Yet it was with Marie, a quiet classmate of whom the nuns thought highly, that I managed to indulge the addiction to fear which I had contracted while trespassing with my mother. One day I persuaded her to try skipping school with me (this was called ‘mitching’), but I forget how we spent the stolen time. Perhaps I took her to visit some of my old acquaintances, like Mrs O’Reilly, several of whose doddery charges, I now realised, were amiably off their heads. Or perhaps our truancy was on one of the days when we walked down the coast to a stretch of rusted railway tracks which had been abandoned when the cliffs along which they ran became eroded. There were places where access roads to the beach ran under, and at right angles to, the tracks. They must once have been supported by some sort of girder but were now as airborne as telephone cables. Stepping out along yards of slim, unpropped and possibly crumbling track was pleasurably frightening, especially when Marie, standing some way off on terra firma, kept calling to me to come back, be careful, watch out, and remember that the road below me was paved with stones.
‘You’ll be killed,’ she moaned satisfyingly.
Eileen would have been no good as a companion here, where the risk was real, since she wouldn’t have let me run it. Besides, she was always busy now with her fairy tales (which I had outgrown), her garden and my small, but demanding, brother. Amazingly though, Marie let me persuade her to come with me on a more dangerous venture. There was a large cave at one end of the White Rock beach, used as a lavatory by swimmers. Its smell protected it, since nobody, other than myself and the anxious Marie, was prepared to walk through to the back, where the smell stopped and a number of underground passages fanned out into the dark. At least one was so narrow that we had to crawl through it on hands and knees and to come out backwards, since we couldn’t turn around. Another still narrower passage with a high roof led along a slippery clay shelf running halfway up an underground cliff, past the side of a possibly deep pool. The whole area was sculpted from compacted reddish mud, and we learned later that it had been a copper mine, though it had looked to us like blood on our first visits. Following the advice provided by adventure stories read in schoolgirl magazines, we brought along bicycle lamps, matches and candles, by which we would know, if they flickered out, that the air was no longer healthy. They never did, but the place was eerie, litter-free and, as far as we could tell, known to no one but us. Exploring it was an end in itself. We hadn’t expected to find bones or treasure, and had no practical purpose except to test our nerve and defy the adult world’s advice about being cautious and avoiding ‘useless, commercial trash’, which was how my parents described the school stories which, on the contrary and to our delight, had turned out to be so helpful. They didn’t supervise my reading at all closely, so I had often been enthralled by books found on their shelves which were clearly too grown-up for me, since their more exotic meanings remained opaque. Among these were The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Mr Norris Changes Trains, No Orchids for Miss Blandish and a novel by someone called Rayner Heppenstall, whom Seán must have known, for his novel was in galley sheets in our attic. Not quite understanding proved tantalising, and perplexity drew me on. It was a little like the excitement I felt when venturing into the copper mine, and reminded me too of the games I played with Jasmine. The books could have been written by near-aliens, or by the kindly, harmless, semi-human animals which she had invented for us to imitate so as to escape our banal selves. I don’t know whether my parents would have minded the odd selection I had made among their books if they had noticed it. Probably not, since most of my favourites were perfectly orthodox – I revelled in the adventure stories of G. A Henty, Baroness Orczy, Dickens, Hugo and Dumas Père, as well as in the polite world of Jane Austen and the entertainingly ordinary one of Richmal Crompton. The failure to warn me against less suitable books may have hinged partly on Seán’s dislike of the Censorship Board and partly on a Rousseauistic assumption that, just as falling into a fire was the best way of learning not to play with it, reading incomprehensible books would encourage better choices. At any rate, my parents’ only prohibition targeted ‘English trash’, by which they meant a paper called The Girls’ Crystal. They had not read it, but as it was for English children they suspected it of peddling alien values.
*
My third friend was Diana. A Protestant of a different sort from Jasmine, Diana was prim, slightly younger than myself, totally without a sense of humour and apt to deliver little speeches about manners, hygiene and the most appropriate way to blow one’s nose. It amused me to tease her by pretending to be a wild creature who had never even seen a handkerchief, but her readiness to believe this spoilt my fun. Which of us, I had to pause and wonder, was mocking the other? Surely she couldn’t be as prim as she seemed. Could she? She could. And yet it was she who got me into trouble with my school nuns. She lent me a book which was a source of unexpected scandal. The surprise was that this hadn’t happened until now, since some of my parents’ thinking would undoubtedly have upset the nuns. What I had not foreseen was that her book about someone called Darwin would do so even more. It was the first time I had come across his theory, so I elected to give my geography class the benefit of my discovery. The geography nun, who was older than the others, had decided, possibly with an eye to arranging short rests for herself, that in the course of the term, each girl in our class should prepare a brief talk on any topic she liked, so long as it had a connection with geography. I submitted the title ‘The Galapagos Islands’, which did not alert her to what was coming, so it was only after I had laboriously anatomised the unfamiliar heresy known as evolution that she began to worry. Perhaps she hadn’t been listening at first, for she let me talk on for quite a while before asking if what I was telling the class was supposed to be fact or fiction. Perhaps she had just remembered that my mother wrote fairy tales.
