The island was crowded with misery-makers chanting endless rosaries while making circuits of those woeful ‘beds’. There was a timetable of hardship for us to follow: something like 54 rosaries a day to be recited while circumnavigating each of the circles in turn. We paused twice daily for a single cup of builder’s tea – black of course and sugarless – and a slice of dry toast. There were also oatcakes which looked and tasted like compressed cakes of hamster food. I discovered on the first day that one nibble was enough to set my stomach on a protest race, in both directions; so toast tasting like cardboard it had to be.
My poor mother, God help her, was up for it all. She went at these duties with the diligence and fervour of a drill sergeant second-guessing the whims of an inspecting general, and made very sure I complied with every part of the ritual.
Then there were the feet. Hunger and exhaustion were bad enough but the sight of so many naked feet caused me pain as well. I never realised how dainty and inoffensive my own were until I encountered the variety of monstrosities stumbling about the island – a pedicurist’s nightmare, or a chiropodist’s dream.
Having endured enforced insomnia, delusional hunger – I swear I kept seeing Mars bars and French Fancies – and a brain-numbing headache that intensified with each passing hour, I wanted to throw myself into the lough and thrash my way back to sanity. My mother on the other hand took all this hardship in her stride. She smiled and prayed and loved every minute of it. But then she’d been toughened by so many years of hardship.
I could see that this suffering was not so much emotional as physical. Such pain is easier to deal with because it puts the powerless in direct touch with their own, bounded realities. They can see the blood and bruises, and that is joyous; it makes them feel part of the universe. Mental pain is intangible and cannot be so easily displayed. On Station Island the ‘offer it up’ principle, which characterised the Church’s stock answer to my mother’s suffering, was given a somatic vocabulary for all to see.
We underwent an all-night vigil in the ‘Prison Chapel’ – the name says it all. Outside we went, renouncing the Devil resoundingly with outstretched arms. Round and round we went, even if it rained, even if it snowed, buffeted by the wind and the sharp awareness of our sinning selves: praying, praying, praying.
Inside again to the relative warmth of the basilica. Up and down the aisle and nave we went, in single file like prisoners in an exercise yard, invisibly shackled by rosaries, sleeplessness and hunger, chained together by decade after decade after decade. Until at last the awakening sun fell through the stained-glass windows, bathing our heads in light.
The following day I staggered about, as if I had just survived 24 hours in the desert. All moisture pulled from eyes and mouth, my head throbbing. I was simply aching to stretch out on the nearest bench and sink into oblivion. However any attempts at sleep were quickly thwarted by a hearty priest who went about prodding those he saw were about to nod off. There was no escape; I’d just have to endure every bitter minute of it. Meanwhile my valiant mother soldiered on, performing her painful duties, striking her breast, bowing her head, kissing the cross, and desperately whispering her entreaties to God.
At ten o’clock on the second night paradise did indeed come, in the form of a bunk bed and a single blanket. I let mother have the bottom bunk and I collapsed into the top one. Only a set of drab canvas curtains separated us from our neighbours. It seemed that I had slept two hours at most before a bell started clanging outside the cubicle. I peered through the curtains, to see a termagant in green overalls; to the accompaniment of this unmerciful racket she was urging us out into the keen air of dawn. I had the sinking feeling that I’d just woken up in Lowood Charity School; at any minute Mrs Scatchard would haul me out by the hair to suffer a humiliating harangue from Mr Brocklehurst. Instead I got my shoes – my delectable shoes! – handed back to me and sat down to a Dickensian farewell breakfast in the refectory hall. This was to be our final day of purgatory.
Elation swept over me at the thought of release. I could not quite believe that I’d come through the torture. After a final round of the island we departed at midday, my mother ebullient and proud and I exhausted and sick. God had been well and truly thanked and, with the staunch devotion of the time-serving egoist, I kept telling Him that I was due a big favour in return for my sacrifice.
