Daisy's Wars Read Free Page A

going
down the pits and the girls into service or to work on farms.
    As fate would have it, though, Bernard would work in the Newcastle coalfields for only fourteen years, before an unlikely scenario brought his time to an end.
    ‘I never knew my grandfather,’ Michael would say, ‘but I heard so much about him that to this day I can almost see him. He was a small, stocky man, well-muscled because of the
work, with brown hair and grey eyes; quiet, so they say, and cheerful. He didn’t draw attention to himself and his only ambition was to save enough to take his family back to Ireland one day,
though he wasn’t the only one who was doing that. He missed the open air and the space, and in his mind he thought he could go back home, buy a farm and start his life over again. He had to
work as a sinker, but his heart wasn’t in it, and when he had a few hours off, he walked.
    ‘My father told me he would go off on one of his walks and just disappear for hours at a time, then come back and get ready for work again in his quiet way.’
    Daisy could almost see Bernard through Michael’s eyes, just as Michael saw him through his own father’s, and she wondered if he was ever aware that he was describing Granda Paddy and
himself as he talked about Bernard. She never tired of Michael’s stories; even if she was never sure how true they were, because each time she heard them it was as if she was seeing her past
a bit more clearly, and feeling a sense of herself that much stronger.
    ‘He liked the sea, I think it was that space thing again. You know how you can stretch your eyes when you look across the sea?’
    Daisy nodded.
    ‘And it reminded him of Ireland, of course, because his home wasn’t far from the sea and he was used to boats. He liked to spend time where fisherfolk were to be found, to walk by
the riverside and down the lanes, Dark Chare, Blue Anchor Chare and Peppercorn Chare. And that’s what he was doing on that October day in 1854,’ Michael said with a sigh, ‘walking
along the Tyne by Guildford, looking at the fishing boats landing their catches and the wherries taking loads to bigger ships lying down river. Then there was the big explosion.’
    A fire had started in a worsted factory in Hillsgate, Gateshead, and quickly spread through the cramped riverside buildings to a warehouse containing thousands of tons of sulphur, saltpetre,
turpentine and naphtha. As it exploded, stones and bricks were thrown across the Tyne, starting fires on the other side, and fifty-three of the crowd that had gathered to watch were killed,
including Bernard Sheridan.
    ‘He’d been using explosives at work every day for years,’ Michael said, ‘and he died at the age of thirty-four in an explosion on his day off. Now isn’t that just
plain unfair? And they talk about the luck of the Irish,’ he would finish bitterly, as though the whole world regularly conspired against them.
    Bernard’s wife, Niamh, left a widow at the age of thirty with six children to care for, briefly considered moving back to Ireland, an instinctive reaction to run for home in times of
trouble. Niamh was made of sterner stuff, though, and she used the money Bernard had been saving ‘to go back home’ to rent a house in Byker, a working-class area far from the
coalfields, and became a landlady. She was small, as all malnourished people were in that era, with dark blue eyes, her fine fairish hair in a bun that never quite contained the strands, and she
had a bustling air about her. She was a feisty woman who had opinions and voiced them freely in a way that Bernard never would have. She resented the anti-Irish feeling she and her children faced
every day, and remarks that blamed the Irish for being poor, uneducated and dirty.
    Newcastle was a busy port and, like all ports, the constant traffic of foreigners brought diseases like typhus and cholera to the city, particularly when there were many people crammed into
little space. The