Rigger
Rigger never knew his father – he had never been spoken of. His mother Nuala was hard to know properly. She worked so hard for one thing, and she said little of her life in the West of Ireland in a small place called Stoneybridge. Rigger knew she had worked as a maid in a big house for three old ladies called the Miss Sheedys, but she never wanted to talk about it nor her family back home.
He shrugged. It was impossible to understand grown-ups, anyway.
Nuala had never owned anything of her own. She was the youngest of the family so any clothes she got had been well tried out on the others first. There was no money for luxuries, not even a First Communion dress; and when she was fifteen they had found her a job working for the Miss Sheedys in Stone House. Very nice women they were; ladies, all three of them.
It was hard work: stone floors and wooden tables to scrub, old furniture to polish. She had a very small room with a little iron bed. But it was her own, more than she ever had at home. The Miss Sheedys hadn’t a penny really between them, so there was a lot of fighting back the damp and the leaks and there was never the money to give the house any proper heating or a good coat of paint – both needed badly. They ate very little but Nuala was used to that. They were like little sparrows at the table.
She looked at them with wonder, as they had to have their table napkins each in its own ring and they sounded a little gong to announce the meal. It was like taking part in a play.
Sometimes Miss Queenie would ask about Nuala’s boyfriends, but the other sisters would tut-tut as if this wasn’t a suitable topic to discuss with the maid.
Not that there was that much to discuss. There were very few boyfriends around Stoneybridge. Any lads her brothers knew had all gone to England or America to find work. And Nuala wouldn’t be considered good enough for the O’Haras or some of the big families in the place. She hoped that she would meet one of the summer visitors who would fall in love with her, just like Chicky, and not care that she was in domestic service.
And she did meet a summer visitor, called Drew. It was short for Andrew. He was a friend of the O’Haras, and they had all been kicking a ball around the beach. Nuala sat watching the girls in their smart swimsuits. How wonderful it must be to be able to go into town and buy things like that, and lovely coloured baskets and coloured towels.
Drew came over and asked her to join the game. After a week she was in love with him. After two weeks they were lovers. It was all so natural and normal, she couldn’t understand why she and the other girls had giggled so much about it at school. Drew said he adored her and that he would write to her every day when he went back to Dublin.
He wrote once and said it had been a magical summer and that he would never forget her. He gave no address. Nuala wouldn’t ask the O’Haras where to find him. Not even when she realised that her period was late and she was most probably pregnant.
When this became more certain to be true, she was at a complete loss about what to do. It would break her mother’s heart. Nuala had never felt so alone in her life.
She decided to tell the Miss Sheedys.
She waited until she had cleared and washed up their minimal supper before she began the story. Nuala looked at the stone floor of the kitchen so that she did not have to meet their eyes as she explained what had happened.
The Sheedy sisters were shocked. They had hardly any words to express their horror that this should have happened while Nuala was under their roof.
‘What on earth are you going to do?’ Miss Queenie asked with tears in her eyes.
Miss Jessica and Miss Beatrice were less sympathetic but equally unable to think of a solution.
What had Nuala hoped they would do? That they might ask her to bring up the baby there? That they would say a child around the house would make them all feel young again?
No, she hadn’t hoped for that much but she wanted some reassurance, some pinprick of hope that the world was not going to end for her as a result of all this.
They said they would make enquiries. They had heard of a place where she might be able to stay until the baby was born and given up for adoption.
‘Oh, I’m not going to give the baby away,’ Nuala said.
‘But you can’t keep the baby, Nuala,’ Miss Queenie explained.
‘I never had anything of my own before, apart from the room you gave me and my bed here.’
The sisters looked at each other. The girl didn’t begin to understand what she was taking on. The responsibility, the fuss, the disgrace.
‘It’s the 1990s,’ Nuala said, ‘it’s not the Dark Ages.’
‘Yes, but Father Johnson is still Father Johnson,’ Miss Queenie said.
‘Would the young man in question perhaps . . .?’ began Miss Jessica tentatively.
‘And if he’s a friend of the O’Haras, he would be an honourable person and do his duty . . .’ Miss Beatrice agreed.
‘No, he wouldn’t. He wrote to say goodbye; it had been a magical summer.’
‘And I’m sure it was, my dear,’ Miss Queenie clucked kindly, not noticing the disapproval from the others.
‘I can’t tell my parents,’ Nuala said.
‘So, we’ll get you to Dublin as quickly as possible. They’ll know what to do up there.’ Miss Jessica wanted it off her doorstep soonest.
‘I’ll make those enquiries.’ Miss Beatrice was the sister with contacts.
Nuala’s eldest brother Nasey was already living in Dublin. He was the odd one in the family, very quiet, kept himself to himself, they would always say with a sigh. He had a job in a butcher’s shop and seemed settled enough.
He was a bachelor with a home of his own, but he wouldn’t be anyone she could rely on. He had been too long left home to know her and care about her. She did have his address for an emergency, of course, but she wouldn’t contact him.
The Sheedys had found a place for Nuala to stay. It was a hostel where several of the other girls were pregnant also.
