Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  The foxes had left by June.

  Wild Horses

  Connemara had the worst frost and snows in many years. The gardener in the hotel said that the frost would burn the spring grass and “do” for the fuchsia bushes and the weed on the river. The river was glassy and frozen, except under the narrow bridge where the water squeezed its way with a whoosh and then fanned out into a dark, supple flow. From the overhanging fir trees the melting snow hung like panels of frayed lace, the little saplings a dainty gossamer. Connemara ponies were rolling and reveling in the snowed-on mountain grass.

  Connemara is one of my favorite places, where the epithets of “wild, picturesque, and rugged” are still true and where visitors went to get a glimpse of both the “natives” and the leprechauns alighting on tufts of bog.

  I had spent the previous night in Ballynahinch Hotel, where I found a small, leather-bound book with a vivid account, by the author Maria Edgeworth, of her visit there in 1834. Her companions were Sir Culling Smith, baronet and philanthropist, and his young wife, Isabella. They set out from Galway city, ignorant of the perils on the road ahead. They traveled in a fine barouche in which there were wells for holding writing-boxes, dressing boxes, and maps, except that the maps proved useless, as the roads stopped and there were no signs to guide them onward. Before long the rugged beauty ceased to impress them, and Sir Culling, though full of schemes and improvements for the Irish peasants, had to appeal to some of them, since the horses he had hired in Galway would go no farther. Out of nowhere men and young boys, “bog trotters,” appeared, wild and excitable, speaking in a tongue that the visitors did not understand. With bare arms they seized the carriage, standing, then jumping from stone to stone, a giant of a man called Ulick lifting the ladies as he might a doll, then the men in their frieze coats, and lastly the horses, and setting them down on terra firma. Sir Culling’s philanthropy did not, however, extend to meeting the bog trotters’ demands of a shilling each for their labors. He thought sixpence was reasonable. They screamed, they cursed, they scolded, while the women, understandably unnerved, threw coins in their way, so that they could be safely escorted to Ballynahinch Castle.

  At that time the castle was privately owned by Thomas Martin, and the visitors were somewhat surprised to find a stonework, barely whitewashed, a pigsty, and a dung heap adjoining the premises, rooms sparsely furnished, windows without curtains, windowpanes that rattled, and yet, as Miss Edgeworth said, the supper was such that the bon vivants of London would have blessed themselves with surprise—venison, salmon, lobster, oysters, and game, along with champagne and the finest wines from France.

  I arrived late at night, the taxi going slowly up the winding avenue, where stones painted a stark white bordered the grassy verge. The castle was faintly lit, its walls and turrets taller than the tall trees that surrounded it. As I pushed the hall door in, I found a young man in his shirtsleeves, on a ladder, reciting to himself. It was Hamlet’s soliloquy, with the “too, too solid flesh” and the “little month, or ere those shoes were old/With which [Gertrude] follow’d” his poor father’s body. Turning, he saw me, suddenly stopped, got down, pulled his tie from inside his shirt, and pointing to the blue bucket and the wet, stringy mop, he said, somewhat abashed, “This is what I do,” and introduced himself as the night watchman. I was led from the hall to the Hunt Room, where the fire that was laid for the morrow was soon crackling and wine and fruitcake set down before me. I was being entertained with more flowing passages, rapturous and melodramatic, so that it was not simply a room in Connemara with a picture of a boar hunt on the wall but a pavilion in France where Constance, wife of Geoffrey, is claiming that she is not mad but wishes to heaven she were, or with Margaret of Anjou, the she-wolf of France, leading her army in the Battle of Tewkesbury, or Thomas Jefferson’s dialogue between head and heart. Soliloquies that he had memorized kept him company, as he mopped floors, cleaned teapots, polished shoes, and prepared the breakfast trays. He had, as he put it, his own little theater to while away the worst of the night.

  Later we stood at the open door to look out. A navy-blue sky spanned the snowy fields, and the mountain peaks gleamed with a heavenly, an other-world splendor.

  Now that Ireland had lost its mojo, what would become of her?

  “Poetry,” he said, with the crazed fervor of a mystic, poetry that Ireland had been the cradle of.

  “ ’Tis there…’ tis still there,” he said, pointing to such staggering beauty, and it was difficult in those transcending moments to doubt him.

