Literary Biography

MARY HENEGHAN

I came to writing exceedingly late in years. Following retirement, in 2008 I moved to San Jose to avoid the perilous Michigan winters. As any sane person would do. In 2014, for health reasons, I moved to San Bruno, and to my delight ‘discovered’ the San Bruno Senior Center and the Thursday Writing Group. Not a particularly social woman – I lived way out in the bush in Michigan – the Thursday meetings were a wonderful introduction to my new city. The members were smart, literary people with kind hearts. I hold in deep affection members who no longer attend: Dave, Mary-Stella, Greg, and Bardi, the Director Fine Arts Galleria (San Mateo), whose high-caliber standards were reflected in their witty, imaginative and beguiling work.

An amateur, my writing is a hodge-podge: essay, poems, and the inevitable memoirs. I have been fortunate in submissions to the San Mateo Literary Arts Fair, and have had work published in “Carry The Light” and “Fault Zone”

MY GRANDPARENTS

Mary Heneghan

In England, V.E. Day (Victory over Europe) was a great day. I remember hearing everyone talking about it and seeing huge alphabet letters in the newspapers.

We’d been evacuated to the countryside; our house and car were demolished by the Lufthansa. To the adults, it wasn’t a surprise. Birmingham was on the edge of the Black Country, the heart of the Industrial Revolution. Coventry, thirty miles away, was a major supplier in the war effort, and, like Dresden, was destroyed by saturation bombing. Now we lived on the second floor and attic of a requisitioned Victorian house, and I was in a new school, and all the kids talked about was the street party for V.E. Day. I’d no idea what V.E. Day was, but someone said “No more bombing”, so that’s why everybody was happy.

Actually, I didn’t get to go to the party, Mommy said no. Now I know why: husband overseas in service for over four years already, four children to care for, and teaching at the local, abysmally funded, Catholic Elementary school. Food required coupons, and with three growing boys, was scarce in our house. Even bread required coupons; there was nothing to spare, let alone provide for “parties”.

Some Sundays my mother would walk to Moseley, the next district, and take a bus to Small Heath, I’d no idea why. One Sunday, she made sure we had clean face and hands and we walked with her. It was a long way to the bus and I probably whined. She said we were going to visit Granny and Grandpa. I said, Who? and she said, “My mother and Father”. That really seemed funny to me. She was a grown-up, how could she have parents.

After the bus, more walking and then she said: “We’re here. Mind your manners”, and rang the bell. A lady answered and we walked down a narrow hallway into a sitting room. Mommy introduced each of us to another lady who sat in the middle of the couch, parallel to the fireplace. She had white hair and was kind of plump and I was to kiss her cheek. Michael, my brother, did the same, then we repeated with the man sitting on one of the dining room chairs at the table by the window. He had a very bald head and wore a three-piece suit and a marvelous striped shirt. It had a shiny hard collar that you could put on and off, sort of like a necklace.

So, this was Granny and Grandpa. We sat quietly and listened as Mommy talked to Granny. My mother seemed a bit strange, subdued, I’d say now. Granny didn’t say much, and the lady who answered the door served cups of tea. Turned out she was my Aunt Margaret, not a servant, though over the years I found that was the role Granny seemed to favor for her. In fact, once I was grownup, and reflected to my mother that my aunt was very attractive: blond hair, blue eyes, lovely smile, why had she not married? Her answer: Margaret was told by her mother that her duty, as the youngest, required she stay single and look after her parents. Granny had also told my mother that she should go to work at fourteen to support the family. It was only when the church intervened, in the form of Father Drinkwater, who saw Teresa’s potential, and persuaded Granny to permit her to be trained as a teacher. After he died, my mother would visit his grave and say a prayer.

We went again to Granny’s house on several occasions and found we liked Grandpa a lot. He had a deep voice, a bristly mustache and wore metal-framed glasses. Best of all, he had a workshop in the yard, next to the outside lavatory. He was a retired cabinet maker and his trade was carpentry, so his tiny shop was filled with a workbench and wonderful smells: pots of brown stuff, stains and paints were shelved opposite the bench. His tools hung on the wall over the bench: shiny saws, each for a specified use, awls, drills and bits ranging in size from thumb to forearm, files, both delicate and coarse, and the huge wooden block planes which rested, like sleeping animals, on the workbench. All for hand use of course.

Grandpa was more comfortable in the shop than when sitting formally with Granny. There, he didn’t wear a suit or that delicious collar, and rolled up his sleeves. To keep them up, he wore tiny metal armbands, like small-sized slinkies. He and Michael liked each other. Mike especially liked being greeted by Grandpa, who always asked, “And what school are you in now?”, as if it changed every few months. Mommy said that when our house was bombed Grandpa was under the kitchen table and had been hit by shattered glass. She didn’t tell me which house he was in, but I see now it must have been his, otherwise he wouldn’t be still alive.

We weren’t told when he died, but did know when Granny died sometime later. Much was withheld from children in those days. Years later, I learned some of the hidden aspects of family life. In fact, I’d been married, given birth, and was living in a far country when, on a visit home, my mother’s seemingly inconsequential remark set my world askew. God Knows, we were not talking about sex; no-one talked about sex in that household. The Catholic Church, like many others of Christian persuasion, was granite faced about sex and the control of members’ bodies. Here’s what my mother said, “You know, I wasn’t told about the facts of life (her euphemism) when I got married”. I was horrified. There’s a rather famous story about that very happenstance and its lasting effects.

“Why on earth not?”, I said, more loudly than necessary. “Well,” my mother said: “Some time later I asked her why, and she said, ‘Oh, I just couldn’t’”. Evasive, self-serving, and also cruel; but I need to remember: Granny was born in the nineteenth century amid the strictures of Victorian society, when it seems that women were simply puppets with charm. Young women who could afford the surgery would have their lower two ribs removed in order to satisfy the requirement of a “wasp waist”: nineteen inches was desirable. My mother would repeat on occasion, “You must suffer if you want to be beautiful”; brain washing takes many forms. Children were to be “Seen but not heard”, those who could afford it sent their male children, when seven years old, to boarding school for the majority of the year. For the less fortunate, females began work in the cotton mills at