In all circumstances my mother insisted on obedience, yet in spite of my surface sulks I never really resented her disciplining. She was almost always just – and capable of apologising if she had been unjust – so resentment would have been irrational.
My childhood relationship with my mother was relatively straightforward, but I still find it hard to understand my relationship, at any age, with my father. In a sense, nothing ever grew between us from the seed of child-parent love; it lived on through the years but remained underground; there was no blossoming to affirm its existence to the outside world – or even, for long periods, to ourselves. One of the conditions that hindered its growth was my father’s inability to communicate with the young. He lacked any means of expressing his affection in an acceptable form and his rare attempts to get onto my level and be playful caused me acute embarrassment. Desperately well meant but blatantly phoney, these – I felt – were just making us both look foolish while widening the gulf between us. I much preferred his natural approach when he treated me as a pupil rather than a daughter. His own idea of fun was a fact-packed lecture thinly disguised as a long walk. With the random questioning of small children he had no patience; this was an untidy, unscholarly way of going about learning – a bad habit, to be eradicated without delay. Significantly, I could never imagine him as anything but a tiresomely erudite grown-up, though I could easily picture my mother as a little girl.
For me, our regular Sunday afternoon walks were both physical and intellectual marathons. Week by week I would be tidily instructed about birds, or moral theology, or electricity, or Irish history, or geology, or English literature, or astronomy, or music, or agriculture, or the Renaissance. Often I wished that I were alone beneath my teddy-bear tree and then I would vindictively insulate myself against my father’s voice; though to give him his due he presented all his information in carefully simple terms. Of course some of it fascinated me, despite myself, as several of his enthusiasms were by heredity my own – especially history and astronomy. On the whole, however, these didactic perambulations provided the wrong sort of fertiliser for the seed of love.
Just occasionally the barrier was lifted and we drew very close. My father had an unexpected flair for composing Learish nonsense rhymes and these charmed me utterly; when he was in one of his rare frivolous moods I would gladly have walked with him to the Giant’s Causeway. Then I discovered that I had a similar flair – long since atrophied – and we enjoyed the harmony of collaboration or the stimulus of competition, each striving to outdo the other in dottiness and euphony. But the barrier always came down again at the end of these sessions, leaving us uneasily antagonistic for no discernible reason.
The reason could have been jealousy, an emotion one would expect to find in some rather virulent form in such an introverted family. Perhaps, being so worshipful of my mother, I resented my parents’ mutual devotion. (Although according to pop psychology I should at that age have been so devoted to my father that I regarded my mother as a rival.) Yet I am pretty sure – as sure as one can be on such matters – that jealousy did not then influence any of our relationships. I was certainly given no cause for it. Together my parents lived their own separate child-excluding life, but I accepted this as natural and was never made to feel excluded in any unfair way. From an early age I took part in serious family conferences, and was admitted to the cupboard where the skeletons were kept, and generally was treated as a responsible, dependable individual. Years later I discovered that Pappa disapproved of my being consulted before family decisions were taken; he held that it is unkind to implicate children in adult affairs with which they are too inexperienced to cope.
Every summer Pappa spent July and August with us. I would guess that my father was his favourite child though apart from their common bibliomania the two were alike in no obvious way. Pappa was not merely ‘good with children’; he truly enjoyed them and his annual arrival by train drew not only myself but a score of other children to the railway station. Yet he never gave pennies or sweets or treats to me or to any of his young friends. Instead he played with us endlessly – our own games in our own favourite haunts. And always he brought from Dublin a battered suitcase tied with rope and bulging with dog-eared children’s books bought for twopence a dozen on the quays. No one – not even my mother – could read aloud as Pappa did. He involved us until we were transported beyond anything we knew of into other worlds that seemed to be suffused with a special Pappa magic, whatever the theme of the story or the author’s style. Even the more restless of the smaller children – and those who were not accustomed to being read to and normally had no interest in books – even they would sit motionless for as long as Pappa chose to read.
Punctuality was the only subject on which I used to query Pappa’s wisdom. He argued cheerfully that a capacity for ignoring time marks the truly free in spirit and that over-organised Western man has only himself to blame for the fact that our society would collapse if this freedom were widely enjoyed. His own indifference to time no doubt formed part of his attraction for children. But it made him another of Old Brigid’s crosses. She, too, adored him, and considered it her duty and privilege to ‘feed him up’ during his holidays, and so if he had not appeared by 12.55 she felt obliged to go forth to quarter the back streets and lanes of the town in search of ‘Dr Conn’. Luckily this did not happen too often since I shared my father’s obsessional punctuality – which was perhaps a result of the havoc frequently wrought in his own life by parents who never knew or cared whether it was morning or evening.
There was a Franciscan quality about Pappa’s affection for children and animals and the poor of all ages. It was without any element of paternalism or do-gooding; behind the gaiety which charmed us all lay a deep awareness of suffering and a love based on compassion and respect. For some reason he was always known locally as Dr Conn and he was a particular favourite of the old country folk whose dying traditions he collected for one of his unwritten – or half-written – books.
