Small Things Like These

by Claire Keegan

His mother, at the age of sixteen, had fallen pregnant while working as a domestic for Mrs Wilson, the Protestant widow who lived in the big house a few miles outside of town. When his mother’s trouble became known, and her people made it clear that they’d have no more to do with her, Mrs Wilson, instead of giving his mother her walking papers, told her she should stay on, and keep her work.

He’d a head for business, was known for getting along, and could be relied upon, as he had developed good, Protestant habits; was given to rising early and had no taste for drink.

When they engaged to marry, Mrs Wilson gave Furlong a few thousand pounds, to start up.

Some said she had given him money because it was one of her own that had fathered him – sure hadn’t he been christened William, after the kings.

Furlong never had found out who his father was. His mother had died suddenly, keeled over on the cobblestones one day, wheeling a barrow of crab-apples up to the house, to make jelly. A bleeding to the brain, was what the doct...

Kathleen, his eldest, came in with him to the little pre-fabricated office on Saturdays and for pocket money helped out with the books, was able to file what had come in during the week and keep an account of most things. Joan, too, had a good head on her shoulders and had recently joined the choir. Both were now attending secondary, at St Margaret’s. The middle child, Sheila, and the second youngest, Grace, who’d been born eleven months apart, could recite the multiplication tables off by heart, do long division and name the counties and rivers of Ireland, which they sometimes traced out and coloured in with markers at the kitchen table.

Loretta, their youngest, although shy of people, was getting gold and silver stars on her copy-books, reading her way through Enid Blyton, and had won a Texaco prize for her drawing of a fat, blue hen skating across a frozen pond.

The dole queues were getting longer and there were men out there who couldn’t pay their ESB bills, living in houses no warmer than bunkers, sleeping in their overcoats. Women, on the first Friday of every month, lined up at the post-office wall with shopping bags, waiting to collect their children’s allowances.

news. It was 1985, and the young people were emigrating, leaving for London and Boston, New York.

But it cut him, all the same, to see one of his own so upset by the sight of what other children craved and he could not help but wonder if she’d be brave enough or able for what the world had in store.

Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?

was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.

he thought of the hot water bottle Ned had given him all those Christmases ago, and how, despite his disappointment, he’d been comforted by that gift, nightly, for long afterwards; and how, before the next Christmas had come, he’d reached the end of A Christmas Carol, for Mrs Wilson had encouraged him to use the big dictionary and to look up the words, saying everyone should have a vocabulary,

What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again.

Little was known about the training school, but the laundry had a good reputation: restaurants and guesthouses, the nursing home and the hospital and all the priests and well-off households sent their washing there.

‘Mister, won’t you help us?’ Furlong felt himself stepping back. ‘Just take me as far as the river. That’s all you need do.’ She was dead in earnest and the accent was Dublin. ‘To the river?’

she sat up rigid and said such things had nothing to do with them, and that there was nothing they could do, and didn’t those girls up there need a fire to warm themselves, like everyone?

‘Where does thinking get us?’ she said. ‘All thinking does is bring you down.’

‘If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.’

‘But if we just mind what we have here and stay on the right side of people and soldier on, none of ours will ever have to endure the likes of what them girls go through.

‘I just want to go out with my friends to the shops now before they close and see the lights and try on jeans, but Mammy called down earlier and says I have to go with her to the dentist.’

It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.

‘Won’t you ask them about my baby?’ ‘What?’ ‘He must be hungry,’ she said. ‘And who is there to feed him now?’ ‘You have a child?’ ‘He’s fourteen weeks old.

‘Sure, didn’t I take my own mother’s name, Mother. And never any harm did it do me.’

Furlong watched the girl being taken away and soon understood that this woman wanted him gone – but the urge to go was being replaced now by a type of contrariness to stay on, and to hold his ground.

‘They’re not my sailors but we had a load come in on the quay there, aye.’ ‘You don’t mind bringing the foreigners in.’ ‘Hasn’t everyone to be born somewhere,’ Furlong said. ‘Sure wasn’t Jesus was born in Bethlehem.’ ‘I’d hardly compare Our Lord to those fellows.’

Gossipers stayed down on the edge of the aisle to get a good gawk, watching for a new jacket or haircut, a limp, anything out of the ordinary.

How sweet it felt to be out, to see the river, and his breath on the air.

Sundays could feel very threadbare, and raw. Why could he not relax and enjoy them like other men who took a pint or two after Mass before falling asleep at the fire with the newspaper, having eaten a plate of dinner?

What most tormented him was not so much how she’d been left in the coal shed or the stance of the Mother Superior; the worst was how the girl had been handled while he was present and how he’d allowed that and had not asked about her baby – the one thing she had asked him to do

Driving out the road, she laboured on the hills and Furlong knew the engine was giving out, that the new windows Eileen had her heart set upon for the front of the house would not be installed next year, or the year after.

People could be good, Furlong reminded himself, as he drove back to town; it was a matter of learning how to manage and balance the give-and-take in a way that let you get on with others as well as your own. But as soon as the thought came to him, he knew the thought itself was privileged and wondered why he hadn’t given the sweets and other things he’d been gifted at some of the houses to the less well-off he had met in others. Always, Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people.

‘It’s been a busy time,’ Furlong said. ‘Won’t the few days off do us no harm.’ ‘What it is to be a man,’ she said, ‘and to have days off.’

an order of monks who’d built an abbey there, in the old days, and were given the right to levy tolls on the river. As time went on, they grew covetous and the people had rebelled and driven them from the town. When they were leaving, the abbot put a curse on the town, so that every year it would take three lives, neither more nor fewer.

Furlong carried on uneasily, thinking back over the Dublin girl who’d asked him to take her here so she could drown, and how he had refused her; of how he had afterwards lost his way along the back roads, and of the queer old man out slashing the thistles in the fog that evening with the puckaun, and what he’d said about how the road would take him wherever he wanted to go.

but everything was just as he’d feared although the girl, this time, took his coat and seemed gladly to lean on him as he led her out. ‘You’ll come home with me now, Sarah.’

Not one person they met addressed Sarah or asked where he was taking her.

found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

The fact was that he would pay for it but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this, not even when his infant girls were first placed in his arms and he had heard their healthy, obstinate cries.

Climbing the street towards his own front door with the barefooted girl and the box of shoes, his fear more than outweighed every other feeling but in his foolish heart he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage.

Ireland’s last Magdalen laundry was not closed down until 1996.

Rarely was any of these girls’ or women’s work recognised or acknowledged in any way. Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives.

Earlier this year, the Mother and Baby Home Commission Report found that nine thousand children died in just eighteen of the institutions investigated.