New Day Dawning , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Forde Hickey Edward

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169 pages

English

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A New Day Dawning is set in the unreal world of Rookery Rally, which portrays Tipperary countryside and a hillside community in the late 1940s. It follows a group of children through their formative years as their personal beliefs and personalities develop. Alternating acts of good and evil are carried out by the children as they struggle to set their own moral compasses. They walk three miles to bring back a puppy for an old man left broken-hearted by the death of his dog; they accompany their parents on a hunt and share in the act of killing foxes and their cubs; they drown a tinker's pup; they turn over a new leaf and promise to be good after a stern fire-and-brimstone sermon. There's stop-and-start progression within the children's moral development as they try to prove themselves good and worthy people on their jaunty adolescent journey towards adulthood. Will the good outweigh the bad? Will optimism outweigh the cynicism of today's world?

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Children's

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 octobre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838597528
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Edward Forde Hickey spent his early life in Tipperary (Dolla). He now lives in Kent with his wife. They have three sons. He still spends time in Tipperary on his small hillside farm. He has been writing sporadically since leaving University where he studied Classics.
Also by Edward Forde Hickey

The Early Morning Light

Copyright © 2016 Edward Forde Hickey

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1838597 528

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

www.edwardfordehickey.co.uk

To the memory of Bridget and Jack, my early sun, moon and stars
Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction

