Wheels Within Wheels (11 page)

A few days after Christmas my mother broke it to me that in January I was to go as a boarder to an Irish-speaking coeducational school. Naturally I was devastated. It had always been understood that I would go away to school at the age of ten and I could scarcely credit my parents’ treachery. But in an odd way this sense of having been betrayed kept me calm. Parents who loved me so little must not be allowed to see how much I cared – a melodramatic reaction which carried me through my initial grief and disillusionment. Then suddenly going away to school began to seem an interesting idea; to my own surprise part of me was one morning quite looking forward to it, though I had never yet been separated from both my parents for more than a few days. But soon I was again shattered by the discovery that books in English were
forbidden
at the College. Despair overcame me; this was equivalent to depriving an alcoholic of his bottle or a chain-smoker of his packet. Yet I never made any attempt to alter my parents’ decision. On details I argued interminably with them; on major issues I meekly deferred to their adult wisdom even if their reasoning seemed obscure. Or if, as in the present case, my antennae told me that they were not themselves in perfect agreement.

This was one of the few occasions when my father made a decision, for personal reasons of his own, to which my mother only grudgingly assented. Where the use of English was totally forbidden it seemed possible that within a year even I would have acquired a working knowledge of my native tongue. For nationalistic reasons my father wished me to be as fluent an Irish speaker as himself. Besides, if I were ever to pass an examination some action had to be taken to remove whatever blockage prevented me from learning languages. Or so my parents thought; for years they would not accept the simple fact that I had not inherited their linguistic gifts. They mistook stupidity for laziness and my mother – who held no strong views about the Gaelic Revival – probably agreed to this experiment as a general disciplinary measure.

At the beginning of 1941 the ‘Emergency’ had not yet banished all motor cars from Irish roads and we drove to the College on a cold, dark, wet January afternoon. The hedges were hardly visible through swirling curtains of rain and we were all, for our various reasons, apprehensively silent. Real, live boarding-school authorities were an unknown quantity to me, but I felt that they might prove much more dangerous in life than in literature so I had been afraid to pack even one illicit book. And now I was sick with anguish at the thought of parting from my parents. When the grey school buildings loomed sombrely out of the rain and fog, on their bleak and windswept cliff above the sea, I remarked that there would be no need for any lingering once my luggage had been unloaded. And my mother agreed that this was so.

When we had said our brisk goodbyes my father decisively banged the car door and I turned into a long, empty corridor. Most pupils travelled by train and had not yet arrived. A young master appeared, said something curt in Irish and disappeared, carrying my suitcases. I hurried after him, down the ill-lit corridor and up a steep staircase. The whole place reeked of Jeyes Fluid and boiled onions. Then I was put in the care (not quite the
mot juste
) of a freckled twelve-year-old with sandy plaits and a shrill, bossy voice. I can still see her frayed pale green hair-ribbons and her look of contempt when she realised that I understood not a word she was saying.

In the icy, barn-like, whitewashed dormitory there were no cubicles but only rows of beds with vociferously broken springs and lumpy, unclean mattresses. My bed stood almost in the centre of this desolation and as I paused forlornly beside it, wondering where to hang my clothes, I realised that such a complete lack of privacy would add an unforeseen dimension to my hell. I shivered and needed to go quickly to the lavatory. Half-a-dozen older girls were gathered in a far corner, wearing overcoats and stuffing themselves with sticky buns. When I asked for the lavatory in English one of them threw a boot at me and shouted angrily in Irish. My bladder was about to fail me and I broke into a cold sweat – literally, for I remember pushing the hair out of my eyes and noting the chilly moisture on my forehead and thinking that this must be what authors meant by ‘cold sweat’. I had assumed that
in extremis
we could talk English; now it was plain that to do so, under any circumstances, would
bring some instant punishment from my uncouth and intimidating seniors. Mercifully a lavatory chain was pulled nearby at that moment and I rushed gratefully towards the sound.