A lot of them had jobs in supermarkets or cleaning houses. Nuala was used to hard work, and found it very easy compared to all the pulling and dragging at Stone House. She got jobs by word of mouth. People said to each other that she was very pleasant and that nothing was too much trouble for her. She saved enough to rent a room for herself and the baby when it was born.
She wrote home to her family telling them about Dublin and the people she worked for, but saying nothing of the visits to the maternity hospital. She wrote to the Sheedy ladies telling them the truth, and eventually giving them the news that Richard Anthony had been born weighing six and a half pounds and was a perfect baby in every way. They sent her a five-pound note to help out, and Miss Queenie sent a christening robe.
Richard Anthony wore it at his baptism, which was in a church down by the River Liffey at a christening of sixteen infants.
‘What a pity you don’t have any family there with you at this time,’ Miss Queenie wrote. ‘Perhaps your brother would be pleased to see you and meet his new nephew.’
Nuala doubted it. Nasey had always been withdrawn and distant from what she remembered.
‘I’ll wait until he’s a little person before I introduce them,’ she said.
Nuala now had to get jobs which would allow her to take the baby with her. Not easy at first, but when they saw the long hours she put in and how little trouble the child was she found plenty of work.
She saw a great deal of life through the households where she worked. The women who fussed about their homes as if they thought life was a permanent examination where they would be found wanting. There were families where husband and wife were barely civil to each other. There were places where the children were spoiled with every possession possible and still were not content.
But also she met good, kind people who were warm to her and her little son and grateful when she went the extra distance and cooked them potato cakes or made old dull brasses shine like new.
When Richard was three it was getting harder to take him to people’s houses. He wanted to explore and run around. One of Nuala’s favourite ladies was someone they all called Signora, who taught Italian classes. She was a most unusual woman: completely unworldly, wore extraordinary flowing clothes and had long hair with grey and red and dark brown in it all tied back with a ribbon.
She didn’t have a cleaner for herself, but paid Nuala to clean two afternoons a week for her mother. Her mother was a difficult, hard-to-please person who hadn’t a good word to say for Signora except that she had always been foolish and headstrong and no good would come of it all.
But Signora, if she knew this, took no notice. She told Nuala about a marvellous little playgroup. It was run by a friend of hers.
‘Oh, that would be much too expensive for me,’ Nuala said sadly.
‘I think they’d be very happy to have him there if you could do a few hours’ cleaning in exchange.’
‘But the other parents mightn’t like that. The cleaner’s child in with theirs.’
‘They won’t think like that, and anyway, they won’t know.’ Signora was very definite. ‘You’d like playschool, wouldn’t you, Richard?’ Signora had a great habit of talking to children as if they were grown-ups. She never put on a baby voice.
‘I’m Rigger,’ he said. And that’s what he was called from then on.
Rigger loved the playschool, and nobody ever knew that he arrived there two hours before the other children while his mother cleaned and polished and got the place ready for the day.
Through Signora, Nuala got several other jobs nearby. She cleaned in a hairdressing salon where they made her feel very much part of it all and even gave her very expensive highlights for nothing. She did a few hours a week in a restaurant on the quays called Ennio’s, where again she was involved in the place and they always asked her to try out a bowl of pasta for her lunch. Then she would pick up Rigger and take him with her while she minded other children and took them for walks on St Stephen’s Green to feed the ducks.
Nuala’s family were entirely unaware of Rigger’s existence. It just seemed easier that way.
As happens in many big families, the children who left became dissociated with their old home. Sometimes, at Christmas, she felt lonely for Stoneybridge and for the days when she would decorate the tree for the Miss Sheedys and they would tell her the stories of each ornament. She thought of her mother and father and the goose they would have for Christmas and the prayers they would say for all emigrants – particularly her two sisters in America, her brother in Birmingham and Nasey and Nuala in Dublin. But it was not a lonely life. Who could be lonely with Rigger? They were devoted to each other.
She couldn’t think what made her get in touch with her brother Nasey. Possibly it was another letter from Miss Queenie, who always saw things in a very optimistic way. Miss Queenie said that it was probably a lonely life for Nasey in Dublin, and that he might enjoy having company from home.
She could barely remember him. He was the eldest and she the youngest of a big family. He wasn’t going to be shocked and appalled that she had a son who was about to go to big school any day.
It was worth a try.
She called to the butcher’s shop where Nasey worked, holding Rigger by the hand. She recognised him at once in a white coat and cutting lamb chops expertly with a cleaver.
‘I’m Nuala, your sister,’ she said simply, ‘and this is Rigger.’
Rigger looked up at him fearfully and Nuala looked long and hard at her brother’s face. Then she saw a great smile on Nasey’s face. He was indeed delighted to see her. What a waste of five years it had been because she was afraid he might not want to recognise her.
‘I’m going to be on my break in ten minutes. I can meet you in the café across the road. Mr Malone, this is my sister and her little boy Rigger.’
‘Go on now, Nasey. You’ll have lots to talk about.’ Mr Malone was kindly. And it turned out that they did have lots to talk about.