‘Book’ was a grand title for the few pieces of paper that Peg had bound together but she couldn’t have been prouder of her achievement. There had been lots of drizzly days while Granny Doyle and Aunty Mary had been busy with the stream of guests and the cleaning of the dusty old house, leaving Peg with plenty of time to work on her magnum opus. The Chronicle of the Children of Lir by Peg Doyle was its full title, chronicle a word that had leapt off the sides of one of the old books and danced inside Peg’s head. After a few patchy years, when she missed large chunks of school, Peg was back on track. She’d been selected for the accelerated reading programme, so she could read about tractors that were crimson rather than plain red, allowing her to pick up the books from Nanny Nelligan’s mahogany bookshelf with great authority. Most of them held little interest for her – a good deal were in Irish and Peg had no grá for Gaeilge – but Peg loved the old bookshelf, with its mottled grain and friendly clumps of dust. There would be space for The Chronicle of the Children of Lir by Peg Doyle on it, pride of place if she had her way: stories were for babbies, but chronicles demanded respect.
‘This is STUPID!’ John Paul said, rejecting the squiggles that Peg had placed in front of him.
Peg gave him a look of infinite patience; she could have played a saint in a school play.
‘Damien and Rosie can help you to read if you want. It’s very simple.’
John Paul’s cheeks flushed.
‘I-I don’t want to READ.’
John Paul hadn’t the patience for Peg’s generous tutoring sessions. A tornado of a boy, he couldn’t sit still long enough for Peg’s patient lectures, copybooks best transformed into paper aeroplanes. Damien and Rosie were more promising pupils. Rosie had the alarming attitude that the alphabet was arbitrary, but she at least sat still and listened. Damien actually showed signs of progress, concentrating hard on the puzzle of letters in front of him, ever eager to please. And both of them loved when Peg read to them, lapping up the voices she put on and her embellishments. Peg felt she had greatly improved upon the Children of Lir’s story in her chronicle, adding several storms and adventures to the swan’s three hundred years around Erris, with the eldest, Fionnuala, reliably capable of rescuing her siblings from whatever peril they found themselves in. Savvy about her audience, Peg added a section where one swan befriended a crab (for Rosie loved all animals) and another where one of the swans found a nice, warm cave (for Damien loved being cosy) and she even threw in a battle with pirates and Vikings, history’s rigour compromised by the need to keep John Paul still. Even John Paul had gobbled up the tale the night before, the triplets squished into the one bed, eyes agog until Peg storied them towards sleep. However, listening to a bedtime tale was different from wasting valuable daylight hours reading, a position that John Paul continued to make clear.
‘I don’t wanna read, I don’t wanna read!’ John Paul recited, scrunching up his lines.
‘Stop messing!’ Peg shouted, her saint-like composure somewhat compromised as she tugged the paper from his hands.
‘How about you lot have a look for some cardboard in the back bedroom? I need some children who might be brave enough to fight any monsters in the boxes …’
Aunty Mary had John Paul at ‘brave’ and once he had signed on to the mission, it was only a matter of time before the other triplets bounded upstairs after him.
Initially furious, Peg was mollified when Aunty Mary returned and sat down at the table beside her. Alone time with Aunty Mary was precious for its rarity, like chocolate released from its tin after Lent.
‘This is looking very professional.’
Peg beamed, the adjective better than any gold star.
‘Aunty Mary?’
‘Yes?’
‘Did the Children of Lir make their Holy Communions before they turned into swans?’
Aunty Mary considered this.
‘I’d say not. The world they grew up in was very different.’
‘And then when they turned back into adults after nine hundred years, Saint Patrick gave them their Communion?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘But how were they allowed to take it if they hadn’t made their Communions?’
The rules regarding First Holy Communions were at the forefront of Peg’s brain as her own ceremony loomed. Peg’s patchy attendance at school meant that she had missed her Communion, which meant that she had to take it at a mortifying age when she had clearly already acquired reason. The problem was that reason did not help Peg solve the puzzle of what Communion might taste like. Somewhere between her friends’ helpful ‘It’s like dry paper, disgusting!’ and Granny Doyle’s ‘Like the pure love of our divine Lord Jesus Christ, now would you get away from under my feet’, lived various theological problems that Peg had no idea how to resolve. Peg seized her moment with Aunty Mary to push the matter further. What did baby Jesus’ body taste like? How did he have so much body to eat that churches never ran out? If Jesus was made of bread how had he ever been killed? Peg presented these problems very seriously, so Aunty Mary, who always treated Peg as an intellectual equal, suppressed a smile and asked ‘Do you know what a metaphor is?’
Peg turned her nod into a shake of the head, admitting ignorance as the price of knowledge.
‘Sometimes the truth of stories isn’t necessarily in the facts,’ Aunty Mary said, searching for inspiration. ‘We might think of the world starting with Adam and Eve eating an apple, because a story is easier to understand than science. Or we might say we are eating the body of Christ, but really it’s a special loaf of bread that’s been blessed. The metaphor helps us understand an important truth: that we should share with one another.’
Peg struggled with metaphor but nodded gamely nonetheless.
‘So is the story not really true?’
Aunty Mary checked for the bustle of Granny Doyle’s coat through the door.
‘I wouldn’t say that the story is not true,’ she said slowly. ‘But sometimes you have to be careful about what parts of stories you believe. You have to think about who is telling them and why they would want you to believe them.’
A door edged open in Peg’s brain.
‘Are the swans in this story a metaphor too?’
Aunty Mary smiled and tilted her head to the side, chewing on the thought.
‘Hmmm … you could say they represented the transition between a pagan and a Christian era and also the shift between childhood and adulthood and yes, it’s a good question …’
Peg focused on Aunty Mary’s mutterings intently, keen to display that she was not some child who believed in fairy tales; no, Peg Doyle poked at stories until they revealed their secrets. In fact, she’d just had a brainwave regarding the ending of The Chronicle of the Children of Lir by Peg Doyle, an idea she kept folded up for herself, the better to be unveiled that evening.
*
The performance of The Chronicle of the Children of Lir by Peg
