Second tranche of teaching notes on Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These in the light of the Comparative section of the Leaving Certificate, covering Section 3, from pages 15 to 35 in the Faber paperback edition.

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Teaching Notes 2

SECTION 3: PAGES 15 TO 35

15: Christmas was coming: echoes in this book of A Christmas Carol (see 20).The nuns are ‘talking to some of the more well-off parents.’ 16. The modest lights display is an excitement for the community, but Loretta is scared by the ‘big, fat Santa’ (17), and has to be comforted by her father: again, the sense of fragility that underlines everything, as ‘it cut him …he could not help but wonder if she’d be brave enough or able for what the world had in store.’ (his anxiety earlier about his girls and the ways men look at them on 11). On 15, the Virgin Mary was ‘met with general approval, kneeling passively’ - an image of what is expected of women.
19: preparations for the Christmas cake, and ‘always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things?’ His questioning of the ordinary complacencies of family life, his constantly restless mind and sense of insecurity (from his childhood).
20: Showing how little ‘his mind was not so much upon the here and now’, Furlong ‘reluctantly [] found himself remembering back to when he was a boy.’ That reluctance is to be taken away from the pleasures of the present, but the construction ‘he found himself’ shows how deeper forces are at work. He thinks of Christmas presents as a boy: asking for his daddy or else the jigsaw of a farm in 500 pieces but gets neither. Presents included A Christmas Carol. See 97: he asks Mrs Stafford for a 500-piece jigsaw of a farm, but she does not have any: ‘there was little demand for the more difficult ones anymore.’ The things other children said about him in school and ‘the name he was called’. He plunges his hands into brutally cold water ‘to divert his pain, until he could no longer feel it.’ 20-21.
21: ‘where was his father now?’ The missing piece of the jigsaw. But Mrs Wilson’s stroke means he will not find out from her.
22: he tells Sheila that he did get a jigsaw from Santy, concealing the absences of his childhood from his own children, protecting them.
22: Furlong is almost afraid of women and their ‘canny intuitions’- his wife (he ‘had almost feared Eileen and had envied her mettle, her red-hot instincts’), his daughters. At the bottom of 23, Eileen is folding the laundry, and she does the shirts and blouses first, leaving the more awkward pillowcases to the end: ‘Always, she tackled the hardest things first’, whereas Furlong is naturally ‘reluctant’, but at the end of the book he will have to make a decision about tackling a very hard thing.
24: the girls are allowed to stay up late, even though the next morning is a school day: his sense of the fragility of such happy moments, and his fear that ‘there might never again be another night like this’. And on 25: ‘Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around.’ He has to remind himself that moments can be sweet in the present, and not to think of ‘the trouble ahead, which might never come’: but as readers we know it will (or there will be no story).
25: he sees Joan singing with the choir and thinks ‘how she looked like she belonged there, with all the others’, an extraordinary thought (of course she does) that comes from his own sense of not belonging as a child.
26: Furlong fills the two hot water bottles: his memory of the one Ned had given him at Christmas, warmth and comfort from this significant figure, a provider of warmth as Furlong now is for this community.
27: Mrs Wilson’s praise makes him feel ‘a foot taller, believing, in his heart, that he mattered as much as any other child’, suggesting that normally he does not ‘believe’ this. Society does not regard him as equal to other children.
28: Furlong and Eileen read the children’s Santa letters to see what they can afford. They ‘stretch it out’ as much as they can risk.
30: ‘You know we’ll blink a few times and they’ll be married and gone.’ Time moving, and the fragility of these moments as a family.
31: Eileen’s perceptiveness (‘her instincts’) in seeing that something is on her husband’s mind - ‘You were miles away this night’. Her calmness and strength compared to his anxieties - exchange on 32. She has been looking after the finances, and saving for the windows (see page 90, and the problem with the lorry).
32-3: Furlong’s anxious reflectiveness: paragraph beginning ‘What was it all for?’ Top 33: Coming up to 40, ‘Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls’. CK building to the decision to be taken late in the book. Furlong’s concern about purpose in his life, about things being the same (as in the mushroom factory job).
33: last paragraph - the ‘foolish’ need to go over things with Eileen (born on April 1st & the last sentence of the book).
33-34: the talk of the community, and the sense of people being at the edge economically. At Wilson’s, the livestock has gone, with ‘a few dogs around the place’ (see 12-13 and the cows who are unmilked).
34: the barber’s son has been given a year to live after a cancer diagnosis, another example of how close disaster is in our fragile lives. At the end of that paragraph, another brief reference to Ned (CK dropping small scarcely-noticeable seeds through the narrative).
34: Furlong’s self-doubt, imagining he is ‘poor company’ for his wife. He wonders if she ever imagined ‘how her life would be if she had married another?’ See his own imagining of an alternative life with the women near the yard on 55.