The bells were for me. I knew the nuns would be scurrying and exclaiming and running in useless circles. But the sirens sounded for a different reason. Luckily for me, the police were engaged elsewhere. An RIC patrol had been ambushed in Cobh and every available officer was rushing in that direction. Every girl in the convent could have escaped without capture, if only I’d known to tell them.
First I ran, faster than ever, joyless. I flung off my cap and my apron, in motion, never missing a stride. I ran off the road, through fields. Not the barest slip or side sprain of an ankle. Clean, fast strides, like I’d been in training. I passed a farmhouse where laundry dried on the line, swaying in the cool crisp afternoon. I should have stopped and stolen clothes, disguised myself. The front of my dress was soaked through with milk, drying from my flight and the sun. But I didn’t stop. I ran and I ran.
‘Whoa, there darling,’ a woman said.
I hadn’t seen her, leaning against a barn. Wearing trousers and a thick jacket, a cigarette in one hand, the other raised up in the air as she stepped out in front of me, stopping me short. She had wild grey curls and a wind-burned face, standing close enough for me to smell last night’s whiskey on her breath.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please let me go.’
Her eyes landed on my chest, the milk stains dried by now, then travelled to my shredded stockings and feet. She blew out a stream of smoke then dropped her cigarette dangerously into the hay. Took a moment to stamp it out.
‘And where is it you’re going, then?’
‘I don’t suppose I need to tell you.’ I sounded more weepy than defiant. Nothing had ever felt more incorrect than standing still. I had to run, away and also towards.
The woman took off her coat and placed it over my shoulders. ‘I know where you’ll be going,’ she said, raspy voice wanting to be kind, forcing itself to be stern. ‘Straight to the boy who got you here in the first place. But you mustn’t go to him, dear. Listen to you. Sounding like England. That’s where you belong, then, isn’t it?’
Her name was Vera and she brought me inside, gave me a change of clothes and fed me. I think she told me about her life, the friend she lived with and her feelings about the nuns and what they called charity. I didn’t hear any of it. For the longest time I didn’t hear a word anyone said to me. I was a shoeless girl on foot, desperate to win a race against cars and boats. From the moment I discovered I was pregnant I had only ever been a girl on foot.
At some point another woman arrived, also wearing a man’s work clothes and smelling of smoke and whiskey. ‘Good gracious,’ she said, at the sight of me.
‘That’s Martha,’ Vera told me.
Martha looked directly at my breasts, swollen to lopsided rocks with breast milk. ‘Come with me, love,’ she said. ‘I can help you with that.’
She brought me into the small bedroom and unwound a cloth bandage for me to wrap around my breasts. ‘You want to let the milk out a little bit, every now and then,’ she said. ‘Enough to relieve the pressure, but not so much to keep you producing.’
Thinking about it now I wonder what babies were in her past, whose milk she’d had to stop. But I didn’t wonder at the time. Vera and Martha emptied a biscuit jar of pound notes and shillings. They bundled me up in what may have been one of their best coats. Vera’s shoes fit me better; she gave me a pair of soft-leather boots. Then they loaded me into the back of their wagon.
‘Lie low and still,’ Vera instructed.
And so I left Sunday’s Corner the same way I’d arrived, in a horse-drawn carriage. Martha sang as she drove the horses, the same tune Sister Mary Clare used to hum, echoing like bagpipes through the stairwells and hallways of the convent. Finally I learned the words:
‘Come, all you fair and tender girls
That flourish in your prime