CHAPTER 1

KNOCKNASHEE, CO KERRY, IRELAND

January 1940

Grace Fitzgerald opened the gate that led from the
schoolyard into her own garden and smiled to see several
clusters of snowdrops poking their heads up through the frosty
ground. She’d planted the bulbs last autumn, and the sight of them
lifted her heart, though her right leg ached badly as she limped to
the front door.
Her day spent teaching her class of four- to eight-year-olds had
been great fun as usual but also exhausting, and she longed to set
down her heavy basket of books and rest for five minutes in her
kitchen with a cup of tea.
The morning had involved arithmetic and spelling, followed by
another two chapters of The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey, illustrated by Jack
B. Yeats, brother of the famous poet; the older ones had taken turns
to read aloud. Then after lunch, to everyone’s delight, she got out
the brand-new powder paints she’d bought yesterday from Mr
Delaney, their travelling supplier.
It was wonderful to see the little boys and girls being creative,
but hard work clearing up after them, especially on days like today
when her leg hurt.

The children helped by washing their brushes under the outdoor
tap, but forty-three pictures of donkeys and mountains needed to be
pegged up to dry on a line strung across the classroom, and the
floor had to be mopped because somehow the powder paint got
everywhere, and the old newspapers she’d used to cover the tables
had to be bundled up and burnt in the stove before the turf fire was
tamped down.
Grace’s work gave her no end of joy, but it was a lot to cope with
at the same time. Especially as there were so many more children
now. People who never came near Knocknashee National School
before had started sending their sons and daughters, and while
Grace loved to see them all bounce fearlessly in the door – and she
welcomed each new child with a big smile and a lemon sherbet – it
meant there were now eighty-two pupils to manage instead of sixty
five.

Thank God for Declan.
Grace had given him the eight- to twelve-year-olds to teach,
keeping the younger ones herself. More and more children were
staying past twelve now as well which was gratifying. It would have
been easier for her to take the older children, as they were more
manageable, and if she needed to deal with something in her role as
headmistress – a worried parent or a school inspector – she could
have left the class on their honour to behave and they would. But
she did really love teaching the little ones the best, even though
they couldn’t be relied upon not to set the school on fire or get a
pencil stuck up someone’s nose if she turned her back for an instant.
Father Iggy was a great help to Declan too. He came in for an
hour a day to do lessons with the weaker groups. There were boys
and girls starting school for the first time in the older class who
should have been reading and writing long ago but couldn’t because
their parents had refused to send them to Agnes.
Father Iggy had once confided to Grace that he would have loved
to have been a teacher, but as the second son, the farm at home
going to his older brother, he was bundled off to the seminary aged
twelve. He spoke of his time in the seminary sometimes, and Grace
felt sorry for him; it sounded like a lonely childhood. Even so, he
made a lovely priest, and life was so much easier now that he’d
taken over from Canon Rafferty as head of the school board.
No one was quite sure why the bishop had taken a notion to
move the canon to some tiny parish up in County Tipperary, but
rumour had it that Knocknashee’s former priest had been caught
with his hand in the collection plate. Whatever the truth of it, the
whole place seemed to exhale when the news came through that
the move was happening; everyone had had some kind of a run-in
with him at one time or another.
Only two people were unhappy to see him go. One was Kit
Gallagher, his sour housekeeper, who thought very highly of the
canon and baked him no end of sweet cakes. And the other was
Agnes.

Poor Agnes. When she heard the news of the canon’s relocation,
a long, sad trickle of tears leaked out of her drooping left eye and
down her thin, lopsided face, and Grace couldn’t help feeling sorry
for her sister, even after everything that had happened. Poor, foolish,
deluded Agnes, thinking Canon Rafferty was her friend. Since she’d
had her devastating stroke last year at the age of thirty-three, the
canon had not visited her once, and now he was gone without even
saying goodbye.
Agnes was the reason Grace couldn’t go straight down the hall to
the kitchen and put the kettle on. Before she could relax with a cup
of tea, she needed to pop into the front sitting room, which she’d
converted into a bedroom for Agnes, and say good afternoon and
share the news of her day. It was a ritual she liked to stick to even
though she wasn’t sure if her sister appreciated it.
As she opened the front door into the hall, Dymphna O’Connell
came out of the sitting room carrying an untouched bowl of custard.
Seeing Grace, the slight, careworn woman put her finger to her lips.
‘She’s asleep, Grace,’ she whispered.
‘And how was she today?’ murmured Grace as the older woman
closed the door softly behind her.
‘She’s hardly said two words since this morning, nor eaten more
than a spoonful or two, though I made her some carrot soup for
lunch with no lumps or a bit and normally she likes that.’
All of Agnes’s food had to be mashed, as she couldn’t swallow
large pieces. Since the stroke, she’d existed on scrambled eggs,
soup and custard. Her left hand was paralysed and her right hand
very weak and shaky, so Dymphna or Grace had to spoon-feed her.
Dymphna O’Connell was yet another person Grace couldn’t have
done without.

