"Well, Meggie girl, you've had quite a day, haven't you?" Paddy went over and lifted her out of the hay, gasping as he caught a whiff of her. Then he shrugged his shoulders and held her against him hard.

"I got caned, Daddy," she confessed.

"Well, knowing Sister Agatha, it won't be the last time," he laughed, perching her on his shoulder. "We'd better see if Mum's got any hot water in the copper to give you a bath. You smell worse than Jarman's dairy."

Frank went to the doorway and watched the two fiery heads bobbing up the path, then turned to find the bay mare's gentle eyes fixed on him.

"Come on, you big old bitch. I'll ride you home," he told it, scooping up a halter.



Meggie's vomiting turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Sister Agatha still caned her regularly, but always from far enough away to escape the consequences, which lessened the strength of her arm and quite spoiled her aim.

The dark child who sat next to her was the youngest daughter of the Italian man who owned and operated Wahine's bright blue café. Her name was Teresa Annunzio, and she was just dull enough to escape Sister Agatha's attention without being so dull that it turned her into Sister Agatha's butt. When her teeth grew in she was quite strikingly beautiful, and Meggie adored her. During lesson breaks in the playground they walked with arms looped around each other's waists, which was the sign that you were "best friends" and not available for courting by anyone else. And they talked, talked, talked.

One lunchtime Teresa took her into the café to meet her mother and father and grown-up brothers and sisters. They were as charmed with her golden fire as Meggie was with their darkness, likening her to an angel when she turned her wide, beautifully flecked grey eyes upon them. From her mother she had inherited an indefinable air of breeding which everyone felt immediately; so did the Annunzio family. As eager as Teresa to woo her, they gave her big fat potato chips fried in sizzling cauldrons of lamb dripping, and a piece of boned fish which tasted delicious, dipped as it was in floury batter and fried in the smoking well of liquid fat along with the chips, only in a separate wire basket. Meggie had never eaten food so delicious, and wished she could lunch at the café more often. But this had been a treat, requiring special permission from her mother and the nuns.

Her conversation at home was all "Teresa says" and "Do you know what Teresa did?" until Paddy roared that he had heard more than enough about Teresa.

"I don't know that it's such a good idea to be too thick with Dagos," he muttered, sharing the British community's instinctive mistrust of any dark or Mediterranean people. "Dagos are dirty, Meggie girl, they don't wash too often," he explained lamely, wilting under the look of hurt reproach Meggie gave him.

Fiercely jealous, Frank agreed with him. So Meggie spoke less often of her friend when she was at home. But home disapproval couldn't interfere with the relationship, confined as it was by distance to school days and hours; Bob and the boys were only too pleased to see her utterly engrossed in Teresa. It left them to career madly around the playground just as if their sister did not exist.

The unintelligible things Sister Agatha was always writing on the blackboard gradually began to make sense, and Meggie learned that a "+" meant you counted all the numbers up to a total, where a "-" meant you took the numbers on the bottom away from the numbers on the top and wound up with less than you had in the first place. She was a bright child, and would have been an excellent if not brilliant student had she only been able to overcome her fear of Sister Agatha. But the minute those gimlet eyes turned her way and that dry old voice rapped a curt question at her, she stammered and stuttered and could not think. Arithmetic she found easy, but when called upon to demonstrate her skill verbally she could not remember how many two and two made. Reading was the entrance into a world so fascinating she couldn't get enough of it; but when Sister Agatha made her stand to read a passage out loud, she could hardly pronounce "cat," let alone "miaow." It seemed to her that she was forever quivering under Sister Agatha's sarcastic comments or flushing bright red because the rest of the class was laughing at her. For it was always her slate Sister Agatha held up to sneer at, always her laboriously written sheets of paper Sister Agatha used to demonstrate the ugliness of untidy work. Some of the richer children were lucky enough to possess erasers, but Meggie's only eraser was the tip of her finger, which she licked and rubbed over her nervous

mistakes until the writing smudged and the paper came away in miniature sausages. It made holes and was strictly forbidden, but she was desperate enough to do anything to avoid Sister Agatha's strictures.

