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they’ve had their fill of Hitler.’
    ‘You’ve got to love the aul’ Germans,’ Sean agreed. ‘There’s nothing as good for an Irish farmer as the English at war.’
    ‘Provided it’s not against us,’ said Paddy.
    ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Sean said. ‘We ran them the last time.’
    ‘After a fashion,’ Paddy agreed, ‘although it took us long enough.’
    Mick was paying them no heed; the gaffer’s face was all business as he scanned the cabin for their next move. ‘Come on, you men, and follow me.’
    Quickly, before she thought to object, Jimmy grabbed on to Aileen’s hand and held it tight. Leading her, he followed their broad-chested gaffer through the crowd as Mick assertively shouldered his charges through the bustling bodies. Jimmy held his true love, turning often to check she was still there. He would have liked to have carried her in his arms to protect her and had an ambitious vision that one day she might let him.
    At the opposite end of the room, the path began to clear and they reached ‘their spot’ near the back wall. Carmel and the other women from the group were already there. They had boarded first and were now settled comfortably on makeshift seats made from their cases and a few crates that were scattered around the edges of the vast packed room. Jimmy noted there were one or two windows, but they were too high up to look out of. Over in the corner was another doorway with steep steps that he presumed led up to a deck.
    ‘Surely to God it’s like a coffin ship,’ said Sean, surveying people like themselves who had arrived hoping to find a crateto sit on but had instead to drop down on their haunches to the grimy floor.
    ‘Except, Sean, my friend, you might feel dead by the time we get there,’ said Mick, ‘but you’d better not be, as there’s a savage body of work waiting for us at the other end. It’s a good idea to find yourself a corner to bed down in.’
    Aileen had not let go of Jimmy’s hand. Jimmy brushed aside the glad feeling he had about that when he noticed she was the only woman still standing. The other girls had gone on without her and he was feeling guilty that she had nowhere to sit.
    It was his fault the women had left her behind. He had held her back from them, and however much he didn’t want to, he would have to hand her back to them now. The island women stuck together – that’s the way it was on Aghabeg with his mother and her cronies. Always in each other’s kitchens, weaving and sewing and cooking each other boxty pancakes and talking, talking, talking while using up all the tea and sugar so there wasn’t a bit left for the men and them coming in from a hard day at sea. That was how his father saw it, anyway, and as Jimmy got older, he came to see that his father wasn’t far wrong.
    ‘Women are different from us, Jimmy,’ Sean had told him. ‘They are a law unto themselves – never forget that, son. Just keep your head down and out of their way most of the time. Never contradict a woman, and never approach one when they are in a group. That’s my advice, and if you ever cross one, you’ll learn why.’
    His father loved his mother, but he was afraid of her, which Jimmy could never understand. However, standing in front of this group of women, Jimmy himself felt a little afraid – a feeling he was so unfamiliar with he could barely name it.
    The women were sitting comfortably enough, their shoulders supported by the arched walls, many of them with theirknitting and sewing already on their laps. They were settled, not looking up, as if they had lived there all their lives in that way that women had of making a home in the most unlikely of places, while a man could stand at his own hearth and look like a stranger warming his behind on another man’s fire.
    One of them, a plain-looking creature, looked up and said, ‘Here she comes with her shadow.’
    Jimmy didn’t really know what that meant, so he took a deep breath and said, ‘Sorry