Family Romance

by John Lanchester

  Julia thought this over, and came to a second decision, one far more difficult than the first. She decided she could not go back to the convent. But she also did not feel that she had sufficient strength to tell her parents directly. This was a character trait I know well, not least because I inherited it. She couldn’t bear to give them the bad news; to break their hearts, and face the consequences. So she wrote to the Mother Superior, and told her. As Peggie remembers it: ‘When Julia had been home a short time she didn’t want to go back and was afraid to tell my parents. So she wrote to the Superior, who then wrote to my parents saying this. I actually saw the Superior’s letter. I don’t know if it was best to leave it around for the family to find it, but anyway. The Superior was very nice. She said, she’s very young, she’s little more than a child, and it’s only to be expected. She feels she made the wrong decision. It may be she’ll change later. It would be wiser for her not to go on with it. A very sensible letter. But my parents were absolutely thunderstruck.’

  The whole point of being a postulant was that you were on trial as a nun: you were supposed to be giving your vocation a test, and at the same time you were being assessed for suitability as a member of the order. It was understood that the life did not suit everybody: going in as a postulant was no guarantee that you might turn out to have a vocation. Failure was not supposed to be a catastrophe. It was not even supposed to be failure. That, however, was not how people behaved in practice, and it was not how Julia was treated. Pat and Molly Gunnigan were well-meaning people. But they were country people in an intensely conformist culture, one that placed an extremely high premium on questions of family status and religious respectability. Ireland in the decades after its independence was in some respects all too like Afghanistan under the Taliban. In this world, one of the worst things you could be was a spoiled priest or an ex-nun. Just as the priest and nun had a high status, there was nothing lower or less admirable than someone who had failed in the religious life. It was a practical failure but also a deeper, more staining, more intimate shame. This may have had something to do with sex: nuns and priests were supposed to have renounced the flesh, so to have failed in the religious life was to have been overcome by sexual impulses. But whatever the source, the shame was real. Discredit was brought on everyone associated with the failure. It was a public humiliation for the family. To make this point apparent to Julia, who in herself was the family disgrace, was an imperative; apart from anything else, it was important to make sure that nothing like this ever happened again. As for the ex-nun herself, the reversal of status went beyond humiliation into some exalted state of degradation and shame. Pat and Mary did not so much turn on Julia as behave as if she had died.

  It wasn’t that Julia’s parents refused to take her in – they couldn’t do that – but they refused to accept her. She was the focus of local gossip. She was a walking scandal. Peggie told me:

  Julia went from being the absolute favourite and petted, almost, child – she became barely spoken to, barely mentioned. I remember on one occasion Noreen and Julia had gone out to post a letter. Now the post-box was out near the school. My father was extremely strict with all of us. We were never allowed to go out in the evening. We were never allowed to eat out. He would only have allowed Julia out to post the letter, not for any other reason, and he was watching the clock, to see that it didn’t take longer than it should. He turned to my mother with a sneer and said, ‘Where’s the ex-nun now?’ And more than anything else it was the way he said it that stuck in my mind.

  As I have said, family memories differ about Julia’s early childhood and whether she had been as ignored as she subsequently felt herself to have been. But there is no disagreement about the terrible blankness with which she was treated after she left the Good Shepherds. Her parents made her feel as if she were a disgrace. They did everything they could to reinforce this sense of worthlessness. There was one especially acute point of humiliation. As Peggie tells it:

  The other thing is, she had no clothes to wear. Remember the time in Ireland. I barely appreciated, but there was no money. Farm produce just didn’t sell. We were miserably poor. Fortunately we had enough to eat as we’d grow our own vegetables. We kept hens so we had eggs, my father shot the occasional rabbit or pigeon, but honestly we had no money. We wore hand-me-down clothes and Julia had no clothes, so she was wearing the postulant’s dress. So I remember cutting off the thing and making it into a short skirt, leaving off the veil and the white collar. But she was having to go round in what everyone could recognise was this black postulant’s dress.

  This – not being helped to find something else to wear – was a deliberate piece of public shaming that Julia never forgot or forgave. I’ve already said that there was a hardness to my mother. It was not that she couldn’t be kind and gentle and loving; but she could not bear, even momentarily, to be weak. She would not be a supplicant; she would not admit to needing anything or anyone. This was the last time when my mother allowed herself to ask for something, and allowed herself to be rejected; from now on she always was the one who did the rejecting. It would very often be a pre-emptive rejection: she would turn people away before she gave them a chance to turn her away. From that, I can see how much of a wound she sustained in going home and being spurned – shunned, even. She would not ask for help or for love. I think all of this was due to what happened to her when she left the convent. When she initially went home, she was treated as a star. For perhaps the first time, she felt she had her parents’ love and attention. She may even have entertained for a moment the idea that she was loved not for what she had done, or what she had become, but for who she was. Perhaps, after all, she was loved for herself. But when she put that possibility to the test, her hopes were crushed in the most direct way imaginable. She realised that her worst suspicions were true and that she genuinely wasn’t loved for herself. The high point of her parents’ love and attention turned to the low point. At some level this was the defining emotional event of Julia’s life.

