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Church of England stood side by side, just opposite the Sacred Heart Church and parish school.
    As the Clearys hurried past the general store the Catholic bell sounded, followed by the heavier tolling of the big bell on a post in front of the public school. Bob broke into a trot, and they entered the gravel yard as some fifty children were lining up in front of a diminutive nun wielding a willowy stick taller than she was. Without having to be told, Bob steered his kin to one side away from the lines of children, and stood with his eyes fixed on the cane.
    The Sacred Heart convent was two-storeyed, but because it stood well back from the road behind a fence, the fact was not easily apparent. The three nuns of the Order of the Sisters of Mercy who staffed it lived upstairs with a fourth nun, who acted as housekeeper and was never seen; downstairs were the three big rooms in which school was taught. A wide, shady veranda ran all the way around the rectangular building, where on rainy days the children were allowed to sit decorously during their play and lunch breaks, and where on sunny days no child was permitted to set foot. Several large fig trees shaded a part of the spacious grounds, and behind the school the land sloped away a little to a grassy circle euphemistically christened ‘the cricket pitch,’ from the chief activity that went on in that area.
    Ignoring muffled sniggers from the lined-up children, Bob and his brothers stood perfectly still while the pupils marched inside to the sound of Sister Catherine plunking ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ on the tinny school piano. Only when the last child had disappeared did Sister Agatha break her rigid pose; heavy serge skirts swishing the gravel aside imperiously, she strode to where the Clearys waited.
    Meggie gaped at her, never having seen a nun before. The sight was truly extraordinary; three dabs of person, which were Sister Agatha’s face and hands, the rest white starched wimple and bib glaring against layers of blackest black, with a massive rope of wooden rosary beads dangling from an iron ring that joined the ends of a wide leather belt around Sister Agatha’s stout middle. Sister Agatha’s skin was permanently red, from too much cleanliness and the pressure of the knife-like edges of the wimple framing the front centre of her head into something too disembodied to be called a face; little hairs sprouted in tufts all over her chin, which the wimple ruthlessly squashed double. Her lips were quite invisible, compressed into a single line of concentration on the hard business of being the Bride of Christ in a colonial backwater with topsy-turvy seasons when she had taken her vows in the sweet softness of a Killarney abbey over fifty years before. Two small crimson marks were etched into the sides of her nose from the remorseless grip of her round, steel-framed spectacles, and behind them her eyes peered out suspiciously, pale-blue and bitter.
    ‘Well, Robert Cleary, why are you late?’ Sister Agatha barked in her dry, once Irish voice.
    ‘I’m sorry, Sister,’ Bob replied woodenly, his blue-green eyes still riveted on the tip of the quivering cane as it waved back and forth.
    ‘Why are you late?’ she repeated.
    ‘I’m sorry, Sister.’
    ‘This is the first morning of the new school year, Robert Cleary, and I would have thought that on this morning if not on others you might have made an effort to be on time.’
    Meggie shivered, but plucked up her courage. ‘Oh, please, Sister, it was my fault!’ she squeaked.
    The pale-blue eyes deviated from Bob and seemed to go through and through Meggie’s very soul as she stood there gazing up in genuine innocence, not aware she was breaking the first rule of conduct in a deadly duel which went on between teachers and pupils ad infinitum : never volunteer information. Bob kicked her swiftly on the leg and Meggie looked at him sideways, bewildered.
    ‘Why was it your fault?’ the nun demanded in the coldest tones