by Honor Harlow
Suileen Lane had no houses but when we crossed over Sligo Road, the street was called Railway Terrace. It had plenty of houses with gardens and a footpath. When Mammy and me went uptown, we walked along Railway Terrace to where the railway gates were and crossed over the railway line. After walking for only a small while, Railway Terrace changed its name to Hospital Street because the Woods Hospital was on it. There were plenty of shops on Hospital Street and when I walked with Mammy to go to An Lár or to Mass, I looked at the shop windows.
Úna and Kait lived in Dun na Rí Road. All the houses on the road were the very same, standing together in twos, like twins. They had dark slates heads with two small windows under the forehead for eyes and a big window underneath for the mouth. The nose was a long door with tin numbers hammered into the top part, so everyone knew which house they lived in. Some people, to be really sure, had painted around their windows and doors a different colour from the other houses. In front, the houses wore gardens of grass and flowerbeds, edged by railings. Outside the gardens and gates, there was a footpath. Across the road in front of Úna’s house, there were no more houses, only the big cemetery with a big, big gate and black railings on top of a low, stone wall.
All the twin-houses had a gable end at one side. It was the side that wasn’t stuck to the other house. Some people kept reeks of turf in the gable end but right against the side of the house, leaving a wide space so you could go to the back yard without knocking down the turf. The back yards were like small field and some daddies dug the black clay in them and grew potatoes, turnips, carrots, parsnips and cabbage. At the back, the doors had a round knob that you turned to go into the back-kitchen or scullery. In the small, tiny room there was a window with a big, white sink under it, where the mammies washed the potatoes for dinner. They could look out the window to see the children playing and see the cabbage growing. Kait said her mother put a half curtain across their scullery window because when she looked out it, she saw the rough, stony wall of The Home and knew well what was behind it.
I don’t know if others did the same, but Úna said all her pal’s mammies washed the spuds in the back kitchen and brought the pot to the kitchen, with the fireplace and hobs, and put the potatoes on the fire to boil for dinner. The kitchen was big with a big window, cut into two big pieces with a sash like a white rope at the side. You could push the top part down to open it.
The children who lived in the rows of twin-houses, except a few, like Fionnuala McCabe, were always on the bad side of the class. Nearly every single day, the nun put me on the bad side. I didn’t care because I was beside my pals, Úna and Kait. They played with me in the yard and we were always planning smashing things to do after school.
One day when we stood up to form the line Úna said, “Arlene, after class were going up the tracks to see The Home.”
“Great,” I said. I was dying to go up the tracks to see the place where the Home Babies lived.
When school was over, we rushed outside the convent to Cork Road. We waited until we saw the Home Babies plod up the road. Then we galloped across the road, turned the corner at the bank, ran down Hospital Street, past Woods Hospital and didn’t stop until we reached the station.
“Kait, show Arlene the gap we go through,” Úna told Kait but I was already halfway through the broken part of the wire fence. I ran onto the track for first time and felt the metal bars under my feet. Stepping onto the wooden plank, like Úna and Kait were doing, and jumping to the next one and landing as good as them without falling off was smashing.
Flying from one plank to the next one made the inside of my body giggle, scream and feel tickly. Úna, who knew everything, said the real name for the plank was sleeper. They were ahead of me. I saw Kait stumble and fall. She put out her hand to save herself and the palm got cut with the sharp stones in between the sleeper beams.
“You’ll be better before you’re married,” Úna said and used the inside of her dress to wipe the little drops of blood. I didn’t stop. It was great fun leaping like a hare but then I heard Úna calling after me cos I didn’t know the spot where we’d climb over the ditch to get into the old graveyard. She told me I passed the spot.
“Arlene, if you keep jumping along the line, you’ll end up in Mullingar. Come back here to where we are.”