‘It’s science, Mother.’ You had to keep saying the word ‘Mother’ when you addressed a nun.
‘What sort of science? Let me see that book. Where did you get it?’
‘From a friend, Mother.’
‘A friend? What school does she go to?’
‘Glengara Park.’
‘That’s a Protestant school. Did you know that?’
‘Yes, Mother, but her parents are friends of my parents.’
That gave the nun pause. ‘Well,’ she decided, ‘I’ll have to get advice about this. Let me keep it for a few days.’
It turned out that evolution was erroneous and forbidden, and that the chaplain wanted a word with me. This news, I suspected, would not please the nun, who disliked priests or government inspectors or indeed anyone looking over her shoulder. Intrusiveness, even by other nuns, upset her, but her resentment applied most specifically to men.
‘Men,’ I remembered her exclaiming on an earlier occasion, while drawing a large, free-hand map of Ireland on the blackboard, ‘never give up a privilege. They hate letting women near the altar.’ Her hand wobbled with feeling as she said this, and I noticed that her Ireland was looking more and more like a cross between our rather chubby chaplain and a teddy bear. I was puzzled at priests – who else could she mean? – wanting to keep her away from the altar. ‘They don’t think,’ she warned, turning to address us, ‘that we can think for ourselves.’
I understood this bit, for my mother too liked to think for herself and, if advised to do something one way, would often do it in another. Sending me to school three years late was an example of this, and so was her failure to kit me out in the right uniform. Sometimes I wished she would do things like other people.
‘Who’s the little girl wearing England’s cruel red?’ a nun named Mother Fidelia had called out at assembly on my first day, ensuring that every head turned to stare at my scarlet hair ribbon.
‘You knew,’ I reproached Eileen when I got home. ‘You must have known it was the wrong colour.’
She was unabashed. ‘Ask that nun,’ she challenged, ‘where was she when your mother was fighting for independence.’
She was torn, though, for, while there was romance in despising the new ‘bourgeois’ Ireland, she wanted me to do well in it, so was unsure whether to scorn or join the new order. Ambition, for me, won, though there would be U-turns, like the times when she sent me out on to the road to collect droppings for her rose-beds. Due to the petrol shortage, horses, carts and old, mildewed cabs had by then been brought out of retirement, so my bucket was soon heavy with steaming, yellow horse dung, some of it still sweetly grassy and fresh. When I told her how worried I had been, lest someone from school see me scraping it off the tarmac, her response was always, ‘You should get rid of human respect.’ To help me do this, she might then sing The Red Flag, which had been written, she reminded me, by a County Meath man. I wasn’t sure whether she was indulging in self-parody, or if the parody was an excuse for savouring the corny but rousing words:
The people’s flag is deepest red.
‘Join in,’ she sometimes invited, forgetting or choosing to forget that I had no ear.
It shrouded oft our martyred dead …
During the Civil War, she and fellow members of Cumann na mBann – the IRA women’s auxiliary force – had sung that regularly while slow-stepping behind coffins at Republican funerals. Didn’t that prove that the English had no monopoly of the colour? Nor of aggression. Nuns, after all, could be very aggressive. Perhaps this came from living in a pack. Like wolves?
‘Be sure you tell me,’ she advised out of the blue, ‘if any of them give you trouble.’
‘Any of whom?’
‘Nuns.’
Confused and at cross-purposes, we stared at each other. In those days confusion was as common as mist.
Somewhat at random, I asked, ‘What is a community?’
I had been hearing the word at school which was strictly divided between ‘community rooms’ – off-limits to pupils – where the nuns ate and slept, and those where we had lessons. Any girl, it was whispered, who ventured into the nuns’ domain was violating the privacy of the brides of Christ and could be expelled. Perhaps even excommunicated? To see nuns in their underwear or with cropped heads uncovered would be a sacrilege.
Yet, it mightn’t be. A girl called Ann in the class below mine lived in a house whose garden bordered the convent grounds. Sometimes, she confided, she hid in the bushes which formed a barrier between the two properties and watched nuns bathing in a sea-water pool. The high tide filled it, surging in over rocks.
‘I saw Mother Fidelia,’ Ann told us, ‘wearing a long, thick nightdress and bobbing up and down in the water. That’s all any of them do. Maybe they think sport is worldly.’
‘Or maybe the nightdress is too tight?’
It wasn’t tight, she told us. It floated to the surface when the nun bobbed down.
