by Anne Doughty
This winter he had found quite a few jobs locally, but there were other years when there was no work of any kind. Then the only income was from her sewing. Without her sewing money and the savings she had made while he was away, she couldn’t have kept them in food and turf.
If she went to help Daniel teach, with the house still to run and the children to care for, the hours to spend sewing would be very hard to find, even with the better light of the long, summer evenings.
She glanced out of the open door as if there was some answer to be found out there. The light was strengthening and a few gleams of sunlight were reflecting off the whitewashed cottage walls. Whatever her decision would be, there was no need to delay her visit to Daniel.
She made up her mind to go up to Casheltown and see what Daniel had to say. She knew she needed to wake the children right away so that she had extra time to fit in washing and dressing herself, something she usually left till after they’d gone and she’d done the dustiest and dirtiest of the morning jobs.
They were both fast asleep in the tiny bedrooms Patrick had partitioned off from the single, large bedroom of their two-room dwelling, the bedroom where they had begun their married life, in October 1835, ten years ago this coming autumn.
Sam woke up the moment she touched him, threw his arms round her and hugged her. Rose was always harder to wake and was very often involved in some complicated dream that, given any possible opportunity, she would talk about until they were both ready to leave. This morning, Hannah knew she would have to discourage her usual recital if they were all to leave the house on time.
They did manage it, though as Hannah pulled the front door closed behind her, she was only too aware of all the tasks she had had to leave aside. Out of her normal morning’s routine, only the making up of the fire had been done.
Stepping into the brightness of the April morning, she set aside the crowding thoughts and focused on Rose and Sam who were now telling her what they were going to do with Miss McGee today and what story the master had promised them if they all did their work well.
Hannah listened carefully but as they picked their steps through the broken stones of the track and turned right towards Casheltown, she found herself looking up at the great stone mound, once a fortified place, that looked out over the waters of Lough Gartan. She thought of her own very different walks to school in the softer green countryside of Galloway. There, the sea was almost always in sight, the fields a rich green, the school itself a sturdy, stone building with separate entrances marked Girls and Boys, and a patch of land at the back where the older boys learnt gardening.
She remembered Flora taking her by the hand on her first day and walking her briskly along the familiar lanes to the school where she herself had been a pupil some twelve years earlier.
Suddenly feeling sad, thinking of her brothers and sisters scattered ‘to the four winds’ as her father often said, she was glad when a girl in a tattered shift ran down from a nearby cottage and greeted them all cheerfully.
As Mary O’Donoghue fell in beside her, Hannah gathered her straying thoughts and asked the children how many scholars there currently were in their school.
Neither Rose nor Sam were very sure about the number, but Mary, a year or two older than Rose, was quite clear about it. There were fifteen on the roll, she said, when they were all there, but mostly they weren’t all there at the same time. She explained that often pupils couldn’t come if they were needed at home, for driving the cow to the fair or planting the tatties.
‘But that’s a good thing, Mrs McGinley,’ she went on, as Rose and Sam fell silent. ‘If they were all there, the wee ones would have to sit on creepies. Mr McGee doesn’t like that, but there’s only room for twelve on the chairs and benches.’
Hannah nodded her agreement. The low, homemade stools might be all right for listening to a story, but they certainly weren’t suitable for any written work, or even reading aloud comfortably. She was surprised that there could be any thought of fifteen in a kitchen not much bigger than her own.
Moments later, as they turned off the main track and walked the short distance up to Daniel’s house, she saw Daniel himself waiting near the open door. He was greeting each child as they appeared.
‘Hannah, you’re welcome,’ he said warmly, holding out his hand to her before she had even opened her mouth.
She was completely taken aback. Of course he knew her voice, and he was well known for knowing everyone’s footsteps, but how did he know she was there when she hadn’t yet said a word?
‘Good morning, Mary; good morning, Rose; good morning, Sam,’ he went on briskly, then, taking her arm, he led her towards the stone seat where he sat so often when the evenings grew lighter.
‘I’m heart glad you were able to come,’ he said, as the three children ran into the big kitchen that served as the classroom. ‘I’d be even more glad if you could see your way to helping me out, but we’ll not say a word about that yet. Marie is going to start the work indoors and then she’ll come out and tell you how we manage between us and what we each do. I don’t want to give you a false picture. It’s hard work, I confess, but then you’ve never been afraid of that or you wouldn’t have married your good man. Is he still working on that house up at Tullygobegley?’
*
They sat and talked as old friends do, for Daniel was one of the first people she had met when she came to Ardtur. Patrick had taken her to meet him one evening when they’d been back only a week or so. She’d found a house full of people, not one of whom she yet knew, but Daniel welcomed her warmly, made her sit beside him by the hearth and introduced her new neighbours one by one with a story about each of them, or a joke. Then he had told a long, traditional story after which he encouraged his visiting neighbours to sing, or to recite.
There followed many evenings at Daniel’s house before the children were born. When he had someone with a violin, or a penny whistle, he’d insist the young ones take the floor. Once, indeed, to please him, she had taken the floor herself with Patrick to learn ‘The Waves of Tory’.
She would never forget that evening: being passed from hand to hand by young men in shirtsleeves, dipping her head below raised arms, making an arch herself with a new partner, and all the time the lilt and dip of the music mimicking the flowing waves.
Hannah’s regular visits to Daniel were interrupted when she had her first miscarriage and then again when Patrick went back to Scotland. It was only a week after his departure when Daniel himself came to call on her. He told her that he still expected to see her, Patrick or no Patrick, whenever she could spare the time.
So she had walked up there on her own, or joined with another neighbour from Ardtur, for the long months when Patrick was away in Scotland. And so the year turned and Patrick returned. But it was only after two more miscarriages that she finally managed to carry Rose to full term. Then, there could be no more evening visits for her until Patrick was at home over the winter.
But Daniel made it clear that he was not prepared to be deprived of her company for all those long months. If she could not come to him in the evening because of little Rose, then he would come down and visit her in the afternoons. That is what he then did, almost every week.
Sometimes he brought a book and asked her to read to him, sometimes they just talked, but always he asked her about ‘home’, her father, her brothers and sisters, their lives, their travels and their families. Slowly and very intermittently, he told her something about his own unusual background and how he came to have a formal education that included Latin and Greek.
It was while Rose was still a baby that he came one afternoon to tell her of a decision he’d made. He said that since a young man who took pupils had left the adjoining townland quite unexpectedly, there was now no school anywhere nearby. He had decided that unless he did something himself, a generation of children would grow up on the mountainside who could neither read nor write. He was going to start a school and he needed her advice as
well as her encouragement.
The next book from Anne Doughty is coming in November 2019!
If you enjoyed The Teacher at Donegal Bay, then why not try another heart-warming read from HQ Digital?
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