Family Romance

by John Lanchester

  Pat was not an intellectual like his brother Tim, but he was a hard-working farmer of good local repute. This – as the American anthropologist Conrad Arensberg made clear in his 1936 study of the West of Ireland, The Irish Countryman – was crucial. A man’s standing was determined by the interplay of three closely related things: ‘land’, ‘blood’, and ‘local standing’. Pat stood to inherit some land, his family were known and respected, and his own reputation was sound. Mary would be the first of the six Waldron daughters to be married. She was twenty-four – young by the standards of Ireland, which at this time had the oldest average age for marriage in the world, 29.1 for women and 34.9 for men. All in all, Pat was a good catch. The new Mr and Mrs Gunnigan settled down at Lurgan and set about having a family. Their first child, my mother Julia, was born on 5 December 1920.

  It is only in a certain sort of fiction that marriage automatically constitutes a happy ending. Life for the Gunnigans did not suddenly become easy. Pat was a subsistence farmer – what would in other parts of the world be known as a peasant. The family cows were the key piece of livestock. In the words of Conrad Arensberg:

  The small farmer cultivates a ‘garden’ of oats, rye, potatoes, cabbage and turnips, and devotes his pasture and the hay of his fields to milch cattle. He sells his cows’ increase each year. He keeps large numbers of hens and a few pigs. But the milch cow is the centre round which this economy revolves. Nearly all he raises he consumes at home; his family and his farm animals take the greater part of his produce. It is only his surplus and his annual crop of calves which break out of the circle of subsistence and in so doing bring him the only monetary income he receives.

  The great event, as my mother remembered it, was the slaughter of a pig. The butcher would come to the farm, once or twice a year, kill a pig, and make every bit of it into food. Right to the end of her life my mother could recite what would happen to the various parts of the animal: the hocks would be salted for gammon, the back would be cured for bacon, the head would be boiled for head cheese, the crubeens – that’s the beautiful Irish word for trotters – would be breaded and fried, the blood would be mixed with oatmeal for black pudding, other bits would be made into sausages. ‘Then we’d make up a little parcel, wrapped in a handkerchief, with a little piece of all the different cuts, and take it to the neighbours, and when they killed a pig they’d do the same thing.’ The only produce the family regularly bought, rather than grew or made, were tea, sugar, and soap. Everything else came from the farm. Some variety in the diet was brought by fish, caught or poached, and from the birds and rabbits Pat shot for the pot. He was a legendarily good shot: if he could see something, he could hit it.

  A man’s life on the farm was determined by the routine of the seasons. He would do different types of work at different times of the year. By contrast, a woman’s routine was determined by the hours of the day: its structure was given by the regular demands of the twenty-four hours, and, especially, by the children. The pattern in Ireland was for late marriage – this was determined partly by the need to pass on the family farm in dowry settlements, so parents waited before entering into the semi-arranged marriages common in the countryside – and large families. Molly Waldron had bucked the first trend by marrying relatively early, but she did not buck the second. She was pregnant more or less once a year from 1920 on. Julia’s birth in 1920 was followed by that of Noreen, Mary, Bernie, Peggie, Dilly, John – finally a boy to inherit the farm – and lastly, in 1934, Jane. In addition, she had five miscarriages and still births, for a total of thirteen pregnancies. The fact that this was not unusual for the time and place did not make it any easier.

  This is not a book about the Gunnigans in general. I have not tried to give a rounded, overall account of their lives – though that would be an amazing story, one which described the astonishing change which has come over Ireland over the last half-century or so. The difference between the Ireland into which my mother and her siblings were born, and the Ireland in which my cousins live, is extraordinary and exhilarating. In some people’s versions, the old Ireland would seem lighter, and the new Ireland would seem darker, than they do to me; but I am my mother’s son. Other family members see things differently, and remember things differently. This means not only that specific events and actions struck them in different ways, but that the main incidents of their lives, the turning points and plot points, were different. Family life is not a neutral reality that we can achieve by research and consensus, but a story, in which the characters and the crucial actions are different depending on who is telling the story. This is my mother’s story, and not a consensus version.

