Trespassers

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘Just as well.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Later, though, it struck me that there were one or two pupils from England who at the beginning of the war had been evacuated to the school and who, because their parents were far away, were vulnerable to bullying. One of the boarders had told me that Mother Fidelia patrolled the dormitories armed with a cane and sometimes savagely beat girls whom she caught talking after lights out – even more savagely if she caught them going into each others’ beds.

  Mother Fidelia? I was astounded.

  ‘She’s different with us,’ said the boarder, ‘from how she is with you. And she’s especially hard on the girls from England.’

  One night, hearing me talk in my sleep about cruelty and possibly worse, Eileen woke me up. I fell asleep again, however, almost as soon as she left the room, and plunged into a dream in which Maid Marian was beating me and turning into a nun. Confused by my own feelings, I began to feel guilty. Apparently I then went back to talking in my sleep, but when Eileen questioned me about my nightmare at breakfast, I said I had forgotten what it had been about.

  I hadn’t, though.

  In school the day before, there had been whispers about some trouble that had broken out in the dormitories, about which the boarders didn’t want to tell us. They were clearly shaken, and a girl whom I shall call Jill, one of the evacuees, was led into our classroom. We had been drawn up in a circle and she was now made to stand in the middle. She had pink weals on her legs, was wearing a dunce’s cap, and her face was completely distorted and swollen. This terrified us. Such treatment had not been seen before. Not anyway by me, but not, I think, by any of the other day girls either.

  ‘She’s bad, a very bad girl,’ said pretty Mother Fidelia gravely. ‘I want each of you to say so in Gaelic.’ Then she pointed to the member of our class who was to start doing this and did.

  ‘Is cailín dána í,’ the girl said sullenly. It was clear that she disliked doing so. ‘She’s a bad girl.’ Our Gaelic wasn’t up to dealing with situations of any complexity – and anyway we didn’t know what this one was about.

  ‘Louder,’ commanded the ruthless Mother Fidelia. ‘Say it again.’

  The girl did, and so did the next and the next, until half the circle had agreed that Jill was bad and so, by implication, deserved what she had so clearly got. Then it was my turn. Impotence numbed and strangled me. I felt that I had somehow brought this on the victim by indulging fantasies about the horrible chameleon nun. She was, I now saw, a horrible woman, and the gleam of evil in her was what I had mistaken for charm. Whatever she was up to had nothing to do with keeping order, lessons, or the ‘duty towards God’, which I had heard her claim as her reason for punishing bad children for the good of their souls.

  ‘Say it,’ she ordered me impatiently when I hesitated, and gave me a look which at once reminded me of Eileen’s warning about her being dangerous but also of the useful fact that I – was the nun forgetting this? – had back-up. ‘Is cailín maith í,’ I said fast and loudly before I had time to change my mind. ‘She’s a good girl.’ The pious bully, being as aware as I was that things could now turn nasty and even get into the press, spat out the word ‘stupid’ and moved quickly on to the next pupil. I knew I hadn’t done much. My attempt at solidarity was not only inadequate, but might have hurt the victim by reminding her that other people had more support than she. This, of course, is speculation, and I never knew what she felt, as she neither blinked nor looked either at me or anyone else. She was totally expressionless, seemed inert and frozen and probably wasn’t thinking of us at all. Why would she? We couldn’t help her. Her parents were in England and must have been telling each other that that nice, friendly Mother Fidelia was looking out for their daughter who must surely be better off in neutral Eire than she would have been living with them under German bombs. By now, however, the war was coming to an end, and that stickler for etiquette, de Valera, had already astonished the world by paying a visit to the German minister, Dr Hempel, to condole with him on Hitler’s death.

