The Little Irish Farm
Prologue
PROLOGUE
2013
To: Niall Fitzpatrick
From: Jessica Baré
Subject: First Draft Amy’s Story
This story starts with a children’s book published in 1969, a fairy tale bought by a mother in Northern Ireland on behalf of her youngest child to give to his sister for Christmas 1973. It’s no fairy story, though; nor is it just the sad relaying of brutal facts and a life ended in Lisburn in 1983. It might have finished there, though, if not for her family and had that little book not found its way to me. I don’t mean to sound proprietary because neither the book nor the story I am going to tell you belongs to me. This is Amy’s story, and in order to tell it to you, I have to begin where it all began.
My full name is Jessica Jane Baré – or Second-Hand Jane as my friends have started to call me. Why? Well, it’s because I love the pre-loved – just like that old cliché, someone else’s junk is my treasure. My real passion, though, is for old children’s books – it’s something about the smell of them, I think. It conjures up the innocence of a bygone era of children called Dick and Ann and tea at five o’clock, trapped forever within their much-thumbed pages. I covet the Ladybird Series 606D books in particular – the classic fairy tales every child grows up with: Rapunzel, Cinderella, The Elves and the Shoemaker and most pertinent of all, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
It wasn’t the bold black typeface, however, that had me poring over the books as a child and hoarding them as an adult but Eric Winters’ fabulously detailed illustrations. They brought those stories to life and were the source of a childhood fascination with witches, fairies, princes and princesses. The delicate colours of the foxgloves planted by the thatched cottage’s flagstone path, the grand white Bavarian-styled castles in which as a little girl I had no doubt I would one day grow up to live in, were a world away from the suburban pocket of New Zealand I inhabited. When a young imagination is fuelled, though, the impossible becomes possible. Good fought evil within those pages and always won. If only we could hold on to that certainty forever.
I often wonder, when I open my books to find another child’s mark inside, whether that faceless child felt the magic, too. Who were they, these little people who had scribbled their names inside books long since forgotten by adulthood?
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs arrived with neither pomp nor ceremony but rather by mail thanks to an online auction I was determined to win. Inside the tatty cover, in precise, big print was the dedication:
To Amy with love from Owen,
Christmas 1973
Beneath this, scrawled in orange pencil pressed deep into the cardboard, she had forever made her mark:
Amy Aherne
Glenariff Farm
Ballymcguinness
6 years old
As I looked at the scribbled inscription, I began to wonder. Who was she, this six-year-old girl from the seventies? Was she a dreamer like me, who was now learning the hard way that princes don’t just pop up every day and that there are an awful lot of frogs out there? Or perhaps she was a realist who didn’t believe in a man supplying her with a ready-made happy ever after? Might we have been friends if we had met? Where was she now? What had she grown up to do with her life?
I felt a compulsion that was almost a physical tug. It was one that I have never felt before – this overwhelming need to know. I would find her and tell the story that lay within the name inscribed in the storybook.
What I found, though, was not at all what I expected.