AT WAR WITH COLOUR
When I went to art college in 1976 I walked away from raised voices in cluttered rooms, endless rosaries on the cold floor, my father’s anger, my mother’s pain, my easel under a skylight in the garden shed. And walked towards the violence of Belfast and the freedom of a flat, a goodbye to religion and money in the bank, platform boots and braided hair, Paul Simon on a turntable beside my bed.
I knew that I wanted to paint from the moment I first held a brush in Miss Henry’s art lesson. None the less my artistic training started with a foundation course in all the visual arts: I sculpted, threw pots, took photographs, printed fabrics, designed a handbag and even soldered a necklace. After a year’s exploration of all these areas I emerged knowing what I’d suspected all along: that my desire to paint had not diminished despite my hands coming to blows with all those other media. I was so looking forward to my degree course in fine art.
I imagined the prospect of those art lessons with Miss Henry being stretched over a three-year period – painting all day and every day – and I could barely contain my excitement. However my dream was short-lived. The Ballinascreen painter, with her naive aspirations and notions of art, was to encounter the avant-garde ideas that obtained in the fine-art department – and be thrown to the wolves.
The Belfast College of Art is a glass building given over to creative endeavour. Its unimaginative, many-windowed design is a poor imitation of the Bauhaus style of architecture perfected by Walter Gropius in the late 1920s. It sits at the far end of the city’s main thoroughfare and, because of its location, suffered and saw a good deal of the political turmoil that ripped through the heart of Belfast in the 1970s.
My college life coincided with these ‘troubles’. I was witnessing the authenticity of some of those Eddie Bradley stories, but certainly not to the extent that bullets were whizzing past my ears; nor was I dodging bombs on a daily basis. The Provisional IRA, having despaired of ever reaching a compromise or solution with the British Government and the corrupt, single-party state that was Northern Ireland, had embarked on a bombing campaign. Their targets were British and Unionist installations, army personnel and police officers – or ‘legitimate targets’ as they liked to term them. The bomb, however, being an undiscriminating weapon, made everyone a ‘legitimate target’, often killing or maiming passers-by.
Living in the city at that time was therefore tense, but not so disabling as to make me want to run back to the shelter of my home in Draperstown. The police and army were apt to search you on the street. They also had the power to detain you for as long as they thought fit, to check your identity and credentials. You therefore felt uneasy at the sight of them and would try to be as inconspicuous as possible so as not to catch their eye.
I was adept at making myself seem invisible. Who would have thought that the school-yard bullies could have taught me something useful after all? There were also many irresponsible and vile acts of terrorism carried out in the name of freedom. Carrier bags containing explosives were left in crowded restaurants and shops without adequate warning. Such hazards necessitated your handbag having to be searched every time you entered a shop. After a few months, being questioned by the authorities and searched by security personnel became routine.
There was, however, a glimmer of light in the uneasy darkness of that time. In August 1976 the Women’s Peace Movement – later called the Peace People – was formed by Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan. The group called on the women across Northern Ireland, both Protestant and Catholic, from the ‘working and idling classes’, to come together in the interests of peace and reconciliation. They dem
anded a woman’s right to ‘live and love and build a just and peaceful society’. The brave voices of those two women were heard, but not heeded as it turned out. It would take 18 more years of bloodshed before the men of violence woke up to that sane message from the women of peace.
So I entered a Belfast that was hopeful at that time, and I viewed the occasional inconvenience as a risk worth taking if I were to pursue my studies. My love of painting and my desire for freedom heavily outweighed the negatives. For the first time in my life I had been released from the prison that was home and was experiencing the independence that goes with being a self-governing adult in a grown-up world. If that meant living in a war zone, I reasoned, then so be it.
