LITMIR.BIZ

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he hadn’t the will to fight,’ Matt said. ‘He’d watched his children all die and then his wife had gone as well before he developed it. What was left for him if he had recovered? I imagine he didn’t bother fighting it.’

      Whatever the way of it, there was a spate of funerals and though Angela attended none of them she was aware of a sadness in the McClusky family without understanding it.

      Eventually Mary had to rouse herself for she had a family to see to, including little motherless Angela, and Matt had a farm to run. Mary did wonder if there was some long-lost relative who would look after Angela, but after the last funeral it was apparent there wasn’t and Mary decided that she would stay with them. She knew there would be no opposition from Matt who had by then grown extremely fond of her, as they all had, and he just nodded when Mary said it was the very least she could do for her friend. Matt too had been badly shaken by the deaths of the entire Kennedy family and was well aware that a similar tragedy could have happened to his family just as easily. This time they had got through unscathed and he readily agreed that Angela should continue to live with them and grow up as their daughter.

      ‘Angela will be your new little sister,’ Mary told her sons. Not one of them made any objection but the happiest of them all was her youngest, Barry. At five years old, he was three years older than Angela and she was petite for her age with white-blonde curls and big blue eyes that reminded him of a little doll. She was better than any doll though for she seemed to have happiness running through her, her ready smile lit up her whole face and her laugh was so infectious all the McClusky boys would nearly jump through hoops to amuse her. ‘I will be the best brother I know how to be,’ Barry said earnestly. ‘I was already fed up of being the youngest.’

      Mary laughed and tousled Barry’s hair. ‘I’m sure you will, son,’ she said, ‘and she will love you dearly.’

      And Angela did. Between her and Barry there was a special closeness though she loved all the boys she thought of as brothers and all were kind and gentle with her.

      However the farm didn’t thrive. A blight damaged most of the potato crop, and heavy and sustained storms left them with barely half of the hay they would need for the winter, meaning they would have to buy the hay needed from elsewhere, while many cabbages, turnips and swedes were lost to the torrential and ferocious rains that eventually flooded the hen house, resulting in many hens also being lost. That first bad winter they just about managed although empty bellies were often the order of the day and later Barry told Angela she was lucky not to remember those times.

      Everyone looked forward to the spring after the second bad winter. Matt and his sons knew that if the spring was going to be a fine one nothing would go awry and with tightened belts they might survive. Matt had a constant frown between his eyes because the weather wasn’t good. ‘Surely this year will be better than last,’ Mary said.

      Matt’s lips tightened. ‘We’ll see,’ he said grimly. ‘For if it’s not a great deal better we will sink.’

      In the early spring of that year a cow died giving birth and the female calf died, a fox got into the hen house and killed most of the hens, and one of the lambs scattered on the hillside was savaged by a dog and had to be put out of his misery. As their finances were on a keen knife edge these things were major blows. Matt knew he would have to leave the farm where he had lived all his life and his father before and his father. That thought was more than upsetting, it was devastating, but he had to face facts. One evening in late March after Angela and Barry had gone to bed and the dinner pots and plates had been put away, Matt and Mary faced their four eldest sons across the table and told them they didn’t think they could survive another year.

      There was a gasp from Sean and Gerry, but Finbarr and Colm, who helped their father on the farm, were not totally surprised. They knew as well as anyone how badly the farm had been hit, but they still thought their father might have a plan of some sort and it was Finbarr who asked, ‘What’s to do?’

      ‘We must leave here, that’s all,’ Matt said.

      ‘Leave the farm?’ Sean asked.

      ‘Yes,’ Matt affirmed. ‘And Ireland too. We must leave Ireland and try our hands elsewhere.’

      That shocked all the boys for not even Finbarr thought any plan would involve them all leaving their native land, though Mary, heartsore as she was, knew that was what they had to do.

      Finbarr glanced at his brothers’ faces and knew he was speaking for all of them when he said, ‘We none of us would like that, Daddy. Is there no other way?’

      ‘Aye, the poorhouse if you’d prefer it,’ said Matt and he spoke with a snap because leaving was the thing he didn’t want to do either. ‘They have one in the town.’

      At Finbarr’s look of distaste, he cried out, ‘Do you think this is easy for me? This is where I was born and where I thought I would die. It’s my homeland but we can’t live on fresh air.’ Then he added with an ironic smile, ‘Though we have made a good stab at it this year.’

      Finbarr knew that well enough and didn’t bother commenting, but instead asked, ‘But where would we go?’

      ‘Where Norah Docherty has been urging me to go this past year,’ Mary said. ‘And that’s Birmingham, England. She’s in a place called Edgbaston and she says it’s not far from the city centre and she can put us up until we get straight with our own place and she says she can probably even help you all with jobs.’

      Finbarr nodded for they all knew the Dochertys had left Ireland’s shore four years before when they were in danger of having to throw themselves on the mercy of the poorhouse to save the children from starving to death. Then an uncle living in Birmingham had offered them all a home with him in exchange for looking after him because he was afraid of being put in the poorhouse too. It was a lifeline for the Docherty family and they had all grasped it with two hands and were packed up and gone lock stock and barrel in no time at all.

      Mary knew Norah found the life hard at first for Norah had written and told her that the house was terribly cramped. Her uncle couldn’t make the stairs and his bed had to be downstairs. But a man who lived just two doors down called Tim Bishop was the gaffer at a foundry in a place called Aston and he had put a word in for Norah’s husband Mick. He had jumped at the job they offered him and Mary said he’d been tired coming home especially at first, for the work was heavy, but then a job was a job and with Birmingham in the middle of a massive slump, to get one at all was great. She said you really needed someone to speak on your behalf to have a chance at all and Norah’s uncle had once worked at the same place as Tim Bishop and been well thought of and Tim Bishop approved of the family coming over to see to him in his declining years, for they all knew well the old man’s fear of ending up in the poorhouse or the workhouse, as it was commonly known.

      ‘This Tim Bishop Norah speaks of seems to be a grand fellow altogether,’ Mary said. ‘He had Mick set up in a job before he had been there five minutes. Please God that he may do the same for us.’

      ‘Yeah, but what sort of job?’ Colm grumbled. ‘Don’t know that I would be any good in Birmingham or anywhere else either,’ he said. ‘The only job I know how to do is farming.’

      ‘Well you can learn to do something else can’t you?’ Matt barked. ‘Same as I’ll have to do.’

      ‘We’ll all have to learn to do things we’re not used to,’ Mary said. ‘Life is going to be very different to the life we have here but that’s how it is and we must all accept it.’

      Mary had a way of speaking that brooked no argument, as the boys knew to their cost, and anyway Finbarr knew she made sense and he sighed and said, ‘So what happens now?’

      ‘Well travel costs money,’ Mary said. ‘And that’s something we haven’t got a lot of, so we sell everything we don’t need. Your father has sold all the cattle and even got something for the carcasses of the cow and young calf but it isn’t enough. We’ll sell everything on the farm because we can hardly take anything but essentials with us anyway.’

      Sad days

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