All was revealed one afternoon by Marion, albeit a bit too late. Agnes was helping Marion to dismantle the stall when, out of the blue, Marion brought up Dolly.
“You’d want to keep an eye on your sister, Agnes,” Marion said as they were working away.
“What do you mean?” Agnes had been on her knees rolling up the canvas. She now stopped and stood. Marion was stacking boxes, and she continued stacking as she spoke.
“Dolly was up outside the pub last night selling leather belts, so my mammy says.”
“Selling belts? For who?”
“For herself.”
“Don’t be stupid, Marion. Where would Dolly get leather belts?” Agnes was rooted to the spot by a mixture of puzzlement and shock.
“She steals them, Agnes,” Marion revealed. Now the puzzlement was gone but not the shock. Agnes couldn’t speak. Marion stopped stacking boxes. “There’s a gang of them.” She began to rhyme off the names, counting them on her fingers. “Sadie Scully, Maggie O’Hare, Nuala Wade, and a few others. They go shoplifting during the day, and then they sell the stuff outside the pubs at night.” Once this was said, Marion went straight back to work.
Agnes immediately became defensive. “Shoplifting? Shoplifting? It’s that Sadie Scully one. I bet she put Dolly up to it. Dolly would never do anything like that unless she was being led to it.” Marion went to answer this but then thought better of it. Agnes saw her hesitation and goaded her. “What? Marion, come on, what?” Agnes had her hands on her hips now. Marion stacked the last box, and as she was wiping her hands in her apron she said, “Agnes, they call the gang ‘Dolly’s Mixtures.’ Do you think Sadie came up with that too?”
Agnes turned on her heel.
“Aggie, wait,” Marion called after her, but she didn’t look back.
As Agnes rounded a corner into her street it was like a nightmare. She was already upset and worried about what Marion had said, but her stomach now dropped to her toes and the blood drained from her body. She froze and threw up with fright. The police car was parked right outside her building. A small crowd had gathered around it, and as Agnes got closer she knew the police car was for Dolly. One kid saw Agnes arrive and sang at her: “Your sister’s going to prison, your sister’s going to prison. Ha. Ha. Ha.”
Agnes took the steps up to her flat two at a time. She didn’t realize as she climbed that she was running into the most bizarre twist in her life. Things would never be the same again.
“Who’s this, now? Is this one of the other girls? Tell me, you little brat.” the policeman barked at Dolly in a thick country accent when Agnes entered the room. Dolly was sitting on one of the fire-side chairs in a fetal position. Her eyes were red raw from crying, her arms red from slaps. The huge policeman sat on the other fire-side chair. Agnes’ mother, Connie, was sitting at the table. Both Connie and the policeman had cups of tea, and Agnes was shocked when her mother, instead of intervening on her behalf, said, “Dolly, answer the policeman—is this one of the other girls?”
“No, that’s my sister,” Dolly answered.
Agnes walked slowly toward her mother. “Mammy? Are you all right, Mammy?” Agnes stood in front of her mother.
“Is it, missus? Is that your daughter?” the policeman asked. He spoke to Connie in a little more civil tone.
“Yes, it is indeed, and this is also my daughter Agnes,” Connie replied.
“Mammy, what’s going on?” Agnes asked, confused.
“It’s all right, dear, sit down, everything is going to be all right, we’ll sort this out,” Connie answered Agnes in a very kind voice.
“But, Mammy . . .” Agnes began, but was cut off by the policeman. “Do what your mother tells you, yeh little bitch, or you’ll get a clout from me,” he barked. Agnes sat. For one half-hour they all sat there in silence. Had Dolly not let out a little sob and whimper, they would probably still be sitting there now.
“Oh, go on, cry now, you little pup, ya,” the policeman broke the silence in response to Dolly’s cry. That’s when Connie spoke, and for Agnes the world changed.
