A Daughter's Secret Read online

  A Daughter's Secret

  Anne Bennett

  HarperCollins Publishers (2008)

  * * *

  Synopsis

  A moving and gritty saga of loss, separation and finally hope, set in wartime Birmingham

  Agnes Sullivan is fifteen when her young brother Tom finds her drunk and crying in the lane near their farm. Her dancing teacher has raped her and abandoned her. Aggie is forced to leave home when she discovers she's pregnant and Tom, barely a teenager himself, decides the teacher must pay for his actions.

  Aggie flees to Birmingham, but the safe haven she's been promised turns out to be too dangerous to stay in. She's left with few options until someone she would never have spoken to in her former life gives her the help she so desperately needs. But will World War One ruin her precarious hopes of a future?

  Anne Bennett's sagas of Birmingham during the wars have won her many fans, as they are packed full of emotion, determination and authenticity. Regional sagas don't come any better than this.

  ANNE BENNETT

  A Daughter’s Secret

  To my grandson Jake, the eldest Bennett boy,

  with all my love

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  As Thomas John Sullivan drove the horse and cart past St Mary’s Catholic church on the way home from Buncrana, the nearest market town, the noon Angelus bell was tolling.

  ‘Dear Lord, but it’s perishing cold,’ his wife, Biddy, commented from the seat beside him. ‘The fields and hedgerows are still as heavily rimed with frost as they were this morning, for the sun hasn’t put in an appearance all day.’

  ‘Aye,’ Thomas John agreed, ‘it’s mighty cold, right enough. That’s Donegal for you. Sure, don’t we have the coldest of winters here at times?’

  ‘We do indeed. Is the child all right, Aggie?’

  In the back of the cart, Aggie nursed her little brother, Finn, holding his body tight against her own, her warmest shawl wrapped around the two of them, and yet still he shivered.

  ‘He is all right,’ she said. ‘Just cold, like the rest of us.’

  To divert him, Aggie said, ‘We’ll be home in no time now, and it’s meant to be cold, Finn, for it is nearly Christmas.’ She knew that Finn would know little of Christmas, or Santa Claus either, for he was only just turned eighteen months old. She saw a slight frown pucker his brow as she went on, ‘You’ll like Santa Claus, Finn. He brings good boys and girls presents.’

  The child would, she knew, barely know the word ‘present’ either, for the Sullivan children had few of them. There was no money for such frivolities. But for Finn, the youngest, it would be different. Much had been made of him by all the family when he arrived. Aggie knew her mother had bought a few wee things in Buncrana that morning to fill his stocking on Christmas morning and she was looking forward to seeing his face.

  ‘Aye, nearly Christmas,’ Biddy said. ‘And then the turn of the year – 1898, I wonder what that will bring.’

  Thomas John chuckled. ‘What would it bring, woman, but more of the same? Life seldom changes much, except we all get older.’

  Aggie thought her father was right, and she was glad. She liked the familiarity of one day following the other predictable and safe. She had been twelve in June, so she had left school and now helped her mother in the home full time. She always looked forward to Saturday morning when she would go to Buncrana with her parents, leaving her brothers Tom and Joe to mind the farm. Her mother would sell their surplus produce in the market, like many other farmers, while Aggie went with her father to buy things needed for the farm. Since Finn’s birth, however, her primary task was to look after him while her parents were busy.

  She didn’t mind this in the slightest, for it gave her a chance to meet up with her former classmates, and especially her best friend, Cissie Coghlan.

  That day, though, it had been so cold that she had been glad to go home, and she was looking forward to getting into the warm house and out of the wind. When they passed the church she breathed a sigh of relief that they were not that far from home.

  Tom and Joe were waiting for them in the yard, having heard the rumble of the cart. Thomas John brought it to a halt in the cobbled yard before the squat whitewashed cottage, scattering the pecking hens as he did so, and alerting the two dogs, who came from the barn barking a greeting.

  Tom went forward to take the horse, saying as he did so, ‘I have the water on to boil and the potatoes are in a bucket on the stool inside.’

  Biddy nodded and said to Aggie, who was climbing out of the cart with Finn in her arms, ‘Take the wee one inside. This intense cold is too much for him.’

  The warmth hit Aggie as she opened the door. The room was dimly lit from the one small window at the end, though the sky looked grey and cloud-laden. But the fire burned brightly in the hearth and she saw that one of the boys, likely Tom, had banked it up with peat. There was a further stack of it the other side of the fireplace. The heavy black pot was heating the water over the fire, held up by one of the hooks of the crane that folded out from the wall.

  She carried Finn across the stone-flagged floor and sat him near the warmth on a creepie, a low seat made of bog oak.

  ‘You sit there, my wee man, and get warm while I start dinner for us all,’ she said, and she was rewarded by a broad smile from Finn as he felt the heat from the fire.

