Bird of Passage Read Online Free

wouldn’t be so bad after all.
    Here and there, they saw people working in the fields, or an old man stooped over his vegetable patch. On the road, two small children, no more than four or five years old,  pulled a reluctant puppy in their wake. They hauled their little prisoner onto the verge to let the lorry pass by, and waved. In a cottage garden, a young woman, taking advantage of the late sunshine and a stiff breeze, was pegging out a row of nappies and shirts. She wore a blue and white gingham pinafore. His mother had worn just such a pinafore. Finn had a memory of taking wooden pegs out of her pocket and handing them to her, while she put out the washing on the back green of the house where they lodged. That’s my good boy. That’s my good Finny.
    The woman paused in her work, pushing her hair out of her eyes, and watching the tattie howkers drive past, but she neither smiled, nor waved at the incomers. They were a necessary encumbrance. Nobody welcomed them except the farmer and the island children, who were too young to know better.   
    The farm was called Dunshee. The house was an ancient, slate roofed building with dormer windows on the upper floors. It was set on a plateau of high land, slightly at angles to the sea, to take advantage of the shelter afforded by an uneven ridge behind.  There was a clean courtyard, with byres and barns and stables. It wasn’t many years since the islanders had used horses to work the land.    
    The men were to sleep in the byre, the women in a stone floored building which had been a dairy. The accommodation was spartan enough, but Micky Terrans remarked that it was better than it had once been, now that the government had got involved. And the sleeping arrangements at Dunshee were always better than most other places. This was one of the reasons why Micky preferred to keep his squad there as long as possible, paying the farmer for the privilege, and ferrying them about to other farms as necessary. Micky liked to keep his squad dry and reasonably well fed. The stalls were fitted out with low timber ramps and decent mattresses stuffed with oat straw. Each bed had two or three serviceable blankets. They were to sleep two to a stall, Francis and Finn together. There was a makeshift kitchen in an  outhouse, with a chipped Belfast sink and an old copper boiler for washing the clothes, a tap in the yard and even a proper flushing lavatory with a wooden seat. The little cubicle was whitewashed and smelled pleasantly of bleach.
    ‘I mind when you had to sew the tattie sacks together to make a quilt for yourself,’ said a stocky little man from Donegal,  Jimsy Murtagh. He said it as though he half regretted the loss of that time. Jimsy never looked at you straight. Finn couldn’t work out whether he had a squint, or was just shifty. He had a filthy tongue although when Micky was around he had to keep it under control. ‘And you would have the feckin’ rats running over you in the night. And nibbling away at your bedding, and your toes too if you weren’t careful. But this place is clean enough. And Galbreath does as much as any farmer can to keep the rats down. You boys don’t know you’re born, neither you do.’
    ‘We know all about rats, don’t we Francie?’ muttered Finn, when he had gone, leaving them to make up their beds.
    ‘We do so. But this is great, Finn! Do you not think this is a great place?’
    ‘Let’s wait and see, eh?’
    Later on, there was a feast of boiled potatoes and tea, with plenty of bread and jam, while they on long benches, on either side of a big wooden table. The table was full of saw marks and paint rings, but the food was plentiful. Afterwards, some of the men filled their pipes and went outside for a smoke. They weren’t supposed to smoke in the byre for fear of fires. The breeze had dropped with evening, and the air was still and cool, the sea a mirror. They leaned against the wall, and puffed away,  gazing towards the mainland,