Pack Up Your Troubles
The latest heartrending tale of hope and heartache from bestselling author Anne Bennett. Perfect for fans of Katie Flynn and Annie Groves.Maeve Brannigan is only eighteen when she leaves her rural home in County Donegal and moves to Birmingham, where she falls in love with handsome Brendan Hogan. But married life isn’t as idyllic as she’d imagined, and when Maeve falls pregnant with their first child, she soon realises that Brendan isn’t the man she thought he was.Saddled with a violent husband and with two young’uns needing her protection, Maeve bears her life as best she can. After a particularly vicious attack, she is forced to flee back to Ireland – but her presence is greeted with open hostility by the close-knit catholic community that she was once so eager to escape. Driven away to face her abusive husband, Maeve’s future looks bleak. Will she find the strength to break free and make the prospect of a better life a reality rather than a distant dream?
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Copyright © Anne Bennett 2000
First published in 2000 by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photographs © Gordon Crabb (woman); John Topham /TopFoto (street scene).
Anne Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely 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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Source ISBN: 9780007547807
Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780007547814
Version: 2017-09-08
I am dedicating this book to Denis
for the immense help and unfailing support he has given me over the years. Thank you.
Table of Contents
Maeve Brannigan couldn’t believe she was actually leaving the little farm in Donegal where she’d lived all of her eighteen years. It had been worth the cajoling and pleading, her mother’s tears and her father’s bad humour that had made him moody and snappy with them all. She’d survived it all, as well as the old biddies in the parish, who’d prophesied that no good would come of it, and did she think she ought to go when, after all, she was such a grand help to her mother, for wasn’t the woman herself always saying so?
Maeve had been brought up to have manners and it had only been that innate politeness that had stopped her screaming abuse at the interfering old gossips. Did they think she didn’t know all that? She was the eldest of seven and even when Maeve had begun work in the grocery store in the town when she was fourteen, there had always been a list of chores for her at home.
Well, now it was the turn of Kate and Rosemarie, who at eleven and twelve years of age were well able for it. Maeve was sick of being at everyone’s beck and call; fed up with the isolated farm, and of the suffocating small town where everyone knew everything about you and yours. Her total social life revolved around church activities, and the weekly dance, held only in the summer months, where she met boys she’d known for years, as familiar to her as her brothers and just as exciting. Few of them had any ambition and were content to live in Ballyglen all their lives, and expected the wives they would eventually take to be satisfied with that situation too.
Maeve decided it wasn’t for her. But she wasn’t to go to Dublin, or ‘God forbid’ London, a desperate place altogether, her parents claimed, and where she knew not a soul. No, she was to go to Birmingham where Maeve’s mother, Annie, whose maiden name had been O’Toole, had a brother called Michael.
Maeve knew of her Uncle Michael, though she’d never met him. He’d been in Birmingham since early 1919, when he’d met and married his English wife, Agnes, in just a couple of months, and had never been home since. Maeve also knew that no obstacles had been put in the way of his leaving his home, but in fact the reverse. He’d served in the British Army in the Great War and had come back in late 1918, a bitter and disillusioned young man. Ireland was in disarray, the troubles at their height and rebel gangs roaming the country. His family, terrified he’d be caught up in it all, had encouraged Michael to accompany a neighbour catching the emigrant boat for England. He’d ended up in Birmingham and had got a job – a grand job he’d said, in a foundry. But he was still Annie’s little brother and she wrote him regular letters of the family, and now was sure Maeve could lodge with him to see how she liked the place. In fact Michael had written her a very long, encouraging letter. Not only could she stay with them and welcome, he said, he could even get her a waitressing job in a café. He knew the owner, a Greek man by the name of Dolamartis, a good Catholic, and they went to the same church. He’d told Michael his assistant was leaving. Jobs were hard to find, her uncle said, and Maeve couldn’t afford to be too choosy. Maeve had no intention of being choosy at all and at the mention of a job and place to stay, her parents’ resistance finally crumbled. Maeve was on her way.
