He doesn’t know the horrors of the Magdalene laundries, just that there is a closed sort of school for girls on the hill above the town, but he does know that he was a lucky child and when he marries Eileen and they have five daughters, all healthy and good, he knows for sure they are fortunate.Īny more and I’d be telling you the whole story and you’ll want to be reading it yourself, no doubt, in the lovely lilt of Claire Keegan.
Bill’s mother was a young woman who ‘fell’, but the well-off Protestant lady for whom she worked kept her on and welcomed baby Bill into the household. In 1980s Ireland, Bill Furlong is delivering coal and wood during a particularly cold snap before Christmas. It’s a story that knows exactly when it is told and leaves the future open for the reader to imagine. I read it on kindle expecting a novel, and when it abruptly ended at the end of chapter one I did a little gasp before realising how perfect that was. A long short-story of 128 pages, tight enough so that every, single, word accounts for a lot. I should say immediately that this is a short book. Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan, is a lovely book, full of empathy and kindness, about an ordinary man who knows the right thing to do.
There are many horrific stories about these institutions. Their fault for being a bit clumsy, tripping up because they weren’t paying attention. Some thirty thousand women are estimated to have been incarcerated, their babies adopted out. Women who had ‘fallen’ and needed to be removed from society. In 2013 the Irish government gave a much belated apology to the women who had suffered in these prisons of forced labour. The Magdalen laundries, tool of the Catholic Church and Irish state, was closed down in 1996, to abject disgrace.
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