Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  The preparations to celebrate Mass in these mission stations had the thrall and improvisation of traveling theater. A portable confessional would have been set up for penitents who longed for conversion, while the altar for Mass was a wooden press, above which hung a dark cloth suspended on a bamboo pole. Two little Hanyang altar boys in their white surplices completed the perfect picture, which was in some abandoned garden, among ancient ruins, overhanging temples, and pagodas, which were infinitely more beautiful than the wooden press, but our God, which was not their God, did not dwell in overhanging ornamental temples. Having celebrated Mass, the priest, using chopsticks, would eat a small bowl of rice, and then set out on his donkey or his bullock cart to spread the holy pasturage in the next distant outpost.

  The Messenger also carried romantic stories, which were serialized and which invariably hinged on a crisis of conscience. Take young Blanche, “a personable matron of twenty-two,” to whom Aunt Louisa had willed the Honeysuckle Cottage in County Wicklow on condition that she would never marry. Blanche gives up her lowly job as secretary to a solicitor, moves to Wicklow, tends her rosebushes, her apple trees, occasionally inviting a few friends from Dublin to visit her on summer Sundays. She is the happiest Blanche alive, until one day a wandering artist knocks on her door, a man with flashing eyes, poor but proud, and fatally persuasive. “Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.” Unable to sleep, her hair slipping out of its curling pins, Blanche paces and paces, dreading the bitter fate of life alone, because yield she mustn’t, as apart from Aunt Louisa’s stricture about wedlock, the wandering artist is not a Roman Catholic, whereas Blanche is endowed with an intense spiritual nature and the religious sentiment of her race. At the end of each episode, there would be the heading for the next thrilling installment—“Her Wild Blood” or “A Blighted Evening”—but I never got to the chapter “When the Curtain Fell,” as that edition never reached us, probably because of shortage of money. Threepence seems so little, but there were times when we did not have it. I recall with scalding shame having to ask at the gate lodge for a penny for my dancing class and therefore hating the dancing teacher, with her beautiful black suede court shoes and her calves so sleek and shapely in her navy silk stockings.

  One Sunday I came upon a book in a trunk in a neighbor’s attic room. How it got there, I will never know. It was a secondhand book which had been presented to a Mary McDonald as a reward for regular attendance and industry, from the Edinburgh School Board, in 1907. The cover was also a rich dark red, like the Messenger, but instead of the Sacred Heart a piquant young woman held her arms out, and in the folds of her red cloak were two blank pages, suggesting the drama of her wayward life. It was called East Lynne. It was tastefully illustrated, depicting happy families, father in coattails and mother in long gown with leg-of-mutton sleeves, the blond child the very epitome of happiness. There were 548 pages of it, crammed with love, intrigue, faithlessness, cotton handkerchiefs soaked in eau-de-cologne, distressing dreams, secrets in sachets, and a deathbed scene in which an errant mother, who has returned disguised as a governess to her own children, equivocates whether she should disclose to her little dying son, Willy, her ghastly secret. This errant mother, the Lady Isabel, of fair damask cheek and luxurious falling hair, was daughter of a profligate earl, who died leaving her destitute and therefore in need of marriage. Mr. Carlyle, who lived in West Lynne, though reticent and mindful of the age difference, loses his heart to her, and Isabel, while not being wholeheartedly in love, esteems him and hopes that love will ripen with the years. As she walks up the aisle of the little country church, in a thin black gauze dress because of being in mourning for her father, she little knows the sickening jealousy of Barbara Hare, who had set her cap at Mr. Carlyle. Two women then cast a shadow on that otherwise happy union: Barbara, with poison in her heart, and the imperiously willed Miss Corny, sister of Mr. Carlyle, who takes up residence with them and begrudges Isabel her happiness and her lovely black dresses, beaded with jet. The couple settle into married life, stroll in the grounds in the evenings, and Isabel sits at the piano and sweetly sings verses from The Bohemian Girl, as, unable to restrain himself, Mr. Carlyle then holds the dear face to him, “taking from it impassioned kisses.” Yet shadows loom. Isabel overhears servants talking of Barbara Hare and her former friendship with Mr. Carlyle, and jealousy, like an incubus, takes hold of the young bride. Yes, years pass. There are full moons and half moons, three children are born, and yet Isabel cannot cure herself of the affliction now gnawing at her heart. She falls ill, goes into decline, whereupon a change of air is recommended, and so, alone in Boulogne-sur-Mer, she re-encounters the dashing Captain Levinson, whom she was once madly in love with. As she sits on the sands to enjoy the sea air each morning, Captain Levinson accompanies her, pretending to serve as the anxious brother in the absence of Mr. Carlyle. Soon she is affected by the intoxicating breezes of his attentions, and the symptoms of clandestine happiness are taking root. Her heart beats with rapture, the skies are bluer, the waving trees have an emerald brightness, and she finds herself increasingly reluctant to separate herself from this dangerous foe. One morning, “taking terrible possession of her arm,” he tells her that if ever two human beings were formed to love one another, it is they. She flees Boulogne and his dangerous sophistries; she puts the sea between them, only to find that he follows, ingratiates himself with her husband, and one midnight—it had to be midnight—a chaise and four is tearing through the English countryside, leaving a household in disarray, servants fainting, motherless children, a baffled husband reading a farewell letter, the handwriting swimming before his eyes, and the inevitable fact that Isabel had flown. Here the author, Mrs. Henry Wood, painted the frightful colors and blackness of guilt, addressing her readers, presumably all female:

