by Michael Foss
‘Horrible,’ I replied.
No one was paying attention. We plodded on through a battered perimeter gate to confront the city of Glasgow and the unknown land beyond. An elderly sentry with a .303 Lee-Enfield rifle from the time of the Great War carefully closed the gate after us.
*
‘Whose bairns are these?’ the old man said again, crinkling his eyes and squeezing a little rheumy water out at the corners.
The thin old lady with the ramrod-straight back looked up from polishing boots and replied sharply, ‘Why, Tom, you know they’re Fred’s, of course.’ And she added with a severe glance towards the pale young woman sewing on the other side of the fire. ‘And she’s his wife.’
My grandmother would not mention my mother’s name, if she could avoid it. My mother was Irish and ‘Roman’ while my grandmother was a strict Wesleyan Methodist. My anxious mother, always so worried and unsure and willing to help, was classed among the ranks of the Scarlet Women.
My grandfather nodded peacefully, crumbling a biscuit into his cup of tea. Reassured once more as to the provenance of the little strangers who had burst so surprisingly into the tranquil life of his retirement, he continued to pass us titbits of broken biscuit under the cover of the heavy tablecloth, where my grandmother could not see it.
Soon after the sinking of the City of Simla, my father had been sent back to India by plane. But there was no longer any escape for families. Now ships were too dangerous, and planes too valuable for the brutalities of war to be used for the sake of families. By default, having nowhere else to go, we trailed out of Glasgow heading for my father’s home village in Lincolnshire, most subterranean and glum of English counties.
We came to a brick cottage on a quiet road at the end of the village. The house was very small, a parlour at the front, a kitchen and scullery at the back with a cold-water tap and an eternal chill rising from the stone flags of the floor. In the corner a cupboard door led straight onto the stairs, bare deal planks in a dark enclosure of lath and plaster leading to the two little bedrooms above. There was no bathroom. A zinc tub hung under the lean-to outside the back door. On bath nights it was carried into the kitchen to be filled with scalding water from the big black kettle on the hob. The lavatory was in an outhouse at the bottom of the garden, a single seat above the ordure pit in a dusty wooden hut that doubled as a shed for storage of tools, garden implements, oddments and junk.
For us children this was a place of wonder. We squatted above the not unpleasant sweet-sour hum that came off the digestive rot below, amid spiders’ webs and the desiccated corpses of flies, and the yellowing leaves of old newspapers, and rusted bicycle parts, and broken cloches jostling with dirt-encrusted flowerpots, and my grandfather’s tools on the high oil-soaked shelves from where a hammer had fallen on the nose of my father in the midst of a youthful reverie. It broke the ridge of his nose and left him with a rather distinguished patrician bump.
The outhouse had no electricity. Daytime wonders became frights in the winter dark as we went unwillingly down the long brick path, comforted only by the feeble light of a kerosene lantern, to that insect- and vermin-haunted glory-hole. At night, it was a relief to jump into bed assured of the solidity of a massive china chamber-pot resting beneath the bedsprings.
The cottage was a tied dwelling attached to a job on the Londesborough agricultural estates where my grandfather had worked all his labouring life. As a lad he began as a groom in the stables, chasing watery suds with a broom around the horses’ hoofs, raking the warm brown flanks with a curry-comb, polishing the brass and the leather tackle. He had progressed into the yellow livery of a servant, a smart young fellow on the lead horse or the whip hand on the high seat of the aristocratic carriage. The new century had phased out the horses and my grandfather withdrew from the stables with them, unable to get a grasp on the newfangled mechanicals of the motor cars that had replaced the horses. He became an ordinary estate worker – field-hand, woodsman, park-keeper, ornamental and kitchen gardener, seasonal beater on aristocratic shoots. Year after year the same round, following the tail of the weather – digging, planting, weeding, mowing, hedging, felling, leaf-burning; the same wet soil, wet grass, wet hay, wet leaves. He tied a loop of string round the trousers at ankle level and kept his balding head out of the sun. His eyes acquired a weather-wise squint. The work suited him.
