Heroine Of Her Own Life

3. Two Up, Two Down-1

TWO UP, TWO DOWN

The lamplighter passed with his ladder and long rod as Meg entered Moore’s Place, a narrow street long enough to only hold four small houses, one with a shop on the ground floor. He turned the gaslight on, illuminating the rope swing the children of the street had attached to the lamppost.

Pushing open the paint-cracked green door to their house, she heard her sisters’ voices in the kitchen. Once inside, she was able to glimpse Annie and Jinny sidling around the oak kitchen table, laying it for the evening meal. Her father’s ancient black work boots sat on a newspaper by the door, cleaned of coal dust and polished for the next workday. He sat with his broad back to her before a small coal fire in the parlour, relaxing after his day at the gasworks, reading yesterday’s newspaper, and puffing on a pipe. His feet, shod in woolen slippers, pointed toward the fire in the grate. He wore the light-grey cardigan his wife had knitted for him thirty years before, one his daughters repaired for its continued use.

“Here’s Queenie, home from the fray, Daddy,” Annie stated gaily, entering the parlour while drying her hands with a dishtowel.

Meg’s shoulders sagged with exhaustion. “Not tonight, Annie. It’s been a terrible day.” She looked at her father and youngest sister. Tall, raven-haired people. Large, thick people. Big-bosomed women and deep-voiced men. They filled the rooms of the small house like hot-air balloons.

“The Spaniards” was what the neighbors on Moore’s Place called the Prestons. Her father and seven siblings had hair the colour of jet, eyes nearly black with thick dark lashes. Meg envied the pale olive colour of their skin; hers was milky, freckled, and turned pink at the slightest provocation. A slim woman—the ungenerous might have said stringy, as Annie had—of medium height, Meg was the only sibling with hazel eyes. Her hair wasn’t raven and straight, but russet-brown and frizzy. In looks, Meg took after her mother, while the others were one-hundred percent Preston.

Meg glanced at the back of her father’s sizable, dark head. Perhaps that’s why he’s never liked me.

“Tea, Da,” Annie announced.

Their father grunted as he stiffly rose. The wooden mantel clock struck half six.

Meg followed them into the kitchen as Jinny placed an enormous metal teapot on a trivet on the table.

“Howareya, Meggie?” Jinny asked, red-faced with the effort of heaving the thing from the hob to the table. She wiped her hands on a faded floral apron. Greying and shrinking at an alarming rate, the eldest sibling was no longer as raven-haired and large as she’d once been.

“Tired. An awful day.”

Mismatched chairs scraped the worn wooden floor as they sat. Jinny stood and poured milk and tea, and passed mugs while the others passed sugar and food-laden plates to one another.

Mugs delivered, Jinny took a seat. Mouths too busy chewing to talk, the room filled with the clatter of cutlery on plates. Their father focused on the food before him. Meg tried and failed to eat the boiled ham and cabbage, floury potatoes, stale bread and butter. Sitting back, she warmed her hands on the white chipped mug as she watched Annie dip bread ends into the full mug before eating them.

“I saw a man kicked to death this morning,” Meg said softly.

Her father’s fork hovered in midair as an odd look of incomprehension skewed his face. He swallowed loudly. “What are you on about?”

“A man, kicked to death, right outside the yard this morning by a group of shipyard men. Boiler men and fitters—I recognized some of them.” And I saw the blood on their pants after they’d done it.

Jinny looked upset. “Why?”

“Because he was working at the yard.” The man’s pulpy, bloodied face flashed in front of her.

“What d’ya mean?” asked Annie, her head raised like a dog on a scent.

Meg looked from one face to the next. “Because he was a Catholic. He was found out.”

Annie’s face blanched and she looked down quickly.

Their father snorted. “Serves him right. We ought to start here and go south—kick them all to death. Burning houses down and … and stealing land! Those … those Free Staters, whatever they call themselves … I call them traitors, the lot of them. Britain should keep Ireland all one by force, under the King. Thank God we have men like Carson and Sir Craig with the sense to preserve the union up here!” He thumped the table with a big, hairy fist and set the crockery rattling.

A startled Jinny dropped her fork with a terrible clatter.

