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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: The Hamiltons Series
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
The enchanting story of a young girl growing up in 1950s Ireland Little Clare Richardson is just nine years old when her childhood is abruptly ended, with the death of both her parents. Though part of a large extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins - most living in and around Armagh - Clare feels herself bereft, and with the cares of the world on her shoulders. Her little brother William is a difficult child at best of times, and looking after him proves a full-time job. Taken in by kind Aunt Polly, to live in her cramped house in Belfast, Clare knows only that she wants to go back to live in the country. When her Grandma Scott dies, leaving her blacksmith grandfather alone, Clare seizes her opportunity, and returns to Salter's Grange to take care of him. At first tentative and awkward, the relationship between the old man and his granddaughter develops into a warm and loving bond that will sustain Clare through the years of her adolescence - as she grows into a lovely, intelligent young woman with the world at her feet.
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On a Clear Day
ANNE DOUGHTY
For Margaret,
my sister
Contents
PROLOGUE
To the west, Armagh was outlined against the brilliant blue of the sky, the twin spires of the new cathedral so sharp they seemed to have been etched in with the aid of a ruler. On the hill opposite, less dramatic, more earth-bound, the square tower of the old cathedral rose out of its enfolding trees, its heavy stonework dark with age. Around both great buildings, like currents of water eddying where they will, the small stone houses and later brick terraces curved and wove as they followed the contours and the slopes of the hills on which they stood …
She wished she could climb higher, for somewhere over there, below Cannon Hill, lay the farm at Liskeyborough, only a mile or two away for the jackdaws who played around the church tower. Her grandmother would be feeding the hens or the new calves, or peering at the old wooden barrel in which she’d planted daffodils to have them near her front door.
If she could have seen Liskeyborough, the whole of her world would have been spread out before her, from her own front door to the furthest points of her travels. And on a clear day, too. A day for making up your mind, Granny Hamilton would say.
CHAPTER ONE
June 1946
Beyond the tall, dusty windows of the schoolroom the afternoon sun beat down with unaccustomed fierceness. Dark shadows lay in pools beneath the spread of the full-leafed chestnuts that bordered the playground. From its worn tarmac surface, polished smooth by the daily abrasion of running feet, the light dazzled and reflected, picking out the architectural details of the sharp-edged brick building that in 1931 had won the admiration of all. The Lord Lieutenant with his sword and plumes, the local dignitaries in their Sunday best, the men in flat caps and the women in cloche hats, platform party, teachers and maintenance staff had all without exception said the same thing. In the single, familiar and often-used Ulster phrase, they expressed their unanimous approval. ‘The new school was “the last word”.’
Though the windows stood open as wide as the unpractised metal hinges would tolerate, the classroom where Clare Hamilton sat was thick with heat and heavy with the mixed odours of chalk and dusty floorboards and perspiring bodies. From greasy, screwed-up paper bags piled in the large wastepaper basket, placed precisely below the wall-mounted pencil sharpener, came the lingering remembrances of lunch, an event now receding as the oppressive afternoon moved on towards that longed for moment when the hands of the clock would stand at half past three.
Attracted by the faint aroma of country butter, home-made jam or the shop-bought pastes that had provided lunch more than an hour previously, a large bluebottle fly hovered over the wicker basket. At once, its presence was observed. The teacher spoke. A large, heavy-breasted girl put down her work, received the rolled up newspaper held out towards her and launched herself at the offending insect. She knocked over the wicker basket and bent the newspaper against the wall while the bluebottle buzzed into the open space between the line of girls waiting by the teacher’s desk and the immaculately clean blackboard beyond.
It soared vertically, as high as the Union Jack pinned on the bare wall over the blackboard itself, then, sensing some change in the chalk laden air, it swerved violently to the left, sailed out through the window, rose high into the blue dome of the sky, a tiny, ever-diminishing speck soon lost even to the sharp eyes of the dark-haired, nine-year-old in the front desk who had watched every movement of the unfolding drama without appearing to raise her eyes from the fragment of red-checked gingham on which she was working so meticulously.
In the hubbub that followed the bluebottle’s departure, as the teacher retrieved her bent newspaper and the girl her ‘garment’, Clare looked up at the clock and sighed. It was not even three yet. The bell that would release them into the sunshine still rested on the principal’s desk, the senior boy who would agitate it through all the empty, echoing corridors was still at work in the flowerbeds below the open windows hoeing the minute weeds in the dry soil between the flourishing annuals. There was still more than half an hour to go.
Usually Clare enjoyed handwork classes on a Wednesday afternoon. Miss Slater, who normally presided, was also her class teacher and one of the younger members of staff. She wore make-up and pretty blouses and when she leant over to look at your work she smelt of perfume and exactly the same Creme Puff powder that her mother wore if she was going out. She smiled often and always told Clare that her hemming stitches were the smallest she’d ever seen. Besides, Miss Slater read them stories while they worked. Sometimes they were Bible stories with battles and chariots and walls falling down. Often there were descriptions of palaces and gardens with kings coming and going, having banquets and dreaming dreams, calling their servants to do their bidding, or waving their hands in farewell to princesses who were going to the river with their ladies to bathe and find babies hidden in the bulrushes.
She liked the way Miss Slater told stories ‘with expression’, tossing her coppery curls and raising her finely-pencilled eyebrows and changing her voice to suit the different characters.
Sometimes there were stories about a little coloured boy called Epamanondas who had a knack of getting himself into difficulties in the forest. But what forest it was, Clare had never managed to find out. At the end of every adventure Epamanondas somehow managed to find his way back to his grandfather who lived beside the great, grey, slow-moving river that flowed through the forest.
