Two Walls and a Roof Read Free Page A

to run to the faerie and pulled me back inside . W e left immediately. I kept on telling them about the small man and how he was calling me and why couldn’t I go to him. This was really frightening Nannie and I do remember that both Nannie and my mother became very agitated . T here seemed to be a real sense of dread going on between them, but no one told me why they got so upset, nor why I could not go to the small man. They never again went back to that track, and I was always warned , even as a teenager, to keep away from that place, without being given a single reason why.
    It was rarely discussed at home and if it came up, ( it was usually me that brought it up ) they always fudged the issue. I could never get either of them to talk about it much, and later on in life when I would persist, all Nannie would ever say in a dismissive kind of way was, “Ahh sure you just imagined all of that John, but tis better you stay away from that ould place anyway”. Then her frightened fidgeting look would give her lie away, and besides that, I know I could not have imagined what I saw on that day, because I was far too young to create such a picture.
    Apparently, had the faerie man managed to catch me, I would soon turn into a wrinkled , sickly baby and quite quickly die as a very young child. It was common enough in those days apparently, and I think the folklore people would have called me ‘a changeling baby’.  No medical reason would have been found to explain my untimely death, and I suppose I would have been seen as a victim of the old Roman saying, ‘Those the Gods love, die young’.  Somewhere I read later that when the f aeries don’t get you, they leave you with a gift. I have no idea what gift they gave me, and after researching my life for this book, it may well be that they gave me the gift of a kind of protection from all the harm that nearly befell me over the years . T his I do know ; so far, their gift has not been that of gold coins.
    My next memory of early childhood was when I was about six or seven.  I had begun to read avidly. The first book I can remember having an effect on me was ‘ From the Earth to the Moon’ , written by Jules Verne . This book was all about men landing on the moon for the first time , written at least ten years before they really did land there. It was inspiring to my imaginatio n and from it began my love of science, s pace and my fascination with fire.
    Nannie ’s house was a two- story building : a ground floor, a middle floor and the attic where we all slept. I slept with the Nan in the back room , and in the front room , U ncle Michael had his abode. Nannie long suspected that he smoked in bed, but she could never catch him at it.  She had this genuine fear of being burned alive, and she was terrified of a fire in our home, simply because we had no escape from the attic of that house.
    We always had loads of books in the Nan ’ s house, and I was greatly encouraged to read even though it had to be by candlelight, as we had no electricity in the attic at that time. I’m sure it didn’t help my eyesight , but that’s another story.  When it was my bedtime , Nannie would send me to bed and light the candle, warning me not to go near it. This candle was stuck inside a milk bot tle which stood on an old table that ha d a small drawer in it, used for her secret stuff. She used to make a big pretence of looking for things in the drawer each night , and early on I realize d that she was hiding the matches there. I filed this away for future use, as even at six or seven, her craftiness was already having an effect on me. As if to give her confidence and protection in the night, she also had a heavy , toy snub- nosed revolver sitting openly on this table. It was clearly a toy , but she used to say that if we we re ever b eing robbed, “He’s useless ( referring to Michael ), and i t ’ s up to me to defend us, God help us all”. I thought , even at my young age , that