The Village

by Alice Taylor

  Waddling into the last few weeks of pregnancy I felt like a baby elephant, and one day I explained to Aunty Peg how cumbersome I felt.

  “What weight are you, child?” she demanded.

  “Ten and a half stone,” I answered.

  “What on earth are you complaining about?” she said laughing, “I’m twelve and a half stone and I’m not having anything! You’ll lose that extra weight a lot easier than I’ll lose mine.”

  Later, as I endured in hospital in Cork the agony of labour pains, I was not so sure I agreed with Aunty Peg. In the undignified position prescribed for childbirth, the pain I experienced bore little resemblance to the slight discomfort and pressure so delicately referred to in my manuals and magazines. This was sheer agonising pain, and the fact that the white-coated figures in the antiseptic production-line treated the top half of my body as purely incidental did nothing to make me feel that for them this was anything other than a mere exercise in time and motion. It was their time and I had to keep things in motion. The only thing to brighten my horizon was the sight of my ten toe-nails, which I had painted bright red before leaving home.

  Because the labour was a long-drawn-out affair and I knew nothing about relaxation and breathing technique, the whole business became a nightmare from beginning to end. Chilly, wet rubber gloves investigated my lower regions and injections dulled my mind. The birth took place somewhere at the end of a long, dark tunnel and the only feeling to penetrate its density was the searing pain of the incision the gynaecologist felt was necessary to allow proceedings to continue.

  When I came back to the living world again I was in my bed in the hospital ward, but still for some reason groaning with pain. An irritable nun peered down at me.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she demanded.

  “Pain,” I muttered in agony, not sure if it was real or if my mental faculties had deserted me.

  “You can’t be having pain,” declared the nun. “Your baby is born.”

  I was too muddled to protest that I was not experiencing pain by some perverse choice. However, she investigated matters, then said in annoyance to a nurse she had summoned: “This one is clotting. Take her back up.”

  And so I was rolled back onto the trolley like a bag of flour and taken up to the chamber of horrors I had just left. This time my stomach became a piece of pastry for moulding hands to flatten out, but my mind drifted down a long, hazy corridor and escaped thankfully into the world of oblivion.

  When I came back to reality I was in a quiet room looking out over a beautiful scene. Pink fingers of mid-summer dawn stretched across the city, and the glass wall of the roof-top room made me feel that I was high above the world. Mist rested along the river and the rising sun illuminated the grey and cream stone steeples that rose over the hillside houses. In a strange way I felt that I could almost fly out over this heavenly view, but then I saw that one arm was strapped to a drip and another to a blood-transfusion bottle. Beside me a very young and beautiful nun in a snow-white habit stood motionless. She looked so cold and remote that her face could have been carved in white marble, but when she turned and looked at me her expression was full of concern.

  “You are all right now,” she assured me gently.

  “It’s so peaceful up here,” I said.

  “Yes,” she smiled. “I love this place early in the morning.” As I drifted back into forgetfulness, she stood outlined against the city that rose out of the morning mists behind her, like an angel on the roof.

  My newborn son was entrusted to my arms for the first time and I waited for the glow of maternal bliss that was meant to suffuse me. But nothing happened. The baby squinted up at me distrustfully, as well indeed he might, because at that stage I was far from sure of my suitability for the call of motherhood. Soon, I also began to question the suitability of one of the nuns for the vocation of maternity nursing. I christened her Sister Rasp.

  The baby and I found it difficult to achieve harmony. He was not hungry when he was supposed to be hungry; he did not burp when he was supposed to burp, and he did not sleep when he was meant to either. All in all he knew nothing about routine or how to behave as a baby, but Sister Rasp was determined to mould both him and me into some kind of co-ordinated unit. Neither he nor I had a clue as to what was expected of us. I was further handicapped by a feeling of total inadequacy and fear at the awesome responsibility which, the abrasive sister assured me, was now mine.

  One afternoon when my son should have been filling his stomach he decided instead that he preferred a siesta, and snuggled down for a sleep. Sister Rasp descended on us.

  “Do you know something,” she declared, glaring down at me. “If you don’t straighten yourself out this child will die with the hunger when you go home.”

  But at that stage I felt that I might be dead before him. By the time each feed was over, perspiration and exhaustion were overwhelming me. I felt that having just mastered one marathon, another one was now beginning. Extensive stitching in delicate areas meant that getting in and out of bed was a feat in balancing and climbing with caution. Some of the chairs had removable bases, and this made it possible to sit down. I soon developed a sense of perfect positioning.

  I shared the hospital room with a fine robust woman who made me feel distinctly inadequate. She jumped in and out of bed like a steeplechaser, and her baby was a solid ten-pounder who gulped down his feeds, belched like an old man and slept like a log. I felt that if she had given him rashers and eggs for breakfast he would have polished them off. She was designed for child-bearing and motherhood, whereas I had decided that I was designed for neither.