‘Please, Miss, what was the name of the river?’ she asked one afternoon as Miss Slater closed the book.
Miss Slater seemed surprised.
‘Why do you want to know, Clare?’ she asked brightly.
She waited with the closed book in her hands while Clare shook her head and said that she’d just wondered.
‘In a story it doesn’t matter about names and places, Clare, it’s just the story that matters,’ she explained patiently.
Clare smiled and nodded. She didn’t agree at all, but Miss Slater was her very favourite teacher.
But there was no Miss Slater today. The white-haired woman who sat peering at the finer details of the senior garments was Miss McMurray. Miss Slater was away ill and her class, itself reduced by absence had been summoned to the senior corridor. The dozen or so nine-year-olds now sat uneasily in the too-large front desks of her room, overawed by the presence of so many big girls while Miss McMurray pinned and tucked and twitched the knickers and blouses that had to be finished by the end of the month.
In a few weeks’ time the girls lined up at Miss McMurray’s desk would be leaving school. A few of them would be going to the technical school up in Marketplace to learn shorthand and typing. Some of the others would look for a place in Armagh and serve their time to a grocer, or a draper, or a dressmaker, but most of them would be going into service in the big houses and large farms that lay along curving avenues or down long lanes invisible to the passers-by who walked the country roads on Sunday afternoons.
‘That’s the Richardson’s place,’ her father would say as they headed out the Loughgall Road on the way to visit her Scott grandparents at Salter’s Grange. He would point to an enormous pair of gateposts or a broad five-barred gate, but as often as not Clare could see no dwelling at all. But she tried to memorise the names just the same and loved making Daddy laugh by saying them before he did.
‘That’s the house where the general lived who helped to win the war,’ she announced proudly as they passed one of the few visible residences, a handsome building completely enveloped in Virginia creeper on the much longer walk along the Portadown Road to visit the Hamilton grandparents at Liskeyborough.
How strange it would be to leave school and ride your bicycle to work and not have Miss Slater to look at your writing and help with your sums and read stories while you worked on your samples. Clare was very glad she wasn’t grown up and leaving like the big girls in front of her for she liked school and all the different things they did there. And she loved Miss Slater.
When she’d told her mother this one Saturday night while she was sitting in the tin bath in front of the kitchen stove, her mother said that she was glad to hear it. School days were the happiest days of your life, she added a bit later, as she put a penny in the window frame to stop the wind from making it rattle and tucked the blankets in all around her. In fact, after that night, her mother had repeated the saying regularly each day until one morning, as she was being washed at the kitchen sink, Clare asked her why she kept on saying it.
Her mother laughed and shook her head.
‘Ach, child dear, sure mothers are always saying things like that. You’ll notice yourself when you’re older that people say things out of a kind of habit.’
Clare could see her mother was smiling to herself as she brushed her hair and retied her school shoes more firmly. She was still smiling as she straightened up and leant back against the sink. ‘And maybe sometimes there’s a bit of magic too in what you say every day,’ she went on, thoughtfully. ‘Maybe there’s something of a wish, or even of a blessing. If I say that every day maybe it’ll come true. Indeed, I hope it will. Now, away on or you’ll be keeping Auntie Marjorie waiting. I don’t know where you get all the questions from or what puts some of the notions into your head. I do not,’ she said shaking her head again as she kissed her quickly and hung her schoolbag over her shoulder.
Although Miss McMurray was old and known as ‘a bit of a tartar’ Clare knew that she did permit conversation while you were working, provided it was quiet and sensible and directed only to your immediate neighbour. She looked wistfully at the seat beside her. The seat was empty, her ‘immediate neighbour’ was far away. Margaret Beggs, her best friend, who lived three doors away in the red-brick terrace overlooking the Shambles, was at this moment enjoying the Methodist excursion to Bangor. Her mother, Auntie Marjorie, who walked them both down College Hill each morning before going back up to the sweetie shop in English Street where she worked, had offered to take Clare on the excursion as well. But her mother had said no. Children went free on their own excursion but had to be paid for if they went on someone else’s. She was sorry. It was very nice of Auntie Marjorie to offer but seven and sixpence was a lot of money and her own excursion was only a few weeks away. If Daddy could get the day off they could all go together this year for wee William was that bit bigger and able to walk further.
Clare thought longingly of the train rattling out of Armagh station and into the countryside. Last year, she had sat by the window with her mother and they’d looked out at all the places they walked past on Sundays. But this year her father would be there too and she was sure they would start to talk about the places they were passing, about parties and picnics and hops they’d been to before they were married.
At the level crossing they would wave to children who had run across the fields to see the train steam past. Beyond that point the countryside was completely new to her, unexplored territory with houses and farms she had never even walked past. But her father and mother knew everybody.
‘Do you remember old Danny McMaster, Ellie?’
‘Och, will I ever forget him?’
Clare loved the story of Danny McMaster. He was an old farmer with plenty of money and he had a notion of Mummy. He used to come to the forge where Granda Scott worked with some excuse or other or some piece of machinery for him to mend. It was all so he could see Mummy and maybe get talking to her. But Mummy was going out with Daddy and that was that. Granda said he made a fortune out of old McMaster, for the things he brought him to mend were only five minute jobs. Sometimes there was nothing wrong with them at all except the want of a bit of oil.
Whenever her parents talked about the days before they were married Clare would remember the photographs in the album her mother kept in the sitting-room cupboard. She knew the pictures by heart and who all the people were though most of them she had never met. There were crowds of men in open necked shirts, their arms around girls in long skirts with funny patterned shoes, some of them laughing so much that their bit of the picture was blurred because they had moved. There were tennis parties and boating parties and in one photograph there was a huge bus with all the people they knew lined up in front. There, beside her father, her mother sat holding a tiny white bundle. She had been the only baby in the whole party, her mother said, and she had been as good as gold.
