1. The Poor Bitch

9.30 a.m., Wednesday, 18 April 1956

‘Damn them all! I’m in flames!’ she muttered as she banged the breakfast dishes down on the table. ‘They won’t get me on this one.’ Sitting at the table in her red dressing-gown she glared around her miserable pokey flat at 17 Hume Street near Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green. ‘And that bastard of a landlord, Laurence Brophy, and his grasping wife, Gertrude – I’ll cook their goose: that letter to the revenue commissioners will make him think twice before he tries to push Mamie Cadden around again.¹ A bloody rent increase for this dive? He wants to get me out, that’s what he wants. It’s against the law; my bloody rent is fixed by the court.’ She chuckled when she thought of the revenue commissioners investigating the affairs of her landlord in his so-called South City Hotel at 24 South Great George’s Street. ‘Hotel my arse,’ she thought. ‘It’s a bloody guest-house. I bet he doesn’t pay a halfpenny tax on that either. Bloody Irish Catholic landlords, beggars on horseback that’s what they are; worse than the Protestant ones, and at least the Prods have some class, not like the Brophys.

‘Well, I’ve told the revenue commissioners who was really with me on that night in Meath in June 1938 when that child was abandoned. It’s about time the bloody truth came out. And I’ve told them who paid for Ellen Thompson’s abortion in 1944. They’re such hypocrites but it will be all over Dublin in a week; they won’t be able to keep their mouths shut.’

She reached over to the stove for the teapot and the stinging pain of arthritis shot up her right arm. She hadn’t been in top form for a few days what with the arthritis and Brophy trying to kick her out of her flat. Still, she had enjoyed writing the letter to the revenue, even if her handwriting was not like it used to be. She thought about an article she had seen in the Daily Mail about a cure for arthritis in the Canary Islands: ‘I’ll go in the summer. That’ll give them all something to talk about.’

She patted her mass of dyed blonde hair before taking some more tea. ‘And then there’s bloody Helen O’Reilly, Miss Blackcoat, or whatever her name was. I’m getting too old for this stuff. You’d think a woman of her age would be more careful. It’s not as if she was a spring chicken, she was definitely on the wrong side of thirty if not nearer forty. She didn’t get like that from saying her prayers. And now she’s dead outside on the footpath; same thing as happened to Brigid Breslin.’² An air embolism had caused their deaths – air entering the bloodstream and causing heart failure. It couldn’t have been helped though, she thought, it was an accident and accidents will happen. She had done everything she could. It wasn’t her fault that the woman had died. The same procedure had worked perfectly for hundreds of women and was much safer than the method she had used in the 1940s: the insertion of the sea-tangle tent. Her experiences with Ellen Thompson – for which she had received five years penal servitude in Mountjoy Jail for attempting to procure an abortion back in 1945 – had finished her with the sea-tangle tents. They were just too dangerous. Ellen Thompson had almost died and had of course blurted out everything to the police about Mamie; not about the man who paid for the abortion though – maybe the revenue commissioners would get a kick out of reading his name too.

No, her present method was more successful, though she had lost patients on this one too. But so what? If every doctor in the country was to be held responsible for every patient of his that died then there wouldn’t be a doctor or a surgeon left practising. She was bloody good at what she did and that was why they beat a path to her door. She hardly had to advertise anymore, everyone knew her. It wasn’t even as if that was the only service she performed: people came to her with dandruff, piles, baldness and, most profitably of all, with constipation, the national obsession of the day. She performed an enema to remember and her return list was substantial. She was a right little cure-all, a one-woman hospital, a healing woman, a kind of white witch like Biddy Early from Clare, who a century earlier had been famous for her cures. Except that Mamie was a fully trained midwife. She had done her training in the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street in 1925 and was very proud of it. She was a professional and they knew it. She was Nurse Cadden, that’s what they called her and that’s why they wanted to destroy her: jealousy and spite.

She thought back to her Rathmines days and the hostility she’d faced because she drove a red MG sportscar and they didn’t have the arse in their britches. She still missed that sportscar. It was the sexiest car in the Free State: KG 1647, she remembered it well. It had been imported from Wales. The looks of envy when she whizzed around town in it had to be seen to be believed. Once a man spat in her face! But there was lust in the eyes of the men too; she remembered that as well. It was odd, she didn’t really miss her big house, St Maelruin’s on the Lower Rathmines Road, but the car, the car! All the men thought that women should be scrubbing and cooking in the kitchen, having a baby each year until they died of thrombosis or high blood pressure. She remembered what she had heard back in Mayo about the place of women in society: ‘Keep them barefoot and pregnant,’ the boy had said as the others roared with laughter, a laughter that was serious as well as funny. Well, that was not for Mamie Cadden, she would fight them all, as she had all her life.

