

These memories and thoughts chased each other through my mind as she finished the letter. She took off her glasses, put them in the pocket of her pinnie and the letter on the mantelpiece. While doing so she noticed the time. ‘God!’ she exclaimed, ‘it’s after six if I don’t hurry I’ll miss the paperman and I’m follying up that murder trial’

She had her coat on and was out the door in a flash. I heard the front door slam and life beckoned to me again. My mother would be all right. I’d be all right. We were survivors.

I got the letter of consent and went to Belfast for an interview and medical examination. On the train I met several girls also hoping to join-up. In the barracks to which we reported I saw khaki uniforms for the first time. They looked nothing like the one in the recruiting poster. The colour wasn’t a goldy sand colour. More like the dictionary definition which I had looked up: ‘Of Persian or Urdu origin, meaning dusty’. These uniforms were drab and dusty, but I consoled myself it was age and long wear. Mine, the one in which I’d cause a sensation in Dublin and captivate my love, would be dazzlingly new.

* * *

‘Childhood illnesses?’ the medical officer asked. I listed them whilst my heart was thundering with fear as I anticipated his next question and the lies I must tell.

‘Parents living?’

‘My father’s dead.’

‘What did he die of?’

‘An accident, sir, he was knocked down and killed.’

My mother had tutored me well. Never, never, and especially to a doctor, did you admit that there was tuberculosis in your family. There was a stigma attached to the disease. As a relative of the infected person you felt the guilt and shame. Euphemisms were used. A touch delicate, asthma, a weakness left over from a childhood pneumonia or pleurisy. Employers sometimes refused you work. Parents put between courting couples with consumption in their families.

During the seven years my father had the disease my mother admitted to no one, not even herself, that tuberculosis was what ailed him. All his X-rays, positive sputum tests, weight loss, fever-flushed cheeks, night sweats and racking cough didn’t convince her. Not even his death certificate on which the cause of death was given as phthisis. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing to the Latin word of Greek origin for a wasting disease, especially tuberculosis. ‘Wasn’t I right all along? I knew he never had consumption. That’s what killed him,’ she said pointing to the unpronounceable word. ‘That little cur in the Meath Hospital didn’t know his arse from his elbow. Probably out of the College of Surgeons.’

She had tutored me well. Blatantly I lied to the medical officer, elaborating on the accident that killed my father. For she had warned me, ‘Once you admit to a doctor about consumption they’d start prying and probing. Sending you to clinics for more probing and X- rays. Shadows, patches, things you were unaware of and didn’t interfere with you might be discovered. Then you were in their hands. Your body never your own again.’

My lie was accepted, my heart, lungs and liver declared sound. I was passed Al and given a date on which to return and sign away my freedom. And so on 17 June 1945 I came to the camp in Cheshire.

The people in the tailoring factory made a collection. Thirty shillings, I think. More money than I had ever owned before. From it I bought my first deodorant. A push-up stick of O-Do-Rono. The owning and using of it made me feel grown up and sophisticated. I had presents from relations. A short-sleeved, maroon, hand-knitted jumper, a rosary and a prayer book. A change of clothes, still minus a brassière, and my beautiful coat. Cream and green tweed, made to measure with a dark-green velvet collar. There were always tailors in the trade who did ‘nicksers’, using the firm’s time and often their trimmings as well. That’s how I came by the coat. Apart from those possessions, the only other items I owned were toothpaste, a toothbrush and a comb.

My mother came to see me off. She looked very smart in her edge-to-edge coat. After sizing up a group of girls who were travelling with me to Belfast she singled one from the crowd. A Dublin girl whose name was Deirdre, stout, rosy-cheeked and, in my opinion, years older than me. My mother talked in a voice she used in public, especially in the presence of men, laughing her lovely laugh. Now and then looking round to see if anyone was paying her attention.

I was mortified and prayed for the train to soon leave. When it did she followed it along the platform, still talking, advising, waving, tears falling which she dabbed at with a dainty handkerchief. I, too, leant out of the window waving until the train turned a bend and to my great relief took me out of her sight.