***
My mother spent the odd night in Rathfarnham when trade was not too hectic in the shop. She was reluctant to leave her mother after the attack, but Muddy insisted that her daughter should have a break. She would be all right with a neighbour staying by her.
My mother wrote to Patrick and told him that she had seen the poet, Mr Yeats, being pushed around in a wheelchair in Saint Enda’s park, and that his hair was pure silver. She listened to Frank Ryan broadcasting on the wireless from Madrid. It was easy to get a reception after ten p.m. She read a letter from Gearóid which bore the marks of the trenches. He and his battalion were lying about hungrily eating oranges that had been thrown to them from a passing lorry. He said the oranges were their only nourishment that day. He was never so glad of anything. The oranges kept them alive.
However, she didn’t stay long in the house. She found it too cold and lonely: ‘What is the point of putting down a fire when there is no one to share the warmth with?’
My mother continued to work with Cumann na mBan, but concentrated more and more on the social end of things. Her ideology was fading. A sense of universal justice was a stronger call for her now than what she perceived as the fainter peal of nationalism. She continued to study the Irish language and Irish culture but widened her ken, and after she had dispatched every romance novel in Kevin Street public library, she began to read history and philosophy and whatever little there was at the time on women’s anatomy.
Long before she came to the Liberties, Mrs Chaigneau lived near Monto, the red-light district. She told my mother many stories about the ‘unfortunate girls’ there which she regurgitated to Patrick:
Most of the girls in Monto were unwed mothers, forced into prostitution. They were really silly girls, don’t you think, Patrick? How could they let themselves get in the family way? And some of them so young. They turned the clock backwards before they even knew the time of day. The world is a cruel place. And the rich men arrived in their carriages to exploit these poor girls. They were kept captive in rooms. They couldn’t even go out to the shop. Mrs C used to do a few messages for them – to see them would break your heart, she said, some of them with bruises or a black eye, and others with worse things hidden deep. When there was no one to help them they put a can tied to a string out their windows with money in it for some of the kids to get them cigarettes, and they let the kids keep the change. Slaves they were to the madam. And there was more than one madam who made enough money to send her children off to a posh school in England. There is no justice. Nothing changes. It is always the strong exploiting the weak, isn’t it Patrick? And Mrs C said some of the users of these kip houses were our moral guardians, and she knew names, but she never told me the names.
***
Occasionally, my mother met some girlfriends from Jacobs, and they went to the pictures, but such friends were thin on the ground, as most of them by this stage were married with children.
She explained to Patrick how Muddy was concerned about her:
She keeps saying husband and wife shouldn’t be separated. She says I’m gallivanting about as if I’m single. When I tell her I can’t go over to you because of the war, she says in that case you should be over here, that it isn’t right, that there is enough separation in death. ‘Look at me,’ she says. She’d put years on you, Patrick. She says that the two of us should be together giving her grandchildren. This separation, it will be only be for a while, won’t it, love?
***
Her sister Peg irritated her. To the rest of the Woodburns a royalist was perceived as a rebel. My Aunt’s collection of British memorabilia was always a source of contention between the two sisters. Peg, it seemed, was not interested in romance. She ridiculed men. ‘Will you look at the getup of your man,’ she would say, or ‘will you look at him half cocked?’ They seemed to have nothing in common. Such sibling estrangement exacerbated my mother’s sense of loneliness. In a letter to Patrick, Martha describes Peg as ‘slipping slowly into a bony spinsterhood’. Her attack on the world only compounded Aunt Peg’s own loneliness. But she couldn’t see that. Her consolation was her Baby Power whiskey, that, and of course her visits to Belfast.
To fill the void in her life, my mother wrote daily to Patrick:
Tell me what’s happening in Spain. When Gearóid left he said he was going to fight the fascists. Is it really not safe for me to go and see you? Can’t I go to France? Can you come over – surely at Christmas?
Poor Tommy died. He had no resistance when the consumption hit him. He went very fast. God rest his soul. I went to the wake. They had plenty of everything. I brought a few things from the shop, but most of what they had was ‘on tick’: the loose cigarettes and the matches and the drink of course, and the saucers of snuff which attracted the women. And they talked of the bad times. And when the drink took hold, they forgot themselves for a while, and Jack Ó Súileabháin and a few others began to sing. A friend of Mrs Chaigneau’s started to give out to them for having no respect for the dead. But Mrs C told her to hush, that they meant no harm, and that they might as well sing grief as cry it, which is what Tomás used always say. And my heart sank later as I saw the horses with the white plumes pulling the hearse.
The suffering has dried up all their tears, Patrick. All they can do is sing like the penniless soldiers on the street. But I have tears, buckets of tears for little Tommy and for all of us.
***
‘How come you loved Tommy Chaigneau?’ I shout irately at my mother as I come out of Patrick’s study. She is sitting in her armchair, sitting smugly I may say, going through a bundle of her fusty old newspapers.
‘Tommy?’ she says, looking up. ‘Little Tommy.’
‘He wasn’t even your own flesh and blood.’
