Anne Bennett - To Have and To Hold

As Carmel neared fourteen, Eileen Mackay approached her sister, who was a nursing nun, known as Sister Frances, in Letterkenny Hospital, and asked if there might be an opening for the girl.

‘Only as an orderly just,’ Sister Frances said.

‘There isn’t anything else, anything better that she might train for?’

Sister Frances shook her head. ‘Nothing. But I will take the girl on, if she is agreeable, and we’ll see how she shapes up.’

Carmel shaped up better than Sister Frances could have believed, and it was obvious she loved the work and the patients loved her. Her touch was firm yet gentle, and her voice calm and low, soothing to the apprehensive.

Within a year she was taking temperatures, helping to dress wounds, wash and feed the frail and helpless, and encourage those who were able to get out of bed to do so. Frances began to wonder how they had ever managed without her.

Carmel was too wise a girl to long for something she couldn’t have, but one day, when she had been at the hospital almost two years, she admitted to Frances that she would have loved to have had the chance to go into nursing. Sister Frances knew that she make a first-rate nurse so she asked the advice of her fellow nursing nuns at the convent.

‘Few of us had secondary education,’ one said, ‘but our training and such was done through the Church. She wouldn’t think of taking the veil herself?’

Frances thought of Carmel and the light of mischief that often danced in her eyes, and she said, ‘I should very much doubt it. Just as I am convinced Carmel would make a very good nurse, I know too that she would make a very bad nun.’

‘Pity.’

‘There is an exam they can take,’ said another. ‘Of course she might need coaching to pass it. How old is the girl now?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘Then you have two years to lick her into some sort of shape,’ the nun said, ‘for they’ll not touch her at all until she is at least eighteen.’

‘Put it to her and see what she says,’ another advised. ‘She might not be willing for all the hard work.’

However, Frances saw how Carmel hugged herself with delight and knew that that hard work wouldn’t bother her a jot if it was moving her a step nearer her objective. ‘This isn’t a foregone conclusion,’ the nun said. ‘You do realise the exam is likely to be quite hard?’

‘Would you help me with the work?’ Carmel asked.

‘Of course,’ Sister Frances said. ‘But your parents…your father…’

‘Is to know nothing about it.’

‘Carmel, I—’

‘Sister, you have already said it is not a foregone conclusion that I pass the exam,’ Carmel said. ‘Maybe I won’t even get that far. What is the point of telling my father now?’

Frances could see the logic of that and agreed to say nothing for the time being. That evening, when Carmel explained she was on a special training course at the hospital and would be later home at least two nights a week, her mother just accepted it. Only her father asked if she’d get more money because of it.

‘Hardly,’ she snapped. ‘It’s a training course. You just be grateful that you aren’t being asked to pay for it.’

‘You watch your mouth, girl, and the way you talk to me,’ Dennis growled. ‘You’re not too old for a good hiding and don’t you forget it.’

Carmel held her father’s gaze. Let him yell and bawl all he liked. She was going to be a nurse and master of her own life. Marriage, with children and all it entailed, was not the route she would take. No, by God, not for all the tea in China.

She had seen one aspect of marriage in the bruises her mother sported often, and she was well aware what happened in the marriage bed. It usually began with her mother pleading to be left alone, and then the punches administered, but it always finished the same way—with the rhythmic thump, thump, thump of her parents’ bed head against the wall and the animal grunts of her father, which were perfectly audible over the background noise of her mother’s sobs.

‘Mammy,’ she had said one day, seeing her mother sporting yet another black eye and split lip, ‘how long are you going to put up with Daddy slapping and punching you whenever he has the notion? Stand up to him, for once in your life, why don’t you?’

‘Look at me,’ Eve demanded, standing in front of her daughter. ‘What match am I for your father? Jesus, I’d sooner do battle with a steamroller. I’d likely come off less damaged.’

Carmel knew her mother spoke the truth, for there was little of her, but her husband was built like an ox. Carmel had inherited her mother’s fine bones and slight frame, but Eve was now scrawny thin because she often ate less than a bird so the children could eat a little better, while Carmel, though still slender, got a good meal each day at Letterkenny Hospital. Knowing Dennis Duffy and his love of the drink, whether he had the money or not, Sister Frances had arranged for the money for Carmel’s meals to be taken out at source, so that once a day at least she was well fed. But even so, Carmel and her mother together would be no match for Dennis Duffy.

‘Then tell the priest,’ Carmel said.

‘I did,’ Eve admitted. ‘Just the once, after the first baby was stillborn and I put that down to the beating I had received the day before.’

‘And?’

‘The priest told me I married the man of my own free will, that I married him for better or worse, and he couldn’t come between a man and his wife,’ Eve said bitterly. ‘I was eighteen, and I didn’t bother telling him that it was not my free will at all, and that I had not cared a jot for Dennis Duffy. My opinion had never been asked. My marriage had been arranged by my father in exchange for a parcel of land the Duffy family owned. Think of that, Carmel. A bare green field was prized more highly than me, and that meant I could not appeal to any of my family for help either.’

‘God Almighty!’ Carmel said, for she had never heard this before. ‘Does the priest know that sometimes Daddy near kills you and the weans are petrified rigid of him?’ she demanded. ‘You won’t go across the door if Daddy marks your face. Maybe you should. Let the priest and the townspeople know the manner of man he is altogether.’

‘I’d die of shame, Carmel.’

‘Mammy, it isn’t you that should be ashamed. It’s him,’ Carmel said fiercely.

Eve shook her head. ‘Don’t keep on, Carmel,’ she said. ‘Anyway, the answer from the priest would likely be the same.’

Carmel knew her mother was probably right about that, for the priests seemed in collusion with most of the men of the parish. Did she want a slice of that? You had to be joking.

As for children…Eve had eight living children, two she had miscarried and two more were stillborn. Carmel had seen how tired she had become with each pregnancy and how each birth had near tore the body from her. Carmel had been helping the midwife at the last few births and had seen the agony of it all etched on her mother’s contorted face and the way she had chewed her bottom lip to try to prevent the screams spiralling out of her, lest her husband hear and be vexed at her making a fuss.

She wanted none of that either, nor the rearing of the children after it. God, hadn’t she had her fill of children, helping bring up the seven younger than herself?

‘I don’t want to train in Derry or Dublin,’ Carmel told Sister Frances that first evening as they settled to work.

‘Why not?’

‘My father could still reach me if he felt like it.’

‘But surely—’

‘I want to go to England,’ Carmel said. ‘I don’t care where. I would just feel much safer with a stretch of sea separating us.’

The nun had developed a healthy respect for Carmel and knew she spoke the truth. The man could take a notion to just bring her home and there would be nothing then that Carmel could do; her chance would be gone. Better by far to have her well out of the way from the beginning. Sister Frances had an idea germinating in her head. She said, ‘Don’t get your hopes up, Carmel, but when I was at the convent school just outside Letterkenny, I was great friends with a girl called Catherine Turner. She wasn’t a Catholic, but her father had work in Derry and favoured a convent education for his daughter. We were both mad keen to nurse, but while I left the convent at sixteen to enter the Church and do my nursing training that way, Catherine stayed until she was eighteen. By then, her family had moved to Birmingham and she began her training there.