Country Girl: A Memoir (9 page)

Nevertheless, some of the cloying tendencies of Mrs. Henry Wood stayed with me on my first foray into fiction, aged about eight. It was written on a jotter, and called
Gypsy.
Isolde, the young heroine, dreamed of escape, incarcerated as she was, and often beaten by a cruel and intemperate father, and without the
harmonious influence of a mother, who had been killed off. Her charmer arrives in the person of a Gypsy with a gold earring and red bandanna, who recklessly scours the countryside in a caravan and on horseback. Sighting her one day in the fields, he is struck by her beauty, her ringlets, her pensive expression, and her youth. It needs only dusk, when she is driving cattle in to be milked, for him to abduct her, sit her sidesaddle on his steed, a winding sheet over her head and face, and whisk her to his bastion in the remote mountains. Arriving, she meets a world of strangers, women with flashing but unloving eyes who take her aside and give her a new name, a Romany name, so that she is no longer the Isolde she was. Then she is dressed, groomed, and prepared for her nuptial night, in which I did not rule out the possibility of fatality. By midnight horses are heard. A posse of men have arrived on horseback, led by her father, a volley of gunfire is let off as the two sides engage in battle. Fortunately, I did not have to describe the battle, as the palpitating heroine, from whose point of view the story was told, is bundled into the back of the caravan and hidden under a heavy roll of carpet. All I needed to say was that they fought with the fierceness of Apaches (whatever that meant), that she was rescued by her own, and returned home to her old life of drudgery and submission.

I put my story in a green trunk, where my mother kept oats for her hens, and either it was eventually thrown out or mice nibbled the paper to bits.

After these fictions came the lure of drama. Twice a year traveling players came to the town, and in the town hall, on a stage lit with a few paraffin lamps, we were treated to the vagaries of
East Lynne, Murder in the Old Red Barn,
and
Dracula.
The sight of a very large safety pin being drawn across the tender throat of the young heroine in
Dracula
was too terrible to behold, and also riveting. As living theater it was matchless.
Girls and women cried or choked back their tears, while men pretended to make fun of it, and yet, walking home under the stars, we could talk of nothing else.

The actor who played Dracula was in digs with his wife, in a room above a public house. I decided that I would ask if I could join their company. The domestic situation was depressing. There was one child in a pram, which Dracula wheeled back and forth across the floor, while his wife, with a young baby under her arm, was stirring a saucepan of something on a primus stove. Her complexion without all the pancake makeup was a little ruddy. As for him, all that remained of his luring stage presence was his silverish sidelocks. They were surprised at my having been let up at all, and Dracula asked what I had come for. “I’d like to run away with you,” I said, at which the wife laughed and Dracula showed some commiseration. He asked nicely why I wanted to run away with them. I said I had written a play called
Dracula’s Daughter
and I wanted to see it on a stage. This whetted his interest so much that he said to come back another day and we could read it together. His wife, in full theatrical blaze, picked up the hot saucepan, aimed it at me, and in a beautiful, actressy voice said, “Scram.”

I would go out to the fields to write. The words ran away with me. I would write imaginary stories, stories set in our bog and our kitchen garden, but it was not enough, because I wanted to get inside them, in the same way as I was trying to get back into the maw of my mother. Everything about her intrigued me: her body, her being, her pink corset, her fads, and the obsessions to which she was prone. One was about a little silver spoon from a set of six that she had had since her honeymoon. They were kept in a velvet-lined case, the velvet faded and milky, and they were once loaned to the vocational school when dignitaries
were coming for a function. However, when the case was returned, there was one spoon missing, and my mother got on her bicycle and went in high dudgeon to the school. There was a thorough search, in drawers, in cupboards, under tables, in the pantry, in two bins, and in the turf shed. Inquiries were sent all over the village, but somehow my mother knew in her bones that she would never see that spoon again, and she never forgave it. She was convinced that she knew who had taken it, a shopkeeper who was jealous of our semi-grandeur, and ever after there was a coolness between them.

When, much later, I wrote about my mother, that preoccupation with her had intensified so that she permeated all worlds—
Her mother was the cupboard with all the things in it, the tabernacle with God in it, the lake with the legends in it, the sea with the oysters and the corpses, a realm into which she longed to vanish forever.

We were in all three hundred women in that convent, a limestone bastion housing choir nuns, lay nuns, boarders, and orphans, the sinful issue of unmarried mothers. We, the boarders, were little recruits for Heaven, where we would learn to be immune to passions, to mortify ourselves in every way, and to put up with our chilblains.

The prevailing smells were of wax floor polish and cabbage, but in the chapel it was the smell of burning incense, so exotic, and afterward that smell lingered on in the wreaths of smoke that clouded the air.

