When All Is Said

by Anne Griffin

In the late fifties, you see, we had begun to buy up little plots wherever we could find them. Farmers with their bags packed ready to leave for England, desperate to take what might be offered. We borrowed, counting on the economic tide eventually turning in our favour. We handed over the criminally small payments to those boys heading off, asking was there anyone else around in the market. If we were given a tip, we went straight there, arriving at the next deal with cash in our pockets. Some slammed their door on our insult. But others took it, ready to trade in their farming life for that of barman or labourer or miner. I often wondered, did those hands that pocketed our cash ever ache for the touch of the soil as they held the smooth glass or the cold concrete or the dusty coal of their new lives? At night in their dreams, did they move with the rhythm of a scythe or reach to calm the hind of a cow before milking?

A. How they accumulated wealth, more or less honestly, bit by bit. B. Love how Maurice muses and wonders how other people felt (eg his father, earlier re:Tony’s death)