  Meanwhile I left the school, though I forget quite how this came about. The incident with Jill must have taken place shortly before the start of the summer holidays – the nuns’ sea-bathing indicates that. What must have happened was that Eileen’s intuitions about Mother Fidelia, sharpened by whatever ravings of mine she heard when I was asleep, led her to remove me before the end of term. So I never heard how the trouble between nun and victim was resolved, because by the autumn I was attending a new school which had just opened in Monkstown, some miles north of my old one. It was run by Sacred Heart nuns and was calmly efficient, unlike the anarchic and intermittently brutal one I had left. It was also slightly out of line with the mainstream of Irish education. This pleased Eileen, even though the divergence was to the right rather than the left. Despite her devotion to The Red Flag, she was relieved to find that my new teachers would be as different as possible from the erratic peasants in habit and wimple on whom she and I now turned our backs.

  *

  Memories of post-revolutionary France affected the Monkstown curriculum, which was short on Gaelic, strong on plainchant and required us to curtsy to the top nuns who, like my mother, adopted a high moral tone. Cramming they despised, for they aimed, they said, to educate, and exams were nothing to them if, despite getting us late, they could turn us into ladies and true Children of the Sacred Heart.

  ‘You will all have to be unmade and remade,’ said our Mistress of Studies as coolly as if we had been so many jumpers whose kinked wool she needed to unpick. It was clear that she knew she could do it, but also that she would have her work cut out. We would later discover that she had been chosen as a troubleshooter and brought from one of the order’s houses in Scotland to set the new school on its feet and form us into a unit. She was a Latin teacher, too, and, as most of us had done no Latin at all, whereas my class should – if I remember aright – have been starting our third year of it, she had to start us off and speed us ahead to catch up. Which she did. She was good at her job and, now that Ireland has had two successful women presidents, it strikes me frequently that in the years when women like her had few opportunities to use their talents, there must have been many mute inglorious Mary Robinsons hidden away in convents. Our Mistress of Studies was one of them. Her name was Mother Hogan and she could have run the country.

  She impressed my mother and, more surprisingly, Seán, who had till then taken no interest in my education. Now, however, he wrote Mother Hogan a letter saying, among other things, that he hoped the new school would have some lay teachers, since girls of my age might need access to women with some experience of the world to whom they could turn for advice.

  Mother Hogan invited him to tea. I don’t know what they said to each other, but the meeting seemed to have been a success. They must have amused and challenged each other, for I think there were subsequent teas. She wanted him to know that nuns were less unworldly than he thought, but may have been hampered in her argument by convent etiquette. If she stuck to the rules, she would not have had tea herself, but would have sat there watching him drink his. The tray, unless she countermanded the usual arrangement, would have arrived with a single cup and saucer, and departing from custom might have been tricky. I wonder if she did arrange for a second cup. I should have asked him.

  Since he was in and out of trouble over libel, and had acquired a reputation as an anticlerical who didn’t hesitate to assail the pillars of Church and State, it may seem odd that I was being taught by nuns at all, let alone by those belonging to an order which – as they would proudly inform us – had been founded to prepare the mothers of France to teach their sons to resist revolutionary thinking.

  It was not odd, though, in the Forties.

  I had to go to a convent because in those days schools in Ireland were denominational; almost none were mixed; and if you went to the wrong one, as my small brother did when a Protestant kindergarten opened across the road from our house, a
priest appeared on the doorstep to protest. Religion was a tribal badge, and my parents wanted neither to leave the real Ireland, nor to relinquish their feeling for the ideal one whose image had animated the nationalist struggle.

  Yet it is fair to say that Sacred Heart schools were less nationalistic than others. The order’s Mother House was in Rome, and the curriculum approved there could probably not find much space for Gaelic. This context is unlikely to have been mentioned over the tea cup – or cups. But I could tell that the conversation had been enjoyable. I could tell it by Mother Hogan’s brightening when she mentioned meeting Seán, and his doing the same when he mentioned her. He always liked clever women.

  *

  Patrick, you chatter too loud

  And lift your crozier too high,

  Your stick would be kindling soon

  If my son Osgar were by.

  If my son Osgar and God

  Wrestled it out on the hill

  And I saw Osgar go down

  I would say your God fought well.

  Frank O’Connor, Three Old Brothers and Other Poems, 1936.

