by Honor Harlow
There were rules everywhere and Mammy had to learn the rules of a card game called Bridge. She played it with her gang of friends in the evening and that meant I was with Mrs McLoughlin. The housekeeper taught me how to prepare myself for bed and to get my clothes ready for the next day. At night, I never forgot to say my prayers even if Mammy wasn’t sitting at the side of the bed. I was positive she gave me a kiss when she came home, only her lips were so soft they didn’t wake me.
Mammy was still sleeping downstairs the night I had a bad dream about Liam. His eyes, big and wide, were staring at me. He was begging me to do something for him.
“Liam, stop looking at me and tell me what you want?” I screamed when I could get my voice out. Daddy heard me and came to sooth me. I pushed him away, murmuring, “Where’s Mammy? I want Mammy.”
“Hush, Arlene, when Mammy comes home, she is always tired. Climbing the stairs is too much for her. We had a little chat and decided it’s better she sleeps downstairs.”
“You’re strong, Daddy, you could carry her up the stairs.”
“Aye, lassie I could, but what about the nights when I’m out working in the barracks. I don’t come home until the wee hours.”
“She could sleep on the sofa until you come home.”
“It wouldn’t be good for Mammy to be waking her up.”
“You mean she might get sick, Daddy?” I asked and when I saw him nodding his head, I knew he didn’t want her to get sick.
Mammy was getting better and she stopped going off to hospital in the ambulance and Mrs McLoughlin stopped coming to our house in the evenings. She didn’t want Maura and Catherine to be on their own, so she started washing and ironing our clothes in her house. And that is why after school, I went to their house until the evening-time when Daddy came for me and I went home to sleep.
Nothing was like it used to be, everything had changed, even our house. The shed was empty with only Daddy’s bike put in there to get it out of the way. At least it wouldn’t get dirty cos there was no chickens to poop on it on account of Mammy not buying the baby-chicks that came in a box on the bus from Dublin. She didn’t pluck them and burn the feathers in the fire. The chicken we had for Sunday dinner came from a big, big shop called a supermarket.
We stopped going to the market on An Lár when the supermarket opened up near the Castle Fields. There was everything in it, even baldy chickens with no feathers. It was a big, big grocery shop with narrow hallways with walls of shelves. They were packed with tins and bottles and packets and toilet paper. People picked up a basket on the way in and walked along the aisle taking what they wanted from the shelves at the sides. The meat and naked chickens weren’t on the shelves but behind a glass counter. A butcher with a cap weighed them and gave them to the mammies. Mammy drove to the new shop and on Sundays she drove to Mass. After Mass, we still had roast chicken with peas and jelly and custard for dessert because on Sunday Mammy stayed at home and cooked our dinner.
Mammy shrunk while Mrs McLoughlin stretched around my life. She became like Kait’s and Úna’s mammies for me. We shared looks that only we knew what they meant, like without ever saying in words that she had no meas on Mr Delaney. When she started sweeping around the chair he was sitting on and making him lift his feet or banging hard against the back of it with her brush, she was doing it on purpose, and I knew it. Her habit of forgetting to bring him his cup of tea until it was cold or telling him there was only enough Chester cake left for Mr Blake, was to spite him, as well as putting the radio on real loud when Mr Delaney was saying he had his ‘own thinking’ about the wedding that took place during Lent or that he knew the real reason why such and such a girl was going to England to their aunts’ houses. I didn’t have an aunt in England to go to when the men came into our house to build the extension Mammy wanted, so Daddy sent me to the McLoughlin’s. One morning the men appeared, and the house became full of noise and dust as they started banging away making the new bedroom and bathroom. Daddy told Mammy I was in the men’s way and I’d be better off with the McLoughlin’s.
We got the new part added on because Mammy’s gang of friends, from the golf club, couldn’t go to the toilet in our house.
“William, I go to my friends’ houses for elevenses, but how in God’s name can I invite them here for coffee?”
“Why can’t you? This is a fine house,” he said from behind his newspaper.
“Fine! I’d be ashamed to invite any of them to this place.”