I shared a flat with another student whom I’d met on the foundation course. Margaret was a composite of Doreen and Catherine from my schooldays: a tall, calm girl whose tranquillity made me feel anchored and safe; our unassuming natures drew us together straightaway and emboldened us in the face of all the posturing pretension that surrounded us. We conformed to some extent. We wore our platform shoes and modest denims and moved among our limp-wristed sisters, who were all got up in what looked like the result of frequent and desperate traipses round the Oxfam shop. Later on I daringly crimped my long tresses as some kind of necessary compromise.
The two-bedroomed flat we shared was a bleak little dungeon situated off the Antrim road; it was not the most salubrious part of Belfast. Travelling to and from college Margaret and I would see the women of the neighbourhood, shuffling – slippered and rollered – to and from the shops, fags hanging from mouths, tabloid newspapers rolled up like batons, engaging with the harsh reality of another day. No, we’d chosen the flat not because of the charm of the area – or its interior design – but because of its proximity to the college.
It was owned by a shark who posed as a landlord by day. And by night? Well, who knows? Margaret used to remark that there was ‘something of the nightclub about him’, what with his shiny ties and teddy-boy sideburns. Mr Shark became another ominous figure to add to my growing rogue’s gallery of villains.
Our flat paid homage to his thrifty nature; he did not believe in throwing things out. Everything in the place had its lifespan stretched to screeching point. No piece of furniture was ever allowed to go quietly into that good night. Father and he would have got on famously I fear.
He was a miserable, exacting man – face frozen in sharp angles – for whom it seemed food and smiles were luxuries he could ill afford. He came on the twenty-eighth day of every month to collect his rent and would stand in the doorway, one bony paw extended, and wait, wordless and grim-faced, while we ferreted for the cash. On one occasion we were late with payment, and arrived home from college to find our humble belongings bundled into several bin-liners ranged on the pavement. We never forgot the rent money again.
The living-room, where we conducted most of our life and leisure, was devastatingly drab. The walls, carpet and couch were all rendered in swirling shades of ‘uplifting’ orange and brown. The two armchairs had been ruptured beyond endurance so that when you sat down it was a breath-heaving struggle to get up again, like trying to free your arse from a bucket. The windows were small and grubby and further deadened with greyish bolts of nylon.
In the evening this depressing scene was lifted into sallow relief by a shadeless, 25-watt bulb. Mean Mr Shark didn’t allow anything stronger and we didn’t dare defy him in this regard.
Thus did I live for three whole years. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that if one felt ambivalent about committing suicide then Dunneyfield Park, off Cliftonville Road in West Belfast, might well be the place to persuade one into making the ultimate decision.
One of the advantages of youth, however, is that it blunts you to hardship – hardship whose severity can only be appreciated in retrospect. That awful flat never looked or seemed depressing to us then, simply because we were living independently for the first time and therefore had no yardstick. Sadly the same could not be said of our initial experience at art college. During my first week on the course I began to question the sagacity of my fine-art choice and the sanity of some of my tutors.
One in particular, an Englishman named Alex Wilde – a senior lecturer, mind you; that did not bode well – certainly believed in living up to his surname at all times. There were 30 students on the course and our first assignment was entitled ‘Reality in the Room’. Each day we were locked into one of the studios with only our art materials, and asked to interpret the title’s meaning in our own way.
The room had been stripped of its contents; there was no furniture, no pictures, no points of reference other than a radio that had been tuned to white noise. We were also instructed not to speak to one another – which was very difficult, given the jaw-dropping dramas that unfolded during this incarceration. Let me explain.
With each passing day something truly bizarre would take place, usually orchestrated by Mr Wilde. On one particular day we were sitting idly sketching each other when suddenly the door burst open and in strutted a strange man wearing lederhosen and a blonde wig, his hairy legs bristling with excitement and his ungainly feet stuck into a pair of frail stilettos. He made Norrie look like a nun.