  Lady, wife, mother, should you ever be tempted to abandon your home so will you awake… whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond your endurance of woman to bear, resolve to bear them, bear unto death rather than forfeit your fair name and your good conscience, for be assured that the alternative, if you rush unto it, will be far worse than death.

  Isabel is soon plunged into an abyss of horror; the faithless Captain Levinson is in Paris oftener than not, while she languishes, shivering with cold, hunger, and loneliness in a barn in Grenoble. Completely abandoned, she suffers a railway accident in which she is not only disfigured but lamed in one leg. It serves as a blessing and allows her to come back in disguise to East Lynne as governess to her own children, having assumed the name Madame Vine. Clad completely in black, black crepe swathing throat and chin, thick spectacles, and a pronounced French accent, she has to endure the caresses between Mr. Carlyle and his new wife, Barbara Hare, caresses that were once hers. A solitary candle beams its cold rays in a sickroom where her little boy is dying, while down on her knees, her face buried in the counterpane, a corner of it stuffed in her mouth, the disconsolate mother weeps and weeps, and her former husband, restrained and heroic, remains ignorant of her true identity.

  Conveniently, his new wife, Barbara, is thirty miles away at a watering place, and no sooner has the funeral taken place than Isabel herself is struck down, just as her little boy was, and rapidly, helplessly, she deteriorates. Shall she tell him of that which she had never meant to? Throwing out her poor, hot hands, she reveals all and begs his forgiveness. After much deliberation, Mr. Carlyle raises his noble form, pushes her hair from her brow, wipes the death dew from her forehead, and “suffered his lips to rest upon hers.”

  That same death dew and foolish intoxication I would find again in the pages of Tolstoy, as Anna Karenina, with her black gown, her rounded arms, her bracelets, her string of pearls, her unruly curls, her veiled eyes, also succumbed to the diabolical and enchanting lures of illicit love. But whereas Anna’s story stayed with me all my life, poor Isabel’s faded. The pent-up scenarios, the cheap thrills, and the manipulation of em
otions palled. Anna, at the railway station, about to throw herself under a train, both to punish Vronsky and to escape the malice of others, gets down close to the tracks, looks at the bolts, the chains, the tall iron wheels of the first carriage that is moving up, in order to measure the point midway between the front and back wheels of the second carriage, so as to gauge her exact moment to jump. Poor Isabel, by comparison, is whisked off in a chaise and four in full operatic moonlight.