  I realise, writing this, that it involves a version of my mother I never knew. The young woman who went home after a difficult childhood, looking for a sign or gesture that would make her feel that everything had after all been all right; who went home looking for love, and who exposed herself to rejection by doing so – I never met her. The willingness to give people, especially people she loved, a second chance; and also the desperation. That degree of willingness to accept pain and face rejection was, by the time I knew her, alien. By then, she did her rejecting first. She was not reluctant to turn her back, and when she did so, it stayed turned. Because I knew her after this first rejection – which may have been the shaping experience of her life, her frantic attempt to prove that her parents loved her and her discovery that they didn’t – I know how completely she shut down that side of her personality, I know how much it must have cost her to leave the convent and go home as a supplicant for love or forgiveness. I don’t believe she ever sought human forgiveness again.

  There were other psychological consequences. My mother had a lifelong and extreme touchiness about what people said behind each other’s backs. She dreaded scandal. It was a real thing to her, a physical force; it was a key truth about the world that people must not know damaging things about you, because if they did, they would use them to hurt you. If they could do it they would do it. This conviction was born in her encounters with the Ireland of ‘squinting windows’, at the time of her return to Mayo in 1938.

  To the younger members of the family, it wasn’t really clear what was happening. These things were not spoken of, even in private. One minute Julia was the family heroine; then she was the family disgrace. They felt sympathy, but they also found her unreachable. Even in this plight, Julia was not an easy person to help. And the fact she never told me any of this is a sign of that. Telling me the story would in a way have been asking for my sympathy; and Julia would not, would never, do that. But of all the things I wish my mother had told me, I wis
h most that she had told me about this. I wish it because I wish she could have shared fully and honestly the story with at least one person who would have been entirely on her side. I don’t think she ever did that. I wish she had had the chance to tell me the whole story, start to finish, and to see how outraged it made me feel on her behalf. I wish she had trusted me, and herself, enough. But, I’m sorry to say, to wish that is at least partly to wish that my mother was somebody else.

  The next months were terrible for Julia. She was treated as if she did not exist. Her parents tried not to speak to her. In effect, they sent their oldest daughter to Coventry, not as a temporary rebuke but as a permanent state of disgrace. ‘It must have been terrible, I hate even to think of it,’ says Peggie now. The younger children were bewildered and didn’t know what to say or how to behave. It was not clear what Julia was going to do. She had no qualifications and there was no work. This was late 1938, and agricultural Mayo was in deep depression. One idea was that Julia might train as a nurse; but that needed money, since in those days in Ireland nurses had to pay for their own training. But the family had no money. This is not a figure of speech: during difficult times when there was no market for produce, the Gunnigans had no cash at all, either coming into the house or going out of it, and lived purely on the produce of the farm. So Julia was in an impasse. But then Father Tim, Pat’s brother, found some funds to pay for a nursing course at the Richmond Hospital in Dublin. It is not obvious where he found the cash; he may have raised it from parishioners.

  Early in 1939, not long after her eighteenth birthday, Julia went to Dublin and to the Richmond Hospital. This institution, which no longer exists, was known as the more Protestant of Dublin’s two main hospitals. That may well have been why Father Tim chose it as the place for Julia to do her training, as a way of putting slightly more distance between her and the family; there would have been a lesser chance of Julia’s meeting people she had known at home if they came up to Dublin for medical treatment. (Though, as it happened, when Pat had his appendix out, the operation was performed at the Richmond rather than the Catholic Mater Misericordiae.) The fact that my mother was a trained nurse is, for me, not the least amazing of the secrets she kept. She never once, not by implication or suggestion, or by betraying unexpected glimpses of knowledge, gave so much as a hint of this. She was a very good nurse in a domestic context, mind you: it was one of the occasions when she gave her best and fullest attention. But I must admit to being shocked that there was a whole area of professional expertise and experience about which she never let on. She vaguely allowed one to understand that she had spent some time at university in Dublin, and implied that this time had been at Trinity. Even as a covering-up lie, as a covering-up nimbus of falsehood, this was an odd thing to say, since Trinity was the college with Anglo-Irish Protestant associations – it was the place attended by ‘Horse Protestants’, as she used to call them, quoting Brendan Behan. (Asked to explain what he meant by ‘a Horse Protestant’, Behan said, ‘Why, a Protestant on a horse.’) The Catholic college was University College Dublin. As to why my mother projected that particular smoke-screen, I don’t know, unless it had started as a way of saying snap to my father – who went to Trinity College, Melbourne – and then got stuck. Or perhaps it dated to a time when my mother was trying to make herself seem less Irish, and claiming to have been at Trinity was a (highly Irish) way of doing that. But I suspect that the answer is that the medical faculty at the Richmond was affiliated to Trinity, and so the sense in which my mother attended Trinity had to do with the nursing training that she kept secret.

