Country Girl: A Memoir (13 page)

The negative influences with which he was obsessed were British newspapers, evil literature, communism, and foreign soccer players. The cinema too was a hotbed of iniquity. Only instructional films, such as
The Fight against Tuberculosis,
or those showing the maneuvers of various local defense forces,
were recommended, and at his bidding protests were organized outside cinemas; at different times Orson Welles, Danny Kaye, Larry Adler, and Arthur Miller were all denounced for their leftist tendencies. Even Cole Porter in time was censored. When, for
Hospitals’ Request,
the words “Always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion” were played on the radio, the archbishop insisted that the following week they be replaced by harmless instrumental orchestra music. For his “modesty campaign” he used to be driven in his deluxe Dodge through the streets of Dublin at night, looking for any sign of miscreance, and if there were nude mannequins in a shop window of a department store, he ordered that they be removed next day. When, mistakenly, tampons were introduced without consulting him, he immediately issued an episcopal censure to the government, so that an unfortunate parliamentary secretary for health had to explain that the sale of tampons was to be discontinued, as they were in danger of stimulating girls at an impressionable age and could eventually lead them into acquiring contraceptives (which were also illegal) to satisfy their dangerously aroused passions.

The craze for fashion was whetted when in the papers I saw advertisements for dinner gowns in banana cream, coatees embroidered with pearls and diamonds, black muskrat stoles, and whitener for “Milady’s teeth.” But I had saved only enough to get a pair of gold sleepers, believing the words of the song, “And if your love wears golden earrings, she belongs to you…” It was to Dr. Masterson I went, as I knew his name from the prescriptions, which were almost impossible to decipher. He was a gruff man. The method was rudimentary. A needle was bored through the earlobe, into a cork at the back, then wriggled and rewriggled to make a hole large enough for the little sleeper to be fitted. Before he began, he said that if I squealed at
the first one, he wouldn’t do the second. His dispensary was crowded and pierced ears were a frivolity. For a week or so, little crusts of dried blood could be seen on my earlobes, which the dummies examined and fretted over.

I was on my bicycle when I saw a group in Baggott Street that had surrounded a tall woman dressed completely in black, like a nun. It was outside the Unicorn restaurant, and being so tall, she had stooped to address them. Someone said that this was Maud Gonne, the fairy queen about whom Yeats, laboring in ecstasy, had written poem after poem. She was the Woman of the Sidhe, who long ago on horseback, with her dog Dagda behind her, rode all over Donegal to give heart and fire to the evicted peasants as their cabins collapsed under the assaults of the battering ram. It was the nearest I would ever come to a myth, because not only had she served as Yeats’s muse, she had also married Major John McBride, a hero of the Boer War, and one of the men executed in the doomed 1916 rebellion. History and literature had meshed and were embodied in her loftiness—“Pallas Athene at Howth station, waiting a train.”

As she walked away, an older man, shaking with emotion, recited the prophetic poem that Yeats had written to her:

…A crowd

Will gather, and not know it walks the very street

Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud.

Some years later I would meet her son, Sean McBride, who had all his mother’s aristocratic air and mien, his temples like hers, white as alabaster, and his accent slightly French from having grown up in Normandy. He took me to lunch in Jammet’s, Dublin’s grandest restaurant, and afterward he smoked a cigar and had a cognac, while I had a peppermint frappé, my first ever. I was married by then and lived in County Wicklow,
and McBride offered to drive me part of the way, toward the Wicklow Mountains, to Kilmacanogue. I was too frightened to let him hold my hand on the journey. That rectitude, combined with my longing, was what made him the protagonist in my first novel,
The Country Girls,
the aloof and mysterious barrister whom Kate would moon over and lose her heart to, in fiction.

As Christmas was approaching, the head of the transport company announced that railway stations no longer needed to resemble Victorian ones and, moreover, to banish the ghost of rationing stations, would be lit up to generate a “festive atmosphere.” Ornate greeting boards, hanging flower baskets, fairy lights, and garlands went up. The tallest tree ever seen in the capital was in Westland Row. But I was going home from a different station, “Kingsbridge of the bitter winds,” with the borrowed volume of Sean O’Casey’s autobiography in my suitcase. I had the same old tweed coat with, however, an added touch of flamboyance, a gentleman’s scarf of white silk with sumptuous fringing that I had bought in a secondhand shop for a song. As I arrived home, the welcome was effusive, and my mother felt the gold sleepers, as if somehow they reminded her of her own youth.

