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been looking for him.

Chapter Ten
    They were on the cart for less than an hour, but it felt like the longest part of the journey to Aileen because she was not with Jimmy.
    How was it possible that she had become used to this stranger after knowing him for less than a day?
    While she had been falling in and out of sleep on the boat, she had felt his presence all around her as if he had somehow imbued the very hay she was sleeping on, the very coat that lay over her, with some of his spirit. He was a strange boy surely – strange-looking, strange-talking – and yet she felt safer under his guardianship than she had with anyone, even her brothers. She should not, perhaps, have called him ‘harmless’ in the way she did, but she had meant it at face value. She did not feel she could come to any harm when Jimmy was around her. His company itself was armour protecting her from the rigours of the big wide world she felt she had so suddenly entered.
    On the cart, she sat between her brothers. Jimmy was in the cart in front of theirs. The night was dark and the air cold and damp, and Aileen was aware of being far from home. Excited but nervous too – of what lay ahead. She curled her hands around her eldest brother Paddy Junior’s arms and leaned against his chest, but didn’t get the comfort she was seeking. His chestwas still and impervious; his hands did not grip hers as they always had done when he had comforted her as a small girl during thunderstorms, or carried her on his shoulders back from the beach, or defended her if she got into a fight with the younger Martin. She looked across at her father and tried to catch his eye, but couldn’t. He was busy talking with Mick Kelly, quiet and conspiratorial men’s talk – all business. He had no time for her. Perhaps she was not his little girl anymore, but a woman. Could that be why Paddy Junior would not hold her hand? Were they to abandon her now to womanhood? To the savage intentions of Jimmy Walsh? The very idea that he might not be as ‘harmless’ after all terrified and thrilled her in equal measure.
    When they did, finally, stop, Aileen stayed where she was while the others alighted, momentarily disbelieving that they had really reached their destination.
    It was dark and they were in the courtyard of what seemed to be a large farm – Aileen made out a few horse stables and the shadows of some farm machinery. To one side were two long, low buildings running at right angles to each other with oil lamps clearly burning at their windows.
    Aileen felt a twinge of excitement as she imagined what cosy set-up must be inside; would there be carpets and ‘teak sideboards’ like the English homes in her mother’s housekeeping book? Her brothers started to gather their bags from the cart, and as she went to climb down, Jimmy was there holding out his hand to help her, as she had known he would be. He squeezed her hand as he held it briefly, letting go when he saw Martin’s murderous glare.
    The two of them walked side by side, then across to the accommodation. Inside, the building was not the furnished home Aileen had imagined. While from the outside the building looked rather large and grand, inside it was basically a shed with nofurniture to speak of. There were large shallow crates that were potato-seed boxes and that she later learned had to be laid in lines along the wall to be made up into beds. The other women were already inside, hurriedly stuffing straw into sacking to make mattresses without even taking off their coats – busying themselves to get the place liveable before the oil in the lamps ran out.
    Aileen’s disappointment did not last for long, however.
    ‘Don’t be standing there catching flies in your mouth,’ an older woman shouted across. Aileen recognized her from the ship as the centre point of the women’s tableau she was excluded from. She was a good deal older than her own mother and squatting next to an old stove. ‘There’s work to be