I saw her other listeners try, as I was doing myself, to visualise this. We couldn’t help being fascinated. A taboo was being broken. And taboos in our twelve-year-old world – we must by now have been twelve – focused either on sex or, as in this case, on its rejection. That was what cropped heads and forbidden community rooms came down to. Sex was the satanic snake whose clammy neck the Blessed Virgin’s triumphant foot crushed in paintings hanging in convents all over the city. It was at once absent and present. Just visible under the hem of her lapis-blue gown, its sly emergence seemed to be part of herself.
Finding this thought too furtive for words, we averted our eyes from each other, and fell silent.
Turning to the safe topic of sleeves, a girl called Stella insisted that these could be too tight to permit swimming. ‘That,’ she reminded us, ‘was why women used to be allowed to serve underarm at tennis. Their sleeves were too tight at the armpits for them to raise their arms. You see that in old photos.’
‘How high did the nightdress float?’ another girl wondered. ‘Did it leave her legs bare?’
The imagined sight of Mother Fidelia’s legs, fish-pale in murky sea water, was fascinating. The limbs, Ann claimed, had been tightly joined and as neat as a mermaid’s tail. Mermaids must have died out like garments with tight armholes.
‘Isn’t that what your evolution heresy says happens?’ Stella remembered. ‘What, by the way, did the priest have to say about it when you saw him?’
‘Not a lot,’ I told her. ‘He asked why I wanted to think my ancestors were monkeys, and when I told him that that wasn’t what the book said happened, he didn’t listen.’
A pious girl said, ‘You’re lucky he didn’t burn it. Looking into things like that could be dangerous. So is spying on nuns.’
Ann, wanting the last word, said she had every right to sit in her parents’ garden and look wherever she chose. This was true, so, though letting property rights trump religion made us uncomfortable, we didn’t argue. She, who had actually glimpsed bare nunnish flesh, seemed less prurient than the rest of us, who had only imagined it – so how could we?
*
The religious order which owned our junior school wasn’t the only one to have snapped up big houses which had been sold off when the Free State took over. Its grounds sloped down to the edge of the sea, and relics of old finery subsisted indoors, especially between the tall windows of what might once have been a ballroom. The chief relic, a mirror surrounded by gilded carving, stretched from the top of a marble console table to a lofty ceiling. It might once have been part of a larger display which had been removed by the nuns as being too worldly. The mirror itself could not be removed, and they were clearly glad of this for, when interviewing parents, they boasted happily about their school’s charm. None of them, they were keen to point out, owned anything personally (‘Not even our clothes,’ they would say, and point to the ones they were wearing), for they had each taken a vow of poverty. That, though, did not prevent their rejoicing in the convent’s good fortune in having attractive surroundings for pupils to enjoy.
Mother Fidelia, as head of the junior school, was particularly prone to rejoice. She was a pretty nun about whom I sometimes dreamed. Her flowing habit reminded me of Maid Marian’s clothes in the film of Robin Hood, and, though sorry that the black habit was a touch funereal, I felt that this was compensated for by the strangeness – even mystery – of someone as pretty as she being a nun. So my feelings about her were mixed. Once or twice I began to develop a crush on her, only to remember and resent the ridicule to which she had exposed me on my first day in school. She hadn’t done anything like this again, because Eileen had made it her business to let her know that she would not tolerate my being bullied. She had visited the school, talked pleasantly about her experience working as a teacher in Boston and London, and established herself as someone who might, if provoked, make trouble. At first I didn’t understand that this was what she was doing even though, as she herself told me later, it was I who had signalled to her that this nun was dangerous. The incident with the red ribbon was only a small part of the picture which Eileen had been building up from my chatter. Having herself taught in a convent school in London, she was aware of the furtive and blatant improprieties that could go on in such places. In the English school, she told me years later, the head nun, a hard-nosed Kerry woman, had actually ordered one of the lay teachers to open the sealed envelopes containing state exam papers on the day of the maths exam, go through the questions with the girls and give them the answers. The teacher, being not only lay but also English and young, was so stunned by the experience that she did as she was told, then resigned from her job.
‘There was a conflict of loyalties,’ Eileen explained. ‘You get that with nuns. In the mind of a woman like that, keeping English rules would always take second place. She’d see helping Catholic pupils to do better than those in secular schools as her first duty.’
‘So she got away with cheating?’
‘The lay teacher’, Eileen guessed, ‘may have despised her, then felt ashamed of this and so been too deferential. I, being Irish, could have stood up to the nun, but the English woman couldn’t.’
‘But yo
u didn’t denounce her either?’
No, Eileen admitted. She hadn’t. She too had left soon after that to come back to Ireland.
I guessed that the old Irish hatred of traitors was the reason, but didn’t ask. Instead I said, ‘Well, there are no English people in our school.’
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