In placid sequence he and his wife had four girls, country lasses with stout legs and broad bottoms and sensible views on life, bursting out of the tiny upstairs bedroom. Then twelve years after the last girl, and twenty after the birth of the eldest sister, came my father, a sickly runt and an afterthought from an almost exhausted womb. The advent of this late son, who had nearly done for his mother in childbirth and who was both delicate and clever, caused a softening of my grandmother’s iron-clad heart. She unbent far enough to spoil him, and in this she was enthusiastically helped by the four robust sisters.
My grandfather left home matters in the hands of his capable wife and daughters. His only son grew into a bookish, bright lad, a scholarship winner at the local grammar school. He was completely devoid of a country-man’s ways and interests. He never did know a robin’s egg from a blackbird’s. A maple looked the same as a sycamore. And digging was forbidden to one of such delicate health. To my father, fishing and hunting and shooting were murderous pursuits for the coarse-minded gentry and the slack-mouthed aristocracy. My grandmother forgave him all his idiosyncrasies and insisted on one thing only – a regular weekly attendance on Sunday in the Methodist chapel. My father went, but he angled it so that he was put in charge of the bellows on the little organ, which was operated from outside the building by a long handle through the wall. When a hymn was coming up the organist would call for wind by sharp raps on the wall. Squatting outside, my father put down his cigarette (he was a keen smoker from an early age) and his copy of Sexton Blake or Sherlock Holmes and started pumping the bellows.
My grandfather allowed himself some pride in the unusual and academic range of his son’s activities. But he did not concern himself with household affairs, among which education was included, and was content to remain puzzled though admiring. In the steady habit of his life he came from field or garden to the house, knocked the mud from his boots and laid them carefully just inside the back door, then went in stockinged feet across the polished gloss of the parlour floor to his usual chair on the right of the fireplace.
I remember him there in his old age, when his wits had begun to wander a little. He had trouble with his feet and hobbled in old carpet slippers with pieces cut out to ease his toes. Watching him take the weight off his feet with a sigh, I could not decide which was more kindly – the winking glow of the few coals in the fire, or his genial broad country face, scoured by so many changing seasons, topped by fringes of soft white hair. Settled in his chair he was ready to begin the solemn ritual of his pipe. He reamed out the black dottle, teased strands of tobacco from the block, and tamped the bowl with a stained thumb. Then taking a long paper spill from a holder on the mantel he would turn to one of us children. ‘Now, young fellow –’ he could never remember our names – ‘here’s a little job for you.’ My brother or I would light the spill in the coals and with much care take the glowing paper to his gnarled hand. In a while he had the pipe drawing well. He closed his eyes in a modest bliss that temporarily wiped from the often confused terrain of his face the field-marks and etched scars of many thousand hard working days.
In his later years my grandfather did not have far to go to work. All along one side of his garden ran a high wall of solid brickwork. This wall continued far beyond my grandfather’s small plot, enclosing in a wide embrace a Victorian mansion and its extensive grounds. All this belonged also to the Londesborough estate. An elegant reverend clergyman lived here. He was a churchman of the old Anglican school, a muscular Christian with a general licence to rectify social manners and keep a watch on the lower orders. He was perpetually busy in what he assumed to be God’s terrestrial
kingdom but with no particular responsibility other than to follow the strenuous life of the sporting parson. He had been a famous cricketer and had done notable things at the wicket for England. For this, the government of the day had granted him a Civil List pension. He lived in gentlemanly ease, well attended by servants, with my grandfather assigned to him as gardener and ground-keeper. In time there had arisen between the priest and my grandfather a dispute about land. The Reverend, with time and leisure to poke among certain ancient deeds, had concluded that he had a right to a large part of my grandfather’s garden. The long thin plot of this garden was vital to the lean economy of my grandfather’s household, and he made use of every inch of soil and space: the neat beds of green and root vegetables bordered by marigolds; the potato patch and the marrows under the hedge; the raspberry canes tied up with green twine; the bushes of red and black currants; the trimmed fruit trees, a big Bramley and a nondescript eater with a pinkish flesh; and lastly, the provider of good garden muck, the pig in its little sty, fattening on the kitchen swill, waiting for the autumnal slaughter and the consequent gifts of ham and bacon and sausages and chitterlings. In the long evenings and at weekends my grandfather gave his garden serious and professional attention. For him this was no light recreation. The produce that came out of it was not something extra but was essential to the well-being of his family.
