Anne Bennett - Danny Boy

Rosie learned fast. Nothing enraged her mother more than vegetables burned onto the pan, lumpy gravy or inadequately drained cabbage and she had no wish to inflame her mother’s temper. So, without complaint, she learned also how to make soda bread, barnbrack and apple pie.

She’d always been used to helping. It had been her lot for long enough anyway, particularly as she was the eldest. She knew it was what most girls did and that it would stand her in good stead when she married. But, just sometimes, she would have liked to hold the baby, to feel his warm little body against her and see his eyes looking into her own.

Minnie however, guarded him jealously, only letting Seamus hold him grudgingly. Babyhood though, doesn’t last forever and as Dermot began to crawl, and then pull himself up to stand and walk, he wasn’t content to be cuddled all the day. He loved all his sisters, who were always willing to stop what they were at to do his bidding, but Dermot’s favourite in the house was Rosie and he was devoted to her.

Dermot began at the County School in Blessington the September before his fifth birthday. Rosie and Chrissie had both left school by then and Geraldine, who had been eleven in June had just one year left, so it was her job to take Dermot up to the school while Rosie and Chrissie helped wherever they were needed, on the farm, the house, or the dairy.

Rosie had settled well in to the mundane life, although she often missed the company of the girls at school and as she neared fifteen she noticed changes to her body she could have done with advice over, things that she could hardly discuss with a younger sister. There was no-one she could think to ask and she often wondered if thinking about it too much could be construed as a sin.

Then, one dreadful day, she’d gone to the privy outside, driven there by severe stomach cramps and found she was bleeding from her bottom. She came in, her eyes swollen, her body weak from crying for hours, for she was convinced she was dying.

Even then, she could hardly bear to tell her mother, but fear eventually overcame her embarrassment. ‘You’re not dying,’ he mother told her brusquely. ‘It’s what happens to every woman, every month.’

Rosie’s eyes opened wide in astonishment. She’d never heard of such a thing. Minnie McMullen was hazy about why women had periods and the workings of a human body – it wasn’t something a good, Catholic woman should know about she felt. But, she knew the monthly periods were connected somehow with having a child, and this was what she told Rosie.

Rosie looked at her in horror. She knew very little about sex and what you did to have a baby, but from the odd snippets picked up in the school yard, she knew you had to ‘do’ things with a man and she knew that to do those things before you had a husband and then to go on and have a baby, was just about the worst thing in the world. She’d be like Cissie Morlarty who, people said, had been expecting when she was but a young girl and there had been no boyfriend in sight. Anyway, whatever the truth of it Cissie was sent far away from her home to a place for bad girls so the rumours went and she was never seen or heard of again.

Rosie, gripped with desperate fear cried, ‘But, I’m not having a baby. I don’t want to have a baby.’

‘I didn’t say you were, you silly girl,’ Minnie replied sharply. ‘And I trust you won’t think of having a child until you are respectably married. This other thing is just part of being a woman, so that you can have a baby when you’re ready.’

Rosie was relieved beyond measure that she was normal and she wasn’t dying, but there were still things she needed to know and she decided to ask her mother now, while they were talking of intimate matters. ‘Mammy, how do babies get into you?’

Minnie’s lips pursed. ‘There is no need to know those things, or even ask about them until you’re married. Then, all will come clear to you.’

How? Rosie wondered, but she didn’t ask. One look at her mother’s face convinced her it would be a waste of time. Maybe, when she married, her husband would tell her. She hoped to goodness he knew something about it, or they’d never have a child.

She spent a lot of time as she reached her mid teens thinking about boys, wondering who she might marry and whether it would be someone around them, like Larry Sullivan the son of the blacksmith, or Rory McCabe, whose family owned a farm similar to their own, or even Dessy Finnegan, though when she thought of him she had to smile, for the boy was so small she stood head and shoulders above him like most of the other girls.

However, none of these boys attracted her in any way. In fact, they irritated her more often. Perhaps feelings change as a person gets older she mused or maybe she’d be swept off her feet by someone else entirely. She wondered what it would be like to fall in love, how it would feel to have a man’s hands upon you. Of course, that verged on impure thoughts and then would have to be confessed to Father McNally and yet she could scarcely prevent thinking of such things when she was in her bed at night.

Really though, when she thought deeper about it, she wondered if she’d ever have a boyfriend. She’d had to do so much with her sisters since she’d been ten that she’d seldom had time to think of her own appearance. She brushed both her sisters’ hair a hundred times each before plaiting it for bed, but her own waves got a cursory brush and she’d spent so long seeing that Chrissie and Geraldine were neat and tidy for school or Mass, that she scarcely had a minute to think of herself.

She examined her face and body critically in the mirror in her room and could see she had little to recommend her. Her eyes she felt were as dull as her hair, her skin sallow and while her body was thin enough, it had no shape to it at all.

She had few to compare herself with, for she saw her contemporaries only at Mass or the village, if she went in on Saturdays. There was a social in the church hall once a month for young people over the age of sixteen, but Rosie didn’t think she’d ever be allowed to go. She knew her mother didn’t approve of such goings on. Rosie didn’t mind too much for she had nothing to wear, the serviceable day clothes and outfits for Mass were not the sort of clothes to wear to a dance. She knew too, the possibility of her mother spending money to get her new clothes, especially the things suitable for a social, was as likely as her flying to the moon, and she had no money of her own.

But, despite all this, there was a boy, a man almost, Rosie liked and his name was Danny Walsh. She was the same age as his younger sister Elizabeth, while Sarah his other sister was another two years older and he had a younger brother Phelan, who was the same age as Geraldine. The girls had all been at school together and when she talked to them after Mass, she had ample time to study their older brother, Danny.

He was a well set up and muscular young man, and from being out in all weathers his face was always bronzed. As he was the eldest son he was set to inherit the family’s farm and he carried that assurance with him. His mouth turned up at the sides as if he was constantly good humoured, his chin was determined and strong and his sparkling eyes were as dark as the mop of brown curls he sported.

Rosie, knew that nobody as handsome as Danny Walsh would look the side she was on, and she kept her thoughts about him to herself and only dreamed about him in her bed at night when she was tucked in beside her sisters. However, Danny Walsh had noticed the young girl with the deep brown eyes and hair that shone in the sunlight, but he also knew how old she was and he was no cradle snatcher.

In the spring of 1914, Rosie was sixteen and a half and Danny’s feelings for her had deepened, though he had no idea how she felt about him. He was no flirt and didn’t give his heart freely and that Sunday morning he decided it was time to see if Rosie liked him enough to step out with him and he dressed with extra care. The McMullen family came out of church and Minnie and Seamus stopped to speak to some neighbours just a little way from the porch.