To Have and To Hold
A stirring saga of a nurse who only wants to do her duty in World War Two – and who ends up having to make an agonising choice. Set in Ireland and Birmingham, this is the latest from emerging star of the genre Anne Bennett.Carmel Duffy is the eldest child of a brutal and abusive marriage, and she can’t wait to leave home. She’s equally determined to have no husband or children of her own – what she wants more than anything is to be a nurse. As soon as she turns eighteen, she heads for Birmingham and begins her training.With her beautiful auburn curls, she draws plenty of attention and her resolve to concentrate on her career is tested when Dr Paul Connolly comes onto her ward and into her life. Gradually he wins her heart, and they agree to marry, both certain that they want no children. They have valuable jobs to do – all the more so when World War Two looms. But those years will change everything: their relationship, their priorities, their very characters. Carmel will find that the future is very different to the one she thought she wanted for so long…
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To Have and to Hold
ANNE BENNETT
To my eldest grandchild and onlygranddaughter Briony Wilkeswith all my love.
Table of Contents
Carmel was positively mesmerised by the bustling docks at Belfast. She could barely wait to board the mail boat anchored in the dock, fastened tightly to the solid concrete bollards with ropes as thick as a man’s forearm. Yet still the boat moved ever so slightly and Carmel tingled all over as she wondered how it would feel to be aboard that vessel and moving out into the open sea.
Just a little later she stood at the rails and watched the shores of Ireland disappear. She felt not homesickness, but relief, and she gave a defiant toss of her head that set her auburn curls dancing, while the excitement shone in her flashing dark brown eyes as the boat ploughed its way through the waves. Many were sick as the boat listed from side to side, including the nursing nuns that she was travelling with, but Carmel discovered her sea legs and explored the mail boat from end to end.
She was quite disappointed to leave the boat in Liverpool, yet as she and the nuns boarded the train for New Street Station in Birmingham, her insides turned somersaults with excitement—and a little trepidation. From the station she would be taken to the nurses’ home attached to Birmingham’s General Hospital where she would live for four years. She could barely believe that she was really here at last, and just as far from her family as she had wanted to be. She had known she wouldn’t feel free of her father’s dominance until she reached the shores of Britain. From now on, she decided, her life was to be her own. She would start the same as all the other probationers and no one need know about her earlier life at all. She would try to scrub it from her mind and forget it had ever happened.
But as the train rattled over the rails, taking her to her new life, she allowed herself to remember with great relief all she was leaving behind, like the abject terror her brutal father had always induced in her till she didn’t know that there was any other way to feel, and regarded herself as worthless and of no account.
She would never forget her horrifying schooldays, especially that awful day when she was about seven, when Breda Mulligan, the post mistress’s daughter, had pushed her face close to Carmel’s and said, ‘My mammy said I am not to play with you because you are dirty, smell bad and have nits in your hair.’
It had all been true. Carmel remembered then how the other children had formed a circle around her and chanted tunelessly in the school yard, ‘Carmel Duffy has nits in her hair, nits in her hair, nits in her hair.’ Time and again she had tried to break out of the circle, but the children held firm and pushed her back in. Even now, years later, she recalled crying with helplessness and fear. As the tears had trickled down her dirty face, they mingled with the snot from her nose that she wiped away with the sleeve of her ragged cardigan. ‘Filthy, snotty Duffy,’ Breda had cried with disgust, and they had all taken up the call. Eventually, one of the teachers, Mrs Mackay, had saved Carmel, scolded and scuppered the children and took Carmel inside to clean her up, but the damage had been done.
After school, the children had been waiting for her, but Mrs Mackay had anticipated that and she left her down at the house. House, huh, more like a shack—and Carmel had been mortified at her teacher glimpsing the hovel she lived in.
Once, Carmel imagined, the small cottage walls had been whitewashed and the thatch thick, but long ago the neglected thatch had had to be removed and lay in a sodden, rotting heap beside the house. The only roof they had then was of corrugated iron, and the sides of the house were reduced to bare stone. The shabby and ill-fitting door was hanging off its hinges, one of the grimy windows covered with cardboard after her father, in a rage, had put his fist through it, and outside was a sea of mud. Carmel wanted to curl up and die with shame.
After Mrs Mackay had told her mother why she had brought Carmel home, her mother, Eve, had waited only until Dennis left the house before boiling up a large pan of water on the fire. She scrubbed Carmel from head to foot, kneading at her hair until her scalp tingled, and then washed her clothes in the water and dried them before the fire.
It made no difference: it was too much fun hounding someone for any of the bullies to want to stop, and if they were inclined to, Breda would invent some other taunt so that Carmel began to dread going to school. In the end, Mrs Mackay suddenly found she had many jobs to do inside at lunchtime with which she needed Carmel’s help, and when she found the child had arrived with no dinner, which was usually the case, she would always say she couldn’t finish her own and share it with her.