Not long after I had arrived there, crossing the courtyard, I was halted in my tracks by the sound of whistling, and it seemed to me the sweetest and most melodious sound imaginable. I felt that it was a young boy on his way home from work, and I had the deepest longing not to be in that courtyard but to be out there, walking, walking under the stars. Although we were on the edge of the town, we might as well have been in Timbuktu. Our dormitories were on two floors, one for the junior girls and one for the seniors. Seniors had a private cubicle with a curtain at the end, but for us it was a question of washing by a basin at the side of the bed, girls splashing themselves from ewers of freezing water and trying not to let their dressing gowns slip off. My dressing gown had belonged to my mother. It was fawn and hairy, and my name tag was sewn on the back of the collar. You could tell the girls whose parents were rich by their dressing gowns, which were either quilted or satin, in pink and rose colors. My mother had stitched name tags on all my uniform
and, as she said, stitched her heart into each one. She cried for a week after I left, and not once did she break her fast. I fasted also, because the food was awful: meat that was stringy in a pool of brown gravy, the faithful cabbage, and, for evening tea, bread that was already spread with a mixture of butter and dripping. It was wartime and butter was rationed. In those first weeks, a girl whose bed backed onto mine had apples that she’d hidden in her clothes cupboard, and when the lights went out, she would eat them. Depending on her mood, she would or would not offer me some. But before long I learned from a senior that the best way to quell hunger was to put a blob of Vicks VapoRub on the tongue, which induced a slight nausea, though when I fell in love, I was not hungry at all.

The nuns, all sixty or seventy of them, wore voluminous black habits with stiff white gimp that framed their faces and chiseled them. Nuns who had taken their final vows wore a wedding band on the ring finger, which signified that they were the Bride of Christ, and lay nuns, who were different from choir nuns, also had those wedding bands, but they wore aprons and did the menial work. Three hundred women with their humors and their tempers and their yearnings and their doubts and their several menstruations. My religious fervor would soar and falter during those years into which I crammed so much knowledge and information that I would in time forget.

They were dour years, in which I came to love Latin, the words so right in my mouth, as if it were the mother tongue—
amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant;
years in which I failed by a few marks to win a scholarship, the scholarship that my parents so fervently hoped I would win, as the annual fee of forty pounds was a tremendous strain on their resources; years during which I would fall in love with a nun in a manner no
different, no less rapturous, from the successive loves which I would conceive for men down the years.

Three times a week we were allowed a walk outside the gates, though not through the town itself, since we might be subjected to worldly or profane temptations. The town, Loughrea, which took its name from the lake, had a population of several hundred souls and, as we were told, was cutting its industrial teeth by mining for zinc and silver some eight miles distant. We walked in pairs and were supposed not to speak, though the tossing of our lunches into the lake inevitably led to hilarity. After the first week, disgusted by the stringy meat and the strips of cabbage, I, like every girl, put my lunch in a bit of paper and tucked it inside my gym frock, to dump in the lake. The gravy leaked into the chest and left a wet, warm patch there. I remember the walks as being windy, and when the lake was frozen, a man in dungarees went in with a sledgehammer and broke the thick shelves of ice in order to let the pairs of swans move about, as they did imperceptibly, breaching the dark pockets of freed water.

The convent had its rules, its friendships, its penances, and its hilarities. Once, by mistake, a girl flushed a ten-shilling note down the lavatory and was in utter despair. It happened to be the same period as when parcels were arriving for Halloween, and when the Head Nun gave her nightly homily, referring to the parcels piling up in the parlor, she said that there seemed to be a great flush of money about. Hearing the word “flush” sent the girls into peals of laughter. We all laughed, including the girl who had lost her ten-shilling note. So perplexed was our nun by this skittishness, and our refusal to say what it was about, that she too began to laugh, and it was the only time it ever occurred to me that she might have a human trait.

The nun I was poised to fall in love with was different. She was younger, her cheeks extremely pale, ivory-colored, with
sometimes the merest tincture of wine-red on her cheekbones when in frustration she became inflamed if we failed to grasp the geometry theorem that she had just written on the blackboard.

I would watch for her. I would wait for her. I would rush to her assistance when she came down steps with a load of books and copybooks, often, too often, beaten to it by other strapping girls who were also smitten with her. Yet one evening, when I passed her unexpectedly in the recreation hall, she gave me what I can only call the intimation of a smile—but it
was
an encouragement. In the chapel I saw where she knelt, the slope of her long back an escarpment, her collarbones the pillars of the Parthenon, these newfangled comparisons I had gleaned from a book I had found in the glass bookcase that was opened on Sundays when, for one hour, we were allowed to read for recreation. There were devout books, the lives of saints, the sermons of Cardinal Newman, and the wholesome novels of Canon P. Sheehan describing the dull lives of families in County Tipperary. The book I picked out by accident was an encyclopædia of gods and goddesses, full of strange and unlikely occurrences. Dionysus, god of wine and moisture, visiting King Dion in Aetolia fell in love with Carya, whose jealous sisters were about to betray her to their father, when Dionysus struck them with madness and turned them into rocks. Male gods disguised themselves in such cunning ways, appearing as the North Wind or bedraggled cuckoos or in the fleeces of ewes to ravish nymphs and goddesses, whereupon miraculous conceptions ensued that were, however, unlike that of the Virgin Mary, who had conceived by the Holy Ghost. These long-ago gods, with their cunning and their debaucheries, were so different from our stern God who lived above in the tabernacle where one day I would have to stand as a punishment.