An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  It always ended in the same way – only when we were completely destitute; when the shopkeepers refused Mother even a loaf of bread, and the landlord threatened us with eviction, and Father could no longer raise the price of a single pint. At that point only did he give in – ‘cave in’ better describes what really happened to him. Sour and savage and silent, he began to look for another job. He rarely went back to the job he had left, and in those days I believed it was because he had lost it. Now I am certain that he was far too good a workman to be put off because of a drinking bout, however prolonged, and that he was too humiliated to go back. To have done that would have been to admit his weakness and guilt. He was, as I have said, a proud man, and he would never have admitted to the other poor labourers, whom he despised, that he had sunk so low. And because something had to be done about the mass of debt that had accumulated in the meantime, he and Mother would have to go to the loan office in Paul Street, accompanied by some friend to act as guarantor. Mother had to go with him, because even at this stage he would still have taken the money and drunk it along with the rest. I was very impressed by the big interest we had to pay, and it struck me that if only I could accumulate a little capital and lend them the money myself, it would be an excellent way both of getting rich and of saving Mother anxiety – the money would, at least, be in the family. But my own savings usually evaporated in the first few days of strain, and I realized that I would need a more settled background before I could set up in business as a moneylender.

  With the aid of the loan, Father would take out his ‘ring paper’ and draw his pension, and out of that he would release his best suit, so that he could again worship God on Sundays in the Dominican Church on the Sand Quay. Then would come the clocks and the watch and chain and the military medals, and finally Mother’s blue costume. It was characteristic of him that when he started to put money aside again, it was to pay the publicans. He preferred to let Mother work for a shilling a day rather than defer the payment of his drinking debts. It would seem to be obvious that he was only preparing the way for another debauch – because this, in fact, was the ultimate effect of it – and yet I should still say that this was untrue. I am sure it was pride that moved him. I don’t think Mother had much pride. Gay people have no need of pride because gaiety is merely the outward sign of inward integrity; as with all mentally sick people, the two sides of his nature hardly communicated and were held together by pins and Hail Marys, and pride was one of the ways in which he protected the false conception of his own character that was one side.

  And once again the little house was reconstituted about that incomplete conception of Father as a home-loving body, and a new cycle began. Brisk and cheerful, he rose in the early morning to wash under the tap and bring Mother a cup of tea in bed, and in the evening he read the Echo to her while I sat in some corner, absorbed in my own boys’ weeklies, and a wind blew up the river and seemed to isolate us as on a ship at sea. On such evenings, no one could doubt his love for her or hers for him, but I, who had no other security, knew better than she did what he was really like, and watched him suspiciously, in the way that only a child can watch, and felt that all authority was only a pretence and that God Himself was probably not much better, and directed my prayers not to Him, but to His mother, who had said nothing but merely suffered.

  Because I was jealous of him, I knew that there was real devotion between that strangely assorted pair, and yet I often wonder what really went on in Mother’s mind during those terrible years. I think when she wasn’t entirely desperate, pity was what was uppermost in her mind, pity for this giant of a man who had no more self-knowledge or self-control than a baby. The least pain could bewilder and madden him and even a toothache could drive him to drink. He died as he had lived, wandering about Cork, looking for drink when he was in the last stages of pneumonia, and I, who might have controlled him, was not informed because it would upset me too much, and besides Mother felt I wouldn’t understand. Even God wouldn’t understand. Whenever his anniversary came round, she withdrew herself for weeks and, without a word to anyone, the offering for Masses was sent to the Cistercians at Mount Melleray, because God might fail to realize that poor Father really was at heart a home-loving body and a good husband and father, and might keep him too long in Purgatory, a place he would not be happy in at all because he could not stand pain, and even a toothache would drive him mad.

