My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress

by Christina McKenna

  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.

  When I recollect those distant days it’s the silence that I remember most: the potent absence of noise out of doors; utter quiet, save for the mooing of a hungry cow or the stammering note
s of a bird.

  We broke that silence with our shouts and songs. We busied ourselves with the activity of play, climbing trees to pluck plums and pears, playing games of hide-and-seek in the cool, cavernous barns and having tea parties on tea-chests covered with flour bags.

  Sometimes we’d be sent to a nearby spring to fill a pail of drinking water. This was arduous work for small people, for O’Neill’s well lay at the far end of a distant field. The journey there was easy enough, but coming back was fraught with difficulty. When we got to the well we’d spend ages on our hunkers, gazing down into that circle of shimmering sky reflected in the water. I was annoyed by the midges that skimmed and pocked its surface, aware also that this was heaven’s reflection and that I might be as close to it as mere mortals could get. Then suddenly the midges would rise and heaven break as we plunged the bucket in. The hard part was drawing it up again: we would struggle with the weight of its gurgling rebellion, and heft it onto the grassy rim.

  We’d break our return trip with many stops, all out of breath. The handle of the bucket was knitting-needle thin and would dig into our soft hands. We’d alter our grip, thereby slopping the water into our wellies. Usually we’d arrive home with a much-depleted bucket; mother would give us a good telling off and send us right back to do it all over again.

  Through the shifting days of summer we roamed the fields and lanes around the house, busying ourselves out of doors so that our mother could find peace within. We lassoed jam jars with baler twine and set off to the nearby Moyola river.

  Unwary sticklebacks trapped themselves in our glass prisons, wriggling and struggling for the freedom they would never know again. Sometimes we were very lucky and would capture two in one jar. Cupping hands carefully around our trophies, we’d carry them proudly home to show mother. She wouldn’t allow them in the house, though, so we’d line the jars up on an outside windowsill, studying their captive occupants until we tired of them. But more often than not the poor fish tired first and would already have turned belly up in defeat before darkness closed in.

  I delighted in the river. That active, surging mass of water moved me more than the fixed hedges and meadows that hemmed it. I loved to sit on the rocks that jutted from the bank and plunge my legs in up to the knee, marvelling at the refracting pull of the water’s gravity. The sun would glitter madly, stunning my eyes, and my ears took the swell and sway of the water’s release. I was alive to nature then, alert to the tender violation of all of my senses.

  The river was a metaphor for fearlessness and risk-taking as it plunged along its path to freedom; being near it made me believe I could touch those same qualities in myself. My mother always warned me not to go in but, away from her watchful eyes, I invariably did. However fleetingly, I wanted to be part of that clamour that had the power to cleanse and quench and sometimes take life.

  These were the idle wanderings of my childhood; with no television or books to distract me, my love affair with nature was guaranteed.

  We trudged to and from school with the seasons; in winter capped, gloved and belted against the cruel sleet and bitter gusts, our shoulders hunched against the onslaughts, eyes and noses weeping. On rare occasions, prodded into action by my mother, father would come to collect us in the wobbling Ford Popular. He wouldn’t drive all the way to the school gate, however, but stop a good mile down the road, making us stumble in sodden file the rest of the way. We were ‘bother’ to him and this was his way of letting us know it.

  Once in the car, we’d rattle home in silence. There were no enquiries from him as to how school had been or what we’d learned, just a morose and bad-tempered muteness that hung in the air like a poised axe. I’d sit in the back seat between my two brothers with the rising smell of damp wool and the sting of his cigarette smoke in my eyes. I wanted to talk but knew I dare not. As a rule you did not speak unless you were spoken to and father never initiated friendly conversation with us, only accusation and rebuke. So we’d listen to the drubbing of the rain on the car roof and the lazy swish of the wipers, gaze through the runnels of water and stippled panes that made a Seurat canvas of fields and trees, as the car shuddered its way home.

  On our arrival mother would divest us of the soaking overcoats, arranging them on a clothes-horse by the range, where they steamed themselves dry.

  Oh, how I hated those short, damp days of winter! In the evenings our kitchen took on a look of sublime squalor, like some Turkish den in the peasant quarter of Istanbul.

