There was something special about those sunlit journeys, as we lingered on the hot road, when the wind held its breath and the bees buzzed alongside us. The sun seemed hotter then: a glorious, golden gasp that caught the opulence of nature and held it close for my inspection. I saw it all with the clarity of an optometrist inspecting an iris. So close to everything at three foot ten.
The boys would amble on ahead, getting farther and farther away, pivoting round from time to time to urge me on. I’d see them whirling and shouting, but I was too engrossed, and they’d give up; the shouts of protest dying in the act of their turning back to the road.
As the days grew hotter we plodded and sweated under the cumbersome weight of schoolbags. We’d often heave them off and sit by the sunstruck roadside, eyes intent on the bubbling tar. Few cars or mortals plied the roads in those days so we had the country lanes to ourselves. The density of that reflected silence was ours as well:
Absence with absence makes a travelling angle,
And pressure of the sun
In silence sleeps like equiloaded scales.
That silence was broken only sporadically by birdcalls and the needling hum of a tractor. The fields marked our progress, and throughout the year we marked theirs, from glossy upheavals of winter soil to calming intervals of green. The swathes of ripened corn in summer gladdened our hearts most of all; the golden prize of the long holiday was finally within reach.
Occasionally we’d be delayed by a strapping lady on a bike, grey hair standing on end and a navy-blue raincoat billowing out in concert with the breeze. We’d hear her approach, her breath coming out in great gusts of effort as she laboured up the hill behind us. We were a little afraid of her, so none of us dared look round until she spoke. Then she’d heave herself off the mighty conveyance and continue on foot beside us, wheeling the bike as she talked.
Mary Catherine was a pious lady who always enquired as to how we were, and assured us with breathy conviction that whatever day she happened upon us was the feast-day of a favourite saint.
She invariably had an oilcloth shopping bag, patterned with red and grey diamonds, swinging from the handlebars. When she had finished her spiel, she would hoke in it for a few moments while we waited expectantly, and produce a crumpled bag of brandy-balls. We were then each rewarded for our patience and indulgence.
There were many Mary Catherines in those days: rural women who, without the distraction of a husband and children, could devote their time to venerating the Sacred Heart and marking off the feast-days of saints on calendars. When I now consider my mother’s demanding life, answering everyone’s needs but her own, I realise how much more fortunate those single ladies surely were.
Yet Mary Catherine was gregarious in her own way. There were dwellings I passed on those journeys that had the power to intrigue and entice me: whitewashed hovels at the end of winding lanes that willed me to stop and look for signs of life. They were inhabited by strange, solitary individuals who, I suspect, lived on windfalls and tins of corned beef. These people were generally ignored by the community because they had not married and had children.
One such house belonged to an eccentric named Jamie Frank, a bachelor who wore a cap way back on his head and seemed to exist in a mysterious, interior world. When we’d meet him on the road he was barely aware of us, so engrossed was he with his own inner dialogue.
Sometimes when we’d pass his house we’d see him unhook the half-door and emerge, bearing a lidless teapot to empty on the dung-hill. He had the queerest walk; his pelvis jutting out, legs straying way in front, with head and shoulders lagging behind, like some sort of ambulant chair. Jamie never seemed to have company. Unlike Mary Catherine he hadn’t found the need to call on the friendship or protection of saints; that protracted discourse with the self seemed to serve him just as well.
He usually kept a goat tethered to a post in one of his fields and one day, in an uncharacteristic act of delinquency, we stopped to hurl pebbles and abuse at the beast. It bucked and jumped in an agitated frenzy while we stood about, laughing and jeering at its wild antics. We were confident, you see, that the sturdy rope would protect us from all harm.
We were wrong. To our sheer astonishment and fright the animal broke free and hurtled towards us over the field, head down, avenging horns held low. We ran, yelling and screaming for dear life as the goat gained on us. We had no option but to dive into the yard of our Great-aunt Rose.
