Free Annie Dunne by Sebastian Barry

the scrubbing and rubbing in that.’
    ‘I do not follow you at all, Sarah,’ I say.
    ‘The children,’ she says, ‘the children and their rolling.’

    ‘That fierce master, Tommy Byrne, taught us all the epics.’
    It is Sarah talking, by the fire, hardly heeding us her listeners, if talking it really is. It might also be said to be a kind of old singing. Things she likes to say, over and over.
     
     
    ‘He beat us without mercy when we were small and spindly. But he had a terrible appetite for the Roman poets, and we learned of the doings of Aeneas in the early days of the Romans. Virgil it was wrote that. And he said we could learn anything we would ever need to know about farming from Virgil, in his book, the Eclogues. And do you know, Annie, the curious thing was, we knew nearly everything that Virgil had to say, even as the master read it, about tilling and sowing and harvesting, because we had been looking at it from the days our eyes first opened at our mother’s breasts.’
    I am washing the two children one by one in the big enamel basin. I have it set out in front of the fire and I am also imploring the boy, whose turn it is now, not to do his favourite swimming motion when my back is turned to fetch an item. He holds the sides of the old curving basin and whooshes himself along through the water, he cannot help it, with the delight of it, and then of course the wave rises up behind him and swamps the great flagstone of the hearth, and he menaces the fire itself with his flood.
    But Sarah is in her chair staring off into the middle distance where the light of the oil lamp barely reaches, her face yellowing in the soft light like a stone in the late sun, talking away as softly as the light of other days, when she was young. For myself I went to the Loreto Convent in North Great George’s Street in Dublin when my father was head of the castle police, and when he was but a village inspector, to the little school in Dalkey Village, among the wild children of Dalkey, so my memories are not of the little village school in Kiltegan.
    Her thoughts - as I soap the boy fiercely, to try and restore him a little to his city cleanliness, not entirely succeeding - have passed easily from a discussion of Billy Kerr (‘Billy Kerr shakes me,’ she has said again), to the Dunnes of Feddin, to Winnie Dunne, who is the schoolmistress now in Kiltegan, to her own schooling there, and the master Byrne, who died of peritonitis in the thirties sometime. He was one of those old-time teachers seemingly with nothing but the classics between himself and ruination. His own father had been the keeper of a proper hedge school, where the penniless classes of Catholics and Protestants went for their education. They weren’t real hedges, but poor bad sorts of buildings going begging, lean-tos and the like, the sort of crazy habitation that might suit a labourer and his offspring till the very roof fell in on them.
    I don’t know what it is about Sarah these times, but some little latch has been loosened in her tongue, by something, by someone. She is very much a brighter person and the usual glooms have been lifted out of her, and she is engrossed now in remembering. Even the boy listens to her like a robin with its head at a listening angle, another sort of latch. It is how a robin looks at me in the yard in the winter when I sally forth—as if about to speak to me civilly, as if expecting some small morsel for himself, and why not?
    The boy at any rate makes no complaint of my scrubbing, whereas the girl fell quickly into tears of vexation, not at all wanting to be naked, though she is perched now on the hearth seat almost wholly wrapped in a big old sheet I use for drying them, and her own innocent disc of a face is entombing its thoughts in the low gutters of the turf.
    ‘The best days of your life, your schooldays,’ I say.
    ‘I was at school already,’ says the boy. ‘We learned Inchworm and Thumbelina. They’re songs for