  Nevertheless, some of the cloying tendencies of Mrs. Henry Wood stayed with me on my first foray into fiction, aged about eight. It was written on a jotter, and called Gypsy. Isolde, the young heroine, dreamed of escape, incarcerated as she was, and often beaten by a cruel and intemperate father, and without the harmonious influence of a mother, who had been killed off. Her charmer arrives in the person of a Gypsy with a gold earring and red bandanna, who recklessly scours the countryside in a caravan and on horseback. Sighting her one day in the fields, he is struck by her beauty, her ringlets, her pensive expression, and her youth. It needs only dusk, when she is driving cattle in to be milked, for him to abduct her, sit her sidesaddle on his steed, a winding sheet over her head and face, and whisk her to his bastion in the remote mountains. Arriving, she meets a world of strangers, women with flashing but unloving eyes who take her aside and give her a new name, a Romany name, so that she is no longer the Isolde she was. Then she is dressed, groomed, and prepared for her nuptial night, in which I did not rule out the possibility of fatality. By midnight horses are heard. A posse of men have arrived on horseback, led by her father, a volley of gunfire is let off as the two sides engage in battle. Fortunately, I did not have to describe the battle, as the palpitating heroine, from whose point of view the story was told, is bundled into the back of the caravan and hidden under a heavy roll of carpet. All I needed to say was that they fought with the fierceness of Apaches (whatever that meant), that she was rescued by her own, and returned home to her old life of drudgery and submission.

  I put my story in a green trunk, where my mother kept oats for her hens, and either it was eventually thrown out or mice nibbled the paper to bits.

  After these fictions came the lure of drama. Twice a year traveling players came to the town, and in the town hall, on a stage lit with a few paraffin lamps, we were treated to the vagaries of East Lynne, Murder in the Old Red Barn, and Dracula. The sight of a very large safety pin being drawn across the tender throat of the young heroine in Dracula was too terrible to behold, and also riveting. As living theater it was matchless. Girls and women cried or choked back their tears, while men pretended to make fun of it, and yet, walking home under the stars, we could talk of nothing else.

  The actor who played Dracula was in digs with his wife, in a room above a public house. I decided that I would ask if I could join their company. The domestic situation was depressing. There was one child in a pram, which Dracula wheeled back and forth across the floor, while his wife, with a young baby under her arm, was stirring a saucepan of something on a primus stove. Her complexion without all the pancake makeup was a little ruddy. As for him, all that remained of his luring stage presence was his silverish sidelocks. They were surprised at my having been let up at all, and Dracula asked what I had come for. “I’d like to run away with you,” I said, at which the wife laughed and Dracula showed some commiseration. He asked nicely why I wanted to run away with them. I said I had written a play called Dracula’s Daughter and I wanted to see it on a stage. This whetted his interest so much that he said to come back another day and we could read it together. His wife, in full theatrical blaze, picked up the hot saucepan, aimed it at me, and in a beautiful, actressy voice said, “Scram.”

  I would go out to the fields to write. The words ran away with me. I would write imaginary stories, stories set in our bog and our kitchen garden, but it was not enough, because I wanted to get inside them, in the same way as I was trying to get back into the maw of my mother. Everything about her intrigued me: her body, her being, her pink corset, her fads, and the obsessions to which she was prone. One was about a little silver spoon from a set of six that she had had since her honeymoon. They were kept in a velvet-lined case, the velvet faded and milky, and they were once loaned to the vocational school when dignitaries were coming for a function. However, when the case was returned, there was one spoon missing, and my mother got on her bicycle and went in high dudgeon to the school. There was a thorough search, in drawers, in cupboards, under tables, in the pantry, in two bins, and in the turf shed. Inquiries were sent all over the village, but somehow my mother knew in her bones that she would never see that spoon again, and she never forgave it. She was convinced that she knew who had taken it, a shopkeeper who was jealous of our semi-grandeur, and ever after there was a coolness between them.

  When, much later, I wrote about my mother, that preoccupation with her had intensified so that she permeated all worlds—Her mother was the cupboard with all the things in it, the tabernacle with God in it, the lake with the legends in it, the sea with the oysters and the corpses, a realm into which she longed to vanish forever.

  Brides of Christ

  We were in all three hundred women in that convent, a limestone bastion housing choir nuns, lay nuns, boarders, and orphans, the sinful issue of unmarried mothers. We, the boarders, were little recruits for Heaven, where we would learn to be immune to passions, to mortify ourselves in every way, and to put up with our chilblains.

