Peeling Oranges

by James Lawless

  He told her that his family had moved to the suburbs to avoid the consumption epidemic. He said everyone who could got out. He records my mother taking umbrage at this. She said it wasn’t true, that Muddy lived for a time in a house in Aughavanagh Road; but she nearly died from the loneliness and returned to live over the shop again after a couple of months. He realised he had offended her and apologised. By way of atonement he told her that the people in the suburbs were not as nice as Liberties’ people, and she was soon in good form again.

  Patrick records my mother teasing him, saying he was not a true blue when he told her that his deceased father, a builder’s surveyor, had married a girl from Wicklow. She was amazed when Patrick told her he was an only child.

  The first day of the Congress the cavalry led the procession followed by cardinals and bishops and judges and all the dignitaries until the last appeared, and they were simply listed as the women:

  ‘Why do women have to be last,’ M said, ‘like the end of a snake?’ M would not march last. She could not march with Cumann na mBan, as they were declared illegal, but she could march with the Irish-speaking Conference of Saint Mobhi from the northside. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I wish I was Amelia Earhart and I could soar above them all.’

  They made their way to Wynns hotel where they had tea and scones. She told him that she had been a supervisor at Jacobs biscuit factory for several years. However, when a number of girls had been sacked for joining a trade union, she left in sympathy with them.

  And apart from attending night classes in Cumann na mBan and doing charity work in the tenements, she worked full-time in her mother’s shop:

  I am fortunate to have met this bright and beautiful girl. But somehow I feel inadequate in her presence. She is so vibrant. She thinks the idea of travelling is romantic. She had a chance, she said, of going to America a few years ago. A student in the College of Surgeons had eyes for her but her mother wouldn’t let her go. Besides, she said, with a grin on her face, she only half-liked him anyway. I wasn’t sure if such a confession was intended to generate or banish a jealousy. She made no comment about my stoop.

  ***

  They went to the cinema. My mother was hesitant to go at first. If members of Cumann na mBan saw her, what would they think? She enjoyed the chocolate Patrick bought her. ‘If you keep buying me this,’ she said, ‘I’ll soon be as fat as a pregnant woman.’

  Then Patrick met Gearóid.

  Gearóid bumped into them as they were coming out of the cinema. He appeared out of a shadow, Patrick asserts. His hair was dishevelled and he was unshaven, his chin carrying a bristle of perhaps two or three days growth. My mother, still in the dream of the film, didn’t notice how distraught he looked. He asked her accusingly in Irish why she was supporting a ‘foreign culture’. My mother gave one of her heartiest chuckles and said she didn’t give a damn. Patrick noted how Gearóid glared incriminatingly at him before storming off. My mother realised her faux pas. She told Patrick that Gearóid was always very touchy, and she spent the rest of the evening brooding over the stupidity and falsity of motion pictures. Patrick observed:

  She discarded her light-hearted alter ego. She retreated deep into herself, her hurt registering on her face, her arms enfolding her into a protective space.

  He teased her, saying she was acting like the sean bhean bhocht, but she turned to him and told him – deadly seriously – that Gearóid had put a player’s eye out once with a hurley stick. She said it was put down as an accident but it was due to something the player had said, some slight he had made of the republican movement. She was just telling him that for his own safety. She could handle him all right; and Muddy. Both of them had known Gearóid since he was a child. He was like part of their family, but she said Patrick would have to be careful because he came from outside the walls. That’s why she didn’t want him calling to the shop.

  A fear has entered my bones. I fear for M. I feel she is trapped somehow, stuck to Liberties’ walls and streets by the blood of its martyrs. I would like to have the strength to wrench her free from this underworld.

  ***

  Patrick walked with my mother in the Phoenix Park after the special children’s Mass. He writes that the place looked like it was covered with snow with all the children dressed in white and the little girls in their veils, singing like angels. ‘A wonderful sight to behold.’ They found themselves joining in the singing (‘it was infectious’) of Faith of our Fathers and Ave Maria. Listening to the music and doting on the children, a tear came to my mother’s eye. ‘She would make a good mother,’ Patrick writes, ‘but would I be able to do the business?’