He pranced around the room like a catwalk model and halted temporarily, as models do, with one hand resting on his thrusting pelvis, elbow flapping almost Uncle James-like, and his left foot shoved back at an obtuse angle to help steady the provocative pose. Who knows, he might well have been attempting to mime an easel, but I could not make such ‘creative’ connections at the time. Here I was fresh from the bogs of Ballinascreen, with my very limited palette of experience, being asked to interpret what can only be described as sheer madness.
In the evening, in the gloom of our sublime living-room, Margaret and I tried to make sense of this strange performance but drew a blank. We consoled ourselves with a Vesta Paella and a Findus savoury pancake enjoyed while watching Crossroads, both hoping that the reality of the following day would never come.
But Alex had something entirely different in store for us that day. He’d evidently decided we needed some calm and entered the room dressed soberly in black trousers and sweater. If the garb was reassuring, however, his actions were anything but. He was armed with a toothbrush and a dustpan; harmless enough items, you would think – until Alex went into ‘crazy mode’. He spent the entire day sweeping the dust up off the floor with the toothbrush and heaping it into neat piles at different points in the room.
After three days my sketchpad contained nothing at all of interest, just a few doodles of those stilettos. The other students were equally baffled – with the exception of a few secretive weirdos (and they are on every art course) who seemed to be engaged in their own, frantic renderings, work they refused to share with the rest of us. The truly mad are a selfish lot.
And abruptly, on the penultimate day of my confinement, inspiration came. It came from a most unexpected quarter. The door to our prison opened timidly and a slim, young woman entered. I guessed she must be a latecomer to the course. I was mistaken. She began to saunter round the room, slowly discarding her clothing, until finally the pale, stark truth stood before us.
As a callow country girl recently released from my rural moorings, who’d spent her schooldays hiding her girlish charms and unaware of, shall we say, the more prurient side of human nature, I was gobsmacked.
I spent the next hour quelling the shock by drawing the model; it would have been highly insulting to have ignored her. Stripping off in front of strangers cannot be easy for any rational woman, regardless of the context. The reality of that crazy room had finally propelled me into action.
At the weekend I went home and recounted the experience to mother. She reacted by crossing herself several times and saying that the devil was loose in Belfast. Father wondered what the world was ‘coming to anyway, anyway, anyway’, and concluded in his ever-positive manner that I should ‘come out of that hole’. It must have been a
tremendous disappointment. My parents had spent most of my youth ‘editing’ TV footage of kissing film stars and gyrating pop singers, yet here was the decorous Belfast College of Art giving me a crash-course in gratuitous nudity, in my first week undoing all my parents’ work of moral counselling.
In the end, however, mother got a mass said for me and we mumbled our way through an extra rosary just to be sure, to be sure. And on my departure for Belfast on the Sunday evening she soaked me with enough holy water to drown a Jesuit. I would have to stay the pace – and drive out Old Nick into the bargain.
Yet as the course progressed I began to see the reasoning behind the lunacy of that inaugural week. We had all come to college accustomed to the rigid demands of our A-level course, knowing our palettes and perspectives to the last hue and line. That was art of the head; now we needed to engage with the art of the soul. That bizarre room with its jolts of senseless action was the catalyst we needed to set those safe perceptions on a more scandalous and revolutionary path.
My safe ‘mantelpiece candy’ had to go. At first I was reluctant, and fought against the bohemian ideal with a perfectly manicured canvas; this was despite my tutor’s instruction to delve into my own Self instead of miming the trite narrative of the camera that any monkey could imitate. I refused. He in turn refused to acknowledge me, and I sat for three weeks in a wilderness, wondering how it was that my dream of being the perfect painter could have come to this.
After the despair and tears I got angry and cut up my canvas. I rearranged the fragments, intending to paint the disruption. The result was an abstract work of disquieting beauty which moved and amazed me. I had managed to actualise my passion and distress; the noetic had lost out to the inspirational. With this move I got the immediate attention of my tutor and stepped over into the compelling and enriching world of abstract expressionism.
My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress Page 17