MY DAPPLED LIFE - A QUILT OF MEMORIES. CHAPTER SIX. MEETING SEAN WHITTLE

 

Luky. Photograph taken by Sean 

CHAPTER SIX

MEETING SEAN WHITTLE

My three years at the library were productive ones.  I had obtained the shorthand and typewriting diplomas which would put so many pots of stew on my table in the busy years that were to follow.  I also gained the elementary diploma in librarianship although unfortunately I had failed the lower diploma which I wrote the following year.  But I was geared up to repeat the exam the following year.

I met a man called Sean Whittle who was a trainee miner in the town.  The first time I stamped his book in the library, he fell in love with me.  He was an Irishman who had left his country for Italy at the age of fourteen, believing he had a call to the Catholic priesthood.  By the time he was nineteen and was three months away from making his perpetual vows he decided that this was not the life for him and he returned home to Ireland.

He had had a hard life since then.  The day after he arrived home his mother, who was also his best friend, had died.  His father’s housekeeper told me years later that she had been dying for weeks but nobody had written to tell Sean.  The housekeeper, Kate, said that Sean’s mother willed herself to remain alive so that she could see her son before she closed her eyes in death.  When they brought him, now aged nineteen after years of study in Rome, to the hospital, his sister told him to walk around his mother’s bed and her eyes followed him, so he knew he had been recognised.  

He and his brothers were in the kitchen at home with Kate the following day, when a knock came to the door.  There was nobody at the door when they opened it.  Then the process was repeated.  Again, nobody was outside.  The third time Kate told them not to go to the door, there would be nobody.  “Your mother has died,” she said.  And so she had.

His father and mother had been activists and had always been more interested in politics than in getting rich.  There was no money to support Sean up so he went to London in search of a job.  He became a bar tender.  There was a period when only the Salvation Army saved him from starvation.  He had unending appreciation for the Salvation Army because they did everything they could for the indigent, yet refused to proselytise.

During the last seventeen years of his life he would run almost daily soup kitchens for the poor and when people offered money provided they could evangelise, he always refused permission.  He did, however, insist that the men (there were few women in his food queues) would take off their caps and say grace.  

Sean was still starving in London when one day one of the many men who had been fed and helped by his parents passed him in the street.  Seeing the state Sean was in, he took him home and took care of him until Sean got a job in a hospital where he worked for two years.  He did quite well nursing in the hospital and rose in the ranks. 

Sean was a reticent man and it was difficult to explain even to those who thought they knew him how startlingly good he really was in his heart.  

The Italian government was advertising for interpreters to accompany their miners in South Africa and Sean got the job.  The miners were all earning more money than he did.  So he decided to resign and joined the Government Mines Training School in the capacity of learner miner. 

Sean and friend at the mine

When he had finished part of his course, his parish priest persuaded him to go to a seminary to resume his priestly studies.  He agreed but six months later finally abandoned his ambitions with regard to the priesthood.  Thereafter he got the opportunity to continue his mining training in my home town.  On the way to choir practice in the parish church, accompanied by a friend named Benedict, he stopped at the library.  When they left, he told Benedict: “There is a blonde in that library, and if she were a Catholic I’d marry her tomorrow.”

“She’s Catholic,” Benedict said.  “She goes to Mass.  I’ve seen her.”

Next Sunday Sean went to Mass three times; at six, at eight and finally at ten where my family and I appeared.   

I could see that he loved me from the start. From the beginning, Sean seemed to be a very special person and I tried to put a distance between us because I thought: “Mr Whittle is such a good man.  I mustn't hurt him.”  

Eighteen months later I was working evening duty.  I had long been reconciled with my colleague, the one with whom I had had the tiff in Mr Riet's office.  She was somewhat psychic and was reading my tea cup.  I had been corresponding with a student with a surname beginning with M and she showed me a perfect M in my tea leaves.  Afterwards, both of us realised it had actually been a W for Whittle upside down. I daresay we could have turned it into an X too, if Sean's name had been Xittle.

I went to the reading room with an armful of newspapers and journals and started taking down the old ones.  Sean was reading the papers.  He gave me his Louisa May Alcott's Professor Bahr look and we were alone in the reading room. I started chatting with him.  He told me that he had resigned from his job and that he was going back to Ireland.  I remember feeling a pang of pain in my heart.  “But Mr Whittle loves me,” I thought.  “Why is he leaving? He's never even told me how he felt about me.”

To my surprise I saw him back at Mass in the weeks that followed, driving himself home in a huge automatic car.  I could not imagine what had happened.  Then my parents, unaware of his feelings for me, got a lift from him and after that he started visiting us.

Many years after we had married, I asked him why he had not gone to Ireland after telling me so.  He said:  “You were so sweet to me that evening,  So I decided to give it a try for another year.  But I bought a car so that I might be able to visit you.”

From the time I had been about fourteen I had hesitantly wanted to become a nun as have many young girls at convent schools, but my mother said I should wait until I was twenty-one.  I was nineteen now and I found myself becoming ever more attracted to Sean.  I fought this feeling but one day I realised that my love had become greater than my resistance.

When my mother found out she was hesitant.  She might not have wanted me to be a nun but she wasn't keen for me to marry Sean either.  In love as I was, none of my mother's objections availed.  Sean liked her and greatly regretted the tension between us at the time.  But he showed me his own mother’s words, shortly before her death, in the last letter she ever wrote to him in Italy:   “One day we will all be kneeling together around the Holy Lamb of God”. 

My father once quoted a Bible text to me about division between family members which had given him comfort when he was trying to clear things up in his mind.  He liked Sean but he loved my mother.  Eventually Sean and I obtained permission to marry.

*Some names have been changed