I turned back. Úna was holding down the bottom line of a bull-wire fence with one foot and holding the top length of wire that didn’t have curly spiky bits, so I could scramble in between the two strands. With hunched shoulders and bent head, I stepped sideways through the gap, hoping I wouldn’t get scratched. A few ribs of my hair got caught and Kait pulled them off for me. It hurt but I didn’t care because I was inside the old graveyard, the magic place my pals were always talking about. It was at the end part of the cemetery where Maura’s McLoughlin’s father was. Úna said no one got buried in the old cemetery now cos it was from the time when people were dying all the time, and then no one had time to buy coffins or dig graves for them.
She was right, there were no gravestones, only weeds growing everywhere. We couldn’t even see the ground right and supposed we were walking near a grave when a piece of a broken, wooden cross or board was stuck in the long, hard straw grass. Some of the boards were hanging loose like the toilet doors at school. They were among the scratchy dandelions and thistle plants, heaps of earth, round like Santa Claus’ belly and covered in grass and weeds, bulged up. It was a great place, and we ran through it playing hide and seek. Sometimes we jumped on a heap and sang, “I’m the king of the castle and no one can knock me down.” When we heard the whistle of a train whishing past and a long, white cloud of smoke from the chimney trailed through the air, we waved at it but Kait’s hand started to sting, so Úna said, “You better go home and put it under the cold tap to stop it hurting.” She started skipping along the path in the middle towards the new part. We followed her.
The new cemetery was as big as the football pitch, but it had graves and headstones, instead of goal posts. People were silent when they went there instead of shouting like at the matches. In the middle there was a stony path that separates the two grassy sides filled with the headstones and crosses. We ran down this long path to the black, metal gates that were at the beginning of the cemetery. Úna lived right across from the gates and Kait lived five houses up from her. They both lived in Dun Na Rí Road, so Kait crossed over the road and ran to her house. We waited for her outside, sitting on the path. She came back with water in a jam jar in case we wanted a drink.
My pals said The Home was around the corner. We moved, bundled together. Úna led the way, her two fists hiding her mouth, her neck gone, her head on top of her shoulders. I was stuck to Kait’s back, stepping on her heels, frightened she’d leave me on my own. Úna stopped and we banged into her. Without meaning to, we pushed her against a pile of scratchy, lumpy, grey bricks. We jumped back, our heads telling our feet to land without noise, in case the stone giant stirred and gobbled us up.
Still shaking we were able to see it was a huge wall, higher than the one in the convent where the nuns lived. We leaned our heads back to see over the top, but it went up into the sky. Some stones in the front were a darker colour, like rows of dirty teeth in a giant’s mouth.
Frightened it would swallow us, we backed away. I was shaking so I hid behind Úna though I am taller than her. She said a bit crossly, “What’s wrong with you, Arlene? We came here on account of you.”
“I know, but I can’t see over the wall.”
“Do you see that stone with the edge sticking out?” she said pointing to one of stones that stuck out a bit from the others.
“I do. Why?”
“Climb up on it. Maybe we can push you up to the top of the wall and you can look in.”
I managed to get one foot on it but there was no room for the other. “Úna, I still can’t see over the wall.”
The girls kept pushing my bottom with their hands and saying, “Look for somewhere for your hands.”
&n
bsp; But there was nowhere my hands could hold on, so I got down. “I want to see the babies, where are they?” I whined.
“It’s full of babies. They’re always screaming,” Kait said.
“I want to see them,” I said again but I really wanted to go home.
“When I take our new baby out in the pram, I’ll let you see him.”
“But he’s not a Home Baby.”
“No, he isn’t. He lives with my mammy in our house,” Úna said crossly.
Kait was saying, “We see the Home Babies every day at school, so we do.”
“But they are not babies.”
“They are, so they are, but they got big.”
“To make their First Holy Communion?” I asked.
“Ya, like we are going to do.”
“If they are going to make their First Holy Communion, why does the nun never ask them any questions about the body and blood of Christ, like she does us?”
