On a Clear Day

To the west, Armagh was outlined against the brilliant blue of the sky, the twin spires of the new cathedral so sharp they seemed to have been etched in with the aid of a ruler. On the hill opposite, less dramatic, more earth-bound, the square tower of the old cathedral rose out of its enfolding trees, its heavy stonework dark with age. Around both great buildings, like currents of water eddying where they will, the small stone houses and later brick terraces curved and wove as they followed the contours and the slopes of the hills on which they stood …

She wished she could climb higher, for somewhere over there, below Cannon Hill, lay the farm at Liskeyborough, only a mile or two away for the jackdaws who played around the church tower. Her grandmother would be feeding the hens or the new calves, or peering at the old wooden barrel in which she’d planted daffodils to have them near her front door.

If she could have seen Liskeyborough, the whole of her world would have been spread out before her, from her own front door to the furthest points of her travels. And on a clear day, too. A day for making up your mind, Granny Hamilton would say.

Beyond the tall, dusty windows of the schoolroom the afternoon sun beat down with unaccustomed fierceness. Dark shadows lay in pools beneath the spread of the full-leafed chestnuts that bordered the playground. From its worn tarmac surface, polished smooth by the daily abrasion of running feet, the light dazzled and reflected, picking out the architectural details of the sharp-edged brick building that in 1931 had won the admiration of all. The Lord Lieutenant with his sword and plumes, the local dignitaries in their Sunday best, the men in flat caps and the women in cloche hats, platform party, teachers and maintenance staff had all without exception said the same thing. In the single, familiar and often-used Ulster phrase, they expressed their unanimous approval. ‘The new school was “the last word”.’

Though the windows stood open as wide as the unpractised metal hinges would tolerate, the classroom where Clare Hamilton sat was thick with heat and heavy with the mixed odours of chalk and dusty floorboards and perspiring bodies. From greasy, screwed-up paper bags piled in the large wastepaper basket, placed precisely below the
wall-mounted pencil sharpener, came the lingering remembrances of lunch, an event now receding as the oppressive afternoon moved on towards that longed for moment when the hands of the clock would stand at half past three.

Attracted by the faint aroma of country butter, home-made jam or the shop-bought pastes that had provided lunch more than an hour previously, a large bluebottle fly hovered over the wicker basket. At once, its presence was observed. The teacher spoke. A large, heavy-breasted girl put down her work, received the rolled up newspaper held out towards her and launched herself at the offending insect. She knocked over the wicker basket and bent the newspaper against the wall while the bluebottle buzzed into the open space between the line of girls waiting by the teacher’s desk and the immaculately clean blackboard beyond.

It soared vertically, as high as the Union Jack pinned on the bare wall over the blackboard itself, then, sensing some change in the chalk laden air, it swerved violently to the left, sailed out through the window, rose high into the blue dome of the sky, a tiny, ever-diminishing speck soon lost even to the sharp eyes of the dark-haired, nine-year-old in the front desk who had watched every movement of the unfolding drama without appearing to raise her eyes from the fragment of red-checked gingham on which she was working so meticulously.

In the hubbub that followed the bluebottle’s departure, as the teacher retrieved her bent newspaper and the girl her ‘garment’, Clare looked up at the clock and sighed. It was not even three yet. The bell that would release them into the sunshine still rested on the principal’s desk, the senior boy who would agitate it through all the empty, echoing corridors was still at work in the flowerbeds below the open windows hoeing the minute weeds in the dry soil between the flourishing annuals. There was still more than half an hour to go.

Usually Clare enjoyed handwork classes on a Wednesday afternoon. Miss Slater, who normally presided, was also her class teacher and one of the younger members of staff. She wore make-up and pretty blouses and when she leant over to look at your work she smelt of perfume and exactly the same Creme Puff powder that her mother wore if she was going out. She smiled often and always told Clare that her hemming stitches were the smallest she’d ever seen. Besides, Miss Slater read them stories while they worked. Sometimes they were Bible stories with battles and chariots and walls falling down. Often there were descriptions of palaces and gardens with kings coming and going, having banquets and dreaming dreams, calling their servants to do their bidding, or waving their hands in farewell to princesses who were going to
the river with their ladies to bathe and find babies hidden in the bulrushes.

She liked the way Miss Slater told stories ‘with expression’, tossing her coppery curls and raising her finely-pencilled eyebrows and changing her voice to suit the different characters.

