‘Brenda, what on earth are you talking about? By the way, I should confess that I wasn’t all that interested in embroidery,’ Helen added, laughing. ‘My mum used to finish off most of the pieces I attempted – I remember once throwing a particularly nauseating piece out of the train window – but without her help I’d never have passed what was sneeringly known as domestic science.’
‘Would you be after learning if I was to show you?’ Brenda asked, still not explaining. ‘You see, I don’t want to pass it on to one of the twins’ daughters – my twin sisters, I mean, not your twins – they’re a poor and disappointing lot and really can’t be entrusted with such an important family matter.’
Helen held up her hand. ‘Brenda, you have to stop right there.’ She took a quick breath. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Why, the quilt, of course!’
‘What quilt?’
‘Well, I’ll be darned, that boy really can keep his mouth shut,’ Brenda said, pleased. ‘Mick says he told Danny about it, but asked him to keep it confidential.’
‘When? Danny doesn’t keep much from me.’
‘In 1945, after he got back from the war.’
‘Maybe he did, that was a long time ago,’ Helen said, feeling a little exasperated.
‘You’d have remembered if he had, darlin’,’ Brenda assured her. ‘Come along, I’ve laid it out in the dining room.’ She rose and Helen followed her.
Laid out on the table, its sides almost reaching the floor, was a multi-coloured quilt that, at first glance, looked as if it was made up of different-sized patches of cloth, completely lacking the symmetry usually associated with an Irish quilt. Nevertheless, it was vibrant and eye-catching and might even have been described as spectacular, except for the traditional border. It seemed to be made up of isolated scenes peppered with Celtic crosses.
‘Goodness!’ Helen exclaimed, not sure how to react.
‘It’s the quilt of Sorrow and Travail with the Far Corner of Joy,’ Brenda explained, as if such a name were natural enough. ‘Come, let me take you through the generations – only five, I fear, because it was only then that my great-great grandmother Caoilainn learned the gentle art of quilting, when she was serving as a lady’s maid at Kylemore Castle, County Connaught.’ Brenda lifted part of the great quilt that hung over one end of the table. ‘See, it is embroidered here in Gaelic. I’ll translate it for you.’
‘Brenda, you never said you spoke Gaelic!’
‘No, no, darlin’, that I don’t. These words were taught to me by Rose.’ Brenda first read them in Gaelic and then recited them in English.
This is the work of Caoilainn and it be
with the greatest humility dedicated to:
The most pious Saint Caoilainn who quickly
won the esteem and affection of her sister
nuns by her exactness to every duty, as
also by her sweet temper, gentle confiding
disposition and unaffected piety.
The more Helen looked at the quilt, the more fascinated she became with it. It wasn’t a thing of great beauty, yet it was undoubtedly a magnificent repository of memory and, judging by the dates, it was a real expression of Ireland’s history. Brenda explained that it dealt with seven generations, because Caoilainn, whose splendid name meant ‘fair and slender’, had started her quilt with the stories of her grandfather and then her father, so that the first incident concerning her family dated back to the middle of the eighteenth century. It was a two-hundred-year history of the major events in the lives of an Irish family, and it struck Helen like a bolt that she was now a part of it, part of the quilt, part of the trail of sorrow and travail with the far corner of joy.
‘Let me take you through the history of one side of Danny’s family, which, of course, is now one side of the twins’ family, and then I’ll explain why you are here tonight.’
Helen listened, fascinated, as Brenda took her through each incident she knew about, although there were many whose meaning had been lost in time that she couldn’t explain. The scenes, montages and symbols, often very crudely done in appliqué and embroidery, were quite bewildering but also wonderful. Some had a short explanation stitched beside them in Gaelic and later in English, while a few had quite long explanations. Each quilt-maker decided for herself what she wished to represent without recourse to any other family members. The quilt was never on display, never explained, and the decision to record sorrow and travail, or to pay a rare visit to work in the far corner of joy, was absolutely the responsibility of the oldest woman in any particular generation.
