Wheels Within Wheels (16 page)

Unlike Pappa, Aunt Kathleen had no inhibitions about dividing my loyalties; she was such a fanatical Republican that she would not have scrupled to subvert anyone by almost any means. In July 1944, when she was in prison following the arrest of Charlie in her home, she wrote me the following letter – carefully designed to steer me towards the mainstream of contemporary Republicanism.

When the present round of the Troubles began in Northern Ireland, Aunt Kathleen was soon to be seen in the Republican ghettos of Belfast. Perhaps she merely went north as an ‘observer’, but that seems unlikely.
It would not surprise me to discover that although well over seventy, and in poor health,
*
she was gun-running. Where there are godfathers there can also be godmothers. And to this day the name of ‘Dr Kathleen’ brings an affectionate gleam – and occasionally even a tear – to the eye of many a Provo.

Molly arrived in May 1944. She was fat and forty and placidly uncritical of our house and its inmates. She baked delicious soda bread, of which she ate immoderate quantities, and could cook two dishes well. (Irish stew and bacon and cabbage.) Her reactions were prodigiously slow; half-an-hour after something had amused her she would disconcert those who did not know her by bursting into apparently unprovoked laughter. Yet she was such an enormous improvement on her immediate forerunners that in June I was measured for my school uniform. Two battered trunks, still bearing French luggage labels of the 1890s, were lowered through the attic trap-door into the kitchen and going away to school became a reality.

I began mildly to dislike the idea as August dwindled. With Molly in the kitchen and my freedom restored the environs of Lismore seemed to have a lot more to offer than the environs of any convent school. Yet the novelty of the adventure still appealed and I was not seriously fretting.

Miss Knowles, the Jubilee district nurse, had by this time become a valued family friend and I was overjoyed when she offered to escort me to school,
in loco parentis
. We were to travel to Waterford by train and this, oddly enough, was the first train journey of my life.

The carriages and corridors were gay with the scarlet and dove-grey of the school uniform and long before we got to Waterford I had begun, unexpectedly, to enjoy the sensation of belonging to a distinctive
community
.

This says a good deal for my schoolmates. Of course they ignored me; as a new girl I was officially beneath contempt. Yet there was no antagonism in the atmosphere; clearly I was not unwelcome. The school stood isolated on a height beyond the city, behind smooth high walls. Its grey stone buildings, solid and dignified, spread themselves in spacious, well-kept grounds that were brilliantly patterned and richly scented by September’s flowering of roses. A not unpleasing air of monastic austerity and formality prevailed. One was aware of entering a world of orderliness and precision, certainty and calm, where the unpredictable could not happen, unless by some act of God. And even
an act of God, one felt, would soon be made to conform to the relevant rule or regulation.

Yet there was no aura of dour oppression. In the wide, bright hallway we joined a dejected group of obviously new girls who were waiting with their parents to be received by the headmistress. All around us the golden parquet floor shone like a lake at sunset and the walls had been freshly painted cream, with pale green woodwork, and opposite the handsome oak hall-door was an alcove holding a gaudy life-size plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The broad staircase swept upward to the left of the door as one entered and when my eye followed its stately curve I saw, whizzing down the banisters, a wiry girl with frizzy ginger hair and a demoniacal grin. As she slowed slightly to negotiate a bend she glanced down the corridor that ran at right angles to the hall, saw a nun approaching, promptly swung outwards off the banisters, hung for a moment by her hands, dropped six feet into the hall and lurked behind a pillar looking blasé.

I held my breath. What grisly punishment would be meted out to her? The nun could not have failed to notice … But it had all happened in such a way that the nun could pretend not to have noticed, without any loss of face, and as she passed the pillar she simply paused to say a suave ‘Welcome back!’ to the ginger acrobat. This little scene neatly epitomised the whole spirit of a school where the pupils had enough respect for the staff not to defy them openly and the staff had enough respect for the pupils not to repress them.

By then it was my turn to be presented to the headmistress – traditionally known as The Hat. She was small and thin and red, like a carrot. As we shook hands I wondered if her toes were as red as her fingers. Perhaps she was a secret drinker, I thought, noting the ruby nose and remembering Jeff. All in all, she looked one of Nature’s less agreeable blunders. And I felt she was coming to an identical conclusion about me. However, our instant mutual antipathy worried me not at all. A liking for The Hat might indeed have inhibited my rule-breaking; that we had at once recognised each other as Natural Enemies was much more satisfactory.

