Sister X had a very long nose, with a ludicrously thin tip, and her angry flushes always began at this tip and radiated outwards like a spreading wine stain on a yellowing tablecloth. ‘I’ll be looking for you tomorrow!’ she squeaked threateningly as I watched her nasal indicator turning crimson. ‘Mind you’re here at a quarter to twelve sharp with the rest! You should be ashamed of yourself, even thinking of rejecting God’s grace! It’s the Devil is putting such wickedness in your mind – he wants your soul for himself – and at this rate he won’t be long getting it!’
Such a challenge to do theological battle made me briefly forget that this was my own current belief. I replied that no Catholic was bound to confess more than once a year and that if I were forced to confess by anyone else the sacrament would be invalid. This final point took Sister X right out of her depth, as it was meant to do, and she sounded like a fork on a plate when she exclaimed – most unconvincingly – ‘I’ll report you to the Canon for this!’ (The Canon was our parish priest, a saintly old gentleman who was known to abhor the very mention of Sister X’s name.) As she swept from the schoolroom giggles erupted among my classmates and in an instant she was back to give us all an hour’s detention. But I knew that she knew that she had been beaten. And vengefully I rejoiced. She brought out the very worst in her pupils – apart from turning them into nervous wrecks.
Years later my mother told me that by the end of November she had begun to worry about my being so obviously off form. She mentioned her concern to Father Power, who at once suggested a mother-daughter conference on the relevant commandments.
The day before my ninth birthday I woke early and tried to read but could not concentrate. At that age birthdays have an epochal significance and I felt that if my tenth year began as inauspiciously as my ninth was ending this misery must continue for every day of the next twelve months. As I lay in bed, staring unhappily at the grey-brown damp stains on the ceiling, I heard my father coming upstairs – but instead of going straight into the bathroom to shave he came to my door and said that my mother wanted to see me. As she did not usually encourage me to enter her life before breakfast-time – rather the reverse – I went downstairs reluctantly, expecting a lecture on some newly discovered misdemeanour. But no; she was in a very gentle mood and invited me into her bed for a snuggle. And then she asked directly, ‘What’s making you so unhappy?’
For weeks I had known, deep down, that a conference with my mother was the key to freedom if only I could bring myself to take the risk of using it. Now that key had been put in my hand – and I did use it.
I shall never forget my mother’s laughter as I lay there with my arms around her neck and my face buried in her hair. She had a deep, rich laugh and soon I, too, was laughing – dazedly, scarcely able to believe that within moments my tragedy had been transmuted into comedy. When I returned to my room to dress I felt just as one does on wakening from a complicated nightmare: elated by the simplicity of reality.
My mother’s amusement had been perfectly genuine, but beneath it she was gravely disturbed by my account of Sister X’s mental torturings. Already she was weary of another aspect of school life; every afternoon, before I could safely be admitted to the house, she had to supervise the fine-combing of my hair over a basin of Lysol outside the back door. So now it was decided that a combination of head lice and faulty theology sufficiently justified my removal from Lismore school.
While debating what to do next, my mother taught me – an arrangement which I favoured. She used teaching methods not then fashionable in Irish national schools. Instead of presenting knowledge neatly cut up into small bits she showed me how to go about collecting my own information and so made learning seem fun. Yet even she could not reconcile me to the German language. Nor could I cope with Irish or French, which my father had been inflicting on me since I was born. Latin was the only language for me. That I enjoyed, and was good at, knowing I would never be expected to make a fool of myself by speaking it.
Many nine-year-olds would have missed the social side of school life, but this loss never worried me. Apart from Tommy, and a girl with the unlikely name of Charity, all my primary school relationships were superficial. For a time I felt that I should have several friends, because children in books usually had, but I soon found that promising to meet for play at a certain time unduly restricted my private life of reading and roaming. Had the choice been wider I might have felt otherwise; I was overjoyed when Charity joined our class and revealed that she, too, was enslaved to Hugh Lofting, Arthur Ransome and Richmal Crompton. Soon I had got her a special pass to visit the library whenever she liked and for the next six months we were Best Friends. But then her army father was posted elsewhere and thus ended my first close friendship, as distinct from the sort of tribal comradeship I had enjoyed with Tommy.
