by Orna Ross
“So I should go home tonight and just tell him my opinions?”
She looked at me as if the suggestion was that she should dance naked with the devil down the village street. “Knowing that there will be a storm, but knowing too that once they’ve finished huffing and puffing, you can get on with doing the work you want to do for Ireland. Yes, Norah, I think if I were you, that’s what I’d do.”
Norah let out a bitter laugh that hurt to hear. That’s when I knew I’d done wrong. “Maybe if I were you, Peg, I might do the same. But we’re not all the same in this world, however much we might wish to be. You can lift that bag of sugar over there with ease. I couldn’t if I tried for a week.”
She turned her eyes on me, two big jewels of green in a tiny skull that looked at me like I was some class of a dunce. “You can talk to your mammy and daddy. They look at you and they see Peg. Mine look at me and they see another O’Donovan, who does and says what O’Donovans are supposed to do.”
I knew what she meant but I knew too that she was probably stronger than she believed. With courage, she could break that grip they had on her heart and soul.
“What if you weren’t to think so much of your family? What if you think about your country?” I hesitated, but I had gone so far, I felt I might as well get it all out. “What about Barney?”
“Barney?” She stopped what she was doing. “What about Barney?”
“Norah, you know. Surely you must know.”
“Do I? Oh God, do I? I suppose I do.”
I thought that was a strange thing to say and I think that I knew, by then, from the look on her shrivelled face and the way her fingers were twisting each other crooked, that I might be going too far. But on I went again. “Norah, have you any time for him at all? I only ask because he has it bad for you, so bad. If he’s wasting his time, you should tell him. Really you should because….Oh, Norah, I’m sorry, stop. Don’t cry.”
Norah burst into shuddering tears. ‘Peg, I don’t know…I just don’t – I don’t—”
“Oh, don’t cry, Norah. Don’t. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not you…You’re right. Everything…you say…is right.”
I put my arm around her, feeling terrible. “Here. Take this.” I pressed a hanky into her trembling hands and she buried her sobs in it. When she recovered a little, she said in a voice washed empty, “You’re right. I’m a coward.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“That’s what it amounts to…And you’re right, you’re right.”
I knew then that I wasn’t. Who could say what I’d be like if I grew up in Norah’s house? Bolstering her is what I should have been doing, not making her feel worse than she felt already.
“Look, Norah, forget what I said. Only you know what’s right for you.”
“Me? Stupid, useless me.”
And that’s when she really shocked me. She started to hit herself, to punch herself on the forehead, hard.
“Norah!”
She broke into a flurry of blows, beating herself around the head with both hands.
I caught hold of her wrists and for a minute she resisted me, then her arms went limp and she gave in, looking up at me with a face that turned a fear in my stomach. It was that fear that made me bluster: “Dear God Norah, what are you doing? Stop that nonsense. I never saw the like…”
She was crying again, quiet tears this time, down frozen cheeks. “Don’t shout,” she said, in a dead voice. “Don’t shout, please. You’ll have them out after us.”
I let her arms go. “Then stop crying. And stop talking about yourself like that. Come on, Norah, blow your nose. Dry the tears. There, that’s better.” I kept on saying things like that, trying to soothe myself as much as her. I never knew the strength of feeling she kept hidden behind her pale, quiet face. Now that I did, what could I say, only advise her not to listen to anyone else, not her family and not me either. To examine her own conscience, and let it tell her what to do.
“It sounds so simple when you say it, Peg,” she said, padding her eyes with the puckered handkerchief.
“Underneath it all, under the confusion and the pressure from all sides, it really is that simple,” I said.
I’ll be a lot more careful about how I speak to her in future.
* * *
Diary 21st June 1922
So we lost, thanks mostly to the traitorous acts of Mr Michael Collins, who — with only hours to go and at the behest of the British — reneged on the pact he had signed with Mr de Valera. That man will surely perish in hell for this grave sin to comrades and country. It’s clear what consorting with the English has done to his morals, he who was once our leader. And the old-timers and the respectables, the farmers and the shoneens, the gombeen men and the merchants got in behind him and voted our Republic away. 239,193 votes to the pro-treaty candidates, 133,864 to us. (And 247,226 to the rest between them — Labour, Farmers and Independents).
Mammy got up out of bed to go to the polling booth on the day. We didn’t even try to stop her because we knew we’d have no hope and she managed fine. She got excited at being out and about with people coming over to her and making a fuss: all enquiries about her health were brushed aside and she concentrated on the politics, getting herself rightly worked up. Once we saw the Constitution, we knew why they’d waited until the morning of the election to publish it. Every nail of the treaty was driven home in it.
She was still complaining about it tonight, as I helped her get ready for bed. Apparently Mr White, Lama’s father, made some remark to Daddy that the result expressed a wish for compromise among the ordinary people, a concern about social and economic matters. That was why the Farmer’s Party and Labour did so well, he held, because people wanted the fighting put aside and for the new government to concentrate on things “that mattered”, like jobs and land reform and housing. Daddy had passed this on to Mammy, hoping, I think, that she might take some notice of that point of view (it being, to some degree, his own) and take it as a consolation.