On a hot summer evening in 1939 an old woman from the mountain hamlet of Ballysaggart called to ask for Dr Conn’s help and I answered the door. Explaining that Pappa was out, I offered to give him a message. The old woman hitched her black woollen shawl higher to protect her head from the midges around the fuchsia bushes. ‘When he comes back, could y’ever ask yer father to drive him out t’see me poor husband? He have a crool pain in his chest wit de past tree weeks. He can’t even raise himself in de bed wit it. An’ the docthur above on’y gev him on oul cough-bottle dat med him sick to his stummick.’
I looked at the old woman in silence and felt wretchedly guilty, as though the family had been caught playing some nasty confidence trick on the entire district. Then I admitted miserably, ‘But Pappa isn’t a real doctor. He’s only a doctor of philosophy!’
The old woman shrugged. ‘Shure isn’t that good enough? Isn’t he a kind man wit brains? What more d’ye want?’
I tried to explain. ‘But you see it’s not the right sort of brains – he wouldn’t know what medicine you need. Philosophy has nothing to do with being ill. At least, I don’t think it has,’ I added, suddenly wondering just what it did have to do with.
Next day I asked, ‘What is philosophy?’ as Pappa and I were walking back from our morning bathe in the Blackwater. My father would undoubtedly have taken this question as the jumping-off point for an outline of the various schools of Western thought. But Pappa simply said, ‘It’s the study of how to live contentedly and how to die peacefully!’
From my point of view our annual summer holiday in some secluded seaside cottage was redeemed only by Pappa’s presence. I enormously enjoyed our weekend trips to the sea, but I detested being away from home for an entire month. These cottages were never anywhere near a public library and, from 1940 on, petrol was rationed and I dreaded running short of books. There was little room for luggage in the Ford Ten with five passengers – including Old Brigid or her successor – and Parnell the all-black sh
eepdog, and Sibelius and Delius the cats, and my mother’s bath chair on the roof. My personal baggage allowance was one large suitcase and to make the most of this I wore all my clothes, including two pairs of pyjamas, on the journey to the coast. But a single suitcase of books seemed meagre fare for a month, even if one chose only volumes that could stand rapid rereading.
However, it was the removal from my natural habitat that I minded most. Amidst the fields and woods and rivers and hills around Lismore I could enjoy myself as nowhere else. Already I wanted to travel to distant lands, so I might have been expected to welcome the substitute thrill of exploring remote stretches of the Irish coastline. But already, too, I had clear-cut ideas about how I wanted to travel. I wanted to wander alone, taking each day as it came, and even at the age of nine or ten it was impossible to pretend that a month in the domestic cosiness of a seaside cottage was any sort of substitute for such adventuring.
6
The autumn of 1940 was marred by a bizarre psychological affliction. Or perhaps it was a ‘normal abnormality’, given my keen interest in sexual equipment and the inhuman puritanism of the Irish Catholic Church. Because I had long been in the habit of closely observing mating animals I one day became convinced that my soul was permanently laden with mortal sins. This conviction rapidly spread, like a sort of mental septicaemia. Soon I felt that to wash above the knees or below the navel must also be a mortal sin. And so must chancing to see a male baby having his nappy changed, or noticing a cat feeding her kittens or a dog sprinkling a lamppost – or even hearing, at the other side of the partition that divided the school lavatory, the hiss of little boys urinating into the stinking gutter. At this stage my having long since given up masturbation was unfortunate. Something as tangible as that to worry about might have saved me from fancying myself corrupt right through because a dog peed in my presence.
What puzzles me now is the extent to which, during those months, school influences temporarily overcame home influences. On trivial issues small children will naturally follow school fashions, on important matters parental attitudes generally prevail. Moreover, at no other period of my life have I been prone to unhealthy – or even, some would say, healthy – guilt. Yet throughout this nightmare period I was half-crazed by shame and self-disgust.
The approach of puberty, combined with an incident which had occurred during the previous summer holidays, may have been partly responsible for this anxiety-state. Physically I was unusually mature and my mother had explained that my budding breasts must now be kept covered. But I so relished the feel of the sun and the wind on my body that I often ignored her directive and wore only brief shorts when playing alone on the deserted beaches near our holiday cottage. Then one day three adolescent boys appeared abruptly from behind a rock, shouted obscene remarks and threw several well-aimed pebbles at my indecently exposed torso. And my eyes were opened, and I knew that I was naked …
A better balanced child would merely have been incensed by this tiny incident, or at worst slightly alarmed. But in an instant it made me see human sexuality not just as an example of nature’s ingenuity but as something apart from the rest of life and capable of assuming ugly, obscurely threatening shapes. I told my mother about the incident by way of exorcising it, though the telling involved a confession of disobedience. Her reaction, as always, was steadying – ‘People can be unpleasant. But their unpleasantness needn’t infect us if we don’t want it to.’ Nevertheless, I now began to think about sex in a new, personal, speculative way (though I have no recollection of experiencing at the time any sexual sensations) and this made me much more vulnerable at school.
