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reminding him of a stirrup. But Annie and Mary were the sensible children! They looked forward to Arthur’s bedtime, for with their father at some Sodality meeting they had their Auntie to themselves. They would ply her with questions about her schooldays, and about Armagh and the games she played when she was young. And Auntie sitting on the sofa between them, Annie hugging one arm and Mary the other, would turn to one and then the other, looking down at their anxious eyes as she told them scraps about her life. Before Daniel would come in she would sing for them verse after verse of Lady Mouse .

    Lady Mouse, are you within?
    Hm, hm-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m.
    Lady Mouse, are you within?
    Yes, kind sir, as she sat and spun,
    Hm, hm-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m.

    They had it by heart now, and all three hummed the hm-ms that ended each verse. Sometimes the hm-ms would be so prolonged by Annie or Mary till one or other would burst out laughing, and Auntie would hold her sides: ‘I’ll be kilt laughing, I’ll be kilt.’
    She sang for them songs of the countryside, courting songs and songs of Ireland’s heroes and Ireland’s traitors, and sometimes she gave them riddles and phrases to say quickly: ‘Three grey geese in a green full of grazing, grey were the geese and green was the grazing.’ She taught them how to knit and how to crochet, and of a Sunday she would read to them out of her prayer book, and though the print was as big as that in a child’s primer, she always followed the words with her finger.
    In the long November nights, when the pains would come into her legs she would go off to bed early, and then Annie and Mary would come slipping into the room with a mug of hot tea for her and two big slices of griddle bread. They would light the candle and sit on the edge of the bed. While Annie would be sipping the tea and dipping the bread in it, her eyes would travel round the holy pictures that she had tacked to the wall. ‘I have a quare squad of them around me, and there’s none of them like that fella there,’ she would say, pointing to a picture of St. Patrick banishing the snakes. ‘A decent fella, a real gentleman, many’s a good turn he done me.’
    Up through the long winter nights she drank little, and now and again at the family prayers she was on the verge of promising to abstain for life, but something told her she’d never stop it. Christmas came and she taught the children how to make a plum pudding; and she bought them brooches like her own with the words Annie and Mary in silver-white stones, and for Arthur a tram-conductor’s cap and a ticket-puncher.
    Then one cold winter’s day when the snow had fallen and Annie and Mary had gone for messages, Auntie Sue was in the house alone. The coalman hadn’t come, and there was only a fistful of cinders for the fire. She felt cold. She closed all the doors, but still there seemed to slice through every crevice in the house a wicked, icy draught. Her teeth chattered and she lifted the wrinkled quilt off her bed and put it round her shoulders, looking miserably through the kitchen window at the white street and the light fading from the sky. Her thin blood craved for a drop of warmth – and not as much as a thimbleful of ‘medicine’ in the house to wet her lips or make a nip of punch. Without waiting to talk it over in her mind, she left four shillings on the kitchen table for the coalman, put on her black plush coat and hat, took an umbrella, and out with her.
    The hard snow lay deep in the street, yellowed by cart-ruts and blackened by coal-dust. In the sky a few stars were coming out. She put up her umbrella, though the snow wasn’t falling. She passed neighbours cleaning their doorways with shovels, and now and again heard the wet, sad sloosh of a brush. A few snowballs thudded on top of her umbrella and she hurried on, her iron-ring cutting circles in the snow. Then Arthur came