Until her advent Stuart had been the chief target of Sister Agatha's cane and venom. However, Meggie was a much better target, for Stuart's wistful tranquillity and almost saintlike aloofness were hard nuts to crack, even for Sister Agatha. On the other hand, Meggie trembled and went as red as a beet, for all she tried so manfully to adhere to the Cleary line of behavior as defined by Frank. Stuart pitied Meggie deeply and tried to make it easier for her by deliberately sidetracking the nun's anger onto his own head. She saw through his ploys immediately, angered afresh to see the Cleary clannishness as much in evidence with the girl as it had always been among the boys. Had anyone questioned her as to exactly why she had such a down on the Clearys, she would not have been able to answer. But for an old nun as embittered by the course her life had taken as Sister Agatha, a proud and touchy family like the Clearys was not easy to swallow.

Meggie's worst sin was being left-handed. When she gingerly picked up her slate pencil to embark on her first writing lesson, Sister Agatha descended on her like Caesar on the Gauls.

"Meghann Cleary, put that pencil down!" she thundered.

Thus began a battle royal. Meggie was incurably and hopelessly left-handed. When Sister Agatha forcibly bent the fingers of Meggie's right hand correctly around the pencil and poised it above the slate, Meggie sat there with her head reeling and no idea in the world how to make the afflicted limb do what Sister Agatha insisted it could. She became mentally deaf, dumb and blind; that useless appendage her right hand was no more linked to her thought processes than her toes. She dribbled a line clean off the edge of the slate because she could not make it bend; she dropped her pencil as if paralyzed; nothing Sister Agatha could do would make Meggie's right hand form an A. Then surreptitiously Meggie would transfer her pencil to her left hand, and with her arm curled awkwardly around three sides of the slate she would make a row of beautiful copper-plate A's.

Sister Agatha won the battle. On morning line-up she tied Meggie's left arm against her body with rope, and would not undo it until the dismissal bell rang at three in the afternoon. Even at lunchtime she had to eat, walk around and play games with her left side firmly immobilized. It took three months, but eventually she learned to write correctly according to the tenets of Sister Agatha, though the formation of her letters was never good. To make sure she would never revert to using it, her left arm was kept tied to her body for a further two months; then Sister Agatha made the whole school assemble to say a rosary of thanks to Almighty Gor for His wisdom in making Meggie see the error of her ways. God's children were all right-handed; left-handed children were the spawn of the Devil, especially when redheaded.

In that first year of school Meggie lost her baby plumpness and became very thin, though she grew little in height. She began to bite her nails down to the quick, and had to endure Sister Agatha's making her walk around every desk in the school holding her hands out so all the children could see how ugly bitten nails were. And this when nearly half the children between five and fifteen bit their nails as badly as Meggie did.

Fee got out the bottle of bitter aloes and painted the tips of Meggie's fingers with the horrible stuff. Everyone in the family was enlisted to make sure she got no opportunity to wash the bitter aloes off, and when the other little girls at school noticed the telltale brown stains she was mortified. If she put her fingers in her mouth the taste was indescribable, foul and dark like sheep-dip; in desperation she spat on her handkerchief and rubbed herself raw until she got rid of the worst of it. Paddy took out his switch, a much gentler instrument than Sister Agatha's cane, and sent her skipping round the kitchen. He did not believe in beating his children on the hands, face or buttocks, only on the legs. Legs hurt as much as anywhere, he said, and could not be damaged. However, in spite of bitter aloes, ridicule, Sister Agatha and Paddy's switch, Meggie went on biting her nails.

Her friendship with Teresa Annunzio was the joy of her life, the only thing that made school endurable. She sat through lessons aching for playtime to come so she could sit with her arm around Teresa's waist and Teresa's arm around hers under the big fig tree, talking, talking. There were tales about Teresa's extraordinary alien family, about her numerous dolls, and about her genuine willow pattern tea set.