cold, like the rest of us.’
To divert him, Aggie said, ‘We’ll be home in no time now, and it’s meant to be cold, Finn, for it is nearly Christmas.’ She knew that Finn would know little of Christmas, or Santa Claus either, for he was only just turned eighteen months old. She saw a slight frown pucker his brow as she went on, ‘You’ll like Santa Claus, Finn. He brings good boys and girls presents.’
The child would, she knew, barely know the word ‘present’ either, for the Sullivan children had few of them. There was no money for such frivolities. But for Finn, the youngest, it would be different. Much had been made of him by all the family when he arrived. Aggie knew her mother had bought a few wee things in Buncrana that morning to fill his stocking on Christmas morning and she was looking forward to seeing his face.
‘Aye, nearly Christmas,’ Biddy said. ‘And then the turn of the year – 1898, I wonder what that will bring.’
Thomas John chuckled. ‘What would it bring, woman, but more of the same? Life seldom changes much, except we all get older.’
Aggie thought her father was right, and she was glad. She liked the familiarity of one day following the other predictable and safe. She had been twelve in June, so she had left school and now helped her mother in the home full time. She always looked forward to Saturday morning when she would go to Buncrana with her parents, leaving her brothers Tom and Joe to mind the farm. Her mother would sell their surplus produce in the market, like many other farmers, while Aggie went with her father to buy things needed for the farm. Since Finn’s birth, however, her primary task was to look after him while her parents were busy.
She didn’t mind this in the slightest, for it gave her a chance to meet up with her former classmates, and especially her best friend, Cissie Coghlan.
That day, though, it had been so cold that she had been glad to go home, and she was looking forward to getting into the warm house and out of the wind. When they passed the church she breathed a sigh of relief that they were not that far from home.
Tom and Joe were waiting for them in the yard, having heard the rumble of the cart. Thomas John brought it to a halt in the cobbled yard before the squat whitewashed cottage, scattering the pecking hens as he did so, and alerting the two dogs, who came from the barn barking a greeting.
Tom went forward to take the horse, saying as he did so, ‘I have the water on to boil and the potatoes are in a bucket on the stool inside.’
Biddy nodded and said to Aggie, who was climbing out of the cart with Finn in her arms, ‘Take the wee one inside. This intense cold is too much for him.’
The warmth hit Aggie as she opened the door. The room was dimly lit from the one small window at the end, though the sky looked grey and cloud-laden. But the fire burned brightly in the hearth and she saw that one of the boys, likely Tom, had banked it up with peat. There was a further stack of it the other side of the fireplace. The heavy black pot was heating the water over the fire, held up by one of the hooks of the crane that folded out from the wall.
She carried Finn across the stone-flagged floor and sat him near the warmth on a creepie, a low seat made of bog oak.
‘You sit there, my wee man, and get warm while I start dinner for us all,’ she said, and she was rewarded by a broad smile from Finn as he felt the heat from the fire.
Aggie ladled water from the pot above the fire into a basin, which she then placed on the table, the bucket of potatoes beside her ready for scrubbing. Her mother came in, followed by Joe, carrying parcels. One of these newspaper-wrapped bundles Biddy placed beside Aggie: she knew what was in it and that was fish that her father had bought from the fleet at Buncrana harbour.
Later, with the scrubbed potatoes boiling in their jackets in the big pot, and the plates taken from the dresser and put on to the side of the hearth to warm, Aggie helped her mother prepare the fish for frying, first, chopping off their heads and then slicing through each one expertly to remove the bone, as she had been taught from a child.
It was as the family was halfway through the meal and their hunger somewhat eased that Aggie said, ‘Me and Cissie were talking to Mr McAllister today.’
Biddy looked at her daughter. She knew McAllister was newly arrived in the town and there had been great curiosity about the family as there would be about anyone new. Biddy said, ‘Isn’t he the husband of Philomena, who was left the grocery store?’
Aggie nodded.
Thomas John frowned slightly. ‘And what business had a man like that with two young girls?’
‘He was nice, Daddy,’ Aggie protested. ‘I’m sure he was just being neighbourly. He asked our names, and when I said mine was Aggie Sullivan he said he could take a bet that wasn’t my given name and that Agnes had a much better sound to it.’
‘Stuff and nonsense,’ snapped her mother. ‘You are called Aggie and that’s all there is to it.’
‘Whisht,’ Thomas John cautioned his wife. ‘Let the girl get on with her tale. What else did he say?’
‘Then he asked would we like to learn to do the Irish dances properly and I said yes but there was no one now to teach us,’ Aggie continued.
‘Seems a strange thing to ask a body,’ Biddy said. ‘Why would he ask you a question like that?’
Tom, two years younger than Aggie, kept his head down so that his mother wouldn’t see his smile. He knew Aggie would have liked to dance all the day long if she had been let. He could take a bet she and Cissie had been jigging about and this McAllister had seen them. No wonder he asked them such a question.
Aggie didn’t answer her mother. Instead she went on, ‘Mr McAllister said it was shameful for us to lose our heritage this way and that he came from the West where such things were prized highly.’
‘Not just now he didn’t,’ Biddy said. ‘His wife was only after telling me this morning that they had been living in Birmingham, England this long while when news came of her aunt’s death. She was really surprised that she had been left the grocer’s shop in the town.’
‘Anyway,’ Aggie said, fearing that they had gone off the track a little, ‘he has offered to teach us to dance, and he said he can also play tin whistle and fiddle, and he can teach any who want to learn those too.’
‘I dare say he would have the time right enough,’ Biddy recounted wryly, ‘for he is more this side of the counter than the other side. He seems to prefer talking with the customers to serving them. His wife has her work cut out with four wee ones to see to as well, for he doesn’t seem to be great in that department either.’
‘Talk sense, woman,’ Thomas John said. ‘What man has a great hand in rearing weans? Sure, that’s a woman’s job.’
‘I know that,’ Biddy said. ‘I just think it a shame that that Philomena McAllister has such a hard time of it. She told me herself her husband is too fond of sitting in Grant’s Bar. In fact, he is there so often she wonders if he has shares in the place.’
‘That’s between them, surely,’ Thomas John replied, ‘and not our business at all, at all. From what I see of McAllister, he’s a personable-looking fellow and he is right, the children shouldn’t forget their heritage. But there has been no one bothered since Matty Phelan died a few years ago.’
‘There’s nothing like a spot of Irish dancing right enough,’ Biddy conceded. ‘I could fling my heels up with the best of them when I was a girl.’
‘So I can go?’ Aggie burst in, almost breathless with excitement.
‘We will make enquiries,’ her father said. ‘That is all I am offering to do at this point. And you can take that smirk from your face, Tom, for I have a mind to ask the man if he could teach you a few tunes on the tin whistle.’
Tom looked at his father in amazement. He was not averse to learning the tin whistle. In fact, if his opinion had been asked, he’d have said that he