Till the Sun Shines Through Read Online Free Page A

is no work for them and many of the families are starving. I know she’s right, for you only have to see the children, with pinched-in faces like old people’s and so thin they’re just skin and bone. They have arms like sticks and quite a few have running sores on their body. Most of them are clothed in rags and many are barefoot. Aunt Ellen said even in the dead of winter it’s just the same .
    Bridie was no stranger to running barefoot. In her mind, to cast off her shoes and run across the springy turf and leap the streams was linked to the freedom of summer – few children back home wore shoes then. However, in September, before she returned to school, along with the schoolbooks and jotters her parents bought her, there would be a pair of shoes. They mightn’t be new, but they would be freshly soled and heeled, and there would be stockings too to keep her from freezing altogether.
    She looked at the children around the streets and hanging around the Bull Ring when she went there with Mary and wondered if many of them had ever had shoes. She doubted that when the winter chill came they’d have thicker clothes to wear either, or a good, warm coat and hats, gloves and scarves to keep the life in them.
    It’s awful, Mammy, is surely is to see so many people living like this , she wrote.
    There had been poverty at home in Ireland, of course there had, and people with large families they could barely feed used to get food vouchers from the St Vincent de Paul fund. The nuns there would find clothes for the children to wear, but here it was the sheer numbers of poor that overwhelmed her.
    It bothered Sarah too when she read Bridie’s letter. ‘Fancy not having shoes for the winter,’ she remarked. ‘Although I shouldn’t think it’s pleasant running barefoot through city streets at any time.’
    â€˜It’s the men out of work that I feel sorry for,’ Jimmy said. ‘God, what that would do to a man, not being able to provide for his family. Seems to me Ireland wasn’t the only one betrayed by that damned war. “Land fit for heroes” and they can’t earn a bite to put in their families’ mouths.’
    â€˜Aye,’ Sarah agreed with a sigh. ‘It must be dreadful and Bridie doesn’t seem to be enjoying it at all.’
    â€˜Ah well, she’ll soon be home again,’ Jimmy said, ‘and then life will go back to normal. No danger of Bridie taking a liking to the place and wanting to live there anyway.’ And that made Jimmy a happy man – it would make his world complete if, when Bridie did decide to marry, it was to one of the local boys and she’d live not far from them.
    â€˜Aye,’ Sarah said with feeling, for she’d missed her youngest daughter and longed to have her home again. When she’d been placed in Sarah’s arms after her birth, Sarah thought she’d never rear her. She thought she’d go the way of the three she lost to TB after Johnnie. Then when Robert and Nuala had both died, she was convinced that Bridie would never reach adulthood. But here she was, on the threshold of it, and still fit and healthy, as beautiful and kindly as ever. ‘Aye, she’ll be home soon enough,’ Sarah said with satisfaction. ‘And, if you ask me, I think it will be a long time before she goes so far again.’ She could have added, ‘Unlike Mary.’ She’d been so upset when Mary went on her wee holiday in the spring of 1926 and had fallen in love with a man called Eddie Coghlan. It had only helped slightly that Eddie was from Derry and a good Catholic into the bargain, because it still meant their daughter would be living and bringing up any grandchildren miles away from them.
    Sarah had been inclined to blame her sister and wrote her a letter telling her so but, as Jimmy said, love is not a thing you can watch out for. Ellen couldn’t have known that Mary would lose