Fairy stories
It would have been Peggy’s birthday tomorrow – 88 if she had been with us.
Flicking through an anthology of Irish writing at the weekend, I spotted lines that were familiar, a William Allingham poem, learned in her school days in the 1920s, that Peggy would have recited. I had never listened closely to the words and only when reading it on Saturday, did it appear as something more sinister than the classroom rhyme I took it to be.
If children at rural primary schools were taught poems telling them …