“Don’t worry, Garda, my husband will straighten all this out when he gets in from work.” Slowly the two daughters looked over toward their mother in simultaneous disbelief. “I used to have a maid, you know,” Connie said to the officer.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It must have been pity. For, once the policeman was told that Connie’s husband would not be home that afternoon or indeed any other afternoon, his whole manner and demeanor changed. He sent for an ambulance for Agnes’ mother, and once Connie was admitted to the Mater Hospital he even drove the two girls home. On the way, of course, he gave Dolly a stern lecture on the evils of crime and warned her that she was so close to being sent to a home for “bad” girls. This home for bad girls, from his description, was two bus stops past hell. Anyhow, Dolly swore on her father’s grave that she would never get in trouble again, and when the policeman was gone, Agnes was still in too much shock and fear even to talk to Dolly. They both fell asleep in the armchairs by the fire.
The next morning, Agnes awoke to find herself the woman of the house. At thirteen years of age, she had a home to run and a young child to rear. The day went downhill from there, for by lunchtime the hospital had discharged Connie with a handful of sedatives, realizing that they could medically do no more. Now Agnes was to be virtually a mother of two. She did not make it down to Moore Street that day, and Marion, mistakenly thinking that she and Agnes had fallen out, didn’t call until the next day. On seeing Marion, Agnes was delighted. She threw her arms around her and hugged her tightly. For the first time in two days, Agnes felt like she was not alone.
Over the next few days, Connie began to improve some, and Agnes took to the job-search trail yet again. Day after day she returned unhappily without a job, but each day found her mother getting better and better. Until, after two weeks, it was as if the incident had never happened. It was a temporary respite, but still a welcome one. After four weeks and still no job, Agnes was really beginning to despair.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get a job,” she told Marion one day as both of them sat by the stall in Moore Street.
“I know where there’s a job,” Marion announced very simply.
“What?” Agnes thought she had misheard.
“I said I know where you can get a job.”
“Where?”
“Here in Moore Street, working on a stall.” Marion smiled and crossed her arms. Agnes smiled right back at her.
“Me? Me working on a stall? I couldn’t sell,” Agnes dismissed herself straight away.
“You wouldn’t have to sell; well, not at first anyway. At first you just help out, build the stall in the mornings, collect stuff from the markets, clean the fruit, and at nighttime take the stall down. It’s simple.”
Agnes thought about it for a moment, working in Moore Street. She looked up and down this wonderfully colorful, musical street that already had been so much part of her childhood.
“But, Marion, your mother isn’t busy enough to employ you and me, and she’s hardly going to sack you.” Even as she was speaking these words, Agnes could see an impish little look in Marion’s eyes.
“It is for your mother, isn’t it?” Agnes asked. Marion shook her head.
“Not your mother?” Marion shook her head again. “Then who?”
“Nellie Nugent,” Marion announced. Agnes’ eyes widened, her mouth opened wide, and her jaw dropped. She spun her head around to look across the street at the same Nellie Nugent.
“Nellie Nugent. Nellie Nugent with a face that could turn the tides? Nellie Nugent with an arse so big you could park your bicycle in the crack of it? Nellie Nugent with a face like a cow licking piss off a nettle?”
Marion began to giggle and laugh, for it was indeed her own descriptions of Nellie Nugent that Agnes was now reciting back to her. “Yes,” she cried through the laughter. When Marion eventually stopped laughing and gathered herself, she went on to explain. “I’m sorry, Agnes, it’s just that she was asking my mother who you were. You know, she says to me mam, ‘Who’s that girl that hangs around your stall all day, and has she nothing better to be doing?’ Mammy just told her that you came here every day after you were out looking for work. So you know Nellie, she said to me mammy, ‘If she wants work I’ll give her work, I’ll give her plenty of work.’ I didn’t think it would be fair not to mention it to you.” Again Marion burst into laughter, and this time so did Agnes. Nellie Nugent looked across the street over her shoulder with that scowl on her face, and the two girls stopped laughing abruptly.
“Careful,” Marion said through her teeth. “Me mother said that she could hear a five-pound note dropping at five hundred paces.” And the two girls howled with laughter again and now had to hide behind the stall. As they crouched there, Marion became a little more serious. “Agnes, stalls here are handed down from mother to daughter. We just don’t get new people in here. You mightn’t think it, but it’s a great honor to be asked, if she really is asking, that is.”