Back in the dormitory I found my suitcases open and their contents scattered on the bed. The girls were examining everything critically and the discovery of my schoolbooks provoked much mirth; I was so tall for my age that from these they deduced extraordinary stupidity. They expressed the opinion that I must be mentally retarded by using graphic traditional gestures, while shrieking with laughter. Then they came on a packet of sanitary towels – proud emblem of my recently acquired womanhood – and used other gestures, not then understood by me; no doubt their comments were to match for they lowered their voices and muffled their sniggers. As I could see no friendly – or even neutral – face anywhere I suppressed my rage and stood by helplessly until the enemy lost interest. They left the dormitory linking arms, scuffling, giggling and shouting each other down. I thought of Mrs Mansfield, who would almost have fainted to witness such behaviour, and the image of her trim little figure, with San Toy trotting regally to heel, sent me hurrying back to the lavatory to weep. Already I had resolved that my enemies would never see me weeping.

At six o’clock a jangling bell summoned us to the refectory for high tea. Most of the other pupils had now arrived, but I seemed to be the only new girl though there were several new boys – all of whom, discouragingly, spoke effortless Irish. As I took my place at one of the long, scrubbed wooden tables, each with mounds of thick bread and scrape placed at intervals down the centre, I vowed that this educational experiment must be made to fail as expeditiously as possible. Since English was forbidden, I would not speak. And when the futility of having a dumb child about the place impinged on the authorities, they would expel me. Nothing could be simpler. As I am naturally taciturn the prospect of maintaining silence for an indefinite period did not dismay me. And to compensate for the lack of books I would secretly write one myself.

Of course things did not work out quite like this. I was far too demoralised by homesickness to concentrate on writing anything more than letters and my misery, instead of diminishing as the days passed,
became more acute. There was not even one remotely congenial character among either staff or pupils and I had immediately become a favourite bullying target for the more sadistic seniors. These also regularly robbed me of my weekly food parcel – an Emergency innovation – and they did use English to threaten to retaliate if I reported them. It is easy to see how I brought out the worst in these schoolmates. To them I must have seemed intolerably priggish,
precocious
, precious, pedantic and pusillanimous. There was no point of contact; in every sense we spoke different languages. Inevitably my memories of this ordeal are biased and the reality may have been a trifle less barbarous than what I recollect. Yet the essence of the atmosphere remained unparalleled in my experience until I worked as a waitress, almost twenty years later, in the canteen of a home for down-and-outs in East London.

Therefore this episode, despite its brevity, was one of the most valuable in my limited educational career. At Lismore school I was subtly accorded privileges by many of the teachers because I seemed ‘different’. At Ring I was given hell for the same reason and thus I learned that standards other than my own were not only acceptable to, but preferred by, large sections of the population.

My parents wrote long letters three times a week but refrained from squandering their petrol ration on me. In my Sunday letters home I never asked for a visit but regularly reported that I was learning
no
Irish and cunningly emphasised the physical hardships of school life. In fact I took these in my stride – apart from the atrocious food they seemed no worse than the rigours of home life – but I felt that my mother would be more disturbed by health hazards than by complaints about bullying. So I graphically described how – after an inadequate lunch – we were driven out every afternoon, whatever the weather, to play camogie (the feminine of hurling) on pitches hock-deep in mud – and how we then had to sit in an unheated prep. hall for two hours wearing damp socks.

These letters were not greatly exaggerated and as a result of
over-exposure
and underfeeding I developed severe bronchitis in the middle of February. After forty-eight hours I was almost too ill to walk, yet the matron merely dosed me with some ineffectual syrup. Everyone had 
snuffles and coughs and she did not pause to distinguish between penny plain and tuppence coloured. So I wrote an extra letter to my parents, one Wednesday morning.

On the following afternoon they arrived unannounced, and despite a keen east wind discerned in the distance their wheezing ewe-lamb, feebly wielding a camogie stick. Moments later I was in the car, drenching my mother’s shoulder with all the tears not shed since our parting. And in the headmaster’s office my father was being told that I had made little progress with my Irish and seemed ‘unable to fit in with the rest’. ‘I should think not!’ muttered my mother, as we drove off. While I was changing and packing she had had an opportunity to observe a
cross-section
of ‘the rest’. 

