My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress (18 page)

It's a pretty town, built around a triangular marketplace fringed with lime trees and boasting, like most Irish towns, a church with an impressive spire. In short, one would never suspect that during the late
1800s this sleepy little community, nestling in the shadow of the Sperrin Mountains, could have given birth to a vice that would in time consume the entire country and be roundly denounced from every pulpit up and down the land. Strange though it may seem, it was the Catholic Church which gave rise to the vice in the first place.

In the 1840s Father Theobold Matthew, a fire-and-brimstone cleric and by all accounts a real ray of sunshine, led a total-abstinence crusade throughout England, Scotland and Ireland. It was one of the most successful of its kind and thousands lined up to take the pledge. Among them was an alcoholic physician named Kelly, who had his practice in Draperstown. Uncomfortable with the notion of having to forgo his pleasure, but not wishing to break the pledge, Kelly sought a substitute for the demon drink.

He came up with ether. He had prescribed it by mouth on occasion and knew of its stronger effects. Following a few experiments of his own he shared the knowledge with his friends and a select group of patients who had also taken the pledge. As a result, ether sniffing became rife in Draperstown.

Some years later the government imposed a heavy tax on alcoholic beverages and the police clamped down on home-distilled whiskey. Things looked bleak for the topers of Draperstown – until somebody recalled Kelly's discovery, and decided to exploit it to the hilt. Ether, which was not subject to taxation, was distilled in London and shipped to Draperstown and other places in Ulster by the barrel. The intoxicant proved to be a godsend – especially among the labouring classes – because it was less expensive than whiskey. Moreover, drunkenness could not only be achieved quickly and cheaply several times a day but it was found that ether
produced no hangover whatsoever. Perhaps the greatest advantage of all was that if a man or woman was arrested while drunk and disorderly then they were more than likely to be sober by the time the police station was reached.

An English surgeon visiting Draperstown in 1878 was astonished to discover that the main street smelled like the inside of his surgery, where ether was used as an anaesthetic.

I was not aware however of this humble town's colourful past when I was sentenced to five years in its secondary school. In primary school I'd had my self-esteem beaten out of me. In secondary it was my individuality that would suffer.

St Colm's High boasted more teachers, more pupils and more space than Lisnamuck PS. It was a large, bright building with endless corridors and flights of stairs. In keeping with the Catholic ethos it was named after a saint. St Colm's picture hung in the foyer and we prayed to the good man each morning to help us through the day.

I studied nine subjects. There were the essential English and maths. Next came history and geography, which I had no great interest in, since my primary-school experience had failed to arouse in me any curiosity about the world's past, or what it might be made of. There was the pervasive RE of course, and three other subjects that caused me to have nightmares: cookery, Latin and PE.

I wore a grey and turquoise uniform, was given a numbered peg and locker and had to wear slippers while in the school building, to protect the floors. Thus packaged, I became the poet's ‘cog in a machine, a thing with one face'.

We switched lessons at the sound of a shrill bell and had to walk in file on the left side of corridors and stairs, to
prevent collisions. After a year my inculcation was complete; we moved and talked, shut up and jumped to the peal of shouts or the sting of slaps. School life, to my chagrin, continued to be cruel. There were quite a number of Master Bradley clones – mostly men – who sent waves of fear through me, and a number of lenient, patient women like Miss McKeague, who helped to make life bearable.

The school's then headmaster, Mr Gunn, was a robust gentleman who wore a grey suit and took a keen interest in our personal hygiene. He had need to: we were by and large a dirty, lumpen lot. Each morning after prayers he'd stand on the podium in the assembly hall and obdure us to ‘hop into a rubber basin' when we got home and give ourselves a good rub down with soap and water. This instruction was clearly ignored of course as everyone stood about yawning and wishing it was 3pm so we could be released into the clean outdoors again.

Master Gunn was none the less dauntless in his crusade. Every day he blustered afresh, patrolling the corridors with his head held high, no doubt to escape the pong emanating from cloakbays, toilets and changing-rooms. He had a keen nose, and that keenness was his scourge.