  Julia was at the Richmond for two years, through 1939 and 1940. She trained there and then began working as a nurse. She would go home for Christmas and for occasional holidays. The only youthful experiences with boys that she ever described to me date from this period, when parental supervision was fractionally less complete. One concerned a young man who had a liking for her and would sometimes give the Gunnigans a salmon he had poached. One day he took her out on a boat in Clew Bay. This was a big adventure for Julia, not least because she could not swim, then or later, and was terrified of the water. As she was dragging her hand in the water and looking at the eddies, a basking shark surfaced near by. As my mother put it, ‘I had conniptions.’ The boy slapped the water with an oar to make the shark go away.

  These visits home were popular with the younger Gunnigans. ‘I used to love her coming home,’ Peggie remembers. ‘She always brought unexpected things. For example, she brought me my first sparklers. She brought baked beans, which I’d never had before. And she brought tinned sardines, which I’d never had and I thought they were wonderful.’ Once, over the New Year, long after the younger children had gone to bed, Julia went outside for a walk and saw that the aurora borealis was making one of its very rare appearances in the skies over Mayo. She knew that this was something they might never get a chance to see again, so she went upstairs, woke the children, and made them go and look at the dancing colours in the night sky. She told them that most people went through their lives without seeing the Northern Lights.

  At the same time, however, these visits home were an ordeal. Julia had not been forgiven by her parents, and it was increasingly clear that she never would be. She was still the family disgrace. ‘You must remember, Julia was not talked about,’ Peggie says. ‘She was brushed under the carpet. When she came home, sure we were very friendly, obviously, and she was very friendly, because she was very fond of us and we were very fond of her. But my parents didn’t acknowledge her.’

  Julia, feeling herself cut off and ignored, did one of the things she would come to do best. She cut her parents and family off in their turn. After the Christmas holidays of 1940, with their exhausting and demoralising mixture of sibling intimacy and parental estrangement, she went back to Dublin and quit her job at the Richmond Hospital. She checked out of her lodgings. She left no point of contact and no forwarding address, and no one in the family had any communication with her for the next two and a half years. ‘Nobody knew where she was. Again it was whispered about but not spoken about.’

  This is one point where I wish I were writing a novel instead of a memoir. The reason is that there are moments in the story where I know almost nothing about what my mother did and what happened to her. I have made every effort to track down what Julia was doing in 1941 and 1942 and 1943, and haven’t been able to do so. I don’t think she can have stayed in Dublin, because Dublin is not the easiest city of the world in which to disappear. I suspect, though, that she stayed near by, perhaps under a changed name, because that is where she was found, two and a half years later, when her uncle Bill, husband of her mother’s sister Nora, bumped into her in a department store. He asked her to come for a coffee in Bewley’s. After visibly thinking it over for a moment she agreed. She thawed out as they talked, and when Bill begged her to write to her mother telling her she was all right, she said she would.

  By now Julia was working in a sanatorium treating tuberculosis patients. The disease was rife in Ireland: in the words of the Clan na Poblachta health minister Noel Browne, the man who did as much as anyone to eradicate it (and who contracted it himself), TB was ‘nearly endemic’. As Greta Jones explains in her superb book on the subject, Captain of All These Men of Death, since the late nineteenth century the incidence and mortality rate of tuberculosis had declined across most of the world – but not in Ireland, where it had risen. TB is an illness of urbanisation and development, which closely tracks a population’s movement from the country into crowded towns. This was the pattern in Ireland. A slow decline in the incidence of tuberculosis through the early decades of the century had begun to reverse in the 1940s. In 1938 the disease killed 3,216 Irish men and women, the lowest number recorded since 1922. By 1942, however, the death rate had reached 4,347. Part of the cruelty of the disease was its capriciousness and unpredictability. The apparently ill could recover quickly and live for decades; the apparently strong could suddenly die. The i
llness seemed to have a malicious will of its own.

  In response to the spread of tuberculosis, sanatoria had opened all across Europe. Here, after an initial period of bed rest, patients were encouraged to spend as much time as possible sitting in the open air. Beds were wheeled out on to verandas – the veranda immediately outside the ward was a distinctive feature of sanatorium architecture. The ‘cure’ of sitting outside in the air was pursued all year round. The consumptive sitting in the open air, heavily wrapped up against the elements, was a pervasive feature of the sanatorium. Today there is controversy about whether this treatment did any good, as distinct from the undeniably beneficial effects of separating infectious tuberculosis patients from the rest of the community. At the time, though, the fresh-air sanatorium was the unquestioned treatment of choice. Even so, the statistics were discouraging; especially the Irish statistics. The National Hospital for Consumptives at Newcastle, in County Wicklow, did a five-year follow-up study on the patients it had discharged in 1937, 1938, and 1947. The death rates were respectively 41.31, 36.27, and 46 per cent. That means that four out of every ten surviving patients died within five years. Effective drugs to cure the disease did not arrive until the early 1950s. Until then, treatment for tuberculosis patients included the advice to avoid stimulation in the form of ‘exciting broadcasts or thrilling novels’.