The autumn of 1951 was wet in Ulster. Morning after morning, Clare cycled to school in pouring rain. Day after day, the return journey in the late afternoon was just as bad. But often, during the hours between, the clouds opened. From great patches of blue sky, the sun poured down with enough warmth to dry the leaf-strewn paths across the Mall. The golden radiance flickered through the lightly-clad branches where the surviving leaves, bronze and gold, fluttered and fell. They caught in the uncut grass that edged the saturated rugby and hockey pitches, grass so lank with growth and so sodden with the regular downpours that it seldom dried out at all.
In these golden intermissions, when strong shadows fell on the worn paintwork and dusty mouldings of whichever classroom she found herself in, Clare would gaze out through the rain-spattered windows, restless and strangely discontent. She felt such weariness upon her. She longed to be free to sit in the sun or cycle down the quiet lanes with nothing to do but please herself.
At moments in the school day, as she changed into hockey boots, or collected her books before walking up the hill to the science laboratory, or ran her finger along the shelf of foreign language literature in the tiny library, she found herself trying to imagine life beyond the present. Would there ever be a time without the endless cleaning, the collecting of rations, the preparing of food, the mending of clothes? Would a day come when she didn’t have to puzzle and calculate how to make the little she and Robert could produce between them stretch to meet their very modest needs?
Though her work for Senior Certificate was heavier and more demanding, Clare didn’t feel it was the cause of the weariness that dogged her. She enjoyed the challenge of the French and German books they were reading and the struggle to make her writing and speaking as good as her understanding was already. And she loved moving into the different world opened up by the French and German magazines that arrived each week. She dreamt of walking down the Champs-Élysées in springtime, or standing in the nave of Notre Dame, or drinking coffee in the Place du Tertre and watching some budding artist struggle with a canvas. She would cruise down the Rhine, visit the vineyards on the south-facing slopes, gaze up at extraordinary castles on rocky outcrops and walk in the Black Forest. Her imaginings delighted her and the work itself gave her a comforting reassurance that dreams could become reality if you gave your mind to them.
No, it was not school that was making her feel so low. She knew she carried a heavy burden of responsibility, for Mrs Taylor often spoke of it in a most kindly way. But, what really troubled her and made her both anxious and sad was Robert’s failing vitality. She saw the distress in his face every time he had to go and take half an hour on the bed. Even quite simple tasks tired him these days and he had to stop and rest more and more often. When he couldn’t be physically active, he had little to occupy him, for work had been the complete focus of his life. As the activity of the forge became less and less, so Robert retreated ever further into himself and grew more and more silent and withdrawn.
His earnings from the forge were shrinking all the time. Nor was it simply a matter of his failing strength. The changes that began during the war were now very obvious throughout the countryside. Repairing farm machinery and shoeing horses had been the mainstay of Robert’s work. But the move from horses to tractors had really speeded up in the last few years and the old horse-drawn reaping machines and harrows that needed regular repairs had almost disappeared. Most of them were rusting in barns though one of them still stood in the long grass opposite the forge, because the owner had never bothered to collect it. Years ago, Robert had admitted to Granda Hamilton that he couldn’t shoe forty horses a week any more, but now there were weeks when the shoeing shed was never used at all and the once familiar smell of singeing hoof no longer lingered on the afternoon air.
Robert still made gates, a job he enjoyed doing and Clare often watched with pleasure the familiar sequence of creating from the narrow iron bars the twists and swirls and curlicues, the signature of his work. But apart from the gates and the odd tool to repair there were very few jobs coming in. Farmers and neighbours came to the forge as before to exchange news, but Clare knew Robert didn’t charge when these old friends brought some small job to be done. Worse still, when he did do a big job, like a pair of gates for a drive way, or a couple of field gates for one of the local farms, he might wait weeks for payment. Several times in the last year, he’d not been able to order more iron from Shillington’s in Portadown, because he was waiting for money to pay their last account.