  His name was John.

  It was morning and I was setting out with the artist Dorothy Cross, who had agreed to come and photograph Drewsboro, enticed by my description of it. Mother Nature, according to my nephew Michael, was now supreme, briar, dock, ivy, nettle, and even little, scutty ash trees with tiny shoots making their way in the crevices of the mortar and the rotting window frames.

  It was still vacant.

  Dorothy was an artist who sometimes took photographs, and the one of her dog Louis was the loveliest and loneliest image of isolation and indecision that I had ever seen. Louis was on an empty track, under a blue sky, with bluer mountain behind, the pebbled seashore covered in a net of ragged green weed. Louis’s head was turned sideways; he was unable to make up his mind whether to go backward or forward.

  She had traveled the world, the Andes, Antarctica, Tahiti, where she worked with pearl farmers, and in Papua New Guinea she had heard the shark callers, the sorcerers of the sea. Her sculpture Virgin Shroud was the one that had made her known, a virgin covered with the skins of Friesian cows, their teats like the Crown of Thorns, sunk in the uddered head. In contrast, the virgin might have been setting out for a ball, draped as she was in satin and veiling that Dorothy had found in her grandmother’s trunk. It was both primitive and ethereal. As a young girl in County Cork she had read something in the Farmers Journal that haunted her—The darkest place in the world is the inside of a cow. Her work sometimes drew criticism, but she laughed it off. One farmer was reported as saying that the silvered glass goblets she had affixed to some male apostles for a convent in Madrid were a ladylike version of a “fella’s hard-on.” Yet she was the one who had come back to live in Ireland and I was the one who had stayed away.

  Now she was queen of five acres of land, which she had acquired through pure luck, having lost the lease on her studio in Dublin to one of the property sharks. She was driving along this isolated road in Connemara when she saw a handwritten sign that said FOR SALE and got out of the car. From the boot, filled with junk and scrap that she collected for her artworks, she took her lucky horseshoe and buried it in that ground, while an inquisitive cow looked on at her. The five acres circled a bay that opened into the rolling reaches of the Atlantic, stretching to the New World beyond, with small islands off the coasts of Galway and Clare, glimpsed through mist, like floating basins of meshed green.

  For the first six months, while she waited for the planning permission to restore the house, she slept in a little tin hut by the water’s edge, her protectors being her seventeenth-century Burmese Buddha, an otter who drank from a spring each morning, and the cow that had first stared at her and whom she named “Hairdo,” because of the crown of its head being so frizzy. She had saved Hairdo many times from the slaughterhouse by doing favors for the local farmer, who naturally believed that good grass could be put to better use. Her one friend, after she moved there, was a man called Mickey, an old man whose hedges she clipped, Mickey holding the ladder, calling her “Mrs. Darlin,” boasting that his cottage garden would surpass the Gardens of Babylon. She would visit him in the evenings, alone in his cottage by the fire, his long, thin fingers, as she said, like pincers on the crook of his stick, not lonely, not waiting for anything, not lamenting either, a hardy Connemara man who had traveled the world and had come back to settle on the western rim of it.

  Because of the frost, the drive was hair-raising, the swerves sudden, as we skittered off the road many time
s, almost landing in one of the big Connaught lakes, whose waters, cold and choppy, swished over the edge. Dorothy talking, talking. Admittedly the view was beautiful, the snow on the mountain slopes shone with mineral brightness and their summits pinkish-gold, the way heaven is always depicted in holy pictures.

  She was telling me the story of New Year’s Eve in her mother’s house in Cork, fireworks from one end of the city to the other, Louis going berserk, chewing her mother’s duvet, then a bed jacket, then cloth slippers, and, finally, the cord that connected the telephone to the wall, mistakenly setting off the fire alarm, so that they saw in the new year in the company of six able, full-blooded Cork firemen.

  The little towns that we drove through were coming awake: an upstairs blind being drawn; a woman hurrying along the towpath, carrying two mugs and a teapot; barrels of beer being rolled from the pavement down into a cellar.

