Anne Doughty - The Belfast Girl on Galway Bay

‘That tea was marvellous, Mary. Can I help myself to another cup? What about you? Are you ready yet?’

To my surprise and delight, Mary held out her cup and let me refill it. All week, she had been pouring my tea and serving Paddy and me at the table, while eating her own meal by the fire. She had waited on others all her life. Now, at last, she’d let me do something for her. It delighted me, for I knew such a gesture could have only one meaning. As far as Mary was concerned, I was no longer a stranger in the place.

We finished our tea in silence. My legs were beginning to throb gently after the long walk and the standing in the shops. Mary had been on her feet all day too, feeding hens and calves, baking bread, separating milk and making butter. We were both reluctant to move.

Finally, Mary got to her feet, her hand to her low back in a familiar gesture. ‘Have you writing to do today, Elizabeth?’

‘I have, Mary, but I’ll wait till we light the lamp. I’ll help you with the supper first.’

Outside the cottage a van stopped. Mary moved quickly to the middle of the floor. ‘I wonder who that is. Bad luck to that hyderange, for I can’t see a thing these days.’

The van started up again and continued on up the hill. The fumes drifted through the open door. They were followed by the scrape of boots on the flagstones. A moment later, Paddy appeared.

He had shaved off the stubble which had graced his chin at lunch and was wearing his best suit of brown corduroy with the pink and mauve tie that had so amazed me on my arrival. His face looked as if it had been polished, the cheeks fresh and pink, his eyes even brighter than usual. From the top of his cap, perched on his shiny forehead, to the toes of his well-polished boots, he looked trim, collected and totally in command of himself.

Such a small man, I thought, as he raised his hand in the doorway. Small and compact and full of a compelling sense of life that related not at all to the lines on his face, the remaining wisps of white hair, or the gnarled fingers, thickened with age. How can a man be old and yet so full of life? Paddy would never be old.

He hung his cap on the hook behind the door, grinned at us cheerfully and walked into the room with only the slightest trace of a sway. He smiled again, a sideways smile directed mostly at Mary. It was like the look on a child’s face, when it knows it has been naughty, but expects to be let off with a caution.

Mary said nothing, but I could see she was amused. We waited.

‘God bless all here,’ he said heartily. ‘I’m sorry, Mary, that I was unavoidably detained. I met some Yankees from Australia.’

Chapter 4

It isn’t Paddy who has the hangover this morning, I thought to myself, as I sat munching wheaten bread at breakfast next day. He had been in such sparkling form the previous evening that we had sat by the fire till midnight. He’d told me stories from every part of his life, moving back and forth across the Atlantic and the decades of his seventy-odd years with equal ease and a fluency that had me spellbound.

He had such a gift with words. Everything he said was put in a simple, direct way but out of that simplicity he built something much more complex. The atmosphere he created was so very potent that as I listened to his stories, some happy, some sad, some cautionary, I felt sure I was experiencing something quite beyond the actual events he was recounting. It came to me that Paddy’s stories were like parables for in them he had concentrated the wisdom of a long life lived with passion and humanity. I had gone to bed, my head full of Paddy’s stories, and spent a dream-haunted night reliving stories of my own.

‘God bless all here.’

The dark-caped figure of Paddy the Postman stood in the doorway, a hand half-raised in greeting. I’d been so far away that I had neither seen the bob of his cap above the hydrangea, nor heard the scrape of handlebars as he leaned his ancient, regulation bicycle against the wall of the dairy.

‘God bless you, Paddy. Sit down and rest yourself, till I get you a drop of tea.’

He sat down, his cape dripping gently from a sudden shower. ‘Ah, miss, I have a handful for you today,’ he said. He counted out three letters for me.

‘Well, what’s news in the world today?’

Paddy O’Dara put down his blue enamel mug. He’d persevered with the delft cup and saucer for two days after my arrival until Mary had absentmindedly taken the mug from the dresser. He clutched it thankfully and the cup and saucer did not reappear.

‘Good news. Mary-at-the-foot-of-the-hill has a wee boy and all well. Seven o’clock this morning.’

‘Ah, thanks be to God,’ said Mary, crossing herself. ‘I’ll go down and see the poor crater after a while.’

‘There’s Yankees arrived at John Carey Thatched House and his brother’s over from Kilshanny. There’ll be a big party tonight, I’m thinking. Flannigan’s lorry was there delivering crates of porter.’

Paddy finished his tea at a gulp and stood up. ‘God bless you, Mary, that was good, but I must be like the beggar man, drink and go, for I’ve a packet for Flaherty’s beyond the Four Crosses.’

‘Ah, ’tis a good way that, Paddy, and mostly uphill,’ Mary nodded.

‘And we’re not getting any younger,’ said Paddy ruefully, as he settled his mailbag on his shoulder and put his cap on.

‘Good luck till ye.’

‘Good luck.’

I began to stack the cups and plates at one end of the table, but Mary stopped me.

‘Sure leave them, astore. Aren’t you going over to Ballyvore. And I’ve not much to do today.’

It was highly unlikely that Mary had not much to do. I had seldom seen her finish her daily round before supper. But I sensed that often she was glad to be alone, with me out pacing the fields and Paddy working on the land or in the haggard.

‘Will I need my wellingtons, do you think, Paddy?’

‘Ah no, it won’t be that wet. The path is rough, but it doesn’t flood and the wind’s been drying between the showers.’

I collected my plastic folder of field maps, put the letters in my pocket and zipped up my jacket. ‘I’ll be back by one, Mary, is that all right?’

‘As right as rain, astore.’

‘Mind yourself, Elizabeth,’ Paddy warned severely, ‘Ballyvore is full of old bachelors and wouldn’t they just like me to make a match for them with a nice, slim, young girl like yourself.’ He laughed as he stumped off to the garden to dig potatoes.

Slim. I smiled to myself as I set off up the road. No one had called me slim before. After my ‘skinny’ phase in early childhood, I had begun to put on weight when I was about eight years old. Despite the removal of all sweets, chocolate and cake from my life and my mother’s continuous nagging not to eat this or that, or anything I put my hand out for, it was my late teens before I suddenly shed the flabby layers that had made my late childhood and teens so miserable. For years now, I had shut out the memory of those unhappy times. The teasing at primary school was bad enough, but what happened at grammar school was even worse. The games mistress made me run round and round the gym every morning before prayers. Remedials, she called it. My face would prickle with heat, I’d get a stitch in my side, and afterwards I couldn’t find my place in my Songs of Praise, because my hands were shaking and sticky with perspiration. Those days were long gone. Thank Heaven.

But slim. I could hardly think of myself as slim. Certainly not compared with Adrienne. Perhaps Adrienne was a bit too slim. George said she had a marvellous figure but he preferred his women cuddly, like me. He said he was glad I wasn’t sylphlike. Often, when we were lying together on the sofa in his mother’s sitting room, or on a rug on some beach or hillside, he would put his head in my lap and say that I was built for comfort. But Paddy thought I was slim.