A few days after Christmas my mother broke it to me that in January I was to go as a boarder to an Irish-speaking coeducational school. Naturally I was devastated. It had always been understood that I would go away to school at the age of ten and I could scarcely credit my parents’ treachery. But in an odd way this sense of having been betrayed kept me calm. Parents who loved me so little must not be allowed to see how much I cared – a melodramatic reaction which carried me through my initial grief and disillusionment. Then suddenly going away to school began to seem an interesting idea; to my own surprise part of me was one morning quite looking forward to it, though I had never yet been separated from both my parents for more than a few days. But soon I was again shattered by the discovery that books in English were forbidden at the College. Despair overcame me; this was equivalent to depriving an alcoholic of his bottle or a chain-smoker of his packet. Yet I never made any attempt to alter my parents’ decision. On details I argued interminably with them; on major issues I meekly deferred to their adult wisdom even if their reasoning seemed obscure. Or if, as in the present case, my antennae told me that they were not themselves in perfect agreement.
This was one of the few occasions when my father made a decision, for personal reasons of his own, to which my mother only grudgingly assented. Where the use of English was totally forbidden it seemed possible that within a year even I would have acquired a working knowledge of my native tongue. For nationalistic reasons my father wished me to be as fluent an Irish speaker as himself. Besides, if I were ever to pass an examination some action had to be taken to remove whatever blockage prevented me from learning languages. Or so my parents thought; for years they would not accept the simple fact that I had not inherited their linguistic gifts. They mistook stupidity for laziness and my mother – who held no strong views about the Gaelic Revival – probably agreed to this experiment as a general disciplinary measure.
At the beginning of 1941 the ‘Emergency’ had not yet banished all motor cars from Irish roads and we drove to the College on a cold, dark, wet January afternoon. The hedges were hardly visible through swirling curtains of rain and we were all, for our various reasons, apprehensively silent. Real, live boarding-school authorities were an unknown quantity to me, but I felt that they might prove much more dangerous in life than in literature so I had been afraid to pack even one illicit book. And now I was sick with anguish at the thought of parting from my parents. When the grey school buildings loomed sombrely out of the rain and fog, on their bleak and windswept cliff above the sea, I remarked that there would be no need for any lingering once my luggage had been unloaded. And my mother agreed that this was so.
When we had said our brisk goodbyes my father decisively banged the car door and I turned into a long, empty corridor. Most pupils travelled by train and had not yet arrived. A young master appeared, said something curt in Irish and disappeared, carrying my suitcases. I hurried after him, down the ill-lit corridor and up a steep staircase. The whole place reeked of Jeyes Fluid and boiled onions. Then I was put in the care (not quite the mot juste) of a freckled twelve-year-old with sandy plaits and a shrill, bossy voice. I can still see her frayed pale green
hair-ribbons and her look of contempt when she realised that I understood not a word she was saying.
In the icy, barn-like, whitewashed dormitory there were no cubicles but only rows of beds with vociferously broken springs and lumpy, unclean mattresses. My bed stood almost in the centre of this desolation and as I paused forlornly beside it, wondering where to hang my clothes, I realised that such a complete lack of privacy would add an unforeseen dimension to my hell. I shivered and needed to go quickly to the lavatory. Half-a-dozen older girls were gathered in a far corner, wearing overcoats and stuffing themselves with sticky buns. When I asked for the lavatory in English one of them threw a boot at me and shouted angrily in Irish. My bladder was about to fail me and I broke into a cold sweat – literally, for I remember pushing the hair out of my eyes and noting the chilly moisture on my forehead and thinking that this must be what authors meant by ‘cold sweat’. I had assumed that in extremis we could talk English; now it was plain that to do so, under any circumstances, would bring some instant punishment from my uncouth and intimidating seniors. Mercifully a lavatory chain was pulled nearby at that moment and I rushed gratefully towards the sound.