Clare found herself continuously doing sums in her head. Robert’s pension was their only regular source of income, though she herself usually managed to add at least five shillings every week to the small drawer in the dressing table where he kept his pension book and his money. She looked after the Robinson children on Saturdays so that Margaret could go to town, did all the family’s mending, washed the eggs when Margaret was behind hand and the collection van was due, and sometimes delivered meals for her to an old aunt down in Ballybrannan. Margaret wasn’t generous with money, but she was very fair. If she didn’t produce cash, then at least there’d be no bill for the milk, butter and potatoes Jamsey brought over to them in the course of the week. When the farm was very busy at harvest, or when the thresher came, there was so much extra work that Clare had no spare time at all but she never minded, because then she would arrive home triumphant, with money, credits for future weeks, home baked bread and often a boiling fowl or a piece of home cured bacon as well.
Whether on her solitary journeys to and from school, or sitting by the stove in the evening when Robert dozed or talked to some neighbour who had called, however often she thought about it, she came to the same conclusion. There was no immediate problem with paying their rent, nor with feeding them. The trouble started when something had to be bought for the house, or for the forge, or for themselves.
Robert’s only coat, an old gabardine raincoat, was so thin it had no warmth left in it. He hadn’t had new underwear since the end of the war and his vests and long johns were so worn the darns were the most substantial part of them.
‘If you don’t stop worrying about it, you’ll only make it worse,’ she said to herself, as she pedalled home one Friday afternoon.
She thought of Jessie and smiled to herself. With any luck, she’d appear sometime during the evening.
‘The food’s awful and there’s a list on the back of the bedroom door of all I’m not to do that’s as long as yer arm,’ she’d announced, on her first visit home after going to Belfast to stay with a distant relative as a paying guest while she did a secretarial course. Each Friday night visit brought a stream of complaints and stories that made even Robert shake his head and smile.
‘The typin’s not so bad, ye’d get to kinda like it, but thon oul shorthan’ would put ye baldy,’ she told them a week later.
The thought of Jessie’s presence revived her, but day by day, Clare felt very alone and missed her sadly. She sometimes remembered what Auntie Polly had said about missing her sister. As if a bright light had gone out. Jessie wasn’t dead like her mother, thank goodness, but their brief meetings at weekends were a sad substitute for all they used to share.
The great thing about Jessie, she decided, was her capacity to see the funny side of anything. It was a gift and she didn’t have it. Apart from her own escape into dreams there was little light in her life and not a lot to look forward to. Everything she did seemed so very fixed. The same thing, at the same time, week after week.
As she got off her bicycle and wheeled it up the lane, she wondered sadly if things would look any better by the time she reached her sixteenth birthday. A week earlier, her fifteenth birthday had passed almost unnoticed. Jessie had remembered and so did her Aunt Sarah, but not Granny Hamilton who was supposed to have such a memory for dates, nor Aunt Polly, though she would remember eventually and send her some dollars which would help with Christmas.
Clare found the winter months a real struggle and it was only in the spring when she felt more like her old self again that she remembered the one person who had actually put her finger on at least part of the cause.
‘Holy Moses, Clare,’ Jessie had said, on one of her visits. ‘Is that my old tunic yer wearin’? If it is, ye must have grown again since lass week! Another inch an’ I’ll get a good look at yer knickers. Here, stan’ wi’ yer back to me. Sure yer near as tall as I am, all of a sudden.’
Christmas came and with it the annual visit from Uncle Bob and Aunt Sadie. Sadie had acquired a fur coat when Bob became the manager at his bank’s branch in Ballymena. It made her even more patronising than when he’d only been deputy manager. Ballymena itself had been a step up from Antrim and now he was manager Sadie was hard at work cultivating ‘the right people’. But Clare was relieved to discover that Bob remained his usual kindly self.
