Free Peeling Oranges by James Lawless Page A

gone. My mother called after him, but she was told to shut up by a couple from a dark corner who were ‘doing the business’.
    ***
    One evening per week (mostly Thursdays as it happened) my mother did social work in the slums and tenements of Dublin – it developed from her visits to the 1916 widows and relations of those killed in the ‘movement’. She described her experiences in her letters to Patrick. She visited families living in single rooms – sometimes up to twenty per room. ‘Imagine, Patrick, these hovels are called the Mansions.’
    One family she grew particularly fond of was the Chaigneau’s. There was a number of such French names (Devereaux and Leon among them) around the Liberties. They were descendants of Huguenots who had been banished from France by Louis XIV because of their Protestant beliefs. But that was centuries ago, and Mrs Chaigneau, as my mother points out, ‘is Catholic now well and true with her family of thirteen.’
    ‘Wouldn’t you wonder what it’s all about?’ my mother said once, referring to nationalism, ‘with the mixing of all the names I mean.’
    Mrs Chaigneau’s family inhabited a basement flat:
    She has a gas sense of humour, Patrick, despite all the hardship. I was visiting her only last week when the rent collector called. ‘I’m looking for the rent,’ said the rent collector. ‘Oh come on in,’ says Mrs Chaigneau, ‘and we’ll look for it together’.
    ***
    The children went around in bare feet even in winter. She comments on their huge red chilblains. She managed to get shoes for some of them, old shoes stuffed with cardboard. The Evening Herald provided a boot fund charity which my mother availed of and Frawley’s department store in Thomas Street gave cardboard boxes which were cut as inside soles for leaky boots. However, one child stood on glass and never told anyone that he was cut – it was a minor thing; everyone had cuts, but he walked on animal dung one day when the drovers brought their cattle and sheep up from the country and he developed gangrene.
    My mother saw the little boy on crutches with one trouser leg swaying in the wind.
    Tommy Chaigneau was eight years old. She wrote to Patrick, saying that she had found a new friend. Sometimes she brought little Tommy to the pictures, sacrificing her romantic preferences for cowboy films:
    He loves Randolph Scott. After a picture he tells the story to the other children, who sit around him feeding on every word. For a short time at least they are transported from a world of poverty to a world of high adventure. Each little boy wants to be ‘the chap,’ and each little girl, ‘the beautiful damsel’. And they run out afterwards looking for Bang-Bang who is shooting everyone with his key.
    Some of the women ask me if I am married. They find it hard to understand that you are away from me. They? Why am I saying they, as if I am no longer part of them? Is it because I went away? They live so close to each other, Patrick: aunts, grannies, cousins, all only a couple of blocks away. Their whole world is contained within an arm’s length.
    They live in the present except for the Diddly club where they save their halfpennies for Christmas. Each day is the one day – a permanent pursuit of a crust to keep them alive. But they have music and song despite the hardship. There is a melodeon in every tenement. And the men, when they have no money, sing on the street corners for the want of something to do.
    Some of them know Muddy. ‘Oh a grand generous woman,’ they say. ‘Many’s the credit she gave, not like some of the huckster shops nowadays. A pudding at Christmas, or a bit of coal for the fire.’
    They ask me if I have children. I tell them not yet. They say the number of children you have is a sign of how much your husband loves you. Mrs Chaigneau says the woman on the top landing only has three children. Her husband doesn’t love her at all, she says
    We will have children, Patrick, won’t