‘The Sisters will take good care of you.’ He may have believed this was true. His voice was gentle, almost regretful. Perhaps he’d go a little way down the road then turn around to come back for me before I could even unpack. ‘We’ll send word to you about Finbarr. I promise that.’
He lurched my suitcase from the back of the wagon – my mother’s suitcase; I’d stolen it from her before I left. She would have given it to me if I’d asked. Better yet, she would have begged me to stay, or run away with me herself. ‘How could you ever have thought otherwise?’ she would ask me, too late. ‘I would have done anything, fought anyone, including your father, to keep from losing another daughter.’
If I’d known in that moment what I do now, I would have trudged off on my own two feet, away from the convent. I would have walked down its long drive, over the hills, and swum across the freezing Irish Sea back to England.
Inside the nuns traded my clothes for a drab, shapeless dress that wouldn’t need replacing no matter how big my belly grew, and a pair of ill-fitting clogs. A young, sweet-faced nun took my suitcase. She smiled warmly and promised, ‘We’ll take good care of this for you.’ I never saw it again. An older nun sat me down and cut my hair so that it barely covered my ears. I’d only ever worn it long and worried what Finbarr would think when he came to get me.
I didn’t follow Mr Mahoney’s advice and speak with an Irish brogue. Once the nuns had explained the rules of my new home, I barely spoke at all, not for weeks.
A young person can’t know her life, what it will be or how it will unfold. When you grow older, you gain a sense that hardships occupy particular moments in time, which, by and by, will pass. But when you’re young, a single moment seems like the whole world. It feels permanent. Years hence I would go on to live a bigger life. I would travel all over the world. But that winter I was scarcely more than a child. I knew exactly two places: London and County Cork and only tiny pockets of both. I knew I was young but I didn’t understand how young, or that youth was a fleeting condition. I knew the war had ended but I didn’t yet believe it. The Great War had seemed not so much an event as a place, unmovable as England but nowhere near as destructible. In London my father’s favourite pub had been blown to rubble, kegs of ale rolling out onto the street as more bombs fell. For the rest of his life my father would say the world lost its innocence during the Great War.
The first task I was given at the convent – my hair shorn, my own clothes taken away – was tending the nuns’ graveyard. With two other girls, both of them heavily pregnant, I went out to sweep and rake, and clean the headstones of lichen. The cold air might have tasted like freedom if not for the iron bars extending around the perimeter, as far as I could see. To the right was a high stone wall. Thin sounds carried over it, which I didn’t realize were the voices of small children, brought out for a breath of air before their supper. Visible through the iron bars lay the road that led away from the convent; no sign of Mr Mahoney returning for me with a change of heart. Neither of the other girls spoke to me. We weren’t supposed to speak at all, or even know each other’s names.
The nuns’ headstones were thick crosses, each one etched with the words Here Lies Sister Mary. As if only one woman had died but she somehow needed fifty graves. I ran my coarse cloth over the stones, dipping my fingers into the carved grey words. And I knew in that moment. The world had never been innocent.
But I had been innocent.
Let’s go back a little further. Before the war, this time. See me at thirteen – skinny and nimble as a cricket – the first time my parents sent me to spend a summer at my Aunt Rosie’s and Uncle Jack’s farm.
‘Nan likes to run,’ my father said, formulating the plan. ‘She wasn’t meant for the city, was she.’ He worked as a clerk at the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company, and often said these same words – not meant for the city – about himself. It pained him to stoop long hours over a desk for little money. I always suspected Da would have regretted leaving Ireland, if that wouldn’t have meant regretting us. His wife was English and that meant his family was too. Except, apparently, for me.
My sisters Megs (elder) and Louisa (younger) were proper girly girls, interested in clothes and hair and cooking. Or at least that’s what they pretended to be interested in. My sister Colleen (eldest) only cared about books and school. I liked books, too, but I also liked kicking a football with the neighbourhood boys. Sometimes after dark my father would come and find me with them, sweaty and filthy in an empty lot.
‘If she were a boy, she could be a champion,’ he boasted.
‘She’s too old for that now,’ my mother complained, but my father took pity.
‘Those other three are yours,’ he said to Mum, ‘but this one’s my Irish girl.’
My father had grown up on a farm just outside the fishing village of Ballycotton. Since I’d been born he’d gone back to visit once or twice when his brother paid the way. But there’d never been enough money for us all to travel there. The thought of my going at all, let alone for a whole summer, was thrilling. I knew it was a modest house but much roomier than our London flat, which only had two bedrooms, one for my parents and one for us four girls. Uncle Jack had done well with the farm. His wife Rosie inherited a small amount of money when her father died, and they’d added solid wood floors and lined the walls of the sitting room with bookshelves. They kept the grass near the house cut short for lawn tennis. (‘Tennis,’ my father scoffed, when he told us. ‘Now that’s an idea above his station.’)
The landscape existed in my mind, the most vivid green. Rolling hills and low stone walls – uninterrupted miles for me to kick a football through the meadows with my little cousin Seamus. I clasped my hands together and fell to my knees beside my mother, imploring her to let me go, only partly joking about the fervour.
My mother laughed. ‘It’s just I’ll miss you,’ she said, and I jumped to my feet and threw my arms around her. She had a dear, freckly face and wide green eyes. Sometimes I regret losing my East End accent because it’s meant losing the sound of her.
‘I’ll miss you, too,’ I admitted.
‘It won’t be a holiday,’ my father warned. ‘Jack’ll pay your passage but you’ll be doing plenty of chores to pay him back.’
Most of the chores would be outdoors, with horses and sheep, a joy to me. I was grateful that my uncle would hire a girl to do them.
And so we come to the Irish boy. Finbarr Mahoney was a fisherman’s son. Two years before we met, he came upon a wizened farmer at the village docks, about to drop a puppy – the runt of a litter of border collies – into the freezing sea.
‘Here,’ Finbarr said, hoisting a bucket of mackerel. ‘I’ll trade you.’