22 / COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH
2 When the Clearys went to church on Sundays, Meggie had to stay home with one of the older boys, longing for the day when she, too, would be old enough to go. Padraic Cleary held that small children had no place in any house save their own, and his rule held even for a house of worship. When Meggie commenced school and could be trusted to sit still, she could come to church. Not be- fore. So every Sunday morning she stood by the gorse bush at the front gate, desolate, while the family piled into the old shandrydan and the brother delegated to mind her tried to pretend it was a great treat escaping Mass. The only Cleary who relished separation from the rest was Frank. Paddy's religion was an intrinsic part of his life. When he had married Fee it had been with grudging Catholic approval, for Fee was a member of the Church of England; though she abandoned her faith for Paddy, she refused to adopt his in its stead. Difficult to say why, except that the Armstrongs were old pioneering stock of impeccable Church of England extraction, where Paddy was a penniless immigrant from the wrong side of the Pale. There had been Armstrongs in New Zealand long before the first "official" settlers arrived, and that was a passport to colonial aristocracy. From the 23
Armstrong point of view, Fee could only be said to have contracted a shocking mésalliance. Roderick Armstrong had founded the New Zealand clan, in a very curious way. It had begun with an event which was to have many unforeseen repercussions on eighteenth-century England: the American War of Independence. Until 1776 over a thousand British petty felons were shipped each year to Virginia and the Carolinas, sold into an indentured servitude no better than slavery. British justice of the time was grim and unflinching; murder, arson, the mysterious crime of "impersonating Egyptians" and larceny to the tune of more than a shilling were punished on the gallows. Petty crime meant trans- portation to the Americas for the term of the felon's natural life. But when in 1776 the Americas were closed, England found herself with a rapidly increasing convict population and nowhere to put it. The prisons filled to overflowing, and the surplus was jammed into rotting hulks moored in the river estuaries. Something had to be done, so something was. With a great deal of reluctance because it meant the expenditure of a few thousand pounds, Captain Arthur Phillip was ordered to set sail for the Great South Land. The year was 1787. His fleet of eleven ships held over one thousand convicts, plus sailors, naval officers and a contingent of marines. No glorious odyssey in search of freedom, this. At the end of January 1788, eight months after setting sail from England, the fleet arrived in Botany Bay. His Mad Majesty George the Third had found a new dumping ground for his convicts, the colony of New South Wales. In 1801, when he was just twenty years of age, Roderick Arm- strong was sentenced to transportation for the term of his natural life. Later generations of Armstrongs insisted he came of Somerset gentlefolk who had lost their fortune following the American Re- volution, and that his crime was nonexistent, but none of them had ever tried very hard to trace their illustrious