A Kiss and a Promise by Katie Flynn Page B

old mammy a great big hug.’
    Unnoticed, Maeve Gallagher had emerged from the cottage and now stood no more than a few feet away, beaming. She was a thin and wiry woman of medium height, grey-haired, and with the seamed and sunburned face of one who spent as much time outdoors as in. Michael, who had not seen her for more than two years, felt his heart contract with love. She was grand, was his mammy – he wondered how he could have stayed away from her for so long. He put the dog down carefully, then gave his mother a hard hug, wondering why on earth he had thought that she would be unsympathetic towards the child Stella had borne. She was smiling with pleasure now, urging him inside the cottage, saying that they had a deal of catching up to do and might as well begin at once. ‘Your daddy’s taken the Orla out to see if he can get a few fish,’ she explained. ‘Oh, Michael, sure and it’s wonderful to see you home again, safe and sound, after the terrible time you’ve had. But I’m that sorry about your young lady. You didn’t say much in your letter but I know you thought a great deal of her. Do you want to tell me about it, son, or is it still too new, too raw?’
    ‘You would have loved her, Mammy,’ Michael said huskily. ‘She wasn’t just beautiful, she was gentle and kind. I think she would have taken to country livin’ like a duck to water, but it wasn’t to be.’
    ‘Your letter said flu and we’ve heard, since you wrote, that the disease is sweeping the whole of Europe,’ his mother said. She gestured him to sit down at the table and went over to where the kettle hung on a chain above the peat fire, a thin thread of steam coming from it. ‘But you’ll be wantin’ a nice cup o’ tay and a piece of buttered brack before you do anything else.’ As she spoke, she was pouring water into the big brown pot into which she had already tipped a tiny spoonful of tea leaves. ‘You’ve come home at the hungriest time o’ year, Michael me love, which means there’s not a great deal of work waitin’ to be done and I think that’s a good thing. After what you’ve been through, rest and quiet and your own folk round you is what you’ll be needin’ most.’
    Michael, agreeing contentedly, bit into the brack, then took a drink of his tea. It was good to be home, he told himself, and everything here would be homemade from the brack itself to the big calico apron which his mother always wore in the house. They were too far from the nearest town – and too poor – to buy when they could make and Mammy’s brack and her lovely stews and bread and apple pies were a great deal tastier than those which Mrs Bennett bought from her local shops.
    Presently, his mother finished her tea and went over to the low stone sink. She must have been scrubbing potatoes for the midday meal when she heard Danny’s welcome, for now she eyed the vegetables in the pan, then reached into a sack beneath the sink and added a couple of generous handfuls to those already in the bowl. ‘This was for supper when your daddy’s home,’ she told him over her shoulder. ‘But I reckon I’ll make a meal just for the two of us now, so what do you fancy? The hens don’t lay well at this time of year but I’ve three eggs, plenty of spuds and cabbage and a piece of salted cod.’
    ‘A fried egg and a few fried potatoes would be grand, so they would,’ Michael said yearningly. Fresh eggs were almost unobtainable in Liverpool, or had been up to the time he had left; in fact food shortages were endemic. Mrs Bennett had told him that, a few months earlier, King George himself had urged his subjects not to eat so much bread since wheat was having to be brought into the country from abroad. Apparently, the King had also said that his own family was strictly rationing the food they ate, though Michael had taken that with a pinch of salt. Many, many times, he had heard his father talking of rich landowners who preached propriety to their