Anne Bennett - Walking Back to Happiness

Hannah put two and two together. She knew that Frances’s drug dosage had been raised to try and give her ease from the intense pain, but Josie hadn’t been told. Nor had she been told that Frances, drugged and pain-riddled, seldom knew any of them anymore. She thought for a moment and then without a word to the others, she slipped out into the yard.

She heard the muffled sobbing as soon as she opened the barn door and she followed it up the ladder leading to the upper floor, the very place she’d always made for whenever she was upset. Barely had her head pushed through the opening, than she saw Josie spread-eagled across the straw bales.

But despite the stealth that Hannah had used so as not to startle the girl, Josie heard her. She raised her head, her face blotchy from crying, but her eyes flashed fire. ‘What d’you want?’ she spat out. ‘Go away! Leave me alone!’

Hannah ignored the anger in Josie’s voice, for behind it she heard the knot of raw pain. She eased herself through the hole and sat on a bale nearby, but not too near to Josie, who’d buried her head once more into the straw and refused to look at her aunt. ‘I used to come here too,’ Hannah said, conversationally. ‘There’s something comforting about the smell of straw.’

There was no movement from Josie, but Hannah knew she was listening intently. ‘I’ll miss Frances too,’ she said. ‘She was the only mother I ever knew. And I might as well have had no father either,’ she added bitterly. ‘Frances said he was so mad with grief, he hadn’t even a name for me. The priest suggested Hannah. It was his mother’s name.’

Josie knew the story. It had often been talked of in the family. ‘Your daddy was like my daddy too,’ Hannah went on. ‘He used to talk to me if I got upset. I loved him dearly.’

Josie raised her head. ‘Then why didn’t you come to the funeral?’ she asked, accusingly. ‘Everyone was asking.’

‘I was ill.’

‘After, then. Mammy used to get upset and cry at night.’

There was a silence between them and then Hannah gave a sigh. ‘There were reasons,’ she said quietly. ‘One day I may even tell you what they were, but what matters now is you and me.’ And then, because she’d sensed the girl’s antagonism towards her from the beginning, she asked, ‘Will you hate living with me so much?’

Josie swung around and stared at Hannah and decided to be truthful. ‘Yes, I will. I don’t know you or anything about England and I don’t want to know either. I don’t want to leave here.’

Hannah thought that now was not the time to tell Josie she wasn’t keen on looking after her either. ‘We can’t all have what we want, Josie,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried to get to know you the last few days, but you … Look, pet, we must make the best of it for your mother’s sake. Give it a year? If after that you’re still miserable, I promise we’ll look at it again.’

And then what? Josie thought. Maybe she could induce Martin or Siobhan to send for her to go to America, but would she like that any better? ‘At least when your Mammy died, you didn’t have to leave the place altogether,’ she cried.

‘No, no I didn’t, and like I said, I’ll always be in your parents’ debt because of what they did. After a while, people forgot I was really Hannah Delaney. I was known as one of the Mullens.’

‘Did you care?’

‘Not at first. I wanted to belong somewhere. My own sisters and brothers became like strangers till one by one they took the emigrant boats to the States till only my eldest brother, Eamonn, was left to farm the land with my father. He doesn’t really know me though and I don’t know him and for a time it was nice being thought of as one of you lot. It was as I got older that I resented Hannah Delaney being swamped altogether.’

‘Is that why you left?’

‘Partly,’ Hannah admitted. ‘I wanted to start afresh. Stand on my own two feet, just to see if I could. A good friend of mine, Molly McGuire, had left Ireland just the previous year and we promised to write to each other. She got a job easily in a hotel in Leeds. It was called The Hibernian, reputed to be the biggest, best and of course most expensive in the town. The wages weren’t great, she told me, but the tips were legion. She said she could get me a job, straight off.’

Hannah stopped there, remembering her indecision. She didn’t want to upset Frances, and she knew she would if she was to follow her friend. But she knew she’d regret it if she didn’t go while she had the chance. As she dithered, Molly challenged her. Hadn’t she always said she wanted to see something of other places? Hadn’t she always said she didn’t want to live the whole of her life in Ireland and wasn’t there a big, wide world out there to explore?

And she was right. Hannah had said all those things and meant them, too, but the actual leaving was hard, especially when she loved Frances as dearly as she would any mother and Paddy and the others, too. She knew she would miss them all.

In the end, she poured her heart out to Paddy and he patted her hand and told her not to fret, that it was natural to want to spread your wings when you were young. ‘But Frances …’ she had wailed.

‘Frances will come around, never fret, I’ll talk to her,’ Paddy had promised.

‘Was Mammy upset when you left?’ Josie asked, jolting Hannah back to the present.

‘Very. I was sad too. God, it was a wrench to go. People said I was ungrateful to leave when I could have been such a help to Frances at long last. Frances never said that and I doubt she ever thought of it, she wasn’t like that. She said she’d miss me so much, but she wished me Godspeed. It broke me up and we cried together as we hugged, and for a while, my resolve weakened. It was your father who said to go and satisfy myself and to remember I had a home to come back to if it didn’t work out.

‘Not everyone saw it like that of course, but then all my life people have been telling me how grateful I should be to Frances and I was grateful to her. But that level of gratitude gets to be a heavy burden when you’re reminded of it constantly. Not that your parents ever spoke about it, it was others, the relatives who hadn’t wanted me themselves, or neighbours who felt justified to speak as they chose because they’d known me all my life.’

‘And did you like it in this Leeds place?’ Josie asked.

‘I did not and that’s the truth,’ Hannah said, remembering her horror at the grim greyness of the place and how the opulence of the hotel unnerved her and the way she could barely understand the way the other girls spoke. She was achingly lonely and many, many times thought she’d made a mistake because she missed her family so very much. She missed the farm too and often longed for the sight of a green mossy hill, springy turf beneath her feet, and good clean air to fill her lungs with.

‘I didn’t mind the work,’ she said. ‘I was well used to work, but everything was so strange and when Molly got married and moved to London only months after I arrived, it was worse. We wrote for a while, but in the end the letters petered out. A girl called Tilly Galston shared my room then.’

‘Was she nice?’

Hannah smiled as she remembered the good friend she’d been and the way she pulled her out of the morose self-pitying attitude she’d been in danger of developing. ‘I’d have gone home if it hadn’t been for her,’ Hannah said. ‘She wouldn’t let me.’

‘How could she stop you?’

‘Oh, she was very bossy,’ Hannah said. ‘But funny too, you know. She could always see the bright side of things and could always make me laugh. She bullied me into going out and about too and making an effort with the other girls. We were good friends.’