Peeling Oranges by James Lawless

Saint Enda’s park, and that his hair was pure silver. She listened to Frank Ryan broadcasting on the wireless from Madrid. It was easy to get a reception after ten p.m. She read a letter from Gearóid which bore the marks of the trenches. He and his battalion were lying about hungrily eating oranges that had been thrown to them from a passing lorry. He said the oranges were their only nourishment that day. He was never so glad of anything. The oranges kept them alive.
    However, she didn’t stay long in the house. She found it too cold and lonely: ‘What is the point of putting down a fire when there is no one to share the warmth with?’
    My mother continued to work with Cumann na mBan , but concentrated more and more on the social end of things. Her ideology was fading. A sense of universal justice was a stronger call for her now than what she perceived as the fainter peal of nationalism. She continued to study the Irish language and Irish culture but widened her ken, and after she had dispatched every romance novel in Kevin Street public library, she began to read history and philosophy and whatever little there was at the time on women’s anatomy.
    Long before she came to the Liberties, Mrs Chaigneau lived near Monto, the red-light district. She told my mother many stories about the ‘unfortunate girls’ there which she regurgitated to Patrick:
    Most of the girls in Monto were unwed mothers, forced into prostitution. They were really silly girls, don’t you think, Patrick? How could they let themselves get in the family way? And some of them so young. They turned the clock backwards before they even knew the time of day. The world is a cruel place. And the rich men arrived in their carriages to exploit these poor girls. They were kept captive in rooms. They couldn’t even go out to the shop. Mrs C used to do a few messages for them – to see them would break your heart, she said, some of them with bruises or a black eye, and others with worse things hidden deep. When there was no one to help them they put a can tied to a string out their windows with money in it for some of the kids to get them cigarettes, and they let the kids keep the change. Slaves they were to the madam. And there was more than one madam who made enough money to send her children off to a posh school in England. There is no justice. Nothing changes. It is always the strong exploiting the weak, isn’t it Patrick? And Mrs C said some of the users of these kip houses were our moral guardians, and she knew names, but she never told me the names.
    ***
    Occasionally, my mother met some girlfriends from Jacobs, and they went to the pictures, but such friends were thin on the ground, as most of them by this stage were married with children.
    She explained to Patrick how Muddy was concerned about her:
    She keeps saying husband and wife shouldn’t be separated. She says I’m gallivanting about as if I’m single. When I tell her I can’t go over to you because of the war, she says in that case you should be over here, that it isn’t right, that there is enough separation in death. ‘Look at me,’ she says. She’d put years on you, Patrick. She says that the two of us should be together giving her grandchildren. This separation, it will be only be for a while, won’t it, love?
    ***
    Her sister Peg irritated her. To the rest of the Woodburns a royalist was perceived as a rebel. My Aunt’s collection of British memorabilia was always a source of contention between the two sisters. Peg, it seemed, was not interested in romance. She ridiculed men. ‘Will you look at the getup of your man,’ she would say, or ‘will you look at him half cocked?’ They seemed to have nothing in common. Such sibling estrangement exacerbated my mother’s sense of loneliness. In a letter to Patrick, Martha describes Peg as ‘slipping slowly into a bony spinsterhood’. Her attack on the world only compounded Aunt Peg’s own loneliness. But she couldn’t see