‘Tom Tall and Butter Ball,’ Bella used to call the two of them, for though Sarah wasn’t that tall, her slenderness made her appear so. Bella was, like her mother, under five foot and ‘as wide and she was high’, she was fond of saying. That wasn’t strictly speaking true, but she was plump and her mother, Dora Carmody, stouter still. Everything about them was round, but their faces were open and friendly and their brown eyes kindly looking. Bella had once had dark blonde hair, but now it was as grey as her mother’s and, like hers, fastened into a bun.
Sam Foley, being the third son, had never thought to inherit the boatyard in Greencastle, nor the family house in nearby Moville. Knowing there would be no opening for him in the family business, his father had apprenticed him to a carpenter friend, who ran his business from a small town called Belleek, in the neighbouring county of Fermanagh, when Sam had been twelve years old.
Sarah Tierney’s family lived not far from the village, on a thriving farm in Derrygonnelly on the banks of the huge Lough Erne, and Sarah often shopped in Belleek with her sisters, Peggy and Mary.
There she met and fell in love with Sam, and he with her. No obstacles were put in the way of her marrying him, for everyone liked the man and knew he was set to inherit the carpentry business, so it was generally thought that Sarah had done well for herself.
Sam’s family had come down for the wedding, and there Sam’s two brothers sought him out and told him they were off to seek their fortune in America as soon as it could be arranged. The boatyard was all his if he wanted it.
Sam wasn’t keen to go back and knew Sarah would be unhappy living so far away from her people, but he also knew his father couldn’t run the place alone. His only option was to return.
The only sweetener to that very bitter pill for Sarah was the house Sam inherited along with the boatyard. It was a fine, solid house just off The Square in Moville. It had two storeys, three bedrooms, and was built of stone with a slate roof. ‘A family house,’ Sam’s father had said. ‘Me and your mother will be fine and dandy in the wee cottage in Greencastle by the boatyard.’
‘I mind the day Sam’s brothers left as if it were yesterday,’ Sarah said to Bella as they drank their tea. ‘We hadn’t been in Moville more than a day or so and we went down to the pier to see them off. Sam had told me that the liners crossing the Atlantic had to be moored out in the deeper waters of Lough Foyle. Passengers were taken out to the ships in small tenders from Moville Pier. There was always a collection of people waiting and that day was no different.
‘Sam’s brothers seemed sorrowful yet, for all their sadness at the parting, they still left. When they climbed into that boat, Sam’s mother’s eyes were so bleak and bereft, I could hardly bear to look at her. The father was holding her fast, or I think she may have thrown herself into the boat after her sons. We waited at the pier side until we saw the small boat bump alongside the liner. The boys gave one last wave and we turned for home. Sam’s mother was crying gulping sobs of such sadness I felt my heart turn over. I thought I understood how she was feeling; I remember thinking I’d die if one of mine was to go such a distance away.’
She sighed and went on, ‘I tell you, Bella, children would tear the very heart out of you.’
However, more tragedy was to hit Sarah. She’d been married just six months when her mother and sisters, Peggy and Mary, took sick with TB. They were all dead before October drew to a close, before Sarah had been able to arrange to go and see them. She’d not even had the chance to bid them goodbye and she spoke of this now to Bella.
‘D’you mind that time?’
Bella remembered it well. Sarah’s grief had been so deep and profound, Sam had worried for her sanity. They travelled down for the funerals. Seeing everyone there so mournful and sorrow-laden had made Sarah worse.
‘Daddy was so sad it near broke my heart to see him,’ Sarah said to Bella. ‘He didn’t seem to see anything around him and it was up to my brother Sean to keep the farm ticking over.’
It was arranged that a widowed aunt called Agatha, whose children were grown and married, would see to things in the house and Sam and Sarah returned to Moville.
‘I never thought I’d be happy again in the whole of my life,’ Maria reminded Bella. ‘And then I found I was expecting. A little life would be dependent on me, something to go on for.’ She grasped Bella’s hand and went on, ‘You showed what a true friend you were then, for you showed not a trace of envy and yet I know how you had always longed for a child of your own.’
That brought the tears to Bella’s own eyes, for it was a burden she carried with her always.
‘When Maria was born, in 1925, I thought her the most beautiful baby in all the world,’ Sarah said, ‘and for sixteen years she has been at the forefront of my mind all the time. I love her so much, Bella, and I really can’t bear the pain of losing her. Once Maria leaves this village I know she will never come back to live.’
‘You will get through this, you know,’ Bella said. ‘It will take time, but it will get easier. I thought when my man died I’d never recover from it.’
‘That was a tragic time, right enough,’ Sarah agreed. It had been a tragic time for both of them. Sarah had just has the disastrous fall that rendered her sterile and was in the hospital. Bella was looking after the toddling Maria, when her husband, a fine, strapping man, who’d never had a day’s illness in his life, suddenly keeled over as he was getting up from his dinner, and was dead before he reached the floor.
‘We supported each other then,’ Bella said.
‘Aye, and wasn’t it wee Maria who was the salvation of us both?’
‘She was indeed,’ Bella agreed. ‘Then Mammy said she couldn’t manage the shop on her own and asked me in with her. I don’t know whether she really couldn’t manage, or did it for me, but I know the occupation of it was a good thing.’
‘I know it,’ Sarah said. ‘But what occupation could I take up that will chase the heartache from me?’
Bella had no answer to this and Sarah went on, ‘I knew that Maria was good at sewing and all. I mean, I taught her to sew, darn, embroider, that sort of thing, and in time she was better than me—far neater, and faster too. I knew she had an eye for colour, the things that go together. Whenever we went in the draper’s shops in Derry, she’d be fascinated by the array of fabrics. She’d feel them between her fingers and be amazed by the different things you could sew on to decorate clothes. She’d prowl around the haberdashery counter like another child might do around a cake shop.
‘I took it as a good, wifely attribute, especially when she mastered that old treadle machine. I told her she’d be a catch for any man, for you know she could make something out of nothing, and I encouraged her to go to evening classes for dressmaking. People say you can’t make a silk purse out of sow’s ear—well, I think Maria probably could.
‘She’s a tidy cook too—we all know the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach—and she’s helped me with the laundry this past year or so. She can poss the clothes, starch and iron with the best of them.’
She looked at Bella with mournful eyes and said, ‘She’ll make a good wife for someone in a year or two, when she is fully grown. That’s what I want for her—to marry a boy here so I can still see her and help her rear any children she might have. It’s all I’ve wanted since the first moment I held her in my arms, and if it hadn’t been for this damned war it would have happened like that. Whatever Philomena Clarke wanted, without the war, Maria going to the Academy would have been impossible.’
Bella knew that was true. By the time Maria finally left school at Easter 1939, everyone knew Britain, and therefore Derry and the other counties across the Foyle, was perched on the brink of war, despite Chamberlain’s claim that there’d be ‘peace for our time’, the previous September.
As