That excursion had been to Bundoran. She didn’t know where that was either. When she asked her father he said in was in the south, but her mother said it was on the west coast, on the Atlantic. Wherever it was, there was no doubt everyone was enjoying themselves. It must have been a very good excursion.
By now, Margaret would have eaten the contents of her lunch bag at the church hall. Corned beef sandwiches and baker’s buns. Last year they each had a wafer biscuit done up in silver paper which she had unwrapped carefully and smoothed out. There were so many things you could make if you had silver paper but, apart from some of the large sweets in the bag her father brought home on Saturday nights, there wasn’t much to be had. Sometimes if you weren’t very careful when you smoothed it out it would tear and that was so disappointing.
Last year’s excursion certainly hadn’t been disappointing. Mummy had bought her lemonade to drink with her lunch and later when they walked down to the front she’d had a large ice-cream cone. She won a prize when the Sunday school supervisor organised races on the beach and she’d played in the water for ages, watching the tiny wavelets breaking against her ankles while Mummy sat in a deckchair knitting and talking to the other mothers.
Margaret would be down on the front by now, walking round to Pickie Pool for a swim or paddling from the beach. Clare stared at the strong grain lines in the wood of her desk and saw them change into long lines of waves, rippling in, peacefully, one behind the other, cool and fresh, all the way from the far horizon. But as she lifted her eyes to the far horizon the waves disappeared, she found she was staring at the battered and ink-stained ledge with a groove for pencils and a round hole into which the monitor would drop the pale, crazed disc of the inkpot.
She looked up again at the clock. The large black hand appeared not to have moved at all. Miss McMurray caught her eye. She said nothing, but a look was enough. Clare lowered her eyes to her work and wondered how she could tell if the clock had stopped.
Whenever the clock on the mantelpiece at home stopped, Daddy would spread a newspaper on the kitchen table and take it to pieces so that he could clean it. He kept a supply of feathers for the job in a jam pot on the kitchen windowsill and whenever they went to visit his parents at the farm he would send Clare and her brother down to Granny’s hen run to see what they could find.
William never wanted to go down to the hen-run. He always said he wanted to stay with Mummy, but Mummy told him he had to go and help Clare. The problem was that William was frightened of the cockerel and he would burst into tears if he crowed at him. Clare did her best to explain that the cockerel was just showing off, that if you shooed him away he’d run flapping to his wives and start crowing at them instead. But William wouldn’t chase the rooster for himself. He’d just stand scuffling his shoes in the dust until Clare had sent him squawking and had started to gather up the sorts of feathers she knew her father liked.
Once the clock was in pieces you had to clean all the bits with methylated spirits. It was purple stuff with a funny smell that came in a big bottle with ribs in the clear glass.
‘You only need a wee drop,’ Daddy explained, as he poured it into an old saucer, ‘but you need to get it into all the moving parts,’ he went on as he poked the feather into the bits of the workings that he couldn’t take apart.
Sometimes Clare wondered how he would ever get all the small pieces together again, especially with his large square fingers, but he always did. He said it was just a matter of taking your time. It was amazing what you could do if you took your time. Just look at the lovely embroidery and crochet work that Mummy did. She’d learnt a bit at school and then she’d taught herself out of a book from the library. And didn’t she win a prize last year at the Armagh show.
‘That tablecloth, Clare, the one with all those wee flowers took such a long time to do. I’m sure she was at it a year or more. But not as long as the sweater with the cherries on it,’ he ended with a twinkle in his eye.
Clare smiled to herself. That was another story she loved and her father loved telling it. When Clare was still quite small Mummy had gone to visit one of her girlfriends and left Daddy to look after her. She’d seen a pattern for a sweater in a woman’s magazine her friend had and she came home full of it. She was so taken with the picture of it that she went out the very next day and bought enough wool to make a start. It looked so lovely with its sprays of cherries across the yoke and little bunches on the sleeves. But, sadly, either the pattern was more difficult than she’d thought or there was a misprint somewhere in the working for the cherries didn’t come out right at all. She’d unravelled the patterned bits and redone them several times but the cherries still looked like lumpy plums. She’d tried and tried until the sight of them so upset her that she unravelled the whole thing and used the ripped out wool to make a batch of crocheted tea cosies for the sale of work at the church.
‘I think it’s about the only time I’ve ever seen your mummy really cross,’ he said, as he wrapped up the dirty feather in the damp newspaper.
‘But the best of it was that those cosies sold like hot cakes. Everyone thought they’d been made especially with ripped out wool and they wanted her to make more of them. So in the end she had to laugh.’
He’d gone out to the dustbin in the back yard and come back into the kitchen still smiling.
‘Sometimes Clare, when all else fails you have to laugh.’
The large black hand of the clock had moved at last. It hadn’t stopped after all. But it was still only five past three. Clare finished the final hem on her piece of gingham, anchored the thread with a double stitch and bit off the piece left over with her small, even teeth. She spread the rectangle on the desk and looked at it, pleased that it wasn’t dirty or crumpled after her efforts as some of the other girl’s work was. Then she caught a glance from Miss McMurray and immediately picked up the two pieces of blue check that she was to join together with a ‘run and fell’ seam.
She knew perfectly well what she had to do but she wondered about the name. She thought of running and falling which she and William often did when they raced each other in the big field in Cathedral Road, just round the corner from where they lived. William always cried when he fell. Even if his knees were only rubbed green from the grass he’d lie there bawling and crying for Mummy.