‘Why?’ she says. ‘Is that what you’re asking?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because he died, that’s why.’
***
Patrick and my mother met at Christmas in nineteen thirty six. They stayed in Rathfarnham. Attempts at sexual union were unsatisfactory:
Her reference to the rig made me very uncomfortable. Could she be laughing at me behind my back? She tried so hard to please me. She is patient, but so conventional. All I can see before me is M, her beauty which I must not sully. The image in my mind, however, is blank.
***
I read that Napoleon was a rig and yet he had a son whom he called the king of Rome, and Mark Twain was impotent, and so was Pope Pius VI (how did he know?). Impotence is not sterility. Erectile dysfunction is the correct term. An erection is caused by the penis filling with blood (six or seven times the volume of the flaccid penis). It was Leonardo da Vinci who discovered this.
They met again in the summer of thirty seven. And once more at Christmas in thirty eight. Years without issue.
Although Patrick disliked Spanish heat, he did like Spanish light. In Dublin he found the greyness of Irish weather weighed heavily on an already ripened melancholia:
It’s a dead day, a day that has died, or a day that never came alive. There is no joy here. There is only the pretence of joy. The dancers are arthritic and the singers are sad and consumptive.
***
‘He’s worse than Damn the Weather when he’s home,’ my mother wrote to Gearóid.
When Patrick returned to Spain he found an outlet for his loneliness:
I went to see L. Always afterwards I abase myself for doing so, but she releases valves, secret valves, which no one else, not even M, can find. She reduces my anxiety, if only for a little while. She endows me at least with the delusion of normality. What harm is there in that? But I feel so wracked by it, especially after reading M’s last letter about Monto. And there is a fondness growing between L and me, more on her part admittedly. She is so young, but I don’t exploit her, not like some of the wretches who visit her. And that damned Jiménez, always hovering around, a permanent gadfly. She keeps thanking me for saving her life.
Did I really do her a fav
our? Still, I am teaching her to speak English. It’s ironic, she loves Bible passages. She asks me to repeat them and learns them by heart. Her memory is faultless.
***
In 1939 the Civil War ended in Spain, and my mother returned to Patrick. She asked Peg to keep an eye on Muddy discreetly without entering into any arguments. As regards having children, there was plenty of time. There was no need to rush into anything, not like some of the unfortunate women in the Dublin tenements who had no choice in the matter.
***
When England declared war on Germany in 1939, de Valera and Franco kept their countries neutral. Initially, the wily Caudillo was anxious to join up with Hitler in the wake of early German victories – France was beaten and England was expected to collapse. Most European diplomats – including Patrick Foley – believed that the Germans would conquer England. Franco would have liked a share of the spoils. However Hitler, flushed with victory, rebuffed the predatory general.
Nevertheless by 1940, the Führer began to woo Franco, and on the twentieth of October he crossed Europe in an armoured train to meet the Spanish head of state at Hendaye.
In return for joining forces with Germany, the Spanish dictator made considerable demands. He wanted territories in France and North Africa together with military and economic aid, and would only join Hitlerafter Germany had successfully defeated Britain.
***
On her return to Spain, my mother went walking with Patrick through the Madrid streets:
It was good to feel her on my arm, like an assurance, like carrying a little piece of Ireland around with me in exile. M was struck by the poverty all around her. She had thought of Ireland as the only poor country. I have no objection to her doing social work, but it seems to have made her light-heartedness disappear – the more she examines the world of the have-nots. I don’t know if it is a good thing. The poor may be poor but they are indigenous; they don’t suffer that wrenching of heart strings only known to the likes of us.
As they walked the paseo, they witnessed the victims of war in the streets: men with a shirt sleeve or a trouser leg dangling; the sound of crutches striking stone; women in black widows’ weeds; blind vendors sitting on stools on street corners; child beggars, barefooted and emaciated; the icy look of hunger which not even a Spanish sun could thaw:
M was amazed on seeing used tooth brushes and half cigarettes on sale in the shops, and fountain pens on HP; but the smell of the dead men’s clothes, she said, was just the same as in the Iveagh market at home.
‘The poor are the same all over. Remember in The Grapes of Wrath? Such poverty among the poor farmers in America.’
‘Would you like to go over there?’ I said.
‘Me?’ she said.
‘You got the offer before.’
She tried to smile. ‘I’m sorry, Patrick. Was I getting carried away?’ She pulled my collar up. There was a cold bite in the air. ‘Try to straighten up,’ she said, and then touched my face with a gloved hand and kissed me. I felt a longing for her, a hopeless longing.
‘You could go,’ I said, ‘if you really wanted to.’
‘Look, the queues are starting,’ she said, changing the subject, ‘the long winter queues’.
***
My mother was grateful to Patrick for helping in Gearóid MacSuibhne’s escape, but it is clear that she was still solicitous about the IRA man’s welfare, especially among those whom she simplistically deemed ‘the Germans who kill Jews and other races’. If they took a turn against him – and Gearóid could fly off the handle very easily – God knows what they would do to him. He could wind up in a concentration camp or worse.
