Country Girl: A Memoir (11 page)

Then it happened. The coolness. She began to look pinched and pale, and was bad-tempered in class. She allowed other girls to carry her books. She swept from classroom to classroom like a creature possessed. I dreamed it before it actually happened, I dreamed that she would have to go away. One evening she was
seen in the back of a motorcar, along with another nun, both in their heavy knitted shawls, obviously setting out on a long journey. I believed that she was gone forever, that she had had to renounce her vows and was being brought home to her parents in disgrace; it was weeks after, agonizing weeks, when from a young postulant who came from a parish near home I learned the truth. My nun had had a crisis of sorts, a bit of a breakdown, and was sent to the Sister house in Ballinasloe to recover. There was an entire term without her.

Yet when I did see her again, many months later, my hopes were raised. We had all assembled for the Head Nun’s evening homily, when she came in softly, so softly, whispered something to the Head Nun, and then, when our eyes met briefly, I felt that I had reason to be euphoric. But it was not so. I would never see her alone again. I had moved to a higher class, where a different, brisker nun took geometry and maths. Our paths rarely crossed, but one evening, in the chapel grounds, I saw her coming toward me, alone. There was no one but us. She was whispering her prayers, but as she sighted me, her hands came out from inside her copious sleeves and flew up in defense, as if I were an enemy. She passed swiftly, her praying much louder.

Because of my seeming devoutness and obedience, I was given the honor of playing Our Lady of Fatima in the school play. It was not a speaking part. All I had to do was stand with hands folded as in prayer and gaze at the three shepherd children of Fatima, who knelt below and to whom I was secretly to impart the third secret. My throne consisted of four wooden butter boxes, all covered in pale blue tulle. I, too, was draped in blue tulle. Another girl, who stood at the side of the stage, informed the audience of the first two secrets, which were to do penance and pray for the conversion of godless Russia. The third secret
was preceded by lights, to represent a trembling sun, a sun that moved outside cosmic laws, a sun surrounded by scarlet and purple, which had stretched the abilities of stage management, who had only a flash lamp and some bicycle lamps to rely on. While I was pausing to impart the third secret, the three children recited the rosary as the audience waited, or were expected to wait, in thrall. The prophecy itself, which was most significant, was conveyed by the narrator, who somehow divined the secret words I had transmitted to the children. It predicted a dreadful calamity upon the Church and the martyrdom of the Pope, at which there was wailing from a chorus of girls in their navy gym frocks and the shepherd children lay on the stage, disconsolate. My sole duty was to stand utterly still, not to wobble, as befitted the profundity of my message. Many compliments were bestowed on me for the first two nights, but it was the third night that mattered most, because priests and the Bishop of Galway were attending. Nerves and excitement spiraled. Even as I climbed the butter boxes, I felt unsteady. They seemed not so solid as they had been before, and the distance between myself and the shepherd children seemed enormous. I began to shake, to shake uncontrollably, gripping the blue tulle, which was in itself sacrilege, since I was supposed to remain with my hands folded. I could see the children underneath were also becoming a bit distraught, but I was unable to stop it. All I begged was to get through those forty-five minutes and not disgrace myself, and I had almost regained composure when it started up again, only worse: the sun trembled and indeed made movements outside cosmic laws, as I too began to see things, lost consciousness, and like Humpty Dumpty came tumbling down, to the dismay of the children and flurry as the narrator and a nun hefted me off. The curtain had to be brought down. My understudy, who was not wearing tulle, mounted the butter boxes, and the performance had to start again.

In my cubicle, where I had gone to hide, I could hear the applause, and later a lay nun brought me a jam tart, and though I could not be sure, I imagined it was from
my
nun, to indicate that she had lived my shame with me.

He was known to be a hobo, and yet, when he arrived off the evening bus in the town, things perked up and word went round that Roland was here. Even his name, Roland, had the ring of legend. He was from somewhere in County Limerick and came to stay with a bachelor in the town who owned a hardware shop and kept several greyhounds which he half-starved, yet in his booming voice he would call out, “Roland, give the dogs some water.” It was at the Sunday-night “hops” that Roland came into his own, in his navy blazer and open shirt, bell-bottomed trousers, and hair slicked back with Brylcreem. His technique, as it was known, was feigned casualness as he watched the form, then tugged at some girl’s arm, this being an invitation to dance, along with the usual “Righty-ho?”

The “hops,” for which admission was sixpence, was in aid of a new altar for the chapel, which was to be in Italianate marble with mosaics of gold and modeled on an altar in the Vatican. The parish priest stood near the entrance, where one got the ticket, and afterward he sat on a chair inside the hall to ensure that couples did not make free with one another when dancing. The floor was slippery from some new miracle powder that had been discovered, and it was no longer having to endure the awful smell of paraffin oil with which they used to douse it.

