From Heaney I moved on to Larkin and MacNeice. What need had I for those canting rosaries when I could recite Prayer Before Birth and be empowered by it as I tramped the tarmacked road to and from school?
With water to dandle me,
grass to grow for me,
trees to talk to me,
sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.
It did not seem necessary for me to understand those words; it was their mystical essence that enraptured me. This was spirituality of another kind, the creative kind. If language introduced me to it then art certainly gave me the freedom to explore it to the full.
In the art class I found I could do other things with my pencil too. In my hand it became more than a writing tool; it was an instrument that lured meaning into colour, line and shade.
My teacher, Miss Henry, was a fine woman: calm, agreeable, well-intentioned, the fixed point in the fear house that was school. She never startled me with barked orders or sudden confrontations. The thought of the art lessons made me happy. In the hush of Miss Henry’s room all my panic vanished, and I rejoiced in being freed from the moil of other subjects. I experienced much the same feelings as I had in Miss McKeague’s sewing class. I was at peace, felt safe, unconstrained, and worthy. It was as if I’d shed a great burden, or had happened upon a slash of sunlight in a forest, a light that suddenly defined me, gave me meaning, answering the ‘who’ and ‘why’ of what I was.
I set to work with my paints and pencils and laboured over the challenges of still-life and real-life models; capturing the blush on an apple skin or pondering the lineaments of a face. My love of words and art sometimes coalesced. I wrote an ‘Ode to the Old Masters’, and another poem entitled ‘One-Man Show’, its theme being the power of abstract painting to challenge the viewer.
All white and serviceable,
Susceptible to the bulk of us
Who’ve never held a paintbrush.
At equidistant intervals,
Framed utterances abound
By someone who prefers to speak
With paint instead of sound.
Miss Henry spotted my modicum of talent; my mother picked it up and sprinted with it like a relay runner. If I wasn’t going to be a poet, then I ‘sure as God’ would be a painter. And I like to think that I repaid her zeal and, in a modest way, realised her dream.
Finally I had the attention of the only person I truly wanted to please. This nascent talent diverted mother, gave her focus; it made the days timeless and the roads straight. She could see ahead to great things: exhibitions and celebrations; her gilding of all those futures was the spur that urged me on. My creative skill had given her a vicarious kind of fame.
She was my patron and I was the poor beneficiary, a Vincent to her Theo. My new-found ability made her bold. She persuaded father to cut into the housekeeping tranche, using the goad of education and the certainty of picture sales. Suddenly canvases and tubes of expensive oils appeared; and every trip or tour she took was a hunting expedition for postcards and pictures and photographs. They littered the house, all the contextual references I needed for my transforming brush. She would arrive home like a robed Maecenas bearing gifts; a spill and rush of objects that would bring those visions to life. No canvas I painted could disappoint her. She overlooked flaws clearly visible to me. Love broke out and bloomed in her. With that brush in my hand I was faultless. All those sweaty fistfuls of posies I’d plucked and carried home to her from primary school, in a bid for her attention and a smile, were now being repaid one hundredfold. I painted the ‘mantelpiece candy’ that she adored: scenes of rural tranquillity that demanded nothing but bribed the eye and attempted to beat the camera at its own game. I painted mountains, lakes and dwelling houses, all in their proper places, and all augmented with the vivid hues of fantasies and farce. These renderings of the landscape were the language she understood.
I painted on request, for the doctor and the dentist and the neighbours down the road, and she sold my canvases at such bargain prices that I rarely obtained a decent return. Mother excused the injustice with: ‘But we couldn’t charge too much; sure she’s a friend,’ or ‘He’s your teacher,’ or even ‘She’d be a second cousin of the parish priest, you know.’ She loved conducting these transactions, delivering the finished product into the buyer’s hands and carrying back to me the measly profit and the effusive praise.
She also knew how to put those WI ladies in their place. Some of them had the impudence to suggest that the paintings were too good to be done freehand and that I must have painted by numbers instead.