‘If you want Mummy, we’ll have to go home,’ she’d told him time and time again. ‘Come on then.’
But William would neither pick himself up nor let her take him home. He’d just sit up and start snivelling even though he had a clean handkerchief in his pocket. Sometimes Clare got cross with him and pretended to walk away but it was only pretend for her mother had said she was never to leave him alone. He was too small to come back by himself even though there was no road to cross between the field and the adjoining row of red brick houses.
William was at school now and would soon be six but it didn’t seem to make much difference to the way he behaved. He would still sit wherever he had fallen and cry till his teacher came to pick him up. Then when they came home from school he’d go straight to Mummy and cry all over again as he showed her the graze on his knee or the sticking plaster the teacher had put on.
‘Oh dear a dear, poor old William,’ she’d say, giving him a hug, ‘Sure you’re here to tell the tale, it can’t be that bad, now can it?’
Often her mother would nod to Clare over William’s dark head for she had once told Clare that sometimes boys were far harder to deal with than girls, though most people seemed to think it was the other way round. She said that her own mother, Granny Scott, had always said it was the boys that had her heart broke with their complaints and worries while the girls just seemed to make the best of things.
‘Not all wee boys are like William, Clare, just some of them. Your Daddy would never have been like that, but your Granny Hamilton said that your Uncle Jack was never away from her skirt tail till he got his first job in the fruit factory. And look at the age he’d have been by then.’
There was no doubt, Clare agreed, boys were funny. Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha, as her father would say. You could never tell what they were going to do next. Whatever it was, it was usually a nuisance. But, as her mother always said, what you can’t change you must thole.
The last of the line of big girls had reached Miss McMurray’s desk. She stood awkwardly as she presented her work, the ‘garment’ which represented the culmination of the years of sewing samples and the previous year’s effort of making an apron with two pockets outlined with bias binding in which to place dusters.
Mary Bratten’s garment was large and shapeless and although Clare knew that it was either a blouse or a pair of knickers it was quite impossible to tell which. Of course, if it were knickers the elastic would go in last. But, even allowing for that, the voluminous spread of green gingham looked more like a laundry bag than either of the possible garments it was supposed to be.
Clare knew exactly what her mother would say if she saw it: ‘It would fit Finn McCool and leave room for Mary as well’.
Miss McMurray spread the fabric out, surveyed it wearily and reached for a box of pins. Mary shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other and tried to avoid the glances of her friends sitting in the back row. She looked all around the room as if desperate to escape the sight of the green shape that twitched and writhed below Miss McMurray’s pins.
Clare felt sorry for Mary. It was all very well if you liked sewing or were good at it, but it wasn’t very nice for you if you didn’t. And it was clear that Mary didn’t like sewing and was no good at it at all.
The clock clicked audibly in the quiet of the room where even the senior girls had fallen silent, their gossip expended or their observation of Miss McMurray judging it expedient.
From the corridor, footsteps sounded, firm and measured. As Clare glanced towards the window on that side of the room, she caught sight of a blue figure. The dungarees were a blur behind the moulded glass of the lower panes, but where the panes reverted to plain glass above the level at which pupils could be distracted from their work, the head and shoulders of Mr Stinson, the school caretaker, were clearly visible as he moved steadily past.
Clare didn’t know Mr Stinson very well because his store room was on the Senior corridor and he was seldom to be seen in her part of the school. Occasionally he would appear with a bucket and mop when some child had been sick in the classroom and every few weeks he would arrive with a huge bottle of ink to refill the inkpots. She always liked seeing him because he wore exactly the same blue overalls her father wore for work, and like her father, they nearly always had marks of grease or oil from some job they had been doing.
‘I’m sorry Ellie, they’re a bad job this week,’ her father would say when he came downstairs on Saturday afternoon wearing his old trousers for the allotment and carrying the blue overalls on his arm. ‘Ye may put in a drop of that stuff I got from Willie Coulter down at the depot.’
‘Never worry, Sam, there’s no work without mess. I’ll soak them in the children’s bathwater tonight and they’ll have all Sunday to loosen up. Sure the better the day, the better the deed. Your other pair came up a treat last week even after you working on Jack’s car. That car grease is far worse than bicycle stuff.’
‘That’s true, Ellie. It’s far heavier, it has to be, for the moving parts are so much bigger. But it’s hard on you, love, that has to wash them.’
‘Never worry yourself. Sure when you get the shop won’t I send it all to the laundry and act the lady?’ she’d say, laughing at him.
Clare loved to hear them talking about the shop. It would be a bicycle shop because that was what Uncle Harry had and he was going to retire one day and Daddy was going to buy it and it would have Samuel Hamilton over the door instead of Harold Mitchell. Her father had all sorts of plans for when he took over. Most of all he wanted to branch out into the sale and repair of motorbikes. He loved motorbikes and in the photograph album there were pictures of him in the Isle of Man at something called the TT which was a race. He said he never won but that wasn’t the point, it was experience. You learnt more about a bike by riding it than by stripping it down and putting it together again.
He had sold his motorbike when they got married. Her mother didn’t want him too but they needed the money to buy furniture and besides, in Edward Street, there was nowhere to keep it. But one day when they had a house with a garden and a workshop, he would have his own motorbike again and she and William would go for rides on the pillion. That was what you called the seat for the passenger and when you rode you would have to put your arms round his waist and hold on tight.