But by looking at the dates, diligently embroidered beside often mystifying or quixotic scenes wrought with scraps of appliquéd cloth, Helen realised several of them involved even earlier events. The quilt, she estimated, covered a period of two hundred years, but it seemed fairly certain that the oldest images would have derived from oral history recorded by the first of the quilters. These seemed to start around 1740, then in 1798 came the Irish Rebellion. The 1829 emancipation of the Catholics was commemorated in the far corner of joy, but travail and sorrow followed in 1845 with the beginning of the potato famine, then again in 1867 with the abortive Fenian uprising.
Helen couldn’t identify any of the events that followed, until the First World War, by which time Brenda’s parents were already in Australia. Rose had added the deaths of her two sons, slaughtered in Britain’s unholy war fighting against the Germans. It was curious, or perhaps poignantly sad, that the only item in the far corner of joy was the Catholic emancipation, until Rose’s addition of the birth of her little son, the first of the family to be born on Australian soil. Brenda had added Danny’s birth, and now it would be Helen’s task to add the birth of the twins, a responsibility she would take very seriously. Brenda had earlier pointed out a small paragraph embroidered in Gaelic, which explained that the quilt had been blessed with holy water and a promise made that, come what may, whether travail or disaster, the quilt must remain forever within the family.
The back of the ancient quilt was also uniquely revealing for it carried the outline of a tree with hundreds of names and birth dates, each on a single green leaf. But at the base of the tree lay hundreds of leaves in autumnal colours, yellows, reds, purples, russet, pinks and browns, and on each leaf was embroidered the same name as appeared on a green leaf, and the date of that family member’s death.
‘Helen, you are the next in line as Keeper of the Quilt. Will you accept? And, in your turn, will you hand it over to one of the twins?’ Brenda finally asked.
Helen wasn’t in the least religious but nevertheless found ‘the oath’, as Brenda described it, and the responsibility for the quilt overwhelmingly meaningful. Close to tears, she gazed at her mother-in-law, a woman she had learned to love and respect far more than she did her own mother. ‘Brenda, I would be enormously honoured, but I cannot sew or appliqué. Any idea you may have of my embroidery skills should be dismissed from your mind, and I draw like an intelligent five-year-old.’
Brenda laughed. ‘That, darlin’, is why I called you in now and not on my deathbed. Are you willing to learn?’
Helen gulped. Of all the unlikely skills she might have thought to acquire, quilting, sewing, appliqué and embroidery were not among them. ‘Mother, I am overwhelmed with the honour, but most fearful of the result,’ she found herself saying, in a formal manner that seemed to be required in the presence of the eccentric but venerable quilt. Helen, biting her bottom lip, thought hard. It was a decision from which there could be no turning back. Finally, she spoke again. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, I am prepared to learn, but you in turn must be prepared to tell me if I don’t succeed.’
Brenda laughed. ‘The entire quilt has been made by ordinary women; some of them knew their craft, and others knew little of it but accepted it as a part of their family life. Thank you, Helen. Can you give me four hours a week, o
ne hour each night?’
‘For how long?’
‘You will decide that yourself. The only measure you have, the only comparison, is against those who went before you.’
And so began the quilting lessons, the bloody and cramped fingers, the tiny invisible stitches always too visible, constantly unpicked and done over, often a dozen times. Helen was a strong woman who held herself in high regard, not from any conceit but because she approached most things in life with full confidence that she would be able to do well if she only tried her best.
The task was twofold: to maintain the quilt, and to add the information, written or pictorial, that symbolised her own generation. Restoration involved carefully mending the work of the past while trying to preserve it’s integrity. For historical clarity the embroidered words were repaired precisely, the spelling errors maintained, and the colours matched, even though they were often badly faded. The task was to match the original work as closely as possible and to preserve the quilt in its original form. Brenda, while competent, could claim no special talent, although some of the long-dead quilters might well have been considered serious artists.
