My Lady Of The Chimney Corner

MY LADY OF THE CHIMNEY-CORNER -- PAGE I LOVE IS ENOUGH 5 2 THE WOLF AND THE CARPE TER 26 3 REHEARSING FOR THE SHOW 37 4 SUNDAY IN POGUES ENTRY 52 5 HIS ARM IS NOT SHORTENED 67 6 THE APOTHEOSIS OE HUGHIE THORNTON 82 7 IN THE GLOW OF A PEAT EIRE 97 8 THE WIND BI OWETH WHERE IT LISTETH I 10 9 BEYOND TH MEADOWS AN TH CLOUDS 122 10 THE EMPTY CORNER 39 The Chimney Corner Revisited I54 F O R E W O R D THIS book is the torn manuscript of the most beautiful life I ever knew. I have merely pieced and patched it together, and have not even changed or disguised the names of the little group of neighbours who lived with us, at the bottom of the world - INTRODUCTION - IN an age when we must do battle for the humanities, in which material rewards are those most esteemed in a materialistic society, we shall do well tr prize more than ever before those books that are not written to a formula for the receipts they will bring in dollars and sterling, but which, having their roots in the things of the spirit, renew our faith in the essential goodness and nobility of mankind. It is in this genre that we - place My Lady of the Chimney Corner, for this book is not born of the imagination however fanciful or beautiful, but is homespun from the loom of the authors own experience-in his own words, the torn mariuscript of the most beautiful life I ever knew. For the Lady was Anna, his mother. She had none of the things on which the world lays store-the paraphernalia of birth and wealth and social status-nor had she need of these things, for she was endowed with something far greater, a native wisdom which enabled her to accept lifes many vicissitudes gracefully and without bitterness. She understood the nature ofthe eternal verities that good and evil are not separate and unrelated powers, but that they are interwoven in the very pattern of life that sorrow and laughter are not wholly incompatible, and that a too conscious self-righteousness may cloud our vision and distort our values of the lives of those about us. Best of all, she had the power of communicating her love. It is this influence which made sweet the lives of all with whom she came in contact and lives on in the book which her son wrote to her memory. True, the book was not awarded the Pulitzer Prize nor given the Prix Goncourt, but it has a message for all who are awake to the beauty that lies at the heart of the simple things of life, and especially for those whose lot is that of poverty and hardship wherever such are to be found in the world. The circumstances under which the authors parents reared, or tried to rear, a family of twelve were appalling in the extreme. His father earned a precarious livelihood as a shoemaker. With the advent of machinery he had to choose between going to a distant city and working in a shoe factory or remaining at home and trying to earn a living as a cobbler. He chose the latter, a course which meant semi-starvation. Life was made still more complicated and difficult because Jamie, an illiterate Protestant, had chosen as his bride a Catholic of some education. Poor Anna To marry an illiterate was bad to incur a mixed marriage was unthinkable...