was stiff and sore, and every part of her seemed to ache. She wanted to hide from the world, at least until her face was back to normal, she felt so ashamed.
She finished feeding Kevin, changed him and then rocked him in her arms until his eyelids drooped and eventually closed. She laid him in the pram and went into the bedroom, where she painfully dressed herself. Then, wrapping her shawl around her head and shoulders, pulling it well over her face, she made her way to the outdoor lavatory.
Outside the autumn sun penetrated the court in dusty shafts, and small children played around the doorways. Two women stood keeping an eye on them and having a chat and both looked curiously at Maeve. She muttered a greeting, but kept her head down and hurried past.
When she returned the women had gone, though the children still played on, and she was grateful that they took no notice of her. As she reached her door, she heard Kevin’s plaintive cry, and she struggled with the latch, anxious to get in and see to him. She lost her grip on the shawl and it slipped from her just as Elsie Phillips’s door opened. She stared at Maeve’s face with a look of dismay and shock.
So she’d been right, she thought to herself. The brute had been smacking her about, but it was more than the odd slap or punch this time. ‘You poor sod,’ she said with feeling, and the sympathy started the tears in Maeve’s eyes.
She stumbled through the door, the tears almost blinding her. Elsie stood undecided, not sure whether to follow her into the house or go out to the shops, as she’d intended, and mind her own business. But then, she reminded herself, the girl had no one belonging to her, except a sour-faced old cow of an aunt. She’d seen her just the once at Kevin’s christening and couldn’t take to her, nor her milksop, henpecked husband, who seemed to think the sun shone out of Brendan Hogan’s arse.
Her mind made up, she put down her bag, took off her coat, closed her own door and went to Maeve’s. The girl still cried, even as she held the baby, and Elsie’s heart was smitten with pity for her. She knew the pattern Maeve’s life would take from now on, for she believed once a man started beating his wife he would always do so, and she also knew Maeve would not get a lot of sympathy from anyone because of it either.
She took the baby from Maeve and sat him up in the pram, where he could watch what was going on, and pressed his mother down into a chair.
‘I’m going to make us a cup of tea,’ Elsie said, ‘and then see if I can do summat about your face. After that if you need any shopping I’ll get it for you. You’ll not want to go out much for a day or two, I’d say.’
Maeve marvelled that Elsie seemed to know just how she felt and was very glad of the older woman’s presence. For the first time she didn’t feel so isolated.
Elsie had been right. Maeve’s life took on a pattern from that first real beating, the first one that Brendan hadn’t apologised for. She realised whatever she did or didn’t do, however she pleaded, begged or tried to talk to Brendan, he would treat her as he saw fit. In his eyes that was grudgingly giving her money he could spare her after his booze, fags and bets had been accounted for, however inadequate it was, and clouting her whenever he felt like it.
‘Write 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