My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress (19 page)

But we muddled along as best we could, clinging together like two flailing swimmers in a treacherous ocean, straining and spluttering under the force of the crushing
verve and push of the ‘happening' townies – the girls from Draperstown. Catherine and I pooled our resources and plodded our precarious way through thick and thin; we were the two clots who sat together, stuck together, ate together, played together, all this innocent unity compounding the felony of our weaknesses. Catherine and I needed each other. There was true strength in that bond; together we held a flimsy kind of power.

Coeducational schools are bad news for girls; they experience the chauvinism and hegemony of the male too early. The less clever boys – and St Colm's had a great many – attempted to camouflage their shortcomings by dominating and intimidating us girls. They swaggered like little sweaty animals of the lower orders, sniffing us out in order to cast lewd comments about our swelling breasts and bums. Those breasts that went unnoticed by my mother became points of intense interest in the schoolyard.

I was 12 and hated the male of the species with a raw and extravagant passion. How could I be ‘friends' with such tormenting little brutes? Master Bradley and father gave me pain, my brothers pulled my hair and gave me grief. In my young head the male reared up as a fearful prospect, a figure to be approached with caution. They were capricious, impulsive; hazards that could break in on me at any time and destroy my whole
raison d'être
.

I cultivated the art of becoming invisible, editing my speech and gestures. I longed for my life to be a series of short, still days with the sun and the birds and the clouds and the green unfolding hedgerows: a natural world to grow calm in. I yearned for a world without the sharp realities of home and school, a place to be alone in.

That gathering danger was forever on my mind. It followed me home from school and woke me from my slumber, and sometimes in the night I thought I heard that ‘knocking visitor' under the bed.

The dark was talking to the dead;

The lamp was dark beside my bed.

I never believed I could enjoy school. Those first four years with Miss McKeague brought joy, but those that followed lowered me into the depths of despair. From an early age there was the unspoken implication that life was not to be enjoyed but suffered. The unhappy adults around me had themselves grown up with this flawed philosophy and so could offer me no alternative.

In St Colm's, however, I was fortunate to have two teachers who would point me in a completely new direction: Miss Henry, who taught art, and Miss Maguire, my English teacher. The one gave me a thirst for language and the other a yen for colour; together they instilled in me a longing to explore those twin creative fields, a longing that's never left me.

English and art were the touchstones that led me into a new and sustaining world of culture, a world I never knew existed. For the first time I was told that I was good at something. Those words of praise and encouragement flowed through me like a benediction. Suddenly I mattered; I was facing the creative in me. Those good women had kindled flames.

In my English class I encountered the poetry of Seamus Heaney for the first time. He was born and raised in Bellaghy, a few miles from my home. The publication of his collection
Door into The Dark
coincided with my third year at school. Suddenly, in his hands, the sublunary became sacred, the monotony of the elements spoke with an astonishing freshness.

Rain comes down through the alders,

Its low conducive voices

Mutter about let-downs and erosions

My farming father became ‘an expert':

His eye

Narrowed and angled at the ground,

Mapping the furrow exactly.

And my domestic mother an occasion of handsome endeavour:

Now she dusts the board

With a goose's wing,

now sits, broad-lapped,

with whitened nails

and measling shins.

The poet exulted in an environment I'd never noticed before, and burnished otherwise dull images until they dazzled me. I wanted to write like that and had the effrontery, at the age of 14, to think I could.

Miss Maguire was a dark, vivacious beauty whose energy and enthusiasm enabled me to take risks with language. She was daring in her choice of texts. I was both intrigued and unnerved by Shakespeare. The ambition and evil of Macbeth left a lasting impression and showed me what happens to the human heart when lust for power takes hold: a perfect metaphor for the ego's struggle against God. When we got to the night-porter scene and the mysterious knocking, I fancied that it could have been the recently murdered Duncan doing a Great-aunt Rose.

