Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  He would not have been locked in the barracks that night, as it would be too disgraceful to our family, which was once prosperous. He would have been brought in a car, or a hackney car, to a Cistercian monastery in Roscrea, because he was a friend of the abbot’s. There monks cared for him as he went through the ordeal of delirium tremens, which I knew little about, and then he would be given broth and semolina pudding and asked to make a resolution, to take the pledge and to never touch a drink again.

  Those lulls while he was away were the happiest times in our house, my mother and I baking, cleaning windows inside and out, and once, as I remember, mastering the intricate recipe for queen of puddings, which, when it came out of the oven with its crest of lightly burnt meringue, seemed to levitate from the oblong Pyrex dish.

  Visitors

  Important visitors were few, except for Yanks who came in the summer and talked with a twang and brought us necklaces and bone bracelets as gifts. Afterward, when they had gone, my mother hankered for her times in America and the style she had had and the flavored ices.

  At night we could guess the visitor by the particular clang of the gate. For a while, it was a new guard who had struck up a friendship with my father and called without any reason, knowing that he would be given tea and cake. The other was a bachelor who was writing a history of the parish, which he called a “histoire.” He lived with his two brothers, who were also bachelors, and they had one good overcoat between them. It meant that on Sundays they had to go to different Masses, one having to travel to the next parish, since there were only two Masses in ours. Reading snatches of his histoire aloud to us, he would take the opportunity to touch my mother’s knee, over her thick lisle stocking, and refer to her as “Mrs. O.,” reiterating what a lady she was. He would also be given tea and fruitcake and then, weary from the histoire (my father would have gone up to bed), she would cough and move around, this being the hint for him to leave. When male visitors left, she did two things: she plumped the cushions and smelled the leather seat of the chair, to see if they had farted, and if they had, the removable seat would be lifted out and put on the windowsill to air all night.

  We dreaded tinkers, strapping women in plaid shawls, beating their tin cans on front and back door, insisting that we needed our pots mended and demanding milk, along with money. As I had not yet started school, I was given the task of watching out for them when my mother was occupied up in the yard. On many unfortunate occasions they had already come into the kitchen, hussies with their insolent manners demanding things. But one day I was quick enough to spot them as they came in at the lower gate and I yelled for her; we both hid in the shoe closet, which smelled of old shoes and had mice, but it was the only hiding place that did not have a window. We could hear them going all around the house, their threats, their pleadings, since they suspected we were in there, and as they left, they heaped curses on us and swore that we would regret the day.

  That evening, when my mother went to search for her good tan shoes, which she had washed and put to dry on the pier of the gate, they were not to be found. The further we looked, the louder her laments became. She described the shoe cream she had specially bought with which to polish them, she pictured the little worms of shoe cream in the punched holes along the toe cap and instep, she imagined outings that she would now never make in them. She dreaded having to admit that most likely the tinkers had swiped them. It was with reluctance that she told the sergeant, never believing he would take the matter further, except that he did. The shoes were found in the bottom of a pram, covered with ticking and a pillow, in the flea hotel where some of the female members of the tinker families lodged. Others were in caravans over in an empty, haunted field, where they drank and had singsongs and later beat each other up. A summons was served on two women, who had identical names, and to her shame my mother had to appear in the local courthouse, where she was jeered and laughed at by warring tribes of tinkers, especially when she walked up to a stand and identified the shoes as being hers. When the sentence of a fine of fifteen shillings was passed, there was uproar; the judge, banging the table, said a month in jail would do all of them a world of good. The shoes were never the same after that.

  The visitor we most dreaded, after tinkers, was Mad Mabel. She moved with such swiftness: she would appear suddenly, as out of nowhere, tall and fluent and wild-eyed, wielding an ash plant, shouting and hitting out at all before her. She would be in our kitchen scolding our mother for her untidiness and her dirt. The ash plant would bounce off the ledge of the dresser as she took particular exception to the ornamental plates arranged along three shelves, one plate eased into the neighboring plate to make room for the half dozen on each shelf. They had colored paintings of pears and apples and pomegranates, and my mother quaked at the thought of one getting broken. Mabel would then smell the flitches of salted bacon that were hanging up on nails near the cupboard, smell them and say they were rotten. She insisted that we had stolen potatoes and duck eggs from their yard and all must be returned by nightfall. It would be not too long after those fearful visits that we would learn of her being carted off to the lunatic asylum and how she had not wanted to go, had run around the farmyard holding a pitchfork, vowing to do herself in, until eventually a father or an uncle or an older brother had had to seize her and tie her with rope and drag her to the waiting horse and cart. She would not be seen or heard of for many months, and then she would return home and we would see her at Mass, so very quiet, peculiar-looking and mumbling to herself.

  One day I was getting clothes off the line, which was on a hill not far from our back door, when she surprised me. Her shadow and her gabbling preceded her, a tall streelish figure with a stick, raving, raving. She asked me to say her name, and when I said, “Mabel, Mabel,” she burst out laughing, sensing that I was frightened, and went off on a spiel. Mabel gone. No more Mabel. Mabel dead. Blood blood blood. Ha ha ha. Mabel no more.

