Chapter 1: Childhood

There was nothing special about little Anne Tynan, she was a typical daughter of a poor Dublin family who lived in the maze of little streets between Pill Lane and the Quays, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Still a virgin, as any good Catholic girl was almost certain to be, she married at eighteen and moved in to live with her husband Stephen O'Driscoll in his mother's little terraced house. Sex was a painful surprise on her wedding night, for not even her mother had told her any of the facts of life. All the instruction she had received was that she was to obey her husband in everything. While sex soon stopped being painful, never in her whole marriage to Stephen did she get any pleasure from it; it was just something he did to her every night without fail, under the covers, in the dark, in the one position. It lasted a few uncomfortable minutes and then he rolled off her and was snoring within moments, while she lay there and leaked.

Anne had her plans for her children, which were the usual dreams of any mother then. Her sons would be brilliant, and one would work in a bank, which for her was the height of ambition. Another would become a priest. Others would have equally brilliant careers. Over the first four years she bore five daughters and no sons. This was, of course, God's will and Anne did not question it. In any case the children were not brilliantly clever; even she could see that.

Their fourth daughter, named Molly, was a quiet child who seemed little different from the others, until one day when she was three, Anne found her staring intently at a Bible, which she was holding upside down.

"What are you doing with that?" she asked the child.

"Nothing, mammy," replied the child, "I was only looking at the story."

"What story?"

"See here mammy, it says this man was thrown into the lye-own's den. What's a lye-own, mammy?"

Anne took it as a sign from heaven when she confirmed that her daughter could read a good few of the words in the bible, self-taught. She could only read upside down, since she had learned by watching her mother read the bible from the other side of the table. However, she read silently and swiftly, unlike Anne, who had to keep her finger on her place as she read, and say the words aloud, or she got lost.

From that day onwards it was decided that Molly would enter a convent and become a nun.

"If that were not the divine intention," Anne explained to Stephen, "why would she have been taught to read by a miracle?"

Stephen was run over by a passing carriage when Molly was five, and Anne stayed in the house with her mother-in-law, eking out a bare living by taking in washing from the soldiers in Kilmainham Barracks. Two years later she met a fifteen year old boy soldier called Rory O'Callaghan when he started to act as runner at the barracks, carrying washing too and from the barracks.

She was not yet thirty, but thought of herself as an old widow woman. Rory was lonely, a boy soldier many miles away from home, and she treated him like the son she never had. There was always hot soda bread to be had when he brought the washing, and he liked that. The volume of washing coming in to the little house grew steadily through his influence. Most of the soldiers for whom he was the runner cared little who did their laundry, so he brought all he could to Anne and she prospered. As she was conscientious about her work, and made minor repairs to frayed shirts at no charge, the word spread and she was soon making a comfortable living.