Country Girl: A Memoir (4 page)

The first faux pas happened when Eily’s father came in, his wet cap dripping onto the point of his nose; suddenly alarmed at the altered state of the room and the elegance of it, he turned to my father and said, “Am I in my own house at all, mister?” He called all other men mister because, having had no education, he reckoned that others were scholars and deserving of his respect. Then he shook the groom’s hand and called him mister.
The conversation turned to the crops: some corn already lodged in the fields from so much rain and whether it would not have been better to have used it for pasture.

I shall never forget the giddy elation in Eily’s expression when she jumped up, stood in front of the fire, and thanked everyone profusely for being so good to her. Her father, who loved her and who must have suddenly guessed the implications of what she had just said, ran out of the room, for fear of crying. The tea and porter cake came next.

The couple moved away soon after that, to the opposite end of the county, where the wedding was held, and many years later I saw Eily in Grafton Street in Dublin, much older, her eyes scared, those eyes the color of dark slate and that many had envied. She was talking to herself in a mad, high-pitched voice and scolding people whom she imagined to be staring at her.

Also in that dining room, my mother and I once narrowly escaped death. My father had gone in there with a bottle of whiskey and a revolver that had belonged to my mother’s brother, Captain Michael. It was on top of a wardrobe, with a leather holster and bullets. In there, he vowed havoc and slaughter on all of us and on families along the road who had refused him drink, and eventually the sergeant was called and went in to reason with him. After a while, when they had obviously been arguing fiercely, the sergeant came out and said the only person he would give the gun to was my mother, and I went in with her to be her protector.

My father kept swinging the loaded revolver, jauntily, as if it were a toy. My mother asked in a pacifying voice, what did he want? What was it he wanted? He wanted money. “Give it to me. Give it to me,” he kept saying. He did not believe that she did not have any, and he put the revolver down on the bamboo whatnot and crossed and stood before us. Then he searched
inside her bodice, where she sometimes kept money and where I, and no doubt he, had sometimes seen the jut of an orange-tinted ten-shilling note. She was shaking like a leaf. Then he searched in good cups in the china cabinet, and finding only the delicate handles that were broken off and kept in the hope of their being glued back one day, he became even more enraged. We saw him go back to the bamboo table and pick up the revolver. My mother asked him to put it down, in the name of Jesus, to put it down. That merely egged him on. The shot was the loudest I’d ever heard, not like gunshot from down in the woods, when men hunted rabbits and hares. Crouched down next to her, I thought that we were dead and found it strange to be smothered in burning smoke. The bullet missed us and passed into the frame of the door, where white paint was crumbling and falling off in little shards. Carnero and the sergeant were there in the room, speaking in savage bursts, as though they were about to attack him, and my father had grown peculiarly quiet, almost contrite, as he was being led out.

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.

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.