That next morning, not having to mount the bicycle, I slept till noon, and she wakened me with a pot of tea and fingers of toast cut very daintily. She was curious about Dublin, the style in the shop windows, the altars in the numerous churches, the friars in their brown robes hurrying through the streets to minister to the sick, and our cousins who, though they came each summer and ate like gluttons, were too stingy to give us a cup of tea.

Later I went out into the fields. It was frosty, the grass crisp and dry, and you could hear an animal’s moan a mile off. I had
forgotten how much I loved those fields, my breath almost blue in the clean air, our two dogs trotting along beside me and sometimes scampering off when a rabbit had darted from some hole and in a crazed stupidity came first their way and then ran for its life. Birds flew and dipped with a jauntiness, sometimes perching on the telegraph wires, from which there came a low, zinging throb. Then suddenly they would take a bold flight off to somewhere else and possibly resume their concert. I knew that I would always come back to Drewsboro and yet that I would never come back entirely. I felt carefree, stayed out a long while, went up the hills to see the river, the icy water crystal clear, with wild swans shivering in the rushes.

My mother’s eyes were seething, even before she spoke. She was holding the volume of Sean O’Casey’s autobiography, open at the incendiary page. Was this how I spent my time? Was this their reward for the sacrifices they had made to get me to Dublin? I was flustered, having read only the first forty pages, which were about family and the trade union movement and the backstage rivalries in the Abbey Theatre. I nearly fainted as she started to read aloud:

It was commonly reported by those who were close up to the inner circle, that, if a monk was to be kept from straddling a judy he had to be shut up in a stone coffin and let out only under the supervision of a hundred halberdiers while he was having a snack in the first, second and third watches of the day, but as this guardianship of the ladies was too costly and too troublesome, the monks had it all their own way, and there wasn’t a lassie in the whole wide world who didn’t know a codpiece from the real thing, even when her eyes were shut and her mind wandering.

She was about to burn it. I begged her not to, saying it was not my book and that I must return it. I begged her and I hated her.

Back in Dublin, debauchery was thriving. An unemployed laborer from Crumlin was fined two pounds for offensive behavior in the Olympia Ballroom after he had been caught jitterbugging. The end of the world was predicted. One thousand pilgrims who had traveled to Knock Shrine in County Mayo were warned by a Father Declan of Inchicore of the mounting avalanche of infidelity and apostasy that threatened to submerge the world in blood and tears. In a pastoral letter the Pope was forced to admit that it was “the darkest hour” in history since the Deluge. A third message from Our Lady was due to be conveyed to the children in Fatima, prophesying this Armageddon. Chapels were packed. On the appointed day and at the given hour of three o’clock, in a swish golf club outside the city, players and caddies lay on the damp turf pleading for mercy. Except that the hour passed uneventfully and people resumed their wicked ways.

Funds permitting, I would twice monthly, on my half-day from the pharmacy, go to a stage show in the Capitol Theatre, billed to be Ireland’s answer to the Folies Bergère. It was a veritable Mecca, the stage with gauze backdrop and lurid Technicolor, peroxide blondes with flashy suspenders kicking their thighs and their legs to the heavens, their flesh so beautifully, so evenly bronzed; their faces, in contrast, a stark alabaster white. They were the mere backdrop to the main event, when a crooner, in a fawn suit and with a dazzling smile, strolled on, the goddesses already having formed a semicircle, their arms making a balustrade for him to lean on. Then he came downstage to ravish rows of us besotted women and girls, who had paid one shilling for this thrill. The collective swooning in that audience would
be impossible to measure as his first song came as a signal to each yearning one of us:

Brush those tears from your eyes

And try and realize

That from now on

I’ll always be true.

I went away

But I didn’t mean to stay

And I will regret it until my dying day.

By then the handkerchiefs were out, and sometimes he would sing the last verse again, as a sop, while the chorus girls, the goddesses, shrugged and pouted in a mimicry of huff.

At the stage door, where we, the adorers, hovered, he would emerge smiling, whistling, proud of his little audience. One or two might be lucky enough to get a hurried autograph. I was disappointed to note that his handwriting was slovenly. As I watched him go down the lane, it never occurred to me that he might single me out, except that he did. It was brief. It was a beckon of the head to detach myself from the others and his asking if he should call the following Sunday around two, then making a note of my address on the North Circular Road. Already I was negotiating the minefield of getting my sister and Anna out of the flat, and my hopes hinged on the fact that they did corporal works of mercy, visiting sick people in hospitals.