Old Rose was my father’s reclusive aunt. She ‘couldn’t be doing’ with noisome children, so you didn’t bother her unless it was a real emergency. In my memory she is for ever ancient: a feeble dry stick with a crooked back, dressed always in black. Her rheumy eyes and dismal face had spent so much time judging the actions of others that she’d forgotten how to live herself. We were afraid of her, there was no doubt, but that fateful day we were forced to make a desperate decision; it was either Aunt Rose or the goat’s revenge. We cried out for her help.
She hobbled out when she heard the racket, and chased the brute away with a few whacks of her knobbly blackthorn stick. She was never without that stick; it seemed like a natural extension of her arm. The danger past, she beckoned us into her gloomy lair.
And so we entered a cottage strewn with the detritus of decades gone: every surface furred with dust, the walls smoked yellow, the cobwebbed cornered windows; all was pervaded by the smell of smouldering turf and stewing tea, forgotten milk and bread. In short, the house reeked of a life in decay. We timidly sat down on a worn couch, the tumult of our narrow escape pulsing in us, and watched her make the tea she knew would calm us.
I remember the kitchen in the same way you’d recall a memorable visit to a museum in a foreign city. You take account of things because you know with near-certainty that the experience is unlikely to be repeated. Fear also has a habit of sharpening our recollection of things we’d prefer to forget.
Aunt Rose’s kitchen was the wicked witch’s den of fairytale. The soot-caked kettle hung over the hearth, boiling itself into a frenzy, and her black cat sat on guard to one side of it. When its mistress unhooked the kettle to wet the tea it roused itself and stretched, before padding to the door. We were motioned to the table with a curt nod and dumbly watched her fill the cups. It was easy to see she was not used to entertaining or being with children; this new experience put her out. I watched the rivulets of blue veins on the withered hand swelling with the effort of gripping the teapot. A plate of biscuits and ginger cake materialised from a deep drawer in a glass case and trembled their way to where we sat in the greenish glow of the recessed window. Shyly, we proceeded to eat.
I was frightened of Aunt Rose. We all were. I imagined that if the dead came back to earth they would probably look like her: the skin cracked and shrunken, the yellowed, joyless eyes and lipless mouth, the crooked body swathed in black. (I could not have known it then as I sat in the silence and the gloom, but before long those musings would come back to haunt me.)
After these quivering exertions the old woman returned to the stool by the hearth and composed herself. The stick was propped back in the corner and the shawl tightened about the bent back. These trusted gestures steadied her as she contemplated the flickering embers and the weight of our intrusion. I wonder what thoughts she had then and can only conclude that she looked on us as a nuisance she could well have done without. We munched the cake and biscuits and drank our tea in a conspiracy of silence, savouring this unexpected treat, wondering all the while about the charging goat that had driven us to her door.
This one incident jangled the rhythm of those days of habit. We’d steal past the billy-goat after that; one movement from it was enough to send us fleeing.
Normally I left Marie at her gate to the yelps of her excited Jack Russell. I’d continue over the Forgetown bridge, rounding McCrystal’s corner and going down the lane. More often than not I’d be clutching the sweaty stems of the wildflowers I’d picked for mother, the emblems of my love for her.
When I look back, I see those reasons for dalliance – Jamie Frank, Mary Catherine, old Rose – as jerky images on an old-fashioned cinema screen. I hear the sluggish whirr of the reel and see the blend of motes and smoke in the steady beam of the projector’s light. In my imagination Jamie becomes the silent poisoner, carrying the guilty evidence of his crime to the dump in that lidless teapot. Mary Catherine is the breathless angel gliding up that hill to enfold us in her wings, and Great-aunt Rose is the wicked witch hobbling out to censure us with her arid heart and accusing eye.
They’re all gone now, to another place: all those mysterious people, the ones who passed their days largely ignored, trapped in those desolate shacks, flooded with loneliness, with only the ticking clock and crackling fire for company.
I did not understand loneliness then. These people were regarded as misfits to be feared, but now I realise that at some point in their lives they had, for whatever reason, taken the wrong turn, had wandered off that main road which buzzed with life, where maidens sang and children danced, where the birds and banter flew – and had somehow lost their way. The saddest part, however, is that no one in the community made the effort to go in search of them and gently guide them back to that sun-filled road.