I loved writing essays and sometimes Miss would ask if Uncle Robert (the Master, English graduate and linguist) had helped me. He barely acknowledged my presence, let alone asked what I was up to in school. I was none the less pleased to think that Miss thought he had a hand in my efforts. It was backhanded praise, but praise all the same.

It was poetry, however, that lifted me up and freed me. It was more accessible than the novel; Jane Austen did not inspire me with all her meandering prose. My parents had no interest in novels. I was raised in a bookless house. The
Sunday Press, Ireland's Own
and the
Irish Messenger of the Sacred Heart
were the height of their literary aspirations. When I met the novel for the first time in secondary school its weight and density scared me. Poetry books were brief and eloquent, the pithy distillations of those more extensive tomes.

So I read and reread the evocative stanzas of Heaney, hoping that some of his magic would rub off on me. I began to write my own verse. Up until I was 20 I continued to produce some dreadful stuff I imagined was poetry: pages of rhyming couplets, doggerel which makes me blush even now.

Mother, marvelling at the speed of this prodigious output – and not understanding a line of it – thought she'd reared a genius. She brought a folder of my poems to Mr Heaney's brother Dan, who was teaching me history at the time. Thank heavens he had the wisdom to put her off, saying that Seamus was so busy he rarely saw him. The folder was returned to me, my embarrassing secrets intact. These few lines I wrote in ‘Words' sum up the ardency and frustration of those days:

Symbolic armies are passing

Through me by the hour;

Marching in to gather,

To multiply and father

A big, violent marriage in my head

Throughout the day, they are my saviour,

Collapsing onto paper unprepared;

And at night in sleeplessness,

The poem mutes the prayer.

Eight of those ‘jingles' have survived in my memory; they rear up at me from the disaffected past, insisting upon a place in my history. Those iambic rhythms and quatrains, although not earth-shattering, had a power all their own.

From Heaney I moved on to Larkin and MacNeice. What need had I for those canting rosaries when I could recite
Prayer Before Birth
and be empowered by it as I tramped the tarmacked road to and from school?

With water to dandle me,

grass to grow for me,

trees to talk to me,

sky to sing to me, birds and a white light

in the back of my mind to guide me.

It did not seem necessary for me to understand those words; it was their mystical essence that enraptured me. This was spirituality of another kind, the creative kind. If language introduced me to it then art certainly gave me the freedom to explore it to the full.

In the art class I found I could do other things with my pencil too. In my hand it became more than a writing tool; it was an instrument that lured meaning into colour, line and shade.

My teacher, Miss Henry, was a fine woman: calm, agreeable, well-intentioned, the fixed point in the fear house that was school. She never startled me with barked orders or sudden confrontations. The thought of the art lessons made me happy. In the hush of Miss Henry's room all my panic vanished, and I rejoiced in being freed from the moil of other subjects. I experienced much the same feelings as I had in Miss McKeague's sewing class. I was at peace, felt safe, unconstrained, and worthy. It was as if I'd shed a great burden, or had
happened upon a slash of sunlight in a forest, a light that suddenly defined me, gave me meaning, answering the ‘who' and ‘why' of what I was.

I set to work with my paints and pencils and laboured over the challenges of still-life and real-life models; capturing the blush on an apple skin or pondering the lineaments of a face. My love of words and art sometimes coalesced. I wrote an ‘Ode to the Old Masters', and another poem entitled ‘One-Man Show', its theme being the power of abstract painting to challenge the viewer.

All white and serviceable,

Susceptible to the bulk of us

Who've never held a paintbrush.

At equidistant intervals,

Framed utterances abound

By someone who prefers to speak

With paint instead of sound.

Miss Henry spotted my modicum of talent; my mother picked it up and sprinted with it like a relay runner. If I wasn't going to be a poet, then I ‘sure as God' would be a painter. And I like to think that I repaid her zeal and, in a modest way, realised her dream.

