LITMIR.BIZ

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for years, even before the war began, and had written to him when he was in the army. A few of the men from their town had been part of a pals battalion and had fought alongside each other and Angela had found out later that the shell that had killed Barry while he’d been trying to save another had blown Michael’s left leg clean off.

      He had thought any future with Maggie was scuppered, that she wouldn’t want to saddle herself with a one-legged man, but Angela knew her friend was a bigger person than that. And Maggie had said that it made no difference to the way she felt about him and Angela knew she spoke the truth. She also knew if Barry had lost his leg, but came home to her, she would have rejoiced. Though getting Michael to understand that took Maggie some time.

      A major slump after the war meant that, with strapping able-bodied men finding any sort of employment hard to come by, no one was prepared to even consider employing a one-legged man, and he felt bad that he couldn’t provide for Maggie. Maggie had said she didn’t need providing for, and besides, as he had been so disabled in the war, Michael had been awarded a pension of twenty-eight shillings a week. Angela was pleased for them both, but was a little confused that as a war widow she qualified for a pension of only eighteen shillings, with an extra shilling added for Connie.

      ‘No understanding the way governments work,’ Mary had said when this had been explained to her after the war.

      Angela had quite a sizeable nest egg in the post office because of her well-paid war work in munitions making and delivering shells, as well as the money Barry was sending her. But savings didn’t last for ever if you had to draw on them constantly and so when Paddy Larkin had offered her a job she hadn’t even had to think about it. She knew Maggie too wouldn’t hesitate, because any job was better than no job, and it would do her very well for now.

      ‘It’ll be money the government won’t know about because Paddy pays you in hand,’ Angela pointed out. ‘Will Michael mind that it’s you working and not him?’

      ‘He may well mind,’ Maggie said. ‘But he is above all a realist. And so he will not show any resentment to me or give me any sort of hard time.’

      ‘He’s a good man you have there, Maggie.’

      ‘I know it,’ Maggie said. ‘But the war exacted a heavy price from us one way and the other. Oh, I know Michael survived and Barry and our Syd didn’t so maybe I shouldn’t moan, but I would like to take the look of failure from his face. He knows in the present climate he hasn’t the chance of a sniff of any form of employment and I can’t even give him a child.’

      She caught sight of Angela’s face and went on, ‘I see you think it irresponsible to bring another life in the world just now when our financial position isn’t great and not likely to improve very much. But, oh, Angela, how I long to hold my own child in my arms – a wee girl like Connie, or a boy the image of his father. I don’t think it will ever happen, that’s the point, and that’s hard to bear.’

      Angela was upset to see her friend so downhearted and the worst of it was everything she said was true; none of the girls she worked in the munitions with had become pregnant. This was such a phenomenon across the country that investigations had been made and it was found that the sulphur many of them worked with had made them infertile.

      Angela had wished at the time she had become infertile too and then there might have been no repercussions from the terrible attack that day she had driven to the docks for the first time. She had been one of the first and only female delivery drivers, transporting munitions around the country. It had been on one of these trips that something terrible had happened, something she had tried to push out of her mind but which had come back to haunt her and caused her to make the most heart-breaking decision of her life.

      One dreadful night she had been attacked and viciously raped when making a munitions delivery at night in a strange town. Her assault had left her scarred, but worse, it had left her with child. With no other course available, with a husband away fighting at war and nowhere to turn, Angela had been forced to leave the child, a young girl with fair hair and blue eyes like her own, on the workhouse steps. The shame and the pain of it had stayed with her and Angela had had to shut off the past to keep the pain at bay.

      At least she had Connie, though, who she loved with all her heart and soul, while poor Maggie had nothing. Angela had pushed all the awful memories away. Better to focus on the present and Connie’s future.

      Maggie was grateful for the chance of employment at the Swan and took herself off to see Mr Larkin. They got on fine and the upshot was that she was to take on the weekend cleaning, while Angela worked behind the bar.

      In fact Paddy felt it was scandalous that two women, one a widow and one with a disabled husband, should have to take on jobs like the ones he was offering to keep the wolf from the door.

      ‘Those men fought for King and country, both of them,’ he said to his wife one night as they prepared for bed. ‘You’d think their relatives would be taken care of if they were killed like Barry McClusky, or crippled like Maggie’s husband, or Pete Lawson, blinded, and so many more.’

      ‘You’ve just said it though, haven’t you?’ Breda said. ‘So many more. Think about it, there were thousand upon thousand killed and even more injured. I should think it takes a great deal of money to fight a war and so they haven’t got the money to provide adequately for all the dependants.’

      ‘And since when have the government cared about the likes of us anyway?’ Paddy said morosely. ‘Cannon fodder, the common people are.’

      ‘That’s about the shape of it,’ Breda said. ‘And people do what they can to survive. And now Maggie doesn’t have to make a decision this winter whether to order another hundredweight of coal or buy the makings for a dinner, and neither does Angela, so at least we have made two of those dependants happier.’

      ‘And that’s all we can do, I suppose.’

      ‘It is,’ Breda said decidedly. ‘Now come to bed and stop fretting about things you can do nothing to change.’

      As Angela worked, whether it was pulling pints behind the bar or cleaning, she was always well aware of what she owed Mary, for without her stalwart help in caring for Connie, she knew their lives would have been financially harder. But she didn’t just appreciate Mary for the help she gave but she was glad she was there with them. She had been part of her life since as far back as she could remember and she hadn’t a clue how she was going to manage without her. And though Mary might have years to live yet, she somehow doubted it. The news of Barry’s death had hit her for six, combined with the death of two of her other sons in 1912 as they had travelled to America on the Titanic to seek better prospects, and the grief had done much to hasten the death of her husband. The bad times were wearing her down and Mary hadn’t the resilience of youth.

      It wasn’t all bad. Mary still thought a great deal about her other two sons in America who had gone ahead some years before the Titanic disaster, and she was glad they were so happy in their new lives. She often wished she could see them again just the once, but she had known when she kissed them goodbye it was final. They wrote regularly though, and she was grateful for that, especially when they included dollar bills folded inside the letter. They wrote about things she could barely imagine, like the flashing neon lights in a place called Times Square and the trolley buses and the trains that ran underground in the bowels of the earth and the motor cars they helped build that were now filling the wide straight roads of America.

      And they wrote of their marriages – for Colm had followed his brother Finbarr and married a Roman Catholic girl – and sent pictures of their weddings. But Mary could barely recognise her sons and their wives, and the babies born later were like the photographs of strangers, names on a page, and sometimes she was heart-sore knowing that she would never hold her sons’ children in her arms and take joy in them. Connie helped there, for she still had to be looked after, and Mary knew Connie loved her with a passion that eased the pain in her heart.

      As Connie grew up, she became very good friends with a girl in her class called Sarah Maguire. Angela had no problem with her having Sarah as her special friend

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