In the second-floor junior dormitory Miss Knowles helped me to unpack and another new girl, having read my luggage labels, introduced
herself as Sally Dowling. Our fathers had done time together in Wormwood Scrubs (the Irish equivalent of having been in the same house at Eton) and she, too, was the only child of comparatively poor parents – and her mother was a semi-invalid. With her raven-black hair, aquiline nose, deep-set grey-green eyes and almost copper-coloured skin she looked not unlike a Red Indian. She was eighteen months younger than I, but we were to be in the same form for she was very clever. She also had a lot of quiet self-assurance and when Miss Knowles had said goodbye she appointed herself – gently, not bossily – as my guide and mentor. It was hard to believe that she, too, was a new girl. That very evening she and I established the foundations of a comfortable,
easygoing
, dependable friendship. Our devotion to each other was deep, but undemanding, undemonstrative, unsentimental, almost masculine; and throughout the next two years we never once even came near to quarrelling.

However, my new friend was of no help when I woke for the first time in my cubicle. I had slept well, but as I opened my eyes homesickness engulfed me. It was almost a physical sensation, like being knocked down and rolled over and over by a wave. And it was all the more devastating for being unexpected. When saying goodbye to my parents I had felt just a little wistful, yet now my loneliness seemed to be even more acute than three years earlier. Then homesickness had been mitigated by the sheer horror of the place and its denizens, much as lumbago takes one’s mind off tonsillitis. But here my personal anguish was unadulterated and I lived through the next week in a stupor of misery. Even to think about those seven days, thirty-five years later, is painful.

Then one morning I woke and something had slipped into place and I felt happy all through. There had been no gradual recovery; on the seventh day I had felt no less miserable than on the second or fourth. So it was with a sense of incredulous relief that I lay in bed on that eighth – Wednesday – morning, looking at the early sunlight streaming onto my pale gold cubicle curtains and realising that I was happy.

This happiness lasted for the rest of my schooldays. Undoubtedly it was in part a result of freedom from those incongruous domestic responsibilities which I had had to shoulder, for much of the time, during the past few years. At school I was leading a life appropriate to
my age and I enjoyed every moment of it. I also enjoyed not being the only pebble on the beach. My parents tried to avoid spoiling me, but any only child – particularly with a strong-willed, perfectionist mother – inevitably receives an unwholesome amount of attention. At home everything to do with me was of prime importance and in itself this constant exposure to parental concern was an infringement of privacy, though never so intended. At school I missed my own room and my long, solitary hours out-of-doors, yet in a sense I had greater liberty to be myself. I was no more or less important than some hundred and twenty other girls and this anonymity pleased me. My parents were agreeably surprised by my enthusiastic letters home. They had expected me to resent the lack of physical freedom, at least during my first term. But I was a more adaptable animal than they knew. And they had been clever in their choice of school.

A grimly authoritarian régime would either have broken my spirit or provoked me to run away – probably the latter. But Waterford’s Ursuline Convent allowed enough scope for me to lead my own kind of life without inviting disaster. (The Hat threatened to expel me three times; but this, I now feel, was because of my private feud with her rather than because I had unforgivably challenged The System.) The atmosphere was relaxed without being permissive – to this extent, a replica of home – and I liked most of my schoolmates and all my teachers. Also, I greatly enjoyed disliking The Hat.

I soon developed a passion for a senior girl and became weak at the knees if she smiled graciously at me when we chanced to pass in the corridors. This was known as ‘having an affec’ for so-and-so, the
so-and
-so in question being described as one’s ‘affec’. My affec was an amiable sixteen-year-old to whom I wrote countless sonnets in praise of her beauty – an attribute which existed chiefly in my beholding eye. Most of these sonnets were seething with subliminal sexuality, as I was fascinated to discover when I came upon them recently in a rusty tin box. Frances also caused me to expend much mental energy on devising schemes which would lead to our meeting more frequently in the corridors. Not that one ever actually talked to one’s affec; that would have been a major breach of both school regulations (the age groups were rigidly segregated) and school tradition. It is interesting that we
schoolgirls voluntarily reinforced this particular school rule with our own code, almost as though we were unconsciously aware of the need for protection from our burgeoning sexuality. By immemorial custom, everyday communication was restricted to the humbly adoring look and the regal smile of acknowledgement. However, school dances were held twice a year, on the feasts of St Angela and St Ursula, and then each affec asked her admirer, or admirers, for one dance (no more), during which verbal exchanges were permitted. But these occasions seldom or never generated immortal repartee.