  We all congregated there in the cloying warmth, the air heavy with the smell of boiling potatoes and stewed tea. Frequently the cramped space was encroached upon by lines of washing. Four drying rails suspended above the range would be draped with everything from bloomers to towels. These stalactites of fabric hung dangerously close to the range and trembled in clouds of water vapour from the bubbling pot. All this moisture made the polished floor a hazard to walk on and the windowpanes clammy. When supper was ended and homework done, boredom would drive me to those panes and I’d finger-paint graffiti into the condensation. I hungered for something nameless – peace, probably, or freedom – and in my frustration would turn away from the noise of the family huddle, press my face against the glass, look out into the darkness, and listen to the wind singing round the corners of the house.

  I don’t know which was worse: being forced out of bed in the early morning, to trek though the elements to journey’s end where you knew the Master waited, flexing his cane – or coming home to the wordless father and fretting mother in the gathering darkness of that house.

  The ritual of those evenings was supper, homework, rosary and bed. We did our homework by the faint glow of a 40-watt bulb high up in the ceiling, young eyes squinting in the gloom. Homework not completed at the table was finished under the bedclothes by the light of a torch.

  Schoolwork was a real burden to me, especially sums. I worried about not being able to do them and, if I managed to complete them, worried whether I’d got them right. All night long they roamed in my head, robbing me of the peace a child’s mind deserves. The spectre of the tyrant Master would rear up in my dreams.

  The rosary followed homework as surely as night follows day: all knees down on the cold, tiled floor, with sets of beads fumbled out of pockets and purses. My mother was the initiator. She took an aggressive interest in our religious affairs and felt it was her bounden duty to keep us all out of hell.

  She’d commence by asking which mystery matched the day in question. We never knew, and would turn our mute faces towards her like a row of innocent pansies. Then she’d be off on a good five-minute’s rant concerning our lack of religious knowledge.

  Father would have taken up a comfortable kneeling position: arse in the air, elbows bogged in the cracked depression of that couch. He’d rouse himself – the hair, released from the restraining hat, standing up like a rooster’s comb – and add helpfully: ‘Aye, thir larnin’ nothin’ at that school, atall, atall.’

  Truth be told we learned little else at that school. But we knew better than to present the case for the defence at that juncture, our sense of self-preservation being as keen as a hunted stag’s.

  When we finally got going, my mother would lead like a hare out of a trap. The rosary itself was a protracted ramble through the solemn terrain of ‘decades’, martyrs and saints. When this portion was exhausted, my father would already be hastening up the inside track with a non-stop version of the litany. His rapid delivery rivalled that of a southern Baptist preacher. ‘Pray for us, pray for us, pray for us’ we’d chorus in unthinking unison.

  And it wasn’t over yet. A raft of saints was implored to get various souls in or out of purgatory. Well, not exactly ‘in’ perhaps, but that’s how it sounded sometimes to me. My mother had a list of names she routinely ticked off: those she obviously considered not quite fit to enjoy, just yet, the blissful reward of heaven. There was Aunt Jane, Great-aunt Mary, Uncle Willie, Great-aunt Mary Maggie, Great-aunt Biddy, Grandma Aggie Anne, Unc
le Joe Paddy John, Aunt Minnie and – last but not least – Big Frenkie.

  There was always a ‘Big Frenkie’ lurking in my childhood. If he wasn’t being prayed for, he was being talked about. I imagined the phantom Frenkie in stout, black coat and hat, moving slowly and ponderously with the aid of a shiny Malacca-cane. I wondered idly what he’d done to be the subject of such supplication and talk, but I never got to know. As a child you knew not to ask questions about things or people that didn’t concern you.

  Consequently I locked in and bottled up all inquiry. Silence seemed safest. We all became expert at hiding our true feelings; we were like little impoverished automatons, existing in a hard-edged world of cause and brutal effect. On reaching adulthood I found that speaking up for myself was a difficult art to master. Harder still was learning to place any value on that which I had to say. I had so much to unlearn.

  GREAT-AUNT ROSE AND THE GOAT

  As the gloom of winter gave way to spring, our journeys to and from school would become more tolerable. Progress home was slow as we dawdled by the hedgerows, plucking and examining anything of interest. We also understood the respite our weary mother enjoyed in our absence, and were in no hurry to even glimpse the dismissive face of father. So we trudged together, my two brothers in front and me trailing behind with my classmate Marie.

  Marie was tall and kind and smart. Her face was stippled with a mass of orange freckles and crowned with a shock of russet hair that sprang out furiously from her head. With Marie I plundered the hedges for primroses or bluebells to carry home to mother, ignoring the objection of briars and nettles that tried to frustrate my trespass. And even if sometimes I did end up with the scratches and stings of my endeavours, it was worth all the pain, just to see my mother smile, which was all my heart desired.