Finally I had the attention of the only person I truly wanted to please. This nascent talent diverted mother, gave her focus; it made the days timeless and the roads straight. She could see ahead to great things: exhibitions and celebrations; her gilding of all those futures was the spur that urged me on. My creative skill had given her a vicarious kind of fame.

She was my patron and I was the poor beneficiary, a Vincent to her Theo. My new-found ability made her bold. She persuaded father to cut into the housekeeping tranche, using the goad of education and the certainty of
picture sales. Suddenly canvases and tubes of expensive oils appeared; and every trip or tour she took was a hunting expedition for postcards and pictures and photographs. They littered the house, all the contextual references I needed for my transforming brush. She would arrive home like a robed Maecenas bearing gifts; a spill and rush of objects that would bring those visions to life. No canvas I painted could disappoint her. She overlooked flaws clearly visible to me. Love broke out and bloomed in her. With that brush in my hand I was faultless. All those sweaty fistfuls of posies I'd plucked and carried home to her from primary school, in a bid for her attention and a smile, were now being repaid one hundredfold. I painted the ‘mantelpiece candy' that she adored: scenes of rural tranquillity that demanded nothing but bribed the eye and attempted to beat the camera at its own game. I painted mountains, lakes and dwelling houses, all in their proper places, and all augmented with the vivid hues of fantasies and farce. These renderings of the landscape were the language she understood.

I painted on request, for the doctor and the dentist and the neighbours down the road, and she sold my canvases at such bargain prices that I rarely obtained a decent return. Mother excused the injustice with: ‘But we couldn't charge too much; sure she's a friend,' or ‘He's your teacher,' or even ‘She'd be a second cousin of the parish priest, you know.' She loved conducting these transactions, delivering the finished product into the buyer's hands and carrying back to me the measly profit and the effusive praise.

She also knew how to put those WI ladies in their place. Some of them had the impudence to suggest that the paintings were too good to be done freehand and that I must have painted by numbers instead.

‘For goodness sake, Avril,' she'd sniff, ‘numbers are for amateurs!' She said this, knowing that certain ladies in the WI group – Avril included – painted by numbers as a hobby.

My love of painting almost made school bearable. Those days when I had art lessons were the best of all. They filled me with such joy that not even Miss Sharp or the bullying boys had any power over me. My creative imagination was let loose to float in whatever direction I chose.

T
HE
W
EIRD AND THE
W
ONDERFUL

M
y experience of the artistic was developing through the poetic image. I began to observe beauty in the commonplace as I trudged to and from school with my brothers Mark and John.

I began to sense an energy that riffled nature to new heights. The wind breathing through the trees; greens variegating from dark to light; a fence with the snagged wool of sheep on the barbs; the swell and fold of the Sperrin Mountains shifting under the sun; purple foxgloves straining proudly; a dazzle of windscreens; the glitter of raindrops on ferns; a fence post rotting at a tethered gate; wet leaves varnished on the road. My heart expanding, my eyes truly seeing for the very first time.

I knew I irritated my brothers when I'd stop continually to study an unusual piece of foliage or the play of light on a bramble.

‘What's keepin' ye?' John would say. ‘Would ye hurry up, would ye? Sure it's only an oul' bush!'

On wet days we took the bus. The features of this area of Ballinascreen were less arresting than those I encountered in my earlier days, no doubt because we used the main road between Tobermore and Draperstown. At that period, in the early seventies, quite a number of families who didn't work the land had moved from the rural areas to the newly built council estates in the town.

The old-style shacks that had accommodated the likes of Jamie Frank and Great-aunt Rose would soon become the deserted relics of a long-flown time; fallen tombstones that spoke their ghostly histories through crumbling walls and broken doors.

The road was ours no longer; there were more cars and buses than ever before, so we traipsed in single file, tramping on one another's heels and standing well into the hedge when we heard the thunder of a lorry. There were few Mary Catherines to detain us. But, to compensate, we had the weird and wonderful Norrie.