The reader may well wonder what methods were used by my teachers to unhinge me so disastrously. In fact sex was never mentioned: eight of the ten commandments were commented on in detail, but the other two were ignored. At the same time the impression was given that these were the most important of all, though the vices they forbade were too evil to be analysed as one could analyse the comparatively minor sins of murder, theft, slander and idolatry. It is remarkable, and quite sinister, that this message, stressing the incomparable heinousness of sexual sin, could be got across wordlessly. Somehow we were made hyper-aware of the horror and revulsion with which such sins must be regarded and in the process a horror of sex itself was deeply implanted in many a child’s mind.
All this left no lasting mark on me though it profoundly affected the world in which I grew up. Behind the popular image of the gay, feckless, hard-drinking, charming, belligerent, eloquent Irishman lies an amount of muted yet intolerable suffering – which is shared by the victims’ wives. The Irish incidence of mental disease and alcoholism is amongst the highest in the world, Irish people marry later than most others – if at all – and the Irish male is noted for sexual immaturity. The Catholic Church has always been the obvious scapegoat here, yet it does not deserve all the blame. Our puritanism is peculiarly Irish rather than peculiarly Catholic; one finds it operating equally strongly among Northern Irish Protestants.
Members of celibate communities are often assumed to be unbalanced, tense, frustrated and generally unsuitable as educators. Yet many priests and nuns seem, to those who know them best, exceptionally balanced, relaxed and fulfilled. However, when celibates do go dotty they go very dotty indeed, frequently in rather nasty ways, and one of my teachers – not Sister Andrew – should never have had anything to do with children. She regularly interrupted our history, geography or arithmetic lessons to gratify herself by terrorising us. Obviously she believed in her own fevered descriptions of Hell and the Devil and the conviction with which she spoke made her harangues all the more blood-curdling.
I was unsettled not only by this poor creature’s words but by the evident sick satisfaction she obtained from frightening us. I recall one of her sessions with particular vividness because I was sitting in the front row just below her desk. She had a high-pitched voice which became little better than a squeak when she was enraged or excited and on this occasion, as she spoke, fine beads of sweat broke out on her hairy upper lip. She was telling the ‘true’ story of a ten-year-old Co Waterford girl who one day committed a filthy mortal sin (the adjective told us that it was sexual) and next day fell into a stream and was drowned. Because she had not been to confession, or made an act of perfect contrition, the Devil promptly dragged her soul down to Hell where she was doomed to an eternity of tortures which Sister X assured us were indescribable though this did not deter her from attempting to describe them in considerable detail. None of us thought to ask our mentor the source of her information on this case. It was a cruel coincidence that I came under the influence of such an unstable woman during the unhappiest phase of my childhood.
At noon every Saturday I went to confession with my classmates, as was the custom. We sat in restless rows near the three confessionals, examining our consciences and memorising our sins while awaiting our turn to enter the stuffy, anonymous darkness of the box. During my guilt period I used to envy my companions whose rapid reappearances, following the muffled drone of the absolution, indicate their freedom from moral problems. It made me feel doubly depraved to think of the innocent content of their confessions, which I knew would go something like this: ‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It’s one week since my last confession. I forgot to say my morning prayers three times. I was distracted at Mass on Sunday. I stole five sweets from my brother. I told three lies to the nun. I was disobedient nine times. I hit the girl next door. That’s all, father.’ Then they would be given three Hail Marys for penance and would cheerfully emerge to commit the same crimes – more or less – during the week ahead.
I always chose to confess to Father Power. The other curate too plainly conveyed the extremity of boredom to which juvenile misdeeds drove him and the parish priest was eighty-five, stone deaf and apt to confuse ‘impure thoughts’ with adultery. While in the confessional most Catholics regard their confessor not as the neighbour who calls for a chat but as an impersonal representa
tive of God. Therefore it was easy for me to put Father Power in the picture. But his calm reassurances and careful explanations achieved nothing. Like any mentally deranged person, I was isolated in a private world of my own, beyond reach of common sense. Father Power repeatedly urged me to confide in my mother, but this was no help as my inability to do so was an integral part of my disease. I was so far gone that I feared losing her love if she discovered my vileness. When I explained this to Father Power he again tried unsuccessfully to make me see the absurdity of my terrors; had he not been bound by the seal of the confessional he himself would certainly have warned my mother of her daughter’s pathetic state. More acceptable was his advice to confess only four times a year instead of once a week and to stop keeping a tally of my sins in the copybook I had specially set aside for the purpose. But unfortunately even this counsel did not reach to the root of my obsession – though it came near enough to it. However, it stimulated an enjoyable argument with Sister X who furiously asked if I wanted to ‘lose my soul’ when I told her that in future I would not be joining my class at confession time. I declined to explain that I was acting on Father Power’s advice; why should I divulge to her what went on in the confessional? Besides, I was delighted to have a chance to deflate her single-handed. I did not then clearly recognise her contribution to my problem, but I disliked her more than anyone else I had ever known. (And indeed, now I come to think of it, I have never since met anybody I disliked as much.)
Wheels Within Wheels Page 9