If that is what he hoped, he must have been sorely disappointed. She ranted and railed against the Whites as a crowd of Bolshevists sheltering under the name of Republicans. Then she moved on to all the self-seeking people who put their own welfare above the noble cause of the nation. (“Who were the Farmer’s Party anyway? Only a string of Orangemen and Freemasons.”) And then she went back to denouncing the provisional government and her outrage that people in general were now taking up their label for anti-treaty soldiers – “Irregulars” — though these were mostly the men who brought the government into being in the first place, while most of those joining the new “National” Army had never seen a day’s service in their lives.
At first I feared she might strain herself if she got too worked up, but after a while I came to feel it did her good to fume and think of something besides her own poor health. It was a change from the reminiscences that have made up so much of her conversation lately and to see her so excited and alive to the present again…it made me hope…
If we, the women and young men, had had our vote, we’d have won it, that’s what gets me most. That’s what I can never forgive them.
Well, they needn’t think that it ends there. I don’t know what we do next, but we won’t be lying under this injustice, of that they can be sure…
* * *
Diary 1st July 1922
I was supposed to be going to Ring College in the Gaeltacht for an Irish course. All the arrangements are made, I’ve paid my money and Father John is agreeable and has sponsored me. He won’t be too pleased when he hears what I’m going to do instead. This afternoon I leave for Enniscorthy, where our troops are preparing for war against the Free Staters. Outright war has come to Wexford.
Since Michael Collins took two 18-pounder guns from Winston Churchill and used them to blast apart the defences of the brave men holding the Four Courts for the Republic, the rest of us have been waiting for orders on how to react. All Dublin is said to
be a shambles: the heart, liver and lights torn out of the city by days of bombing and shooting.
There’s a song going around that just about sums it up:
Oh Churchill dear, did you hear, the news from Dublin town?
They’ve listened to your good advice and blown the Four Courts down.
And likewise with O’Connell Street, the worst we’ve ever seen
The guns the best (as per request) and the lorries painted green.
When they turned those English guns on the Four Courts, they blasted to high heaven six centuries of documents and records, and charred scraps of paper were carried for miles beyond Dublin, like leaves on a storm wind. My head and heart are full of these burnt fragments of British rule blowing about the place. And of course of our men, so many of them, who lie dead, dying or wounded.
We don’t know how many yet, only that we’ve taken a fearful hammering. The fighting is dirty and we are outgunned by English weapons. And outnumbered by men who were nowhere to be seen when it was the English we were fighting, the type who are all for it now there’s a salary going and free uniform and boots.
“Official IRA” they have painted on their lorries and armoured cars. Meanwhile, we are nothing but “Irregulars”. Mammy is right: it is beyond belief.
So there’s an end for any hopes of unity. We can forget any notion now of being able to work together. They’ve declared war, and war they shall have, and though they may have might on their side, we have right. They’ll not find country boys as easy to defeat as in the city. They won’t find their way around woods and mountains as handy as avenues and streets.
And down here, outside the Pale, it is the Staters who are outnumbered, by at least four to one. In Wexford, all the main towns – Gorey, New Ross, Wexford town and Ferns – are now held by us. Only Enniscorthy is not ours, not yet, so it must be taken. Barney has gone ahead, so have Tipsy and Lama and Molly, and I’ll be leaving myself as soon as Daddy gets back from the station. I will be able to stay as long as is necessary, as we began our school holidays yesterday. I haven’t told Father John of my intentions – I wasn’t in the mood for one of his little talks and would prefer to face that music when I get back. Even if school was still on, I would be going. This thing is bigger than any one of us.
Mammy is delighted to see us off, only wishing she could join us herself. When Barney told her what was planned, and of the concerns we had about leaving her, she waved them away. “Go. Go with God’s blessing and mine. Your father’s too. Go save Ireland.” I don’t know about blessing, but Daddy is being better than brave about it all. Even he is sickened by what’s going on.
Barney spoke to me before he left about Dan. There’s more than a few on the Stater side who are sickened by this betrayal and have declared themselves unwilling to shoot at old friends. We both feel Dan is likely to go this way, even though such men of honour are no longer required by the Stater Army and are being rounded up and arrested. We both know Dan wouldn’t be able to actually turn out for the army and turn an English-sponsored gun on us. Now he can see what true treachery looks like in action, he’s bound to come back to us.
I hear George’s hoofs pulling into the yard. Daddy is back. It is time for me to go. My next entry will be when I come back from Enniscorthy. I should have plenty to report by then. God bless the work.
(4pm)
The best-laid plans…Here I am still in Mucknamore having taken you back out of the drawer in which I so carefully locked you away. I was about to leave my bedroom, giving it a last go over, making sure there was nothing untoward if Mammy or anybody else should decide to pop in while I was gone, when next thing I heard a call from Tessie downstairs. “Peg, are you up there?”
“Yes.”
“Someone to see you.”
I went out of the bedroom and hung down over the banisters to see who it was and there stood Norah, her eyes like two big green lamps shining up at me. “Come ahead,” I said to her and she took the stairs two by two, most unlike her, bursting to tell me her story. I’ve never seen her so agitated.