  In my mother’s account, there was a division of qualities between the parents. The Gunnigans were the good – the humanly good – side of the family. Her father was a kind man, or as kind as he was allowed to be by the need to work all the time and keep up a stern front. He was fond of my mother. One day when she had a rash he took her to one side, so that the other children in the family wouldn’t hear and laugh at her, and told her that the best thing was to dab a little of her own urine on it. When my mother told that story the affection in her voice was for the fact he had shielded her from ridicule.

  That was Gunnigan through and through. So were the family jokes. When my mother was three she tripped and fell down the short, steep staircase – still a feature of the house to this day. She landed on her head. As people rushed towards little Julia, her grandfather announced, ‘Oh don’t bother, she’s bound to be dead.’

  On the other side were the Waldrons. Family memories diverge over the question of Molly, my mother’s mother. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that my mother hated her. Julia certainly feared and distrusted her: she saw her mother as a spreader of gossip, a great one for rummaging through people’s secrets, a reader of other people’s letters and diaries, malicious, a troublemaker who took great pleasure in the trouble she made. This fed into the sense of what Ireland and Irishness meant for Julia. In my mother’s stories, Ireland was a sad and glorious place, and being Irish was something to be proud of: she was, and she hoped I was too. But it was also a place to be careful of and to keep your distance from. People wishing each other ill featured a lot in my mother’s stories – envy and malice were vivid realities to her. And that was somehow connected to Ireland and to her experiences with her mother. Families could be trouble: there was a connection between Ireland and that fact as well. Things like wills had endless potential to make difficulty.

  Julia felt that her mother resented her and did everything she could to do her down. It may well be that Molly took out on her eldest daughter her own resentment at being trapped and hemmed in. The dislike my mother felt for her mother sometimes expressed itself in a dislike for all the Waldrons. In my mother’s account they were hard people: they could be mean, mean-minded, practical, ungenerous. In later life, when she was angry at me, she would tell me that I was behaving like a ‘typical’ – or sometimes she would use the word ‘real’ – Waldron. This was not intended as a compliment. But it had a very specific meaning. I never heard my mother voice any actual complaints against any of her other Waldron relatives, many of whom had been very kind to her. So this was really just a way of talking about her mother. Almost the only favourable thing she ever said about Molly was that she was a very good cook. The division was simple: Gunnigan father nice, Waldron mother nasty.

  That’s not how others remember it. My aunt Peggie has a great deal of sympathy for her mother. ‘I know Mum could be infuriating – I can understand Julia in many ways – but Mum had a very tough life. She’d been brought up in Mountview, in a comfortable home by West of Ireland farmhouse standards. Then when she married she came to this absolutely bleak, comfortless home.’ Comfortless: that seems a fair summary of the incessant round of work, pregnancy, and child-rearing in a tiny and very Spartan home, not much changed since its construction in 1873, lacking running water and power. By rural custom and precept, ‘one woman in
the house must always be working’. That, for a woman brought up to expect to be a schoolteacher, who had given up a job in Dublin for marriage, made for a hard life. Making the food grown on the farm stretch to feed the whole family, adjusting clothes for hand-me-downs for the younger children, mending everything that broke – these were now her crucial skills.

  Life was hard. That is the key point. I don’t want to belabour this, since it has been a recurrent feature of writing about Ireland since the revival of Gaelic literature in the 1900s. As soon as people began composing prose memoirs in Irish, a tidal wave of books vied with each other in describing just how extravagantly difficult the protagonist’s upbringing had been – walking ten miles to school, dining off the smell of cabbages, etc. This trend was parodied, devastatingly, by Flann O’Brien in his novel An Béal Bocht (‘The Poor Mouth’), whose title comes from the great Irish expression for complaining about how hard a time you’re having – ‘giving it the poor mouth’. In the novel, instead of walking miles to school, O’Brien’s characters have to swim in from the island of Aran – that sort of thing. One might have hoped that The Poor Mouth would have put a permanent end to people’s giving it the poor mouth, but not so, as the success of Frank McCourt’s memoirs show. It’s a pity O’Brien didn’t live to parody that.