‘For goodness sake, Avril,’ she’d sniff, ‘numbers are for amateurs!’ She said this, knowing that certain ladies in the WI group – Avril included – painted by numbers as a hobby.
My love of painting almost made school bearable. Those days when I had art lessons were the best of all. They filled me with such joy that not even Miss Sharp or the bullying boys had any power over me. My creative imagination was let loose to float in whatever direction I chose.
THE WEIRD AND THE WONDERFUL
My experience of the artistic was developing through the poetic image. I began to observe beauty in the commonplace as I trudged to and from school with my brothers Mark and John.
I began to sense an energy that riffled nature to new heights. The wind breathing through the trees; greens variegating from dark to light; a fence with the snagged wool of sheep on the barbs; the swell and fold of the Sperrin Mountains shifting under the sun; purple foxgloves straining proudly; a dazzle of windscreens; the glitter of raindrops on ferns; a fence post rotting at a tethered gate; wet leaves varnished on the road. My heart expanding, my eyes truly seeing for the very first time.
I knew I irritated my brothers when I’d stop continually to study an unusual piece of foliage or the play of light on a bramble.
‘What’s keepin’ ye?’ John would say. ‘Would ye hurry up, would ye? Sure it’s only an oul’ bush!’
On wet days we took the bus. The features of this area of Ballinascreen were less arresting than those I encountered in my earlier days, no doubt because we used the main road between Tobermore and Draperstown. At that period, in the early seventies, quite a number of families who didn’t work the land had moved from the rural areas to the newly built council estates in the town.
The old-style shacks that had accommodated the likes of Jamie Frank and Great-aunt Rose would soon become the deserted relics of a long-flown time; fallen tombstones that spoke their ghostly histories through crumbling walls and broken doors.
The road was ours no longer; there were more cars and buses than ever before, so we traipsed in single file, tramping on one another’s heels and standing well into the hedge when we heard the thunder of a lorry. There were few Mary Catherines to detain us. But, to compensate, we had the weird and wonderful Norrie.
Norrie was a transvestite – though at the time I was unfamiliar with the term. To me he was simply a man who liked to ‘walk out’ dressed as a woman. Given what I now know about those less enlightened times, I realise that Norrie was fearless. He was also polite, happy and inoffensive – or a ‘harmless cretur’, as my mother used to say.
The gossip fingered Norrie’s mother Maggie as the architect of this situation. She wanted a girl child and, on giving birth to a boy, could not accept him. She thus condemned the infant Norrie to years of frilly boyhood and the adult Norrie to a life of long-line bras and scent. I’d see them at close quarters on the late bus I sometimes took from school. Maggie made a brash statement without speaking; her face was a powdered mask of panstick pink, her hair as black as a raven’s wing. She swelled out of high heels and tight frocks, carried a handbag in front like a Highland dancer’s sporran. Being a teenager, stilettos and handbags interested me greatly. Once I peered into the gaping mouth of Maggie’s bag as she paid the bus driver. Inside I saw a collection of surrealism that would have inspired an entire Dali series:
a make-up bag, a pension book, a pair of worn tights, a pound of pork sausages, an upper row of dentures and a clock.
Since Norrie lived just a couple of fields away from us, I had the opportunity to observe him at close quarters. His daywear collection consisted of ‘safe’ biscuit-coloured separates: a belted raincoat, polyester slacks, a buff-coloured handbag and matching Scholl sandals. He wore a felt beret to conceal his baldness and a powerful amount of slap and powder to conceal the traitorous evidence of a razor.
In fact, if you’d sat him down in a hip London nightclub, he could easily have passed for the artist David Hockney, similar glasses and beret being the Hockney signatures at the time.
This bland mode of dress in public was deliberately adopted to neutralise the impact of his cross-dressing. On seeing Norrie for the first time you tussled with the dilemma of how to pigeonhole him – not quite a man, but then again not really a woman.
