Bob nodded. “Yes, Daddy.”

The next morning Meggie was horrified to discover that she was expected to go to school as usual.

“No, no, I can’t go!” she moaned, her hands clutching at her head. “Mum, Mum, I can’t go to school like this, not with Sister Agatha!”

“Oh, yes, you can,” her mother replied, ignoring Frank’s imploring looks. “It’ll teach you a lesson.”

So off to school went Meggie, her feet dragging and her head done up in a brown bandanna. Sister Agatha ignored her entirely, but at playtime the other girls caught her and tore her scarf away to see what she looked like. Her face was only mildly disfigured, but her head when uncovered was a horrible sight, oozing and angry. The moment he saw what was going on Bob came over, and took his sister away into a secluded corner of the cricket pitch.

“Don’t you take any notice of them, Meggie,” he said roughly, tying the scarf around her head awkwardly and patting her stiff shoulders. “Spiteful little cats! I wish I’d thought to catch some of those things out of your head; I’m sure they’d keep. The minute everyone forgot, I’d sprinkle a few heads with a new lot.”

The other Cleary boys gathered around, and they sat guarding Meggie until the bell rang.

Teresa Annunzio came to school briefly at lunchtime, her head shaven. She tried to attack Meggie, but the boys held her off easily. As she backed away she flung her right arm up in the air, its fist clenched, and slapped her left hand on its biceps in a fascinating, mysterious gesture no one understood, but which the boys avidly filed away for future use.

“I hate you!” Teresa screamed. “Me dad’s got to move out of the district because of what your dad did to him!” She turned and ran from the playground, howling.

Meggie held her head up and kept her eyes dry. She was learning. It didn’t matter what anyone else thought, it didn’t, it didn’t! The other girls avoided her, half because they were frightened of Bob and Jack, half because the word had got around their parents and they had been instructed to keep away; being thick with the Clearys usually meant trouble of some kind. So Meggie passed the last few days of school “in Coventry,” as they called it, which meant she was totally ostracized. Even Sister Agatha respected the new policy, and took her rages out on Stuart instead.

As were all birthdays among the little ones if they fell on a school day, Meggie’s birthday celebration was delayed until Saturday, when she received the longed-for willow pattern tea set. It was arranged on a beautifully crafted ultramarine table and chairs made in Frank’s nonexistent spare time, and Agnes was seated on one of the two tiny chairs wearing a new blue dress made in Fee’s nonexistent spare time. Meggie stared dismally at the blue-and-white designs gamboling all around each small piece; at the fantastic trees with their funny puffy blossoms, at the ornate little pagoda, at the strangely stilled pair of birds and the minute figures eternally fleeing across the kinky bridge. It had lost every bit of its enchantment. But dimly she understood why the family had beggared itself to get her the thing they thought dearest to her heart. So she dutifully made tea for Agnes in the tiny square teapot and went through the ritual as if in ecstasy. And she continued doggedly to use it for years, never breaking or so much as chipping a single piece. No one ever dreamed that she loathed the willow pattern tea set, the blue table and chairs, and Agnes’s blue dress.

* * *

Two days before that Christmas of 1917 Paddy brought home his weekly newspaper and a new stack of books from the library. However, the paper for once took precedence over the books. Its editors had conceived a novel idea based on the fancy American magazines which very occasionally found their way to New Zealand; the entire middle section was a feature on the war. There were blurred photographs of the Anzacs storming the pitiless cliffs at Gallipoli, long articles extolling the bravery of the Antipodean soldier, features on all the Australian and New Zealand winners of the Victoria Cross since its inception, and a magnificent full-page etching of an Australian light horse cavalry-man mounted on his charger, saber at the ready and long silky feathers pluming from under the turned-up side of his slouch hat.

At first opportunity Frank seized the paper and read the feature hungrily, drinking in its jingoistic prose, his eyes glowing eerily.

“Daddy, I want to go!” he said as he laid the paper down reverently on the table.

Fee’s head jerked around as she slopped stew all over the top of the stove, and Paddy stiffened in his Windsor chair, his book forgotten.

“You’re too young, Frank,” he said.

“No, I’m not! I’m seventeen, Daddy, I’m a man! Why should the Huns and Turks slaughter our men like pigs while I’m sitting here safe and sound? It’s more than time a Cleary did his bit.”