  I don’t want to overstress a thoroughly stressed fact. Still, life was hard, and this made a hardness enter into people. There was a mixture of objective poverty and a cultural narrowness, directed particularly towards women and intensified through the various pieties – Catholic, nationalist, Gaelicist, traditionalist – of the new-born Irish Free State. It is the world depicted in Patrick Kavanagh’s masterpiece The Great Hunger, in which the hunger is both literal and imaginative, a longing for something more, something bigger. And this hardness contributed to a hardness in Julia’s character. This is an Irish trait about which the Irish don’t write or talk, but it’s something I’ve often noticed, a bleak, adamantine toughness: a refusal to yield anything to circumstances (which is usually good) or weakness (which is usually good) or to anybody else (which is sometimes good) or to one’s own better nature (not so good) or to love (not good at all). Julia’s dominant memory of her childhood was that it was hard, cold, comfortless, and unloving. When I once asked her whether she had been happy as a child, she said that she had not. I asked her why.

  ‘Because I was ignored. And it isn’t very nice being ignored.’

  My mother never felt she had had her mother’s love; she never felt she had had a moment’s undivided attention from anyone in her childhood, ever. You might say that the oldest daughter in a family of eight children living on the edge of subsistence will be bound to feel that, and you might be right. But the hardness of which I write was strongly present in her upbringing. Her father Pat she loved, and felt loved by, but she also felt him as an absence, and the reality for a farmer of his time was that life was an unremitting struggle to survive and provide. She felt it especially of her mother, who came across to her as hard, dark, bitter, unyielding, merciless, remorseless, and ruthless. And my mother could be some of these things too, and knew it, and it was not her favourite truth about herself.

  The route out was education. Nobody needed to tell Julia that, she worked it out for herself. She thrived on her first experience of the outside. There is a beautiful observation in Arensberg’s The Irish Countryman: ‘At four in the “evening”, as the countryman divides the day, the children arrive from school, to be fed and questioned. For they are important purveyors of news.’ Julia loved this sense of contact with the world. She did exceptionally well in school, and soon came home with praise and prizes. She had a phenomenal memory and was a champion retainer of facts and a star reciter of poetry. To the end of her life she could recite yardfuls of the verse she had learnt as a child, and she had a big line in Edwardian and Victorian narrative poetry – ‘The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God’ was a particular favourite. (The author of that poem, J. Milton Hayes, also wrote ‘The Whitest Man I Know’. I don’t think you need to have read it to feel that you’ve read it.) My wife’s name is Miranda; my mother would often have to be prevented from reciting the whole of Belloc’s poem ‘Tarantella’ (‘Do you remember an inn, Miranda, do you remember an inn?’) to her. ‘Horatius’ and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ were also set pieces. These would be performed at family concerts, and to ‘entertain’ visitors.

  ‘Julia was a very bright child,’ my aunt Peggie remembers. ‘Everybody said that.’ Until the age of eleven, she was educated at the National School in Dugara. This was a walk of about a mile each way. She was immediately and lastingly at the top of her class. The open nature of academic competition suited her, and the attention and praise she earned through her success in the school suited her too. This is another point over which memories diverge. My mother, as I’ve said, saw her childhood as one long immersion in being neglected and ignored. That’s not exactly how other members of the family remember it. ‘Julia was the bright one, the clever one, the one that was always trotted out for visitors,’ one of her sisters recalls. She would be brought to the parlour and encouraged to go through her paces. Sixty years later, there was still an edge of sibling competition to these memories. Pat and Molly, in this version of events, doted on Julia’s deeds: ‘Everything she did was then repeated.’

