‘I’m afraid we didn’t always get round to washing her and that,’ Ida said.

  ‘You did your best,’ Rosie said firmly. ‘Now I’m here it will be easier for you all, and for Gertie too hopefully. We’ll have to lift her gently onto a chair because she’s just skin and bone.’

  She was no weight, but still they used four women to lift her into the chair before the range. Her sheets were sodden and Rita had a bucket of water ready to steep them in. Betty helped Rosie strip the bed, turn the mattress, and remake it with the protective sheet.

  Gertie’s nightdress too was wringing wet and Rosie lifted it off her and washed her all over with water she’d had heating on the range. Then she put on one of the nappies she’d cut from the bolt, and secured it with nappy pins before slipping a clean nightdress over her head.

  ‘We’ll change her during the day,’ one of the women promised and they moved her back to the bed. ‘Try and keep her a little drier at least, the poor old sod.’

  ‘Do what you can,’ Rosie said. ‘I just want her to be a little more comfy.’

  As Ida spooned bread soaked in gravy into Gertie’s mouth – which was all that the old woman seemed able to take – Rosie surveyed the room. Everywhere was clean at least, and the smell of neglect had left the place. The other things Rita had suggested, the bright cushions and rag rug, would have to wait until she moved in.

  Rosie could hardly believe how kind the women in the court had been, although they were naturally curious about her. She told them what Rita and Betty had already been told: that she’d been ill and had come to spend a few weeks with her aunt who was a nun at the convent. She wondered what they’d make of Danny and whether they’d react the same way as their fellow parishioners at the chapel, or the employers of the factories where Danny had tried to find work. She hoped not, but gave a sigh. It didn’t do to worry overmuch about something she couldn’t do anything about.

  Rosie really didn’t see how she was going to be able to get Bernadette dressed and ready so early in the morning and also try to see to Gertie, but Danny took the situation in hand after the first two fraught mornings. ‘Look, Rosie, why do you have to run yourself ragged? I might be a man, but I’m not totally useless.’

  ‘I know that, Danny, but…’

  ‘But nothing, Rosie,’ Danny said. ‘I can help Gertie after you’ve left for work. If I can feed Bernadette, I can help an old lady just as easy, and I’m sure I could take Bernadette to the nursery and fetch her home in the evenings too? I won’t stop looking for a job, mind, but while I’m unemployed I may as well make life easier for you. I mean, I bet you nearly pass the factory in the tram on the way to the nursery?’

  ‘Aye, near enough,’ Rosie said. ‘If we’re upstairs you can see the gates on Witton Road. But…well, there’s Rita’s Georgie as well.’

  No doubt I could cope with him too,’ Danny said. ‘He’s not a bad little chap.’

  ‘Oh Danny, it would be marvellous so it would,’ Rosie said. ‘You wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘I’d mind far less than I mind you supporting the entire house. In fact it would make me feel better to be doing something and might raise my standing with the neighbours who must see me as a lazy bugger.’

  Danny had a point; there were so few fit young men out of uniform that he did stand out a bit. Unbeknownst to the Walshes there was much speculation amongst the women in the courts and streets about Danny, almost as soon as they moved in, and the women had drawn their own conclusions.

  ‘Why d’you think he ain’t in the army then?’ one asked Ida one day. ‘I mean, you live next door to them.’

  ‘Don’t mean I know all their business,’ Ida retorted. ‘Maybe he has flat feet.’

  ‘Flat feet don’t keep you out the army!’

  ‘It does,’ someone else put in, ‘My uncle has them and they turned him down.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I dunno. They just do.’

  ‘All feet are bleeding flat, ain’t they?’ another said. ‘I mean, I don’t know anyone what’s got round feet.’

  ‘It’s summat to do with the instep,’ another offered.

  ‘Well that Danny Walsh don’t look like he has flat feet to me.’

  ‘How would you know with his bloody boots on?’ Ida said. ‘And it must be flat feet, cos there ain’t another reason that I can think of that the army would pass up such a strong, well-set-up man.’

