Country Girl: A Memoir (5 page)

It was borne in on me at that very young age that I came from fierce people and that the wounds of history were as raw and vivid as the pictures on the packs of cards that had been flung down. The North was an area on a map, and yet the way they harangued, losing their reason and hurling accusations at each other, I felt it would one day darken our lives.

The classroom had to be swept each morning, the wooden floor sprinkled with water to keep down the dust that rose in little swirls. From the holes in the floor one could hear mice trotting underneath, and sometimes a snout or a brown tail would peep through and girls went berserk, pulling their legs up under their clothes and huddling. The smell of dust was always there, but in summer it would be mixed with the smell of flowers that were in jam jars along the windowsill. Girls that brought flowers were “pets” of the teacher, and the flower smell that lasted longest was that of stocks, which had a perfume even when withered.

On my very first day at school, the teacher picked me up in her arms; the brooch she was wearing was identical to one my mother had, a nest of flowers in a leaf-shaped silver recess. Hers had strawberries and my mother’s were violets. She asked me in Irish if I was happy to be at school, and if I would shine and win a scholarship, and proudly she spoke the answer for me in Irish. There was a box for black babies in Africa, and as a surprise she allowed me to put a penny in the slot; the china skull of the black baby, with its braided hair, nodded a thank you. A letter from a leper colony in Uganda, yellow from turf smoke, in which the school had been thanked for monies sent was nailed to the wall. Next to it, on parchment more yellowed, were the reproachful words of the Englishman Sir John Davies, the King’s Deputy, written in the 1600s:

For if themselves [the mere Irish] were suffered to possess the whole country as their septs have done for so many hundreds of years past, they
would never, to the end of the world, build houses, make townships or villages or manure or improve the land as it ought to be. Therefore it stands neither with Christian belief nor conscience to suffer so good and fruitful a country to lie waste like a wilderness, when His Majesty may lawfully dispose of it to such persons as will make a civil plantation thereupon.

Irish history was the subject she most liked to teach. She strode through the classroom, in and out between the desks, where we sat in pairs, the small white pots of watered ink in an enamel inkwell, and a dent in the wooden slope to hold pen and pencil. With hyperbole she spanned centuries, invoking sieges and battles—Slievemurry, Gorey, and Athenry—bemoaning the seven-hundred-year conquest, the cruelty of the Invader, the Saxon sheriff. She reeled off the names of heroes whose heads were impaled on the gates of Dublin Castle, and yet, and yet, Malachi retained his collar of gold. Hitting with her ruler the cloth map on the wall, she fixed on the name of Kinsale, the six-year siege which marked the end of the cream of Irish soldiery, the great earls, O’Neill, O’Donnell, having to flee their own land, where they soon died of heartbreak, their auxiliaries going to fight as mercenaries in foreign brigades. She would then recite, her eyes filling with tears:

And all Valladolid knew

And out to Simancas all knew

Where they buried Red Hugh.

She spanned centuries, jumping back to the age of mythic men whose lives constituted battle and banquet, whose women were all beautiful, with pale, sea-green eyes, cheeks with the hue of the foxglove, and perched on their shoulders ravens with the gift of prophecy. Cú Chulainn, who took the name of his hound, was the hero she most liked to dwell on, he who had
vanquished all the rival tribes and scions of Ireland until the fatal day when the gods deserted him and, as the bird Morrigan had foretold, his bowels spilled out onto the cushions of his chariot. Alone and bleeding, he stooped and drank from a stream, then staggered to a lake into which his blood flowed, and he watched as an otter drank. Rather than die defeated, he strapped himself by his torn tunic to a pillar stone, because he knew from the Olla and the bards that “a great name outlasts a man.”

It was a mere trot from Cú Chulainn to Pope Pius XI, who before his death had told Cardinal MacRory, Primate of all Ireland, that the Irish people were God’s pure air. “They were everywhere and like the air, giving life and vigor to the Catholic faith.” His death was so full of pageantry; we heard, in her lachrymose tones, how doctors, monsignors, and his private sacristan stood aghast at his passing, as the scarlet veil was raised from his face and Cardinal Pacelli, his chamberlain, took a small silver hammer and struck him three times on his forehead, calling him by his Christian name, “Achille, Achille, Achille.” When he did not answer, they sank to their knees in lamentation and recited
De Profundis;
then the sad news was immediately dispatched to Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, who in turn informed Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy.

Often, after these great sallies, she would sit, quiet and lank, staring into space, and thinking. Thinking what? Of her own fate, or Ireland’s fate? She lived alone in a rookery of a house about half a mile from the school. And one Saturday, before an exam, we had an extra class there. From upstairs she brought down a cake box, in which there were the remains of a rich fruitcake and a lot of broken bits of icing. It reminded me of cakes that brides kept after their wedding, in wait for the christening of their first child, but that could not be true of her, as she was a spinster.

When the school bell rang for lunch, we would go out into the yard to eat our lunches, and one of the girls who was her “pet” would stay behind to make her a jam omelette. I wanted to be one of her pets; I strove in every way, especially with my compositions, except that, pointedly, she slighted me.