There was a knock at the classroom door. Surprised, Clare looked up and saw that Mr Stinson had come in. He didn’t have an inkbottle or a window pole in his hand but when Miss McMurray handed Mary Bratten back her work and looked up at him he took a piece of paper from his top pocket and said something to her in a low voice with his head turned away towards the blackboard.
Miss McMurray stared at him and shook her head.
‘Alison Hamilton,’ she said aloud, as she turned back to scan the front desks and the unfamiliar faces of the juniors who sat there.
No one moved and although Clare was quite sure the message was for her, for a moment, she was too surprised to put her hand up.
‘Please miss, I’m Clare Hamilton.’
‘Have you a wee brother called William in the infants?’ asked Mr Stinson quietly.
She nodded and watched as the two adults exchanged glances.
‘Clare, the principal wants to see you in his office,’ began Miss McMurray. ‘Leave your work here and take your schoolbag with you. Mr Stinson will go with you.’
There was complete silence in the classroom as Clare put down the joined fragments of blue fabric, run but not felled, and fastened the buckles on her schoolbag. She stood up and found her legs were shaking. Something was wrong. Something had happened to William. He’d fallen down and broken his leg and he wouldn’t stop crying or he’d forgotten where he lived. This was what happened in books. They always sent someone to fetch the hero, or heroine, like in David Copperfield. But that was his mother.
An awful thought hit her. Maybe it was her mother who was ill. She’d not been well this morning. She’d had an awful headache and in the middle of washing William she’d had to run outside to the lavatory. When she came back she was pale and her forehead was damp but she’d said she was fine.
‘Women sometimes feel bad at certain times, Clare. You’ll understand when you’re older. I’ll away and lie down when you go off to school. I’ll be as right as rain by the time you come home.’
The principal’s desk was empty when Mr Stinson knocked and opened the door but the school secretary was at her typewriter under the window and sitting on one of the hard upright chairs by the door was William. He appeared to be completely absorbed in studying a marble he had taken from his pocket.
‘There ye are,’ said Mr Stinson quietly. ‘I’ll leave you with Mrs Graham and your wee brother.’
‘Sit down, dearie, the principal’ll not be a minute,’ Mrs Graham called over her shoulder as Clare sat down beside William.
Clare heard a car stop outside the main entrance and the heavy tread of the principal as he came up the steps. He looked hot and uncomfortable as he stepped back into his office. His large, bald head was sweating as profusely as his forehead and the remains of his hair was damp.
‘Ah, there you are, Clare and William,’ he said jovially. He put out his hand to pat their heads, a habit he had when he spoke to children. He paused, withdrew his hand abruptly and stepped backwards.
‘Now I want you two good children to come for a little drive with me. I’m afraid Mummy hasn’t been too well today and she’s been taken to hospital just so that she’ll be more comfortable. I’m sure it’s this heat has made her feel so unwell. Now you’re not to worry at all. I’m going to take you to the hospital and when Mummy is feeling better you can go in and see her.’
‘But what about Daddy’s tea,’ Clare burst out, without a moment’s thought. ‘Who’ll make Daddy’s tea if Mummy’s in hospital?’
The principal took out a large, white handkerchief and mopped his brow. He looked even hotter, despite the fact that his office had no south facing window and was always cool, if not actually chilly, even in summer.
‘Don’t worry about Daddy’s tea, Clare. Daddy was feeling a bit sick too so he’s gone to the hospital as well. He’d want to be with Mummy wouldn’t he? So they are both quite safe and sound with nice nurses to make their tea. Why don’t we go off and see them,’ he said encouragingly, as he waved them through the door of his office. ‘Now we don’t want any arguments about who sits in the front seat with me, so why don’t you both sit in the back like grown-ups in a taxi,’ he added as they went down the steps.
‘I want to sit in the front’, muttered William sulkily.
Clare didn’t even nudge him for being rude, she just followed him to where the principal’s Austin sat gleaming in the sun. It was so hot you could smell the petrol and when she got into the back seat the leather was so hot she thought it might burn her legs.
William marched round to the front seat and to her surprise the principal just opened the door from the inside and let him climb in.
They drove across the empty playground and down the hill to the Courthouse, but instead of driving up College Hill and going up Abbey Street to the County Infirmary, the principal turned along English Street.
‘This isn’t the way to the hospital,’ cried Clare, who was very near to tears.
‘No, Clare, it isn’t. We’re going to a different hospital from the one you know. It’s a hospital where you can stay till Mummy and Daddy are better.’
Clare watched him wipe his perspiring face again. She could see his face in the rear-view mirror and he seemed quite different from his usual self. Daddy knew him well because they were in the same lodge, which was a kind of club men went to one Friday night in the month. He said he was a good sort, always ready for a joke. But today he didn’t look as if he could even smile never mind make a joke.
The principal was indeed a good sort. It was because he knew Sam Hamilton so well that he was in such distress. It was not his job to tell his children how bad things were, that Ellie Hamilton had aborted the child she was carrying and was in a critical condition and that Sam himself, as fine a man in his prime as you might wish to see, had collapsed in the street outside the shop where he worked.
He drove quickly along the empty road and turned right about a mile out of Armagh. He slowed down on the wide sweep of gravel that swung away across empty acres of grassland towards a hard-faced, grey building set on a slight elevation in the low, undulating countryside.
He was expected. As the car drew up, a white figure came down the steps to greet them, took a child by each hand and said the briefest of goodbyes to the man who stood towering over them, quite at a loss for anything to say.
As the principal of the Armagh Primary School made his way back from the Fever Hospital, one of his senior boys collected the bell from his office and walked up and down the corridors ringing it vigorously.
The clangour echoed round the empty corridors and escaped through the open windows. It was now half past three.