During my absence from home Old Brigid had at last retired to her cottage near Cappoquin and been replaced by one Maggie –
unenthusiastically
described as ‘adequate’, fading to ‘better than nothing’, in my mother’s letters. As we drove towards Lismore I found it hard to imagine life without Old Brigid, but I would have been a good deal more upset in any other circumstances. Having just regained Paradise not even her loss could dilute my joy and on being assured that I might visit her weekly I philosophically accepted the idea of Maggie.

I did not, however, accept the reality of Maggie. She was sharp-boned and purple-hued and her voice rasped and she always looked
discontented
– with some reason, as a servant chez Murphy. We disliked each other on sight; to me she was an unloving tyrant, to her I was a saucy little puppy. And the chances of our ever coming to terms were much reduced by my having to take to my bed at once and stay there for three weeks, during which time Maggie found herself toiling up and down stairs every few hours with trays of such delicacies as were then available. (I particularly remember dark-brown beef-tea, jars of Calves’-foot jelly and a weird, chewy ginger-based concoction which was alleged to do wonderful things for the bronchial chords.)

Even in our Spartan household bronchitic patients were permitted a fire in their bedroom and it was typical of my mother’s feeling for servants that she always asked my father to take on the consequent chores – which he most willingly did. Old Brigid had greatly appreciated his help, but it quickly became obvious that in Maggie’s estimation such face-losing behaviour on the master’s part drastically lowered our status. For a few weeks after my recovery she and I sparred daily; I was missing Old Brigid dreadfully, resenting Maggie in proportion and making my feelings plain. Then one morning she left without notice to become housekeeper to an elderly, childless couple who lived in a comfortable new house where no one had committed suicide.

Having been born with ‘a weak chest’ I was accustomed to enjoying a
few weeks of invalidism each winter and I revelled in being free to read, almost without interruption, for fourteen hours a day seven days a week. Whatever the theologians might say about Heaven being a state of union with God, I knew it consisted of an infinite library; and eternity, about which my parents were wont to argue with amusing vehemence, was simply what enabled one to read uninterruptedly forever.

The only interruptions I welcomed during these withdrawals from the world were Dr White’s visits. He treated me with the sort of rough affection one bestows on a large dog and gave me delicious syrup from a bottle excavated with difficulty from the depths of his greatcoat pocket and told heart-stopping stories about his soldiering days in India and South Africa. Sometimes he advised me to rest my eyes, but this advice went unheeded as I took no interest whatever in any of the standard children’s games or pastimes. (A serious handicap nowadays, when I have a more versatile child of my own.)

I remember the perfection of my happiness – a perfection not often attained in this life, as I realised even then – when I woke on a dark winter’s morning and switched on the light to see a tower of unread library books by my bed. From them I would look caressingly towards my own books on their shelves around the wall and reflect that now I had time to reread; I could never decide which was the greater pleasure, rereading old favourites or discovering new ones. For a moment I would lie still, ecstatically anticipating the day’s bliss. And sometimes it would cross my mind that only Pappa could fully understand how I felt.

There is a difference between the interest taken in books by normal readers (people like my parents) and the lunatic concern of
bibliomaniacs
(people like Pappa and myself). Everything to do with books mattered to me and I fretted much more over their wartime deterioration – that squalid gravy-coloured paper! – than I did over butter rationing or inedible bread. (Clothes rationing I of course considered a blessing in disguise.) After a quick glance at any open page I could by the age of nine have told you the publisher of most children’s books – and often the printer and illustrator, too. One of my hobbies was rewriting blurbs which seemed inadequate and I collected publishers’ lists as other children collect stamps. During June and July I often prayed for rain; on fine days I was supposed to be out in the 
fresh air, but on wet days I could go to the county library headquarters and help unpack the new books that came by the hundred, in tea-chests, at that season. The sight, smell and feel of these books so intoxicated me that I often refused to go home at lunch time. I had an agreement with my parents that when the children’s books came I could always help unpack, regardless of climatic conditions. I would then – to my father’s sensibly silent disgust – seize on the least worthy volumes (Biggles and so forth) and beg to be allowed to borrow them even before they had been initiated into public circulation. But my father did not believe in Privilege so I had to bide my time – very sulkily. It must have exasperated my parents that for so long I preferred exciting stories to good writing. At every stage of childhood I completely rejected all the classical fairy stories, and Lewis Carroll, Captain Marryat, Louisa Alcott, Kipling, E. Nesbit and any volume that I suspected might be intended to improve my mind. But neither, to be fair to myself, would I read Enid Blyton when she began to pollute the literary atmosphere. I was
uncompromisingly
middlebrow; and so, with minor modifications, I have remained to this day.

