Nothing But Bad Times: Chapter Eight, Part One
The death of their daughter in February 1908 had left Michael and Mary Ann Hughes feeling somewhat drained. After all, it was not the first time they had lost a child, a daughter. The Owens clan, I find, are very much defined by loss, but also a determination to prevail through this loss, in a manner reserved and silent.. Its something quite overwhelming. Of course at the times in which they lived, it was nothing out of the ordinary at all.
2 Nimmo's Row's was now a house full to the brim. Mary Ann, Michael, Eliza, Patrick, Margaret, Bernard, Nellie, and Peter now called it home. Peter had lost his father Charles aged five and his mother Catherine aged ten. Eliza was now no longer entitled to receive Devaney's posthumous relief, because she had entered her seventieth year, and was on the roll for an Old Age Pension. She was an elderly woman now, living her final years in the company of a comfortable but drastically reduced family unit.
At this time in Scotland, the railway industry (particularly in Lanarkshire) was colossal. Michael Hughes, in being a railway plate layer, was a key cog in the industrial machine that swept across much of the country. However, in the summer of 1910, he had been struck down with a fever, and have also began to suffer from convulsions. Something wasn't quite right with Michael, and Mary Ann spotted something in it, too. She had seen this sort of thing before, whilst caring for her first husband, Francis McDonald. Michael was now suffering from the same symptoms as he had, and although probably not diagnosed until after death, Michael was indeed suffering from pththsis (tuberculosis). There was no treatment for this disease at the time.
With his five children growing up around him, Michael now stopped working and as Christmas 1911 approached, he became bedridden and skeletal. His face has lost all it's life and colour, and his clothes shrank about him. He was dying. Mary Ann was losing her second husband, and my great great grandfather, to the same, horrifically degenerative disease that had haunted Mary Ann ever since 1889.
Mary Ann now had to care for her ailing husband, as well as her frail mother and her children. Yet, when Michael called her, she would always go, she would always drop everything to tend to him. It seems that she did truly love him. Normally people married for other reasons back then, but they appear to have been truly in love. She would cradle him, when he became so ill that he lost the power to thank her. Michael knew that as he lay dying, she was always going to be the last thing that went through his mind, before drifting to sleep every night, not knowing if he would awaken the next morning. They had been through the mill together, and come out fighting.
As autumn set in, Michael waned and deteriorated chronically. The disease seemed to set upon him quicker than it did Francis. The eldest of the children were now reaching the age where they were beginning to understand what was happening to daddy. Who knows what was the last thing Michael thought about, but for the last few days of his life, he was a breathing shell. Motionless. His loving wife cared for him and embraced him as the end drew near. With his head perched in her arms, Michael now had minutes to live. Mary Ann whispered a prayer into his ear whilst clutching his hands and positioning them as one would if one were to pray. Not long, before she finished, Michael stopped breathing... Yet she did not grieve, she did not weep uncontrollably. She was no longer a stranger to grief. It is almost as if, she had become tired of grieving. It was the children who would grieve ferociously, not her. She knew how to quell the numbness inside of her. After Michael died on December 1 1911, it was simply Mary Ann on her own with her mother and children. No more working men to bring money into the household. Mary Ann was now given a widow's pension, and Eliza was comfortably catered for with her Old Age Pension.
Michael was gone. The man who arguably (and without any bias opinion) had given Mary Ann hope when she had none, and strength when she was weak. He had left her to care for the children, and to protect them at all costs. Yet, in the face of global events of the next decade or so, Mary Ann found again that she could influence very little in her life. After Michael had died, everything seems to have calmed...of course, the calm before a storm. Mary Ann had been tested and tested and tested and had always managed to come out of the other end fighting. Yet, after war was declared in 1914 against Germany, she found herself being tested in a way nobody in the family had ever seen before, or has seen since. Nobody could have anticipated the heartache to follow...
Copyright © Matthew Reay, 2008