CHAPTER TWO
Two days after Ellie Hamilton lost her unborn child, the hot weather ended in thunderstorms and torrential rain. Rainwater streamed down the tall window of the bare, half-tiled room where her children played ludo and tiddley winks on the white surface of one of the two small beds that stood on the highly-polished floor. Whenever Clare raised her eyes from the game in which William was completely absorbed, the view over the surrounding countryside appeared only as a blurred wash of green and dark grey. For Ellie, her mother, the sun never stopped shining. As she moved in and out of consciousness responding sometimes to the nurses who bathed her face and hands or coaxed her to drink, she was aware only of the light, a warm golden light that spread all around her.
Late on the morning of her third day in hospital, she began to move towards the light. Suddenly, she found herself standing under the rose-covered arch that framed the front door of her parents’ home. On the fresh morning air she caught the hint of smoke from the newly-lit fire in the forge. Somewhere nearby a blackbird sang a joyous celebration of the new day. For a moment she felt reluctant to step outside, to break the deep sense of peace and stillness all around her. Then, quite suddenly, she heard Sam’s voice from the orchard. There was a burst of laughter from the children. At the sound of their voices she stepped through the doorway without another thought and was gone, the light enfolding her. By her bedside a young nurse stared in amazement at the sweet smile on her pale face and the tiny indentation made by her lifeless body on the surface of the high white bed.
The children were not told of their mother’s death that day. After much discussion with her staff, the matron decided it would be better if their father told them when he himself had recovered enough to do so. In the meantime, the younger nurses were sent to play with them when they could be spared from other duties. They were brought books and toys. Each time a nurse appeared in the children’s room the little girl asked to see her parents and each time the nurse, as she had been instructed, told her gently that it would have to be a little longer before she could see either of her parents.
The little boy seemed indifferent to what was happening. His only wish was to go outside. As it was now clear that neither child had been infected, they were allowed out as soon as the lawn adjoining their ground floor room had dried after the rain. As long as Clare would kick back the football which one of the male orderlies had brought for William, he seemed perfectly happy, paying not the slightest attention to where he was, or to the comings and goings of nurses and doctors, or the fate of either of his parents.
It was a shock even to the most experienced of the nursing staff when later that same day, before he had yet been told of his wife’s death, Sam Hamilton, who had been holding his own with the fever which had struck him, had a heart attack. The Fever Hospital was not equipped for such an event and though they acted promptly and did what they could, phoning the Infirmary in Armagh for immediate help, it was of no avail. While the doctor was driving between the city hospital, perched on its hill in the centre of Armagh and the isolated building only a mile or so away, Sam had a further attack and died.
Standing in Matron’s office as he wrote out the death certificate, Dr Adams from the Infirmary heard the unexpected sound of children’s voices. Puzzled, he went to the window and saw Clare and William playing on the lawn. He asked who they were and to his amazement received no answer. It was the first and only time in his long association with the Fever Hospital that he had seen its formidable Matron overcome by tears.
Both the Scotts and the Hamiltons were local families with large connections. Brothers and sisters of Ellie’s parents and of Sam’s had married both within the city itself and in the villages that had grown up in the last century within walking distance of the various Armagh markets. Sam was a respected member of the Masons and had recently been made Master of the Orange Lodge which he had joined when he moved to Armagh. The entire lodge paraded at his funeral, their sashes decorated with large black rosettes. And when colleagues, friends and family took up the formal method of expressing grief by making insertions in the newspaper, the Armagh Gazette had seldom had so many columns of text under any one name.
But the rituals of funeral and wake did little to mitigate the shock to the whole community that an illness, long-absent from the catalogue of everyday maladies, should strike so suddenly, so unpredictably and so tragically. Nor did those rituals do anything whatever to help the two children who had suffered such grievous loss. They remained in the care of the hospital, carefully excluded from all the public expressions of mourning.
Clare wept as if her heart would break when the matron herself took on the task of telling them what had happened. But almost before that kind lady had offered her clean handkerchief to the child she began to ask questions. In the long hours of the night and in the small spaces when William did not insist on her total attention, she had feared the worst and had already begun to think what would have to be done.
‘I’ll have to look after William now,’ she said quite firmly, ‘but what shall I do about shopping for the groceries? I won’t have any money and I’m too young to get a job …’
She looked anxiously at William who had gone to the door and would have gone outside had Matron not called him back.
‘Clare, would you like me to send Trissey to play with William so that you and I can have a talk?’
Clare nodded and breathed a sigh of relief when the young nurse arrived to collect him. She had tried so hard to keep him amused because she knew her mother would want her to look after him, but the hours had been so long. Now she thought she’d have to do it forever because Mummy wasn’t there any more. And at the thought of Mummy not being there any more she broke down and wept again on the matron’s starched bosom, appalled by the world that was opening up in front of her, a world full of William and no Mummy, or Daddy, to make it seem worthwhile.
Matron let her cry, stroked her dark curls with one hand and surreptitiously wiped away her own tears with the other. What was there to say to the child that wasn’t a pathetic platitude? She’d hear enough about the will of God and doing his bidding when the minister got to her after the funerals. What she needed right now was an aunt, or a grandmother, to step into the aching space the loss of her parents had created. So far, her own enquiries about the family had not been very productive. No one had contacted her about the children as yet, but then both families were busy making funeral arrangements and they knew the children were in good hands. Besides, it was unlikely that any of them had a telephone and it was a hard thing to have to use a call box at a time like this.
‘Will we be going home now, Matron?’ Clare asked, quite forgetting that she and William could hardly live in an empty house.
‘Well you are now free to leave here,’ Matron began slowly.