  The prevailing smells were of wax floor polish and cabbage, but in the chapel it was the smell of burning incense, so exotic, and afterward that smell lingered on in the wreaths of smoke that clouded the air.

  Not long after I had arrived there, crossing the courtyard, I was halted in my tracks by the sound of whistling, and it seemed to me the sweetest and most melodious sound imaginable. I felt that it was a young boy on his way home from work, and I had the deepest longing not to be in that courtyard but to be out there, walking, walking under the stars. Although we were on the edge of the town, we might as well have been in Timbuktu. Our dormitories were on two floors, one for the junior girls and one for the seniors. Seniors had a private cubicle with a curtain at the end, but for us it was a question of washing by a basin at the side of the bed, girls splashing themselves from ewers of freezing water and trying not to let their dressing gowns slip off. My dressing gown had belonged to my mother. It was fawn and hairy, and my name tag was sewn on the back of the collar. You could tell the girls whose parents were rich by their dressing gowns, which were either quilted or satin, in pink and rose colors. My mother had stitched name tags on all my uniform and, as she said, stitched her heart into each one. She cried for a week after I left, and not once did she break her fast. I fasted also, because the food was awful: meat that was stringy in a pool of brown gravy, the faithful cabbage, and, for evening tea, bread that was already spread with a mixture of butter and dripping. It was wartime and butter was rationed. In those first weeks, a girl whose bed backed onto mine had apples that she’d hidden in her clothes cupboard, and when the lights went out, she would eat them. Depending on her mood, she would or would not offer me some. But before long I learned from a senior that the best way to quell hunger was to put a blob of Vicks VapoRub on the tongue, which induced a slight nausea, though when I fell in love, I was not hungry at all.

  The nuns, all sixty or seventy of them, wore voluminous black habits with stiff white gimp that framed their faces and chiseled them. Nuns who had taken their final vows wore a wedding band on the ring finger, which signified that they were the Bride of Christ, and lay nuns, who were different from choir nuns, also had those wedding bands, but they wore aprons and did the menial work. Three hundred women with their humors and their tempers and their yearnings and their doubts and their several menstruations. My religious fervor would soar and falter during those years into which I crammed so much knowledge and information that I would in time forget.

  They were dour years, in which I came to love Latin, the words so righ
t in my mouth, as if it were the mother tongue—amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant; years in which I failed by a few marks to win a scholarship, the scholarship that my parents so fervently hoped I would win, as the annual fee of forty pounds was a tremendous strain on their resources; years during which I would fall in love with a nun in a manner no different, no less rapturous, from the successive loves which I would conceive for men down the years.

  Three times a week we were allowed a walk outside the gates, though not through the town itself, since we might be subjected to worldly or profane temptations. The town, Loughrea, which took its name from the lake, had a population of several hundred souls and, as we were told, was cutting its industrial teeth by mining for zinc and silver some eight miles distant. We walked in pairs and were supposed not to speak, though the tossing of our lunches into the lake inevitably led to hilarity. After the first week, disgusted by the stringy meat and the strips of cabbage, I, like every girl, put my lunch in a bit of paper and tucked it inside my gym frock, to dump in the lake. The gravy leaked into the chest and left a wet, warm patch there. I remember the walks as being windy, and when the lake was frozen, a man in dungarees went in with a sledgehammer and broke the thick shelves of ice in order to let the pairs of swans move about, as they did imperceptibly, breaching the dark pockets of freed water.

  The convent had its rules, its friendships, its penances, and its hilarities. Once, by mistake, a girl flushed a ten-shilling note down the lavatory and was in utter despair. It happened to be the same period as when parcels were arriving for Halloween, and when the Head Nun gave her nightly homily, referring to the parcels piling up in the parlor, she said that there seemed to be a great flush of money about. Hearing the word “flush” sent the girls into peals of laughter. We all laughed, including the girl who had lost her ten-shilling note. So perplexed was our nun by this skittishness, and our refusal to say what it was about, that she too began to laugh, and it was the only time it ever occurred to me that she might have a human trait.