  Was St Patrick, Ireland’s first bishop, arrogant, and did he, like many of his successors, lift his crozier too high? My guess is that, as he was more myth than man, nobody knows, especially as I recall my father’s great friend, the Celtic scholar D. A. Binchy, telling us that colleagues of his had come to think that there could have been two or even three St Patricks. Of more immediate interest here is the likelihood that O’Connor’s poem about the pagan Oisín (pronounced Usheen) defying the saint may have been fuelled by anger against recent Irish bishops.

  Politically, their lordships were often autocratic. They had condemned the Fenians in the 1860s and during the Civil War ruled armed resistance to the new, legally elected government to be immoral, thus virtually excommunicating the whole Republican side. Some went further, including the bishop of Cork, who instructed his clergy to refuse Republicans the sacraments. This rankled bitterly with Seán’s and Frank’s comrades who, when defeated, on the run, and at risk of being shot out of hand if caught with guns, must frequently have felt in acute need of absolution lest, by dying in a state of mortal sin, they go to a worse hell than the one they were in, which was after all what the bishops had ordered their flock to believe. Knowing this, a number of Cork priests, some of whom may have had Republican sympathies, disobeyed their bishop whose ukase, as Seán later wrote, ‘was considered by all Republicans an abuse of clerical power. It was never to be forgotten or forgiven.’

  He himself did not forgive it, and when my brother and I were small, one of Seán’s best-kept secrets was that, if he was a Catholic at all, he was no longer a full-time one. As there was nothing unusual about members of a household going to different churches, and there were three within walking distance of our house, it would be years before I guessed that on Sunday mornings he and Binchy were likely to be walking out Dún Laoghaire Pier when the rest of us supposed them to be at Mass: a shift designed to avoid giving scandal to Binchy’s housekeeper, his and our neighbours and my brother and me. A similar ambivalence must have driven generations of Irishmen to take similar measures, some of whom believed in but no longer practised their religion, while others disbelieved but shrank from breaking with their community. Despite endless conversations on the topic, I don’t know to this day to which category Seán belonged and I suspect that neither did he.

  He was tough when it came to criticising the actual Church and State, but all toughness melted before the memory of his and Eileen’s love affair with Gaelic culture and their first encounter with it by the shores of Lake Gougane Barra. So on wartime holidays we went back regularly to remember their youth, as old friends foregathered and danced and sang to old tunes, and Father Traynor, who planned his summer visits to coincide with theirs, said Mass in Gaelic in the small lake-island church which Seán attended, presumably more from friendship than fervour.

  Years later I learned that anti-clericalism had been infinitely harsher elsewhere than it ever was in Ireland. The French Revolution, after all, had seen priests guillotined; Mexico, to this day, forbids any but Franciscans to wear clerical dress in public, and I met a man in Italy whose parents had given him the name Ateo, meaning ‘Atheist’. An Irish equivalent – ‘Atheist Murphy’, say, or ‘Atheist Ó Faoláin’ – is imaginable only as a bar-room joke. This is partly because anti-clericals often remained friendly with ordinary priests who, in relaxed moments, were apt to confide that they suffered more from overbearing bishops than the laity ever did. And indeed it was when Seán went into print with jokes about how Bishop Browne of Galway bullied his clergy that Browne launched a libel action. Such was my mother’s innocence and my own (I am going back now to when I was eight), that we were slow to see the danger of this, for I clearly remember us being cheerily hailed, when out walking, by young priests who asked us to relay their congratulations to Seán on his having stood up to the bully. We agreed light-heartedly. Soon, though, it grew clear that, given Browne’s resources and the bias of English libel laws in favour of plaintiffs, Seán could not fight him in court. Neither did his publishers intend doing so. On the contrary, in a letter to The Irish Press, they disowned and apologised for his book. And I, as a child moved by impotent fury, became an anticlerical of the extreme sort which Italians call a mangiaprete or ‘priest-eater’.

  Seán had been rash – or else had been trailing his coat. ‘Truly,’ he had written of Galway, ‘I never met such a place for scandalous gossip … I wonder, is it libellous to repeat the sad tale of the bishop and the curate, as I heard it in a Galway pub?’

