The Maguire home was so different from Connie’s – although cramped and noisy it was filled with a vibrancy and vitality often lacking in her own. She liked them all, even Sarah’s parents. She saw little of Mr Maguire but what she saw she liked. He was called James and his eldest son, wee Jimmy, was named after him. He had big swollen muscles that often strained against the fabric of his shirts, which he usually wore folded up to the elbow so that his lower arms looked like giant hams, and led to large, red, gnarled hands. His face was equally red, with his nose sort of splashed against it and his wide, generous lips tilted upwards so it looked as if he was permanently smiling. He did smile a lot anyway and laugh, and a full-throated and very infectious laugh it was too. Added to this he had a fine head of brown hair which was sprinkled only lightly with grey.
Mrs Maguire, Maeve, had an equally dark head of hair though it was always tied away from her face in a bun of some sort. She wasn’t as pretty as Connie’s own mother – few people were – but Maeve Maguire’s face had an almost serene look seldom seen on those with a houseful of children. Connie had never heard her raise her voice and Sarah said she almost never did. So her face had a contented look about it, with no lines pulling her mouth down, although there were creases around her eyes which were a strange grey-green colour.
‘Do you mind me coming round so often?’ Connie asked her once. ‘My granny says I mustn’t annoy you.’
Mrs Maguire gave an almost tinkling laugh. ‘Child dear, you don’t annoy me in the slightest,’ she said. ‘You are like a ray of sunshine. And anyway, when you have so many, one more makes little difference and there is more company for you here. The children’s friends are always welcome and you help Sarah with the jobs she must do, so you must assure your granny you are no trouble.’
Maeve Maguire had hit the nail on the head, for Connie, though she loved her mother and grandmother dearly, was often lonely. There was something else too. Sometimes her mother seemed far away. She was there in person but when Connie spoke, she sometimes didn’t answer, didn’t seem to hear her and her eyes had a faraway look in them. She had asked her grandmother about it and Mary had said that her mother was still remembering her daddy, Barry.
‘You said that when I asked you why she was sad at Christmas.’
‘Yes. She’s remembering then too.’
‘But, Daddy didn’t die at Christmas.’
‘No, but Christmas is a time to remember loved ones, especially those you might not see again,’ Mary had said and added, ‘Don’t you feel the same when you remember your daddy?’
Connie didn’t; in fact, if she was absolutely honest, she didn’t remember her daddy at all, just the things people had told her about him. But even though she was a child she had known her granny would not like her to share those thoughts and so she contented herself by saying, ‘Mmm, I suppose.’
So she went for company to Sarah and the Maguire house. They sat together at school and met often on Saturdays and holiday times and on Sundays at Mass.
‘Beats me how you don’t run out of things to say,’ Angela commented dryly as they sat down for an early meal before she went to serve behind the bar one Saturday evening.
It was funny but they never did. They often talked about their families and one Saturday as they went along Bristol Street, fetching errands for Maeve and pushing the slumbering baby Maura in the pram, Connie suddenly said, ‘Aren’t your mammy’s eyes an unusual colour?’
‘I suppose,’ Sarah said. ‘Neither one thing or the other. Mine are the same. Look.’
‘Oh, I never noticed,’ Connie said.
‘All us girls are the same,’ Sarah said. ‘Well, that is, Kathy and Siobhan are. Too early to tell with Maura yet and the boys both look like Daddy.’
‘It must have been more noticeable with your mother because she has her hair pulled back from her face,’ Connie said. ‘But now I come to look closer you look very like your mother.’
‘Oh, the shape of my face is the same and my mouth is and thank goodness my nose is like Mammy’s too. I would hate to have a nose like my father’s, which isn’t really any shape at all. Looks like it’s been broken and not fixed properly or something. I asked him once and he said that if it had been broken he hadn’t been aware of it. Mammy said she grew up nearly beside him on the farm in Ireland and Daddy grew up with a rake of brothers, seven or eight of them with only a year between them all. There were girls too, cos there were thirteen altogether, and Mammy said near every time she saw the boys two or three of them would be scrapping on the ground like puppies. She said Daddy’s nose could have been broken a number of times and their mother wouldn’t have had time to blow her own nose, never mind notice that one of the tribe had theirs busted.’
The two girls burst out laughing. ‘Why do boys do that, fight and things?’
Sarah shrugged. ‘Who’d know the answer to that or care either? It’s just what boys do.’
‘Glad I’m a girl.’
‘And I am,’ Sarah said. ‘And it’s a blooming good job because there’s nothing to be done about it if we were unhappy. And never mind the likenesses in my family, what about yours? You look just like your mother. I’ve never seen hair so blonde and your ringlets are natural, aren’t they? I mean, you don’t have to put rags in your hair or anything.’
Connie shook her head so the ringlets held away from her face with a band swung from side to side.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re natural all right, it’s just that I can’t ever wear my hair loose for school. Mammy insists I have it in plaits.’
‘That’s because of the risk of nits,’ Sarah said. ‘The same reason Mammy won’t let me grow mine long. But still, you’re luckier than me because when you’re old enough you can wear your hair any way you like and you’ve got the most startling blue eyes.’
‘I know, I seem to have taken all things from my mammy and none from my daddy at all.’
‘D’you remember your daddy?’
Connie shook her head. ‘Not him, the person. Sometimes I think I do because I’ve been told so much about him, but I know what he looks like because Mammy has a picture of him in a silver frame on the sideboard. Remember I showed you? I don’t look like him at all.’
‘That’s how it is sometimes though, isn’t it?’ Sarah said.
‘Oh yes,’ Connie said as Sarah’s words tugged at her memory. ‘My mammy was born with golden locks and blue eyes like mine, my grandmother said, but she’s not my mammy’s real mother. My mammy’s real mother died in Ireland when she was a babby, like I told you before.’
‘Yes,’ Sarah said, ‘she lost the rest of her Irish family and that’s when she went to live with the McCluskys who came to England. Their son Barry was your daddy.’
Connie nodded and added, ‘And my daddy was killed in the war.’
That wasn’t uncommon and Sarah said, ‘Yes, I think lots of daddies were. But maybe your daddy and your other granny are in heaven this minute looking down on us all?’
‘I’d like to think it.’
‘Don’t say you have doubts,’ Sarah said with mock horror. ‘If you have, keep them to yourself, for if Father Brannigan hears you he will wash your mouth out with carbolic.’
Connie grinned at her friend and said, ‘When I die I shall ask God if I can pop back and tell everyone it’s true.’
Sarah laughed. ‘You are a fool, Connie. You’ll have to come back as a ghost and that will frighten everyone to death,’ she said. ‘Anyway, when were you thinking of dying?’
‘Oh, not for ages yet.’
‘Good,’