After three months, Helen had gained sufficient humility to realise that she was dealing with a serious art form, and while she would perhaps always be an amateur, her naturally competitive spirit meant that, at the very least, she hoped to become a serious amateur. The curious thing was why she cared so much. Her work would seldom if ever be seen, and she wasn’t competing with anyone except the long dead. Then one day she realised that she was doing what the tomb decorators did in ancient Egypt – making beautiful decorations to be admired by the ghosts and phantoms who peopled the afterworld, and, curiously, this notion spurred her on. She wanted to excel for her own sake; she wanted to know that, in her own eyes, she had not let herself down nor those who came before her. It was a strangely gratifying feeling.
As an Egyptologist, her task had been to attempt to reveal the past through a scrap of linen bandage impregnated with traces of resin; now, as a quilter, she was attempting to understand the travails and sorrows of life in another time, as well as express what was most significant about the life of her own family, visiting, she hoped, the far corner of joy which suggested that, in the field of human endeavour, sorrow was in far more ready supply than joy. As Keeper of the Quilt, she was at once anthropologist, art historian, custodian, restorer and potential contributor. Helen accepted this task with a zeal that, if it had been manifest in Danny, she might have judged obsessive.
In the time that she worked on the quilt with Brenda as her taskmistress, Helen grew very close to the older woman. They had always enjoyed each other’s company and the differences in their backgrounds and education seemed to count for little: both were professionals, lived busy lives, and much of their free time was spent with their families, so that the intimacy women are capable of feeling with each other had never had time or space to truly blossom. Now, as they unpicked and stitched, patched and replaced, they talked endlessly. Brenda told of her stoic parents and the tragic deaths of her brothers, and of how this had left her father a bitter and cruel man. Her mother, Brenda and her sisters had become the butt of his cruelty, disdain and indifference. He had lost his sons, who had been butchered in the First World War by Britain, the great mother of all whores, leaving him with only the burden of daughters, for whom he had, if anything, a harsh love but little understanding. He simply handed these responsibilities to his wife. His irascible nature and stubbornness meant that he lay on a bed of thorns that Brenda had come to think was largely of his own making.
Unlike Helen, Brenda had had a childhood of grinding labour and fear. The terrible beatings her father had inflicted on her were more a consequence of his inner rage than of anything she might have done. And where Helen had searched for and found her soul mate, Brenda described the lonely years when she’d used Half Dunn, the lump of lard, to change her life, forcing him to marry her. Both women were grateful for their healthy babies – Helen had waited years for her twins, and Brenda had miscarried, finally visiting the far corner of joy with the birth of Daniel Corrib Dunn. With it came the determination that she would dedicate her life to making him into ‘a somebody’. This confession had brought tears to Helen’s eyes. ‘Mum, you were always “a somebody”, only you didn’t know it,’ she said softly, hugging Brenda to her breast.
Now, with everything beginning to change, Brenda spoke of preparing to retire. Half Dunn had lost weight, and with it the lassitude that had oppressed him. Brenda had discovered another person, someone she had first grown to like and now confessed to love, so that she wanted to get to know him – truly know him – at last. ‘Retirement will be wonderful,’ Helen said. ‘We’ll have more of you both; how lovely.’
‘Ah, yes, my darlin’, but first I must be rid of the pub – clearly, Danny won’t be taking it over – and a sad day that is going to be, but with all the changes coming, I’m too old and tired . . .’ She sighed. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see what turns up, my dear.’
Helen, for her part, was able to talk of her recent fears that all the effort in the world wasn’t going to allow her to achieve the career in Egyptology she knew she was capable of. She admitted to her mother-in-law that while she was reconciled to Danny attempting to win at the next election, the idea of being a politician’s wife wasn’t enough for her. His obsession to change the world wasn’t something she could or would want to stop, but neither was it one she shared. The twins would soon be teenagers and her role as a mother was likely to decrease; her greatest fear was that she would inevitably end up as just another academic during the day and her politician husband’s grinning handbag at night, as they attended endless boring but necessary functions.