  In 1931, at the age of eleven, Julia won a place as a day pupil at the Convent of Mercy in Ballyhaunis. This small market town is about fifteen miles from the family home in Lurgan. It was a good school, run by the Sisters of Mercy, so Julia went to stay with her mother’s brother Tony Waldron, then a young GP just setting out in practice. (Tony died while I was writing this book, in 2005 at the age of 101. The Waldrons are very long lived: at the time of writing, my mother’s aunt Nora is still alive at the age of ninety-eight.) Another of her mother’s siblings, her sister Biddy, was staying with him as his housekeeper. Julia moved in with them for the duration of the school term and continued to do well, better than well, in school. There was a national essay competition on some patriotic subject or other, and Julia won it. This was a famous event in the family. ‘This was absolutely wonderful, that Julia was so very clever and so very bright,’ Peggie recalls.

  At thirteen, Julia changed schools again, when she won a place at the Presentation Convent in Tuam. This time she would be a boarder. She would spend twenty-four hours a day in the atmosphere of a missionary nuns’ school.

  The Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary are a religious order with Irish origins. The founder was a Cork woman, Nano Nagle, born in 1718, who received her religious education in France and then went home and dedicated her life to education and to the poor. At that time it was illegal to educate Catholic children: the penalty for doing so was exile and confiscation of property. Nano Nagle went ahead and did it anyway, which is the reason she recently came top of a poll to identify the greatest Irish person in history. (I find this a less depressing choice than the permanent British option of Winston Churchill.) She founded what was initially a branch of the Ursuline sisters, and then in 1775, when the Ursulines were forbidden to break their contemplative way of life to work with the poor, she set up the Sisters of the Charitable Institution of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which then became the Order of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. From its inception it has been an order with a strong bias towards education. It is not as well known or as prominent as its male equivalent, the Christian Brothers, but nonetheless has a considerable presence in Ireland and as a missionary order abroad. The first overseas branch was founded in Newfoundland in 1833, followed by India (1842), San Francisco (1854), Tasmania (1856), and so on. The glory and wonder and drama of these missions were a constant subject in the school. Nuns returning from the missions would regularly come and give talks to the pupils. ‘It’s very difficult to imagine, it’s very difficult to explain to anyone without the background,’ says Peggie. ‘If you were at boarding school in Ireland, several times in the ye
ar nuns from the missions would come looking for postulants.’ A postulant is a trainee nun, one who has gone into the convent but has not yet ‘taken the habit’ and sworn the vows which commit her to the order and to a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. ‘You’d get a long talk about how wonderful the life was, the marvellous possibilities, they’d show you photographs of things they did, and tell you stories. So if you were in a convent boarding school you were fired with this idea of how wonderful it would be to go on the missions. I imagine a lot of very unsuitable people went into convents, not having a clue of what they were letting themselves in for at a very early age. They’d grown up totally sheltered.’

  Sheltered in one way; exposed, or indoctrinated, in another. It might not be true to call Ireland in the middle 1930s the most Catholic country in the world. But in other countries with a strong Catholic presence there was also forceful opposition to Catholicism: there were strands of secular, left-wing, anti-clerical thought, ranging from mild atheistic dissent to outright militant Communism. That was not the case in Ireland. The ascent to power of De Valera’s government in 1932, the anti-treaty body having reincarnated itself as Fiánna Fáil, saw Catholicism and nationalism locked in an inseparably tight clinch. The Church had been courageous as the embodiment of national identity all through the dark years of the penal laws and the deliberate, violent suppression of Irish identity through religion, language, education, and economics. Now the Church was garnering its reward at the centre of a state that was, if not exactly theocratic, then not far from it; the least you could say is that it was distinctly, defiantly unsecular. The air was heavy with piety: a peculiar and deeply Irish national-Catholic piety. The new state religion was religion and the state. The intensity of feeling and the monolithic character of this new state, and its attitudes to women, at times conspire to seem, to a contemporary observer, close to some versions of Islam. Julia, like everyone else, but especially everyone else in a convent boarding school in the West of Ireland, drew in this mixture with every breath. A bright girl and a devout one, she was constantly being prompted to ask herself if she might have that most exciting, most noble thing of all: a religious vocation.