They could prove nothing anyway. There was no evidence that Helen O’Reilly was ever there. And how would they believe that a woman of Mamie’s years could drag the body of a pregnant woman out of her first-floor flat, down the stairs and up the street? After all, she would be sixty-five this year, not that she’d admit that to them. Then there was her arthritis. No, not even a Dublin judge and jury could be so stupid as to think that she could do a thing like that on her own! Not to talk of the commotion she would make dragging a body down the stairs. It would have awoken the whole street not alone the whole house.

Thank God for Standish O’Grady! He hadn’t let her down in her hour of need. He had come over when she called the night before and had advised her well: ‘Cover your tracks. They have nothing to link you to her.’³ The old saying was true: A friend in need is a friend indeed! If it weren’t for him she would have no one. Her family was useless. Her three sisters, Ellie, Teresa and Eliza were all dead – not that they had been of much use anyway even though she had given one of them good work in the nursing-home in Rathmines. Her brother, Joe, had let her down back in 1938. She had wanted him to post bail for her and, though he had agreed, he hadn’t turned up when she was remanded in custody along with her maid, poor, loyal, stupid, Molly O’Grady. Molly hadn’t even been with her on the night in question. She had told the revenue commissioners about this too. Joe came in the end but he shouldn’t have left them for all that time in that hellhole of a Mountjoy Jail. She blamed his wife, a national-school teacher with notions, totally under the thumb of the priests, and he without the backbone to stand up to her. They were trying to be respectable and would drop family for that. The only one of them with any backbone or loyalty was her cousin, Paddy Cadden, a carpenter who lived in Dublin. Blast them, she would take on all comers, she was not broken yet. Why had her father taken them away from the States back to this bloody godforsaken country? ‘I’d have been a great success in America,’ she thought. ‘With my business acumen I’d be a millionairess by now. I’m still an American citizen. They can’t take that away from me.’

The door of her flat was left ajar to see if she could hear anything from the street. She’d already been outside the front door looking at the crowd gathering. Two policemen had called earlier and she had taken them up to her room. She told them she had heard nothing during the night and that she had left the radio on, as she couldn’t sleep. She’d shown them her bandaged legs. When they’d told her about the woman’s body she had said, ‘God bless us. Sure it must have been a man that did that.’ That might put them off the track – or maybe she should have kept her big mouth shut. They were gone now but would be back again, she could be sure of that. They had persecuted her all her life, even before they had charged her with abandoning that child back in 1938, spreading rumours about bodies of seventeen babies being found in the garden of her house at 183 Lower Rathmines Road. Lies, damn lies and the gardaí had done nothing to scotch them though they knew the truth.

But now she was ready for them. There was nothing in the flat to connect her to Helen O’Reilly lying cold on the street outside. The reporters would be around too. She was looking forward to that. She liked them, at least you could have a bit of a laugh with them – not like the gardaí. She’d tell them about the time she landed a bucket of shite on top of Detective Tom Cryan. She’d given a man an enema that day and had a bucket of shite – enough to cover four acres – in the flat. Cryan and another guard had been following her around for days and as they stood on the street outside she emptied the contents of the bucket right on top of them out through the front window. They didn’t know what had hit them and she’d laughed for a week.⁴

Just then there was a light tap on the door. It was John Moran who lived upstairs with his mother. He was an unemployed baker and was friendly with Mamie. Decent working people with no airs and graces, she thought.

‘The gardaí are all over the place,’John spurted out. ‘They’ve found the body of a young woman outside Number 15. They think she’s been murdered. I want to ring my girlfriend to tell her. She was here with me last night.’

‘I know,’ said Mamie. ‘I saw you both on the stairs. Who was the young woman, do they know?’

‘They do,’ John replied. ‘They have her bank book. Her name is Helen O’Reilly. Can I use your phone to ring Lizzie?’

‘Tear away,’ said Mamie, easing herself into her chair so she could listen in on John’s conversation with his girlfriend, Elizabeth Burke:

‘Pat Rigney, the milkman from Lucan Dairies, was making deliveries to the street when he found the body at about half-six this morning. He was coming into Hume Street from Stephen’s Green when he saw what he thought was a bundle of clothes down the street. When he went down the street past the bundle he saw a leg sticking out from it. He went up to it and found that it was the body of a woman. He went round the corner and told a guard he met there.’