One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Author’s Note
Like the peeling of an onion there lurks inside each one of us that small unshaped child, who supposedly perished and died years and years ago. This book is set in the unreal world of Rookery Rally and portrays a Tipperary countryside and a hillside community in the late 1940s where people and places have no real-life counterpart past or present. Persons arrive on the imagined scene as and when the tales dictate so as to make the writing more readable and believable – more reflective of human nature during the formative years of adolescence – creating a mixed picture of compassionate and generous youth when they are helping others, as well as occasional bouts of somewhat cruel and aggressive behaviour towards the vulnerable and the innocent. There’s a stop-and-start progression within the children’s moral development as they try to prove themselves good and worthy people on their jaunty adolescent journey towards adulthood. Will the good outweigh the bad? Will optimism outweigh the cynicism of today’s world?
Introduction
The War Was Over
It was September 1945 and the cruel war elsewhere was over at last. Dowager and her son, Blue-eyed Jack, had just waved goodbye to Teddy, who had stayed with them throughout the war years so as to avoid the German bombing of London the year he was born. And now they were two sad old figures – lonely and heartbroken to see him leave Rookery Rally and go off on the train that’d lead him to the boat and back to his parents in England – parents, whom he had never known. It was too much to bear, so much had they grown attached to him.
Home From The Train
The old lady and her son came home from the station in Matt-Saddle-up’s pony-and-trap. Ahead of them lay the bitter silence of the hills. Matt finally guided Moll-the-mare in over the stream’s flagstones where she dawdled in front of the empty house. Now that the little boy had gone away, the place had a bare and ruined look about it and they felt like a pair of weary beggars, afraid to go in the doorway. Finally they managed to put the key in the lock. There’d be no child lurking behind the door to greet them as of yore and they sat on their chairs in front of the cheerless hob. For the next half-hour the daylight simply flitted away from them, flat and ashen as never before. They didn’t even bother to light the oil-lamp – only the two candles, the sole illumination that they were able to tolerate.
Had It All Been A Dream?
Had these last five-and-a-half years been a terribly sad dream? There wasn’t a word out of them and even the crickets and beetles in the turf-box didn’t have the nerve to interrupt their silence. They tried to hold onto a few of their recent images. Blue-eyed Jack could picture his little nephew this very evening and he bravely sailing out across The Irish Sea and he stuck against the wet railings of that old cattle-boat and his aunt trying her living best to soothe him. He could see him shrinking minute-by-minute away from the coast of Ireland and finally fading away altogether towards England and out of their lives forever.
Dowager was full of her own thoughts too – to have looked upon her grandson’s every small gesture and to have walked and talked with him – abroad in the yard, out in the fields and down by the well-hole – a child (and those big words of hers that she never stopped using) who had been a gleam of sunshine in her old age from the moment he arrived in his yellow swaddling clothes the time of The Blitz – a child who had become a ray of firelight dancing in and out over the walls of her old heart. And from now on she knew she could never look over her shoulder across at Corcoran’s Well in the direction of The Roaring Town (whence the train left) or even to say the child’s name without getting a great big choking catch in her throat.
Of course it wasn’t the same for the rest of us and by next day we were all getting on with our lives here in Tipperary’s hills. It was natural that even the children among us would have forgotten all about their little friend before the week was over and school began.
But Then A Very Strange Thing Happened
But then a very strange thing happened. The Old Pair (as the neighbours now called them) were suddenly whipped out of their misery when Moll-the-Man and By-Jiggery came across the fields and dragged the two of them out the half-door and down the yard. These good souls knew that what was needed was a harsh hand. It was the only way to get them out of their deep sadness or else they would simply never get a bit of work done for themselves – they’d just sit idly by the fire in the gloom of their Welcoming Room and watch their seven cows lie down and die on them below in The Bull-Paddock. This couldn’t be let happen.
A few days later the rest of us (adults and children alike) came tippy-toeing down the road in a combined effort to restore The Old Pair’s cheerfulness. You could see us standing on the flagstones and a few of our wives edging shyly across the yard. And to the fore were some of Moll-the-Man’s older children (Lippy, Philly and Gallantry), determined to show that they were every bit as good as the adults in attempting to bring the heart and soul back into their two old friends’ lives.
The men weren’t slow either in getting down to the task. They placed their skittles on the flagstones and pelted their sticks up to the mark. They followed this up with a round or two of horseshoe-pitching and pitch-and-toss-the-pennies-at-the-mott. The women sat on the singletree in the grove and they watched and admired the stylish way the games were being played out. They listened to the hoorays of the winners and the fierce curses of the losers lighting up the place when they lost their few brown pennies.
And then the play and the pitching were replaced by the arrival of the card-players and poachers, whose evening bicycle lamps shone down the hillside, illuminating the whitewashed road ahead of them. Ayres ‘n’ Graces (the leader of the poachers) came in along Dowager’s yard with a stickful of rabbits for her. Then each of the card-players stepped lightly in behind him and across the doorway. The candle-lit card-table was pulled out into the middle of The Welcoming Room. The cards were dealt out and hammered off of the table and the noise filled the rafters and it slowly began to destroy the sadness in the old woman and her eldest son.
Is It Christmas?
Dowager and Blue-eyed Jack were left scratching their heads. Had Christmas come early? A day or two later some of the women almost knocked the two of them out of their boots with their honest-to-goodness kindness. Moll-the-Man brought down a pig’s head with the two eyes left standing in it (she gaily pointed out). Ducks ‘n’ Drakes sent up the featherless corpse of her Little Red Hen and offered Dowager another broody hen that she had tucked underneath her arm. Gentility sent down a bag of goose-feathers and she knitted a pair of bed-socks for her old school-friend. Cousin Mary-the-Linnet (the schoolteacher) brought a fine fat goose with her from across the fields in Copperstone Hollow. She gave Blue-eyed Jack a little nudge and a sly little wink and she told him to look inside the gable-end of the bird. And when he did, what do you think he found but a bottle of her finest homemade whiskey (the potheen) tucked neat-and-tidily inside the breast cavity – a bottle with which he could carouse himself till kingdom come (she said) – a bottle with which he could go and rot his fine set of teeth for himself (she said).
All these acts of goodwill were enough to frighten the saints in heaven. It was going to take a week-and-a-half to devour all the fine fare – the hen, the rabbits and the goose and all the other foodstuffs that came pouring in through the half-door. The grateful hearts of Dowager and Blue-eyed Jack raced out of their bodies when they listened to the squeals of lusty laughter coming in the door along with each new visitor and these echoes of Rookery Rally friendship would stay with them a long time and help to gladden their lives as of old.
Everybody Now Knew The Child Had Gone
By mid-September the people across the fiel