Most of us hate nonconformity; we judge and label and box everyone we meet in order to still the panic that sheer eccentricity can bring. Norrie knew this all too well; consequently he dressed ‘down’ in public so as not to cause offence, and ‘up’ in private when all those judgemental eyes were looking the other way. The Norrie I’d observe through the meadow gate when idling on a Sunday afternoon was not the colourless figure who shared those bus journeys from school. He’d have emerged from the drab chrysalis of that dowdy raincoat and metamorphosed into an exotic butterfly that shimmered and flitted within the safe confines of his garden.
His summer collection – his ‘private’ wardrobe – looked as though it had been put together in a darkened room by a myopic seamstress. Norrie would parade about his garden, committing every sin in the fashion bible. There was a crêpe-de-Chine frock in a furious cadmium orange (I knew my palette now with all that painting); a satin blouse with fearless flounces rampaging everywhere down the sleeves, round the cuffs and opening onto a hairy chest. He favoured preposterous shoulder pads, long before Nolan Miller put them on the dames in Dynasty and Dallas. There were skirts of the floaty, pencil and A-line variety, and all finished with pairs of stilettos that looked even higher than the Yankees’. Polka dots fought with checks, and violent reds screamed at timid pinks. This was courageous dressing at its best – or worst, depending on which side of the fence you were leaning. Norrie could have shown those staid ladies of the Women’s Institute a thing or two.
Often on lazy Sunday afternoons his mother and he, emboldened by the sun and sparseness of the traffic, would stroll out to the end of their lane, and venture onto the public highway, or the ‘county road’ as we called it. Those were acts of bravery. On these occasions Norrie would camouflage his baldness with a brassy, blonde wig or shelter under a straw hat the size of a griddle. At a distance, with the light behind him, he looked positively female. A short-sighted motorist would not have suspected a thing.
I also used to see him shopping in Draperstown with his mother on Saturday afternoons. In my early teens those trips to the town were the highlight of my week. Morose and silent as usual, father would taxi mother and me between the shops. First the grocer, Mr Kelly in High Street, where she bought the flour and tea and sugar and whatever other basic foodstuffs were needed. Her purchases were always basic.
The shop had shelves going all the way up to the ceiling, filled with tins and bottles and packets of every description. It was a fascinating panoply of colourful labels which took my eyes for a walk and relieved the boredom of having to listen to those adult conversations. There were bottles of Camp coffee and Sanatogen wine; tins of Birds custard, and Ovaltine and Horlicks which mother sometimes bought to help her sleep; there was Persil washing powder and big yellow cakes of Sunlight soap.
A door set into a section of the wall opened onto the hallway of Mr Kelly’s home. Both door and wall were festooned with various items of haberdashery and first-aid. You were not aware of this gap, until his wife would come in through it, creating a magical breach and setting all the dangling zips, plasters and whatnots in motion.
Mother would read from her list and Mr Kelly would fetch the items. Often he’d have to climb a ladder to reach the otherwise unreachable, his expert hand plucking the products from the shelves. As he stretched and leaned outwards I’d giggle to myself, thinking he resembled a skilled monkey up a tree.
He wore a snuff-coloured shop coat and always had a pencil lodged behind his ear. When all the groceries were assembled on the counter he’d free the stubby pencil and lick its tip. Mother always asked the same question.
‘What’s the damage, Hugh?’
And he’d proceed to tot up the bill, mumbling to himself as his eye roved over the purchases and mother stood waiting for the bad news.
Our next stop was the butcher for the Sunday cut. I didn’t go in there because I hated having to look at all that dead flesh, too visceral and too malodorous for my young sensibilities.
The last stop was Burns’s clothes shop, which I loved. It smelled of new fabric and fine leather and its long, cool interior stretched itself around a corner on two levels. It had counters polished to a high sheen, used mainly for measuring and cutting cloth. This shop was the final gasp of the Drapers Company, set up all those centuries earlier. The rails of overlapping garments were mustered in ranks and files, the more expensive items swathed in protective layers of cellophane. The shoeboxes were stacked to the ceiling and labelled to correspond with size and sex.