Whether Nellie Nugent’s offer of a job was genuine or not, Agnes didn’t have time to think about it. For the very next day she was offered her first position. Agnes had called into Walker’s Rainwear Limited, a huge sewing factory that employs nearly five hundred girls. Lo and behold, within thirty minutes of filling out her name and address on an application form, she was hired, and began work the next day, making buttonholes.
Walker’s Rainwear Limited had been making gabardine rainwear and trench coats for fifteen years. They depended heavily on orders from the European mainland countries, whose military contracts kept the place going. Now they had expanded. In America the trench coat was becoming all the rage for the man in the street. Walker’s was sending them over there by the boatload. The key to the success of the company was, of course, the young girls that worked for very little money. The rag trade at this time was exploitive everywhere, and if Walker’s had a good side it would be fair to say that it was a little less exploitive than some. Every girl that had completed her three months’ probation was given a free trench coat. The company was unionized. The girls had regular tea breaks, and the working week was only forty-five hours. Every new girl started on the buttonholer, then moved to the flat machines, then to the overlocker. The process of moving as far as the overlocker took about a year. Not for Agnes. She proved to be really adept with the machines and was overlocking by the time she received her free coat. Her wages of one pound eighteen shillings and six-pence was over five times her mother’s widow’s pension. So not only did life improve at home, Agnes could even spend a little on herself. After a hard week’s work, Agnes’ treat was to take Marion to the Metropole Cinema on Friday night. There they would sit licking their Orange Maid ice pops, and chewing away on a bar of Cleeves toffee. The two girls were enthralled by the movies, every movie—although they did have a penchant for Boris Karloff horrors. It was during the interval at one of these that Agnes was fired by an idea that she had not had since the night her father died. The usual adverts were running when suddenly the screen was filled with a scene of a forest in the fall. Technicolor at its best. The picture took Agnes’ breath away. Brown, gold, red, orange, green, and blue. It was stunning. Then came the smiling faces of happy people, big cars, fashionable clothes. And the voice-over.
“Your new life awaits you in beautiful Canada.”
Canada! Agnes’ eyes opened wide.
Marion frowned. “Canada? Where’s that?” she asked Agnes.
“Beside Greenland,” Agnes answered without taking her eyes from the screen.
Marion shrugged. “I’m no fuckin’ wiser now.” She went back to licking her lolly.
Agnes watched and listened.
“Call in and talk to us at the Canadian Embassy and soon you too could be on your way to the most beautiful country in the British Empire. Assisted passage is only twenty pounds. We need people just like you.”
And then it was gone. The picture, but not the idea.
From the public phone outside the canteen in Walker’s, Agnes made the call the following Monday. The girl in the Canadian Embassy sounded really nice. She told Agnes that there were plenty of jobs available in Canada and described how beautiful Toronto, her own home, was. She took Agnes’ address and told her the application for assisted passage would arrive by post within days. She didn’t, however, ask Agnes her age. To Agnes’ delight, the letter arrived from the Canadian Embassy two days later. She did not open it until that night. Her mother was asleep, and Dolly, back to her wayward ways, had still not arrived home. The flat was quiet, and she spread the papers over the table. There was lots of information, but only one form to fill out, Agnes was glad of that. She began answering the questions, filling in the answers as neatly as she could, in pencil. It took her over an hour to finish. She read it over and over again, and when she was satisfied she had done her best, she sealed the prepaid envelope and left the flat to post it straight away. As Agnes was coming down the stairs she could hear the thud of heavy feet coming up. On the next landing she met the policeman.
“Do you live here, in this building?” the policeman asked her.
“Yes,” she said. And she knew.
“Do you know the Reddins?” he asked.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Agnes’ heart was breaking. Marion squeezed her hand. Dolly looked tiny, standing there before the judge, flanked by two huge policemen. The arresting officer gave his account of the burglary. He was convinced, he said, that there were at least three young wans involved. However, the one he caught, Dolly, refused to give any other names. Dolly looked over her shoulder at her sister. Both were close to tears, and yet they smiled at each other. The judge, a severe-looking woman with her glasses halfway down her nose, stared at the child. She tut-tutted and looked around the room.