My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress

by Christina McKenna

  St Colm’s High boasted more teachers, more pupils and more space than Lisnamuck PS. It was a large, bright building with endless corridors and flights of stairs. In keeping with the Catholic ethos it was named after a saint. St Colm’s picture hung in the foyer and we prayed to the good man each morning to help us through the day.

  I studied nine subjects. There were the essential English and maths. Next came history and geography, which I had no great interest in, since my primary-school experience had failed to arouse in me any curiosity about the world’s past, or what it might be made of. There was the pervasive RE of course, and three other subjects that caused me to have nightmares: cookery, Latin and PE.

  I wore a grey and turquoise uniform, was given a numbered peg and locker and had to wear slippers while in the school building, to protect the floors. Thus packaged, I became the poet’s ‘cog in a machine, a thing with one face’.

  We switched lessons at the sound of a shrill bell and had to walk in file on the left side of corridors and stairs, to prevent collisions. After a year my inculcation was complete; we moved and talked, shut up and jumped to the peal of shouts or the sting of slaps. School life, to my chagrin, continued to be cruel. There were quite a number of Master Bradley clones – mostly men – who sent waves of fear through me, and a number of lenient, patient women like Miss McKeague, who helped to make life bearable.

  The school’s then headmaster, Mr Gunn, was a robust gentleman who wore a grey suit and took a keen interest in our personal hygiene. He had need to: we were by and large a dirty, lumpen lot. Each morning after prayers he’d stand on the podium in the assembly hall and obdure us to ‘hop into a rubber basin’ when we got home and give ourselves a good rub down with soap and water. This instruction was clearly ignored of course as everyone stood about yawning and wishing it was 3pm so we could be released into the clean outdoors again.

  Master Gunn was none the less dauntless in his crusade. Every day he blustered afresh, patrolling the corridors with his head held high, no doubt to escape the pong emanating from cloakbays, toilets and changing-rooms. He had a keen nose, and that keenness was his scourge.

  When he retired, a tyrant filled his shoes. Master Maloney was a maths teacher whom I’d had the great misfortune to encounter during my first months in the ‘big school’. He made it obvious from the start that he did not appreciate my lack of understanding in maths. Regularly he would demonstrate his displeasure with a well-aimed blow to my head of the type that made my hair stand on end and sent hair slides and glasses skittering across the floor. I often suffered the indignity of having to get down on all fours to retrieve them.

  In fact he possessed all the qualities of Master Bradley: he was cold, harsh and unfeeling. And, like Bradley, Maloney preferred to express his ire through the tactile immediacy of the stick or his bare hand.

  He was a redoubtable presence, precise in manner and speech, who never wasted energy or time on the frivolity of smiles or small talk. His only pleasure was his cigarette. After a terse exposition of the topic on the blackboard, he’d set us a problem to solve, and retire to his desk for a smoke.

  The red Silk Cut was lit and enjoyed with the ease of a voluptuary. There was an integrated flow of unhurried actions: his left hand rose and rested by turns as the smoke was imbibed and expelled into the fraught room.

  I had the misfortune to be seated in the front row, under Maloney’s stinging stare and the smarting clouds of smoke. I’d sit there wondering what on earth I was supposed to do and knowing that if I asked his help it would simply bring down his wrath more quickly on my head. So I’d toil with the pencil, making a dog’s dinner of wretched angles or quadratic equations, and quiver silently until the cigarette was spent.

  Fortunately I didn’t have to suffer his fury for too long. His appointment to principal excused him from his teaching duties. From then on I’d see him at assembly time and at breaktime, padding the corridors with the stealth of a tiger, on the scent of troublemakers. Occasionally he’d arrest some hapless boy, seizing him by the earlobe and frogmarching the victim into his office for a mauling.