Brenda pressed her for more. She had become very involved with Danny’s stand as an Independent and Helen knew she would back him to the hilt in the next election. Brenda understood that Danny was attempting to do for Balmain what she had done for herself through sheer hard work and determination. Danny wanted to help the people who were locked into a life of poverty over which they had little or no control, those men who bought her beer for the small comfort it brought them and who, together with their wives, were being led by the nose by Tommy O’Hearn. The fat slug had skipped enlistment, pretending to have flat feet, while her precious Danny had gone to fight for them, had suffered for them and now was willing to fight for them again – had already fought for them in the courts. Brenda was inordinately proud of Danny being a lawyer, especially the fact that his defence of Balmain women and their children meant that he was virtually idolised by those who attended Brenda’s soirées, in fact by most of the women in Balmain. On the other hand, Brenda was equally enthralled by the prospect of Danny following in Doc Evatt’s footsteps. ‘Do you think Danny will win next time?’ she asked.
Helen shrugged. ‘Who knows, but I can say this for him: I’ve never seen him lose. He may be a dreamer, but he’s prepared to do the hard yards, do the planning. Changing an entire social structure, one that’s existed for a hundred years, is a frightening idea. This is the biggest project he’ll ever attempt and I live in terror that it won’t work and we’ll . . . well, I suppose we’ll get by, but he won’t! For Danny, this is the end game.’
Brenda said nothing. She was thinking about Helen’s need for independence, which she understood very well. She too had enjoyed life on her own terms; she herself had escaped virtual servitude as a sixteen-year-old maid in a pub. So, one afternoon while quilting she asked, ‘Helen, are you sure you want to leave the university? You know how proud we are of what you’ve achieved. I can never get over the thrill I get when I talk about you as Dr Helen Dunn.’
‘Mother Brenda, I’ll still be a doctor if I’m washing dishes for a living. I must say, going to work and facing a lecture room full of students who think of Egyptology as simply a unit to add to their quota for the year is becoming less and less interesting, and elevatio
n, even at one of the new universities, is, frankly, less and less likely. I sometimes feel like a mummy myself, wrapped in an endless career bandage that is slowly covering anything useful I have to offer the world.’
‘Well then, darlin’, I’ll come straight out with it. Why don’t you take over the pub? We’ll back you. Things are changing fast, too fast for us, and we’ll be left behind if we don’t change with the times. Pubs are becoming restaurants and entertainment centres and goodness knows what else in the future.’
Helen, usually circumspect, looked at Brenda and, surprising even herself, replied, ‘Yes, please.’
Brenda didn’t make a fuss; she simply replied calmly, ‘Good. And so now you will both change your lives; that’s a brave decision but, I think, a good one, certainly not one I would have dared contemplate once I had my arms locked around the security of owning a pub.’
And so began Helen’s apprenticeship, on the day she completed the restoration of a scene on the quilt of an eighteenth-century cannon depicted at the moment of discharge, the mouth of the great black metal monster exploding with sharp-coloured flames of appliquéd material. Flying in the air in front of the cannon was a soldier in uniform, who had obviously received the full force of the blast, his hat and bayoneted musket flying through the air, together with an arm and a leg detached from the body, both high above his head and moving in different directions. Then, as if in a different part of the scene, a young redheaded girl, in a dress the same colour as the soldier’s uniform, watched him as he struggled with only one arm and the stump of the other on crutches. Under it all were several verses in Gaelic that Helen had been careful to embroider exactly as they had been. The whole scene had been badly faded when she began, and her restoration was a triumph, the result of a great many hours of work. Her skills had progressed to the point where she enjoyed the task and seldom these days pricked a finger; in fact, she was rather proud of the calluses that had formed on her thumb and forefinger.
The Story of Danny Dunn Page 48