She wondered if Clare would understand if she explained about incubation periods and carriers. She liked the child but had had little time to spend with her, for Ellie and Sam were not the only victims to be brought to the hospital during the last week. There had been no other deaths as yet but if the rate of admission continued to increase as it had in the last week, then it was only a matter of time before there were.
‘Did you think William and I would get the fever too? Was that why we had to stay indoors?’ she persisted.
‘Yes, it was. But you’re both all right now,’ she said reassuringly.
The small forehead was wrinkled in thought. It was clear that her reassurance had been irrelevant. Whatever was shaping in the child’s mind it had clearly moved beyond the question of being ill.
‘Will William and I have to go to Dr Barnardo’s?’ she asked politely.
Matron smiled in spite of herself.
‘No, I shouldn’t think so. Dr Barnardo’s is for children who have no family, but you have lots of aunts and uncles, haven’t you?’
‘Oh yes, lots and lots, but we could only go for a week. When we go to Granny Hamilton or Auntie Polly for a holiday Mummy always says that a week is quite long enough. She said you can’t go imposing on people just because they are your own family. It’s just not fair.’
‘But I’m sure some of your aunts and uncles would like to have you, Clare. Has Mummy got any sisters?’
‘Oh yes, but they have their own troubles,’ she replied promptly.
‘What do you mean?’
Clare tried to remember which aunts were real aunts and which were just Mummy’s girlfriends. Sometimes she got a bit mixed up and once at school she’d had a very embarrassing time when she said she had six grannies. One of the other girls in her class said you couldn’t possibly have more than two, so Clare had recited off the names of all six.
‘Oh you are silly,’ said the girl who had challenged her. ‘It’s only your mother’s mother and your father’s mother that are proper grannies.’
This time she would be more careful. Mummy had three sisters and two brothers, but Daddy had nine brothers and sisters altogether and she couldn’t even remember all their names.
She looked up at Matron and decided that she must be thinking one of her aunts would come and collect her with William and take them away to a new home. That was what usually happened with orphans in books unless they went into an orphanage like Anne of Green Gables. Then you got sent out as a servant to work on a farm when people like Marilla and Matthew needed a boy to help. Anne had been so lucky to get sent to them by mistake. She wouldn’t mind helping people like Marilla and Matthew.
She took a deep breath and began counting on her fingers; ‘Well, Auntie Polly has a heart of gold, but Uncle Jimmy has a bad back since he fell off the scaffolding at the aircraft factory. He’s on the Boru most of the time and Auntie Polly has to work very hard to pay all the bills. She has three big sons but two of them only think about number one. That’s why she can’t get up to see us very often and we only see her when Daddy borrows Uncle Harold’s car. Auntie Mary is in Michigan and has four children of her own and Auntie Florence is a glamour girl. Auntie Polly says she’s great fun but she lives in London and she says she’s never going to marry.’
Matron listened, fascinated as Clare continued to list the various members of her family. She discovered that Clare’s Granda Scott was a real gentleman but he had no hands. This might have been alarming had not Clare immediately explained that it meant outside his forge he was no use at all and couldn’t even fry bread without it sticking to the pan. He did his best to help Granny with her jobs because she had bad legs and her chest had never been right after all those years at the Ring Spinners, but he wasn’t much good at it and Mummy worried about the bed linen and the curtains.
‘I could go and help to look after Granny Scott,’ she went on, ‘but William wouldn’t like it. There’d be no one to play with him while I was busy and he’d get himself so dirty in the forge. If there’s somewhere to get dirty then William’ll find it,’ she added sadly.
The strange thing about this child, thought Matron, is that although she’s repeating what she’s heard her parents say, she has thought about it and she understands what she’s saying in her own way. If she makes the Unemployment Bureau sound like the High King of Ireland it’s hardly her fault. That’s what she’s heard so that’s what she calls it. A very sharp ear for what people say, Matron decided, as she listened to Clare’s account of her family.
The large black telephone on Matron’s desk rang so loudly it made Clare jump.
‘Yes, I’ll come immediately,’ Matron said, standing up as she put the receiver back. ‘I’m sorry Clare, I have to go, but as soon as I can we’ll go on with our talk. Why don’t you go and have a wee walk yourself while William’s busy. If you see the gardener he’ll give you some flowers if you ask him nicely.’
Clare had never seen so many flowers in her life. Formal wreaths in great circular mounds, crosses and emblems with words and mottoes picked out in individual blooms, sprays and posies from local gardens of every colour and hue. In the shady greenness of the Presbyterian burying ground, the spill of colour washed so far beyond the newly-cut graves that from the moment her father’s youngest brother parked his car and opened the heavy iron gates at the end of the long beech avenue to let her and Auntie Polly pass through, she could see quite clearly where her parents lay.
She walked quickly, her own flowers in one hand, a shopping bag with a jam pot and a tightly screwed up bottle of water in the other. She wondered where she was going to put her bunch of marigolds and asters with all these other beautiful flowers spread everywhere. She looked over her shoulder and found that Auntie Polly and Uncle Jack were now a long way behind.
Jack and Polly had met for the first time two days earlier, the morning of the funeral, when Jack had met Polly’s train at Armagh station and taken her to the church on the Mall. Now Clare observed that they were walking very slowly, talking quietly, nodding towards other graves they passed, people they both knew though their own lives had been separated by Polly’s fourteen years of absence and by Jack being sixteen years her junior. As they moved towards the double burial, Clare saw Uncle Jack point out to Auntie Polly how the grass for yards around had been tramped flat by the feet of hundreds of mourners.