Gazing up at her father’s treasured portrait of the bewigged Dutch and English King William of Orange seated on a rearing white steed, Meg sighed inwardly. This was a routine rant, one that often ended with a resounding, “No Home Rule here! No Pope here!” Her father’s life-long hatred of Catholics was in the air they breathed, but as far as she knew, he’d never known many Catholics to speak to, and they’d never taken any bread out of his mouth, f*******n as they were to work in the gasworks alongside him … f*******n as they were to work alongside her at the shipyard.

Annie, her eyes glittering, looked hard at Meg, who held her gaze and shook her head. Your secret is safe with me.

Annie’s face relaxed.

“Oh, but that’s awful, Meg,” said Jinny with a shake of her head.

Meg reached over and patted her hand.

“It’s nothing of the sort. He asked for it,” said their father, glowering at them, smoothing his huge black mustache with a thick, scarred index finger and unknowingly flicking a piece of ham onto the floor.

Aware that she was playing with fire, Meg turned away and quietly said, “You didn’t see him, Father.”

“What does that mean?” he demanded, his face darkening with anger.

She met his furious glare. “It means that seeing the men do what they did today … and seeing the man after … it … is different to talking about it.” Meg braced for what was sure to be an explosion, with possible violence following the tirade, but the front door opening and closing distracted him.

David, the only son left at home, whistled merrily as his heavy footsteps rang down the short hall to the kitchen.

“Take those boots off! Covered in sawdust from some pub, are they?” their father shouted without looking at him.

David rolled his eyes at Jinny behind their father’s back, and she giggled.

“What is it now then? Crying over a Fenian liar one minute, then giggling the next?” roared the father. “And you,” he warned, pointing his knife at Meg. “I won’t tolerate any rotten Protestants under my roof any more than I’d tolerate Catholics. Not for five minutes. Know that, wee lass.”

The smile disappeared from David’s face and he disappeared back down the hall, and reappeared in stocking feet. He silently folded his large frame into a spindly chair next to Jinny. He kept his eyes cast down as he accepted a mug and a plate of food from her.

Watching Annie, who’d stopped eating, Meg was reminded of the heartbroken nine-year-old girl, the baby of the family, when their mother died in 1910. She brought herself back to the present to see Jinny eyeing her full plate.

“Lovely ham, Jinny,” she said with a reassuring nod, as Jinny did the lion’s share of the housekeeping. “Isn’t it, Father? Isn’t it lovely ham?” Meg looked at him as though from a great height. Annoyed and exhausted by his tirade, she wanted an end to this part of their evening.

He looked at her, suspiciously she thought. “Eh? I don’t know. You could read through the slice I was given.”

“Here Da, have some more,” said Jinny. A small tremor disturbed her hands as she sliced a thick piece and handed it forward.

He snatched the plate.

“You eat me out of house and home, the lot of you. Why don’t you find men to take you off my hands, like your sisters, like decent, normal women?” He spat the meanness out with his words.

Meg dared not wonder if he was singling her out, or lumping his three spinster daughters together. We pay more into the house than he does now. She thought she detected a look of relief on David’s face.

“And you. What kind of man are you? You’re worse than the little girls yon. Hadn’t the courage to enlist and fight for Britain like your brothers, to show them Home Rulers, had you? No wife and a job that wouldn’t keep one. Your mother would be ashamed of youse … the lot of youse.”

David’s smooth, young face flushed and he pulled his hands off the table. Watching Jinny place her hands over her face, Meg felt a surge of rage toward the man. Her face burned, but she held herself still as her gaze swept around the table. Annie’s pallor had turned a pale grey again and they fell back into silence.

Feeling smothered by the stillness, Meg looked anywhere but at her father. Avoiding King Billy’s portrait, her gaze slid to the framed picture of the Titanic she’d received as a young girl from the shipwright, Mr Andrews. A young and handsome man, he’d invited the kitchen staff to celebrate the Titanic’s launch, and signed copies of the ship’s portrait for everyone, from Chef Lazio down to scullions like herself. She’d presented the picture to her father that evening, and he’d seemed pleased and proud of her. He’d found the frame for it, she recalled, and had helped her frame it.