Pack Up Your Troubles. Anne Bennett

she could buy jumpers and cardigans to be unravelled and knitted up again, or skirts that could be cut up to make something for the children, and then sometimes Elsie would bring a similar load from the rag market.

      Maeve had been taught to sew and her mother had a treadle sewing machine similar to Elsie’s, so Maeve knew all about cutting out and tacking together for Elsie to go over seams and hemming neatly. Knitting she’d never been shown, but she soon picked it up. ‘Born of necessity,’ Maeve said when Elsie commented on the speed Maeve was able to knit after just a couple of weeks. ‘Anyway, it gives me pleasure to have the children dressed respectable. I only wish I could knit shoes like the booties they had as babies.’

      Shoes were the very devil to get. There were adult shoes sometimes, and Maeve had got herself a pair at a jumble sale when her others had literally fallen off her feet, though the second-hand ones were a size too big. Any children’s shoes were, in the main, worn through, the toes kicked in or the soles hanging off.

      She remembered how she’d run barefoot all through the spring and summer of her Irish childhood and delighted in it, leaping over the spring turf and never feeling the pebbles in the dusty farm tracks. She thought there wouldn’t be the same pleasure on the cobbles of the courts or the hard dirty pavements of the streets, but barefoot Kevin and little Grace often had to go.

      Before school every September, Maeve and her brothers and sisters had all been fitted out with shoes. Sometimes they were handed down from an older child, but newly soled and heeled, and they all had new clothes made by their mother during the holidays. Maeve had little hope of finding a pair of shoes for each child that weren’t too worn before the cold of winter, but if she was lucky she could sometimes get a ragged pair of plimsolls, the canvas worn and ripped and with paper-thin soles that she’d line with cardboard.

      The spring that Grace turned two years old and Kevin was three, Maeve again missed a second period. She was terrified of telling Brendan. She didn’t know why he appeared surprised by it and acted as if it was her fault. Surely to God he must have realised that what he did most nights was bound to lead to pregnancy in the end. She’d never complained or refused because she knew it was her duty to submit to her husband.

      The little sexual forays and fondling that she’d enjoyed in courtship when she’d longed for Brendan to continue had stopped in the early months of her marriage, once she’d told him of her pregnancy. Brendan had seen no need after that to bring Maeve to the point of excitement and longing. He didn’t really expect her to enjoy it and didn’t really care whether she did or not. In the marriage service she’d promised to obey him and that’s what she had to do.

      At first, again and again Maeve had responded to Brendan, each time hoping to recapture the heady romance and embraces she’d enjoyed before she’d told him she was expecting a baby. She remembered how Brendan’s fingers could touch, stroke and caress her body and send her senses reeling and a throbbing urgency she’d never felt before beginning between her legs. Oh God, how she’d wanted him to go on and on. But now she felt nothing but the sensation of Brendan’s body in the bed at night, his beery breath wafting across her and his thick tongue probing her mouth till she felt she might choke, and then he’d take her roughly and without any form of tenderness. It was, Maeve reflected, just one thing to be endured, but it had already resulted in two children, and now there was a third on the way. She no longer loved Brendan, she realised with an aching sense of loss; now she only feared the man she’d once have laid down her life for.

      Another month passed and there was a definite rounding out of her stomach and Maeve knew any day Brendan would discover her pregnancy for himself. She tried to work out whether he would resent her even more for not telling him. Either way, she knew she was going to catch it.

      Then one Friday night in April, with Brendan fed and sitting reading the paper with a cup of tea in his hand, Maeve began getting the children to bed. They always sat stock-still whenever their father was around and it wrung Maeve’s heart to see them sitting so silent and quiet like no children should ever be – like only petrifying fear could make them. Poor little Grace only had to hear her father’s boots ringing on the cobblestones for her to wet herself.

      When Maeve got them up into the attic, unless it was the depths of winter, she’d often have a bit of a game with them – tickling them into laughter perhaps or telling them a wee story. However, that evening Maeve, having finished washing Grace, then picked her up to take her to bed. Kevin, who’d been washed first and was sitting on a cracket by the fire, got to his feet, having no wish to be left with a man who scared the living daylights out of him. In his panic to follow his mother, he stumbled over the fender, knocking against his father, causing him to tip the hot tea down his leg.

      With a roar Brendan was upon the child and Kevin’s resultant shriek stopped Maeve in her tracks. But she knew whatever had happened she could do nothing with Grace in her arms. She ran up to the attic and laid her in the bed, cautioning her to stay there, then flew down the stairs. She knew Grace would stay where she was for she was a timid little thing, and no wonder, and anyway, the screams and shouts from below would frighten the most stout-hearted.

      What Maeve saw when she stepped into the room nearly stopped her heart beating, for Brendan had the belt unhooked from his trousers, Kevin’s ragged underpants that he slept in pulled down, and he was whipping his little bottom. Maeve didn’t know what Kevin had done, nor did she care. Whatever it was it didn’t warrant what his father was doing to him and with an outraged scream she was upon him.

      Brendan warded her off and then, totally enraged, he turned on her, the belt lashing her to right and left till she sank to the floor with a whimper. ‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ he growled as he pulled his coat from the rail behind the door and slammed his way out.

      The next day, Maeve miscarried and she sent Kevin for Elsie. She looked at the stripes on her body where the belt’s end had flicked and asked, ‘Was it you telling him you were pregnant brought this on?’

      ‘No, not this time,’ Maeve said. ‘This time I got it protecting Kevin. This time the bloody sod didn’t even know I was pregnant.’ The tears came then, hot and scalding as she cried for herself, her children and the little baby she had lost.

      Elsie held Maeve tight as she went on, her voice muffled with tears, ‘Kevin spilt his tea, that’s all. An accident, of course – he never goes near the bastard if he can help it – and for that Brendan took his belt off to him.’ She pulled herself out of the comfort of Elsie’s arms, and though the marks of tears were still on her face, her eyes were dry and wide and staring. ‘D’you hear me, Elsie?’ she demanded. ‘That child who’s little more than a baby was whipped with a belt for spilling a drop of tea.’

      That was the first time Brendan used his belt on Kevin, but not the last. Maeve fought for him when she could, but she was often stopped by Brendan’s threat: ‘Come nearer or lift a hand to help him and I’ll beat him senseless.’

      Maeve knew he was capable of it, for he truly seemed to detest Kevin and she was forced to watch. She thought of seeking advice at the church, but hesitated to involve the priest, Father Trelawney, who seemed anyway a great buddy of Brendan’s. Brendan said it was a father’s duty to chastise his son and Maeve was very much afraid the priest might agree.

      Just before Kevin began school, Maeve miscarried again and Kevin indirectly caused that as well. Both children had caught measles, but Grace, who’d not been as ill as Kevin, was up and about while Kevin was still very poorly indeed. He lay across the chairs during the day with the curtains drawn to protect his eyes. Maeve used the rent money to pay the doctor’s bill and buy the medicine and the meat for nourishing broth to spoon into him.

      That day Maeve had Brendan’s dinner cooking on the stove when Kevin began to vomit. By the time the nausea had passed and Kevin had lain back exhausted on the pillows and Maeve had wiped his face and given him a drink and taken the bowl to wash, the potatoes had stuck to the pan and the sausages were blackened.

      Brendan’s rage was terrible. ‘But,’ Maeve told Elsie later, ‘he knew I was pregnant this time. I don’t know how, Elsie. He seemed to concentrate on my stomach. Anyway he’s got what he wanted,