When he retired, a tyrant filled his shoes. Master Maloney was a maths teacher whom I'd had the great misfortune to encounter during my first months in the ‘big school'. He made it obvious from the start that he did not appreciate my lack of understanding in maths. Regularly he would demonstrate his displeasure with a well-aimed blow to my head of the type that made my hair stand on end and sent hair slides and glasses skittering across the floor. I often suffered the indignity of having to get down on all fours to retrieve them.

In fact he possessed all the qualities of Master Bradley: he was cold, harsh and unfeeling. And, like Bradley,
Maloney preferred to express his ire through the tactile immediacy of the stick or his bare hand.

He was a redoubtable presence, precise in manner and speech, who never wasted energy or time on the frivolity of smiles or small talk. His only pleasure was his cigarette. After a terse exposition of the topic on the blackboard, he'd set us a problem to solve, and retire to his desk for a smoke.

The red Silk Cut was lit and enjoyed with the ease of a voluptuary. There was an integrated flow of unhurried actions: his left hand rose and rested by turns as the smoke was imbibed and expelled into the fraught room.

I had the misfortune to be seated in the front row, under Maloney's stinging stare and the smarting clouds of smoke. I'd sit there wondering what on earth I was supposed to do and knowing that if I asked his help it would simply bring down his wrath more quickly on my head. So I'd toil with the pencil, making a dog's dinner of wretched angles or quadratic equations, and quiver silently until the cigarette was spent.

Fortunately I didn't have to suffer his fury for too long. His appointment to principal excused him from his teaching duties. From then on I'd see him at assembly time and at breaktime, padding the corridors with the stealth of a tiger, on the scent of troublemakers. Occasionally he'd arrest some hapless boy, seizing him by the earlobe and frogmarching the victim into his office for a mauling.

When I look back I am amazed at the barbarousness with which male teachers were allowed to hit little girls. That we were more fragile and felt pain more keenly than boys did not seem to matter. All pupils – defenceless children – were at the mercy of the moods and tantrums of certain teachers, who could not bring themselves to think of their charges as individuals. We conformed, or we paid a heavy
price. I remember being slapped brutally and sent outside the door for innocently smiling to myself. On another occasion the same man called me out from the lavatory where I was combing my hair, to belt me several times across the face. This was no more than an exertion of power – and a naked abuse of that power. Is it any wonder that there is such anarchy in schools these days? The pupils of my era are taking their revenge through their own offspring. The dreadful cycle continues.

Maloney punished the females in a different manner from boys. In our case his hand would become a blurring paddle, slapping the cheeks from side to side with unimaginable swiftness, and finishing with that final hair-raising blow to the head. Hair lacquer was the only cosmetic we could get away with using in those days; it was invisible and thus undetectable. Yet no matter how thick you sprayed it on it didn't offer sufficient buffering power against the Maloney swipe. Girls carried big cans of Silvikrin (‘strong hold') in their schoolbags, to minimise the damage.

There was cruelty aplenty in the cookery class too. Our teacher Miss Sharp sizzled and bubbled as much as the contents of her saucepans. She hated everybody, it seemed, and loathed me in particular. I was too dull, too plain, and presumably too witless for her, and so she made my life as miserable as she could. What she did to fruit and veg she did to me: chopping, crushing, grating and grinding. After each lesson my confidence lay in the bin with the scraps and the skins and the debris.

Once inside her room there was no escape. She followed my every move and blunder, lashing out at the spilt sugar, the burnt buns, the broken pastry, the stewing pan of custard. I committed every culinary sin imaginable, smashing and burning my way through that horrid lesson.

She had a handful of favourites in the class and the rest of us were on a sliding scale of preference, varying with her mood. Susan was overweight and shy. Mary-Jane was unkempt. Fiona had a stammer. All these beautiful, blameless girls, through no fault of their own, were targets. With hindsight I realise that Miss Sharp, like Master Bradley, probably hated herself and hated her job, and we pupils bore the brunt of this frustration. Nothing we did was right and, on the rare occasions when we did succeed, we never got the praise we so desperately craved.