  “I’ll get you a drink of lemonade,” I said, anything to escape her. She refused it, did not want charity, moreover she had important business to do. Then she pulled my mother’s stockinette bloomers off the line with such force that the clothes-pegs came off with them, and she left, slashing the air with her stick, saying again she had business to do, to burn down the barracks and the sergeant and all the buggers in it. It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.

  Each summer a father and son came from Dublin. They were wealthy cousins of my mother’s, and she cherished the distant hope of a little legacy. The preparations were myriad; the house was scoured from top to bottom and new recipes were pored over. She discussed menus with them almost as soon as they arrived, and there were the usual jokes about their “avoirdupois,” except I did not know what it meant. They always brought either a tin of Roses assorted sweets or a box of chocolates, which was put on the sideboard. Much was made of their gift, too much. They ate so well that after their big feed in the middle of the day, when they went out in the fields for a “constitutional,” they flopped down in a cornfield or a hayfield and dozed, yet they were always ready and peckish for the evening meal, which was usually cold meats with piccalilli and sausage rolls, a delicacy she was proud of.

  The legacy was never mentioned, though she drew hope from the fact that the father had mentioned how he had given her name and address to his solicitor. We also hoped that they might leave me a ten-shilling note on departure. I could see its coloring, a golden, prosperous pink, with a picture of a lady wearing a veil. No sooner would their car have disappeared outside the second gate than we ransacked their bedroom, put our hands into pillow slips and bolster cases, turned over the mattress, searched under ornaments and statues, but found nothing. My mother would shed a few tears because, with all the largesse, we now owed money in three shops, and reverting to one of her two faithful platitudes, she would recite, “Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.”

  Once a year, just before Christmas,
there would be a card party in our house. They were held in different houses, and the eventual prize was a goose, which families took it in turn to provide. It was there I had my first glimpse of feuding over politics. Card tables and card chairs were set down in the kitchen, and in the pantry, covered with a slightly dampened piece of muslin, would be the two-tiered plates of sandwiches, with a choice of ham, mutton, or egg. There would also be dainties on a different plate. A fad of my mother’s at that time was doughnuts, so the smell of hot oil and warm sugar permeated the kitchen. The game was Forty-five and at first everything was jovial. Partners were decided and people sat at the different tables, their consignments of change set down beside them. It may have been that someone cheated, or reneged, or that a player had mistakenly played against their own partner, but inevitably a row erupted, fists hitting the green baize tops, cards scattered all over, and in the slanging match that followed political memories, so raw and so real, were resumed. It was the old story of Ireland partitioned, the six counties cut off from the motherland and raging argument as to who was to blame. Some were for de Valera and others for Michael Collins, the “long fella” and the “big fella,” the pith of the argument being that de Valera had sent Michael Collins to England to negotiate a treaty, knowing that he would come back having had to accede to the detested partition that the English demanded. Raging grievances against the foe were now mixed with raging grievances against each other, and calm, or the semblance of it, was only gradually restored by one or two reasonable people resorting to clichés about the terrible dark times that Ireland had been through, and sure, wasn’t the country only just trying to get back on her feet? The card game was resumed, but somehow the sparkle would have gone out of the evening.

  It was borne in on me at that very young age that I came from fierce people and that the wounds of history were as raw and vivid as the pictures on the packs of cards that had been flung down. The North was an area on a map, and yet the way they harangued, losing their reason and hurling accusations at each other, I felt it would one day darken our lives.

  Classroom

  The classroom had to be swept each morning, the wooden floor sprinkled with water to keep down the dust that rose in little swirls. From the holes in the floor one could hear mice trotting underneath, and sometimes a snout or a brown tail would peep through and girls went berserk, pulling their legs up under their clothes and huddling. The smell of dust was always there, but in summer it would be mixed with the smell of flowers that were in jam jars along the windowsill. Girls that brought flowers were “pets” of the teacher, and the flower smell that lasted longest was that of stocks, which had a perfume even when withered.

  On my very first day at school, the teacher picked me up in her arms; the brooch she was wearing was identical to one my mother had, a nest of flowers in a leaf-shaped silver recess. Hers had strawberries and my mother’s were violets. She asked me in Irish if I was happy to be at school, and if I would shine and win a scholarship, and proudly she spoke the answer for me in Irish. There was a box for black babies in Africa, and as a surprise she allowed me to put a penny in the slot; the china skull of the black baby, with its braided hair, nodded a thank you. A letter from a leper colony in Uganda, yellow from turf smoke, in which the school had been thanked for monies sent was nailed to the wall. Next to it, on parchment more yellowed, were the reproachful words of the Englishman Sir John Davies, the King’s Deputy, written in the 1600s:

  For if themselves [the mere Irish] were suffered to possess the whole country as their septs have done for so many hundreds of years past, they would never, to the end of the world, build houses, make townships or villages or manure or improve the land as it ought to be. Therefore it stands neither with Christian belief nor conscience to suffer so good and fruitful a country to lie waste like a wilderness, when His Majesty may lawfully dispose of it to such persons as will make a civil plantation thereupon.

