A City Tale

By Clare Ryan

Towards the end of that summer in 1960 when her brother Barry was sixteen and went to work in Fords, Winifred inherited two of his jobs. One was to ring the Angelus Bell at six o’clock in the chapel next door. ‘It’s easy.’ Barry said as he walked ahead of her up the stairs to the gallery and in through the small door that led to the base of the bell-tower. ‘Just put your hands around the rope and pull hard and slow, three, three and nine.’ 

He laughed and said. ‘It’s like going to the Chipchop for bags of chips, three threes and a nine, that’s all you have to remember. Put your hands over mine now and we’ll do it together this time.’ 

In time with the tolling bell overhead, she would murmur. ‘The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary and she conceived of the Holy Ghost.’

The second job was to collect The Cork Examiner every morning from Miss Buttimer’s across the street in a dark hovel at the base of a tenement building She had been there forever and nobody knew what she really looked like. So Winifred was both curious and frightened as she crossed the road just after eight o’clock one morning. 

The door was of ancient dark wood and the filthy windows were covered on the inside with yellowing newspapers, obscuring all light. Miss Buttimer and her shop were shrouded in darkness. She had no face, no body, totally enveloped in black, only her hands and her faintly glowing eyes were visible. 

Winifred blinked until her eyes adjusted to the dim interior. The counter slowly loomed from the back of the room and the piles of newspapers rose like stone columns as she inched her way forward. A glimmer of light caught her eye away to the right, filtered by a dark drape. She moved slowly along looking for the blue masthead of The Cork Examiner. 

Reaching to pick it up, she jumped as the drape moved. ‘And who might you be, young lady?’ The woman’s voice was soft and almost musical. ‘Winifred Murphy, Miss, from number ten.’ ‘Ah, you must be Barry’s little sister then.’ ‘Yes Miss,’ Winifred’s voice steadied as the gentleness of Miss Buttimer’s words reached her ears. ‘Has he started his new job?’ She asked. ‘Yes Miss, this morning, in Fords.’ Winifred said, moving from one leg to the other now that she was no longer rigid with fright. ‘So how old are you Winifred? ‘Ten, Miss.’ ‘You’re a fine tall girl for ten’ she said. Winifred wondered how she could see enough to know.

No longer frightened of her, Winifred would answer Miss Buttimer’s questions about school and the things she liked to do. But some days she would only say ‘Good morning, Winifred’ in that gentle voice. 

Those were the days when Winfred would have red eyes after finally falling asleep the night before with a pain in her head from crying. Most nights she lay in bed fearfully awaiting her Daddy’s arrival home from the pub, hoping he would be in a singing mood. If he’d left in bad humour she would wish he’d lose his way and not come home at all, as she listened to the anxious movements of her mother downstairs. 

On days like that, she would be glad that Miss Buttimer would ask her no questions and she would trudge her way to school, stopping at the chapel to ask for forgiveness for wishing her father harm. She knew it was so terrible a sin that she couldn’t even confess it on Saturday morning.

One day Miss Buttimer said. ‘What a lovely spring morning it is, Winifred.’ ‘Good morning Miss.’ Winifred was not so enthused. ‘If you didn’t have to go to school today what would you do?’ Asked Miss Buttimer. ‘I’d go out to the Lough and feed the ducks.’ Winifred said, dreaming. ‘Then I’d go to the Library and take out a new book, if they had one’ ‘What do you mean if they had one, it’s a library, it has lots of books?’ Miss Buttimer’s voice smiled. ‘So what do you like to read?’ She asked. 

‘Famous Fives and Chalet Schools,’ Winifred said. ‘But I have most of them read now’ ‘Well, you’ll just have to read other books.’ Miss Buttimer suggested. ‘What kind of other books?’ Winifred asked, thinking of the books on the shelf at school that the nun said they should read; all to do with saints, most of whom had terrible lives and died horrible deaths. 
Though helping the lepers like Fr. Damian sounded good, but you had to be a priest to do that. 

‘What about ‘Anne of Green Gables?’ Miss Buttimer asked. ‘Or ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel?’ That was one of my favourites.

‘They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere, is he in heaven or is he in hell, that damned elusive Scarlet Pimpernel’ She intoned.
Winifred giggled and said. ‘I’ll look this evening after school.’ ‘Good girl’ Miss Buttimer said. ‘Then you can tell me all about it.’

She found Anne of Green Gables that afternoon in the City Library and ever afterwards spelled her second name ‘Anne with an e’. Miss Buttimer asked her about the story and told her to look up where Prince Edward Island was so she’d be able to see the setting in her mind’s eye.
‘I hope you’ll soon read ‘A Tale of Two Cities.’ Miss Buttimer said one day. 

