Free The Guns of Easter by Gerard Whelan Page B

full. Jimmy stopped and raised one side of the hinged lid and looked inside. He saw a jumble of tin cans. FRUIT PUDDING , said one; another had EXCELLENT PRESSED TONGUE written on it in fancy letters. They weren’t foods that Jimmy knew, but at least they were foods. There were only six tins left in the basket; the rest must have fallen out.
    Sarah and Ma were still asleep when Jimmy got back to the house. He lit a fire in the grate and put water on to boil. He took the tins from the basket and put them on the table. Then, struck by an idea, he chopped the wicker basket roughly into pieces with the kitchen knife and fed the pieces to the fire. Nobody could accuse him of stealing if there was no evidence. The food, of course, was still here, but not for long.
    When the water boiled Jimmy put some tea-leaves into the blackened teapot and poured boiling water over them. Then he put the teapot and the two cracked mugs on the table beside the tins of food. He went over and woke his mother.
    ‘I’m after making tea, Ma,’ he said softly in her ear.
    Ma started guiltily and sat up. ‘I fell asleep!’ she said. She turned to check on Sarah.
    ‘How is she?’ Jimmy asked.
    ‘Still feverish, but I think it’s gone down a bit.’
    ‘Maybe she’d like some tea?’
    ‘Let her sleep,’ Ma said. ‘I’ll give her something later.’
    She stood up and rubbed her eyes. She still looked tired. She went over to the table to pour some tea, and then she saw the tins.
    ‘Jimmy!’ she said. ‘Where did these come from?’ Her voice wasn’t sharp or suspicious, only surprised. Faltering, Jimmy explained. His face grew red, and he stopped several times during the story. But Ma didn’t give out to him when she heard it; instead, she hugged him close. ‘Oh, Jimmy!’ she said, ‘you’re a brave lad and a good one.’
    ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he said. ‘I knew it was wrong to take it, but it was wrong to leave you here with no food too.’
    ‘Hush!’ Ma said, hugging him tighter. ‘You were brave, Jimmy. Brave and good.’ She tried to explain. ‘Jimmy,’ she said, ‘you know it’s wrong to shoot at people.’
    Jimmy was puzzled. ‘Yeh,’ he said.
    ‘But your father is in the army, and he shoots at people. And now Mick is out fighting, and maybe he’ll have to shoot at people too.’
    ‘But that’s different …’ He stopped. It was a complicated matter. He didn’t have the words to express himself.
    ‘Sometimes,’ his mother said, ‘taking things that aren’t yours is the same. It’s wrong. But you knew it would be more wrong to leave us with no food while this lay thrown away in the street.’
    Jimmy saw that she understood. He nodded enthusiastically. Ma stood up, laughing almost gaily. Jimmy knew that she was doing it to reassure him. She made a great show of reading the labels on the cans.
    ‘Excellent pressed tongue, indeed! Maybe we won’t be eating much for the next few days, Jimmy,’ she said, ‘but we’ll be eating very fancy stuff.’
    ‘I’ll bring one of these tins up to Mrs Doyle,’ she went on. ‘She has a bit more food than we do, but she has our Josie up there as well as her own.’ She examined the tinned food again. ‘We’re not too badly off at all.’ It was a lie, but Jimmy knew that Ma thought keeping his spirits up was more important.
    Jimmy, though, wasn’t cheered. A few cans of food and a couple of stale sandwiches from Mick wouldn’t last long, and there was no way of knowing how long it would be before they would get anything else.
    So far the British had made no serious effort to force the Volunteers out of Sackville Street, but that wouldn’t last. The army would attack and the rebels would fight. When that happened, Jimmy and his family would be in the middle of a battlefield.
    Things couldn’t be like this all over the city. He was sure of that. There didn’t seem to be a huge number of rebels. They would defend the places they’d taken over, but other