  When I look back I am amazed at the barbarousness with which male teachers were allowed to hit little girls. That we were more fragile and felt pain more keenly than boys did not seem to matter. All pupils – defenceless children – were at the mercy of the moods and tantrums of certain teachers, who could not bring themselves to think of their charges as individuals. We conformed, or we paid a heavy price. I remember being slapped brutally and sent outside the door for innocently smiling to myself. On another occasion the same man called me out from the lavatory where I was combing my hair, to belt me several times across the face. This was no more than an exertion of power – and a naked abuse of that power. Is it any wonder that there is such anarchy in schools these days? The pupils of my era are taking their revenge through their own offspring. The dreadful cycle continues.

  Maloney punished the females in a different manner from boys. In our case his hand would become a blurring paddle, slapping the cheeks from side to side with unimaginable swiftness, and finishing with that final hair-raising blow to the head. Hair lacquer was the only cosmetic we could get away with using in those days; it was invisible and thus undetectable. Yet no matter how thick you sprayed it on it didn’t offer sufficient buffering power against the Maloney swipe. Girls carried big cans of Silvikrin (‘strong hold’) in their schoolbags, to minimise the damage.

  There was cruelty aplenty in the cookery class too. Our teacher Miss Sharp sizzled and bubbled as much as the contents of her saucepans. She hated everybody, it seemed, and loathed me in particular. I was too dull, too plain, and presumably too witless for her, and so she made my life as miserable as she could. What she did to fruit and veg she did to me: chopping, crushing, grating and grinding. After each lesson my confidence lay in the bin with the scraps and the skins and the debris.

  Once inside her room there was no escape. She followed my every move and blunder, lashing out at the spilt sugar, the burnt buns, the broken pastry, the stewing pan of custard. I committed every culinary sin imaginable, smashing and burning my way through that horrid lesson.

  She had a handful of favourites in the class and the rest of us were on a sliding scale of preference, varying with her mood. Susan was overweight and shy. Mary-Jane was unkempt. Fiona had a stammer. All these beautiful, blameless girls, through no fault of their own, were targets. With hindsight I realise that Miss Sharp, like Master Bradley, probably hated herself and hated her job, and we pupils bore the brunt of this frustration. Nothing we did was right and, on the rare occasions when we did succeed, we never got the praise we so desperately craved.

  PE was tolerable because the teacher was understanding and did not feel the need to make me or anyone else an object of ridicule. But I hated the rigour that those sports demanded. I was not a runner or jumper or batter of balls. I was a clumsy, bashful girl for whom even the activity of talking was an ordeal.

  The real ordeal, however, took place not on the playing field but when the games had ended. I had to change in front of other girls – and nobody, not even my sisters, had prepared me.

  My mother had told me nothing about my maturing body. Anything ‘down there’ was not up for discussion in our house. Breasts and periods came without warning. I had deduced that there must be something terribly wrong with these unwelcome developments and knew not to go asking.

  My mother’s voice would drop a note or two when discussing any such matters with the district nurse. Mrs Muck-Spreader called regularly for tea and gossip and a good old hour of dirt-dishing, before moving on to continue her gossiping in a house down the road.

  ‘That daughter of Mary Katie’s has another bun in the oven. Isn’t it terrible she can’t conduct herself?’

  ‘Aye, God it’s a shockin’ thing altogether with these young girls.’ Of course the baker (or indeed the butcher or the candlestick-maker) who put the bun in the oven in the first place never came in for
criticism; it was always the young woman’s fault. This was the era of the lowered voice and raised eyebrows where sex and the private lives of others were concerned.

  There were other ominous signs too. If two actors made to kiss on the TV, mother would be out of her seat like a spring-loaded marionette to change the channel before things got too steamy. Then we’d have to listen to a stream of invective that would have made Mary Whitehouse proud.

  ‘You’re not watchin’ any of that smut as long as I’m here!’ she’d cry. ‘What’s the world comin’ to when you can’t sit down to watch a decent film but that dirt has to come into it? That TV’ll raise the divil, so it will.’

