Getting High Read Online Free Page A

potatoes, awaiting her.
    If Peggy was deprived financially, the same couldn’t be said of her emotionally. The Sweeney children belonged to a tight, loved family, never starved of love. For sure the sisters tended to band together against the boys, and that was only natural. But there was no cruelty, no violence. Their parents gave them love and discipline, fully preparing them for the world by not allowing them any illusions. William and Margaret knew how tough things were, and weren’t about to fool their children.
    When Peggy was seven years old she received her first Communion. From then on the weekend belonged• to her church: confession on Saturdays, Mass on Sundays. This small church, Bushfield was its name, lay to the West of the village and it was here, as well as school that Peggy was indoctrinated into the ways of a religion obsessed with sexual purity and strict moral behaviour.
    In Catholicism priests do not marry, and boys born illegitimate can never enter the priesthood. To lose your virginity before marriage was a sin and, to this day, the use of contraception is strictly forbidden. Homosexuality was viewed as absolute proof of the Devil’s work.
    The Catholic Church instilled everlasting sexual and moral guilt in all its children, and Peggy was no different. She learnt about good and bad, heaven and hell. She was taught that one of the worst things that could ever happen to her was to be excommunicated from the Church. It would mean eternal damnation.
    When Peggy thought about her God she imagined a vengeful and wrathful God, precisely what the Church wanted. Complete social control. The Church took the young and stole their minds. It taught that all people are born in sin and must spend their lives in penance. It said no one is without evil.
    When Peggy went out into the world and married, she had to bear children and she must never, never, ever divorce; to part from your husband would mean severance from the Church. The Vatican would never sanction divorce, and therefore it was considered a terrible sin for which there could be no forgiveness. Such powerful ideas invade an impressionable young mind. At an early age Peggy vowed she would stick by her eventual husband, good or bad.
    No one missed Mass in Mayo. It was unthinkable. Everyone went. In rain, sleet, snow and cold winds that howled across the bleak landscape in winter, Peggy and her family walked up their bordeen (country lane) and through the fields to church every weekend.
    And still the babies kept arriving, one every year. Eventually there were too many children to house. Peggy, along with Kathleen, Una, Helen, Ann and Bridie were placed in the hands of a convent school in Ballaghaderren where they stayed for the next six and a half years and were further exposed to the scriptures and strictures of Catholicism. Yet Margaret knew that out of all her brood Peggy was the most reliable and the hardest worker. More than that, Peggy had a natural affinity for child rearing. Many times, with her baby sister Pauline in her hands, she would dream of the day when it would be her child that she would be tending to. It was the only dream that she would ever be encouraged to follow.
    It was the twin forces of human invention and rugged determination that lay at the core of Manchester’s dramatic rise.
    Water power, the first steam-engines, the spinning jenny, the mule and the power loom, all of these revolutionised Manchester’s cotton industry; made it, in fact, the first British industry to be fully mechanised.
    To achieve such a vision, the people behind these changes had to be a dynamic breed. They had to be strong-willed and utterly single-minded in their pursuit of the new world that they had visualised, a new age which they, and only they, could define and make their own.
    The architects of this vision were young, powerful Mancunian businessmen, determined to build Jerusalem on England’s green and pleasant land, and so be