My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress (6 page)

Nothing could compare with the relief I felt at being excused from the Master's presence with the words, ‘Would the girls now slip quietly into their sewing.' The word ‘quietly' was superfluous here: each of us was a model of subordination. Yet the Master always felt the need to remind us just the same.

In Miss's sewing class I was forever knitting a red scarf. This joyous labour seemed to stretch over four years, with a multitude of dropped stitches and tangled knots along the way.

We would sit in a semicircle round the stove, our shins mottling in the heat, our pink faces lowered and tongue-tips appearing through lips tightened with effort. And, as the crackling fire and clacking needles carried on a noisy dispute with each other, it didn't matter if the sun shone or the rain fell; for that hour of the fearsome school week I was happy.

I was happy because I was in safe territory, away from the ill-tempered jolts and stabbing gaze of the Master. In Miss's room I could drop a stitch without the risk of being beaten. Her customary reaction was to gently free the wool from my hands and repair the damage as best she could.

With Miss I knew I could make mistakes and be forgiven, that I could ask permission to go to the toilet and not be refused. My limbs felt looser, my head lighter, and my words flowed more freely.

As I sat there I sometimes thought about the boys and girls who had, like me, sat at that stove – or one very much like it – trying to make sense of that little part of Ulster we inhabited. This was the school my parents and relatives had endured all those years before. Had their
teachers been any different? Perhaps. I wondered if they, as children, had sat there like me, tightened in by unknowing, with all their dreams before them ‘spread out like a spring-woken tree'.

U
NHAPPY
H
OME

O
ur house stood in the shadow of the Glenshane mountain range, three miles east of predominantly Catholic Draperstown, two miles north of Protestant Tobermore, and five or so miles from Maghera, which nurtured a risky mix of both. Such clearly delineated boundaries along lines of religion seemed just as important back then as they are now. The people of the locality liked to know where they – and their neighbours – stood.

This South Derry region is mainly farming country, studded with freeholds that have witnessed generation-long internecine conflict. Land and religion are of equal importance to the Ulster Catholics. This obsession with the soil is rooted in the dark past, when their forebears, being dispossessed during the Plantations, had to buy back their plots from the Protestant British. The sons of farming fathers therefore live together in an uneasy alliance, waiting for the ‘holy ground' to one day pass to them. Where there is land there is discord; nowhere was this more in evidence than in my father's bleak ancestry.

On a piece of land ceded to him by his family he built the bungalow that would house us all, and reluctantly farmed the land that would feed and sustain us into adulthood. I say reluctantly because from the earliest age I was aware that my father did not want me. He'd wanted none of us; we were the unfortunate by-products of the marriage bed, the burdensome extras that forced him
into a life of labour, rather than one of indolence, more fitting to his natural mien.

My parents, as seen in their wedding picture, bore little resemblance to the two people I came to know. My father was tall, rawboned and dour. His thick, black hair was combed severely back and fixed in place by a felt hat, shed only on Sundays and when eating. The eyes were blue and staring; one would need a raft of cold adjectives to describe their colour and intensity. The meagre mouth and narrow face rarely surrendered a smile.

As a child I do not remember a single encouraging word from him, a comforting arm around me if I fell and hurt myself, a smile of approval, an unexpected gift, a birthday card, a hug. He remained morose, pessimistic and a stranger to me always.

There were six boys in father's family; he was the third-born. From all accounts they were the progeny of a loveless union and a harsh childhood. They grew up in the cold, post-war atmosphere of the 1920s; from the earliest age they were treated not as children but used as little slaves to do the heavy housework and farm labouring.

They had proceeded from sunless children to barren bachelors: a yawning sombre procession trudging along one of life's more aimless paths, each one reticent and uneasy until my poor mother happened along. She naively chose my father and stumbled blindly and all too willingly into wedlock.

His brothers never forgave father for this transgression, an enmity they extended to us children as well. A suspicious eye and a grim look were all we received from our uncles; there were no pennies of reward, no smiles of approval, no words of comfort, not ever; just the accusatory, glaucous stare, especially from Uncle Robert, the Master. He was the bursar, the man who held the purse-strings.