“That’s why.” If Kait didn’t know the reason for something, she always said ‘that’s why’.
“Arlene, are you getting your communion dress bought from the shop?”
“My mammy is making it on her sewing machine.”
They opened their eyes wide and said, “Does your mammy have a sewing-machine?”
“She does.”
“That’s because your daddy is a Garda and ye have money, so ye do.”
Mammy had a Singer sewing machine and she made all my dresses and skirts on it. Every evening, before I went to bed, I had a wash in a basin beside the fire. Mammy put the tin bowl on a stool with cold water and then she poured in hot water from the kettle, until it was lukewarm and didn’t scald me. I stood in my shift so she could wash me. The back of my neck and behind my ears and knees were the parts she scrubbed really hard. When I was clean and dry and wearing only my knickers and vest, Mammy used to fit on the dress or skirt she was making me.
Being reminded of Mammy with the sewing, gave me the chance to leave and get away from the horrible wall with the black teeth, so I said, “I’m remembering Mammy told me to hurry home in case she needed to try my communion dress on. Will ye come back with me as far as the station?”
“I can’t cos Mammy is waiting for me to take the babies for a walk.”
“I’ll go with you,” Kait said and we ran back through the graveyards. On the tracks we walked together, and I told her about my communion dress and the drapery shop on the corner of High Street and Shop Street.
“How do you know what the streets are called?”
“Cos my mammy is teaching me the names of all the streets.”
“What’s it called where the town hall is?”
“That’s easy. It’s An Lár and it’s not a street, it’s a square.”
“I know, cos it’s where my mammy buys turf from the countrymen on the day we have no school.”
“Mr Delaney gives us our turf.”
“Look, there’s the gap to get out. I’m going back home from my tea,” she said and turned to run back up the tracks.
I wasn’t afraid and called after her, “I’m going home too for mine. I’ll tell you about my communion dress tomorrow.”
The Drapery Shop
Sr Ignatius told us all communion dresses are white and Mammy bought the white material in the drapery shop that was twisted around the corner of High Street and Shop Street. It was in front of An Lár, the place where the giant grey cross with a round face in the middle was standing. Daddy called it a Celtic Cross. When he said it, it sounded like Seltic, but Mammy told him it was a Celtic Cross, sounding like it started with a K.
I liked the drapery shop, but I didn’t like the shopman, with the fat belly, standing at the door, always looking at the people outside the shop and the ones inside. His belly was round and smooth, like a small Mass Rock and his eyes were round and bulging out. He had thick, navy-blue stripes at the sides of his body. Mammy said they were braces to keep his trousers up. I asked her if there was no belt wide enough to go around his tummy and she got cross and told me to have manners and not to say things like that. It was the man with the round ball of a tummy who had no manners. He was always staring at my mammy with his frog’s eyes and standing in the doorway blocking the way, so she had to pass really close to him when she went in through the door of the shop. Maybe he thought he had seen her in the pictures in the Odeon cinema. Daddy said the first time he saw Mammy, he thought she was Liz Taylor, a famous film star and was going to ask her for her autograph.
After we passed by the fat man, we went inside and over to the high, shiny, brown boards counter. The boards, all stuck together, were higher than my head and I couldn’t see over them to the man behind the counter, so I let go of Mammy’s hand and went out a bit to be able to look at him. He wore a navy-blue overall coat and stood in front of flat rolls of material that were on shelves. Mammy told him she wanted material to make a communion dress and pointed to a white flat roll against the wall. The man lifted it onto the counter and spread it out. Mammy touched it and rubbed it between her thumb and finger and nodded her head. The man measured the material, then he took a scissors that was tied to the counter, by a long string, and placed it at the edge of the material nearest him. The scissors opened its jaws and cut a straight line along the cloth making a lovely sound as it cut.