“Ashamed?” He lowered the paper and looked at her with a serious face.
“Yes, ashamed. If they asked me to use the bathroom, I’d look a right eejit saying we don’t have one.”
“Don’t we have a toilet? Surely to God they are not coming here for a bath!”
Mammy started sniffing and took out her hankie. Daddy ducked behind his paper and didn’t say anything else.
“William, why do you speak to me like that?” Mammy said in a half crying voice.
“Sorry.” The paper went down for a minute.
Mammy said, “I only wish you saw the bathroom they have in the Burke’s and you’d understand why it would be lovely to have one too.”
“The Burke’s?” Daddy asked surprised, lowering the paper again. Mr Burke was the manager of the bank that went around the corner on Barrack Street and Cork Road.
“I was at a coffee morning in Assumpta Burke’s house yesterday. I couldn’t get over the lovely bathroom they have.”
“Good for them.”
Mammy pretended she didn’t hear him. “Assumpta told me Joe Daly did the work and it didn’t cost as much as she thought it would.”
From then on, every chance Mammy got, she told Daddy how Joe Daly did this thing and that thing in her friends’ houses, until one morning Daddy said, “Joe Daly wouldn’t be available for a good few months, Dervla, so when we build the extension, I’ll get Gerry Curry to do the job.”
“Why’s that, William? I hope Joe is not sick?”
“No, nothing like that. The nuns have him contracted to knock down the thick wall which hides the nuns residence from view.”
“Is it the wall with the spikes of glass on top, Daddy?” I asked.
“The very one, Arlene.”
“Why are they getting rid of it. Mr Delaney said the high, thick, glass-crowned wall is to keep the nuns safe, Daddy?”
“Safe from whom? Thank God that Pope of yers, John XXIII, has a bit of sense.”
Mammy frowned but Daddy didn’t see her, mar dhea.
“About time the nuns were let live like normal people and not having them locked up behind walls,” said Daddy.
I saw Mammy’s face tighten and I knew she was going to give out to Daddy, so I said really quick, “But our school is nice and normal, isn’t it, Mammy?”
My primary school, with the gate going out to Cork Road, had a low white wall and railings around it. It did not have a high wall around it like the old school and the nuns’ residence did.
“Of course it is, Mary, and you are lucky to have the nuns teaching you. So William, you want Gerry Curry to build the extension?”
“If you agree, we’ll get Gerry to do the work. It’s better the money goes into his pocket than to anyone else’s.”
“Whatever you want, William. I must tell Margaret when I see her today.”
Garda Curry, Evelyn’s daddy, came when he wasn’t on duty with another Garda and built the extension. While Mr Curry was wallpapering the walls and painting the doors and windows and putting in new floors, Mammy and Mr Delaney were buying new carpets, curtains, lamps and piles of things Daddy said we didn’t need.
Garda Curry was changing our house and making the old part nice and new-looking and Joe Daly and the men were changing the convent. They knocked down the high wall of big, thick stones around the house where the nuns lived, near the chapel. It reached up past everyone’s heads to the sky. When it was gone, they built a low, pebble-dashed white wall with railings like the one in the primary school
. The solid, black gate on the chapel side was changed for two wide ones with a design that looked like metal cobwebs. Now there was only one high wall with pointy, broken glass bottles on top of it in Church Street, on the path in front of Wynn’s Bakery and Cafe.
The first Sunday after the wall disappeared, the people going to Mass couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw the nun’s residence across from the chapel. It looked like a mansion, the same as the Fitzgerald’s house, with a tarmac driveway, wide enough to let the priest’s car drive on it and park in front of the door of the nuns’ residence.
Mr Delaney and Mammy didn’t like the new wall, saying the light and sights of the outside world would pass through to the nuns and corrupt them. According to them, it would be more in the Pope’s line to leave things the way they were. Everyone liked the Pope except them. He looked a bit like Úna’s baby in the pram with a fat belly on him and always smiling and thinking how to make the Mass better. He didn’t mind if women didn’t wear scarfs on their heads and he let the nuns wear normal skirts.