  Once only did she say anything significant, and that was while she was raving. I was a grown man and living in Dublin, and I came back to Cork on holiday to find her desperately ill, and poor Father – the world’s most hopeless man with his hands – devotedly nursing her with nothing but neat whiskey. I blasted him for not wiring for me, and he snarled back: ‘How could I, when she wouldn’t let me?’ And then he sat over the fire, flapping his hands and snivelling: ‘What would I do without her?’ When I had made her comfortable for the night, I sat with her, holding her hand, and heard her muttering about him as though I were not there.

  ‘God! God!’ she whispered. ‘He raised me from the gutter where the world threw me. He raised me from the gutter where the world threw me!’

  3

  Whenever I read about juvenile delinquents, I find myself thinking of Mother, because she was whatever the opposite of a juvenile delinquent is, and this was not due to her upbringing in a Catholic orphanage, since whatever it was in her that was the opposite of a juvenile delinquent was too strong to have been due to the effect of any environment and, indeed, resisted a number of environments to which no reasonable person would subject a child; the gutter where life had thrown her was deep and dirty. One way of describing this quality is to call it gaiety; another is to say that she was a woman who passionately believed in the world of appearances. If something appeared to be so, or if she had been told it was so, then she believed it to be so. This, as every psychologist knows, leads to disillusionments, and when a juvenile delinquent is disillusioned we describe it as a traumatic experience. So far as I could see, up to her death practically all Mother’s experiences were traumatic, including, I am afraid, her experience with me. And some small portion of her simple-mindedness she did pass on to me.

  She was small and dainty, with long dark hair that she was very proud of. She had only two faults that I ever knew of – she was vain and she was obstinate – and the fact that these qualities were masked by humility and gentleness prevented my recognizing them till I was a grown man. Father, who was as grey as a badger at thirty-five, and in danger of growing bald, in spite of his clippers, was very jealous of her beautiful dark hair, and whenever he wanted to make her mad he would affect to discover white strands in it. Being an orphan, she had no notion of her own age, and had never known a birthday, but Father had discussed it with my Uncle Tim and satisfied himself that she was several years older than himself. When he believed she was seventy, he got really angry because he was sure she was going to let her vanity deprive her of a perfectly good pension. Mother shrugged this off as another example of his jealousy. To tell the truth, that was what I thought myself. She looked, at the time, like a well-preserved fifty-five. However, to put his mind at rest, I had the date of her birth looked up in the Customs House in Dublin, and discovered that she was only a few months short of seventy. Father was triumphant, but I felt guilty because I feared that the knowledge of her real age would make her become old. I needn’t have worried. I think she probably decided finally that though the Registrar of Births and Deaths was a well-intentioned man, he was not particularly bright.

  She had a lordly way with any sort of record she could get her hands on that conflicted with her own view of herself – she merely tore it up. Once, the poet George Russell did a charming pencil drawing of her, which I had framed. The next time I came home on holiday, I found the frame filled with snapshots of me, and my heart sank, because I knew what must have happened. ‘What did you do with that drawing?’ I asked, hoping she might at least have preserved it, and she replied firmly: ‘Now, I
’m just as fond of A.E. as you are, but I could not have that picture round the house. He made me look like a poisoner.’ When she was eighty-five, and we were leaving to live in England, I discovered that she had done the same thing with the photograph in her passport. She was entirely unaffected by my anger. ‘The sergeant of the police at St Luke’s said it,’ she proclaimed firmly. ‘The man who took that picture should be tried for his life.’ I think she was glad to have official authority for her personal view that I had been very remiss in not bringing proceedings against the photographer. When my wife and I separated, the only indication I had of Mother’s feelings was when I looked at my photograph album one day and saw that every single photograph of my wife had been destroyed. Where she had been photographed with me or the children her picture had been cut away. It was not all malice, any more than the destruction of her own pictures was all vanity. I am certain it went back to some childish technique of endurance by obliterating impressions she had found too terrible to entertain, as though, believing as she did in the world of appearances, she found it necessary to alter the world of appearances to make it seem right, but in time it came to affect almost everything she did. It even worked in reverse, for one Christmas an old friend, Stan Stewart, sent her a book, but because it came straight from his bookseller, it did not contain an inscription, as books that were sent to me did. After her death, I found the book with a charming inscription from Stan, written in by herself. Her affection for him made her give herself away, for she wrote ‘From dear Stan’.