Sometimes there were stories about a little coloured boy called Epamanondas who had a knack of getting himself into difficulties in the forest. But what forest it was, Clare had never managed to find out. At the end of every adventure Epamanondas somehow managed to find his way back to his grandfather who lived beside the great, grey, slow-moving river that flowed through the forest.

‘Please, Miss, what was the name of the river?’ she asked one afternoon as Miss Slater closed the book.

Miss Slater seemed surprised.

‘Why do you want to know, Clare?’ she asked brightly.

She waited with the closed book in her hands while Clare shook her head and said that she’d just wondered.

‘In a story it doesn’t matter about names and places, Clare, it’s just the story that matters,’ she explained patiently.

Clare smiled and nodded. She didn’t agree at all, but Miss Slater was her very favourite teacher.

But there was no Miss Slater today. The white-haired woman who sat peering at the finer details of the senior garments was Miss McMurray. Miss Slater was away ill and her class, itself reduced by absence had been summoned to the senior corridor. The dozen or so nine-year-olds now sat uneasily in the too-large front desks of her room, overawed by the presence of so many big girls while Miss McMurray pinned and tucked and twitched the knickers and blouses that had to be finished by the end of the month.

In a few weeks’ time the girls lined up at Miss McMurray’s desk would be leaving school. A few of them would be going to the technical school up in Marketplace to learn shorthand and typing. Some of the others would look for a place in Armagh and serve their time to a grocer, or a draper, or a dressmaker, but most of them would be going into service in the big houses and large farms that lay along curving avenues or down long lanes invisible to the passers-by who walked the country roads on Sunday afternoons.

‘That’s the Richardson’s place,’ her father would say as they headed out the Loughgall Road on the way to visit her Scott grandparents at Salter’s Grange. He would point to an enormous pair of gateposts or a broad five-barred gate, but as often as not Clare could see no dwelling at all. But she tried to memorise the names just the same
and loved making Daddy laugh by saying them before he did.

‘That’s the house where the general lived who helped to win the war,’ she announced proudly as they passed one of the few visible residences, a handsome building completely enveloped in Virginia creeper on the much longer walk along the Portadown Road to visit the Hamilton grandparents at Liskeyborough.

How strange it would be to leave school and ride your bicycle to work and not have Miss Slater to look at your writing and help with your sums and read stories while you worked on your samples. Clare was very glad she wasn’t grown up and leaving like the big girls in front of her for she liked school and all the different things they did there. And she loved Miss Slater.

When she’d told her mother this one Saturday night while she was sitting in the tin bath in front of the kitchen stove, her mother said that she was glad to hear it. School days were the happiest days of your life, she added a bit later, as she put a penny in the window frame to stop the wind from making it rattle and tucked the blankets in all around her. In fact, after that night, her mother had repeated the saying regularly each day until one morning, as she was being washed at the kitchen sink, Clare asked her why she kept on saying it.

Her mother laughed and shook her head.

‘Ach, child dear, sure mothers are always saying things like that. You’ll notice yourself when you’re older that people say things out of a kind of habit.’

Clare could see her mother was smiling to herself as she brushed her hair and retied her school shoes more firmly. She was still smiling as she straightened up and leant back against the sink. ‘And maybe sometimes there’s a bit of magic too in what you say every day,’ she went on, thoughtfully. ‘Maybe there’s something of a wish, or even of a blessing. If I say that every day maybe it’ll come true. Indeed, I hope it will. Now, away on or you’ll be keeping Auntie Marjorie waiting. I don’t know where you get all the questions from or what puts some of the notions into your head. I do not,’ she said shaking her head again as she kissed her quickly and hung her schoolbag over her shoulder.

Although Miss McMurray was old and known as ‘a bit of a tartar’ Clare knew that she did permit conversation while you were working, provided it was quiet and sensible and directed only to your immediate neighbour. She looked wistfully at the seat beside her. The seat was empty, her ‘immediate neighbour’ was far away. Margaret Beggs, her best friend, who lived three doors away in the red-brick terrace overlooking the Shambles, was at this moment enjoying the Methodist excursion to Bangor. Her mother, Auntie Marjorie, who walked them both down College Hill each morning before
going back up to the sweetie shop in English Street where she worked, had offered to take Clare on the excursion as well. But her mother had said no. Children went free on their own excursion but had to be paid for if they went on someone else’s. She was sorry. It was very nice of Auntie Marjorie to offer but seven and sixpence was a lot of money and her own excursion was only a few weeks away. If Daddy could get the day off they could all go together this year for wee William was that bit bigger and able to walk further.