  ‘Who cares why he ain’t in the bleeding army, any road,’ another said. ‘It’s nice to have a man about the place, maybe he can fix the brewhouse door before winter because the wind slices through there like a knife.’

  ‘Yeah and the maiding tub leaks like a sieve.’

  ‘Yeah, and I’m sure he’ll stop that dripping tap in the yard if we ask him, cos if that drip ain’t fixed it will freeze solid in the winter.’

  Danny did all that was asked of him, glad to be able to fill his days with something useful. Eventually, the news filtered through that Danny Walsh had never been for an army medical to find out if he had flat feet, for he was Irish, and though there had been volunteers from Ireland there was no conscription. Gradually, the women’s attitude to Danny changed to resentment.

  They still approved of Rosie, who kept her place clean and tidy and her child respectably dressed, despite being at work all day, and was kind to Gertie too and so relieved them of some of the burden, but what was wrong with Danny that he was in none of the Forces?

  Danny was more aware of the women’s feelings than Rosie, who was too busy to really see, but he said nothing to her for she could do little to change the situation, and anyway she had to work alongside and live amongst these people.

  EIGHTEEN

  Eventually life established a pattern. Rosie would get Bernadette and herself up and dressed before Rita and Betty came up the entry and then Georgie was left in Rosie’s house. The three women would be joined by others from doors and entries along the street until there would be a fair few of them waiting for the tram.

  Danny would get Bernadette’s breakfast, and while she ate it he’d pour Gertie a cup of tea and spoon porridge into her mouth. Like Rosie, Danny always spoke to the old lady when he came in and out or when he was doing something for her. He didn’t know if she understood, but Rosie always said their voices seemed to soothe her. Gertie rarely answered, but she nodded and smiled and Danny thought that she liked being acknowledged.

  After he delivered the children to nursery he seldom went straight back to the house, knowing it would be full of women doing personal things for Gertie, things it would be unseemly for him to watch, never mind do, and instead, every fine day he would often find himself going down to the clock tower at Aston Cross and along Rocky Lane, past the Dunlop’s works to the canal. The sludgy grey-brown water was as far from the babbling streams and rivers in Wicklow as it was possible to be and yet he liked the place.

  Danny often felt that if he hadn’t the canal to visit each day, and the boaties to pass the time of day with, he’d have gone mad, for there were few other men about. The narrow boats and barges, many decorated with roses and castles in bright colours and of all different shapes and sizes, travelled up and down the canal carrying goods and sometimes people from one place to another. They held a fascination for him, as did the large shire horses that pulled many of them.

  Danny was grateful for the friendship of the men on the canal, for while many ordinary people and employers saw Danny as a Catholic Irishman, therefore one of the rebels, a trouble-maker and a friend of the Hun, the boaties were different. They were a law unto themselves. He particularly liked a boatie called Ted Mason, and one day Ted said to him, ‘No-one’s got a good word for us, either. Calls us river gypsies. We ain’t gypsies and they ain’t got any right to say so.’

  Danny sympathised with Ted, for his narrow boat was always spotless and gleaming. Danny was asked aboard for a meal one day after he’d helped Ted’s youngest son Syd leg the narrowboat through a tunnel after Ted had hurt his back. As the narrowboats had no engines, when a tunnel was reached, a child or woman would lead the horse around the tunnel to meet up on the other side while the rest of the family would have to haul the narrowboat through the water. The usual way to do this was to lie out on boards long enough for your feet to reach the sides of the tunnel and leg the narrowboat through.

  Danny was surprised how much effort it had taken and how his legs had shook after it, and when Ted’s wife Mabel asked him in for a bite and a drink he accepted gratefully. However, when Danny went through the double doors to the cabin below, although the space was small he was amazed at what he saw.

  To the left of him was the cooking stove, raised up on a plinth, and gleaming pots and pans hung on hooks around the stove while the chimney disappeared through a hole in the roof. Opposite the stove was a bench that Ted explained was turned into a bed at night. ‘Syd sleeps there,’ he said. ‘Len used to too before he was called up. Syd, thank God, is too young yet. He’s only sixteen.’

