Up until Christmas week of 1985, the Furlongs (Bill, his wife Eileen, their five daughters) lead a regular working class life, or at least as regular as can be in a time of changing, of rising unemployment, of economic struggles. He works his way up at a coal yard, eventually becoming a merchant. He’s raised there, never knowing who his father is, and at age 12, he’s orphaned. More so, in fact, it’s a tale, an epic unlike any other.Īn honest man, Bill Furlong is bleakly ordinary, save for his childhood: in a Catholic Irish town, Mrs Wilson - a widowed Protestant - opens her home to a 16 year old domestic, pregnant to Bill. Meanwhile, the Polish and Russian boatmen were a novelty going about town in their fur caps and long, buttoned coats, with hardly a word of English.Infinitely heavier than a book of its brevity, “Small Things Like These” is more of a long story than a novel. Two full days it took for the men to collect, carry, sort and weigh it all out, back at the yard.

The coal was the dirtiest work and had, in winter, to be collected monthly, off the quays. He also sold bales of briquettes, kindling and bottled gas. These were ordered by the hundredweight, the half hundredweight or the full tonne or lorry load. ‘We could soon be on the rims.’Īnd it was true: hardly had one customer left the yard before another arrived in, fresh on their heels, or the phone rang – with almost everyone saying they wanted delivery now or soon, that next week wouldn’t do.įurlong sold coal, turf, anthracite, slack and logs. ‘She’s on the road every hour of the day,’ he told his men. And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.ĭown in the yard, Bill Furlong, the coal and timber merchant, rubbed his hands, saying if things carried on as they were, they would soon need a new set of tyres for the lorry.

The people, for the most part, unhappily endured the weather: shop-keepers and tradesmen, men and women in the post office and the dole queue, the mart, the coffee shop and supermarket, the bingo hall, the pubs and the chipper all commented, in their own ways, on the cold and what rain had fallen, asking what was in it – and could there be something in it – for who could believe that there, again, was another raw-cold day? Children pulled their hoods up before facing out to school, while their mothers, so used now to ducking their heads and running to the clothesline, or hardly daring to hang anything out at all, had little faith in getting so much as a shirt dry before evening. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare.

Keegan small things like these