He leaped from the cart and helped Molly down before saying, ‘First the bog is cut into lines. See where the others have started?’
Molly nodded and Tom continued, ‘So if I start marking out the lines could you come after me and do the cutting into the brick shapes you have seen at home?’
‘Yeah,’ Molly said. ‘It doesn’t seem so hard.’
It wasn’t hard, but it was backbreaking, though Molly didn’t find that out straight away. She soon realised why the terrain was called a bog. Because no rain had actually fallen for some time, the thin grass covering the bog was dry but as soon as she sliced through the earth with her spade she saw and smelled the black slurry seeping through it. The bog seemed not to wish to relinquish its sod either, and tried to suck it back into the earth, but Molly persevered and eventually withdrew the brick almost triumphantly, threw it into the cart and bent to cut another.
She thought she was working incredibly slowly and ponderously, but when Tom, thinking he had drawn enough lines for the time being, came to join her, he said she was doing just fine. ‘There is a knack to it, as there is to most things,’ he said. ‘You will pick it up eventually, but considering this is your first time, you’re not bad at all.’
They went on hour after hour, until the ache in Molly’s back became unbearable and she stretched with a grimace of pain that Tom noticed. He decided enough was enough for now. ‘How d’you fancy a breather?’
Molly barely kept the relief out of her voice as with a shrug she said, ‘If you like.’
They sat a little way away from the bog on Tom’s waterproof spread on the earth. They ate the bread and cheese that Molly had put up before they left, and they washed it down with cold tea, which revived them both. Molly sat back thankfully and surveyed the cart a little way from them.
‘Isn’t that turf too wet to burn?’ she asked.
‘Aye,’ Tom said. ‘It is surely at the moment. We’ll take it back to the barn and stand the bricks up like little houses leaning against one another till the water has drained out of them and they can be stacked and then we will come back for more.’
‘How often do you come?’
‘Until I judge I have enough to last us the winter,’ Tom said, withdrawing his pipe from his pocket. ‘Now I am away for a wee smoke and a jaw with the neighbours. You can either come with me, or stop and rest yourself.’
Molly looked across at the now quite sizeable knot of men and boys, because more had come as they had worked, a fair few of them taking their ease as they were, and she felt suddenly shy to be the only girl amongst them.
‘I think I will stop here, Uncle Tom,’ she said. ‘I am quite tired.’
She was thoroughly weary and when Tom left her she lay back on the waterproof, closed her eyes and in a few minutes was fast asleep. Tom, returning later, did not wake her but just carried on working in the bog alone. Molly woke an hour or so afterwards, disorientated first, and then guilty as she saw the sizeable amount of bog Tom had cleared while she had slept. He waved away her apologies and she set back to work with a will.
That was not the last time Molly went to the bog. As one day slid into another, she got more into the routine of the work, both on the farm and in the house, and usually let Biddy’s word wash over her, for the silent treatment didn’t last nearly long enough in Molly’s opinion. Biddy was especially bad on Sundays, and Molly knew that this was because she resented the fact that so many greeted her warmly, both before and after Mass.
Biddy particularly disliked it when Molly and Cathy got together and began chattering about what they would do later that day. Molly went to the McEvoys for Sunday tea every week. Biddy would have liked to have forbidden the girl, but she sensed that if she did, everyone would be against her. Nellie had enthused about Molly, saying that they all loved having her in the house and that she was no trouble at all, and the two girls got on famously. Then there was Tom, insisting she needed time with other young people and the town’s folk agreeing with that, and the priest beaming in approval.
Biddy would have liked to tell them all to go to hell, that she would make any decisions about the girl. She was, after all, in her charge, but she had to live amongst these people afterwards. She didn’t really understand why the townsfolk should seem to like the girl so well, for she had done all that she could to blacken her name. So, she contented herself with making Molly’s life particularly miserable on Sundays, and if Tom was out of the way she was given many a clout that she kept quiet about.
Biddy blamed Molly’s arrival totally for the sea change in Tom, yet in Molly’s opinion he was acting in a more normal way now. He would go for a drink on Saturdays with the other men when they were in the town and then on Sunday evening before bringing Molly home. Molly often wondered why Biddy found this such a problem and why she would go for him as she did. It was hardly what a person could term excessive.
Her own father used to like a drink a couple of times a week and always after the match on Saturday, and her mother had never minded. Biddy, however, seemed to want Tom never to leave the farm, or seek any other company but hers. God, what a prospect!
As for Molly, she lived for the time spent with Cathy. Sometimes, they went out, maybe met up with friends, and other times it was just the two of them either outdoors or indoors. Molly barely minded which way it was, though if pressed she would have had to say that she liked best the company of Cathy on her own.
Molly had had friends in Birmingham, but she had sort of got out of the way of going about with them when her mother had been so ill. She had very little free time, anyway, at that time, as she shouldered much of the housework. But, in this place, where she had never wanted to live, Cathy was her life-saver.
The school holidays beginning made little difference to Molly, except the summer heat made the work more tiring, especially inside the house, for however hot it was, the fire had to be kept on. Sometimes there was so little breeze that opening the door and windows made no difference and she was glad of the light showers that took some of the heat from the days.
The farmers, though, watched the weather anxiously, knowing that heavy rain then might mean a poor harvest, but by and large the summer was hot and dry, and by the middle of August the harvest had begun. Molly and her uncle were soon hard at it from dawn till dusk because, as he said, their survival through the winter depended on it.
The flax was the first to be harvested. Once pulled and put into bunches, or ‘beets’ as Tom called them, it had to be soaked in the water butt for about three weeks and then spread out to dry before the fibres would be any good for thatching. So while the flax was being soaked, Tom turned his attention to the hay, which was cut with scythes. He was very wary of letting Molly do that at all.
‘It is not something you were brought up to,’ he said. ‘You are likely to slice the legs off yourself.’
Molly laughed. ‘Why am I? Look, Uncle Tom, I might have been born and raised in a city, but I have got a brain in my head and I do know how sharp the scythes are. You show me what to do and I will copy you. And don’t worry, I will keep my legs well away.’
There was, however, an art to scything, and Molly soon found wielding the scythe, heavy for someone of her build, hard, hard work that made her arms and then her shoulders and then her whole back ache almost unbearably. She watched her uncle slicing his way through the hay fields, seemingly with little effort, and felt quite useless.
Tom told her that however little she did, it would be less for him to do and not to worry about it, but seeing what an effort it was for Molly, he suggested after a little