LIPSTICK, GLAMOUR AND DEATH
In 1968 our house underwent a renaissance. An extension was added, giving us the luxury of another toilet, kitchen and bedroom. This last was an important development for me. At night-time I no longer was the filling in the sandwich; we had an extra bed.
My mother turned my old bedroom into what she termed ‘the parlour’. She even managed to prise a carpet (brown; it wouldn’t show the dirt) and a vinyl, three-piece suite out of my father. For him it was a bold extravagance; for her it was a victory.
The ‘good room’, as it was called, was only used on very special occasions, and one of those occasions was when the ‘Yankees’ came visiting.
Isa was the sister of a neighbour. She lived in Canada and, faithfully every summer, she and her daughter Regina travelled those thousands of miles to visit her brother Sam and his infirm wife in Draperstown. They were always referred to as the Yankees, my parents believing that Canada and the United States were one and the same.
The only time our house got a real seeing-to was several weeks before their arrival. Windows were painted and walls papered; my mother scrubbed, and shouted with more vigour than ever, bellowing out commands that nearly shook the house. In the interests of parsimony and peace, the job of painting fell to my sister Rosaleen and me. Mother knew from past experience not to ask Lipstick, Glamour and Death father, since anything he did inside the house was ‘dear bought’, as she put it. This meant that he complained so much before, during and after the execution of a given task that he nearly drove her ‘mental’.
So we girls would go into action with the white gloss, tackling it with all the precision of a drunk in a lavatory. We strayed madly onto windowpanes, dribbled onto skirtings and floors, even coating the odd cockroach or insect that had the misfortune to blunder into the path of our reckless brushes. Mother seemed not to notice these mishaps; in fact she was so proud of our efforts that she’d send us to a straitened neighbour or myopic uncle to wreak the same havoc there.
We sang and slobbered away with our brushes in those other houses, knowing that no matter how careless our application was it probably wouldn’t be noticed. We also reasoned that our results would definitely be an improvement on what was there before. But perhaps the greatest incentive for our insouciance was that the stingy relative never paid us in coin; the paltry reward was often a mug of tepid tea and a stale bun.
There was exuberance in the air at the thought of the Yankees’ arrival, not least because the humble fare in the cupboard would be replaced with an assortment of cakes and buns which our impoverished palates knew were bound to come our way at some stage.
At the sound of their car there was a flurry of anxiety and excitement that no other visitors to our house could invoke. They caused us to perform to a higher standard, and even our established routines were tossed overboard. One of these involved the non-use of the front door; it would be stiff and unyielding because Rosaleen and I had invariably painted it shut.
‘Christ, there’s the Yankees!’ mother would yell to father. ‘Get off your arse and get that front door open.’
As the car approached, my father would use all his might to try to prise the door open, putting his foot up on the jamb in desperation while mother stood berating him for not having performed this very necessary task sooner.
‘It’s always the same,’ she’d continue, panicking now. ‘Declerta God, leave everything to the last minute. You hadn’t a damn thing to do except that, and you couldn’t even manage that. My heart’s a breakin’. I may give this place up!’
When the front door was finally freed, the back one, which was always open, would bang shut in revolt, making everything in the house tremble and flap. It seemed as though the arrival of the Yankees had the power to unsettle even the contents of the house.
Then came the moment we’d all been waiting for. There was a crunch on gravel and a flutter of chiffon and suddenly there they were in the parlour, my mother ushering them in in her slippery viscose frock and plastic sling-backs, my father in his Sunday suit. My parents looked shabby by comparison with Isa and Regina, unwittingly lending these dames a radiance they did not fully deserve.
The visitors were all elegance and grace: lean ladies with delicate wrists, who moved cautiously on precarious heels, and cared greatly about appearances. They carried powerful handbags and wore a great deal of asphyxiating scent. We had never seen such shoes before: glancing patent leather which barely covered their dainty feet, with buckles on the toes that glittered. The hair was blonde and wavy, their smooth untroubled faces painted and powdered and perfect. Regina was a younger reflection of her mother, and Isa held the elegant promise of what the daughter could become.