  Syd looked anything but pleased by this news and Danny thought it was amazing how Ted and Mabel had reared such a surly son. Ted had explained before that the boy didn’t like the life on the canals. ‘He was born and bred to it. I can’t understand him at all,’ Ted said. ‘Our bed folds up against the far wall and that’s the bed he was born in, same as his brother. Now Len, he’s a proper boatie. Got a feel for it somehow, and I tell you I’ll be glad when this little lot is over and he’s back home again.’

  Danny could plainly see the discontent in the younger boy’s face and thought it a pity he couldn’t see how fortunate he was. But then, whenever could a wise head be put on young shoulders?

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ Mabel urged as Syd handed Danny a bottle of stout. ‘We were glad of your help today. Syd could never have got the boat through that tunnel on his own. Mind, Ted is his own worst enemy. He won’t see he’s getting older and has to take a bit more care.’

  ‘I’m not in my dotage yet, woman.’

  ‘I didn’t say you was.’

  ‘Stop the blether, woman,’ Ted said. ‘Me stomach thinks me throat’s been cut.’

  ‘I’ll cut you in a minute, Ted, you’re that aggravating,’ Mabel said, but Danny saw the twinkling in her eyes as she lifted the casserole dish from the oven and began to serve it onto the thick brown plates that Danny saw were stored in a cupboard hidden by the table, which would be folded up against it when not in use. As he ate he looked about the small cabin. Every piece of wood visible was stained and varnished and on the side panels were the rose and castle designs, and there were also shining brasses and plates of lace on the walls.

  After the meal was washed down with the stout, Mabel got up to make the tea and Danny had never seen such a teapot. It was large and the same brown as the plates, but the knob on the top of it was in the shape of another miniature teapot, and the matching sugar bowl and milk jug had little crocheted circles covering them.

  Ted, seeing Danny’s interest, was amused, and handing him a cigarette after the meal, he said, ‘What d’you think of it, then?’

  ‘I think it’s grand,’ Danny said. ‘I never imagined it to look anything like this. Were you always a boatman?’

  ‘Yeah, always, like my father before me and his father before him and so on. My grandfather didn’t live on a narrowboat, though, he had a cottage on the land but he was driven off by the railway in 1843 and had no alternative than to do what others before had done and live on the narrowboat. My dad was the first one of us to be born on a narrowboat, then there was me, and then our Len in 1887.’

  ‘What about school for the children?’

  ‘We teach them to write their name and reckon up and as much reading as they need to understand the toll tickets,’ Ted said. ‘That’s as much education as a boatie needs. It’s more important to understand the locks, be able to steer the boat and be strong enough to leg it through the tunnel. Book learning don’t teach them those things.’

  ‘I see that,’ Danny said. ‘And you have it lovely and cosy.’

  ‘Oh, Mabel keeps it like a new pin,’ Ted said. ‘We’re always proud of our boats.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Syd said. ‘I’m sick of it, piddling up and down a little ribbon of water and at a snail’s pace.’

  ‘We know your views only too well, young man,’ Ted growled. ‘And they needn’t be shared with visitors. When you’re a man you can decide for yourself, but for now you’ll do as you’re damn well told.’

  Syd glowered but said nothing more, and as he burst through the swing doors, Danny heard Mabel give a sigh and he felt sorry for her. He wondered if father and son rowed often. It certainly seemed an ongoing argument and he remembered the rows his father used to have with Phelan and the little good it had done in the end. Still, this wasn’t his fight, and he felt guilty even having been witness to it. ‘Can you stick around for the next day or so,’ Ted asked suddenly, handing Danny a half-crown. ‘Just till me back is properly healed, to help with the heavy stuff and legging and that.’

  ‘As long as I can take and fetch the children from the nursery I can give you all the help you want,’ Danny said.

  ‘Good,’ Ted said. ‘Take half a crown today and more tomorrow depending on how long you work.’

  ‘Seems fair,’ Danny said, delighted to be earning, however little it was.

