The Shelter of Neighbours (27 page)

It was a tedious way of acquiring books, labour intensive, especially for the children. But it had its advantages: half-days for the first week, putting off the real start of school for at least that length of time. Standing in queues in the hot September sun wasn't all that diverting, but moving around the city, from Greene's on Clare Street to Fallon's on Talbot Street, stopping off at several shops in between, had a certain excitement to offer.

On my third day in school, I was making my way down Talbot Street to Fallon's, and another shop, The Educational Company. I didn't like Talbot Street. It is very long and the shops on it are slightly seedy. The light on it is harsh, somehow, and it's altogether a disheartening, messy kind of street – stretching from too busy O'Connell Street to the bleakness of Amiens Street Station, near the North Strand, which was bombed during the war and which still looked as if a bomb had hit it twenty-odd years later. By the time I had got to Talbot Street, having been up and down to Clare Street, which was lovely and green and mysterious, to the smart, encouraging shops on Dawson Street, and trudged across the Liffey to the north side, I was tired.

Sister Borromeo and another nun, Sister Assumption, were bobbing along up Talbot Street. There were a lot of religious shops on that street, selling holy statues, religious books, nun's habits, for all I know (they must have bought them somewhere).

‘Hello, Helen,' said Sister Borromeo brightly.

Sister Assumption, who was good-humoured and mischievous, smiled and, unbelievably, winked.

‘Hello, Sister,' I said. I still liked her at this stage.

That was all. They walked on.

This happened in September, just after school had started. The episode of the beret occurred months later, well into the second term, just before Easter, when we were deeply engrossed in rehearsing
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. The pretence of classwork had been dispensed with. We spent the entire schoolday in the hall, singing our songs, and waiting for our cues. By now we knew the play off by heart.

Some of the teachers expressed impatience. Miss Burns was open about it. ‘When are we supposed to get our work done?' she asked. She had got engaged to be married and wore her hair, which used to be any old way, a sort of limp bob, in a new style: up, with elaborate ringlets held by a clasp at the back of her head. She wore a white bouclé suit and patent shoes under her black gown. She looked imperious.

‘It will soon be over,' we consoled her. She had become our ally, almost our equal, since the radio project.

‘Oh well!' she smiled.

A few days after Deirdre's party, which was the day before the play was due to go on, Sister Borromeo called me to the office.

I was terrified. I could think of no reason for this call.

She was sitting behind a huge wooden desk, with a telephone on it and a few files. It was a type of desk I would see often again, in the future, but this was the first time I'd seen one. The desk of a managing director. Her room, too, the office, was spacious and polished, like an important director's. The only difference was that instead of some expensive-looking, inoffensive piece of art on the wall, she had a big statue of the Blessed Virgin in the corner.

‘Sit down,' she said.

I sat down on a slippery leather chair.

‘Your studies are going well,' she said. She seemed to have my school report opened in front of her. I wondered if this had something to do with the half-scholarship. ‘But you are getting to be a little insolent,' she said. ‘I have had some bad reports from a few of your teachers.'

This was a lie, I knew. I was never insolent.

‘You do not wear your full uniform,' she went on.

This was also unfair. I didn't wear the beret. Now. But I was never without my tie, or anything else. I was more compliant than anyone else as far as the uniform was concerned.

‘What I am really worried about is that you have mitched from school.' She stared at me from under her big wimple: the nuns in this school wore very wide wimples. They took the form of two big squares of the stiff white stuff, like plastic, that wimples are made from, on either side of their faces. They were like a sort of small tent with an open front – the kind of tent you see at farmers' markets. Her face was inside the tent, in the space where the stall would be, with its wares, the jars of pickles, the jams, the farm cheeses.

I was so startled I said something natural.

I said, ‘What?'

Because I had never in my life mitched from school. For one thing, I didn't particularly want to. And for another, I didn't have the courage it takes to leave home in the morning, in your uniform and with your bag on your back, and head off to the beach, or into town, or wherever mitching kids go.