  I had known some of those places since my gallivanting days, towns with a river, a stone bridge, a church spire, and raincoats on hangers outside, draper’s windows. Oughterard, with its waterfall, where on a day outing Carlo and Sasha, aged about twelve and thirteen, in some arcane ritual of courtship, had pelted their cousin Marian with stones and Sasha had left his new anorak on the riverbank. Galway city, where sixty-odd years ago I had gone with my sister Patsy to the annual races, wearing a hat so striking that it featured in the following day’s newspaper. Although chronically short of money, I had bought a hat designed by a Signor Forte, a black organza that was to be worn affixed to the side of the head, like a flying saucer. It also caught the attention of some gallants who invited us to the crush bar, one becoming so enamored of my sister that he proposed to her, but next morning in the dining room, sullen and hung over, he had said, “Are you a nurse? Your face is familiar.” Then it was Clarinbridge, famous for its oysters and where I had attended an oyster festival during my ostracized days. The bishop of Galway, Bishop Browne, so objected to my presence that at the gala dinner in the hotel in Eyre Square that night, I was put to sit alone at a side table, the young hotel manager mortified at having to do it.

  But all was “changed, utterly changed.”

  The sway of the bishops and their clerics was no more. Two reports, the Ryan Report and the Murphy Report, had just been published, documenting in all their dark and mordant detail the systematic abuse over fifty years of children by priests, Christian brothers, and nuns, in orphanages, laundries, novitiates, and schools. The countless revelations of beatings, hunger, chastisement, and ongoing sexual abuse were all the worse because they had been so sedulously denied with the collusion of Church and state. The anger was scalding and heartbreaking. At Easter Sunday, outside the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin, railings were draped with infants’ shoes, tied in black ribbon, for all the lost childhoods, and messages on various placards revealed bitter life stories. One, referring to the millstone in Saint Luke’s Gospel, read “Some Millstone. Some Neck. Jesus Wept.” Another maintained that the Catholic religion was “A Nazi Religion.” In the grounds of the Archbishop’s House in Drumcondra, a man who had been on hunger strike for weeks carried what might have been his own obituary: “Beaten every day to make me a Catholic.”

  As the Rock of Rome foundered, so too did the fabled Celtic Tiger, going from boom to bust overnight, as it were, and now known as the Celtic Carcass. A debt-saddened landscape, the never-to-be-finished houses and housing estates, rain seeping into the concrete, were livid specters and reminders of the boastful years and the ignominious fall. Ireland was in belligerent mood. In a brazen orgy of greed, graft, recklessness, and perhaps defiance for being so long the sons of a race associated with hunger and privation, there had been a gargantuan spree of borrowing and more borrowing and building. The highfliers, with the tacit approval of politicians, had robbed the country, so that when the “financial haircut” happened, trillions were written off and millions more written down to one-tenth of their former fortune.

  “ ’Tis karma, ’tis karma” was the current phrase, except that no one knew exactly what karma meant, just as no one knew why Ireland would have been saved if, as one pundit insisted, she had followed the fiscal policies of Maynard Keynes.

  A contractor had driven his cement mixer up to the gates of Parliament, taken the keys, and then disappeared, while someone had hit on the novel idea of auctioning a BMW which had belonged to one of the banking ventriloquists, the stipulation being that it be crushed, which it was, with “a smash and a bash,” in front of the television cameras and a baying crowd.

  Ministers had to go with a begging bowl to Brussels, to be bailed out by the financial heavyweights known as the Troika, who were now hated and accused of injecting “poisons of austerity” into Irish life. Politicians were “affrighted,” an election was called, and in letters to the paper people were urged to vote with revenge on the tips of their pens. One maverick candidate, who said he was “pure of all pastiche” and grew his own cannabis, swore that he would free Ireland from the contagion and rot of money.

  On a bridge on our way, I had read a sign that told it all, GREED IS THE KNIFE—THE SCARS RUN DEEP.

  We had gone from County Galway into County Clare. This was home. Instead of walls of loose stone, the briars, the bushes, and the hazels nuzzled together to make boundaries between fields, and roads that would have been grassy in summertime were untrodden and pearled over. Suddenly a scalding memory, as I recalled the previous morning in a bookshop in Dublin, where I read in Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics by Nancy Scheper-Hughes about a sheep farmer in An Clochán who railed against my writing and said, with evident satisfaction, “They ran that woman out of County Clare.”