  She was beautiful, and – in later life at least – she knew it. Once a well-known woman writer came to the house, and when she was introduced to Mother, she threw her arms about her neck and hugged her. ‘But she’s so beautiful!’ she said to me later in apology, and Mother accepted the tribute modestly as indicating that our visitor showed nice feelings. She had a long, pale, eager face that lit up as though there had been an electric torch behind it, and whenever people told her anything interesting, she studied their faces with a delighted or grieved expression. It was part of her belief in the reality of the objective world. She knew that when people were happy they laughed, and she laughed with them – not so much at what they said, because sometimes she didn’t understand what they were saying, as in sympathy with their happiness. In the same way, when they were sad she looked grieved. It never occurred to her that people could be happy and wear a mournful face. From her point of view, this would have been a mere waste of good happiness. For the same reason, she never teased and could never understand teasing, which was the amusement of people like Father, who do not believe in the world of appearances, and though she was clever and sometimes profound, she went through life burdened with the most extraordinary misapprehension, which she clung to with gentle persistence.

  When I was a child, our walks often took us to the Good Shepherd Convent, in the orphanage of which she had grown up. I liked it because it had trees and steep lawns and pleasant avenues. On fine days we sat with one of her old friends on the lawn that overlooked the valley of the river or, on showery ones, in the grotto of the nuns’ cemetery, and Mother of Perpetual Succour, who was in charge of the garden, took me round and picked me fruit, and I suspect that sometimes, when things were not going well at home, Mother Blessed Margaret gave Mother small gifts of money and clothes. In the convent cemetery, among the tiny crosses of the nuns, was a big monument to one of the orphans, an infant known as Little Nellie of Holy God, who had suffered and died in a particularly edifying way and about whom, at the time, a certain cult was growing up. I had a deep personal interest in her, because not only was I rather in that line myself, but Father had assisted at her exhumation when her body was removed from a city cemetery, and verified the story that it was perfectly preserved. Having attended several funerals, seen the broken coffins and the bones that were heaped on the side, and heard my relatives say knowingly: ‘That was Eugene now. The one below him was Mary,’ I was strongly in favour of the saintly life. When they dug me up, I wanted to be intact.

  But much as I enjoyed the elegance of the convent gardens and avenues, it was here that I picked up the fragments of Mother’s past life that have never ceased to haunt me. At that time, of course, they were merely a few hints, but they were sufficient to sustain my interest through the years, and later I wrote down and got her to write down as many of the facts as she remembered – or cared to remember. I stopped doing this one day when she put down her pen with a look of horror and said: ‘I can’t write any more – it’s too terrible!’

  It was. She had been the oldest of four children whose parents lived in a tiny cabin at the top of Blarney Lane beyond the point where I grew up. After her had come Margaret, then Tim and then Nora, the baby. My grandmother was a country girl from Donoughmore, and had been married in the hood cloak, the traditional dress of country women of her day. My grandfather was a labourer in Arnott’s Brewery, which was near St Mary’s of the Isle Convent, at the other side of the city. Mother was his pet, and sometimes when he went to work he carried her with him in his arms, left her in the playground of the convent to amuse herself, and then came back later to carry her home again. He was a powerful man, a bowls player and athlete, and one day, for a bet, he began lifting heavy casks and injured his back. While he was in Mercy Hospital Mother was not allowed to visit him – I fancy because my grandmother had to work and Mother looked after the children – and, being his pet, she resented it. One day she left the children behind and ran all the way down Sunday’s Well and Wyse’s Hill and across the old wooden bridge where St Vincent’s Bridge now stands to the hospital. She found him, fully dressed, sitting on his bed in the men’s ward upstairs, with a group of men about him who played with her and gave her sweets. When she was leaving he came down the stairs with her, and at the front door, asked if she knew her way home. She said that she did, but he realized that she was confused, caught her up in his arms and made off with her for home. Mother told that part of the story in a rather tentative way, and I suspect that, with a child’s belief in magic, she had always felt that her visit had cured him, and could not face the possibility that it might have been the cause of his death. Anyhow, I doubt if it was. I think he knew he was dying, and wanted to die at home. He lingered only a short while, and Mother remembered how he reported the stages of dying to my grandmother. ‘The end is coming, Julia,’ he said once. ‘The hearing is going on me now.’