The wreaths all had little cards with messages written in black ink in beautiful handwriting, except for some that said Interflora on the back and had messages in ball-point from London and Toronto, Michigan and Vancouver. ‘In loving memory of a valued and respected colleague – The Staff of Harold Mitchell Ltd, Scotch Street.’ ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus – a beloved sister and brother-in-law, Robert and Sadie Scott and family, Ballymena.’ ‘We shall met again on the other side of Jordan – John and Sarah Scott and family, Enniskillen’, ‘With fond memories of Ellie and Sam – Armagh Lawn Tennis and Archery Club’.
Clare read every single label, puzzling over names she had never heard of before, cousins of her parents from places that were quite unknown to her, both in Ulster and abroad. She had to guess at some words smudged by a light shower of rain the previous evening. All these people, known and unknown, must be very sad about Mummy and Daddy to write such lovely messages. The flowers blurred and she wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her cardigan.
She heard Uncle Jack’s voice behind her. He was speaking very quietly but in the deep silence that lay under the tall trees it was impossible not to hear every word he said.
‘Polly dear, I wouldn’t for the world want to hurry the wee lassie but if ye want to get back to Belfast the night we’d need to be gettin’ a move on for that train ye wanted.’
‘Right enough, Jack, it’s after five. Sure I’d clean forgot what time it was. I’m all through meself. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.’
‘Ah sure we’re all the same. But you’ve the hardest job with wee Clare. I don’t think it’s hit her yet. She seems as right as rain.’
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. The matron says she cried a lot when she told her but she seemed to be more worried about William than about herself. D’ye think your mother and father have done the right thing taking him in? They’re not so young any more and he can be a wee handful at times.’
‘Aye, he’s a funny wee lad. I don’t know who he takes after but the father said it was up to the Hamiltons to have him. And Mammy agreed, though she did admit to be honest that she’d had her fill of we’eans. Of course, it’s part of what they believe in, the Friends that is, they’re supposed to help each other at times like this.’
‘Sure I’d forgot they were Quakers,’ said Polly quickly. ‘When Ellie and Sam were married they went to the Presbyterians. Why did Sam not stay with the Quakers? I’ve always thought they were very good people.’
‘They are Polly, indeed they are. I wish there was more like them, but Sam was very keen to join the Masons and the Lodge. Ye see ye can’t join any o’ these organisations if you’re a Friend. It’s against what they believe. There’s none of us boys has followed them to the Meeting House, it’s only some of the girls that still go.’
Clare unpacked the jam pot and filled it carefully with water. So that was why Uncle Jack had taken them all out to Granny Hamilton and then left William there. Granda and Granny must have consulted their consciences about William. That was what Quakers did. They didn’t sing hymns or say prayers, they just sat quietly and waited for the Spirit to move them.
‘Granda, what happens if the Spirit doesn’t move you?’ she’d asked her grandfather one day, as he sat by the window, his finger marking his place in the large Bible he read every day.
‘Well, that’s a matter of faith, Clare,’ he said, looking at her very directly. ‘If you believe that there is help for you, then it is likely to come, but if you are weak in faith you may have to wait and try again.’
Perhaps now if she consulted her conscience God would tell her what to do with her flowers. They seemed such a tiny bunch compared with all these wonderful wreaths. And she hadn’t even got a card. She sat down on the kerb of the grave nearest to where her parents lay and closed her eyes.
‘Uncle Jack, can I borrow one of your pens?’ she said, getting up quickly and running towards where they stood, their backs slightly turned away from her. Uncle Jack was a book-keeper at the fruit factory in Richhill and he always carried a row of pens in his top pocket.
‘Ye can surely,’ he said, taking out a ball-point and handing it to her.
‘Have you a wee piece of paper in your bag, please, Auntie Polly?’
Polly scuffled in her bag and produced a brown envelope, the latest reminder from the Electricity Board. She removed the red notice from inside and put it in her outstretched hand.
Clare sat down again on the granite kerb and wrote leaning on her knee. It was difficult for without something flat underneath the flimsy paper it would tear if she pressed too hard. She wrote slowly:
Dear Mummy,
You always said it was better if men died first because women manage better but that you’d be heartbroken if Daddy died. It is very sad and I shall miss you but you are with Daddy. That is what you would want.
All my love to you both,
Clare
She placed her message under the jam pot of flowers on the kerb where she had been sitting.
‘I’m ready now, thank you,’ she said as she walked back to where Jack and Polly stood and gave Uncle Jack his pen.
Neither Polly nor Jack felt it proper to go and look at what Clare had written but some days later one of Jack’s brothers, Billy, arrived back from visiting the grave to tell the Hamiltons that the message Clare had written on the flimsy brown envelope was now mounted on some very nice, cream-coloured pasteboard and covered by a layer of clear plastic.
Billy had wondered who could have taken so much trouble, for the mounting and covering had been beautifully done. He’d turned the board over and found a message written in a very shaky hand. It read; ‘I have taken the liberty of protecting this message that others may read it and pray for this child, as I shall do in the time that remains to me.’
There was no signature, but for some months afterwards, the jam pot in which Clare had left her flowers was regularly refilled with sprigs of rosemary.
CHAPTER THREE
There were few passengers on the last train to Belfast that evening so Clare and Auntie Polly had a carriage all to themselves and didn’t have to bother putting all their bags and parcels up on the rack high above both their heads.
Clare dropped her things gratefully and studied the faded sepia pictures above the long, lumpy seats that ran the full width of the carriage.
‘The Glens of Antrim, The Great Northern Hotel, Rostrevor and The Ladies’ Bathing Place, Portrush,’ she read aloud.