You would think that marriage and children would have softened my father, but that wasn't the case. The accumulation and hoarding of the money, and getting his hands on the acreage, were as important to him as ever. But he now realised that since committing the sin of marriage he was even less favourably disposed. His wife and children were to blame for thwarting his access to the family fortune. We became a needless expense, and for this he actively resented us.

My poor mother attempted to compensate for his deficiencies, but hers was a relentless battle. Her photogenic beauty had saddened and drooped under the weight of his injustice, but she carried on being mother and father to all of us while he watched the show from the sidelines.

She was the physical force that woke us, washed us, clothed and fed us, before putting us on the road to school, while he slumbered selfishly on. She was the cook – pounding, churning, peeling, baking – and the one who trained us to eat properly at table. She was the cleaner: sweeping, mopping, and scrubbing our soiled nappies and clothes in basins of soapy water. She was the seamstress who knitted sweaters, darned socks, and stitched our floral frocks on her second-hand Singer sewing machine. She was the nurse who bandaged our cut knees, wiped our tears, and put us to bed with an aspirin crushed between two spoons and mixed in with jam.

And as if that wasn't enough, she was the chaperone who took us in to see doctors, opticians and dentists, while our father remained outside in the car. She was the gardener who planted and plucked and weeded to make the place look presentable.

She was the down-trodden wife who would carry tea to him only to hear him declare that it wasn't sweet enough,
and he'd send her back for more sugar. She was the typical Irish mother of her time, dominated by the overbearing, crude actions of a thoughtless husband and cowed by the misogyny of the Church.

This litany of labour was the indispensable, inexhaustible language of her life; it fuelled, understandably, a rush of anger and dissatisfaction that she gave voice to at every turn. She shouted and cried with all the bitter force of a wind across the tundra, never silent, never static – she externalised everything.

It seemed that when she was on the move she was alive, goaded by his inertness. His torpor was her vigour, raging down the years.

There was a stubborn conspiracy between them, the indolent imploding of one exploding into the frenzied action of the other. He could sit for hours on the sofa eyeing a ruminative cow in a distant field while she fizzed and surged around him. He could just about find the energy to raise his feet off the floor as she swept and mopped under him. He knew this annoyed her and would say, in his defence: ‘There's no need for half of that cleanin' atall, atall.' And we'd wait for the skirl of abuse.

My mother had three key utterances that she squawked out with such frequency that they resound in the memory still. One: ‘I rue the day I married that man.' And she meant it, she truly did, every sinewy, rank syllable of it. Two: ‘My heart's a breakin'.' I didn't doubt it. Since our father didn't love us we made up for the deficit by forever feasting on her heart. And finally the cry that stung the most: ‘I may give this place up.' By this she meant the prison that was home and its sorry contents – all of us.

They were the sentiments of a wounded woman, defeated by the demands of being a wife and mother in
1960s' Ireland, who'd wed in the hope of finding contentment and joyous escape, only to discover a wilderness of despair. Now instead of just being the put-upon skivvy to a flock of brothers, she had a flock of children and a shiftless husband to boot. Because of this inequity she bickered fluently and repeatedly with the source of her pain: her husband, my father, and our lives became subordinate to her searing frustration and his cold dispassion.

The house I was born in was the standard bungalow of its time: three bedrooms, a kitchen, a scullery and a bathroom.

The three bedrooms were divided by hierarchy and gender: my parents in the biggest one, five girls and four boys sharing the smaller ones. Space was tight and tempers hot as we fought for our share of that space. Being the youngest girl I usually ended up as sandwich-filling between two sisters, lying straight as a rod with the bedclothes stretched across me; or I sometimes shared a narrow bed with another, wrestling for possession of a thin blanket, even to the point of holding its corner between gritted teeth to retain my territorial claim. As children we clashed for space and comfort and love, because all three were in short supply. When I left home I found that living alone was bliss.