When he considered the poverty of his neighbour, the clergyman thought that those needs, real though they were, accounted for little against his own property rights. The exaltation of his own privilege, living as he did on the fat plenty of an unearned pension, should not be lessened even out of Christian charity, for that put in question the whole mystical arrangement of a propertied hierarchy. After all, the Reverend looked on himself as a kindly man, and his gardener should have confidence in that. He should know that the Reverend merely acted out of principle.
Mildly, my grandfather protested against the land-grab in his garden. But he willingly submitted himself to the obscure and almost secret decisions of his betters. He rested his case, not on the law or advocacy, but on whatever turn of mind the gentry might take that day. Even if he had had the means (which of course he didn’t), he would not go to law. So in some unimaginable court of social usage, where poor people had no representation and no appeal, a verdict was handed down, most surprisingly, in my grandfather’s favour. Though he did not know how it happened, he was content. Whatever way the judgement had gone he would still have stepped from the path and pulled the cap from his head for the Reverend whenever they met, and my grandmother would have bobbed her rigid back in something that might just have been taken for a curtsy.
*
On the other side of the road from the cottage, behind a verge of uncut grass and a tangle of bushes, ran a little stream. The water there, in that winter of our childhood, was clear and sparkling and on many mornings fringed with a rim of ice, giving a promise of some natural exhilaration, though the stream only dwindled out to sodden potato fields under the limitless flat sky. Twice a day, at lunch and at six o’clock high tea, my mother took an earthenware jug and dipped water from the stream for the table. The water was delicious and cold enough to set the teeth on edge.
Once, I saw her stop in the deserted road and take a sip from the jug, as if that were a guilty thing to do.
In this household of strangers, my mother never quite knew what was her place or her role. My grandmother, though old, was still fit and hale, with a mind as sharp as her tongue, and from long practice she had a firm grip on all the simple routines of that house. Her children were all grown up and gone, and her husband knew better than to stray by much from the tracks laid out for him day by day. My grandmother’s cold stare and resonant sniff were likely to stop him short in his wanderings. There were not many things needing to be done to keep that house ship-shape, and my grandmother did them according to her own settled ways.
My mother wanted to help but could not find the right things to do. That grim stare with its wealth of unspoken recrimination made my mother so nervous that her usually quick fingers fluffed the most simple task, leaving her open not only to the icy look but also to the condescending sneer. Suffering under this unreflective cruelty that the righteous impose upon their victims, my mother grew afraid of her mother-in-law. She retreated into the world of her children, gladly busying herself with the patching and snipping and sewing and darning needed to keep our reach-me-down secondhand wardrobe from raggedness. Then she turned unwanted attentions towards our persons – the unnecessary tying of a shoelace or tucking of an errant shirt-tail, the attack with brush and comb on tousled hair, the handkerchief ever-ready for a snotty nose, the prolonged scrub in the zinc bath on the kitchen floor, the hushing in the bedroom for fear of disturbing the old folk as we kids jostled and squealed under the puffy quilt at lights out.
She kept bedtime going as long as possible, demanding more affection than youngsters are usually willing to give. We felt the oppressive warmth of too many kisses. Then she descended with heavy heart to sit, as it were, in the corner, in the solemn evenings of a tick-tocking clock and the ominous drip of the war news from the small bakelite radio on the dresser. Sometimes Churchill himself spoke to them in that slow, truculent growl that reduced the evil Hitler to the status of a mad clown. But most often catastrophe and disaster – it was the winter of 1940–41 – were mediated through the choked vowels of the BBC announcer.
Sometimes, my mother told me later, she was surprised to find herself quietly weeping.
