THE COUNTRY GIRLS WITH TIN MUGS
- By Veronica Breen Hogle
“I’ll wait here ‘til you disappear around the bend at the mouth of the wood," says my grandmother, closing the green iron gate after me.
My sturdy black leather shoes crunch the small stones as I make my way down the winding narrow Wood Road to the Village of the Monks. Mount Leinster is dressed in a mantle of purple. The gray rock walls glint in the early November frost. My stomach churns with nerves as I walk the mile and a half to a new school where I will be a pupil for the first time. Robins and thrushes fly in and out of the blackberry bushes. A blackbird sings in a comforting tone. Skylarks soar and dip over the fields that were amber with wheat in the summer. The smell of my new leather schoolbag strapped on my back seeps up my nostrils. I hear the handle of my new tin mug rattle under the clasp of the brass buckle. I scan the green fields that slope down to the Barrow River and stop to watch a barge gliding towards Waterford.
As I come to the bend in the road, I turn around. Gran is still at the gate. I wave and she waves back. I enter the mouth of the wood. Shafts of sunlight streak in through the holes in the tops of the trees. My shoes make a crunching sound on the carpet of pine-scented needles. I come out into the bright, cold sunlight. I pass the doctor’s house and watch the gardener making small trees snug in their beds. Across the road in the boy’s school, I hear the headmaster shout in Irish,
“What is this?” A chorus of boys shout, “It is a book, Sir.”
I round the bend at the high ivy stonewall and see the old Abbey taking up most of the street. A woman shivers while she arranges fresh herrings, kippers and trout for sale in wood boxes on the narrow sidewalk. I turn right, walk up the steep hill and into the new school for girls. My tummy feels tight and too small because I know no one at all. I stand beside the nun who says to the class,
“This is Veronica. She’s nine years old and a bit. She’s from another town. Because her parents are sick, she’s staying with her grandmother out in the country.”
I go and sit at a desk in the middle of the room, take out my pen with a new nib and put it in the grove beside the inkwell.
At mid morning, the nun takes us outside. “It’s cold today,” she says. “The exercises will do us good and warm us up.” She counts and jumps and we do our gymnastics. In her long black habit, she looks like a giant blackbird trying to jump back up in the sky. After twenty minutes, she takes us back inside.
The Angelus bell rings from the convent. We bow and say the prayer. Girls walk in rows out to the hall and put on their coats. I follow.
“No, not you. These girls are going home for lunch. The girls with tin mugs stay behind," says the nun to me. I feel like running out the door. I want to escape. I want to run home.
“Girls from the country stay behind,” she explains, steering ten of us back outside to the playground. I feel left behind and lonely.
“Here is Sister with your lunches,” she says as a young nun hands us bread, butter and jam sandwiches from a big wicker basket.
“ Sit over on the wood benches. Who wants buttermilk? Cow’s milk?”
I put my hand up and say “cow’s milk,” and she pours it into my tin mug. After lunch, some girls play skip rope, hopscotch, sing songs, or say poems. I don’t do anything.
When we return to the classroom, I watch the slow hands of the wall clock. It’s an eternity between each strike of the hour. At last we are dismissed. My heart thumps with happiness as I head back up the winding road.
The day has turned dreary. As I enter the wood, it’s dark under the canopy of trees. Crows swoop down from the sky and make a terrible raucous noise as they bicker over their big sloppy nests. I tell myself to be brave as I crunch through the pine needles. I see a man sitting in the ditch at the end of the wood. He has a curved pipe in his mouth. As I get closer, my legs feel like jelly. My ears fill up with the rush of the crows making a terrible row, the crunching pine needles, and my pounding heart.
“Evenin,’ says the man, tilting his pipe at his tweed cap. My mouth won’t open.
I nod slightly and speed past him
As I come out of the wood, two goats grazing at the side of the road lift their heads. They gaze at me with round, glassy, yellow eyes. I look up the hill and see gray smoke swirling out of our chimney. My grandmother is standing at the gate. My feet fly towards her. A wind whistles through the trees as we make out way back up to the house. I feel safe in the warm kitchen where black iron pots are bubbling over the open fire, steaming up the windows.
“Well, how was school today?” Gran asks as she washes out my new tin mug. I want to tell her it was cold. I want to tell her the girls with tin mugs were left behind. We were separated from the other girls. But I just say: "Everyone was nice. It was grand."
While we eat hot mashed potatoes mixed with curly green cabbage, butter, pepper and salt, I tell Gran about the gymnastics in the school yard, the bread, butter and jam sandwiches, and that the country girls made up their own games. I tell her I’m afraid of the man sitting in the ditch.
“That’s old Jimmy Walshe,” she says. He’s been sittin’ there for years.”
Relief washes over me. It’s almost dark. Gran lights the brass paraffin lamp. While I do my schoolwork in the circle of light, she nods at the fire.
I look out through the window at all the stars in the sky. I make a wish. “Please let me live close to a school where I can come home for my lunch. Having to stay behind with my tin mug makes me feel so separated and lonely." -end-
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Note: This story was published in the November 2007, Hallowe'en Special Edition of Ireland's Own Magazine, published in Wexford, Ireland.