Anne Bennett - Far From Home

‘So it’s just the one room?’ Sally said, still shocked by the bareness of the place her sister lived in.

‘Basically,’ Kate said. ‘Behind the curtain in the far corner is my bed, and beside that is a chest of drawers for my things with a mirror on top so that it doubles as a dressing table. There are hooks on the wall for anything that needs to be hung up.’ She led the way to two easy chairs in front of the gas fire and placed the tray on the small table between them. ‘Take off your coat and come and sit down.’

Sally obeyed. As she sat down in the chair Kate had indicated, she asked, ‘What about a kitchen?’

‘British kitchens are nothing like cottage kitchens in Ireland,’ Kate said. ‘Here a wee cubbyhole of a place with a couple of gas rings and a few pots and pans and bits of crockery on some rickety shelves passes as a kitchen. But,’ she added as she handed Sally one of the mugs, ‘here I have running water and a proper sink, which is more than I had at home. We even have a bathroom on the next floor down and we can have a bath just by turning on the taps. It has a proper flush toilet that really startled me the first few times I used it.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Sally said. ‘People say they have them in the hotels in the town, but I’ve never had an occasion to go into the hotels, never mind use the toilets.’

‘No, nor me before I came here,’ Kate said. Then she added, ‘This might not look much to you, but, let me tell you, it’s a lap of luxury compared to the place we were reared in. So, now,’ she added, fixing Sally with a steely look, ‘are you going to drink this tea I’ve made and tell me what the hell you are doing here, or are you going to sit there all night criticizing the place I live in?’

Sally felt suddenly ashamed of herself; she swallowed the lump in her throat that threatened to choke her, obediently took a sip of the tea and said, ‘I’m sorry, Kate. Don’t be too cross with me because I’m already feeling that I’ve been really stupid.’

And then she shivered suddenly, and Kate saw tears drip down her cheeks. She said impatiently, ‘Oh come on, Sally, cut out the waterworks. You know that won’t help. You’re cold and hungry too, I expect. You’ll feel a bit better when I have the fire lit.’

‘How will you do that?’ Sally asked, looking at the ugly monstrosity sitting in the hearth.

‘Like this,’ Kate said, and she turned a tap to the side of the fire, lit a match and, with a pop, flames danced at the bottom of the grille. ‘It’s a gas fire,’ she told her sister. ‘And when I come home on a winter’s evening, it has the room warmed in no time. It makes it look cheerier too. Now come on and tell me what this is all about. Did you have a row? Was that it?’

Sally shook her head. ‘No. It was … Oh, I don’t know. I suppose … I suppose I just got fed up.’

Kate stared at her. ‘Sally, you can’t run away from home because you’re fed up,’ she said. ‘God Almighty, we all get fed up – you just have to get on with it. And what exactly were you fed up about?’

‘You know,’ Sally said. ‘Being at the beck and call of Mammy really. It’s “Sally do this” and “Sally do that” morning, noon and night. But nothing I do pleases her.’

Kate laughed. ‘That’s just Mammy’s way,’ she said. ‘It’s the lot of daughters to help their mothers. I had years of the same when I was at home, especially after young James was born. At the time, if I remember rightly, you weren’t expected to do anything and were able to swan around the house like Lady Muck.’

‘But you got away.’

‘I was eighteen when I left home,’ Kate said. ‘And Susie had found me this flat, not far from her parents’ house and a job of work. I didn’t do as you did and up sticks and take off. You won’t even be seventeen till the turn of the year.’

‘Mammy’s on to me all the time,’ Sally complained. ‘And I never have any money of my own. She buys all my clothes and doles out the collection for Mass, as if I was the same age as James.’

Kate knew Sally had a point – she’d never had any money either. Just before leaving home her mother had taken her into town and bought her some new outfits and a nice smart case to put them in, and her father had pressed the princely sum of £10 into her hand. She had protested that it was too much, but he had insisted. ‘Take it, darling girl,’ he’d said. ‘You will be a long way from the support of your family and may have need of this before too long.’

Sally had obviously been thinking along the same lines because she said somewhat resentfully, ‘Mammy and Daddy couldn’t do enough to help you leave home.’

‘And I have told you why that was,’ Kate said. ‘I was older and wiser and doing it the right way, that’s why.’

She knew it wasn’t only that, though. She was sure her mother had guessed the feelings she had for her cousin, Tim Munroe. Tim’s father, Padraic, and Kate’s father, Jim, were brothers. On the death of their eldest brother, Michael, after the Great War, they’d split the farm between them, and so the families had seen a lot of each other. Tim was two years her senior, as familiar as any brother, and they had always got on well.

When she reached sixteen, though, she realized that she wasn’t looking at Tim in a brotherly way any more, or even in a cousinly way. She knew she truly loved him as a woman. She knew Tim felt as she did – she had seen the love-light in his eyes – but he hadn’t said anything about how he felt because it was forbidden for first cousins to enter into any sort of relationship, and marriage between them was totally banned.

Kate’s mother, Philomena, had soon become aware of how the young people felt about each other, but she’d not said a word to either of them. She had been a little alarmed, but she had told herself they were both young and she thought and hoped it was a phase they would grow out of, had to grow out of: they knew the rules of the Church just as well as she did. She watched her daughter and Tim covertly for two years, but if anything their feelings seemed to deepen as they grew older. She didn’t know what action to take for the best.

Then Susie Mason had come on her annual holiday to her grandparents’ farm. She had always been a great friend of Kate’s – Kate’s parents liked her too, and always made her welcome, although Philomena often wished she wouldn’t go on quite so much about the fine life she was having in Birmingham where she lived with her family. After she left school, she told them how she now had money of her own to spend and plenty to spend it on. Philomena would watch Kate’s enthralled face as she listened. She was always worried that Susie’s words might unsettle her – and indeed they did, because Susie brought the life and excitement of city life into that small farmhouse, and it contrasted sharply with Kate’s more mundane existence.

Susie worked in a factory, but even that was not so bad, she declared. ‘You think of the wages at the end of the week,’ she said with a nod of her head and a twinkle in her eye. ‘There’s the clothes you can buy real cheap, especially when you go round the Bull Ring, and then you can wear those clothes when you visit the music hall or cinema.’

She went on to describe some of the acts she’d seen in the music halls that were peppered about the city, and described the cinema, proper moving pictures that she said she went to see once, maybe twice a week. ‘Dancing is all the rage now,’ she told them in the summer of 1935, and she seemed to almost squeeze herself with delight as she went on: ‘Oh I just love dancing. I have started taking lessons to do it properly. You’d be great at it, Kate, because you have natural rhythm. Look how good you were at the Irish dancing, and there was me with two left feet.’