Stepping into their mother’s shoes

Fr Jason Murphy's popular column, Let the Busy World Be Hushed, tells the story of one family's story of grief and how it impacted their lives...

It is the first in a triology telling the stories of six siblings whose journeys took different paths after the death of their mother in the early 1950s...

She watched as her sister Mary threw on her overcoat and tied a scarf over her head, venturing out into the dark of that New Year’s night as Margaret held the door ajar to light the front street as Mary took her father’s bicycle and freewheeled down the pass to the road bound for the village of Ballyhaise.

Her father had sent her, two shillings clasped in her hand, to cycle the three miles to the Parochial House to ask Fr Maguire to pray for his poor wife who was in the throes of labour within in St Felim’s Hospital in Cavan. He sat in silence beside the hearth, the poker in his hand, stoking the embers as he watched through tears, the sparks fly up the chimney, thinking of his beloved wife and the mother of his six children. Apart from the glow of the dying embers, only the flame of the Sacred Heart lamp, shimmering on its wick, gave hope to the darkness of this night as his three youngest children laying sleeping in their beds, unaware that their mother’s life was ebbing to its close and that neither she nor her newborn baby would ever return to their home at Treehoo Cross.

It was theirs to carry the burden in the days that followed, Margaret and her eldest sister Mary, theirs to cook and clean, theirs to fodder and sew as their father fell to pieces before their very eyes. She brought the younger children to school over the road on the cold January mornings as they wondered aloud on their way home whether she’d be there standing there, fornenth the hearth, turning a soda bread as they ran through the door only to find that their sister, Mary, though kind and loving too, was for all their days to come to be in their mother’s shoes. It was a suffering that was to shape the course of each their lives, these six siblings of two brothers and four sisters, the loss of their mother Mary Kate Philbin from the West of Ireland who had met their father Eddie Walsh along the streets of New York near a hundred years ago. Her absence was plain to see in every nook and cranny where she had laid her hand even down to the half a crown that she had put by in a tin on the mantlepiece after the geese, sold at the fair, saved for the nuns who would call in the springtime of the year.

For each and every year they called with the lengthening days, the Poor Sisters of Nazareth, collecting for the upkeep of their orphanages and old people’s homes, built in towns along the sea coast across Britain and Ireland and farther afield and on the feast of St Blaise. As the snowdrops peeked their heads above the ground, the knock came to the door as it had in the February days of all the years they had known and there standing on the frost covered street in the mid-morning light, the familiar face of Sr Teresine, who hailed from County Fermanagh, with a young novice at her side.

Unaware of the sadness that had befallen this warm and loving home along the road, she looked across Margaret’s shoulder wondering where was the smiling woman in the apron, who had never failed to greet them. The tears in the young girl’s eyes told the tale of great sadness they had carried since the dawning of the year, and as she beckoned the two nuns in for tea, the sight of poor Eddie, but a shadow of himself gazing to the depths of the fire undisturbed by their entrance left them without words in this kitchen that had become as familiar as the many hundreds of other kitchens they had visited from last year to this.

They came across manys the sadness on their travels, but a house of children left without their mother was the saddest loss of all, sensing the sheer emptiness of this home as they sipped their tea in the midst of silence and ate the currany bread presented on the side plates brought home from America, proffering a word of consolation from time to time but no words or conversation could distract Eddie from his pain. Where once the sound of children's voices were heard through the house, now silence reigned, each of the little ones having learned all too quickly that they must wait til their laughter could be heard again.

Margaret sat on the settle against the wall with a polite smile in deference to the Sisters, the low light of the sun illumining her face as Sr Teresine turned to deflect the sorrow and asked whether she was near finished school. She told the nun she’d be finished with the Master in Treehoo come the summer months whereupon she would stay at home to help Mary with the children or find a little job for herself.

The Sister who had watched her grow upon each year of her visit knew she was a bright girl and asked tentatively whether she would like to continue with her schooling, to which she replied with delight that she would but in the same breath asked how was that to be? It was then Sr Teresine turned to her father and told him that the sisters could provide Margaret with an education and with training thereafter if that would be his wish, if he allowed her to enrol in the Autumn, in a school far away in Co Cork and there she could continue her studies with other girls of a similar age.

Though Margaret’s face lit up with delight, the nun told her father, as they stood to go, not to make up his mind until the months had passed and that they would write and, if both he and Margaret agreed, she could join with them in the fall of the year. As they shook hands, Mary took from the tin on the Mantlepiece their mother’s last offering for the orphans in their care. And so as the two Sisters walked out into the Spring’s bright sunshine and waved goodbye from the gate at the road, little did those left standing in the door know that the nuns' visit would change the course of their lives and their living from now until evermore.