Anne Bennett - Pack Up Your Troubles

‘Lean against me, Kevin, if you’re tired,’ she said.

‘Aren’t you tired too?’ Kevin asked her.

‘No,’ said Maeve. ‘I’m too excited to sleep.’

She was apprehensive too, though she didn’t share that with Kevin, but whatever reception she found at her journey’s end, she knew it would be better than the life she’d left behind. Kevin was reassured and allowed himself to sleep, and so deep was his sleep that Maeve had to shake him awake when they got to Portadown.

The conductor on the rail bus they boarded for the last leg of their journey recognised Maeve. ‘Well, hello there, Maeve Brannigan.’

‘Hogan now,’ Maeve corrected him.

‘And these are your two?’ he said, smiling at the children. ‘Home for a wee holiday, are you all?’

‘We are that,’ Maeve said firmly, before either child was able to say anything else. ‘And glad of it.’

‘And I would be if I lived in Birmingham,’ the conductor said, and added to Maeve, ‘I bet your mammy will be pleased to see you. It’s strange that she didn’t mention you coming.’

‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,’ Maeve explained, and hoped her mammy would indeed be pleased.

In the dim evening light she could just see the green Donegal hills flecked with sheep, and dotted here and there with little thatched cottages that had plumes of smoke rising in the air. She closed her eyes in relief and happiness. She was nearly home. She pointed out the familiar things to the children and they listened eagerly as she described her parents’ farm to them as the rail bus ate up the miles.

‘Here we are, then,’ the conductor said suddenly.

Grace and Kevin looked about them as they alighted. ‘We can’t be here,’ Kevin said, ‘because it isn’t anywhere.’

Maeve didn’t answer him straight away and instead pulled their luggage from the rail bus to lie at a heap at their feet. She’d helped the children on with their haversacks and picked up the case before she said, ‘This isn’t a proper station like those we passed; really it’s not a stop at all, just the place nearest to the farm. We go through the gate and we’re nearly there,’ and so saying she opened the five-barred gate.

Maeve saw the children looking about them, and led them up the path that ran between two hedges bordering fields on either side. Dusk had fallen and suddenly Maeve felt the children’s hands tighten in her own.

‘Why isn’t anyone here to meet us?’ Grace asked, and Maeve could see Kevin’s puzzled eyes on her too.

Maeve also wondered that. What if they wouldn’t even see her? She told herself firmly to stop frightening the life out of herself and said as confidently as she could, ‘I expect they’re all busy, and anyway, it’s only a step away now.’ And then she laughed at the children’s fright when two cows put their heads over the hedge and lowed at them.

They came to the corner of the cottage and as they turned into the cobbled yard in front of it there was a sudden terrific noise from a building beside the barn, but Maeve told her bemused children it was just the hens locked up for the night disturbed by their footsteps on the cobbles. The words had barely left her mouth when the farmhouse door suddenly opened and two dogs leapt out of it and around them, snapping and barking. Grace screamed and held tightly to her mother.

‘Skip, Laddie,’ said a stern voice from the doorway, and Maeve turned to look at the young man framed in the doorway.

‘Colin?’ she said in wonder and surprise. ‘Little Colin?’

‘Not so little now,’ Colin replied. ‘I’m sixteen.’

She’d known he was sixteen, for hadn’t her mother written with news of the family? But in her mind Colin was still the wee boy of seven she’d left behind nine years before.

‘You’d better come in,’ Colin said.

Later the children told Maeve how pretty they thought the house was. It was low and painted white, with little windows all along the side of it and thatched with yellow straw, and grey smoke escaped from the squat chimney. The door was in two halves so you could open the top or the bottom. Both now stood open and Maeve led the children inside.

She had her heart in her mouth as she entered the dim farmhouse. It was just as if she’d never left. There was the press opposite the door containing all the crockery and a food cupboard to the side of it. Two pails of water stood on stools by the side of the bedroom door, while to the other side was the huge kitchen table before one of the windows with wooden chairs arranged around it. The settle and the armchairs were pulled up before the peat fire, and the curtained-off bed that belonged to Maeve’s parents was in the far corner.

The only difference was in the group waiting for her. There was no Tom, for he’d been married two years before, and no Liam, away in Dublin, and Kate too was living there, in the nurses’ home. Rosemarie was there, but Maeve knew she was engaged to be married, yet she’d been just twelve when Maeve had left home. Colin was still at home, and Nuala, no longer the wee child of just four striking out for independence, but almost a young lady of thirteen.

Her parents hadn’t changed. There might have been a few more grey hairs in her mother’s head, and more lines on her face and on that of her father, but they’d altered so little compared to the children. And across the room, in the silence that screamed around her, she saw them all staring at her.

Annie Brannigan waited for her daughter to speak, to explain to them why she’d done the disgraceful thing of leaving her husband and coming back home with her children.

Grace and Kevin were weary despite the snatches of sleep they’d had, and both were bone tired of getting on and off trams, trains, ships and rail buses. And now they were here in their mammy’s old home and no one seemed to welcome them at all. Maeve saw the wobbling chin of her daughter and the obstinate scowl of her son, and she licked her lips nervously and said in a voice little more than a whisper, ‘Hello, Mammy, Daddy.’

‘Hello! Is that all you can say after nine years and you descending on us like this, and the only notice a scribe of a letter that arrived this morning telling us so?’ Annie asked her daughter angrily.

‘I’m sorry,’ Maeve said. ‘I had to come. There were reasons.’

She saw Grace’s face pucker and the tears that had been threatening since she’d entered the farmhouse spilt down her cheeks. She sank to the flagged kitchen floor with a loud sob, crying, ‘I don’t like it here.’

The sight of the child crying smote Annie’s heart. Whatever was wrong it wasn’t the children’s fault, and she went forward and gathered Grace into her arms. ‘And you’re Kevin, I suppose?’ she said to the boy, who was scowling at her, and without waiting for him to answer went on, ‘Take that look off your face, boy, and come away to the fire. If I know weans, a little food won’t come amiss and will put a new complexion on the matter altogether.’

After that, it wasn’t so bad at all. No one spoke of their unexpected arrival in front of the children. Instead Annie began to prepare a meal for them while Rosemarie and Nuala laid the table and Colin carried the cases and haversacks into the bedrooms.

Maeve saw the children were fascinated by the peat fire that everything was cooked on, the frying pan with the sizzling ham and eggs at the side of it, and the potatoes in a large pot fastened to a hook on a black metal bar that swung out from the wall.

The smell tantalised them all, and Maeve and the children were glad enough to scramble up to the table to eat the fine meal. It was served with butter yellower than the children had ever seen – not that they’d seen much butter at all in their young lives – and slices of bread that Maeve explained was soda bread.