Back in the dormitory I found my suitcases open and their contents scattered on the bed. The girls were examining everything critically and the discovery of my schoolbooks provoked much mirth; I was so tall for my age that from these they deduced extraordinary stupidity. They expressed the opinion that I must be mentally retarded by using graphic traditional gestures, while shrieking with laughter. Then they came on a packet of sanitary towels – proud emblem of my recently acquired womanhood – and used other gestures, not then understood by me; no doubt their comments were to match for they lowered their voices and muffled their sniggers. As I could see no friendly – or even neutral – face anywhere I suppressed my rage and stood by helplessly until the enemy lost interest. They left the dormitory linking arms, scuffling, giggling and shouting each other down. I thought of Mrs Mansfield, who would almost have fainted to witness such behaviour, and the image of her trim little figure, with San Toy trotting regally to heel, sent me hurrying back to the lavatory to weep. Already I had resolved that my enemies would never see me weeping.
At six o’clock a jangling bell summoned us to the refectory for high tea. Most of the other pupils had now arrived, but I seemed to be the only new girl though there were several new boys – all of whom, discouragingly, spoke effortless Irish. As I took my place at one of the long, scrubbed wooden tables, each with mounds of thick bread and scrape placed at intervals down the centre, I vowed that this educational experiment must be made to fail as expeditiously as possible. Since English was forbidden, I would not speak. And when the futility of having a dumb child about the place impinged on the authorities, they would expel me. Nothing could be simpler. As I am naturally taciturn the prospect of maintaining silence for an indefinite period did not dismay me. And to compensate for the lack of books I would secretly write one myself.
Of course things did not work out quite like this. I was far too demoralised by homesickness to concentrate on writing anything more than letters and my misery, instead of diminishing as the days passed, became more acute. There was not even one remotely congenial character among either staff or pupils and I had immediately become a favourite bullying target for the more sadistic seniors. These also regularly robbed me of my weekly food parcel – an Emergency innovation – and they did use English to threaten to retaliate if I reported them. It is easy to see how I brought out the worst in these schoolmates. To them I must have seemed intolerably priggish, precocious, precious, pedantic and pusillanimous. There was no point of contact; in every sense we spoke different languages. Inevitably my memories of this ordeal are biased and the reality may have been a trifle less barbarous than what I recollect. Yet the essence of the atmosphere remained unparalleled in my experience until I worked as a waitress, almost twenty years later, in the canteen of a home for down-and-outs in East London.
Therefore this episode, despite its brevity, was one of the most valuable in my limited educational career. At Lismore school I was subtly accorded privileges by many of the teachers because I seemed ‘different’. At Ring I was given hell for the same reason and thus I learned that standards other than my own were not only acceptable to, but preferred by, large sections of the population.
My parents wrote long letters three times a week but refrained from squandering their petrol ration on me. In my Sunday letters home I never asked for a visit but regularly reported that I was learning no Irish and cunningly emphasised the physical hardships of school life. In fact I took these in my stride – apart from the atrocious food they seemed no worse than the rigours of home life – but I felt that my mother would be more disturbed by health hazards than by complaints about bullying. So I graphically described how – after an inadequate lunch – we were driven out every afternoon, whatever the weather, to play camogie (the feminine of hurling) on pitches hock-deep in mud – and how we then had to sit in an unheated prep. hall for two hours wearing damp socks.
These letters were not greatly exaggerated and as a result of over-exposure and underfeeding I developed severe bronchitis in the middle of February. After forty-eight hours I was almost too ill to walk, yet the matron merely dosed me with some ineffectual syrup. Everyone had snuffles and coughs and she did not pause to distinguish between penny plain and tuppence coloured. So I wrote an extra letter to my parents, one Wednesday morning.
On the following afternoon they arrived unannounced, and despite a keen east wind discerned in the distance their wheezing ewe-lamb, feebly wielding a camogie stick. Moments later I was in the car, drenching my mother’s shoulder with all the tears not shed since our parting. And in the headmaster’s office my father was being told that I had made little progress with my Irish and seemed ‘unable to fit in with the rest’. ‘I should think not!’ muttered my mother, as we drove off. While I was changing and packing she had had an opportunity to observe a cross-section of ‘the rest’.
7
During my absence from home Old Brigid had at last retired to her cottage near Cappoquin and been replaced by one Maggie – unenthusiastically described as ‘adequate’, fading to ‘better than nothing’, in my mother’s letters. As we drove towards Lismore I found it hard to imagine life without Old Brigid, but I would have been a good deal more upset in any other circumstances. Having just regained Paradise not even her loss could dilute my joy and on being assured that I might visit her weekly I philosophically accepted the idea of Maggie.