PE was tolerable because the teacher was understanding and did not feel the need to make me or anyone else an object of ridicule. But I hated the rigour that those sports demanded. I was not a runner or jumper or batter of balls. I was a clumsy, bashful girl for whom even the activity of talking was an ordeal.

The
real
ordeal, however, took place not on the playing field but when the games had ended. I had to change in front of other girls – and nobody, not even my sisters, had prepared me.

My mother had told me nothing about my maturing body. Anything ‘down there' was not up for discussion in our house. Breasts and periods came without warning. I had deduced that there must be something terribly wrong with these unwelcome developments and knew not to go asking.

My mother's voice would drop a note or two when discussing any such matters with the district nurse. Mrs Muck-Spreader called regularly for tea and gossip and a good old hour of dirt-dishing, before moving on to continue her gossiping in a house down the road.

‘That daughter of Mary Katie's has another bun in the oven. Isn't it terrible she can't conduct herself?'

‘Aye, God it's a shockin' thing altogether with these young girls.' Of course the baker (or indeed the butcher
or the candlestick-maker) who put the bun in the oven in the first place never came in for criticism; it was always the young woman's fault. This was the era of the lowered voice and raised eyebrows where sex and the private lives of others were concerned.

There were other ominous signs too. If two actors made to kiss on the TV, mother would be out of her seat like a spring-loaded marionette to change the channel before things got too steamy. Then we'd have to listen to a stream of invective that would have made Mary Whitehouse proud.

‘You're not watchin' any of that smut as long as I'm here!' she'd cry. ‘What's the world comin' to when you can't sit down to watch a decent film but that dirt has to come into it? That TV'll raise the divil, so it will.'

On Sunday evenings we'd have to sit through a succession of boring programmes:
Z-Cars, Dr Finlay's Casebook, Sunday Night at the London Palladium
, hoping against hope that we'd be allowed to watch
The Tom Jones Show
at10.30. But now father became the censor. Just as Tom was beginning a gyrating romp through
It's Not Unusual
he'd be on his feet.

‘You're not watching that dirty oul' bugger in this house,' he'd mutter, switching off the set – and mother would helpfully suggest that we all get down on our knees to say the rosary.

Even then I suspected that it was Tom's padded ‘down there' that caused father to become so surprisingly alert. He was up and off the couch with an unnatural swiftness, not at all in keeping with his character.

On reflection I'm amazed that Irish men and women from that era ever got round to being intimate at all; and the fact that they did – well, is it not a miracle in itself, begod?

My young mind was thus given yet another phobia to deal with: the fear of womanhood; and I muddled along
blindly, developing and bleeding in a fog of ignorance. It would be a long time before sex education was introduced in schools.

I recall one occasion when the district nurse made a visit to the needlework lesson to show, with the aid of a plastic doll, how to bath a baby. A lesson or two in the functions of reproduction would have served as a helpful preliminary. We girls might have benefited had we been taught to connect the mysterious menarche with babies – but no, that would have meant letting us into the great secret of
sex
.

The more I wanted to hide from the world the more it wanted to intrude. I felt like an outcast who tagged along after the others, trudging in the wake of all that vivacity and frolic, bullied by exclusion. I longed for the animated lightness that would loosen all my tense limbs, and make me bounce and dash and toss my head back and be careless and untrammelled and free.

But I was not pretty enough to be lingered over, not clever enough for praise; I was kept from both by the weight of fear at home and at school, and rooted in a limbo of self-doubt. It was reinforced in the looks and behaviour of my classmates and again in the eyes of those teachers who either ignored me or disliked me.

I made friends with another cast-off like myself. Catherine was also a farmer's daughter and poor in most things too. She matched my specs and spots with blunt hair and very red cheeks. Neither of us possessed the status symbols necessary for acceptance into the club: furry pencil-cases, diamanté hair slides, an identity bracelet with one's name inscribed. We were plain and dowdy, the products of ignorant fathers and harassed mothers.