  Rosie was pleased for Danny’s couple of days’ work and the odd jobs he picked up sometimes on other boats because of it. But she knew those odd shillings he brought home would be of little use to keep them all and when she became aware that she’d missed a period in August she was thrown into a panic. ‘What am I to do?’ she asked Rita and Betty at work the next day, biting her lip in agitation. ‘We can’t manage without my money.’

  ‘There are places…’ Rita began. ‘If you don’t want it like.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ Rosie said appalled. ‘Get rid of it? Rita, what do you take me for? I’m a Catholic and couldn’t do such a thing.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ Betty said. ‘Too bloody dangerous for one thing. Look,’ she said to Rosie, ‘It ain’t the end of the world, is it? I mean you can work for months yet, and I should have a word with them nuns and ask if they’ll take on a babby and…’

  ‘What about feeding the child?’

  ‘You ain’t the only one to work with a baby you know,’ Betty said. ‘They can have bottles of milk these days.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Rita put in. ‘Sadie Miller went back nearly straight after the baby was born. ‘Course, her mother lives just around the corner and she was showing me the bottle. It’s shaped like a boat and with a rubber titty on both ends. Anyroad, whatever you decide, you’d best tell your old man before he tumbles to it himself and realises half of the Kynoch’s workforce and all the neighbourhood have been aware of it before he was.’

  ‘Aye, Rita’s right,’ Betty said in support.

  Rosie knew that Rita was right too, and yet she hesitated, not certain how Danny would react.

  And when she told Danny in bed a few days later, he didn’t know how to react either. He should be delighted, for lovely as Bernadette was, she needed a playmate, and, deep down, he wanted a son. He kept this fact hidden from Rosie, knowing how she’d felt after Dermot’s birth. Had he been able to provide for his family properly he would have welcomed Rosie’s news, but as it was he was quiet.

  ‘Say something, Danny, for God’s sake,’ Rosie pleaded.

  ‘What?’ Danny snapped. ‘What can I say? I’m over the moon so I am, another child I can’t provide for.’

  ‘Don’t!’ Rosie cried, hurt and angry at Danny’s reaction. ‘You said that just as if you’re blaming me all the time, for having a baby and for having a job. Well, I might have got the job on my own, but you had something to do with this baby and don’t you forget it. A fine future the child will have with this sort of welcome from its own father.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Rosie,’ Danny said, chastened. ‘Don’t fret, I will love the baby well enough when it arrives, and I’ll try harder not to feel sorry for myself and secure some sort of job, any job, and as soon as possible.’

  ‘I’ll go back to work after I have the baby,’ Rosie said.

  ‘Oh no you won’t. I’ve told you, I’ll get a job.’

  ‘Fine!’ Rosie said. ‘But if you don’t, I can go back.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Rosie. How can you do that?’

  ‘As long as the nuns can take such a young baby on, I can manage it,’ Rosie said. ‘Other mothers have gone back.’

  ‘A baby needs its mother.’

  ‘Maybe, but they also need to eat and be kept warm,’ Rosie said. ‘Come on, Danny,’ she went on, conciliatory now. ‘Be reasonable. I know you’ll do your best, but if in the end it’s not enough, then there is this alternative.’

  Danny shook his head. He didn’t like it. Didn’t like any of it, but what could he do about it – damned all, that’s what, and all the talk in the world wouldn’t change the situation. He sighed and put his arms around Rosie. He didn’t need to speak. She understood and kissed his cheek.

  ‘So de Valera is president of the Irish Volunteers as well as head of Sinn Fein,’ Danny said after reading the letter his mother had written. ‘He has the political and revolutionary movement all sewn up.’

  ‘Aye,’ Rosie said. She’d read the letter but she hadn’t time to worry over it much. Her pregnancy, now in its fifth month, was dragging her down. She’d been violently sick since September and not just in the morning either, and by November she was more than feeling the effects of it. It was harder each bleak, cold morning to push herself from her bed and out into the inky blackness with only tea to sustain her, for her stomach would accept nothing else.

  She’d also developed a cough and wasn’t sure whether it was from the munitions or the cold, but the spasms often doubled her over and made her chest and back ache, and, together with the pregnancy, she often felt wretched.