  On Sunday evenings we’d have to sit through a succession of boring programmes: Z-Cars, Dr Finlay’s Casebook, Sunday Night at the London Palladium, hoping against hope that we’d be allowed to watch The Tom Jones Show at10.30. But now father became the censor. Just as Tom was beginning a gyrating romp through It’s Not Unusual he’d be on his feet.

  ‘You’re not watching that dirty oul’ bugger in this house,’ he’d mutter, switching off the set – and mother would helpfully suggest that we all get down on our knees to say the rosary.

  Even then I suspected that it was Tom’s padded ‘down there’ that caused father to become so surprisingly alert. He was up and off the couch with an unnatural swiftness, not at all in keeping with his character.

  On reflection I’m amazed that Irish men and women from that era ever got round to being intimate at all; and the fact that they did – well, is it not a miracle in itself, begod?

  My young mind was thus given yet another phobia to deal with: the fear of womanhood; and I muddled along blindly, developing and bleeding in a fog of ignorance. It would be a long time before sex education was introduced in schools.

  I recall one occasion when the district nurse made a visit to the needlework lesson to show, with the aid of a plastic doll, how to bath a baby. A lesson or two in the functions of reproduction would have served as a helpful preliminary. We girls might have benefited had we been taught to connect the mysterious menarche with babies – but no, that would have meant letting us into the great secret of sex.

  The more I wanted to hide from the world the more it wanted to intrude. I felt like an outcast who tagged along after the others, trudging in the wake of all that vivacity and frolic, bullied by exclusion. I longed for the animated lightness that would loosen all my tense limbs, and make me bounce and dash and toss my head back and be careless and untrammelled and free.

  But I was not pretty enough to be lingered over, not clever enough for praise; I was kept from both by the weight of fear at home and at school, and rooted in a limbo of self-doubt. It was reinforced in the looks and behaviour of my classmates and again in the eyes of those teachers who either ignored me or disliked me.

  I made friends with another cast-off like myself. Catherine was also a farmer’s daughter and poor in most things too. She matched my specs and spots with blunt hair and very red cheeks. Neither of us possessed the status symbols necessary for acceptance into the club: furry pencil-cases, diamanté hair slides, an identity bracelet with one’s name inscribed. We were plain and dowdy, the products of ignorant fathers and harassed mothers.

  But we muddled along as best we could, clinging together like two flailing swimmers in a treacherous ocean, straining and spluttering under the force of the crushing verve and push of the ‘happening’ townies – the girls from Draperstown. Catherine and I pooled our resources and plodded our precarious way through thick and thin; we were the two clots who sat together, stuck together, ate together, played together, all this innocent unity compounding the felony of our weaknesses. Catherine and I needed each other. There was true strength in that bond; together we held a flimsy kind of power.

  Coeducational schools are bad news for girls; they experience the chauvinism and hegemony of the male too early. The less clever boys – and St Colm’s had a great many – attempted to camouflage their shortcomings by dominating and intimidating us girls. They swaggered like little sweaty animals of the lower orders, sniffing us out in order to cast lewd comments about our swelling breasts and bums. Those breasts that went unnoticed by my mother became points of intense interest in the schoolyard.

  I was 12 and hated the male of the species with a raw and extravagant passion. How could I be ‘friends’ with such tormenting little brutes? Master Bradley and father gave me pain, my brothers pulled my hair and gave me grief. In my young head the male reared up as a fearful prospect, a figure to be approached with caution. They were capricious, impulsive; hazards that could break in on me at any time and destroy my whole raison d’être.

  I cultivated the art of becoming invisible, editing my speech and gestures. I longed for my life to be a series of short, still days with the sun and the birds and the clouds and the green unfolding hedgerows: a natural world to grow calm in. I yearned for a world without the sharp realities of home and school, a place to be alone in.

  That gathering danger was forever on my mind. It followed me home from school and woke me from my slumber, and sometimes in the night I thought I heard that ‘knocking visitor’ under the bed.

  The dark was talking to the dead;

  The lamp was dark beside my bed.

