Free Two Walls and a Roof by John Michael Cahill

all, though I still had my doubts.

The lost train set .
     
    May Sheehan was a small , frail little woman who owned a grocery shop across the road from our house. She sold the newspapers, groceries and butter. The butter had to be delivered from the creamery and would not keep well - f ridges being an unheard of machine in those days, so she didn’t carry a large stock of it, and relied on the odd delivery from a local who might be passing the creamery. Th is was not an ideal arrangement and she often ran out , so she needed a delivery boy.  Almost every few days , she needed a new supply and I was to become that delivery boy. I don’t know how I actually got the job, but when I was about twelve years old, I began working for May collecting her butter. The deal was six pence a load and a load was about ten pounds I suppose, maybe more. I do know that I used an old shiny biscuit tin to carry this butter from the creamery to her shop. Sh e paid me faithfully every trip and it was great having real money of my own to spend as I liked.  A sixpenny bit was made of silver and had a shiny dog on its face, and it felt so good in my pocket. With such an amount of money, I could easily buy lots of slab toffee and even a bar of chocolate if I was to go really mad. Each time she paid me , I would be over the m oon with happiness and I often bought a slab of toffee for both Kyrle and Lill as a surprise from my wealth.
    The biscuit tin weighed quite a bit, but the creamery was only down at the bottom of the town, so my journey was not too long and I used to rest my tin on strategic window sills on the way up to her shop. It only took me about twenty minutes , and for that I earned a full six pence every few days . Th ings were surely looking up for me at last.
    I do remember one day passing Peggy Corbett’s drapery shop j ust some weeks before Christmas and seeing , to my utter amazement, a beautiful train set in a box in her shop window. I stood transfixed, sta ring in at this amazing sight. I had dreamed of having a train set for a very long time , hoping for one at Christmas some day, but ne ver telling anyone of my dreams because this would be a really expensive toy . A nd I didn’t want to add more stress to my Nan , knowing Santa did not exist for us Cahills. But there it was. It was very unusual to see toys in Pe g gy ’s window as it was a drapery shop, and she never had toys in it, but that year she seems to have decided to try a new line of business to make money.
    Peggy Corbett always seemed to me to be a tall gentle woman, always soft spoken and never gruff or ugly to me, or to anyone else either. She had never married and lived up the street with her parents . A nd what’s more , she never seemed to age at all.  She sold cloth , wool, some children’s clothes and Communion outfits, and of course she was also the Nannie’s primary bank.  I think because of my many borrowings for Nannie, Peggy got to know me well, and I’m sure she liked me, and I liked her too.
    After staring in a t the train set for a long time I became determined that I would have it one way or another , and so in I went to Peggy. I enquired about the train set, how much it would cost, and did she have many for sale . I had a lot of questions that day.
    She said that the price of the train set was seven shillings and six pence, an almost gigantic sum then, and she only had the on e train set. When one considers that before the May Sheehan job I was only getting the odd penny now and again, it would have been totally impossible to buy that train set ever, as seven and six was 90 pennies. B ut , by then I was ‘working’ and I made up my mind that I would have that train set by Christmas. As a rough guess , I worked it out at about fifteen butter trips and I felt sure it could be done , and with time to spare. I asked Peggy if I could take the train set by paying her in small amounts and she asked me how small. “Sixpences” , I say . Peggy