Upstairs in the ladies department mother would chat to Miss Quinn, the elegant assistant, and try on whatever coat or dress caught her eye. Miss Quinn was tall, slim and perfectly groomed. She had long nails and long eyelashes and I knew my mother – who was probably not much older – felt like a dud beside her. I was in total awe of this lady. She replaced the Yankees in my head, holding up a picture of polish and refinement that I dreamed one day would be mine too.
I’d linger among the rails of clothing while mother fitted on various ‘costumes’ and covertly watch Miss Quinn touch up her lipstick. Sometimes she’d catch me peeking and would flash me a smile; I’d quickly turn away, feeling guilty, and gaze out of the window at all the hurrying Saturday shoppers.
Finally the curtain would swish back and out mother would come, looking proud in the chosen outfit. She’d wheel and shift in front of the large mirror, her head going this way and that, advancing and reversing as the praise flowed from the assistant.
‘Mary, it’s lovely,’ she’d hear. ‘It’s really you, just perfect for your colouring and dark hair.’
And mother would smooth down her stomach and say: ‘Are you sure it doesn’t make me look fat?’
‘Not a bit of it,’ Miss Quinn would lie glibly, lifting a finely arched eyebrow and adding helpfully: ‘But if you want I can let you have the latest Playtex eighteen-hour girdle at a good discount.’
So mother would muse and flirt with the idea, a conflict of figures and desire and what-would-he-say going on in her head. She’d always err on the side of caution.
‘Oh, it’s lovely, Anne,’ she’d say with a tinge of sadness, ‘but it’s too dear; I couldn’t afford it. He would go mad if he seen it.’
And Miss Quinn, being kind, and eager to make a sale, would bat in with that well-aimed sale clincher.
‘Nonsense, Mary! Don’t worry about him or the price. Sure you can put a deposit on it and pay it off.’
And with that mother’s mind was settled, the deal was done. Miss Quinn would expertly tear a swathe of brown wrapping paper from a roll by the counter, fold the garment into a neat parcel and secure it with a length of string. Mother would give that ‘to hell with it’ smile as we left the shop. I knew she was experiencing that rare and sudden rush that comes with blatant misbehaviour.
She bought most of what we wore in this way, paying in instalments, making the odd purchase for herself which she’d hide from father’s disapproving eyes until she found the appropriate occasion and time to wear it.
Now and again, especially at sale ti
mes, I’d see Norrie and his mother in the ladies department, rooting through the lingerie. Norrie couldn’t try the items on – for obvious reasons – and you were greeted with the bizarre sight of him holding up in front of his chest a succession of bras and slips. All would be done as quickly and furtively as possible, and all for his mother’s approval.
Burns’s shop provided me with some prize items which made me feel very special too. Those communion and confirmation frocks, a green coat with a shiny buckle which I adored, and a pair of patent-leather shoes which were so beautiful I could hardly bear to wear them. I kept them in their box under the bed and, if I felt sad or bored, would take them out and caress them, standing them on the tissue paper to admire. Those shoes were only for wearing on very special occasions.
After these Saturday forays we’d like as not arrive home to find one of our neighbours on the doorstep: John Mallon, who regularly ceilidhed on a Saturday night.
John was a sober bachelor, just like my uncles. He wore a long serge coat, in dubious black – the colour of choice for the wifeless man, since it didn’t show the dirt and therefore excused the need for care and attention. Like Robert’s raincoat it covered a multitude. Even on stiflingly hot summer evenings I never once witnessed the shedding of that weighty coat. He accessorised it with a pair of matching wellingtons and a cap that bore the lustre of a decade’s wear or more.
John Mallon’s modes of transport were rather unusual – not least because the demands of driving a car had obviously proven too great and forced him to adopt inferior, and rather imaginative, alternatives.
He had a Bella scooter to begin with, the very poor relation of Eddie’s BSA. It was a beige-and-maroon affair and it heralded its slow approach with a long, low, thrumming note. That unusual yet all too familiar sound on a Saturday evening never failed to bring all us children to the window and mother to the edge of despair.
My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress Page 15