  When the time came to go home I was delighted, feeling that I might function better on home ground with the moral support of Gabriel. But whether in hospital or at home the baby was a miniature time-bomb. He could choke, he could stifle, he could stop breathing. The potential for disaster was endless and I thought that it would be nothing short of a miracle if we both survived. On that first day at home I lurched from one crisis to another. Having got the first feed into him he promptly shot it up all over me, so we both had to change from the skin out. It was the first time I had ever changed the clothes of a tiny baby. His little bones looked like brittle twigs and I was so afraid that I would snap them that my movements were slow and hesitant. During the entire proceedings he yelled until his face was purple and waved his matchstick limbs madly. As he continued to cry I thought it best to change his napkin. That was a major operation, so I laid a book with instructive diagrams beside him on the bed. I was amazed that something which looked so simple could in fact be so complicated, but eventually the job was finished, and though the end product looked far more lumpy and untidy than its diagrammatical equivalent he was at least safely wrapped up in a napkin. But still he cried non-stop. I put him down. I picked him up. I walked around with him, but all to no avail. The wailing reached a crescendo like an orchestra in full flow. It filled the room, it filled the house and it filled my head until I thought it would explode.

  Sister Rasp had been right: he was going to die. I would be the first woman ever whose baby died because his mother lacked the capabilities that every normal mother possessed. In the midst of all this self-inflicted psychoanalysis the phone rang. It was my sister.

  “How are you getting on?” she enquired cheerfully.

  “Dreadful!” I wailed louder than the baby. “I fed him, he vomited; I changed him and I walked around with him, and he hasn’t stopped crying for two hours. I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.”

  “You have no time for that now,” my sister informed me. “Wait until he’s gone to sleep. Did you feed him again?”

  “No,” I answered.

  “Well do,” she said, “he’s probably hungry.”

  I did as instructed and blissful, wonderful peace descended upon me, just when I was beginning to think I would never hear the sound of silence again.

  During the weeks that followed the baby dominated our every waki
ng hour. As I moved around in a constant stupor of exhaustion, behind which a backlog of old tiredness continually built up, my unobtainable dream was simply to have a full night’s sleep. Often, in the small hours of the morning, as I sat on the old ottoman in the baby’s room, the quietness of the dark broken only by the sound of an occasional car, I wondered if there was anyone else awake in the village besides me. I began to think that I would never again have a life of my own.

  Gradually order encroached upon the chaos of first-time motherhood. Married sisters offered practical advice on the phone, the most valuable example of which was: “Put that baby into the pram and take him out the road every day for a walk. Not for his sake: for your own.” Eager to find ways to cope, I did so, and on one of the first of these walks I met Lizzy May, who had assured me on my arrival in the village that I was so thin and delicate that I would not do at all.

  Now she sized me up once more, and declared with the greatest satisfaction: “That baby is after making a woman out of you.”

  The lady in the village known simply as the Nurse lived a few doors up the street; she called regularly to help and advise but most of all to assure me that the things I was worrying about were all part of the normal pattern, and that babies were a lot tougher than they looked.

  As I gradually gained in confidence I stopped my constant checking to see if my infant was still breathing and slowly it dawned on me that we were both going to survive. After about three months he was sleeping round the clock, and as I no longer suffered from exhaustion I began to enjoy him. Gabriel proved very capable and took caring for the baby in his stride. Uncle Jacky adored him; I would often go into the baby’s room to find him looking down at the child in wonder. Never having had a baby in the house, he was absolutely fascinated by this new arrival, and so was I now that I had stopped worrying so much.

  Soon my enthusiasm swung too far in the other direction. One day one of my sisters looked me straight in the eye and said: “He is a beautiful baby and you find him very interesting, but don’t forget that to the rest of us he is not as beautiful nor as interesting – so for God’s sake don’t be boring me stiff with non-stop talk about him! There is nothing as dull as women who can talk about nothing but their children.” Only a sister could tell me something like that and remain a friend, and from then on I tried to remember her tart advice.

  When our second son was born I was surprised to find that I could now tackle with confidence an occurrence that three years earlier had disrupted my entire life. First-time motherhood is an experience that thankfully has to be endured only once in a lifetime.

  IS THAT IT?

  ON A WET Monday in late summer I was sitting at the table in our small kitchen surrounded by potato peelings and dirty dishes. Gabriel had gone back to work and our eldest little boy was busy making a facepack of mashed potatoes while his baby brother banged his spoon off the tray of his high chair. The windows needed cleaning, the floor cried out for a wash and the laundry-basket upstairs overflowed with dirty clothes. The garden outside the window was obliterated by sheets of driving rain, and water ran in streams down the fogged-up glass. Hemmed in by the four walls of the kitchen, my head vibrated to the tempo of the banging spoon.

  Wallowing in a sea of self-pity I thought: “Is that it?” Endless days of peeling potatoes, washing dirty clothes, and minding noisy children stretched ahead of me.

