An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  When Grandmother was dying in the workhouse, only Mother could make the journey to say goodbye to her. Grandmother wept, and Mother took out her own handkerchief to dry her tears. As she left the workhouse, she remembered the handkerchief. It was school property, and she might be punished for the loss of it, so she rushed back to the ward. Grandmother was still weeping, but Mother could not keep the lay sister waiting in the convent cab.

  Grandmother’s gentleness and humility had endeared her to some of the nuns, and when she died, Reverend Mother decided to save her from what was considered the shame of the pauper’s hole, where the unclaimed bodies of the dead were thrown. Mother Mary Magdalen was a lady, and did not allow the other nuns to forget it. Her family had been of Isaac Butt’s party, as opposed to the popular party of Parnell. ‘My brothers were in Parliament when there were none but gentlemen there,’ she told the children. She also told them that she had found her vocation at the age of twenty-eight, while attending a performance of The Colleen Bawn at the Opera House in Cork. I wonder whether the subject of the play, which deals with the seduction of an innocent Irish girl, and her peculiar choice of a name in religion do not imply that she considered herself to have been flighty. She sent for Mother to find out where Grandfather was buried, but Mother did not know. So Grandmother was buried in a city graveyard, and Reverend Mother ordered a hearse and two covered cars – the old-fashioned two-wheeled vehicles known only in Cork. In one rode Mother with a lay sister, and in the other a couple of orphans.

  There was little of the agony of the orphan child that Mother did not know, either through her own experience or the experiences of the other children, which she observed in her sympathetic way. It was the height of the Land War, and all over Ireland poor cottagers were being thrown on to the roadside by police and British troops. One frightened little girl went about for days asking: ‘Will the men with the wed wousers (red trousers) come here too?’ Once, a baby girl called Lynch, from Kerry, whose family had been drowned, was missing for hours, and was finally discovered in the empty chapel, patiently knocking on the altar and calling: ‘Holy God! Holy God! Are ‘oo there? Will ‘oo send up my Daddy?’ Some of the children did not realize for days the immensity of the change that had come over their lives. For a whole week one little girl called Anne Dorgan patiently watched the clock till it came to half past three and then stood up and raised her hand, asking meekly: ‘Please ma’am, can I go home now?’ ‘Sit down, Anne Dorgan,’ the nun would say gently, but Anne would stick to her point. ‘But, ma’am, ‘tis half past three. ’Tis time to go home, ma’am.’

  In time she too realized as Mother had done that she had no home now, and tried to divert her feeling for home to the convent, and for her parents to some nun. In some girls that switch was never affected at all and they remained to the end of their lives aloof and cold and conscious of some lack of warmth in themselves, like Kate Gaynor, a friend of Mother’s whom I knew in later years and who said bitterly that every orphanage in the world should be torn down because they robbed a child of natural affection, but others were luckier or maybe less exacting. Mother used to quote a snatch of conversation that she had overheard between two infants sitting on the ground under a window, the one eager and serious, the other bored and pompous.

  ‘Do you love God?’

  ‘I won’t tell you.’

  ‘Do you love Mother Saint Paul?’

  ‘I won’t tell you.’

  ‘Do you rather God or Mother Saint Paul?’

  ‘I won’t tell you.’

  ‘I think I rather God, and then Mother Saint Paul.’

  Then there was silence. Perhaps the child who would not tell was one whose natural affection was being killed.

  Mother herself did not see my Uncle Tim for five years, and in the meantime he had been transferred to the Boys’ Orphanage at Greenmount on the south side of the river. On her feast day, Reverend Mother decided that girls who had brothers there should be allowed to entertain them in Sunday’s Well. Mother was now quite an important person, and she allowed one of her friends to join her in collecting candies and biscuits for the expected visit. My Aunt Margaret in the infirmary had a hoard. When the orphan boys marched up the convent avenue behind their band, Mother and her friend ran screaming through the ranks calling ‘O’Connor! Tim O’Connor!’ A small boy said modestly ‘That’s me,’ and the two little girls stuffed his pockets with sweets and marched him off in triumph to the infirmary. But another little girl, called Eileen O’Connor, rushed after them weeping and crying that they had stolen her brother. When they realized their mistake, Mother and her friend beat the pretender and took back the sweets before returning to look for the real Tim O’Connor. After that, the experiment of allowing brothers and sisters to meet for one afternoon in the year was not repeated.

  Meanwhile, Mother had her living to earn. She had been trained as a bookbinder, and was neat and skilful at this, as she was at almost anything she tackled, but she was always getting into trouble for reading the books she should have been binding. Maria Condon, who was in charge of the bookbinding class and was a gentle, grave, responsible girl, used to smile sadly and shake her head over Mother’s tendency to be distracted by printed pages. She was the daughter of one of the ‘fallen’ women in the penitentiary and was allowed to see her mother once a week in a convent parlour. One of Mother Mary Magdalen’s reforms had been to make a clean sweep of illegitimate girls from the school on the plea that it was unfair to the orphans to have an additional presumption of illegitimacy against them, but an exception had been made of Maria because her mother, who had been seduced by a well-known doctor, had taken vows and become what was known as a ‘dedicated penitent’, serving a life term by choice in atonement for her fall. There was a moving sequel to the story of Maria and her mother which disturbed me greatly when I was an adolescent and caused endless argument between Mother and myself.