Finding a quiet moment he asked her if there was any talk yet of getting the electricity. When Clare said it looked as if it would be a couple more years yet, he said she was to be sure and let him know, so that he could pay for having it put in. He was sure the landlord couldn’t afford to do it and it would be a great help. In the meantime, he slipped her an envelope and said casually there must be one or two things they were needing.
Because there was so much flooding on the roads in Fermanagh at Christmas time, Uncle Johnny and Auntie Sarah didn’t appear until the end of January. Johnny had been saving up his wastage allowances from the shop for months and the result was a whole box full of groceries, tinned food that was only available on points and enough tea to help them through till August when the ration was due to be increased by another half ounce each. Sarah presented Clare with a Bible and a set of twelve booklets each setting out a programme of daily readings with detailed commentary, so she could study a passage of scripture every day and an extra one on Sundays.
Robert was glad to see his visitors come and even gladder to see them go, for he was shy with his sons and thoroughly uncomfortable with their wives. Clare was painfully aware how cold the sitting room felt, even though she’d lit the fire hours before they were due to arrive. She noticed, too, how uncomfortable both the women appeared to find the wooden settle when they had all retreated to the comforting warmth of the big kitchen.
‘Sure company’s very nice, but it wears you out,’ said Robert, leaning back in his chair and hitching his bad leg up on the fender. ‘Did I see ye get a present from Sarah? The same lady doesn’t give much away,’ he added tartly.
‘I’ve four Bibles now,’ she said grinning. ‘Five, if I count in your big one. She gave me one when I came and another about three years ago. Now this one. She must think I wear them out very fast,’ she went on, glad to see Robert looking more relaxed. ‘I never use hers at all for the print is so awful and the paper’s so thin the pages stick together. I think she must have got a job lot cheap. I use the one Granda Hamilton gave me that first Sunday Uncle Jack took us both over. Do you remember that day?’
‘Aye, the first Sunday I met him in his own place. The day he says I cured his mare,’ he laughed. ‘Sure the better the day the better the deed, he said when I wondered if he were afeard I was breaking the Sabbath and him a thoughtful kind of a man in that way.’
Robert lit his pipe and waved the match up and down to put it out.
‘He’s a very well-read man, yer Granda Hamilton,’ he went on. ‘Knows his Bible a lot better than those who go around talkin’ about it all the time,’ he added sharply. ‘D’ye think Sarah reads all them passages and so on that she’s always talkin’ about?’
‘She might, but she doesn’t let anything they say put her off what she’s made up her mind to do anyway. I think Uncle Johnny gets a bit fed up with it all.’
‘Johnny’s no scholar, no more than I am,’ said Robert, shaking his head sadly. ‘An’ a right tear away he was afore he got married. I’ll never understan’ how he took up wi’ a woman like that.’
‘Maybe she took up with him.’
‘Aye, ye might be right there. There’s many a man ended up at the church door wonderin’ how he come to be there.’
He fell silent and Clare watched the blue haze of his pipe smoke swirl up to the blackened ceiling, borne on currents of warm air from the stove. She sensed his thoughts moving far away from their fireside to a different world, a world long gone, where he was a young man, a husband, and very soon a father, fifty years ago, or more.
Clare didn’t know exactly what age Robert was and had never liked to ask.
‘Would ye read a bit o’ the paper or have ye studies to do?’
There was always school work to be done, but he so seldom asked for anything that she never had the heart to refuse him. She took up the local paper, shuffled the pages and wondered where she had left off.
‘What did it say about the King? Ye were readin’ that last night when Eddie called in an’ I don’t rightly mind what the conclusion was.’
She found the item again and read it out to him. The King was clearly recovering well from his operation. He had been to Heathrow Airport in London to say goodbye to Princess Elizabeth as she left for her visit to Kenya. He had stood bareheaded on the January day and waved cheerfully at the departing plane, watching it until it was completely out of sight.