As the librarian’s daughter I did have one priceless perk. When public library books become too battered and disgusting for rebinding or recirculation they are ‘Withdrawn From Circulation’, stamped to that effect and despatched either to fever hospitals or to the pulpers. And among those glorious, revolting heaps of ‘Withdrawn’ books – their pages interlarded with evidence of the diet of the rural reader – I was free to wander and take my pick and carry the noisome volumes home by the armful to be mine forever. (Many of them are still mine; no one ever steals them.)

I went through one appalling crisis in relation to ‘Withdrawn’ books. At the age of eight or so I had a compulsive secret vice – crossing out the author’s name on the title page of old books and substituting my own. This could be done without fear of detection in unfrequented corners of the library; but then, in bed one ghastly evening, I suddenly realised that some of the books I had been abusing might go, not to the pulpers but to a fever hospital. If this happened both my iniquitous vandalism and my vain ambitions would be exposed to a shocked and derisive public. This hideous possibility so tormented me that I could not sleep. As my 
parents were listening to the late news I crept downstairs and confessed all to my mother – who remained astonishingly unperturbed. She assured me that the defacement of such books was forgivable and that no fever hospital patient was likely to report on my little weakness to the world press – which would in any case be disinclined to take the matter up. I always enjoyed the irony with which she put things in perspective; curiously enough, it never made me feel foolish.

By the spring of 1941 most Irish working girls had emigrated to earn good money in English factories and our next five years were dominated by the comings and goings of maidservants. The best were those too young to emigrate, who usually responded well to my mother’s training; but no sooner had she imparted the rudiments of domesticity than they were clutching a ticket for Paddington and saying often tearful farewells. This relay system offered no reward for weeks of hard work. Gone were the days when my mother spent her mornings reading, or listening to concerts on the wireless, or teaching me. Now she was lifted into her bath chair after breakfast and wheeled into the kitchen to supervise the cooking and other household tasks. As a bride she had been unable to cook an egg, but in everything she was a perfectionist and her zealous study of the art of cooking had such sensational results that despite Emergency limitations I have never anywhere eaten better than I did then in my own home.

Several of our non-treasures had to be dismissed within days for intolerable personal filthiness (there was the celebrated case of the louse on the table-napkin …) or irredeemable incompetence, or both. Some were petty thieves, others were incorrigible ‘borrowers’. One sixteen-year-old was detected by my father returning through the kitchen window from a military hop at four o’clock on a summer morning, clad only in one of my mother’s nightgowns. My father imagined her to have been sleep-walking and apologised profusely for having chanced to observe her in dishabille. My mother assessed the situation more realistically and next day patiently lectured the girl on the hazards of associating, in the small hours of the morning, with the licentious soldiery.

As Lismore was a garrison town throughout the war our younger 
maids’ morals were a source of constant anxiety. Those who arrived knowing nothing of the facts of life had to be given sex instruction even before they were taught how to make coffee. And for a few this instruction came too late. These usually stayed longest; when they discovered their condition their bewildered fear was pathetic and
whatever
their professional defects my mother never had the heart to dismiss them.

One eighteen-year-old precipitately gave birth under the kitchen table with me in fascinated attendance. When the drama was all over bar the afterbirth I rushed into the sitting-room exclaiming that it was just the way cows did it. Perennially unflappable, my mother said ‘How interesting’ – and now would I please take some blankets to the kitchen and wrap the baby up well before going to the Post Office to telephone for an ambulance.

It had always been clear that Josie was weak in the head and as her parents now rejected her – an unusual reaction, amongst Irish country folk, to ‘little accidents’ – my mother felt obliged to act
in loco parentis
. The authorities did everything possible, and more than was ethically allowable, to force her to give up her baby; but under the influence of maternal love, she showed unexpected strength of character. When we visited her in the County Home in Dungarvan my parents were so moved by her determination to keep her child that they entered the argument with a few well-chosen remarks about the legal rights of parents. They also guaranteed to look after both mother and son until Dr White could arrange for their admission to some suitable hostel. I never forgot this example of how the uninformed and inarticulate citizens of a democracy may be bullied and confused by bureaucrats – both clerical and lay.