At the beginning of summer when we were nearly finished third class, Pope John XXIII died. It was strange he died because it is only old people who die. Úna said he might not be dead at all, but he was, because during the summer, the big people kept crying and lamenting that it was always the good that were taken. Kait was holy and knew holy things, so when she said, “The Pope died on us.” we were thinking he might be really dead. To make things worse, the first day we were back in fourth class, Sr Leo said a prayer for the dead Pope.
“Kait, why do we have to pray for him if he is already in heaven?” I asked her because she knew holy things. “Sr Kevin and Sr Rita only told us to pray for the souls in purgatory and for sinners.”
“We pray to him cos he is our friend, and he will help us if we ask him.”
Kait knew about saints and prayers, so I believed her. We missed Pope John XXIII and a brónach came on us, a heaviness that made us drag our feet. We didn’t push each other or burst out laughing and lost all the lightness and the happiness that was inside us. It was nearly like as if the fairies had taken away our souls. Mr Delaney wasn’t sad, and Mammy just said, “I hope Pope Paul will put things back the way they were.” She said that because she blamed the Second Vatican Council for everything she didn’t like.
“Women wouldn’t be going around looking like men with trousers on them if it wasn’t for that John XXIII and his Vatican Council,” Mr Delaney said.
“And the young lads going blind with the hair falling into their eyes.”
“Talking about hair, did you see how the girls going to Mass wearing a mantilla instead of a scarf or hat and the mean skirts that leave their knees showing, Dervla.”
“Miniskirts, John. That’s what they call them.”
“Makes sense alright to call them skirteens mini.”
“I can’t, for the life of me, understand the carry-on of the young girls, pulling their hair out and jumping up and down when they listen to the awful music.”
“It’s them hooligans from Liverpool singing ‘Love, love me do.’ that makes them demented, screaming worse than the inmates in Ballinacora.”
“That Vatican Council has a lot to answer for, John.”
“Indeed, it does, with all the changes it’s bringing in.”
Mammy didn’t like the changes in the church, but she liked the changes in our house. Once the extension was finished and the new furniture in place, our house looked completely different. Mammy started inviting her friends in for elevenses, serving them Italian coffee made in the percolator Mr Delaney had brough her back from Rome.
Mr Delaney and his mother were the only people in Drumbron who had been to Rome. They were treated like the holy relics, the tiny pieces of gauze cloth that had touched a saint’s bone, because their eyes had rested on His Holiness, God’s representative on earth. People stopped Mr Delaney in the street looking at him as though he had returned from heaven. He told them how the square, in front of the Papal Palace had been thronged with people looking at the Pope framed in the window. His Holiness lifted his eyes and gazed directly at Mr Delaney and his mother, lifted his hand, made the sign of the cross and blessed them.
Mammy’s gang of friends were delighted to hear Mr Delaney talking about his visit to the Pope, but what impressed them more was him going into raptures about the exquisite coffee he made in the Italian coffeemaker he had brought from Rome. The black coffee-pot looked like the body of a fat woman with a small waist, wearing a skirt like the nannas wore. She had no neck and a tiny knob of a head on her broad shoulders. Mammy’s friends would watch as Mr Delaney spooned shiny, brown beans into a metal box, placed its lid on and started to turn and twist around the handle on the top of the grinder. The kitchen would be filled with a wonderful aroma of the ground coffee beans.
Mr Delaney would pick up the coffee pot and, with a great flourish, unscrewed the bottom, skirt part of it. Then like a showman, he would turn the bottom upside down and shake out a flattish-cup thing with a tube in the middle. Holding the skirt part, for Mammy’s friend to see, he would go to the sink, turn the tap on and fill it with cold water. Back at the worktop he would spoon the ground coffee into the round, middle, cup part, replace it back into the skirt part, and then screw the top part, with the handle and lid, back onto the bottom skirt part before placing the pot on the burner.
