Chapter One
John Henry McClintock met Rose Flanagan when she was sixteen, and he a year or so older.
They met at a tent mission, which is a gospel meeting in a large tent. It was in a field miles from anywhere, in County Down, in the depths of Ireland.
It was a soft, warm summer night. Music poured from the lighted tent as John Henry drew nearer to it. He was one of a large crowd of people, stepping cautiously through the long grass at the field’s edge – soon to be trampled flat by the hordes of visitors – and trying, not always successfully, to avoid the still wet sticky cowpats laid down that day, and the big purple thistles which grew everywhere.
The huge dirty beige tent, which looked dull by daylight but now, in the gathering darkness, shone out as a bright focus of warmth and good fellowship, had no ribbons or other decorations. There was only a cardboard placard set up at the entrance giving the times and the dates of other meetings, in bright red against a whitey-yellow background, with the name of the speaker in a bold dark green. There was a similar placard attached to the gate at the entrance to the field, where a blossoming hawthorn hedge spread its white, sweet-smelling flowers close enough almost, but not quite, to obliterate the writing.
John Henry hadn’t seen Rose yet. He had gone along to the tent with friends of his own age, just as she had done a few minutes earlier. A tent mission was one of the free entertainments on offer in Ireland, in these days just before the First World War. You could be sure of meeting a large crowd of young people, who would seldom be gathered together in one place otherwise.
They pushed into the tent, nudging each other and whispering.
‘There’s Annie Kilpatrick! She’s a whizzer!’
‘Get off my toe, you great lump!’
‘Aw – sorry, Tommy! Hey, there’s Sadie Wilson with Geordie Milligan! Didn’t know they were walking out!’
‘Pity – she’s a lovely girl!’
John Henry listened in amusement, but didn’t contribute much. He liked his friends, Tommy, Willie and wee Artie, but he sometimes wondered how much he had in common with them. They had all left school early and had shown no reluctance to do so. John Henry himself had done the same, but not by his own choice.
When John Henry had left school at the age of fourteen, a few years before, it had been at his father’s insistence, in spite of his evident ability. And in spite of the desire of his teacher that he should stay on, even try for teacher training eventually (the idea of university an impossible dream in the minds of most).
The master of the local Church of Ireland school in the village, Michael Patrick Fyfe, was a descendent of the French Huguenots who had come to those parts a couple of centuries ago, driven out from their homeland by persecution, and had brought their linen making skills with them. Fyfe was a clever man who deserved to be doing more than teaching in a village school. He felt this particularly when a pupil who should have achieved much more was forced to leave by his family’s desire that he should go out and earn his living.
In John Henry’s case he had felt it so strongly that he’d called round with the boy’s father to make his protest.
Fyfe rehearsed in his mind what he would say as he knocked on the door of the three storied house beside the church grounds. He could see that the house had once been an impressive building. Tall, built in grey stone, it was covered nearly up to its second story in sweet smelling rambling roses. And the garden spread around it on all sides, neglected and overgrown with nettles and thistles now, had clearly at one time been a pleasure to see. The owners had obviously gone downhill, and the house with them. He knew that Douglas McClintock, John Henry’s father, was a widower, and had heard that he drank. Maybe that was where the money for house repairs went to.
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