Country Girl: A Memoir (2 page)

By the time I was born we were no longer rich. True, we had the large house and the two avenues, but the thousand acres or more that my father had inherited had been sold off in bits, or given away in fits of generosity, or bartered to pay debts. My father had inherited a fortune from rich uncles who, when they were ordained as priests, emigrated to New England and served in the parish of Lowell, outside Boston. There, they combined spiritual and secular powers by patenting a medicine called Father John’s, which was reputed to be a cure for everything and sold by the gallon.

Not far from our house was the ruin of the old house, also called Drewsboro, which like many big houses had been burned in order that the English militia, the Black and Tans, could not occupy them as a barracks. My father took part in that burning and would describe the high spirits with which he and other gallants doused rags in petrol, then went all around with the petrol cans, soaking walls and woodwork. Scores of matches were struck, and the subsequent bonfire, seen for miles around, was another notch of victory over the invader.

Long before, Lord and Lady Drew had lived there, and the story went that the ghost of Lady Drew, in her shift, roamed our fields at night, wailing the loss of her acres, a woman dispossessed.

My great-grandmother, who was widowed, acquired that house from the Drews, the money having come from the priests in Lowell. She was a haughty woman, who was driven in her pony and trap each Sunday to view her lands and her herds and then onward to glimpse the red deer as they rushed from their brakes into the heart of the wood, where oak, ash, and beech had grown into one another. By the time I was growing up, that wood had become the preserve of foxes, stoats, badgers, and pine martens who warred in the night as our dogs, too frightened to go in there, barked hysterically from the outskirts.

Though she lived alone, she would dress each evening for dinner, always in black, with a white lace ruff, and she drank toddies from a silver-topped horn cup that bore the questionable motto of the O’Briens—“Might Before Right.” She was waited upon by a factotum named Dan Egan, and there was a verse about him, as indeed there were verses about many local people:

Dan Egan’s in Drewsboro

The Wattles at the Gate

Manny Parker’s in the Avenue

And the Nigger’s walking straight.

The Nigger had a strawberry face that wasn’t black but dark puce, with berries hanging from it. He worked in a slate quarry. Manny Parker was a hermit who claimed to be a botanist, roamed our fields, and sometimes slept in a tent in our bog so that he could study the habits of birds and insects who, like himself, eschewed chimney corners and barn and church porches. The Wattles were so named because a daughter had gone to Australia and used the word frequently in her letters home. A postcard of hers that opened out concertina-wise, showing reefs and blue islands, was displayed on their front window.

I preferred the outdoors, fields that ran into other fields,
storm and sleet, showers and sun showers; then, as if by enchantment, primroses and cowslips sprang up next to the tall thistles and fresh cowpats that were elegantly called “pancakes.” Time flew out there, but indoors was different, being often fraught.

My mother’s family was different from my father’s, poor people evicted from the wealthier environs of County Kildare who trudged across the central plain, met the mountains, and, in a godforsaken place, built a cabin on a bit of stone land. It was about five miles from Drewsboro, and I sometimes attribute my two conflicting selves to my contrasting grandparents, the one a lady, the other a peasant. Quite recently this was brought home to me when I was approached by an Irish newspaper to have my DNA tested, along with other people with historic family names. I balked at the procedure, but the journalist assured me that when I received the kit, he would tell me exactly what to do and what it entailed, which indeed he did. The swab was returned, and in due course I was told that, according to their findings, I share DNA with the last tsarina of Russia, Marie Antoinette, and Susan Sarandon. Asked what I felt about the royal lineage, I flinched at the unfortunate fate of the first two, and my efforts to reach Susan Sarandon proved futile.

The ruins of the big house held a fascination for me. Along with the weasels, there were the signs of its former life: torn tongues of dark green wallpaper embossed with acorns hung in the reception room, and in the kitchen there was a set of gongs with thick crusts of verdigris, the green and silver brilliancies of bygone days. On a high mound of rubble was an elderberry tree that birds must have seeded, and my mother and I would pick the berries to make wine, which had to be hidden from my father, who might be tempted by it and after a mere sip go on the batter. It was reserved for visitors, who, apart from tinkers
and Mad Mabel, were few and far between. The rungs of a staircase dangled down into what had once been a ballroom, feeding the various fantasies that I contrived, of balls, carriages along the back avenue, and footmen rushing out with lit sods of turf to help the visitors down. There would be pipers in the forecourt and tables with jugs of mulled wine, and feasting as in the sagas of old. My great-grandmother I pictured in black taffeta with an ermine coatee and a corsage, maybe violets or some other woodland flower. My mother, hearing these ravings, would smile, but then frown, desperate as she was to keep everything together and possibly sensing that the prodigal blood of the O’Briens reigned uppermost in me, rather than the blood of her own people, the Clearys, who clung steadfastly to their little mountain holding.

Once, when I got home from school, a bailiff was sitting in our kitchen, drinking tea. He was an affable man, and before long he spoke to me, asked about school and what I had learned that day. Then he asked me to recite a poem. I recited “Fontenoy,” a heroic ballad of Irish earls and chieftains, banished and serving in foreign brigades all over Europe, missing their native soil. It was very rousing and patriotic as, even on the brink of battle, they thirsted, they starved, for their native County Clare.

