Walking Back to Happiness
Family saga set in Birmingham in the years following World War TwoHannah Delaney is a young woman with a secret. It is not one that she can share with her large family still back home in Ireland, and especially not with her dying sister. Hannah’s moved to England to build a better life, and has met and fallen in love with a young soldier. They intend to marry on his next leave, but then comes D Day, and he doesn’t return. Hannah is left alone and pregnant.Surrendering her baby to the nuns is the only option, and Hannah grimly picks up the pieces and goes to work in a Birmingham guesthouse. Common sense tells her to agree to marry sensible Arthur Bradley, but he too has a secret. And secrets will not remain hidden for ever…
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ANNE BENNETT
Walking Back to Happiness
This book is written for my mother Eileen Josephine Flanagan and is dedicated to her memory.
Contents
Hannah Delaney looked down at her sister, Frances Mullen, and knew she’d never leave her bed again. She felt tears prickle the back of her eyes as she reached for Frances’s yellow, emaciated hand, but she held them back. If Frances could be brave about her impending death, then so could she. ‘You’re a grand girl, Hannah,’ Frances said in little more than a hoarse whisper. ‘Thank you for coming.’
Hannah’s face flushed at the implied reproach. ‘You didn’t bother when I sent for you when my husband, Paddy, was coughing his guts up in the County Hospital,’ Frances might have said.
Hannah knew Frances must have been badly hurt but there had been a desperate reason why she’d not been able to come back when Paddy lay dying and one she could never share with Frances, nor with any of the family. Hannah had told Frances she had the ’flu and wasn’t well enough to travel. She hadn’t even come for the funeral and no one could guess how heartsore she was that she couldn’t come and mourn the man who’d always been more of a father to her than her own and maybe be a measure of support to her sister.
The townsfolk couldn’t understand it at all. ‘People have the ‘flu all the time and get over it,’ they’d said to Frances. ‘Why doesn’t she come for a wee visit now to see how you all are?’
‘Sure, isn’t she rushed off her feet with the fine job she has?’ Frances had answered the criticisms. But inside, she’d ached for the presence of her youngest sister. She’d reared her and had loved her like one of her own, but she seemed to have forgotten all that, for she’d not been near the place for three years.
But now she was here and suddenly to Frances it didn’t matter any more. There was little time to waste on censure and argument and Hannah certainly had no wish to quarrel. She’d always loved Frances dearly and she was saddened that she had such little time left.
‘Why wouldn’t I come?’ she said with a forced smile, giving her sister’s hand a gentle squeeze. ‘Aren’t you the only mother I ever knew and don’t I love you more than anyone in the whole world? If there’s anything I can do for you, you only have to say.’
Frances gave a wry smile and a little sigh. So, she thought, God does answer prayers, some prayers. He couldn’t spare her any longer and God knows at times she was tired enough not to care, but now Josie would be all right. She’d fretted about the child, worried to death that Hannah wouldn’t come, that she wouldn’t be able to ask her.
Frances studied her sister, while she framed the question she had to ask. She wasn’t worried Hannah would refuse. How could she? She’d taken Hannah in when she was just a day old, when their mother had died of childbirth fever. Frances’s third child, Martin, had been only a week old himself and she also had Miriam just fifteen months and Peter coming up to three yet she’d not hesitated to offer Hannah a home. And for that reason Hannah owed her a debt. ‘It’s Josie,’ she said. ‘Will you take Josie? Will you look after her when it’s … when it’s all over?’
‘Josie?’ That dark, secretive, plain child, the one Hannah hardly knew at all for she’d been born after she’d left the farm and always seemed to disappear whenever she’d come for her very occasional visits home.
She’d scarcely ever given the child a thought, for Frances had done what their own mother had done and had a large gap in the family and the nearest in age to Josie was Sam, who at twenty was eleven years her senior. Hannah knew from the letters her sister had written that Sam had been living in the mountains, working their grandparents’ farm since he’d left school at fourteen. If Josie was to go there, she’d become a maid of all work, her childhood would be over and Hannah well knew that.
But for God’s sake, there was a fine family of them. Surely to God one of them could look after their own sister?
But in her heart she knew she was the only one left. Peter had become a priest and was living away in the Scottish Highlands somewhere and poor Miriam was married to a man she had met on a brief visit to England. She returned with him to his home in Connemara where, according to Frances, they tried to scratch a living from the stones. At twenty-eight, she’d been married eight years and had eight children.
Miriam had not come home for her father’s illness or funeral either and gave the excuse she was almost on her time, but Frances had suspected she couldn’t afford to come. Even if she’d have offered a home to Josie, Hannah knew Frances wouldn’t have been happy sending her there.