The day the inspector came, I thought that I had excelled myself. He wore a tweed jacket with crinkled leather buttons the color of conkers and matching tweed plus-fours. He looked at her syllabus and her logbook, then glancing around, he asked if one of the pupils might like to recite a poem or some catechism. Since I devoured things by heart, she told me to stand up and repeat the miracle of the loaves and fishes from Saint Luke’s Gospel. Not content with speaking it, I added a little flourish of my own, saying that after everyone had been fed, Jesus ordered his Disciples to gather up the remaining loaves and fishes that lay strewn on the shores of Galilee. The inspector asked me if I took a great interest in Jesus, to which I replied that I was disappointed that he had been so curt with his mother at the Feast of Cana, when, worried about the scarcity of wine, he said, “It is not my business or thine.” There were titters in the classroom, and he strolled around smiling, looked over some girls’ shoulders at their copybooks, took a pencil that was in the rim of his tiny diary, made a note, then left us, and, as we later learned, had a long lunch in the pub that boasted the name of a hotel. Far from bestowing praise because of the glowing report he sent back, the teacher had a “set” on me and was determined to punish me. She requested that I bring my china doll Rosaleen for the Nativity play at Christmas, in which I was not given a part. It was galling to see Rosaleen, in her ivory satin dress that was strewn with violets, being passed clumsily from hand to hand, and worse when one of the Three Wise Men almost dropped her. After the performance, when I went to reclaim her, my teacher said she could not be given back, as a
photographer was expected to come and take a photograph of the crib, along with Mary, Joseph, and animals that had been fashioned out of straw. In the meantime, the doll was kept in her house, and on the way home from school I could see her through the sitting-room window, propped on a sideboard, her stumpy legs splayed out and her two china hands, as I believed, imploring me to kidnap her. My heart was bursting with anger. Eventually, my mother wrote, saying how attached I was to the doll, but the letter was not referred to and not acknowledged.

Another day she sent me to the town for tuppence-worth of chops. I noticed that father and son smiled when they heard the humble request. I stood between the big haunches of meat that hung from the ceiling, their skins white and larded, with amber flypapers flapping in and out between them. From a gauze-fronted safe the son pulled out some scraps of meat that might have been for dogs and wrapped them in a double fold of white paper, then cleaned his hands in his half-apron, which was of black oilcloth.

Hilarity reigned in the classroom. It was tuppence-worth of chalk I had been sent for. I was an amadán. She made me stand in front of the fireguard, holding the open sheets of blood-spattered paper for everyone to behold, and afterward, when I sat down, girls sympathized with me, except for the few who threw bits of crumbled rubber and toffee papers in my direction.

My brother and sisters, being older, had gone away to boarding school, so walking home alone was full of hazards. There might be tinkers, or some wild man, hiding behind a wall who with a twirl of the finger would spit the words “I want to do pooley in you.” Once I arrived home to find that my mother was not there; I could tell by seeing the second gate swinging open, hens on the flag, starving and pecking at bits of lime, our back door not locked—all proof that she had fled to her mother’s after a frightful row. It meant my having to stay with the
Mac family in the gate lodge, an older couple who smelt of wintergreen oil, the husband scratching his head and asking his wife how long they would have the nuisance of me. Her hair was snow white and as wavy as the waves of a sea, and seeing that I was sniffling and sad, she would let me sit up that bit late to say the rosary with them. I slept in the attic room, reached by a ladder, and through the skylight window I looked for sky, for stars, and begged for my mother to come home, which she always did, vowing that we would be a happy family from then onward, as my father had taken the pledge. As a celebration, she would make an orange cake, and when it was almost baked, she would take it out of the oven and allow me to plunge a knitting needle into it, which I could then lick—the taste of the warm, orangy dough so delicious.

Our hens began to lay well, as we knew from the jubilant yodel they let out after they had laid, and then it was up to the yard to gather the eggs from under them, in their dank, clammy nests, their eyes with a shine of beads. She cleaned the eggs with a damp cloth and a bit of bread soda, and brought them in her basket to a new shopkeeper in the town. She had credit there, her name being the very first to be entered in his big, important ledger, which looked like a dictionary. I was allowed to get a two-pound pot of blackcurrant jam. It was where the footpath ran out, jumping down onto the road itself, that I dropped it. There it was, a spew, purple and black, pieces of glass everywhere, the tiny blackcurrants like goat droppings. A woman from the nearby garage came out, to sympathize, and then brought a worn goose wing and a bit of cardboard to sweep it up.

It so happened that I had become smitten with film stars, whose photographs came in cigarette packets which I collected from all the men who smoked. Women did not smoke. The photographs were so bewitching that I would make up little
dramas about them, and my two chosen stars were Clark Gable and Dorothy Lamour. I twined them in a romantic situation, swearing love, et cetera, when foolishly Dorothy mentioned her suspicions regarding Greer Garson, who lived nearby, also in a shaded mansion. Clark was fuming. Did she not trust him? So things got heated and Clark left in a huff, announcing that he was going to the ocean. Greer then seized her moment to walk across the lawn, seemingly to console her friend, but in truth to persecute her. This playlet got to be known, and one day when I was coming from school a man called Tim called me into his shop and then into a small office where a second man sat on a high stool. A bottle of whiskey lay on the slant of the brown wooden desk, and the two men were skittish. They asked me to put my play on, which I did, interposing the dialogue with the pictures on the cigarette cards, the performance lasting about five minutes. As a reward, I was given a threepenny bit. It felt warm in the palm of my hand, and it had the image of a hound on it. I handed it back to Tim, so he could take it off our bill, and for a minute the two men looked away, not knowing what to make of it, and I tied the threepenny bit into my handkerchief so as not to lose it.

Years later, when I had, as they put it, “gone up in the world,” my mother asked me to go and see my old schoolteacher, who had been ailing for some time. Her room had that mustiness that all sickrooms have, as the window was kept shut, along with the smell of medicines and orangeade. Her skin was very yellow, as if she had jaundice, her body skeletonlike, except for the little bowl of her belly under the sheet, and the only trace of her highly strung temperament was the way she fidgeted at the fringing of the cotton quilt on her bed. She barely spoke for some time, then, with her voice whistling through her windpipe
and gripping my hand, she asked was she not the first to detect the writing spark in me, was it not she who had first ignited the fire? Then a quick dart of light passed over her eyes, as though she were hearing the sound of Cú Chulainn and his men charging up the quiet street.