  Aggie ladled water from the pot above the fire into a basin, which she then placed on the table, the bucket of potatoes beside her ready for scrubbing. Her mother came in, followed by Joe, carrying parcels. One of these newspaper-wrapped bundles Biddy placed beside Aggie: she knew what was in it and that was fish that her father had bought from the fleet at Buncrana harbour.

  Later, with the scrubbed potatoes boiling in their jackets in the big pot, and the plates taken from the dresser and put on to the side of the hearth to warm, Aggie helped her mother prepare the fish for frying, first, chopping off their heads and then slicing through each one expertly to remove the bone, as she had been taught from a child.

  It was as the family was halfway through the meal and their hunger somewhat eased that Aggie said, ‘Me and Cissie were talking to Mr McAllister today.’

  Biddy looked at her daughter. She knew McAllister was newly arrived in the town and there had been great curiosity about the family as there would be about anyone new. Biddy said, ‘Isn’t he the husband of Philomena, who was left the grocery store?’

  Aggie nodded.

  Thomas John frowned slightly. ‘And what business had a man like that with two young girls?’

  ‘He was nice, Daddy,’ Aggie protested
. ‘I’m sure he was just being neighbourly. He asked our names, and when I said mine was Aggie Sullivan he said he could take a bet that wasn’t my given name and that Agnes had a much better sound to it.’

  ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ snapped her mother. ‘You are called Aggie and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Whisht,’ Thomas John cautioned his wife. ‘Let the girl get on with her tale. What else did he say?’

  ‘Then he asked would we like to learn to do the Irish dances properly and I said yes but there was no one now to teach us,’ Aggie continued.

  ‘Seems a strange thing to ask a body,’ Biddy said. ‘Why would he ask you a question like that?’

  Tom, two years younger than Aggie, kept his head down so that his mother wouldn’t see his smile. He knew Aggie would have liked to dance all the day long if she had been let. He could take a bet she and Cissie had been jigging about and this McAllister had seen them. No wonder he asked them such a question.

  Aggie didn’t answer her mother. Instead she went on, ‘Mr McAllister said it was shameful for us to lose our heritage this way and that he came from the West where such things were prized highly.’

  ‘Not just now he didn’t,’ Biddy said. ‘His wife was only after telling me this morning that they had been living in Birmingham, England this long while when news came of her aunt’s death. She was really surprised that she had been left the grocer’s shop in the town.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Aggie said, fearing that they had gone off the track a little, ‘he has offered to teach us to dance, and he said he can also play tin whistle and fiddle, and he can teach any who want to learn those too.’

  ‘I dare say he would have the time right enough,’ Biddy recounted wryly, ‘for he is more this side of the counter than the other side. He seems to prefer talking with the customers to serving them. His wife has her work cut out with four wee ones to see to as well, for he doesn’t seem to be great in that department either.’

  ‘Talk sense, woman,’ Thomas John said. ‘What man has a great hand in rearing weans? Sure, that’s a woman’s job.’

  ‘I know that,’ Biddy said. ‘I just think it a shame that that Philomena McAllister has such a hard time of it. She told me herself her husband is too fond of sitting in Grant’s Bar. In fact, he is there so often she wonders if he has shares in the place.’

  ‘That’s between them, surely,’ Thomas John replied, ‘and not our business at all, at all. From what I see of McAllister, he’s a personable-looking fellow and he is right, the children shouldn’t forget their heritage. But there has been no one bothered since Matty Phelan died a few years ago.’

  ‘There’s nothing like a spot of Irish dancing right enough,’ Biddy conceded. ‘I could fling my heels up with the best of them when I was a girl.’

  ‘So I can go?’ Aggie burst in, almost breathless with excitement.

  ‘We will make enquiries,’ her father said. ‘That is all I am offering to do at this point. And you can take that smirk from your face, Tom, for I have a mind to ask the man if he could teach you a few tunes on the tin whistle.’

  Tom looked at his father in amazement. He was not averse to learning the tin whistle. In fact, if his opinion had been asked, he’d have said that he was quite pleased, but he did wonder when he might get time to practise anything he learned because he and Aggie, being the eldest, were kept hard at it.

  His doubt was reinforced when his mother said to Aggie, ‘And don’t you look so pleased with yourself. If we allow you to go to this dancing it will be on top of your duties, not instead of them, and the same goes for you, Tom, and the tunes you learn.’

  ‘Don’t you be giving out to Aggie and Tom before they have done anything wrong, Biddy,’ Thomas John chided. ‘Neither are slackers, but there is no point in Aggie learning the dancing and Tom the tunes if they are not given time to practise. Haven’t I Joe to help me – and we mustn’t forget Finn, of course,’ he added, ruffling the hair of his youngest son.

  Biddy said nothing more. Really, she expected she would have a houseful of sons by now – not that she was keen on children herself, not even her own, but she knew sons were essential on a farm. But she had gone six barren years after the birth of Joe before she produced Finn. She had really thought her childbearing days were over.