  A few weeks later a “For Sale” sign appeared on the gable-end of the corner house next-door. George had come to the conclusion that he was too old for running up and down ladders and had decided to retire and live with his relatives. It was a large, rambling three-storey house with a big yard and garden at the back. “This is it,” I thought. “We’ll buy it and start something.” What we were going to start I had no idea. One smart friend suggested a house of ill-repute, which, she assured me, would do well due to an absence of competition. Despite our lack of plans, we gathered together every penny we had and with the help of both our families we bought the corner house. Having bought it the next step was to decide what exactly we wanted to do with it, bearing in mind that we had no money for restoration. After making enquiries regarding grants we discovered that the tourist board, Bord Fáilte, was the only avenue open to us and, not quite knowing what to expect, we wrote to them and sat back to await developments.

  Some weeks later, on a cold, wet, miserable winter’s evening, just as I was about to bath my two grubby, tired and cranky children and put them to bed, the doorbell rang. I went to answer it, hoping that it was not somebody who had to be invited in and entertained.

  Outside stood two well-groomed young men. They informed me that they were from Bord Fáilte and had come to view the premises about which I had been in correspondence with their office. Tucking one child under my arm and taking another by the hand, I led the Bord Fáilte executives around to the corner house. Any old house bereft of furniture and left empty for a period does not look its best, but as well as that I had strung a temporary clothes-line across the Dickensian kitchen and from it a line of nappies hung like grey ghosts in the shadows. As I led these impeccably-dressed men around the dusty rooms and up the creaking stairs to the dark attic, I suddenly saw it through their eyes. How shabby the whole place looked! From the expression on the face of the slightly older man I could see that he was wondering what this crazy female, already overburdened with two fretful children, intended to do with this rambling old house.

  He placed his polished leather briefcase on a dusty window-sill, snapped it open and sifted through some official-looking documents.

  “Well now! To bring this place up to the required standard for a registered guest-house you are talking about an investment of about twenty thousand pounds,” he informed me matter-of-factly.

  “Twenty thousands pounds,” I repeated parrot-like, trying to keep the shock out of my voice and the shattered look off my face. He might as well have said twenty million as far as I was concerned.

  Then, as if to drive the final nail in the coffin where he had lain my dreams, he concluded, “You are planning this at a very difficult time, what with the present credit squeeze in the banks. They are not giving out any money right now, not even for necessities – not to mention something like this.” He waved his hand dismissively at the peeling wallpaper and thumped his young, aggressive heel on a sagging floorboard. It creaked in protest. Then, having informed me that I should employ an architect on their approved list in order to qualify for a grant, the two dashing young men sat into their car and swept out of the village.

  The following week the list of architects arrived by post. I got on the phone and tried to choose an understanding architect who would prove a pleasant working companion. It was almost like choosing a husband because I felt that our whole future depended on him. One came out the following day to view the premises, and he turned out to be a charming man of middle years. His attitude was so helpful and positive that I began to think that the creation of a guest-house might yet be possible. I tentatively mentioned the twenty thousand pounds estimate and he smiled sympathetically, “Ah well,” he said, “we might be talking about half of that.” But that was still big money, so the bank manager was about to become the next man in my life.

  Up to then bank managers were to me an unknown species. I imagined them rather romantically as portly gentlemen with gold watch-chains draped across their chests, who lived behind high mahogany counters deep in the hallowed recesses of the bank where they sat in brown leather armchairs consulting weighty financial ledgers. They had had no bearing on my lifestyle because my financial resources had never necessitated the services of a financial institution. As thrift had never been my strong point, my pocket had never been more than a temporary resting place for my liquid assets. But all that was about to change.

  The mahogany desk was the only thing that came up to expectations in his office: the manager looked like a footballer, and a grumpy one at that. Despite the gloomy forecasts of our two Bord Fáilte officials, I s
ailed into the bank full of enthusiasm, but the banker was not long in pouring cold water over me.

  “Do you realise,” he demanded, “that there is a severe credit squeeze on?”

  “Well, we heard about it,” I admitted, “but we need the money now whatever about the credit squeeze.”

  Because Gabriel was more of a realist than I, he had sheets of figures prepared. As the bank manager pored over them he shot another arrow.

  “What makes you think that there is an opening for a large guest-house in your little village?”

  I assured him that tourism was on the move, but he looked unbelievingly at me across his wide desk. I began to feel my confidence dwindling into a cold hard lump of rejection in the pit of my stomach. Bank managers, I decided, were very bad for the morale. The result of this unsatisfactory interview was that he would apply to head office for a loan, but, he assured us, he was very doubtful of our chances. He told us to ring him on a certain day when he expected that he would have the head office’s decision.

  Gabriel made the phone call while I stood beside him, praying. But God must have had his phone off the hook that day because our application was turned down. I stood rooted to the floor with shock and disappointment. Even though the bank manager had warned us that our chances were poor, I had still believed that the loan would come through. The alternative was unthinkable. All our hopes and the money we had scraped together were tied up in the corner house, and without development it would become a white elephant.

  We went back to the bank the following day and after much negotiating came away with a loan of hundreds instead of thousands. It was far short of our requirements but enough to get moving, and we were determined to make a start. In the meantime the architect had begun to draw the plans and gradually our guest-house began to take shape. The entire plan was for seventeen bedrooms – as it had to be above a certain number to qualify for a grant – but this was to be reached in two stages. Part one reckoned on eight bedrooms opening in the first year, and the remainder would follow the year after.