A Christmas Tale

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These might be a slip of a book – it is only 110 pages long – but it packs a mighty punch.

As the title suggests, Keegan’s novel, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, focuses on the minutiae of life. At the same time, however, it shines a light on larger issues and shameful deeds in Irish history.

Set in 1985 in the small Irish town of New Ross in County Wexford, the events of the narrative unfold over the weeks leading up to Christmas.
At the centre of the novel is Bill Furlong, a successful coal and timber merchant who has made a name for himself after a difficult start in life. The illegitimate offspring of a 16 year old unmarried mother, he has never known his father – his birth certificate records the father as ‘Unknown’. Born just after the Second World War, into a conservative religious society, his illegitimacy is a shameful matter.

However, by the standards of the times, Bill – and his mother – get off lightly. Disowned by her family when she fell pregnant, Bill’s mother was taken care of by her employer, the wealthy Protestant widow, Mrs Wilson. Instead of dismissing her, as would be expected, Mrs Wilson kept her in service, allowing both mother and son to live with her and taking an active role in Bill’s upbringing. So, although Bill is ‘jeered and called some ugly names’ by his schoolmates, ‘his connection with the big house had given him some leeway, and protection’. As he grows up, his hard work and the ‘good Protestant habits’ instilled in him by Mrs Wilson (he ‘was given to rising early and had no taste for drink’) means he does well and earns the respect of his fellow townsfolk. Married to Eileen, with five daughters, all of whom are doing well in school, Bill is a man who should be content with his lot in life.

However, there is a brooding darkness in his life. As the family – and the town – prepare for Christmas and all the excitements it offers, Bill is haunted by thoughts of the futility of life: ‘What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry.‘

Visiting the Christmas tree and the nativity scene in the town square on the first Sunday in December, then coming home to make the Christmas cake, Bill struggles to shake off his anxious thoughts:

‘Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? … Even while he’d been creaming the butter and sugar, his mind was not so much upon the here and now… so much as on tomorrow and who owed what, and how, and when he’d deliver what was ordered..’

He is also wracked by the sufferings of others, ‘small things like these’ keeping him awake at night. In the mid-80s Ireland experienced significant economic problems and in New Ross shops are closing, employers are laying off staff, young people are emigrating to London and the USA, and poverty is rampant: ‘[t]he dole queues … getting longer and .. men … who couldn’t pay their ESB [the Irish electricity board] bills, living in houses no warmer than bunkers, sleeping in their overcoats’.

Bill’s concern contrasts with his wife’s reaction. Telling her that he saw ‘Mick Sinnott’s little chap… out on the road again today, foraging for sticks’ and gave him some money, Eileen retorts that ‘some of these bring the hardship on themselves’, and that Sinnott, who has a drink problem, should ‘pull himself out of it’; her husband’s more sympathetic response is that ‘Maybe the man isn’t able’.

But it is the goings-on at the town’s convent which cause Bill most concern. The Good Shepherd nuns who live there run a ‘training school’, providing girls with a basic education, alongside a highly-regarded laundry business. And rumours circulate about the girls: ‘Some said that the … girls ….weren’t students of anything, but girls of low character who spent their days being reformed, doing penance by washing stains out of the dirty linen… Others swore the place was no better than a mother-and-baby home where common, unmarried girls went in to be hidden away after they had given birth…’

The reader recognises that the convent is housing one of the notorious Magdalene Laundries, institutions that were set up, usually by Catholic religious orders, to house women and girls with nowhere else to go, either because they were orphaned or lacked family support, or because they had fallen pregnant outside marriage. The Laundries operated for about 200 years, the last one closing in 1996. Far from protecting the girls and young women, the Laundries operated a system of abuse, both physical and mental, leading to the Irish Government issuing a formal state apology in 2013 in which the laundries were described as ‘the nation’s shame’.

Bill clearly has some idea of what is going on in the convent, but is initially reluctant to act. On one visit to the convent to deliver coal, arriving earlier than anticipated, he wanders around the site until he finds a lit chapel where a number of girls and young women, wearing rough shifts and no shoes, are polishing the chapel floor. One of the girls approaches him and asks for help: ‘Mister won’t you help us? … Just take me as far as the river… Or you could just let me out at the gate.’ Turning down her request, Bill delivers the coal but returns home in a dazed state, haunted by the sight of the girls, but also the visible signs of their imprisonment: ‘a padlock…and… the top of the high wall separating the convent from St Margaret’s [the girls’ school] next door was topped with broken glass’.

Returning to the convent this Christmas with another delivery, Bill goes to place the coal directly in the convent coal shed, only to find a young girl cowering in there, who tells him that her baby has been taken away. As with the previous episode, he initially hesitates to get involved – ‘the ordinary part of him simply wanted to be rid of this and get on home’. But when he gets home in time for second Mass, the doubts begin: ‘With a fresh type of reluctance he … changed into his Sunday clothes’. He finds the Mass long, is distracted during the sermon and ‘[w]hen …it came time to go up and receive Communion, Furlong stayed contrarily where he was with his back against the wall’.

Realising that the girl locked in the coalshed could have been his mother, had it not been for the ‘daily kindnesses’ of Mrs Wilson, Bill decides he has to act. He fears the consequences of his actions, but knows that not acting will be even worse: ‘he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror’.

A Christmas tale of hope against the odds needs Christmas cake, the making of which is a key episode in the novel, a cake made by the whole family which stresses their togetherness and good fortune, something which Bill recognises is alien to so many in their local community:

‘That evening, when they got home, Eileen said it was well past time they made the Christmas cake. Good-humouredly, she took down her Odlum’s recipe and got Furlong to cream a pound of butter and sugar in the brown delft bowl with the hand mixer while the girls grated lemon rind, weighed and chopped candied peel and cherries, soaked whole almonds in boiled water and slipped them from their skins. For an hour or so they raked through the dried fruit, picking stalks out of sultanas, currants and raisins while Eileen sifted and flour and spice, beat up bantam eggs, and greased and lined the tin..’

Keegan more or less provides the recipe for Christmas cake – minus the quantities of ingredients – and you can find my recipe (including quantities) here, plus below a photo of the one I made a few weeks ago.