Small Things Like These

Small Things Like These is a novella by award-winning Irish author, Claire Keegan which can be easily read in one sitting. In December 1985, in the little Irish town of New Ross, coal and timber merchant, William Furlong delivers a load of fuel to convent next door to St Margaret's school, where two of his daughters are taught.

Sister Carmel being absent, he opens the chapel door to find a group of young women on hands and knees, polishing the floors, one of whom begs him to take her away. He has heard, and perhaps dismissed, the rumours about the convent's training school for girls, that girls in trouble are made to work in the laundries. He gets on with his job.

Then, on the icy Sunday before Christmas, he has another load of coal to deliver to the convent. He's a little early, and none of the Good Shepherd nuns are at the coal shed to meet him, but eager to get on, he unlocks the shed.

What he finds, or actually whom, is a shock, and despite the ready cover story that the Mother Superior provides, her smoothly convincing act, William is disturbed. Her veiled threat towards the future of his daughters and his business, should he make any sort of fuss about what he has encountered, while it is echoed by his wife and others in the town, disturbs him even more.

"…you want to get on in life, there's things you have to ignore, so you can keep on"

William cannot forget that he was born to an unwed mother in 1946, and his mother had only escaped the same fate as those girls he has seen through the Christian generosity of a Protestant widow. But for Mrs Wilson, where might William have ended up? Can he really tolerate the status quo?

"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?"

Keegan deftly portrays a hard-working man who is charitable and generous, both with what he has and his opinions of those around him. Her descriptive prose easily captures the setting and the mindset of society at that time, the power of the Catholic Church in small Irish towns.

This powerful little tale demonstrates just how the Magdalen laundries were able to persist in a first-world country until four years short of the twenty-first Century and illustrates the saying that evil persists where good men fail to act. An uplifting story.

This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Grove Atlantic.