To Have and To Hold. Anne Bennett

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      ‘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.

      ‘We vowed to keep in touch and compare the different paths our lives had taken, but the training was intensive and in the end it dwindled to a Christmas card with a scribbled note inside. However, I know that she is a matron at a place called the General Hospital in Birmingham, and from what she says, I understand the hospital runs a training school for nurses. It would be marvellous if she would consider you, because our order has its own hospital in Birmingham called St Chad’s, and the sisters from there would be at hand to keep an eye on you.’

      She smiled at the face that Carmel pulled. Sister Frances knew full well what that expression said: that she neither wanted nor needed anyone to keep an eye on her. However, Birmingham was a large city and she would be miles from home. Sister Frances imagined that the hospital was much larger and possibly more impersonal than the small county hospital she had trained at and the only one she had any experience of. She said, ‘And you can pull a face, my girl, but it is a big thing to go so far at such a young age. I will write to Catherine tonight and see what’s what. I’m going to talk no more about it now, for we have a heap of work to get through.’

      From the day Carmel had started at the hospital and Sister Frances had a glimpse of the life she led, she had advised her not to tell her parents of the wage rises she had been given. Her conscience had smote her about this, for surely it was a sin to deceive parents? But then Dennis Duffy didn’t act like a good and concerned parent. Both she and Carmel knew that however much she took home it would not benefit any but Dennis Duffy. Carmel also understood that she would not stay under the roof of a drunken bully for one minute longer than necessary, and that to escape from him she needed money. So every week Sister Frances took the money Carmel gave her and put it in the Post Office. Soon there was more need than ever to save, for the reply came from Catherine Turner. Sister Frances handed Carmel the letter to read.

      Normally, I would not entertain taking a girl on until I had interviewed her, but I trust your judgement and so I will bend my own rules and take her on provisionally. I will arrange to see her as soon as СКАЧАТЬ