  Cattle stared from gateways, as they always had done, lonely figures waiting as if at the Gates of Purgatory, and the trees and the woods that had their equivalent in some or other of Yeats’s poetry, still beautiful, still storm-struck, the light a palish gold, with a watery shimmer to it and Dorothy hoping it would stay like that, because she did not want Drewsboro to resemble Connecticut.

  Michael was waiting for us at the gate, and for a moment, it seemed to me, I was hallucinating. In his enthusiasm for our arrival, he had removed the very things—the bramble, the ivy, the ash trees, the whole lyrical paraphernalia—which had made the idea of photographing the house so appealing to Dorothy. All the poetry had been forked away.

  “I can pitch it all back,” he said, a little crestfallen by my dismay, as I stared at the hall door, no longer bowered, its red paint chipped and faded, the house a little old hag, buckled and sinking back into the foundations.

  Nothing for it but to go inside. Proudly he led us through the back door, which all these years he had believed to be locked, as once, on a previous visit, he had had to wedge me under the narrow gap of a window, calling as I wriggled through, “Are you in, are you in?” The kitchen had a weird, inhabited quality, dirty Delft on the table as if highwaymen had just passed through and had had a feed, and the little radio on the windowsill was still stuttering, its battery having expired long before. Then into the dining room, where indeed the walnut cabinet, scummed in dust, housed still another dead radio, which in times past was a matter of great pride to my parents, sitting in front of it, as they might sit in front of a blazing fire. There was one half of an orange curtain, like a theater prop, and some dead crows had fallen down the chimney. The presence of my mother was still weirdly in everything: in the crinkles of the orange curtain, in the coal scuttle where she hid bars of chocolate, and on the cushions of bawneen where she had embroidered old Celtic designs, thinking they would impress me. How hard she had fought to keep it all together.

  Upstairs, a wardrobe door creaked open and shut, and propped against the wall in my father’s old room was the oak headboard with the uneven patch, whitish from the graze of his head, from where again and again he would call down repeatedly, to be brought more tea. In a jumble of clothing, there were silk lampshades, a scroll with a papal blessing, consecrating the marriage of my brother and his wif
e, and a jovial jockey on high stilts, wearing a black hard hat.

  The ivy, the mad ivy, had come in through the windows, and in some rooms the beds with their damp covers seemed to house corpses. More crows, but this was not Chekhov’s Seagull, this was Drewsboro, in its dying throes.

  I looked in the press where my brother had kept a tin of peaches that he had won in a music competition, only to find a mohair jumper crawling with moths. Across the landing, in my mother’s room, the holy water font had a residue of dried salt which was bitter on the tongue. I sat on the edge of the bed. The wallpaper, painted over, was now a pale magnolia, yet I could just discern the dipping branches on which tiny pink rosebuds hung, so lifelike on their thin stalks that I used to believe they would bloom, like real roses on the briars.

  Drewsboro House, winter 2012.

  It was in that room that I slept with my mother and that each night we pressed the cold metal crucifix along our bodies and to our lips, reciting the prayer of Christ at Calvary; “They have pierced my hands and feet, they have numbered all my bones.” We were all lonely in that house, lonely and sometimes at loggerheads. In an adjoining room, where my father slept, one night I heard the loud crackle of fire, the leaping gusts of flames, and running across, I saw a bamboo side table on fire and the blankets that were over him as he slept, oblivious of everything, also on fire. Without thinking, I opened the window and threw things out, and my mother, in her last reminiscing days, surprisingly told the nun in the hospital about this and other tribulations that had befallen us, as if there was nothing to be ashamed of anymore. All the time Dorothy moved around taking snaps, marveling at coming on so many strange and evocative things. The room was so cold that my breath sent a cloud of bluish vapor over the lens of her little camera, adding to the ghostliness that she was determined to capture. Suddenly a wren, busy and spry, a taunt to the dead crows, flew into that room and fluttered among the sad debris, delighting in its new surrounds. When it dashed its forehead against the windowpane, its little yellow legs crawling hither and thither, we tried in vain to catch it, but it eluded us. In the end, with the spikes of a broken umbrella that was on the heap, we steered it out into the hall, above the stairwell, then down to the lower hall, where curiosity—it can hardly have been instinct—caused it to alight on an old wedding bouquet of artificial white flowers that had rusted at the edges.