I was a keen but undistinguished player of netball, hockey and tennis, and I founded a clandestine rugger club for those whose athletic tastes were more robust. We played in an out-of-bounds ploughed field and had two seven-a-side teams called Clongowes and Castleknock. Most of our fathers had been to one or other of those colleges and during the Leinster Senior Cup competition the whole school became hysterically involved. As we had no wireless at our disposal illicit telephone calls were made to Dublin to find out who had won each round. When I boasted of an uncle who in prehistoric times had once, during an influenza epidemic, been selected as a substitute for the Irish team my stock soared and even the seniors looked at me with respect.

I was such an unsatisfactory scholar that a school dedicated to
self-glorification
through examination results would have had little use for me. It must have been plain that even at the end of six years I would pass no examination since I applied my mind to only two subjects, English and history. And even during English classes I was selective, regarding grammatical sessions as needless because one knew most of it anyway by instinct. To this day I cannot tell the difference between parsing and analysis. By the end of the first month I had dropped domestic science, art and music, all subjects for which I had no aptitude whatever. Secretly I longed to be a really good pianist like my mother, who had all sorts of impressive awards from the Royal Academy rolled up at the back of a drawer, but my music mistress believed that I suffered from some sort of musical dyslexia and would never be able to master any instrument. So I had at my disposal, almost every day, two and a half hours more freedom than my classmates. And naturally my division mistress wanted to know how I proposed to spend all this spare time.

‘Writing books,’ I replied succinctly.

‘I see,’ said Mother Ambrose. ‘Well, in that case I think you’d better work in one of the empty music rooms. Anywhere else you’ll be
constantly
interrupted. And I imagine you need peace and quiet for writing books?’

‘Oh yes!’ said I. ‘Silence is essential. And no interruptions.’

‘I thought as much,’ said Mother Ambrose. ‘Though of course’ – she added reflectively – ‘Jane Austen managed to write quite a few rather good books in between receiving visitors and doing the household chores. But I expect she was different. May I read your book when it’s finished?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ I said apologetically. ‘It won’t be good enough for anyone to read. It’s not that sort of book. It’s only practice.’

Each term I produced at least one full-length, lurid adventure story set in nameless Foreign Parts where the political crises were even more ambiguous than in Ireland and led to a profusion of warm sticky blood, choking emotions and gallant last-minute rescues. No doubt this ‘practice’ was a development of my teddy-bear-tree fantasies and I often became so involved that I had to continue writing during
prep-time
and on Saturday afternoons when I should have been mending my clothes. Mother Ambrose can hardly have remained unaware of these irregularities, but she made no serious attempt to check them. Just occasionally – pandering to my passion for long words – she would comment on the ‘unarrested disintegration’ of my underwear.

For other reasons, however, I was constantly in trouble. Such rules as were specifically designed to transform us into young ladies aroused my most profound contempt and I rarely bothered to conceal the fact that I had broken them. Yet I soon developed a fierce loyalty to the school and however I might defy its traditions within the precincts I took care to behave impeccably on the rare occasions when I emerged into the big world wearing school uniform. Both my defiance and my loyalty were uncalculated, which may explain the nuns’ tolerance; perhaps they saw that although I was never going to fit into their particular mould I had a certain objective regard for it.

Thirty-five years ago not even the most senior girls at an Irish convent boarding-school were allowed out during term time, with or without
supervision, to pursue either entertainment or instruction. Entering the school grounds on the first day of term, one knew that unless something extraordinary happened one would not leave them for the next two or three months. Nor did we have visitors, because of wartime travelling restrictions, and our half-term merely meant no lessons on a Friday and lots of sticky cakes for tea three days running. Being averse to such confections this was no treat for me. Raising my plate I would say ‘Whizz?’ and whoever first replied ‘Echo!’ won the prize. This corrupt Latin greatly offended me and I aroused much derision by allowing the pedantic paternal genes to take over and attempting to restore ‘Quis?’ and ‘Ego!’ As Sally pointed out, with her usual brusque logic, this was a damn silly attitude considering so many respectable English words are corrupt Latin or corrupt something else.