Chappy News

Beautiful prose. A beautiful ideal.

'When you are born into a great tide of love, you know it. Though you are only minutes old you know. And when you are days and weeks old and can only receive you know that what you are receiving is love. Aeney and me, we knew. We knew when we were being pushed in the big-wheeled pram down the Faha road, when Mam and Dad's faces, sun and moon, came and went over us, when we lay on the blanket in the kitchen and found a huge finger fitted into our tiny hands, and how by just holding tight you made a smile, we knew when we were in handknit jumpers laying on a blanket in the bog while Mam and Dad footed the turf, picked bog-cotton ticklers for our noses, when the cuckoo sang and Mama sang back to it, when she played butterflies under our chins, we knew and learned the strange and beautiful truth that being adored makes you adorable.'

From the novel, set in Ireland, History of the Rain by Nial Williams