The Pull of the Stars(81)

Sister Luke said, You’re raving. Quite unhinged. What has Bridie Sweeney to do with this boy?

I didn’t know how to answer. All I knew was that their two souls were tethered in some way. One barely born, one gone too early; they’d shared this earth for a matter of hours. It was some kind of bargain, that was all I was sure of; I owed this much to Bridie.

I told her, I have permission from the priest. Give him over now.

A moment. Then Sister Luke set Barnabas’s blanketed form in my arms and the bag by my feet.

He mewed. I tucked him inside my cape to shield him from the November air.

The nun asked coldly, What are you going to tell people?

I didn’t have to answer her. But I said, That he’s my cousin from the country.

A snort. They’ll think that means he’s yours.

I registered her snide implication.

Maybe even that your brother’s the father, she added in a worldly tone.

Shame—but then my wrath pushed it away. To defame such a fellow as Tim, who couldn’t answer back.

I didn’t waste any more words on her. I seized the bag and strode off down the street. I watched my shoes land on each paving stone, being careful not to stumble and drop what I carried.

What was I doing, bringing a frail baby home to inflict on my frailer brother, who didn’t take well to noise or disruption? Hadn’t Tim been through more than enough already—what right had I to drag him into this story?

But he was such a tender fellow, I argued in my head. A natural at nurturing; he didn’t even need speech to look after me so well. If any man could rise to this strange occasion, it was Tim.

Small, practical worries crept in too. Once I got off the tram I’d have to walk the rest of the way home; I couldn’t get on a cycle with the baby.

And what would I say, how would I begin, once I let myself into the hall? Tim, you wouldn’t believe what— I met this girl—

Tim, wait till I tell you—

This is Barnabas White.

I was in no condition to persuade my brother with argument or eloquence. Was this anything like Tim’s state when he’d emerged from the trenches, baptised in the blood of the man he loved? If I ever told anyone what had happened to me—the fever dream of the past three days—it would be Tim.

Maybe these hushed thoroughfares looked so foreign because I was showing them to Barnabas. A stranger come among us, unheralded; an emissary from a far star, reserving judgement. Breathe in the fresh air now, Barnabas, I whispered to the downy top of his head. It’s a while more till we’re home, but not too long. We’ll go to sleep then, very soon. That’s all we have to do for tonight. And then when we wake up tomorrow—we’ll see what we’ll see.

So I carried him along through streets that looked like the end of the world.





Author’s Note




The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people than the First World War—an estimated 3 to 6 per cent of the human race.

The Pull of the Stars is a fiction pinned together with facts. Almost all details of Bridie Sweeney’s life are drawn from some of the rather less harrowing testimonies in the 2009 Ryan Report on Irish residential institutions: https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie/ryan-report/. She and Julia Power and the rest of my characters are invented, with the sole exception of Dr. Kathleen Lynn (1874–1955).

In the autumn of 1918, Lynn was vice president of Sinn Féin’s executive and its director of public health. When she was arrested, the mayor of Dublin intervened to have her released so she could keep combatting the flu at the free clinic she’d set up at 37 Charlemont Street (leased by her beloved Madeleine Ffrench-Mullen). The following year, on the same premises, Lynn founded her children’s hospital, St. Ultan’s, with Ffrench-Mullen as its administrator. In the general election that followed the armistice of November 11, 1918, Lynn campaigned for their friend Countess Constance Markievicz, who became the first woman elected to Westminster, and Lynn herself won a seat in the new Irish Parliament in 1923. She and Ffrench-Mullen lived together until Ffrench-Mullen’s death in 1944. Lynn worked on into her eighties at St. Ultan’s, campaigning for nutrition, housing, and sanitation for her fellow citizens. To those interested in her and in the diaries she kept over four decades, I recommend Margaret ó hógartaigh’s Kathleen Lynn: Irishwoman, Patriot, Doctor (2006) and the 2011 documentary Kathleen Lynn: The Rebel Doctor.

Influenza viruses were not identified until 1933, when they were discovered with the help of the newly invented electron microscope, and the first of the flu vaccines that protect so many people today was developed in 1938.

Symphysiotomy (dividing the ligaments holding the pubic bones together) and pubiotomy (sawing through one of the pubic bones) operations were performed in Irish hospitals most frequently between the 1940s and 1960s but as early as 1906 and as late as 1984. Since the 2000s, this has been the subject of bitter controversy and legal conflict.

The film Bridie and Julia discuss, the silent short Hearts Adrift (1914), made Mary Pickford a huge star, but all prints seem to have been lost.

In October 2018, inspired by the centenary of the great flu, I began writing The Pull of the Stars. Just after I delivered my last draft to my publishers, in March 2020, COVID-19 changed everything. I’m grateful to my agents and to everyone at Little, Brown; HarperCollins Canada; and Picador for pulling together to bring out my novel in this new world in a mere four months.