I was waiting for the results of my exam. After the shame of Fatima and my nun’s coolness and other restlessnesses, I made up my mind to cut my education short and sit for my final exam one year early. It entailed endless studying, including with a torch under the covers in my cubicle at night. I kept reading,
devouring all these facts. I had graduated to a private cubicle and, because of my endless studying, became something of a favorite with several nuns. When I got styes or nervous turns, the Head Nun would call me aside and give me valerian, which she dropped from a little pipette into a beaker, that and boric powder to bathe the eyes.

It was the first time I had attended one of the hops, and I was excited by it. A boy called Percy asked me up for a waltz, and as we moved along to the strains of a very sentimental tune, he inquired what color my eyes were and how far I lived out of the town.

This was an oblique way of deciding whether or not to ask to walk me home. The men were always angling to walk girls home, and if things went as they hoped, it meant they would desert the main road and go down the Dock Road or to a path under the bridge, across fields where there were unused cow houses and lime kilns. But no local girl could hope to compete with Dolly the crooner. She was a peroxide blonde with black fishnet stockings and black suede high-heeled shoes. She also wore black velvet gloves that reached to her elbows, and men, watching her hold the microphone as she delivered the slushy song, nudged each other, wondering if they would score. But she was always accompanied by a bruiser, a rough diamond who had metal rings on several fingers, enough to dissuade any upstarts. Toward the end of the evening her songs centered on heartbreak and infidelity. There was “After the Ball,” in which many a heart was broken, “Jealousy,” and “The Tennessee Waltz,” in which, gallingly, a friend steals another man’s sweetheart.

One night, before my last term at school, I somehow guessed that Roland was going to ask me up, which he did, with the expected “Righty-ho?” I cannot remember how we conducted it, except to know that, when the dance was over and lights extinguished, we left and hovered on the street until there were
no longer any car lights or any flash lamps. Not a word was said. I went with him half-willingly, and we climbed the town under a sky that was a feast of stars, outglittering each other. There wasn’t a soul in the street, the townspeople fast asleep in their beds.

Once installed in a siding, by a galvanized door that led into a yard, I began my procrastinations. The upshot was that I opened my coat and allowed my skirt to be bunched up around me. That part of himself that he exposed he half-camouflaged in a handkerchief, and his exertions were so robust that they might just as easily have been spent on the door itself, which shook and rattled. I feared it would alert some holy Mary who might be on the prowl, with a flash lamp, for such indecency. The headlights of the car at the bottom of the hill showed the sheen of wet on the street, and everything was then hurried as he unbolted the door and pushed me into a big yard. In the bit of light from the moon I saw that the yard was full of blue chip stones, as the shopkeeper was a supplier of them.

Roland did not convey me home.

Back in the convent I studied constantly, not wanting to fail my final examination, as it would mean incarceration for another year. The world with all its sins and guile and blandishments was beckoning.

After stumbling along country roads and fields at night, the beam from the flashlight fitful and the battery forever in danger of conking out, I found Dublin enthralling: the street lighting was as marvelous as the illuminations said to have lit the sky with
Laudamus, Adoramus,
and
Glorificamus
during the Eucharistic Congress of 1932. Light flooded the pavements and glinted off the steel of the defunct tramlines, and sent a gold-threaded haze up into a line of young trees where birds roosted.

It was a Saturday night in the late 1940s and my first walk into the city with my sister Eileen; Anna, the girl we shared digs with; and Maeve, a friend of hers, arms linked in pairs. We passed a fairly shabby-looking hotel, where they said hurlers and their followers drank after a match, and then a select grocer’s with cooked hams in the window, so tempting, the bread-crumb crusting of mustard and brown sugar studded with cloves. I was ravenous. For food. For life. For the stories that I would write, except that everything was effervescent and inchoate in my overexcitable brain.

“There goes Bang-Bang,” Maeve said. Each night, holding a key as if it were a gun, Bang-Bang would jump onto buses, throw himself on the platform, shout warnings, then jump off again, but no one paid any heed to him, knowing he had been shell-shocked during the war.

We stood to gape into the Gresham Hotel, the apogee of grandeur, with its overhanging iron and glass awning. Anna said that it was where priests from down the country stayed
when they came to Dublin, so that it exuded both a sacred and a salubrious aura. The giant column of Nelson’s pillar was so tall that it was impossible to see Nelson’s face with his blind eye. Aldermen of the city had erected it in 1809 to celebrate his victory over Napoleon in the Battle of Trafalgar. But poor Nelson had yet to undergo more hazards. His column would be toppled by an IRA explosive, and the head, which was left intact, stored in a shed, only to be stolen, the thief then sending a postal order to the authorities, via an evening paper, to cover the damages for broken glass, padlock, window frame, and screws. Many, including the boxer “Strongman Butty Sugrue,” coveted that head, and very soon it was stolen again and displayed in an antique shop in London, then later returned and laid to rest on the original site. There it was booed while an official from the Corporation took it away, only to drop it as he loaded it into the lorry, and after more skittishness Nelson was taken to end his days in the calm environs of a library.