  One can only marvel at Seán’s chutzpah. He proceeded to describe Browne as ‘an arrogant-looking man, much in favour, I gather, with the de Valera government; not so much in favour with the clergy.’ ( Who, it is clear from what follows, were forbidden to go to the cinema.) ‘At any rate,’ Seán reported, ‘one afternoon the blonde at the box-office heard a voice over the telephone asking if Father X was inside at the show. On asking whose the voice was and on hearing the thunder of “This is the bishop” the blonde said, “Yerrah g’wan out of that! Are you thrying to pull my leg?” Finally the bishop had to drive down himself, and the terrified blonde was sent in for Father X, who of course said to her, “Yerrah g’wan out of that! Are you thrying to pull my leg?” At last, so the story would have us believe, he was induced to come out, and the poor man found his bishop waiting in the foyer like a figure of the Wrath of God. One version of this awful parable for sinners is that the bishop whirled him off straightaway to his new parish at the back of God-speed …’

  The above extract is from An Irish Journey, a travel book on which Seán and his old Wicklow neighbour, Paul Henry, collaborated and which Longman published in 1940, Paul supplying illustrations and Seán the text. The bit about the bishop echoes an oral tradition which contrasts with the high flown Yeatsian vision of Ireland. It strikes me, though, as I write this, that Yeats’ s Crazy Jane poems echo the oral tradition too. He could be earthy when he chose – and give hell to bishops.

  Here is Jane’s view:

  The bishop has a skin, God knows.

  Wrinkled like the foot of a goose,

  (All find safety in the tomb.)

  Nor can he hide in holy black

  The heron’s hunch upon his back,

  But a birch-tree stood my Jack:

  The solid man and the coxcomb.

  But now Yeats had died, and the gentry who had presided over the Irish literary revival had passed the baton to native writers whose taste was for the specific, the realistic and the down-to-earth.

  That same year, along with Peadar O’Donnell, one of Ireland’s rare Marxist activists, Seán launched The Bell, a monthly magazine which promised that, with readers’ help, it would focus on ‘the realities of Irish life’. ‘This is Your Magazine’ was the title of Seán’s first editorial, inviting contributions which might help it evolve. ‘That’, wrote Seán, ‘was why we chose the name The Bell
. Any other equally spare and hard and simple word would have done; any word with a minimum of associations … All our symbols have to be created afresh …’ Meaning, I suppose, that they wanted no rags of old rhetoric, either Celtic or pious. Seán and Peadar were making a stand against the Age of Pretence. What The Bell needed, they told possible collaborators, were documentary articles about aspects of Irish life which the authors themselves knew at first-hand. Isolated by neutrality, Irish writers had both a need and an opportunity to renew themselves.

  So, in among fiction and verse, the magazine published pieces which reported on, among other topics, the experience of living in an Irish slum, an orphanage and a prison, schoolteaching, migrant workers, a new hat factory set up in Galway by a Jewish refugee, the art of window-dressing, and three extracts from a forthcoming book recording the thoughts of the bilingual Tim Buckley, one of the last of the Seanachaí or story-tellers who lived close to Gougane Barra. Buckley, known as ‘the tailor’, though it had been some time since he had worked at the trade, was famous for his mental independence, which locals and visitors alike crowded into his small cabin to enjoy. However, when a writer called Eric Cross made a record of the tailor’s musings and published them in English with an introduction by Frank O’Connor, the book was promptly banned as ‘indecent and obscene’. Not only were the bewildered old tailor and his wife, Ansty, now boycotted by neighbours who grew ashamed of having enjoyed the old man’s salty wit for years, but worse still ‘three louts of priests’, as O’Connor described them, came round and forced the old man to go down on his knees and burn his copy of the book in his own fireplace. Meanwhile the scandal sparked off a sanctimonious four-day debate in the Irish Senate, reading the official record of which was, wrote O’Connor, ‘like a long, slow swim through a sewage bed’.