Small Things Like These

 

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Fiction

2021

Finished on December 14, 2024

Rating: 4.5/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.

Once again, Claire Keegan has authored a spare story that will tug at your heartstrings, while making you believe in the good of humanity. Inspired by true accounts of the Magdalen Laundry scandal in Ireland, Keegan conveys the cruel acts of the Catholic nuns with lean, yet powerful, prose. Both Foster and Small Things Like These belong in everyone's permanent collection. 

It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.

A Note from the Author:

This is a work of fiction based in no part on any individual or individuals. Ireland’s last Magdalen laundry was not closed down until 1996. It is not known how many girls and women were concealed, incarcerated and forced to labour in these institutions. Ten thousand is the modest figure; thirty thousand is probably more accurate. Most of the records from the Magdalen laundries were destroyed, lost, or made inaccessible. Rarely was any of these girls’ or women’s work recognised or acknowledged in any way. Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives. Some or most lost the lives they could have had. It is not known how many thousands of infants died in these institutions or were adopted out from the mother-and-baby homes. Earlier this year, the Mother and Baby Home Commission Report found that nine thousand children died in just eighteen of the institutions investigated. In 2014, the historian Catherine Corless made public her shocking discovery that 796 babies died between 1925 and 1961 in the Tuam home, in County Galway. These institutions were run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish State. No apology was issued by the Irish government over the Magdalen laundries until Taoiseach Enda Kenny did so in 2013.”

Joni Mitchell wrote "The Magdalene Laundries" after reading an article shortly after the discovery of 155 bodies of "fallen women" in a mass grave in Dublin. 

I was an unmarried girl

I'd just turned twenty-seven

When they sent me to the sisters

For the way men looked at me

Branded as a jezebel

I knew I was not bound for Heaven

I'd be cast in shame

Into the Magdalene laundries 

 

Most girls come here pregnant

Some by their own fathers

Bridget got that belly

By her parish priest

We're trying to get things white as snow

All of us woe-begotten-daughters

In the steaming stains

Of the Magdalene laundries

 

Prostitutes and destitutes

And temptresses like me

Fallen women

Sentenced into dreamless drudgery

Why do they call this heartless place

Our Lady of Charity?

Oh charity!

 

These bloodless brides of Jesus

If they had just once glimpsed their groom

Then they'd know and they'd drop the stones

Concealed behind their rosaries

They wilt the grass they walk upon

They leech the light out of a room

They'd like to drive us down the drain

At the Magdalene laundries

 

Peg O'Connell died today

She was a cheeky girl

A flirt

They just stuffed her in a hole!

Surely to God you'd think at least some bells should ring!

One day I'm going to die here too

And they'll plant me in the dirt

Like some lame bulb 

That never blooms come any spring

Not any spring

No, not any spring 

Not any spring

Bravo, Claire Keegan! Highly recommend.