She felt herself driven to look for housework, which was an irony for a girl with her history. In her youth she thought she had had enough of that for a lifetime. The whole tortuous trail of her early life had been an upward trajectory aimed to take her out of the mire of domestic labour – washing, scrubbing, polishing, ironing, dusting, cleaning, always cleaning. In India, when she had arrived there as nanny to the children of an Inspector of Indian Railways, she knew instinctively that she had at last kicked free from a certain submerged past. The gawky young officer, handsome enough but hopelessly maladroit, who had stepped on her toes at a Madras ball and thereafter pursued her with the hangdog perseverance of the poor scholarship boy on the rise, at least gave her a promise, seen in the shiny subaltern’s pips on his shoulder and the masterly cut of his blue and scarlet mess-dress, of a final escape from the kingdom of grime, from chapped red hands and sore knees.
‘How different this world is,’ she thought, hearing of games and pranks, of how, during a parade, the pet monkey of the young officers shat on the wondrous hat of the colonel’s wife. Oh how she laughed. Another future beckoned, graced by ease and leisure, peopled by a retinue of servants. The tinkling of the ice in the chota peg – the early-evening whisky and soda – heralded a more spacious gentility than the rough and tumble against lewd hands that she had previously endured in the shilling seats of some local cinema.
So, although she fled from my father, it was not so briskly that she could not be caught.
But now, in Lincolnshire, in this blighted wartime, she had been thrust back into a poor servitude, a crippled life, that bore comparison with her own beginnings. At the age of sixteen, after too many small family tragedies, she had been forced to abandon the luckless rural economy of the West of Ireland and make her way to England. There was nothing unusual in this, a course repeated time and again in families struck by misfortune or unemployment. Her father was dead; her eldest brother had gone down to tuberculosis; she was the eldest remaining child and there were five smaller ones for her mother to feed. There was a great need for money and it was accepted by all that she had a duty to take her poor qualifications to the labour-market in Ireland’s hard-hearted but rich neighbour, sending home as much as she could afford out of her wages.
At first, she became a skivvy. There was nothing else available for someone as ill-prepared as a sixteen-year-old convent-educated country girl. The only prizes she had ever won at school had been for embroidery and needlework.
In bitter English lodgings she tried to keep alive some sense of the dignity of the past. She kept in her mind the image of the wide Mall in Castlebar, with the ample proportions of the Georgian façades, and her convent school at the end, in a mansion of some small-town grandeur formerly owned by the family of Lord Lucan. She recalled, in Westport, the little shop of her relatives, so snug and neighbourly by the running stream. She thought of her lazy young summers, scrambling the sunny scree above Clew Bay. She remembered her young brother, a boy-soprano standing out from Father Egan’s choir at sung Mass to sing Panis Angelicus. She felt again in her bones the hard ascent of Croagh Patrick amid blustery showers, a crowd straining against the stones, united not only in religion but also by something beyond religion that connected their loneliness with the Inis Fail – the Island of Stones – of her homeland and with the coming of the Tuatha De Danann and the making of the hero-land. My mother was sentimental rather than religious, pious towards fables, though religion also entered into those fables. She knew her forebears on both sides of the family, tenant farmers with too few acres and small-time shopkeepers. She could count their lines for several generations. ‘We are descended,’ she later told me often enough when she was slightly tipsy, ‘from the High Kings of Connacht.’
The nuns, and wretchedness, had whacked into her a notion of Holy Ireland.
But in her heart she knew that it was all a sham. Real Ireland left other feelings, more like wounds. She recalled the times of grief, one by one, when her mother brought forth a still-born baby or a little babe so tremulous in life that it expired within a few days. Wrapped in a lace shawl the tiny body let go and fell into a silence from which it had hardly emerged. Five times that had happened out of a total of twelve births. She remembered the gaunt cow out at her uncle’s smallholding on the road to Bohola from whose TB-ridden milk her brother had caught the disease and died. She recalled the dangerous conviviality of her father, a farmer turned tailor who liked a drop and a flutter on the horses. Many times she had led him home with his arm about her shoulders and a soft look in his eye. She remembered another relative, an uncle dragged by the heels behind a Black and Tan cart, his head bouncing on the bumps of the roadway.