I did not, however, accept the reality of Maggie. She was sharp-boned and purple-hued and her voice rasped and she always looked discontented – with some reason, as a servant chez Murphy. We disliked each other on sight; to me she was an unloving tyrant, to her I was a saucy little puppy. And the chances of our ever coming to terms were much reduced by my having to take to my bed at once and stay there for three weeks, during which time Maggie found herself toiling up and down stairs every few hours with trays of such delicacies as were then available. (I particularly remember dark-brown beef-tea, jars of Calves’-foot jelly and a weird, chewy ginger-based concoction which was alleged to do wonderful things for the bronchial chords.)
Even in our Spartan household bronchitic patients were permitted a fire in their bedroom and it was typical of my mother’s feeling for servants that she always asked my father to take on the consequent chores – which he most willingly did. Old Brigid had greatly appreciated his help, but it quickly became obvious that in Maggie’s estimation such face-losing behaviour on the master’s part drastically lowered our status. For a few weeks after my recovery she and I sparred daily; I was missing Old Brigid dreadfully, resenting Maggie in proportion and making my feelings plain. Then one morning she left without notice to become housekeeper to an elderly, childless couple who lived in a comfortable new house where no one had committed suicide.
Having been born with ‘a weak chest’ I was accustomed to enjoying a fe
w weeks of invalidism each winter and I revelled in being free to read, almost without interruption, for fourteen hours a day seven days a week. Whatever the theologians might say about Heaven being a state of union with God, I knew it consisted of an infinite library; and eternity, about which my parents were wont to argue with amusing vehemence, was simply what enabled one to read uninterruptedly forever.
The only interruptions I welcomed during these withdrawals from the world were Dr White’s visits. He treated me with the sort of rough affection one bestows on a large dog and gave me delicious syrup from a bottle excavated with difficulty from the depths of his greatcoat pocket and told heart-stopping stories about his soldiering days in India and South Africa. Sometimes he advised me to rest my eyes, but this advice went unheeded as I took no interest whatever in any of the standard children’s games or pastimes. (A serious handicap nowadays, when I have a more versatile child of my own.)
I remember the perfection of my happiness – a perfection not often attained in this life, as I realised even then – when I woke on a dark winter’s morning and switched on the light to see a tower of unread library books by my bed. From them I would look caressingly towards my own books on their shelves around the wall and reflect that now I had time to reread; I could never decide which was the greater pleasure, rereading old favourites or discovering new ones. For a moment I would lie still, ecstatically anticipating the day’s bliss. And sometimes it would cross my mind that only Pappa could fully understand how I felt.
There is a difference between the interest taken in books by normal readers (people like my parents) and the lunatic concern of bibliomaniacs (people like Pappa and myself). Everything to do with books mattered to me and I fretted much more over their wartime deterioration – that squalid gravy-coloured paper! – than I did over butter rationing or inedible bread. (Clothes rationing I of course considered a blessing in disguise.) After a quick glance at any open page I could by the age of nine have told you the publisher of most children’s books – and often the printer and illustrator, too. One of my hobbies was rewriting blurbs which seemed inadequate and I collected publishers’ lists as other children collect stamps. During June and July I often prayed for rain; on fine days I was supposed to be out in the fresh air, but on wet days I could go to the county library headquarters and help unpack the new books that came by the hundred, in tea-chests, at that season. The sight, smell and feel of these books so intoxicated me that I often refused to go home at lunch time. I had an agreement with my parents that when the children’s books came I could always help unpack, regardless of climatic conditions. I would then – to my father’s sensibly silent disgust – seize on the least worthy volumes (Biggles and so forth) and beg to be allowed to borrow them even before they had been initiated into public circulation. But my father did not believe in Privilege so I had to bide my time – very sulkily. It must have exasperated my parents that for so long I preferred exciting stories to good writing. At every stage of childhood I completely rejected all the classical fairy stories, and Lewis Carroll, Captain Marryat, Louisa Alcott, Kipling, E. Nesbit and any volume that I suspected might be intended to improve my mind. But neither, to be fair to myself, would I read Enid Blyton when she began to pollute the literary atmosphere. I was uncompromisingly middlebrow; and so, with minor modifications, I have remained to this day.
Wheels Within Wheels Page 10