  Because of the international flavour of the Congress, there were hundreds of interpreters in city churches. Patrick acted as Spanish interpreter, attached to the Pro-Cathedral. Men and women were segregated by the Church, so he and my mother had to attend separate sodalities. They arranged to meet afterwards at White Friar Street.

  When the Dutch girl guides concluded their procession with a fascist salute to the cardinal legate, Patrick had this to say:

  Maybe it is due to my own touchiness, but I am amazed how the fascist salute is accepted as a norm by all nationalities in the Church. If they warn of the dangers of other ideologies such as communism, why don’t they equally warn of the dangers of fascism? No one has raised a voice against it.

  ***

  He reflects on my grandmother and Gearóid:

  I am glad M told me about G. I thought she did not want me around the shop because of her mother, who is like Maud Gonne in her widow’s weeds mourning for her husband and her son. I thought that perhaps her mother might have objected to the age difference between M and myself. But she was polite to me when I met her. She spends most of her time in the back room and leaves most of the running of the shop to M. She never invited me into the back of the shop. She is fond of G. Perhaps she sees him as a surrogate son. (M told me his mother died young and his father was killed by the Tans). I think he is in the ‘movement’. I think the shop is being used as a ‘safe house’. I’m not sure. G is a rather surly character, or maybe it’s just that I don’t know him or understand him. He strikes me, not as an ideologist, but as a vindictivist, as one out to settle old scores. There is tension in his presence. He appears suddenly as if from nowhere. He is a denizen of darkness, fading in and out of the pitchy labyrinths around the Liberties. He speaks only in Irish to M. She told me that an English soldier said to G at the Pillar once: ‘Got the time mate?’ G refused to answer. He just pointed to the fáinne on his lapel. ‘Hey’, said the Englishman, ‘he don’t speak English. How many of the Irish is illiterate?’ M says that if we were all as stubborn as G, the Irish language could be saved.

  ***

  After sodality, Patrick escorted my mother home. They bought a ‘one and one’ in Rocco’s in Wexford Street, which my mother claims was the first chip shop in Dublin. She teased Patrick. She asked him if she knew the origin of the term ‘one and one’. ‘Of course’, said Patrick, ‘a fish and chip; it was before the Italians got the lingo.’ And then she said she’d like an ice cream from Capello’s. Patrick wanted to know if it was her birthday. She just laughed as they rambled up Cuffe Street.

  As they headed back towards the Woodburn shop, they saw Gearóid coming out and caught a glimpse of my grandmother with her black shawl ruffled by the wind. She stood in the doorway for a moment, Patrick records, and then disappeared into the back before they could reach her. Gearóid looked disapprovingly at Patrick and rattled on in Irish to my mother. He was very irate. He said that the Northern pilgrims were being stoned in Lisburn and Belfast. When he had finished his spiel, he pushed past them rather brusquely. My mother shouted after him in Irish, asked him to wait a moment. She apologised about the film, asked him not to be angry, that there was no harm in it. He turned and scowled at her, said there was harm in it and that she was drunk on foreign capitalist rubbish. He glowered at Patrick, saying how she insulted him in front of a stran
ger. My mother pleaded with him, but he pulled away.

  After the women’s Mass, Patrick asked my mother what the sermon was about. She said that they were told to be helpful towards their parents and brothers. With Tomás gone, she said she looked upon Gearóid as her brother now. ‘And wives...’ She laughed and threw back her hair, ‘should inspire their husbands with the sweet fragrance of their goodness and virtue and gentle attractiveness of their example.’

  The main Mass in the Phoenix Park on Sunday the twenty-sixth of June was attended by one million people. Although Patrick noted that General O’Duffy gave his Blueshirts the day off for their competence in handling the occasion, he also records how:

  M lost her beige hat at the Mass. She was not too put-out by it. She brought me into Whitefriar Street chapel to show me the shrine to Saint Valentine. The saint’s casket was all aglow with light and flowers and worshippers praying for sweethearts. We walked back to the shop, hand-in-hand, flushed by hymns and candlelight. She allowed me to kiss her before I set out for Rathfarnham.