Robert shook his head sadly. ‘Whatever it says, I don’t think that man’ll do. He didn’t sound himself at Christmas. Never mind the stammer, sure he has that near beat, it was his voice. It wasn’t right. Poor man, he has himself wore out with the war an’ him niver trained up to be a king. ’Twas desperit hard on him when his brother let him in fer it. Sure I read somewhere he’s only fifty-seven and here’s me seventy-five an’ in better health than him.’
He knocked out his pipe and pulled off his boots.
‘I think I’ll take half an hour before we hear the news. Ye can maybe have a word with them people in Paris to see if we’re missin’ anythin’,’ he said with a short laugh as he headed for the door of The Room.
The King died the following week and Robert could not have been more upset if it had been Bob or Johnny. As if to make up for not going to pay his respects, he listened to every news broadcast, even though they all said the same thing. He perused all the newspapers Clare brought home for him and then asked her to read them aloud as well. He seemed anxious he might miss some detail he felt he ought to know.
Clare felt sad for Princess Elizabeth. It was all very well being a princess, but she’d lost her daddy. Losing someone you loved was the same thing, whoever you were. But it must be awful having to say the right thing and do the right thing as she had to do, when she must be feeling so unhappy. With that schedule she was given every morning, there wasn’t much hope she could have a quiet cry when she needed to.
Standing in the cold wind in front of the Courthouse in Armagh, the High School neatly lined up in the space allocated to them behind the children from the Armstrong Primary, Clare tried to remember that this was a historic moment, a moment one would recall for one’s grandchildren. Or so everyone kept saying. But as she listened to the proclamation that Elizabeth was Queen, all she could think of was a young woman who had lost the father whom she clearly loved, just as she herself had lost her father and her mother, six years earlier.
The week of the King’s death was a long, sad week, it felt as if life had come to a standstill. Jessie’s college closed and she came home unexpectedly. She wanted to take Clare to the pictures as a treat, but The Ritz cinema had closed too. On Thursday evening when Clare read the paper to Robert, she found that a meeting of the Drum Unionist Association in Drumhillery, a few miles down the road, had also been cancelled because the King had died. Until after the funeral, although Robert had visitors enough in the forge by day, anxious to talk about the news, not a single person called in the evenings.
On the following Friday, the day of the funeral itself, while all thoughts turned to London and the silent crowds waiting near Westminster Abbey, Robert limped down the frosted path to the forge and instead of opening the lower part of the half door and starting work, he closed over the upper part and put a padlock on the end of its large bolt. Robert hadn’t bolted and padlocked the door of the forge since the day of his own father’s funeral in 1920.
Between the bitter cold weather and the sadness that lay like a shadow after the King’s death, February passed slowly. March roared in with westerly gales that tore a branch from the big pear tree half way down the path to the forge and ripped up a corner of the dark felt that covered the low building’s high pitched roof.
When the storm passed, leaving the felt flapping but still in place, Clare gave thanks for Uncle Bob’s Christmas gift. Robert had expected to have to tackle the job himself, but instead a young man came with a long ladder to do it for him.
On a mild Saturday morning with sudden bursts of warm sun and the very first daffodils showing signs of unfurling in the sheltered corner by the old house, Clare carried mugs of tea to the forge and watched him as he climbed down into the pool of sunshine where she stood waiting.
‘Do you take sugar?’ she asked, as she held out his mug.
‘Ah do, if ah ken get it,’ he replied promptly.
‘I do have some,’ she said laughing, as she offered him the sugar bowl from the tray. ‘Not more than two, please. I have to make it last.’
He took two well-heaped spoonfuls and stirred them vigorously.
‘How’s it going?’ she enquired, nodding up to the exposed lathes where he had pulled back the torn felt.
‘Rightly. Great view from up there. Ye can see Armagh.’
Clare looked at the long ladder and the steep pitch of the roof against the blue of the sky in which the last fluffy white clouds were dissolving in the warmth of the sun.