As the man was folding up the cloth, Mammy was opening her handbag and taking her purse out. She counted out the money and put it in little heaps on the counter. When the shopman saw the money, he reached up and unscrewed a small can on a rope above his head and left it on the counter. It was round like a tin of peas but short like the tins of John West Salmon Daddy has for his tea.
There was a clanging sound as he let the money fall from his hand into the round box. Then he leaned up to a rope stretched across the ceiling and screwed the tin back into the lid on the cord. There were a few of these ropes, like clotheslines, high on the ceiling, with round cans instead of clothes, crossing the whole shop and going into a tiny hole in a small, wooden room, like a shed, upstairs. Mammy said the ropes were called pulleys.
When the shop assistant pulled a rope, the tin went flying across the shop to the shed and went in through the tiny window. After a minute, a bell tinkled, and the same round tin came back to the counter with the change. While my head was bent backwards looking at the tin with the money, the man in the overall coat was wrapping the material up in brown paper and tying it with twine.
Before Mammy left the shop, she went to the part in the very back where there were clothes for big people and bought a thing called a corset. I watched the canister fly into the shed holding the money and come back out again.
That evening Mammy spread the white material on the table and drew out some shapes with the thin, putty biscuit that was really chalk. The scissors made a crisp sound as she cut out the top part of the dress and two roundish shapes she said were the sleeves.
First, she tacked the pieces together and then sewed them on the machine. When she sewed the round pieces along the sides, they looked like short trousers legs and were way too wide for my arms. But when she tacked them on to the top part of the dress and put a doubled-up band at the bottom, they turned into puff sleeves.
Daddy came home and I told him Mammy had the top part of my holy communion dress nearly finished. “William, I’ll finish it tomorrow. I just have to make the skirt and sew on the buttons at the back.
The next evening Mammy started doing the skirt part. It looked long and wide like a bolster case before Mammy pulled the thread she had tacked into the top. Then it became narrow at the waist and all the rest spread out wide like a bell, only not stiff but moving like a ponytail. She tacked the skirt onto the top part she called a bodice, and it was a full dress.
“Mary, slip this over your head,” Mammy said. Once it was on me, she fiddled with the dress before she took it off. Then she turned it inside out and ran the needle of the sewing machine over the seams. I put it on again and Mammy said, “Stand still w
hile I take up the hem,” and handed me a pin cushion as she bent her head towards my knees.
I passed her pins which she stuck in the fold at the edge of the skirt. When she had finished putting pins in the front, I then turned around so she could do the back. She had to be very careful pulling it over my head, so the pins didn’t scratch me. After she tacked it, I had to try it on again before she sewed the hem with long stitches by hand.
Daddy was reading the paper and said, “Dervla, why don’t you sew that on the machine. Wouldn’t it be quicker?”
“Easily known you’re a man. I don’t want the stiches showing on the outside so that’s the reason I’m doing a backstitch on the inside of the hem.” She put the iron on the fire to heat it and said, “Mary, be a good girl and put this cloth under the kitchen tap. Wet it and then wring it out in the sink.”
I had done this plenty of times before and knew she would then say, “Get that blanket there and spread it over the edge of the table.”
Before she had to tell me, I put a sheet on top of the blanket. Daddy was looking at me and smiling because we knew what was coming next. Mammy placed my white frock on the sheet and the wet cloth over it. We watched as she started to iron. When the hissing sound and steam came out from under the iron, as Mammy pressed it on top of the damp cloth, I jumped into Daddy’s arms. It was a game we played about the dragon in the iron. Mammy didn’t like Daddy ‘acting the eejit’ with me because she said he was filling my mind with nonsense.
When the dress was ironed, she put it on me. It was a hundred times prettier than the dresses Loretta wore.
“Mammy, this is like a miracle. You changed a white tablecloth into a princess dress.”
Daddy’s eyes looked like they were going to cry, and he said, “Aye, Dervla, our little girl is the most beautiful thing in the whole, wide world.”
“The dress turned out better than I expected,” Mammy said.
