On a Clear Day by Anne Doughty Page B

life to be easy or without grief. From her earliest years she had been well acquainted with both hard work and sudden losses. As the eldest girl in a family of six, with a mother often disabled by illness, she bore much of the burden of running the household. She rose early to light the stove, carried water from the well before she went to school and came home to sweep and scrub the stone floor of the big kitchen where the day to day life of the family went on. In the month of her ninth birthday, her own much-loved grandmother died and later that same summer, her playmate, Dolly, from the farm just down the hill was drowned in a flax hole. Two years later, her baby brother died suddenly when only a few days old to the greatdistress of her mother who continued to lament for years because he had not even been baptised.
    The Scott family were not poor for her father, Robert, was a skilled craftsman. Although there were several other blacksmiths within a few miles distance, he was never short of work and he willingly toiled all hours for the sake of his young family, but until Ellie and Mary and little Florence were able to help in the house, the burden of keeping the place clean and making sure the younger children were presentable for school was often a full time job for Polly.
    Bob and Johnny, her two brothers had an even greater talent than most small boys for tearing their trousers, scraping their boots and arriving home marked with the results of their activities. Long before Polly left school at fourteen to be apprenticed to a dressmaker in Armagh, she was an expert on mending.
    In the cramped back premises of the shop in Thomas Street, Polly worked six days a week. The hours were long and wearisome, the pay during her apprenticeship almost non-existent. But Polly always had the capacity to make the best of any situation. It was she who made the other girls laugh when they were presented with yet one more batch of sleeves to make up, a job they all hated, and it was she who suggested dances and parties and picnics on their rare days off.
    But any hardship there might have been in her early years was completely forgotten when Polly met Jimmy at a dance in Belfast while she was staying with her aunt on the Lisburn Road.
    Jimmy, who was some years older, wanted to go off to Canada and make his fortune and he made it quite clear that he wanted Polly to go with him. At nineteen, she was delighted with the prospect. Polly, who had never been further from home than her annual visit to Belfast, organised her wedding and set out for Canada a few weeks later as if she were going to the Isle of Man for her holidays. She simply assumed she would come home regularly to visit her family as so many Canadians and Americans appeared to do.
    Life in Canada in the 1920s was not as easy or as luxurious as the letters of emigrants often made out. Two years after the local band had played to her and Jimmy for the two miles to Armagh station and ranged themselves to play Will Ye No Come Back Again on the platform where her family and friends were to say their goodbyes, life in Canada was not as rosy as the picture Polly had painted for herself.
    With two babies and a husband who could not always find work despite his skills, the prospect of coming home to visit her parents had receded into the far distance. She was homesick and often short of money, but only the most perceptive ofher new friends would have guessed at either. Polly always managed to stay cheerful and she had the gift of spending a very small amount to create a treat, or some small outing for her family however bad things were. She began sewing at home and the moment Eddie went to school she found a job in a dress shop.
    It was only months after they had bought their first modest home on the outskirts of Toronto that the prospect of the coming war forced a difficult decision upon them. They had been in Canada for fourteen years and had never made the return journey to Ulster. Both