‘I remember meeting you in town one day. Myself and Sister Assumption met you.'

‘But that was during the school book week. We had a half-day,' I said.

‘I don't think so,' she said firmly.

There was nothing to say to that. I moved into a zone of disbelief, a zone where I knew I was helpless to rescue myself. Because how can you help yourself if you are faced with a liar in a powerful place?

‘Mitching is something we take very seriously in Marymount.' Her voice was precise and ladylike, like a little ivory paper knife with a sharp edge. ‘You are a scholarship girl and we expect a certain standard of behaviour.'

I had stopped feeling startled, or frightened. I gained composure from my disbelief.

‘We don't like to use the strap, Helen,' she said.

Now I was startled again, back into emotion. Strap?

‘But we do if we are forced to,' she said.

I looked at her wimple-like a tent, and her black habit, and her black beads and the big black strap around her waist. The acre of polished desk, separating me from her. The slippery chair. The prinking statue of Our Lady. There were lilies in a silver vase in front of her, calla lilies, with their pointy yellow tongues sticking out of their wimple mouths. Like snakes' tongues.

She said she would let me off this time, but that I had better watch out.

She put it more elegantly, of course, but that was what she meant.

That night, I started my campaign to get out of Marymount.

I told my mother I really missed all my old friends. I told her I missed Irish, which was the language we had spoken in my primary school, and was the language of St Bridget's. I told her I had made no new pals, which was a lie – but I didn't have the sort of friend whom I could not betray, the sort of friend who would bind me to the school.

My mother didn't want me to move. It would mean buying a new uniform (which was no small expense). The fees in St Bridget's were higher, too (surprisingly, given its plebeian-sounding name). And there I would have no half-scholarship.

I kept at her.

Orla was going to start secondary in September, and she was going to St Bridget's – she was not like me, experimental. She knew where her friends were going and she was not going to make the mistake of going elsewhere.

Then something happened. Something that would go down in Irish history, and would incidentally change the course of my life. The Minister for Education, Donagh O'Malley, announced that he was introducing free education for secondary schools. From now on there would be no fees. That is, there would be no fees in schools that made the decision to opt in to the free scheme, but fees would continue in schools that decided to opt out, and preserve their exclusive, upper-class tone by keeping out poor children.

Both Marymount and St Bridget's opted into the scheme. Nobody would have to pay fees in those schools. Ever again.

‘Well, I suppose it will just be the uniform,' said my mother. ‘If you're really not content in that school, I'll see if you can change.' (Contented in that school, she would have said. Not content.)

So I did.

My mother wrote the necessary letters.

This all happened at the beginning of May.

The weather was glorious, as it often is in Dublin at that time of year. All along the roads on the way to school the cherry blossoms were in bloom. Morning and evening I cycled under the generous branches, flung like long arms out of the gardens over the road, spilling their benison of pink popcorn petals over the road, over me.

And suddenly, in the midst of all this miraculous flowering, I got what had been lacking all year. A special friend. One morning I whizzed around my corner and there was Yvette, turning from her cul-de-sac onto the main road. How like her to start now that the weather was warm and lovely, I thought. I supposed she hadn't wanted to cycle in the bad weather, not being made of such stern stuff as I. But I did her an injustice. In fact, she had just been given the bicycle, for her birthday, a few days ago – she'd asked for it because she'd noticed me, cycling along, and thought it looked like so much fun.

Yvette had copy-catted me. Wonders would never cease.

Immediately, we became cycling companions. She waited for me at her corner in the mornings, and instead of zipping along alone, amusing myself by removing my hands from the bars, I cycled slowly, with Yvette beside me, chatting. It turned out that she wasn't stuck-up or precious or spoiled at all. That she looked exquisite didn't concern her in the least – she did not seem to even realise it, although she was fond of nice frocks (but then, so was I; so were almost all girls). Nor was she especially unusual, in spite of looking it. Our conversation was about teachers, and other girls, and what we had for homework, and where we would go for our holidays (she would go to Liverpool to visit her aunty; I would go to West Cork where my mother had rented a bungalow for a fortnight in August). We talked about sport. Yvette was very good at tennis, a game that suited her, of course, what with the white skirts and sunny courts, but she was even better at hockey, which isn't so glamorous.