Eventually Josie and son departed to a nun-run hostel and we got occasional postcards, laboriously inscribed in capital letters, telling us of George’s progress. (To my father’s disgust the child had been named in honour of the King of England.) A few years later Josie called one afternoon to introduce her husband and month-old second son – who had been born, she happily informed us, during the honeymoon. George was now a fine lad and seemed on excellent terms with his
amiable
stepfather. Obviously all concerned were going to live happily ever after.

The Josie drama had provoked much comment throughout the
neighbourhood
, yet not even she could compete with Cattie. Cattie arrived the day after my father had been immobilised by sciatica. She looked middle-aged but claimed to be twenty-two. She was tall and gaunt and grey-haired and never removed her Wellington boots; when my mother hinted that she might find another form of footwear more comfortable indoors, she snapped enigmatically, ‘I has me notions!’ A few days later she acquired another notion and took to carrying everywhere, under her arm, a sweeping-brush. Even while bearing laden trays into my parents’ bedroom she stuck to her brush; and when my mother – speaking timidly, at this stage – suggested that she might find it more convenient occasionally to lay it aside, she snapped, ‘It’s a need!’

That night sounds as of tap-dancing came from Cattie’s room and large quantities of plaster fell from the dining-room ceiling. Next morning, before dawn, weird rhythmic wails, as of an oriental widow keening, became increasingly audible from the direction of the kitchen. I was thrilled. Indisputably we had a fully fledged lunatic on the premises. But when we held a council of war after breakfast it disconcerted me slightly to realise that my parents took Cattie’s overnight deterioration quite seriously. The district nurse was due at ten o’clock to minister to the two invalids – my father was temporarily almost as incapacitated as my mother – and we decided to ask her to telephone Dr White.

At that very moment a shrieking Cattie came storming up the hall and burst into my parents’ room brandishing the sweeping-brush. Her face was distorted and she was yelling – ‘I’ll fork ye! I’ll fork ye!’ By any standards she was an alarming sight. It soon transpired that she believed my parents to be two fried eggs and the brush a fork. Afterwards I saw the joke, but not then. I rushed to my mother and clung to her and she whispered – ‘Fetch the guards!’ But such crises prove the strength of the herd instinct. My mother’s order made sense, yet I could not leave that room while Cattie was darting about with contorted face poking her fork towards the two defenceless fried eggs. If murder were about to be done, let us all die together. Only when Cattie’s expression relaxed, and she began again to tap-dance and to chant quite cheerfully, did I flee onto the street and beg a passer-by to fetch the garda sergeant. Then the nurse arrived and said, ‘I told you so!’ because for days she had been
warning us of our peril. Within an hour the unfortunate Cattie had been removed, under sedation, to the nearest lunatic asylum – from which she had been discharged, we then discovered, only two months previously.

After this débâcle my mother observed dryly that our neighbours probably regarded it as a ‘judgement’ on the Murphys. My parents’ attitude towards unmarried mothers was condemned by many as a scandalous condoning of immorality. Like middle-class communities everywhere, our neighbours abhorred and feared illegitimacy. And being Irish Christians, their abhorrence was compounded by the uniquely nasty odour they could detect emanating from sexual licence. A few managed to pay lip-service to Christian charity, but not one would have encouraged an unmarried mother to keep her baby. To rear one’s bastard was considered far worse than merely having it furtively and quickly giving it away for adoption; allowing the maternal instinct to take over branded one as a brazen hussy. Therefore middle-class girls never did keep their babies. I often heard my parents denouncing this vicious hypocrisy – one could feel the viciousness vibrating through the anti-Josie vituperations of some of our neighbours. Their moral code was of the primitive sort that seeks confirmation and reinforcement in the merciless punishing of delinquents. A century earlier they would have formed part of the grimly gleeful crowd around the scaffold at a public hanging.