  I never believed I could enjoy school. Those first four years with Miss McKeague brought joy, but those that followed lowered me into the depths of despair. From an early age there was the unspoken implication that life was not to be enjoyed but suffered. The unhappy adults around me had themselves grown up with this flawed philosophy and so could offer me no alternative.

  In St Colm’s, however, I was fortunate to have two teachers who would point me in a completely new direction: Miss Henry, who taught art, and Miss Maguire, my English teacher. The one gave me a thirst for language and the other a yen for colour; together they instilled in me a longing to explore those twin creative fields, a longing that’s never left me.

  English and art were the touchstones that led me into a new and sustaining world of culture, a world I never knew existed. For the first time I was told that I was good at something. Those words of praise and encouragement flowed through me like a benediction. Suddenly I mattered; I was facing the creative in me. Those good women had kindled flames.

  In my English class I encountered the poetry of Seamus Heaney for the first time. He was born and raised in Bellaghy, a few miles from my home. The publication of his collection Door into The Dark coincided with my third year at school. Suddenly, in his hands, the sublunary became sacred, the monotony of the elements spoke with an astonishing freshness.

  Rain comes down through the alders,

  Its low conducive voices

  Mutter about let-downs and erosions

  My farming father became ‘an expert’:

  His eye

  Narrowed and angled at the ground,

  Mapping the furrow exactly.

  And my domestic mother an occasion of handsome endeavour:

  Now she dusts the board

  With a goose’s wing,

  now sits, broad-lapped,

  with whitened nails

  and measling shins.

  The poet exulted in an environment I’d never noticed before, and burnished otherwise dull images until they dazzled me. I wanted to write like that and had the effrontery, at the age of 14, to think I could.

  Miss Maguire was a dark, vivacious beauty whose energy and enthusiasm enabled me to take risks with language. She was daring in her choice of texts. I was both intrigued and unnerved by Shakespeare. The ambition and evil of Macbeth left a lasting impression and showed me what happens to the human heart when lust for power takes hold: a perfect metaphor for the ego’s struggle against God. When we got to the night-porter scene and the mysterious knocking, I fancied that it could have been the recently murdered Duncan doing a Great-aunt Rose.

  I loved writing essays and sometimes Miss would ask if Uncle Robert (the Master, English graduate and lingu
ist) had helped me. He barely acknowledged my presence, let alone asked what I was up to in school. I was none the less pleased to think that Miss thought he had a hand in my efforts. It was backhanded praise, but praise all the same.

  It was poetry, however, that lifted me up and freed me. It was more accessible than the novel; Jane Austen did not inspire me with all her meandering prose. My parents had no interest in novels. I was raised in a bookless house. The Sunday Press, Ireland’s Own and the Irish Messenger of the Sacred Heart were the height of their literary aspirations. When I met the novel for the first time in secondary school its weight and density scared me. Poetry books were brief and eloquent, the pithy distillations of those more extensive tomes.

  So I read and reread the evocative stanzas of Heaney, hoping that some of his magic would rub off on me. I began to write my own verse. Up until I was 20 I continued to produce some dreadful stuff I imagined was poetry: pages of rhyming couplets, doggerel which makes me blush even now.

  Mother, marvelling at the speed of this prodigious output – and not understanding a line of it – thought she’d reared a genius. She brought a folder of my poems to Mr Heaney’s brother Dan, who was teaching me history at the time. Thank heavens he had the wisdom to put her off, saying that Seamus was so busy he rarely saw him. The folder was returned to me, my embarrassing secrets intact. These few lines I wrote in ‘Words’ sum up the ardency and frustration of those days:

  Symbolic armies are passing

  Through me by the hour;

  Marching in to gather,

  To multiply and father

  A big, violent marriage in my head

  Throughout the day, they are my saviour,

  Collapsing onto paper unprepared;

  And at night in sleeplessness,

  The poem mutes the prayer.

  Eight of those ‘jingles’ have survived in my memory; they rear up at me from the disaffected past, insisting upon a place in my history. Those iambic rhythms and quatrains, although not earth-shattering, had a power all their own.