After about a week of this cycling companionship, Yvette asked me to come around to her house for tea on Friday.

This was the first time any girl in the school had issued such an invitation.

So I got to see Yvette's house. It was the same type of house as my own, slightly smaller, with smaller gardens. And although it was pleasant enough, it was not as cosy or feminine or beautiful as I had anticipated. True, the favoured colour for floors was red, whereas my mother liked fawn or brown, and the wallpapers were white with red roses in the hall, blue cornflowers in the kitchen, which created a cheerful effect. But when I visited, the hall floor was covered with newspapers, because her mother had just washed it, and a clotheshorse, hung with sheets and underwear, dominated the kitchen and gave off their warm, damp, rather embarrassing, smell. Work went on in Yvette's house, just as in mine, and it wasn't all that different in other respects. The food was chips and fried eggs, for instance, with tinned pears and condensed milk for sweet. Yvette and I watched television afterwards in their dining room, while her mother did the ironing down in the kitchen.

It was an ordinary enough visit. And yet it was momentous. I had got inside her house. She liked me enough to invite me in. We were, in short, en route to being best friends.

Too late. The letters were in the post. Within a week, everything was settled, and although I felt, if not regretful, certainly ambivalent, I was too cowardly to pull back and change my mind again.

So I left Marymount – nobody ever found out why – and I went across town to St Bridget's. It was not half as good a school as Marymount. The teachers were a mixed bunch, but they never used the strap there (or threatened to). And the headmistress was nice. A little mad – she advised me to go to Trinity College when the time came to leave, and then to come back and be a nun. This was at a time when there was a ban on Catholics in the archdiocese of Dublin going to Trinity. The headmistress of St Bridget's was the kind of person who would like to have a pupil flouting that ban. I couldn't imagine Sister Borromeo recommending anyone to ignore an episcopal regulation.

I couldn't cycle to St Bridget's, which was three miles away on the other side of the city. A long enough bus journey – one that we did, all the same, four times a day, usually.

I did not entirely lose contact with Yvette. She lived just around the corner, after all. I invited her back to my house for tea just before school ended; that's when I told her I was changing schools. She was surprised but not devastated; she had plenty of friends. We saw each other from time to time afterwards, but of course our lives moved off in different directions. I was wearing a different uniform from hers now, and I wasn't cycling to school any more.

My bike lay in the garden shed – our garden was full of sheds. For a while after I changed school, I'd take it out and have a spin at weekends. I planned to go on long cycles, to the countryside, to the beach. Once or twice I did actually ride down to Sandymount, cycled along the seafront and then came back again. In my plans, I would go on a cycling holiday with girls from school. (I never made a very close friend in the new school – my old pals were in different classes from me and had regrouped by the time I got there. I had a few girls to whom I was close, but they lived far away and were not the type to cycle.) In my fantasy, we – me and this group of cheerful and enterprising girls – would cycle all over the country, camping in woodlands or fields at night, or staying in country inns. I would have pannier bags, and shorts, and a smile on my freckled face. The bee would suck in the cowslip's bell.

Of course, none of this happened.

I did use my bike again, though.

The year I did the Leaving I got a job in a bookshop. Greene's Bookshop. I was taken on in the summer to sell the schoolbooks, to be there in September when the school book rush was in full swing and they needed a lot of extra hands. It seemed like the perfect job. In practice it wasn't all that wonderful. It was a bit like being in the army during a big war, training and polishing your gun, waiting for the signal to launch an attack. For two months there was very little to do; boredom was the main problem for me and the other half-dozen students who had been taken on for the summer. Then came D-Day, the first of September. The school book rush. From then on, it was mayhem. There was not one second to draw a breath, from nine to five thirty, nine to one on Saturdays.