‘Could I go and have a look?’
‘Aye, if ye’ve a mind to. Yer not afraid of heights? Some women bees scared.’
‘I’ll have a try, if that’s all right with you.’
‘Aye surely,’ he said agreeably, as he took a great gulp of his tea. ‘I’ll keep a hold of it down here an’ steady it fer you. It’s a bit whippy as ye get to the top.’
Clare gathered up the ends of her skirt, tied them in a loose knot above the knee and checked that she could still step from tread to tread. She thought of all those women in long skirts she and Jessie had watched at The Ritz, hopping in and out of covered wagons, trekking across the prairies, fording rivers and organising themselves for sudden attacks by Indians. No wonder Annie Oakley chose to wear trousers.
Her eyes focused on the damp, green-streaked gable in front of her. She climbed slowly and steadily, until she could grip the edge of the roof itself. Only then did she let herself scan the horizon.
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.
In the brilliant light, everything looked fresh and beautiful. Across the road from the forge, Eddie Robinson’s fields were a rich, velvety carpet, on which his cattle, a motley collection of different breeds, appeared trim and well-fed. The Robinson’s square farmhouse was dazzling white. Beyond its stables and byres, long, low, whitewashed buildings with red doors and shutters, the mossy branches in the orchard stretched their thickening grey buds skywards. And everywhere the hawthorn hedges were misted with green.
Most of the road to Armagh was visible, but to her surprise Clare found she could see part of Drumsollen House, on the Richardson’s estate. Usually only its tall chimneys were visible, rising clear of the surrounding trees, but from her viewpoint, she could actually see its gardens splashed with sunlight, though normally they were completely hidden by the long, curving driveway which led up from the gates on the Loughgall Road.
She twisted round carefully till she could see Grange Church pointing its spire into the blue, well clear of the ancient yews in the churchyard, where at least three generations of Scotts lay buried. Cottages marched, one beside the other down the hill, low-roofed, the wispy smoke from their fires rising vertically in the still air.
She shaded her eyes and looked south-eastwards across the main road and beyond Eddie’s water meadows. The hedges were white with the earliest of the flowering thorns, but the low hills blocked her view. 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 round 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.
She remembered the young man drinking tea and leaning against the ladder to steady it. With a last glance behind her, down at the cottage itself and the tumbled ruin opposite where she shut up the chickens at night, she began her descent, her eyes still dazzled by the light, her mind preoccupied by the map of her world her climb had set out before her.
‘What’d ye think?’ he asked, giving her his hand on the uneven ground.
‘Great, just great. I wouldn’t have believed you could see so much. The forge isn’t that high,’ she said easily, as she took his empty mug and put it back on her tray.
‘No, it’s not, but it’s clear of trees and suchlike. You only need a wee bit a height to see a brave way if there’s nothin’ comin’ between you an’ it. Especially on a clear day.’
She smiled and thanked him for holding the ladder and left him to go back up and finish securing the new piece of felt.
‘You only need a wee bit of height to see a brave way if there’s nothing coming between you and it,’ she said to herself as she went back into the kitchen to get on with the weekly scrubbing of the floor.
‘Especially on a clear day’, she added as she filled her bucket.
It wasn’t a very exceptional remark, but it echoed in her mind, stirring up feelings she couldn’t properly place. After this long, weary time with all its troubles and sadnesses, she felt as if something had been cleared out of her way on this lovely spring-like morning.
It might be the turn of the season, or her own joy in the springtime to come. Whatever it was, there was no point puzzling about it. When the young man spoke about seeing from a clear space, she’d felt her heart leap, her spirits rise. For the next hour, she scrubbed her way across the kitchen floor without noticing the dark foam she was producing, the grit accumulating in the piece of old towelling she was using to rinse, or the redness of her own hands from the hot water.
In her thoughts, she was circling the tiny world in which she lived and giving thanks for a decision she had made nearly six years ago, on just such a clear day.