All day long, she had been stuck behind the counter in Furlong’s, listening to the hearsay being carried in by customers visiting the store. Furlong’s had no shortage of customers, it being a Saturday, and no shortage of rumours about the goings-on in Enniscorthy: the fighting had started with an all-out attack launched on the courthouse where our boys are; the fighting had started with the Republicans besieging the Castle where the Staters are lodged; the fighting had not started yet but wouldn’t be long now.
It was torture for poor Norah, listening to all this, not knowing what was true, what was false. Then through the window of her office, she saw that Mrs Redmond was in, Molly’s mother, and that she was deep in conversation with Miss Ellen Bolger at the millinery counter, whose sympathies are in the right place. Under pretext of making notes about the gloves and umbrellas at the next counter, she managed to listen to their conversation and to hear that Molly had gone up to Enniscorthy to get involved. Mrs Redmond was upset, hadn’t wanted her to go, but Molly had been insistent. As Norah listened to this, something in her just clicked.
“I knew this was the moment,” she said. “That if I didn’t go to Enniscorthy like Molly, I would regret it for the rest of my living days.”
So she went back to her office for her coat and hat and went to find Mr Carr. She found him in men’s footwear and told him she had to leave, and when he asked why, she told him out straight. And he said to her, that’s not a reason I’d allow any of my girls to leave work. And she, brave as can be, said it was as good a reason as she could think of, the future of Ireland. And he says, if you leave now, you needn’t bother coming back. And she didn’t have to even think, not even for a second. “I’m sorry you should say that,” she told him, “but I’m afraid I have to go.” And she went.
“I went,” she said to me in my bedroom, amazed at herself. “I just went.” At this she burst out laughing and I joined her. It was the kind of laughing you do after you’ve come round from jumping out of your skin and find out it was only someone shouting boo.
“So I’m going with you,” she said. “But first I have to go up home and get my things.”
“What will you tell them?”
“I don’t know yet. As little as possible, maybe. I’ll see when I’m up there.”
I was afraid for her when I heard her say that. “Come ahead now instead and say nothing. I’ll lend you clothes and whatever else you might need. Face them when you come back.”
But she wouldn’t hear of it. On up she went and she’s been gone nearly an hour now. I hope to God they haven’t talked her out of it. I hope to God she’ll be back soon and maybe, just maybe, her brother with her?
1970
I turn twelve. That September, I leave Mucknamore for the first time, am driven into Wexford town by Mrs D. to boarding school. Convent boarding school. The routine there is rigid, every hour accounted for with prayers, meals, classes, study, exercise or pastimes. The nuns are strict and expect “The Highest Standards of Behaviour”. They tower over us in their stiff black habits, shrinking us to silence, decorum, obedience.
Our day begins with the dormitory bell and Sister Elizabeth — we call her Lizzy — singing a chant at us, the same words every morning in her up-and-down voice: “Good morning, girls…Seven o’clock…Mass at half-past…Praised be Jesus.” Then she brings a font of holy water round from cubicle to cubicle, thrusting it through our curtains with a Latin blessing. We have to be up before she arrives at our cubicle in order to dip our fingers in the font, make the sign of the cross, answer her with an “Amen”. All the way round she harangues us: “Up now, girls, please…Take off your night clothes and wash yourselves properly…”
Deirdre Mernagh says Lizzie only says this so she can have a gawp at us in the nude as she goes round with the holy water. Lezzy Lizzie, she calls her. Dee is always saying things like that.
Once we are washed and dressed, we have to strip our
beds to the mattress, folding blankets, sheets and under-sheets across our chairs to “air” our beds. Then it’s downstairs for Mass, mantillas clipped onto our hair. The priest comes down to us from the local boys’ school and the nuns play altar boy, passing him his chalice and cruets, servants of the servant of God. Mass can take anything up to an hour, depending on which saint’s day it is. Every few weeks one of the girls, overcome with hunger, falls into a faint.
After breakfast, we are joined by the outside world in the form of day-girls and lay teachers for the school day. The lay teachers are not so strict, but the nuns are said to be better teachers.
“They’ve nothing else to be thinking about, that’s why,” says Dee, rolling her eyes. “No family, no boyfriends, no sex. Imagine.”
Dee loves saying the word Sex. Or Fuck. Or Ride. Or Bollox. Any word she’s not supposed to say. I am learning other words from her too, words that are not taboo, but that I never heard in Mucknamore. I now describe girls I like as “dead-on” or “the business”. Those who are boring are “drips”. Good things are “desh” or “deadly”; bad things are ‘woeful’. These words come from the town via the day-girls, but Dee picks them up and makes them her own.
We like to think we have more in common with the girls from town. As Dee puts it, we might be from the country but we’re not culchies. She comes from Oulart, a village in the north of Wexford that sounds even worse than Mucknamore. Her father is an “alco”, she says, and her mother worn to nothing trying to pretend that he isn’t. She turns them into a joke, laughing at her father’s drunkenness and her mother’s attempts to cover up.