  Thomas John couldn’t understand why she worried over the lack of sons. ‘What is the problem?’ he would ask, in genuine bewilderment. ‘You have a daughter to help in the house, a wee one to dandle on your knee and gladden your heart with his smile, while I have two fine, strapping sons to help me about the farm. Many would be satisfied with far less.’

  Biddy never answered this, but both Tom and Aggie could have told their father that their mother was easily dissatisfied and discontented. The two of them, and to a lesser extent Joe, had borne the brunt of her ill humour time and enough, meted out by the stick that she kept hanging up to one side of the hearth.

  In the New Year the dancing lessons were held each Saturday afternoon in St Mary’s church hall, the older ones going to the later class. The church had had to be put at least a mile outside the town, as decreed by the British, who had controlled Ireland at the time it was built. It was in a district called Cockhill. The Sullivans’ farm was also in Cockhill and a little over a mile away from the church so it was no problem for Aggie to get there.

  McAllister owned a gramophone, a magnificent thing with a big golden horn. It was his pride and joy, and when he put records on it and lifted the needle over, tunes came out of it. Aggie and the other girls were enchanted, for they had never seen anything like it before in the whole of their lives.

  ‘I thought he would play the tunes on the fiddle for you,’ her father said when she told her parents about the gramophone, ‘or, indeed, the tin whistle, for he has a fine hand with them both.’

  ‘He said he couldn’t play and teach us properly, and using the gramophone is better,’ Aggie said.

  ‘And you enjoy it?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ But much of Aggie’s enjoyment was down to the fact that she had been attending the classes only a little time when she fancied herself in love with McAllister.

  ‘I can’t understand why his wife complains about him so much,’ she said to Tom one day, after she had just come from a lesson. ‘She should be grateful to be married to such a handsome man and one that seems to be in good humour all of the time.’

  ‘Maybe that good humour is Guinness- or poteen-induced?’ Tom suggested with a grin, and added, ‘That’s what Daddy said, anyway.’

  ‘Tom,’ Aggie said angrily, ‘how can you say such a thing? Isn’t he doing a grand job with you and the tin whistle? And what’s wrong with a man taking the odd pint of Guinness or nip of poteen anyway? Our own daddy does the same thing now and again.’

  ‘I was only repeating what Daddy said.’

  ‘Well, don’t!’ Aggie retorted. ‘Isn’t the man giving up his time freely?’

  It wasn’t exactly freely, though no money changed hands. However, as he taught Irish dancing to the butcher’s daughter he got his payment in kind, and he had similar treatment from the newsagent for teaching his daughter so that he had all the tobacco he needed. The various farms around provided him with other produce and so, with their own grocery store as well, his wife was well enough pleased.

  The teaching of the tunes was done in the children’s own homes and the payment for this was usually in the shape of a bottle of poteen, which was distilled in the hills of Donegal. It never seemed to affect McAllister’s ability to teach, however much he drank, and he rode from farm to farm on the horse that was also used to pull the cart for the shop.

  Philomena once said to Biddy that half the time she didn’t know how he made it home and it was a good thing his horse knew the way. She wouldn’t be at all surprised to find him fallen into a ditch somewhere one day, having slid from the horse’s back.

  Biddy knew exactly what Philomena meant, for the man had often been well away when he left their house. If she
ever complained about this, however, Thomas John would always maintain there was no harm in the man, that he just had a terrible thirst on him.

  Aggie thought there was no harm in him either. In fact she thought him wonderful and strove in all ways to please him. With her love of dancing she soon progressed, and after she had been at it a year McAllister declared her a gifted little dancer. Soon after this, he asked her and Cissie to go for extra lessons on Wednesday evenings, to which Thomas John readily agreed.

  He was delighted with McAllister. Tom had got on so well with the tin whistle that Joe had asked to learn too, and Tom had begun to learn the fiddle. Each week, McAllister would listen to them playing the tune he had taught them the previous week, which he expected them to master before he would teach them another. They soon had a fair collection of material and would often entertain their parents in the long winter evenings. They would play for Aggie too, and she would roll back the rugs and dance on the flagged floor of the cottage, her brown eyes flashing, her dark brown plaits bouncing to each side and her feet fair flying along. Afterwards her cheeks would be flushed and pink, and Tom realised with some surprise one day that Aggie was very pretty.

  Afterwards, those pictures would often come back to haunt Tom. They were a time of innocent pleasure that would never return – before his life and Aggie’s were touched by evil.

  As Aggie began to develop, her infatuation for McAllister grew stronger. In her own home, as he taught her brothers, she was able to study everything about him, like his fine head of hair, so black it sometimes shone blue in the lamplight. He had wonderful masculine hands too, with a dusting of hairs on the backs of them, and long and very flexible fingers with square nails. She watched the movement of his mouth, with his fine, full lips, listening to the lilting timbre of his voice and the way he threw his head back when he laughed, as he did often.

  Tom wondered if Aggie knew that her eyes went all dopey and dreamy in this scrutiny of McAllister. It worried him slightly, though he barely knew why, and he hoped that the man himself had never noticed.