  Irish history was the subject she most liked to teach. She strode through the classroom, in and out between the desks, where we sat in pairs, the small white pots of watered ink in an enamel inkwell, and a dent in the wooden slope to hold pen and pencil. With hyperbole she spanned centuries, invoking sieges and battles—Slievemurry, Gorey, and Athenry—bemoaning the seven-hundred-year conquest, the cruelty of the Invader, the Saxon sheriff. She reeled off the names of heroes whose heads were impaled on the gates of Dublin Castle, and yet, and yet, Malachi retained his collar of gold. Hitting with her ruler the cloth map on the wall, she fixed on the name of Kinsale, the six-year siege which marked the end of the cream of Irish soldiery, the great earls, O’Neill, O’Donnell, having to flee their own land, where they soon died of heartbreak, their auxiliaries going to fight as mercenaries in foreign brigades. She would then recite, her eyes filling with tears:

  And all Valladolid knew

  And out to Simancas all knew

  Where they buried Red Hugh.

  She spanned centuries, jumping back to the age of mythic men whose lives constituted battle and banquet, whose women were all beautiful, with pale, sea-green eyes, cheeks with the hue of the foxglove, and perched on their shoulders ravens with the gift of prophecy. Cú Chulainn, who took the name of his hound, was the hero she most liked to dwell on, he who had vanquished all the rival tribes and scions of Ireland until the fatal day when the gods deserted him and, as the bird Morrigan had foretold, his bowels spilled out onto the cushions of his chariot. Alone and bleeding, he stooped and drank from a stream, then staggered to a lake into which his blood flowed, and he watched as an otter drank. Rather than die defeated, he strapped himself by his torn tunic to a pillar stone, because he knew from the Olla and the bards that “a great name outlasts a man.”

  It was a mere trot from Cú Chulainn to Pope Pius XI, who before his death had told Cardinal MacRory, Primate of all Ireland, that the Irish people were God’s pure air. “They were everywhere and like the air, giving life and vigor to the Catholic faith.” His death was so full of pageantry; we heard, in her lachrymose tones, how doctors, monsignors, and his private sacristan stood aghast at his passing, as the scarlet veil was raised from his face and Cardinal Pacelli, his chamberlain, took a small silver hammer and struck him three times on his forehead, calling him by his Christian name, “Achille, Achille, Achille.” When he did not answer, they sank to their knees in lamentation and recited De Profundis; then the sad news was immediately dispatched to Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, who in turn informed Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy.

  Often, after these great sallies, she would sit, quiet and lank, staring into space, and thinking. Thinking what? Of her own fate, or Ireland’s fate? She lived alone in a rookery of a house about half a mile from the school. And one Saturday, before an exam, we had an extra class there. From upstairs she brought down a cake box, in which there were the remains of a rich fruitcake and a lot of broken bits of icing. It reminded me of cakes that brides kept after their wedding, in wait for the christening of their first child, but that could not be true of her, as she was a spinster.

  When the school bell rang for lunch, we would go out into the yard to eat our lunches, and one of the girls who was her “pet” would stay behind to make her a jam omelette. I wanted to be one of her pets; I strove in every way, especially with my compositions, except that, pointedly, she slighted me.

  The day the inspector came, I thought that I had excelled myself. He wore a tweed jacket with crinkled leather buttons the color of conkers and matching tweed plus-fours. He looked at her syllabus and her logbook, then glancing around, he asked if one of the pupils might like to recite a poem or some catechism. Since I devoured things by heart, she told me to stand up and repeat the miracle of the loaves and fishes from Saint Luke’s Gospel. Not content with speaking it, I added a little flourish of my own, saying that after everyone had been fed, Jesus ordered his Disciples to gather up the remaining loaves and fishes that lay strewn on the shores of Galilee. The inspector asked me if I took a great interest in Jesus, to whi
ch I replied that I was disappointed that he had been so curt with his mother at the Feast of Cana, when, worried about the scarcity of wine, he said, “It is not my business or thine.” There were titters in the classroom, and he strolled around smiling, looked over some girls’ shoulders at their copybooks, took a pencil that was in the rim of his tiny diary, made a note, then left us, and, as we later learned, had a long lunch in the pub that boasted the name of a hotel. Far from bestowing praise because of the glowing report he sent back, the teacher had a “set” on me and was determined to punish me. She requested that I bring my china doll Rosaleen for the Nativity play at Christmas, in which I was not given a part. It was galling to see Rosaleen, in her ivory satin dress that was strewn with violets, being passed clumsily from hand to hand, and worse when one of the Three Wise Men almost dropped her. After the performance, when I went to reclaim her, my teacher said she could not be given back, as a photographer was expected to come and take a photograph of the crib, along with Mary, Joseph, and animals that had been fashioned out of straw. In the meantime, the doll was kept in her house, and on the way home from school I could see her through the sitting-room window, propped on a sideboard, her stumpy legs splayed out and her two china hands, as I believed, imploring me to kidnap her. My heart was bursting with anger. Eventually, my mother wrote, saying how attached I was to the doll, but the letter was not referred to and not acknowledged.