Suggested experimentation with AI was another matter. She considered the whole idea sick. ‘We don’t need to deepfreeze our love. Love should never be put on hold.’ She said that such a thing was not for human, Christian life. She still believed that there was plenty of time to have children. She thought they were going about it in the wrong way, ‘without enough passion’.
As the days got hotter and as summer approached, my mother became more alluring:
She danced for me tonight in our bedroom. Someone was playing flamenco guitar outside on the street. Our shutters were open to all and sundry. She tried to arouse me under a Spanish moon, gyrating to the music. She was like the Indian pipe player rousing the snake; but the snake refused to come up. I felt acutely embarrassed when she began to disrobe on her own accord. It was downright brazen, not at all ladylike. I averted my eyes and told her to put her clothes back on and to turn off the light. God knows who was watching her making a spectacle of herself.
She apologised. She didn’t know what had got into her. ‘It must have been the heat,’ she said. ‘I just looked up and I saw the moon like a mother watching over her little stars.’
And then she wept.
***
In a letter to my mother, Gearóid mentions Patrick. He refers to him as her bourgeois husband; but he admits the diplomat saved his life from that fool of a fascist driver whom he hoped had been got rid of.
When my mother received this letter, giving details of Jiménez’s actions, Patrick was in Barcelona. She saw the driver on the street polishing the embassy car. Without any fear or prior thought – she was so incensed – she went out directly to where he was and, with the palm of her hand, slapped him hard across the face.
When Patrick returned, she remonstrated with him. Why had he not told her about Jiménez? ‘He threatened Gearóid’s life and endangered yours. Did you even report it? Why can he not be sacked?’ ‘He cannot be sacked,’ Patrick replied almost resignedly, ‘and that’s all there is to it.’ ‘What is the matter with you?’ my mother said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re afraid of that little pipsqueak.’
Two days later Patrick Foley was severely reprimanded for the behaviour of his wife. He was warned that his diplomatic career could be in jeopardy. The reprimand had come, he writes, directly down the line from Francisco Franco himself.
That night Patrick cautioned his wife about the dangers of loose talk and impetuous action, especially in a diplomatic environment, and in such a tense climate as prevailed in war time. He quoted Minister Mac Bride: ‘Every action of a diplomat credits or discredits his nation, because he or she is the representative of that nation.’
Patrick records: She was getting dangerously close. Jiménez is milking me dry for his silence and all M does now every night is gaze incomprehensibly at the moon.
And then ‘suddenly’ the following evening:
...she has cut her hair to shreds with a scissors. She thinks she is not beautiful any more. She says beauty fades when love fades. What am I to do? I will have to hide her away until it grows again. What will the embassy staff think?
***
Meanwhile Gearóid continued to write to my mother, fearlessly recounting his exploits.
The German plan to attack Britain was going ahead. So was the plan to instigate a revolution simultaneously in Ireland.
A U-boat was sent to Ireland with the revolutionaries, including MacSuibhne, on board. But the leader, Seán Russell, who was to plan the campaign, died on the voyage, of a perforated ulcer. Gearóid wrote to my mother saying that if they could not start a revolution in Ireland, they would make their own blitz on the neighbouring island.
On the twenty fifth of July 1939 a bomb was planted in a tradesman’s bicycle box which was left standing in Broadgate, the main street in the medieval city of Coventry. At two thirty p.m. the bomb exploded. It shattered twenty five shops, blasted holes in the street, overturned cars, scattering glass, handbags and children’s toys.
It also killed fifty people.
One of the dead was a young woman who was trying on a wedding dress when the bomb exploded.
The man who planted the bomb walked from the scene of the explosion. He did not run, as some of the newspapers maintained. Only when he had turned the corner did the man run in the direction of the train station. Workmen commented on the speed o
f the man. In parts of Ireland they said he ran like a hurler in Croke Park, soloing towards goal with a bomb like a sliotar balanced on his hurley stick, and the British metropolitan police were the opposing team hot on his heels.
If only Uncle Tomás had been as fast.
When my mother read about Coventry, she wondered about the betrothed girl: what her wedding dress looked like, what lace and frills there were, what her husband-to-be was like, how many children they would have had. She wondered about these things as a child wondered about a fairy tale.
Gearóid wrote to her to say two men were hanged for the bombing on rather flimsy evidence. He said he was lucky to escape but that he felt bad about the two men.
My mother had a strong social conscience but she also was what she was. She did not weep for the victims of Coventry because, in her eyes (at that time), they were casualties of a just war. The Dublin people on the North Strand killed by a German bomb were similar casualties. One can’t cry for the whole world. Pity, after all, is selective, like memory.
Gearóid was kept busy in 1939. He dyed his hair black and placed bombs at train stations throughout England (‘I planted oranges in their stations.’).
In 1940 Coventry was hit once more – this time devastated from the air by German bombers. One thousand people were killed.
The sealion had mated with the dove.
***
My mother found it difficult to settle in Spain. No sooner had she arrived back there than the second World War broke out, and although Spain was declared neutral, the country was awash with foreign agents and intrigue. Patrick insisted that she stay within the parameters of the embassy.
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