  ***

  England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity, or so we were taught at school.

  My aunt Peg perceived the abdication of King Edward V111 on the tenth of December 1936 (to marry the commoner, Mrs Simpson) as an opportunity to add more press cuttings and photographs to her royal collection.

  De Valera perceived it as an opportunity to delete the crown from involvement in Irish affairs internally at least. Britain was reluctant to argue with him at such a stage, as it suffered the embarrassment of the royal scandal.

  While the King had to be recognised at least symbolically by diplomats abroad, Patrick Foley perceived the abdication as an opportunity to attempt to advance in his career. This hopefully would be achieved by his helping to secure a separate and independent identity for Ireland abroad. Ireland’s affairs, asserted Patrick, must no longer be seen as simply an appendage of British foreign policy.

  He was posted to the new Irish legation in Madrid in 1935. Before this he had been granted short sojourns in Paris and Rome, but the Madrid position would be for a number of years, hopefully – suitable for a ‘family man’. He had another reason for wanting to get out of Ireland for a longer period than previously. The Civil Service at home was stagnating and simply replicated the British system. He wanted to escape from what he considered the ‘narrow and closed mentality’ in Ireland and search for opportunities to show innovation in a meaningful diplomatic sense. But rather contradictorily he writes: ‘My head rules my heart, but my heart is lonely.’

  Both he and my mother kept in regular communication.

  ***

  In June 1936, Martha Woodburn and Patrick Foley were married in Dublin in the church of Whitefriar Street. My mother wore a cream-coloured dress with intricate designs and a lace-frilled hat, and carried a spray of white heather (for luck) and orange blossom (for fruitfulness) in her bouquet of flowers. On Patrick’s side there were some people from External Affairs in Dublin, and doctor José Beltrán from Madrid who acted as best man. Peg didn’t like the look of Beltrán. My mother recorded her calling him ‘a shifty-eyed oul fella’.

  Muddy, now ailing and slow in movement, was there, and Peg acted as matron of honour. Some of Martha’s old friends from Jacob’s and Cumann na mBan were also present. Gearóid MacSuibhne did not appear.

  Of the presents the couple received, perhaps my mother’s most treasured one was a woollen blanket sent by Maud Gonne. The latter thanked my mother in a wedding card for her dedication in Cumann na mBan and for her charitable work in the tenements.

  On the day of their wedding the IRA executed three people who were pro-Treaty. As there was no republic looming, the revolutionaries began to despair of de Valera. The latter invoked special powers and set up tribunals – methods which he had previously criticised the opposition for adopting. Many IRA members were arrested, sometimes by former colleagues now in the Special Branch.

  Gearóid MacSuibhne was one of those arrested.

  ***

  My mother and Patrick Foley were among the first to fly the new national airline – Aer Lingus. Patrick records: ‘It is better to entrust oneself to the air than have one’s stomach constantly churned by water.’ Martha was not nervous. She was making up for lost opportunities. Patrick Foley was a new opportunity. Her only complaint was a pain in her ears caused by the air pressure which the sucking of several hard sweets failed to allay. The crew informed them that they were the first honeymoon couple to travel on a DeHavilland Dragon. They wished them a long and fruitful marriage in a new and free Ireland. The captain greeted them and wore a grin from ear to ear. My mother wondered had he been on something, but Patrick told her that it was just the Aer Lingus smile, that it went with the job, just like in the diplomatic world, the good characteristics of Ireland had to be presented:

  ‘But you don’t smile that much; you look so serious at times,’ M said to me. ‘I present our case in words,’ I replied. ‘The smile is in the words.’

  ***

  In Madrid, the embassy provided Patrick with a car – a model T Ford. They drove to Galicia. Patrick spoke a lot about the renaissance in the arts and culture in Spain during the time of the Second Republic. It was not unlike the Irish renaissance, he said. Madrid, like Dublin, was abuzz with artistic activity. He admired Lorca’s poetry and plays but was uncomfortable about the Spaniard’s homosexuality. (‘The body condemns the soul,’ he wrote, on hearing of Lorca’s murder later on). In spite of this, he records ‘secretly devouring Dalí’s nudes’.