The first few times Mr Delaney demonstrated his technique, me and Evelyn were among the audience in the kitchen. We watched in awe as the coffee pot was put on the cooker and waited for it to boil. The percolator didn’t sing like a kettle when it was boiling but bubbled and made gurgling sounds. In the steam that came from the triangular snout on the lid, there was a woody smell. Mr Delaney walked around the kitchen moving his fingers in front of his nose saying the delicious aroma, filling the kitchen, reminded him of the lovely, little, outdoor cafes that lined the street in Rome.
One day in the yard, me and Evelyn were telling Kait and Úna about the coffee and the going-on of Mr Delaney. Kait laughed and said, “If he had to smell my brother’s farts in the bed, he’d be running from the house with his hand in front of his nose.”
“And from mine too,” Úna said. “Next summer my cousins are coming from Liverpool for the holidays, so we’ll all be stuck in the same bed with no room to move.”
“My uncle Martin is coming too but he stays in his own house,” Kait said. Her uncle Martin Ward had his house in Drumbron but slept in England nearly all the time, cos he worked there and was only home in the summer and at Christmastime.
The summer came when third class finished, and Mr Ward arrived home on the train as usual. We all crowded into Moran’s shop for our ice-cream cones. Kait’s uncle said, “You wouldn’t have any cardboards boxes you wouldn’t be needing, would you now, Jimmy?”
“I do, Martin, I do. I’m getting a lot of people asking me for them lately.”
“Sure, with the way things are I’m not surprised.”
“I won’t ask you what you want the boxes for.”
“It’s no secret. I want to pack a few things from the house in boxes and crates.”
“You’re another one thinking of leaving us for good.”
“I am.”
“Hey, ye young ones, when ye’re finished the ice-creams, go out the back and get the boxes I have stacked up in the wool warehouse.”
“Daddy, I want to go with you to see what you have for me in the suitcase,” Shelia said to her father.
“No fear of ye not coming home with Mammy and me, Shelia, my little one. Kait, will ya be a good girl and get the boxes while we head on home?”
“A course we will,” we said galloping out the shop and around the back to the courtyard where there was a stone building full of square, cloth bundles packed tight with wool.
“Let’s sit on that bale there to eat our ice creams,” Úna said as bossy as always. We ran and sat down on one of the smaller ones she was pointing to that was thrown on the stone fl
oor.
“Úna, you’re right.”
“A course I am. Shur, we’ll need our hands free to carry the boxes,” she said as she held up her cone and started licking the sides. The melting ice-cream was dripping down the outside of the wafer cone. Me, Kait and Ev started doing the same to our own ones and had no time to talk we were so busy.
Voices, coming from on top of our heads, shouted, “Ah go on, give us a lick.”
We looked up. Two faces were staring down on us. They had no bodies, like the angels in the crib at Christmas time with no bodies only wings under their fat heads. Mammy calls cherubs. The faces without the bodies had no wings and were called Ricky Martin and Kevin Fitzgerald.
“What are doing up there, ye eejits?” Úna demanded to know.
Kait looked up and asked softly, “Where’s yer bodies?” For an answer, a pile of lumps of wool were thrown down on top of us. We ran screaming to the door of the warehouse with strands of wool clinging onto our heads and shoulders.
When we got near the door, the boys’ aim wasn’t good enough to hit us, which gave Úna and Ev a chance to organise and tell us what to do. Bunched together, we twisted our heads in different directions, surveying the battlefield. Turning around so we were face to face again, we each reported back on what we had observed and outlined our plans for a counterattack, like they do in the matinee pictures on Sunday.
Our enemy, Ricky Martin and Kevin Fitzgerald, were lying on the floor of the loft, which was the roof of the wool warehouse. There was a ladder going up to that part of the wool shed but it was in the line of fire. We would be exposed to enemy ammunition until we reached it. As I was the tallest, the other girls decided I would act as a shield and they crouched behind me. We ran from bale to bale and reached the ladder without being shot too often. As I climbed up, wool missiles rained down on me, making me look like a woolly snowman. I was protecting Úna and Evelyn who were right behind me. Kait was the last in line and shook with every step she took on every rung on the ladder.
