On a Clear Day Read Free

win a prize last year at the Armagh show.
    ‘That tablecloth, Clare, the one with all those wee flowers took such a long time to do. I’m sure she was at it a year or more. But not as long as the sweater with the cherries on it,’ he ended with a twinkle in his eye.
    Clare smiled to herself. That was another story she loved and her father loved telling it. When Clare was still quite small Mummy had gone to visit one of her girlfriends and left Daddy to look after her. She’d seen a pattern for a sweater in a woman’s magazine her friend had and she came home full of it. She was so taken with the picture of it that she went out the very next day and bought enough wool to make a start. It looked so lovely with its sprays of cherries across the yoke and little bunches on the sleeves. But, sadly, either the pattern was more difficult than she’d thought or there was a misprint somewhere in the working for the cherries didn’t come out right at all. She’d unravelled the patterned bits and redone them several times but the cherries still looked like lumpy plums. She’d tried and tried until the sight of them so upset her that she unravelled the whole thing and used the ripped out wool to make a batch of crocheted tea cosies for the sale of work at the church.
    ‘I think it’s about the only time I’ve ever seen your mummy really cross,’ he said, as he wrapped up the dirty feather in the damp newspaper.
    ‘But the best of it was that those cosies sold like hot cakes. Everyone thought they’d been made especially with ripped out wool and they wanted her to make more of them. So in the end she had to laugh.’
    He’d gone out to the dustbin in the back yard and come back into the kitchen still smiling.
    ‘Sometimes Clare, when all else fails you have to laugh.’
    The large black hand of the clock had moved at last. It hadn’t stopped after all. But it was still only five past three. Clare finished the final hem on her piece of gingham, anchored the thread with a double stitch and bit off the piece left over with her small, even teeth. She spread the rectangle on the desk and looked at it, pleased that it wasn’t dirty or crumpled after her efforts as some of the other girl’s work was. Then she caught a glance from Miss McMurray and immediately picked up the two pieces of blue check that she was to join together with a ‘run and fell’ seam.
    She knew perfectly well what she had to do but she wondered about the name. She thought of running and falling which she and William often did when they raced each other in the big field in Cathedral Road, just round the corner from where they lived. William always cried when he fell. Even if his knees were only rubbed green from the grass he’d lie there bawling and crying for Mummy.
    ‘If you want Mummy, we’ll have to go home,’ she’d told him time and time again. ‘Come on then.’
    But William would neither pick himself up nor let her take him home. He’d just sit up and start snivelling even though he had a clean handkerchief in his pocket. Sometimes Clare got cross with him and pretended to walk away but it was only pretend for her mother had said she was never to leave him alone. He was too small to come back by himself even though there was no road to cross between the field and the adjoining row of red brick houses.
    William was at school now and would soon be six but it didn’t seem to make much difference to the way he behaved. He would still sit wherever he had fallen and cry till his teacher came to pick him up. Then when they came home from school he’d go straight to Mummy and cry all over again as he showed her the graze on his knee or the sticking plaster the teacher had put on.
    ‘Oh dear a dear, poor old William,’ she’d say, giving him a hug, ‘Sure you’re here to tell the tale, it can’t be that bad, now can it?’
    Often her mother would nod to Clare over William’s dark head for she had once told Clare that sometimes boys were far