Mary was surprised Bridie hadn’t tumbled to it living on a farm. But then she remembered Bridie was always sent elsewhere when the bull or rams were due to service their cows and sheep. It was an effort to protect her, Mary supposed, but children could be protected too much.
She bit on her lip as she considered whether to divulge the whole matter of sex with her younger sister. She’d never get the information from their mother, she knew that, because she’d never discuss anything so intimate. Mary had got all her information from Aunt Ellen and she often thanked God she had.
So she told Bridie how the seed inside her had grown into a baby and watched Bridie’s eyes open wider and wider in shock as she spoke. ‘Something else occurs before a woman can have a baby,’ Mary told her. ‘They’re called periods and they mean you bleed from your private parts every month. You need to know: I began mine at school and because I hadn’t been warned, I thought I was dying. Sister Ambrose eventually found me in the toilets, limp from crying, and explained it to me and took me home.’
‘Was Mammy cross?’
‘No,’ Mary said. ‘But she was embarrassed. She told me she had linen pads in the press ready and I was to pin one to my liberty bodice. When they were soiled I was to put them in the bucket she’d leave ready and that respectable women didn’t need to know any more than that, in fact they didn’t need to talk of it at all.’
‘And that bleeding happens to every woman every month?’ Bridie asked, curling her mouth in distaste.
‘Aye,’ Mary said, smiling at her sister’s discomfort. ‘I’m afraid it does. It’s a sort of preparation for motherhood and even people like Aunt Ellen, who’ve never had children, have periods.’
‘So, when … How will I know when it will be?’ Bridie asked.
‘Your body will change first,’ Mary told her. ‘Your breasts will begin to grow and you’ll get hair down below.’
Bridie let out a sigh of relief. She’d been horrified to see the little swellings around her nipples and even more so to see hair sprouting where it had never done before, certain that she was abnormal and too worried to even contemplate discussing it with Rosalyn.
Mary heard the sigh and saw the relief, but hid her smile. She was glad she’d told her. ‘But,’ she cautioned her, ‘don’t you be telling Mammy about this, d’you hear? She’ll have my mouth washed out with carbolic.’
‘I won’t,’ Bridie promised with a giggle, visualising her mother forcing a bar of soap into Mary’s mouth. ‘I’m glad you’ve told me. I’ve wondered, you know.’
‘Of course you’ve wondered, it’s natural,’ Mary said. ‘And you needed to be told. But one thing I do agree with Mammy about is respecting yourself. It’s all the advice she ever gave me, but for all that she was right. Boys will try to … well, you know what I mean, and if you let them, they’ll not respect you anymore. Wait for the ring like I did. Believe me, it’s worth it.’
‘I don’t know if I want to get married,’ Bridie said doubtfully. ‘I don’t think I want to be doing that sort of thing to make babies either.’
‘Oh you will, little sister,’ Mary said with a laugh. ‘You will.’
Almost as soon as Terry picked Bridie up at the docks three weeks later, she knew there was something wrong with him. But she also knew to press him would only annoy and so she waited for him to tell her.
She hadn’t long to wait: Terry was bursting to tell somebody his news and as soon as they were seated on the train, he couldn’t contain himself. Bridie looked at him in astonishment. ‘Leave the farm? But, Terry …’
‘Hear me out first,’ Terry said, ‘and then judge if you want to, Bridie.’
Bridie nodded and Terry went on. ‘Look at me – I’m twenty years old in a week’s time, I never go out, I’ve never dated a girl in all my life and why? Because I never get a penny piece of my own, that’s why. Oh, they point out, Mam and Dad, that this place will be mine one day – Seamus will hardly want it – and they remind me I have a warm house and plenty of food and clothes bought for me when I need them. Aye, I do, working clothes and a suit for Mass that I never even get to choose the colour and style of.
‘I can’t stand it, I tell you, Bridie. I don’t like farming anyway, never have, and I won’t grub around in this place for much longer, with Mammy doling out small amounts of money to me for the collection at Mass as if I was a wean.’
Bridie saw some of the injustices of Terry’s predicament that she’d never realised before. ‘Oh, Terry,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t you tell Mammy and Daddy how you feel?’
‘Do you think I haven’t tried?’ Terry snapped. ‘It’s like talking to a brick wall.’
‘But where will you go?’
‘New York,’ Terry said. ‘Seamus and Johnnie said they’d send me the fare.’
‘But what about a job?’ Bridie said, for she knew as well as any that unemployment was rife everywhere since the Great War and getting worse. ‘It’s as bad there as here. Worse, in fact. They have soup kitchens in America, Terry.’
‘I know,’ Terry said. ‘That’s the threat Mam and Dad use when I’ve mentioned it to them. Not that I’ve said that much, you know. I’ve just tested the ground as it were. I wrote to Johnnie and he said he can probably get me set on alongside him in time. There’s nothing for now, but he’s keeping an eye out and will send for me. I’m willing to work. I’ll not go to America and live off him and Seamus, never fear. All I’m waiting for is word and the money for the fare.’
Bridie knew then that eventually Terry would go. It might be weeks or even months, but he wouldn’t stay.
However, the weeks rolled by and soon winter was upon them again and still no word came from America. Still and all, Bridie told herself, there might not be a place in America for Terry for a long while. She couldn’t imagine Johnnie and Seamus to be the only Irish boys with relations clamouring to join them. The dole queues in America were as long as those anywhere else and why would they take another person into the country when it made more sense to employ one of their own?
That winter proved to be a severe one and both Jimmy and Francis were worried about their pregnant ewes. Rosalyn came over one day and complained how bad-tempered her father had become lately. Bridie expressed surprise – Francis usually had a smile on his face and had a far more relaxed attitude to life than his brother Jimmy.
They were, as usual, in the barn and Rosalyn peered out of the barn window as she said, ‘Poor things to be born in this anyway.’ She rubbed at the window with a mittened hand, clearing the ice. ‘I mean just look at it,’ she said. The landscape before them was covered in snow blown into drifts at the sides of the fields and gilding the trees and hedges.
Bridie shivered, despite her thick coat. ‘Aye, you’d think they’d wait till spring is really here and the snow had at least disappeared,’ she said. ‘I think God slipped up there.’
Rosalyn gave her a push. ‘Don’t let the priest hear you say that, Bridie McCarthy,’ she said in mock severity while her eyes twinkled. ‘You’ll spend the rest of your life on your knees repenting, you will.’
‘Aye? Well, I’ll say one for you when I’m down there,’ Bridie promised with a smile.
But in all truth there was not much to smile about during those bitterly cold days and the only bright news at all that awful January was that Mary had given birth to a baby and named him Jamie after her father. Jimmy