“You’re under age, Frank, they won’t take you.”

“They will if you don’t object,” Frank countered quickly, his dark eyes fixed on Paddy’s face.

“But I do object. You’re the only one working at the moment and we need the money you bring in, you know that.”

“But I’ll be paid in the army!”

Paddy laughed. “The ‘soldier’s shilling’ eh? Being a blacksmith in Wahine pays a lot better than being a soldier in Europe.”

“But I’ll be over there, maybe I’ll get the chance to be something better than a blacksmith! It’s my only way out, Daddy.”

“Nonsense! Good God, boy, you don’t know what you’re saying. War is terrible. I come from a country that’s been at war for a thousand years, so I know what I’m saying. Haven’t you heard the Boer War chaps talking? You go into Wahine often enough, so next time listen. And anyway, it strikes me that the blasted English use Anzacs as fodder for the enemy guns, putting them into places where they don’t want to waste their own precious troops. Look at the way that saber-rattling Churchill sent our men into something as useless as Gallipoli! Ten thousand killed out of fifty thousand! Twice as bad as decimation.

“Why should you go fighting old Mother England’s wars for her? What has she ever done for you, except bleed her colonies white? If you went to England they’d look down their noses at you for being a colonial. En Zed isn’t in any danger, nor is Australia. It might do old Mother England the world of good to be defeated; it’s more than time someone paid her for what she’s done to Ireland. I certainly wouldn’t weep any tears if the Kaiser ended up marching down the Strand.”

“But Daddy, I want to enlist!”

“You can want all you like, Frank, but you aren’t going, so you may as well forget the whole idea. You’re not big enough to be a soldier.”

Frank’s face flushed, his lips came together; his lack of stature was a very sore point with him. At school he had always been the smallest boy in his class, and fought twice as many battles as anyone else because of it. Of late a terrible doubt had begun to invade his being, for at seventeen he was exactly the same five feet three he had been at fourteen; perhaps he had stopped growing. Only he knew the agonies to which he subjected his body and his spirit, the stretching, the exercises, the fruitless hoping.

Smithying had given him a strength out of all proportion to his height, however; had Paddy consciously chosen a profession for someone of Frank’s temperament, he could not have chosen better. A small structure of pure power, at seventeen he had never been defeated in a fight and was already famous throughout the Taranaki peninsula. All his anger, frustration and inferiority came into a fight with him, and they were more than the biggest, strongest local could contend with, allied as they were to a body in superb physical condition, an excellent brain, viciousness and indomitable will.

The bigger and tougher they were, the more Frank wanted to see them humbled in the dust. His peers trod a wide detour around him, for his aggressiveness was well known. Of late he had branched out of the ranks of youths in his search for challenges, and the local men still talked about the day he had beaten Jim Collins to a pulp, though Jim Collins was twenty-two years old, stood six feet four in his socks and could lift horses. With his left arm broken and his ribs cracked, Frank had fought on until Jim Collins was a slobbering mass of bloodied flesh at his feet, and he had to be forcibly restrained from kicking the senseless face in. As soon as the arm healed and the ribs came out of strapping, Frank went into town and lifted a horse, just to show that Jim wasn’t the only one who could, and that it didn’t depend on a man’s size.

As the sire of this phenomenon, Paddy knew Frank’s reputation very well and understood Frank’s battle to gain respect, though it did not prevent his becoming angry when fighting interfered with the work in the forge. Being a small man himself, Paddy had had his share of fights to prove his courage, but in his part of Ireland he was not diminutive and by the time he arrived in New Zealand, where men were taller, he was a man grown. Thus his size was never the obsession with him it was with Frank.

Now he watched the boy carefully, trying to understand him and failing; this one had always been the farthest from his heart, no matter how he struggled against discriminating among his children. He knew it grieved Fee, that she worried over the unspoken antagonism between them, but even his love for Fee could not overcome his exasperation with Frank.

Frank’s short, finely made hands were spread across the open paper defensively, his eyes riveted on Paddy’s face in a curious mixture of pleading and a pride that was too stiff-necked to plead. How alien the face was! No Cleary or Armstrong in it, except perhaps a little look of Fee around the eyes, if Fee’s eyes had been dark and could have snapped and flashed the way Frank’s did on slightest provocation. One thing the lad did not lack, and that was courage.