My mother called me into the pantry and put her finger to her upper lip to signify that I must tell no one of the disgrace we were in. My father had gone out, presumably to borrow money, and it was near dark when he returned and conferred with the bailiff, who then left. Disaster was postponed. Then ructions. Horses. Horses, the waste they were, strutting around the fields eating all before them, having to be sent to stud farm to be covered, eating up still more money and losing races, as my mother saw it, out of pure spite. There was one, Shannon Rose, which she singled out for particular odium, saying that
the filly could come first, if she wanted to, but chose to come third, the difference between the two prize monies being exorbitant. It ended with my father going up to bed, which was far preferable to his going out, where he would be tempted, in anger and frustration, to drink.

Horses always loomed in my mind as dangers, creatures that led to argument and pending destitution, their eyes so moist and shining in contrast to their movements, which were jerky and unpredictable as they whinnied their way from one field to the next. I would see them in the fields and then again in my mind’s eye—that great unleashing of energy, when they exploded as one into a mad gallop, their flying tails arched up, moving with such daring, such speed, showered in the dust they had raised and in their exhilaration seeming to float.

Two summers ago a plaque was unveiled in my honor on one of the piers that led to the old avenue. Unlike the time when I was considered something of a Jezebel because of my books, now from the altar the priest spoke of the honor that it was to have me back and encouraged people to attend the ceremony. There was a small crowd, children cycling in and out, bursting with laughter, as I made a short speech on the influence Drewsboro had on my writing. “A font of inspiration” was the phrase I used, at which children laughed even more.

It was a warm summer evening, and afterward my nephew Michael and I picked our steps over the high grass and crawled under loops of barbed wire to visit the house. It was going back to nature: trees and briars and bushes had moved in like an army to overtake it. Ivy and saplings climbed up to where the cut stone met the plaster, along with shoots and briars and ferns that wove their way, to get a grip, establishing their ownership of the place, as none of the living had succeeded in doing. Even
the wild cats had gone. Some red, ribbony roses that my mother had planted threaded their way through the fallen hedging, and, picking a few as a keepsake for me, Michael cut himself, the red spurt of blood as vivid and alive as the stored memories. This the house my mother strove to keep together, this the house she swore she would never give to her thankless son, this the house with our unfinished stories and our unfinished quarrels with one another.

My mother and father, Lena and Michael O’Brien, in Drewsboro, 1970s.

My mother’s death was sudden. I had gone to see her in the Mater Hospital in Dublin, where she had been admitted with shingles. With a nun, Sister R., who had become her friend, she smeared a brown ointment over them; it was one she had got from a faith healer, and they both believed that it would cure her. She was due to be discharged in a week, but calling me over to the side of the bed, she said that we would have to
go down home, just for the day. I was to fix it with the matron and the registrar, and hire a car to bring us there and back. It was like this. Long ago, when they were in danger of losing the place completely, my father, after one of his drinking sprees and in contrition, had signed the place over to her, as she would be a better manager of things. Two years before and after much insistence, my brother, John, had asked her to make a will, saying he and his wife would accompany her to the solicitors. She made the will, giving him Drewsboro, believing in her heart that at a later date she could make another. What she wanted now was to go down home in secret and make the second will, giving me the house and the surrounding lawn. I said there was no hurry, it could all be done in the fullness of time and openly, when she was recovered.

To this day, no matter how I try to reconstruct it, I cannot arrive at the exact moment of my mother’s death, although I know the circumstances of it. It was in March 1977. I was in the airplane returning from New York, and, when I got home, the telephone was ringing; it was my sister, giving me the news. Later, from Sister R., I learned of the several comings and goings of that last flurried day. My mother was going home. A driver was coming to collect her. Since breakfast she had been ready, dressed for travel, sitting on her bed with a walking frame and a walking stick, which the nun had given her on the quiet, to take with her as a gift for her husband. In the days leading up to her going home she had been indiscreet, telling various nurses how proud she was of her intention of changing her will. One nurse, who boasted about being a friend of my brother’s, rang him urgently at his practice in Monasterevin to tell him of the crooked plan his mother was hatching. He arrived in an utter fury. Unluckily Sister R., signed up that day for a course at the university, was not present for the ugly confrontation, but as she told me in a letter, when she did return at
lunchtime and popped in to say “Hello,” she found that between mother and son there was a ghastly tension.

“A pity you couldn’t have come sooner,” my mother had said to her, barely able to hold back her tears, and the nun, not wishing to interfere in family grief, excused herself. My brother, it seems, left some time after, and still dressed for travel, my mother waited for the driver from home, who was already a few hours late.

Sister R.’s letter was handed to me in the chapel by the undertaker, after the coffin was brought in and laid down on its trestle, and it was there that I read it. She described her hurried visit at lunchtime and how later she learned that my mother had not yet left and so went to see her, only to find that she was in the lavatory and could be heard calling plaintively. She was brought out, and, as she got paler and began to tremble, the cardiac arrest team was called and she was wheeled, bed and all, into the operating theater. When I read Sister R.’s words “I had to let go of her,” I realized what a deep friendship had sprung up between them in so short a time. It seems that briefly, as they waited to put in a pacemaker, my mother rallied, sat up, and, in one last desperate attempt at greatness, she asked those around her not to cry, for “death shall be no more.” I never felt closer to my mother than when I heard those words that had come from her lips, she who had found literature to be inimical had nevertheless uttered those words as a farewell.