When he had finished giving his spectacular news to his girlfriend, he related it again to Mamie. She resumed her breakfast. ‘The poor bitch’, was all she said as she buttered another slice of bread.⁵

2. Mayo, God Help Us!

It had all started so hopefully. There was love and romance, travel and even a bit of money in Mamie’s background, which set her and her family apart in Ireland of the 1890s. Patrick Caden had emigrated to America where he had met Mary McLoughlin of Teirnard in County Mayo (about ten miles from where Pat himself hailed). Teirnard was a rugged, lonely place, which couldn’t have been more different from the teeming city of Scranton in Pennsylvania. They were married in 1891; Pat was twenty-seven years of age and his wife was a year older. He worked as a miner in this town that was at the forefront of the American industrial boom, whose fortunes depended solely on the coal-mining industry. Though it was 134 miles from New York City it attracted the immigrant Irish in their thousands with its promise of relatively well-paid work in the mines. The wages were low by American standards but to the poor immigrant Irish they were a godsend.

The young couple settled down in New Street in this rapidly expanding city and Pat went down the mines each day to earn his living. Their firstborn child was a healthy, fair-haired girl and both parents, particularly Pat, doted on her. She was born on 27 October 1891 and christened Mary Anne, soon becoming known only by her pet name of Mamie.¹ She was baptised in St Peter’s Cathedral in Wyoming Avenue by Fr Mangan on 15 November. Pat’s brother, Michael, and his wife, Bridget, acted as godparents at the ceremony. Another girl, Ellen, was born in August 1893 but she was not to survive childhood; they later gave the same name to a child born in 1899.

The young Caden family seemed set for the tough challenge which so many of the Irish in America faced at the end of the nineteenth century and which some, like the Kennedys, did with spectacular success. But their future was not to be an American one. Scranton was a hard, ugly place and the loss of their daughter, Ellen, hit them hard. When Pat’s father died in 1895 they were only too happy to return to Ireland and the family farm, far from the hustle and bustle of the city and coal-mining life.

The Ireland they found on their return was one which was changing rapidly. Charles Stewart Parnell, the great leader, had died, broken and defeated in Brighton in 1891 in the arms of his beloved wife, Kitty O’Shea. The land agitator, Michael Davitt, from Straide, was elected MP for South Mayo the year the Caden family returned to Ireland, though his great days as Land League leader were winding down. Still, the work of the league in bringing about land reform was proceeding apace. Now tenants could buy their own farms with government assistance – a revolutionary change in rural Ireland.

Pat Caden and his young wife and child were beneficiaries of all this when in 1911 they were able to purchase the Caden family smallholding, becoming owner-occupiers rather than tenants living at the whim of the landlord and his agent.² Rents were low and security of tenure had been established. Their house was the largest of the twenty in the townland of Doonbredia, boasting five rooms, which Pat later extended to six. With their American savings they opened a grocery shop in part of the house and built an extra outhouse which gave them a stable as well as a fowl house and a cowhouse. In 1901, they even had a domestic servant, sixteen-year-old Katie Donoghoe.³

They had seven children in all, of whom two did not survive infancy. Besides Mamie there was Michael Joseph, their only son whom they called Joe, born in 1897; Ellie, born two years later; Teresa, born in 1900; and Eliza, born in 1906. The new century saw the Caden family settle down to a life not untypical of the better-off small farmer in early twentieth-century Ireland but with a relatively small family by contemporary standards. They would have been termed a ‘respectable’ family, a step down from ‘strong’ farmers but way above the landless labourers in the social scale. They were the peculiar product of their times: the new Catholic lower-middle-class, literate and property owning. But things could not have been easy: it was a poor place, the land was poor, and their holding was remote. In 1897, famine stalked north Mayo but they survived; many not so far away from Doonbredia didn’t. ‘When we survived that we will survive anything,’ Pat Caden used to say.

With five women in the house the servant was soon let go. The family all attended school and all except their mother, Mary, could eventually read and write. They were a proud family and their mother’s illiteracy was carefully kept from the census takers.⁴ The whole family, we are told, was proficient in Irish as well as in English. Mamie never forgot her Irish and was still able to converse in it fifty years later.