It seemed that my mother never rested. The kitchen naturally was the focus of most of her activity. It was basic and functional (my father did not allow money to be spent on unnecessary things like cushions or frills). There was a scrubbed wooden table and eleven chairs, a brown vinyl couch, heavily studded along base and top with a seam of brass tacks, and cracked deeply into submission at one end, due to my father's frequent rest periods. A hulking range jutted out onto the polished
floor, making as much noise as my frazzled mother, spitting and hissing with the wood and coal it was fed each day.

That range was rarely idle. A kettle or saucepan was forever on the boil. Endless ‘drops' of tea were made and potatoes were a staple at lunchtime. Every day during holidays and at weekends I watched a great pot of Golden Wonders or Kerr's Pinks splutter and fume at noon, the lid bubbling up with furious thrusts and sighing back down again, creating rivulets of steam that burst and sizzled their way across the angry hot plate.

A good portion of my mother's day was spent baking and cooking. On the floured surface of the scrubbed table she kneaded and rolled the dough for the daily batches of scones, carrying the floppy triangles to the fired griddle and patting down with her caked ‘masonry' hands. This job could not be rushed or left, so she'd stand there, palette-knife at the ready, waiting, flipping over, and waiting again, before carrying the swollen farls to the cooling rack. Back and forth, back and forth she'd go, between table and stove, wearing a path, felling the hours, nursing her angst and woe. I wonder now how many miles she travelled between that table and stove in the course of her lifetime, just to give us our daily bread. When finished, she'd take down the goose wing that hung by the mantelshelf, and dust off the excess flour. The griddle was cooled on the floor before being returned to its nail behind the scullery door.

In the oven of that vast range she roasted red meats and chicken for the Sunday lunch. She also cooked what she commonly referred to as her ‘oven-scone'. This was a mighty currant mountain which raised itself to hot perfection in the tarnished whiskey tray she used as a tin.

For special occasions such as Christmas and birthdays she baked buns and cakes, and I'd help. Like old-time
cook's assistant Johnny Craddock I always got to do the menial tasks: measuring the flour, breaking the eggs into a bowl and greasing the tin. She would stand there mixing the ingredients with deceptive ease while I knelt on a stool beside her, the better to follow it all. It was all magical to me then: the process of turning the gloopy mixture into a delicious cake amazed me. I thought that mother was a wonder-worker, and in her way I suppose she was.

The scullery was the source of all this industry and the place I loved to explore. It housed a collection of pots, pans and large bowls, and the hundredweight bag of Early Riser flour which went to bake all those wondrous cakes and scones. It sat on a stool behind the scullery door, its furled top steadily drooping down the more mother baked.

She didn't like having us under her feet when she was working in the scullery and she'd send us out to play. Our yard was an area flanked by great whitewashed barns, and it signified freedom and escape from our incommodious dwelling. During summer holidays we'd let our playful imaginations run loose there, or in the triangular garden to the front of the house, and the fields beyond. We'd tumble out of the back door with the aromas of eggs and baking bread in our nostrils – only to be pulled up short by the stench of manure spread on a nearby field. But there were other smells to compensate: sometimes we'd catch the exhilarating fragrance of freshly mown grass.

That yard was my world. I knew by heart the topography of its landscape: the rise of chopped firewood at its farthest point, which held out the promise of warmth against colder days to come. A row of cowpats from barn door to field where the lazy bluebottles droned in a gauze of summer heat, lighting and straying in a ceaseless
dance. I'd hold my nose and watch them, wondering how they could feed on the rotten cakes; all that lifting off and landing seemed to indicate a kind of circumscribed freedom I couldn't understand.

The grey Fergie tractor with its striated metal bonnet, like the breastplate of some superior Indian chief, stood to one side of the firewood. A circular saw did double duty: it split wood and its bench served as shelter for Carlo our collie. He could just about raise his head and gaze with bored weariness when we invaded the yard, then lay his chin back down again and continue his doze in the sawdust. This was the domain of the farmyard animal and we were the intruders, frequently scattering the hens with our exuberant horseplay. They let us know we weren't welcome, giving us fierce, sudden looks as they high-stepped away.