They would arrange themselves on chairs either side of the fireplace, like two exotic birds flanking the listless space. I’d hang shyly in the doorway, awed by the glinting jewellery that moved and winked as they talked. And boy could they talk! Streams of languorous syllables would issue from them all afternoon, the fine hands fluttering and straying in the air for added emphasis.
They inspired mother to gaiety and father to alien acts of chivalry: I’d see him getting up to replenish the flutes of sweet sherry and light the proffered cigarettes, which were as long as their stilettos. We children milled around, sneaking looks at the unfolding spectacle – a Hollywood drama right there in our living-room with the Yankees centre stage.
Tea was the high point of this production and mother would reluctantly leave the guests, to direct operations in the kitchen. She didn’t trust us, you see, and with good cause: she was aware that, left in charge of all the fancy food, we were liable to lose control and wolf down the lot.
She needn’t have worried, however; the ladies barely touched a thing. The symmetry of those figures had to be maintained; cheekbones and hand-span waists were forever their priorities.
Mother would wheel in the trolley to showers of obliging remonstration.
‘Oh Gawd, Mary,’ Regina would protest, ‘you shouldn’t have! How absolutely divine.’
‘You’ve gone to sooooo much trouble,’ Isa would say, ‘and we’re only slightly peckish. Well, just a morsel then; those teacakes look super.’
They’d linger over the morsels with absentminded ease, an art perfected through years of dizzy-making self-denial. And so the cake stand with its tier of buns and biscuits would remain like an offence between them, the sandwiches gradually curling up in defeat. And our eyes would widen at the prospect of all those yummy leftovers.
Before departure there was a photo opportunity on the front step. We stood in an awkward group, bashful in the scrutiny of the camera. And there they are: Isa and Regina forever conquering the lens, with their brilliant hold-it smiles and the confidence they
knew was rightly theirs. When they left, their subtle energies went with them and the house returned to its drab old self. We could still, however, imagine those lilting voices and still smell the soft exudation of that scent.
As the car bore them away we’d dive onto the cake stand, and mother would unwrap the gifts the ladies had brought. There’d be a plate or ornament with the predictable maple leaf or Mountie. Over the years we accumulated a great deal of Canadian tat; it jostled for prominence on walls and shelves, growing with each successive visit.
Being an awkward teenager, I wanted to grow up very fast and be just like the Yankees. I imagined having a white mansion on a sun-drenched hill. Every year I would take off from it like an effortless swan and land in dear old Ireland to pay a visit to the humble folk. I wanted to feel those flimsy fabrics next to my skin and the danger of those stilettos on my feet; I wanted to lay claim to all that urgent beauty that had the power to fell envious women and halt men in their tracks, to have the ability to electrify atmospheres with my wit and charm, and manifest every kind of goodwill in everyone I met. I longed for that sculpted elegance, the diamonds and the scent, the glamour and polish that belonged to another world entirely.
There was no compromise with the Yankees. They caused such beautiful riots in my head and left lasting impressions. I felt no quandaries of faith where they were concerned. They were so unlike my mother and the other women I knew, those who slaved and gave to others because that was their function. These ladies relaxed and gave to themselves, and that was their triumph.
Isa’s brother Sam was a Seventh-day Adventist. In Ulster back then it was important to know a person’s religion – more important, in fact, than knowing their name. People were either ‘our sort’, meaning Catholic, or the ‘other sort’, meaning Protestant. Sadly little has changed in this regard.
Master Robert claimed that he could guess a person’s persuasion just by looking at them. It was a bizarre idea, coming as it did from an adult who appeared to be in possession of a fully functioning cerebral cortex. He’d say: ‘I saw an odd-lookin’ individual in the town today. He had the look of a Protestant about him.’ And nobody thought to question the veracity of such a wild assertion. Such innocuous comments, foolish as they might have seemed at the time, all served to harden the cement that built the walls of division in Ulster.
My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress Page 6