Forget-Me-Not Child - Anne Bennett

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in their faces and when the cold eventually drove them home they would huddle over the fire to still their shivering bones and feel like abject failures. No one could help and neither of them knew what they were going to do to help ease the situation for the family.

      Slowly the days began to get slightly warmer as Easter approached. Angela would be going to school in the new term and she was so excited. She was just turned five when she walked alongside Mary for her first full day at school on April 15th. She was so full of beans it was like they were jumping around inside her. At the school she was surrounded by other boys and girls all starting together and they regarded each other shyly. When their mothers had gone their teacher, Miss Conway, took them into the classroom, which she said would be their classroom, and told them where to sit.

      Angela was almost speechless with delight when she realized she had a desk and chair all to herself. After living with the Dochertys for months, she was used to sharing everything. She looked around and noticed what a lot of desks there were in the room, which was large with brown wooden walls and very high windows with small panes. There were some pictures, one with numbers on it, one with letters, and a map above the blackboard that stood in front of the high teacher’s desk.

      Another little girl was assigned the desk next to Angela and she turned to look at her, envying the pinafore she wore covering her dress. In fact most of the girls wore pinafores but her Mammy said funds didn’t run to pinafores and she knew better than to make a fuss over something like that. The girl had straight black hair that fell to her shoulders and dark brown eyes, but her lips looked a bit wobbly as if she might be about to cry and her face looked as if she was worried about something, so Angela smiled at her and the little girl gasped. What the little girl thought was that she’d never seen anyone so beautiful with the golden curls and the deep blue eyes and pretty little mouth and nose. Spring sunshine shafted through the tiny windows at that moment and it was like a halo around Angela’s head. ‘Oh,’ said the little girl with awe. ‘You look like an angel.’

      Angela laughed, bringing the teacher’s eyes upon her. She thought maybe laughing wasn’t allowed at school and she was to find that it wasn’t much approved of. Nor was talking, for when she tried whispering to the other girl, ‘I’m not an angel, I just look like my mother,’ the teacher rapped the top of her desk with a ruler, making most children in the room jump. ‘No talking,’ she rapped out and Angela hissed out of the corner of her mouth, ‘Tell you after.’

      And later, in the playground, she told the whole story of how she ended up living with the McCluskys, according to what Mary had told her. ‘Funny you thought I looked like an angel,’ she said. ‘Because my real mammy thought so too and she insisted I was called Angela. All the others looked like my father.’

      ‘And they all died,’ the girl said. ‘And your mammy and daddy as well?’

      Angela gave a brief nod and the other girl said, ‘I think that’s really sad.’

      Angela shook her head. ‘It isn’t really, because I can’t remember them at all. Mammy, I mean Mary, has a photograph of them on their wedding day. It was stood on the dresser at home and I suppose it will come out again when we have our own house, but I have stared at it for ages and just don’t remember them. And Mary and Matt McClusky have loved me as much as if I had been one of their own children and the boys are like brothers to me.’

      ‘Huh,’ said the other girl, ‘I have no time for brothers. I have two, both younger than me, and a proper nuisance they are.’

      Angela laughed and said, ‘What’s your name?’

      ‘Maggie. Maggie Maguire and my brothers are called Eddie and Patrick. But I think Mammy is having another one and that will probably be a boy as well. I’d love a sister.’

      ‘So would I,’ Angela admitted. ‘Shall we just be good friends instead?’

      ‘Yes, let’s.’ And so a bond was formed between Angela Kennedy and Maggie Maguire from that first day.

       THREE

      Just after Angela began school, the priest heard of a house that would shortly be vacant due to the death of the tenant and Mary went straight down to see the landlord. She took her marriage lines with her and the birth certificates of the children and to prove her honesty she carried a recommendation from the priest and she secured the house, which was in Bell Barn Road and only yards from Maggie’s house in Grant Street.

      Mary was delighted to get a place of her own though she did wonder how she would furnish it, but when she said this to Matt he had a surprise for her. ‘With the sale of the farm and land I had money over when I bought the tickets to get here,’ he told her. ‘Not knowing when I would get a job when we arrived, I put it in the Post Office and it’s still there, so we’ll go off to the Bull Ring Saturday afternoon and see what we can pick up to make the place more homely at a reasonable price.’

      Mary was really pleased that Matt had kept the money safe and that he had kept knowledge of it to himself as well, or she might have been tempted to dip into it from time to time, and where would they be now if she had done that? They’d have a house but not a stick of furniture to go into it.

      In fact it wouldn’t have been that bad because the previous tenant had died and his family didn’t want much of his furniture, so the house already had two armchairs, a small settee and a sideboard downstairs, and a bed and wardrobes were left in the bedroom upstairs. Norah went to inspect the house and agreed with Mary it needed a thoroughly good clean before anything else and they undertook that together. In the Bull Ring Mary and Matt bought oilcloth for the floor, a big iron-framed bed for the boys in the attic and two chests for their clothes. For Angela there was a truckle bed that was to be set up in the bedroom because Mary declared it wasn’t seemly for her to share the attic with so many boys when she was not even officially related to them.

      The purchases severely depleted Matt’s savings and money from day to day was tighter than ever and Norah was finding it hard to make the money stretch. If some days they seemed to eat a lot of porridge it was because a pair of boots needed repair or there was a delivery of coal to pay for. Mary worried about the meals often. ‘Men need more than porridge,’ she said to Norah. ‘If Finbarr and Colm do get a job they’ll hardly be able for it and Matt works hard now and needs good food or he might take sick.’

      Sometimes she would take Angela with her when she went to the Bull Ring on a Saturday afternoon and she would hide away and send Angela into the butcher’s and ask for a bone for the dog. The butcher knew there was little likelihood of there being any sort of dog; most people had trouble enough feeding themselves. But he would be charmed by the look of Angela, her winning smile and good manners, and she usually came out with a bone with lots of meat still on it. Often the butcher would slip her something else, like a few pieces of liver, or a small joint because he would have to throw them away anyway at the end of the day.

      And Mary would boil up the bones and strip them of meat for a stew along with vegetables and dumplings to fill hungry men. She would do the same with pigs’ trotters if she had the pennies to buy them. She could make a couple of loaves of soda bread almost without thinking about it and if there was no money for butter, mashed swede would do as well. Cabbage soup was also on the menu a lot so though no one starved, the monotony of the diet got to everyone, but no one complained for there was little point.

      Finbarr and Colm were filled with shame that they couldn’t do more to help and knowing this, Gerry felt almost embarrassed to join Sean on the apprenticeship scheme in 1902 when he turned fourteen and left school. ‘Don’t feel bad about it,’ Finbarr said. ‘You go for it. I would do the same given half a chance.’

      Both apprentice boys were full of praise for Stan Bishop and thought he was a first-rate boss, always patient with them if they made mistakes in the early days. ‘He’s a decent man,’ Mary said. ‘I always thought it.’

      ‘He’s a happy bloke, I know that,’ Sean said. ‘He’s always humming a tune under

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