  ***

  Patrick Foley was not above arrogance:

  ‘Remember G,’ I said to M, ‘he is an example of one who would gain from a European influence, that is presuming he has a mind to broaden, and it could be done without jeopardising his own national viewpoints.’

  ‘G has a mind,’ she countered, ‘no matter where he is.’

  ***

  They visited Santiago de Compostela where the remains of Saint James the Apostle are supposed to be interred, transported there on scallop shells according to the legend. They watched as the giant thurible in the Cathedral was raised on ropes by several men. It overpowered my mother and Patrick with its incense. People applauded as it was hoisted.

  My mother was sceptical. ‘Why do they need it so big?’

  Patrick confesses to being unable to avoid a smile. ‘To fumigate all the unclean,’ he said.

  They went to a bullfight in La Coruña. My mother vomited:

  ‘Just think of it,’ she said afterwards, ‘six bulls tortured and killed like that in a drawnout rigmarole. And I used to feel that putting the animals through all that roaring in the slaughterhouse in Camden Row was cruel. At least their suffering there was shortlived.’

  Patrick adds: I tried to explain the symbolism of it all. I told her that it was a duel between man and beast, and that sometimes the man lost. But all she said was, ‘It’s not man and beast, but the beast in man.’

  ***

  In Vigo they met Leopold Kerney, Patrick’s superior, who was taking a holiday with his family. From there they took a boat to the island of Cies where the sun shone with great intensity. They bathed in the clear water, and my mother made love to Patrick Foley on the fine, silver sand. At least she thought she did:

  Patrick records:

  We were like gods on the island. The sea, the sky, the sun, the sand, the air, were so pure. ‘Can you hear the earth working?’ I said to M. ‘I’m more worried about something else working,’ she answered. I looked at her for a moment. She smiled impishly. She thinks it will all come right. There was no hurt intended. She doesn’t realise how easily such statements can wound. ‘In the beginning,’ I said, ‘the world was covered in ice. Ireland was joined to Europe until the ice broke.’

  ‘You’re making me shiver with all this talk about ice.’

  ‘Our earliest inhabitants…’ I said.

  ‘Do you like my hair?’ she said.

  ‘You aren’t listen
ing.’

  ‘The sun is shining.’

  She caught her hair up. ‘Do you like it like this?’

  Once more I had to smile. ‘It looks like honey when the sun catches it,’ I said.

  ‘And why wouldn’t it?’ she said, ‘isn’t this our month of honey?’ And she burst into a giggle.

  She commented on a little jellyfish which was ruffled by the breeze. ‘It’s like the wobbly phlegm on the streets in the tenements.’ She did not speak with vulgarity but in a factual tone. I sometimes don’t know what way to take her. However, one thing is certain. She will always carry the Liberties around with her, no matter where she travels. They are entrenched deeply in her soul, and no amount of sun will ever burn them out. She says already that she misses the bakery smells from Jacobs and the smell of the hops from Guinness’s.

  She swung me around, forcing me to dance. We laughed. A tickle and a chuckle.

  ‘Loosen up,’ she said, and I realised what a dull, cerebral fellow I must appear before her.

  She fulfils me now that she is with me. There is no longer any need for that other business. Pudere. It’s just that hardness is difficult to sustain. But she doesn’t mind. She keeps saying that we have plenty of time. But she has more time than me.

  ***

  At the same time the political atmosphere was growing more tense. When the left-wing Popular Front won the general election in 1936 there was an increase in violence against the Right. Churches were burned in Catalonia. Peasants revolted against their landlords. Many people felt that only the army could restore order.

  On their return to their hotel in Vigo, a telegram awaited Patrick from the embassy informing him that Calvo Sotelo, the monarchist leader in the Cortes, had been murdered by government police. The army under generals Mola and Franco were advancing on Madrid. Patrick’s instructions were to head for the French border immediately.