Clare thought longingly of the train rattling out of Armagh station and into the countryside. Last year, she had sat by the window with her mother and they’d looked out at all the places they walked past on Sundays. But this year her father would be there too and she was sure they would start to talk about the places they were passing, about parties and picnics and hops they’d been to before they were married.

At the level crossing they would wave to children who had run across the fields to see the train steam past. Beyond that point the countryside was completely new to her, unexplored territory with houses and farms she had never even walked past. But her father and mother knew everybody.

‘Do you remember old Danny McMaster, Ellie?’

‘Och, will I ever forget him?’

Clare loved the story of Danny McMaster. He was an old farmer with plenty of money and he had a notion of Mummy. He used to come to the forge where Granda Scott worked with some excuse or other or some piece of machinery for him to mend. It was all so he could see Mummy and maybe get talking to her. But Mummy was going out with Daddy and that was that. Granda said he made a fortune out of old McMaster, for the things he brought him to mend were only five minute jobs. Sometimes there was nothing wrong with them at all except the want of a bit of oil.

Whenever her parents talked about the days before they were married Clare would remember the photographs in the album her mother kept in the sitting-room cupboard. She knew the pictures by heart and who all the people were though most of them she had never met. There were crowds of men in open necked shirts, their arms around girls in long skirts with funny patterned shoes, some of them laughing so much that their bit of the picture was blurred because they had moved. There were tennis parties and boating parties and in one photograph there was a huge bus with all the people they knew lined up in front. There, beside her father, her mother sat holding a tiny white bundle. She had been the only baby in the whole party, her mother said, and she had been as good as gold.

That excursion had been to Bundoran. She didn’t know where that was either. When she asked her father he said in was in the south, but her mother said it was on the west coast, on the Atlantic. Wherever it was, there was no doubt everyone was enjoying themselves. It must have been a very good excursion.

By now, Margaret would have eaten the contents of her lunch bag at the church hall. Corned beef sandwiches and baker’s buns. Last year they each had a wafer biscuit done up in silver paper which she had unwrapped carefully and smoothed out. There were so many things you could make if you had silver paper but, apart from some of the large sweets in the bag her father brought home on Saturday nights, there wasn’t much to be had. Sometimes if you weren’t very careful when you smoothed it out it would tear and that was so disappointing.

Last year’s excursion certainly hadn’t been disappointing. Mummy had bought her lemonade to drink with her lunch and later when they walked down to the front she’d had a large ice-cream cone. She won a prize when the Sunday school supervisor organised races on the beach and she’d played in the water for ages, watching the tiny wavelets breaking against her ankles while Mummy sat in a deckchair knitting and talking to the other mothers.

Margaret would be down on the front by now, walking round to Pickie Pool for a swim or paddling from the beach. Clare stared at the strong grain lines in the wood of her desk and saw them change into long lines of waves, rippling in, peacefully, one behind the other, cool and fresh, all the way from the far horizon. But as she lifted her eyes to the far horizon the waves disappeared, she found she was staring at the battered and ink-stained ledge with a groove for pencils and a round hole into which the monitor would drop the pale, crazed disc of the inkpot.

She looked up again at the clock. The large black hand appeared not to have moved at all. Miss McMurray caught her eye. She said nothing, but a look was enough. Clare lowered her eyes to her work and wondered how she could tell if the clock had stopped.

Whenever the clock on the mantelpiece at home stopped, Daddy would spread a newspaper on the kitchen table and take it to pieces so that he could clean it. He kept a supply of feathers for the job in a jam pot on the kitchen windowsill and whenever they went to visit his parents at the farm he would send Clare and her brother down to Granny’s hen run to see what they could find.

William never wanted to go down to the hen-run. He always said he wanted to stay with Mummy, but Mummy told him he had to go and help Clare.
The problem was that William was frightened of the cockerel and he would burst into tears if he crowed at him. Clare did her best to explain that the cockerel was just showing off, that if you shooed him away he’d run flapping to his wives and start crowing at them instead. But William wouldn’t chase the rooster for himself. He’d just stand scuffling his shoes in the dust until Clare had sent him squawking and had started to gather up the sorts of feathers she knew her father liked.