Page 62 of The Start of the Story
Iwantedto say, ‘Well, that’s a fat lot of good to them now, isn’t it?’ but didn’t. Just because I didn’t believe, and thought that the religion that had caused grief-stricken parents to have to bury their babies secretly in a resting place marked withwhat they probably thought was a heathen symbol ought to keep very, very quiet right now – well. It wasn’t my place. Through recording people talking I’d heard what previous generations had had to go through. Folklore wasn’t a synonym for pretty. It wasn’t all household charms and lights guiding you through a bog. There was blood at the heart of it. Folk tales were the smooth edge that made you not notice the razor underneath.
Fairyland beneath the stone. The stone that must not be lifted for fear of disturbing the Little People, who lived a life away from man, that could be heard at midnight if you put your ear to the stone. Stories told by the grieving, to help ease their consciences and their sorrow.
My throat squeezed. ‘What do we do?’
His head came up, watching his brother, who was walking around the stone now, gently sprinkling water on the site and praying in Latin. ‘First, we watch and remember,’ he said quietly. Then, with a lift of his chin and a sideways look to me, ‘Then we all head into town and have a bloody good meal, quite a lot to drink, and we talk about the future.’
I opened my mouth to protest, but a quick kiss came out of nowhere to silence me. ‘Eamonn can drive us. He doesn’t drink.’ A fond glance at his brother, who was standing praying now. ‘He’s a great lad, except for the Church thing.’
I thought of all those parents, all that guilt. All that sadness. It would have been there, even if their babies had been properly buried – they would still have felt a guilt and an awful aching unhappiness for that hole in their lives. The loss bound us together somehow – my loss of a husband and the desire to keep the Fairy Stane intact for the sake of my memories. Their loss of their babies, and the Stane standing for all the graves that would never be marked.
Grief and loss. Then I looked over at Connor, who was watching Eamonn continue to perform a baptism ritual andthought,And a future. They might have gone on to have more children, children who lived. I can go on and have a life. An end doesn’t have to mean the end of everything.
These parents had done what they could and I thought, with a tingle of possibility, to honour them I could write the story of those parents; maybe even find out their names and where they’d lived. I could give them another life, linking the folklore of the stone to what hadreallygone on here. Maybe, wherever they were now, they’d know that their children were not forgotten.
26
1963
Mr and Mrs Turner followed the old sexton up along the overgrown path. Ironically, this was the ‘new’ part of the cemetery, although to them it looked less cared for than the old part, which bore jutting monuments of staggering Victorian hideousness.
Eventually he stopped and held out a hand. ‘’Ere is where we puts ’em,’ he said, coughing around his Woodbine. ‘Nice spot. Lovely view.’
Mrs Turner mopped at her eyes. ‘They never told us…’ she half whispered, her voice competing with the wind. ‘They took her away and we never knew…’
Her husband put his arm around her. ‘Now, lass,’ he said, not unkindly, his own voice somewhat thick. ‘Don’t take on.’
‘I’m sorry, Peter.’ She made an obvious attempt to straighten her back and take in her surroundings. ‘It’s just that seeing the place…’
‘I know, love.’ He patted her arm. ‘I know.’
‘We buries ’em proper.’ The gravedigger nodded, wiping his hands down his shiny trousers. ‘Reverent, like. Not so long ago they wouldn’t have been allowed in…’ he took a run at theword, ‘…con-se-crated ground, but—’ he coughed liberally ‘—now they’ve changed the rules. Babbies can go straight to heaven now, ’parently. Dunno what was stoppin’ ’em before, like, but there you go.’
He looked at the bereaved parents, him in his good suit and overcoat, her in a two-piece and tidy little slingbacks that were all stuck up with the mud. They’d dressed up smart to come out to see where their little one lay – that was nice, he thought. Respectful.
‘But no headstones.’ Mr Turner addressed him directly.
‘Nope.’ The sexton thought about spitting but decided against it. ‘Mass grave, y’see. All the babbies that doesn’t…’ Showing unusual sensitivity, he changed tack. ‘All them little ones, they keeps each other company. All in there.’ A grubby fingernail indicated the tiny plot. ‘I keeps it nice.’
Mrs Turner bent and put her tiny posy of primroses on the shorn grass. ‘She wasn’t christened,’ she said, through tears. ‘She never got to be christened. But we were going to call her Primrose, weren’t we?’
Mr Turner and the gravedigger, united in male embarrassment, watched as she gently touched the ground next to the flowers. ‘Sleep well, our little Primrose,’ she said softly.
Then she took her husband’s arm, and they walked back to the waiting car, past all the properly marked graves of those who had lived and died.
Now – A Year Later
‘Put your hand there… that’s it. Move it gently… careful now.’
‘Is that it?’
‘Nearly. There. Can you feel that? Now, here, lift this, very, very slowly, until you feel…’
‘I think I’ve got it… oh, feck!’
The car leaped forward, jerked and stalled again. Connor pulled a face. ‘I told you, I’m not cut out for this driving yoke,’ he said.
‘Hill starts are always difficult.’ I tried to sound sympathetic, but, in reality, teaching Connor to drive would have tested the patience of a saint, and I decided to buy him some more driving lessons for Christmas this year. Last year’s Christmas present, the plastic centurion, had pride of place on the new shelving in the living room, but this year there would beproperpresents. A proper dinner – I’d already bought and stuffed the turkey. We’d asked Eamonn over but he was doing the official ‘family’ thing, and I still hadn’t met the rest of the O’Keefe clan, because we were ‘taking things slowly’, according to Connor, or ‘avoiding them’, as I put it. Connor was working on researching othercillínin England, being a visiting lecturer in Irish History at York and generally achieving a medal in ‘not going home to be nagged’.
