A Daughter’s Secret
A moving and gritty saga of loss, separation and finally hope, set in wartime BirminghamAgnes Sullivan is fifteen when her young brother Tom finds her drunk and crying in the lane near their farm. Her dancing teacher has raped her and abandoned her. Aggie is forced to leave home when she discovers she’s pregnant and Tom, barely a teenager himself, decides the teacher must pay for his actions.Aggie flees to Birmingham, but the safe haven she’s been promised turns out to be too dangerous to stay in. She’s left with few options until someone she would never have spoken to in her former life gives her the help she so desperately needs. But will World War One ruin her precarious hopes of a future?Anne Bennett’s sagas of Birmingham during the wars have won her many fans, as they are packed full of emotion, determination and authenticity. Regional sagas don’t come any better than this.
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ANNE BENNETT
A Daughter’s Secret
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This paperback edition 2008
1
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2007
Copyright © Anne Bennett 2007
Anne Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © JUNE 2008 ISBN: 9780007283576
Version: 2017-09-08
To my grandson Jake, the eldest Bennett boy, with all my love
CONTENTS
As Thomas John Sullivan drove the horse and cart past St Mary’s Catholic church on the way home from Buncrana, the nearest market town, the noon Angelus bell was tolling.
‘Dear Lord, but it’s perishing cold,’ his wife, Biddy, commented from the seat beside him. ‘The fields and hedgerows are still as heavily rimed with frost as they were this morning, for the sun hasn’t put in an appearance all day.’
‘Aye,’ Thomas John agreed, ‘it’s mighty cold, right enough. That’s Donegal for you. Sure, don’t we have the coldest of winters here at times?’
‘We do indeed. Is the child all right, Aggie?’
In the back of the cart, Aggie nursed her little brother, Finn, holding his body tight against her own, her warmest shawl wrapped around the two of them, and yet still he shivered.
‘He is all right,’ she said. ‘Just cold, like the rest of us.’
To divert him, Aggie said, ‘We’ll be home in no time now, and it’s meant to be cold, Finn, for it is nearly Christmas.’ She knew that Finn would know little of Christmas, or Santa Claus either, for he was only just turned eighteen months old. She saw a slight frown pucker his brow as she went on, ‘You’ll like Santa Claus, Finn. He brings good boys and girls presents.’
The child would, she knew, barely know the word ‘present’ either, for the Sullivan children had few of them. There was no money for such frivolities. But for Finn, the youngest, it would be different. Much had been made of him by all the family when he arrived. Aggie knew her mother had bought a few wee things in Buncrana that morning to fill his stocking on Christmas morning and she was looking forward to seeing his face.
‘Aye, nearly Christmas,’ Biddy said. ‘And then the turn of the year – 1898, I wonder what that will bring.’
Thomas John chuckled. ‘What would it bring, woman, but more of the same? Life seldom changes much, except we all get older.’
Aggie thought her father was right, and she was glad. She liked the familiarity of one day following the other predictable and safe. She had been twelve in June, so she had left school and now helped her mother in the home full time. She always looked forward to Saturday morning when she would go to Buncrana with her parents, leaving her brothers Tom and Joe to mind the farm. Her mother would sell their surplus produce in the market, like many other farmers, while Aggie went with her father to buy things needed for the farm. Since Finn’s birth, however, her primary task was to look after him while her parents were busy.
She didn’t mind this in the slightest, for it gave her a chance to meet up with her former classmates, and especially her best friend, Cissie Coghlan.
That day, though, it had been so cold that she had been glad to go home, and she was looking forward to getting into the warm house and out of the wind. When they passed the church she breathed a sigh of relief that they were not that far from home.
Tom and Joe were waiting for them in the yard, having heard the rumble of the cart. Thomas John brought it to a halt in the cobbled yard before the squat whitewashed cottage, scattering the pecking hens as he did so, and alerting the two dogs, who came from the barn barking a greeting.
