Kehoe, warns him that the Church runs everything, including the school his daughters attend. News of his encounter with the Mother Superior soon spreads through the town’s rumor mill, and a local café owner, Mrs. Furlong leaves the convent with the money, feeling hypocritical. The nun intimidates Furlong by making it clear that she knows about his family and offering him a Christmas bonus as a form of hush money.

Furlong is then apprehended by the Mother Superior, who makes a show of fussing over Sarah and pretending that she has a mental illness, while insisting that Furlong take tea with her. She asks him to see if the nuns will find her baby. On a second visit to the convent, Furlong discovers a girl named Sarah Redmond locked in the coal shed. Wilson had not intervened, Eileen insists that it is nothing to do with them and they must not meddle in the nuns’ business. When he reports this to Eileen, stating that his own mother might have ended up there if Mrs. However, when Furlong arrives, he sees that the girls, some of whom are young mothers, are living in a state of punishment and squalor. The Good Shepherd nuns who own the convent also run a so-called “training school for girls” (26), as well as a laundry service that all the town’s wealthy residents patronize. One day, Furlong is making a fuel delivery to the convent that is separated from his daughters’ school by only a wall. Furlong feels that he was granted a lucky break, although not knowing his real father’s identity plagues him. Wilson-Furlong was able to go to technical school, run his own business, and support a family. Thus, with the encouragement of his makeshift family unit-his mother Mrs. Wilson, his mother’s Protestant employer, who allowed his mother, Sarah, to continue working there and encouraged Furlong in his education, even giving him a copy of The Christmas Carol. However, he was given good opportunities, thanks to the generosity of Mrs. This is, in part, because he feels like an outsider, as he was born to an unmarried domestic servant in conservative, small-town Ireland, where the Catholic Church runs all public institutions.

He gives money to the needy and employs the new Russian and Eastern European immigrants whom others find suspicious. Margaret’s, the only good school for girls in town, which is run by an order of nuns.įurlong is of a more compassionate, egalitarian bent than most New Ross residents, who are content to keep their heads down and “stay on the right side of people” (13) in positions of power, such as the wealthy and the Church. Although the Furlongs often struggle to make ends meet, he is hopeful about his intelligent daughters’ future and sends them to St.

The protagonist, Bill Furlong, is a coal seller who is married to Eileen, and they have five daughters. It is December 1985 in the town of New Ross, County Wexford. Content Warning: The source text contains depictions of physical and emotional abuse.

Keegan small things like these