When Teresa, Agnes’s previous carer, had left to get married,
Grace put a card up in the post office advertising the position of
carer for Agnes. But the tyrannical reputation her sister had built up
for herself in the village meant Grace was not exactly inundated with
people desperate to replace Teresa. Despite the dire financial need
of many in Knocknashee, they weren’t that desperate.
But Dymphna, a widow with two small children, was badly in
need of a job, and for Grace, she was a godsend.
‘Now come on through to the kitchen, let you, and I’ll make you
a cuppa. I baked a few queen cakes this morning – they’re in the
tin,’ added Dymphna as she carried the custard away down the hall.
It sounded like a blissful idea, but the poor woman looked even
more worn out than usual.
‘No, you get on home,’ said Grace as she followed Dymphna to
the kitchen, walking slowly because of the pain in her leg. Polio was
like that. Sometimes she would hardly feel it; other times the ache
was enough to bring tears to her eyes. ‘I sent Paudie and Kate on
before you with instructions they were to have their lessons finished
by the time you get back.’

Dymphna smiled at the mention of her seven-year-old son and
five-year-old daughter. ‘And you know as well as I do, I’ll go home to
find them up on that new donkey of Bill Shannon’s and not a
copybook opened,’ she said softly as she set the tray on the counter.
‘Probably,’ Grace conceded with a chuckle. ‘So you’d better go
and get them off the donkey, and I’ll bring that custard to Agnes
when she wakes up.’
‘Yerra, they’ll be grand for half an hour. Let you sit down there,
and I’ll put the kettle on.’
‘I can make tea for myself, Dymphna, honestly…’
‘I know you can, but ’twon’t take me a minute, and you look like
if you don’t sit down, you’ll fall down, you poor craythur.’
‘Well, if you’re sure.’ Grace sank onto her chair as Dymphna lit
the gas under the kettle.
Progress was a wonderful thing. A Cornishman called Ritchie Gill
had brought the idea for bottled gas back from America in 1934, and
it was beginning to catch on in many rural areas of Ireland. Grace
had felt guilty buying it, knowing it was an extravagance Agnes
would never have allowed if she was in the fullness of her health,
but it made Dymphna’s life so much easier as well as her own.
The older woman made a pot of tea and opened the tin, offering
Grace an iced bun, which she took. It was only as she bit into the
soft sweetness that she remembered she’d not eaten since
breakfast.
‘These are delicious, Dymphna. Will you have a cuppa with me
before you go?’
‘I will so.’ The other woman sank into the chair opposite to Grace,
poured out two mugs and took a bun for herself. ‘Tommy, God rest
him, was a divil for cakes and sweets. He had a wicked sweet tooth
altogether.’ She sighed. ‘He never got a treat in the orphanage, so he
always said he had plenty of making up to do.’
‘He married the right woman so,’ said Grace. It was good that
Dymphna spoke of Tommy. Most people would never mention his
name again due to the circumstances of his death.
Dymphna nodded sadly. ‘I hope so.’
The young widow was only thirty-seven, but the loss of her
husband had carved deep lines of grief on her face. Her hair was
grey at the temples, and her deep-set brown eyes were filled with
sorrow. She was a soft person, kind and gentle, and when her
beloved Tommy had walked into the sea one night, it had shattered
her heart.

Nobody really knew what drove poor Tommy, a man who was
utterly devoted to his wife and children, to take his own life, but he
did, and to heap more pain on the already distraught family, the
canon hadn’t allowed him to be buried in consecrated ground.
Tommy O’Connell was laid to rest in the cillín, an unofficial
graveyard that had served for centuries as the final resting place for
unbaptised infants, new mothers who died before being churched,
beggars, the mentally disabled, strange bodies washed up from
shipwrecks – all manner of reasons the Church deemed the person
unworthy of a Catholic burial.
Canon Rafferty had insisted it was beyond his authority, that the
laws of the Church clearly stated those who were to be afforded an
ecclesiastical funeral rite and those who were to be denied.
Tommy wasn’t the first person to take his own life that Grace had
heard of, but usually the family said it was an accident to avoid the
scandal, and nobody would contradict it even if they knew it wasn’t
true. But poor Dymphna had no such option, because Tommy had
left a note to say how much he loved her and his children and how
sorry he was for all the trouble this would cause.
The poor man wasn’t in his right mind obviously.
He’d been raised in an orphanage, being a foundling with no
family, and maybe his childhood had eaten away at him, in the same
way Declan McKenna still got dreadful flashbacks to his time in the
reformatory at Letterfrack, after the canon took him and his baby
sister away from their widowed father.
Grace took a refreshing sip of her tea. ‘How are things,
Dymphna?’

Dymphna responded with a wan smile, and the lines of tiredness
and loss seemed to deepen. ‘Not too bad. Better since I got this job– you were a lifesaver. I don’t know what would have become of us
if you hadn’t given me this, really and truly I don’t.’
Tommy had been a fisherman, like most of the men around, and
he and Dymphna and the children had existed hand-to-mouth.
Dymphna’s family never approved of her husband. They owned a
shop in Dingle, and the Tommy O’Connell out of the orphanage was
beneath them to their way of thinking, so they cut Dymphna off
when she married. When he died, her mother did come to
Knocknashee, but because she spoke so unkindly of Tommy and was
so critical of what he’d done, calling him selfish and useless,
Dymphna put the run on her and so was entirely alone.
‘Well, ’tisn’t everyone could do it,’ Grace said, glancing in the
direction of the sitting room. Dymphna was so good-hearted and
trying her very best. God knew Agnes had been next door to
impossible with Teresa, but Grace was sure Agnes was being ten
times more difficult with Dymphna due to the poor woman being
Tommy’s widow.