  After his death, neighbours and friends took the children in. My grandmother’s people in Donoughmore, who were comfortably off, refused to do anything for her. Nora, taken by one couple, was never heard of again in this world, though in later years Mother tried hard to track her down. Someone else took Tim. Margaret, I fancy, remained on with Grandmother. Mother fell to the lot of a foreman in the Brewery named O’Regan, who lived with his childless wife in a place called Brandy Lane on the south side of the city. They were a good-natured couple, but with no comprehension of a child’s needs. After the intimacy of the little cabin, Mother was terrified of her own tall solitary bedroom and the streetlamp outside that threw its light up on to the ceiling, and in the daytime Mrs O’Regan went out and left her alone in the house. One day she dragged a chair into the hall and managed to lift the latch. Then she ran wild through the city streets till a policeman picked her up and brought her home by the hand.

  It was only a brief respite, because a couple of days later they were evicted for not paying the rent, and Mother and Margaret sat for hours on the roadside with the remains of their little home: the tester bed, the picture of Sir John Arnott, the brewer, and the picture of the Guardian Angel – the two protectors who had done so little for them. After that, Grandmother took Mother and Margaret to the Good Shepherd Orphanage, and when Mother realized that they were being left behind, she rushed after my grandmother, clinging to her skirts and screaming to be taken home. My grandmother’s whispered reply is one of the phrases that haunted my childhood – indeed, it haunts me still. ‘But, my store, I have
no home now.’ For me, there has always been in imagination a stage beyond death – a stage where one says ‘I have no home now.’

  My grandmother went mad under the strain and was for a time in the Lunatic Asylum. When she came out, she worked for a few months as a maid. She used to visit Mother and Aunt Margaret at the orphanage, and once she brought Tim, then two, who was on his way to an infants’ orphanage in Waterford. To begin with, the two little girls were comfortable enough. They were too young to dress themselves, so they were dispensed from the necessity for going to Mass, and for the same reason they didn’t attend classes and were left in the kitchen with the older girls who did the cooking. Their cots were side by side in the dormitory, and sometimes Mother got into Margaret’s bed and was caught there at 6.30 when Mother Cecilia came into the dormitory, clapping her hands and reciting the morning offering.

  By the time Mother was attending classes, fever broke out in the school and a temporary hospital had to be erected in the grounds. Margaret disappeared with many of the others, but by this time Mother was growing used to disappearances. One day two girls entered the classroom, carrying a third whose legs dragged dead behind her.

  ‘Minnie,’ they said. ‘Here’s your sister.’

  Mother ran away, and then the tall, thin girl they were carrying began to cry. Margaret was now a cripple for life and lived in the infirmary. It was Mother who carried her to and from the classrooms, where she could move about fairly well by swinging on the desks. She had developed into something of a pet and a tyrant. She was precocious, and read everything that came her way. Whatever poetry she read, she immediately memorized. She developed a hatred of injustice, and attacked even the nuns when she thought they were doing wrong. She despised Mother’s timidity, and when Mother peered in the infirmary door to see if any nuns were around, Margaret called out to her not to be such a coward. The owner of the Queen’s Old Castle, one of the big city stores, who sometimes visited the convent, had a wheelchair made for her so that she could be pushed around.