‘I still remember my father reading that to me when I was in bed for weeks with the measles. He’d sit in the window-seat and read a few pages every day’. Her voice was softer than ever. ‘It was the best of time it was the worst of times’, I can still see the shiny boots and the buttons of his uniform.’ ‘Was he a soldier?’ Winifred wondered. Her granddad had been a soldier in The War and was never right after it, according to her mother. Winifred could only remember his soft eyes and the smell of tobacco. ‘Yes, he was a medical officer in the Army, he was killed in France.’ Miss Buttimer said in a way that told her to ask no further questions that day.

Winifred would take her book to bed to read in peace away from her mother’s incessant fear-filled talk about her father. Folded up in the scratchy blanket, she would travel away to other worlds where right was might, courage overcame all obstacles and goodness was rewarded. She would pay attention to names and places and to the way the story went so she could recall them for Miss Buttimer. Some nights, she would fall asleep reading and not hear her father coming home at all.

‘I finished ‘Pollyanna,’ Winifred said. She had been surprised that Miss Buttimer had never read it. ‘It’s about a girl called Pollyanna who is an orphan and she gets sick and can’t walk but she keeps her courage and always looks on the good things in life, not the bad things.’ 

‘She sounds like a very brave and intelligent girl.’ Miss Buttimer said. ‘She was and because of that she does learn to walk again…that bit made me want to cry.’ Winifred said, surprised. ‘When good things happen to people, it sometimes does that, not because we’re sad, but because we feel FOR them.’ ‘And do you think that things get better if you try hard enough, like in Pollyanna?’ Winifred wondered. ‘Maybe. But, certainly you’ll never know if you don’t try. Better to have tried and failed than never have tried at all, I always think.’ Miss Buttimer said. Winifred decided that she would definitely prefer to be a person who tried.

On her way from school one day, she called in to Miss Buttimer and told her about the test to get into the scholarship class. ‘I have to write a composition called ‘A Childhood Memory’. She sighed. ‘But I can’t think of anything. Miss says it must be interesting.’ ‘Well, don’t forget, a composition can be fiction, it doesn’t have to be true.’ Miss Buttimer said. ‘You mean the teacher won’t think I’m telling lies?’ Winifred said. She was smiling as she crossed the street.

The following week she brought the composition that gained her a place in the scholarship class for Miss Buttimer to read.

‘My Mammy died when I was born and I lived with my Daddy in a big house surrounded by green fields. A woman called Alice lived upstairs in the attic and she looked after us. She made lovely fruit cakes and apple-tarts.

Daddy was a soldier and we had two Red Setter dogs called Left and Right. Daddy said they were Army dogs. I could never tell which was which and I think they didn’t know either because if I called one of them, they would both come. When I was about nine years old I got the measles and was very sick for a long time. 

I had to stay in bed with the curtains drawn. In my mind’s eye I can still see my Daddy sitting on the window-seat in his uniform, the buttons glistening and his shiny boots gleaming. He read ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by Charles Dickens and it is my favourite book. 

My Daddy was killed fighting in the Great War in France in 1917 and was given a medal for being a hero, posthumously, which means after his death, and I have it still. I was proud but also very sad because he was a gentle and kind Daddy. Left and Right missed him too. 

Miss Buttimer’s voice was soft and crackly when she said. ‘Thank you for showing it to me Winifred, it is a beautiful story.’

Winifred went to secondary school on a scholarship and even her Daddy smiled when the letter came. On the last day of the summer holidays, she went across to Miss Buttimer as usual ‘Good morning Winifred’. She said. ‘There’s a little gift for you on top of the papers, to wish you well in your new school. You should be proud of yourself, you worked very hard all year and deserve your good fortune now.’ 

She unwrapped the brown paper to find a dark blue fountain pen, nestling in a velvet-lined box with her name engraved on it. Beneath it was a brand new copy of Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ with gold writing on the spine. For the first time, she inhaled the magical scent of a brand new book. On the flyleaf was written the date and a message. ‘May you enjoy the best of times. Your friend, Leonora Buttimer.

Many years later on a sunny May morning, Winifred sat in the church as the priest read the names of the recently deceased parishioners from the pulpit. Finally, the name she’d come to hear. ‘I ask you also to remember Miss Leonora Buttimer, a former parishioner, who died far from here on April 30th. Outside in the churchyard, she heard the neighbours’ comments: ‘Ah she was a real lady’, ‘A harmless poor soul’, ‘Not a friend in the world’. 

At home later, she took down a book from the shelf, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ and held it to her face though its scent had long since faded. After drying her eyes, she took her fountain pen and wrote, under the inscription on the flyleaf: ‘In memory of my friend, Leonora.’ And added her own name and the date. 

In her bag, she had a brand new copy of the Dickens book, hard-covered with gold writing on the spine. Tomorrow, she would bring it to school and give it to the girl who wrote the best essay entitled ‘A Childhood Memory’. It was a prize she awarded each year before her class moved on to Secondary School. 
 
 

Author Clare Ryan lives in Cork, Ireland. Her short story, "The Exchange," ran in the autumn, 2007, issue of The Irish American Post.