  When Maria was sixteen or seventeen she had to be sent out to work as a maid, but the nuns decided that it was unsafe for her to work in Ireland, where people would get to know of her illegitimacy. Maria, who had been told nothing about this, wanted to remain in Cork, where she could be close to her mother, but instead the nuns sent her to New York as maid in a rough Irish boarding house. An older girl who was also a maid in New York was told to look after her. Maria was homesick; she wanted to save her wages to earn her fare back to Ireland, and finally the older girl told her why she could not go back. Maria returned to the horrible boarding house, packed her few possessions, and was not heard of again for a long time. She had been so horrified at her mother’s ‘sin’ and her own illegitimacy that she had decided to break off all connexion with her mother and the convent.

  After the revelation, she had gone out and taken the first job she was offered. Fortunately for her, this was with an old American family who soon realized that she was a superior and intelligent girl. But they could not understand why she never received or wrote letters. Finally, the mistress of the house questioned her, and Maria, believing that since she was illegitimate she would be dismissed, broke down and told her everything. Her employers were shocked, and they insisted on her writing at once to her mother. Correspondence with her was resumed, but the nuns were hostile – Maria had left the good Catholic home they had found for her. Her employers encouraged Maria to get a better job and save for a little home of her own to which she could bring her mother. When she had saved enough she returned to Cork, but she found the nuns openly hostile to her plans, and her mother refused to go back to her. She had taken her vows and would end her days as an unpaid trusty in a penitentiary.

  As was only natural, when I learned the truth about Maria, I had no sympathy for anyone but her, but Mother refused to let me criticize the nuns. ‘They did what they thought was right,’ she said obstinately and that settled it for her. But it didn’t settle it for me, and I have never ceased to be haunted by the images of Maria and her mother, whose innocent lives had been blasted by an introverted r
eligion.

  Mother must have been a dreamy, sensitive child, because she had spells of somnambulism, and once she was found walking up and down a convent corridor in her nightdress, reciting Wolsey’s speech from Herny VIII – ‘Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness!’

  She was not sent to a bookbinder’s to work. One winter evening, when she was fourteen or fifteen, the Mistress of Studies came to her in the orphanage workroom where she was sewing and told her she had found a nice home for her with two ladies who had called to inquire for a maid. The Mistress of Studies then went out and returned with a regular convent outfit for girls who were leaving school – a black straw sailor hat and black coat, a pair of gloves and a parcel of clean aprons. Mother gathered up her own possessions – a statue of the Blessed Virgin and a couple of holy pictures – said goodbye to her friends, and went off in the darkness down Sunday’s Well in a covered car with the two ladies, a Mrs Bowen, who was a widow, and her daughter-in-law. The car stopped outside a terrace of new two-storey houses on Gardiner’s Hill.

  Mother thought the Mistress of Studies had probably been mistaken, because it didn’t seem a very good home. The younger of the two women lit a candle and showed her her room, which was a little cubbyhole with a fireplace, a bed and two or three framed Bible texts. Mother unpacked her belongings and ranged the statue of the Blessed Virgin and the holy pictures on the mantelpiece to keep her company. After her tea she sat in the kitchen till Mrs Bowen told her it was time for her to go to bed. Then she lit her candle and went up to her room. That night all her old fears came back. Since she had been taken by the O’Regans she had never slept alone in a room. She had become used to the big classrooms and dormitories, the voices and the loud footsteps along the corridors, and she was terrified. When she left her room, she stooped for fear of knocking her head on the lintel, which was so much lower than in the big doorway she was used to, and dreaded to move lest she knock something over.

  The Bowens were poor, and Mother got no wages, but the younger woman was a dressmaker, and made Mother some clothes of her own, which she liked just as well. Anyhow, she was not accustomed, to money. (One of the orphans had once stolen a pound and gone straight to a sweet store, where she ordered ‘a pound’s worth of sweets’ – as though a child of our own time should ask for ten pounds’ worth of sweets.) The Bowens kept two lodgers, and the younger woman waited on them. She was an eager, earnest housekeeper, forever on the rush, and so careful of the scraps that she sometimes kept bread till it turned green. Once, Mother was throwing it out, but Mrs Bowen gave her a lecture on waste and explained that bread was healthier that way. Being a great believer in the world of appearances, Mother tried to like it, but couldn’t. She decided that, like the view that the Mistress of Studies held of the Bowens’ house, this was just a mistake.

  Mr Bowen had a job in a wine store on Merchant’s Quay, but his health was poor, and Mother was frequently sent into town to explain his absences. She was very sorry about his bad health, but she enjoyed the trips into town. At nights she was allowed to read in the parlour while the Bowens sang sentimental or comic songs or, on Sunday, hymns – Protestant hymns of course. Mother’s own favourites were always the old Latin hymns like Ave Maris Stella and Stabat Mater, but she thoroughly enjoyed the Protestant ones, having, like her son, an open mind on the subject of anything with a tune. The books at her disposal were limited in appeal, boys’ school stories with a strongly sectarian bias and standard editions of the poets, but at least she was able to read Shakespeare right through.

  When she was hanging out the washing, she became friendly with the sour-faced maid next door, one Betty, who kept house for two old maids called Bennett. Mother talked to her at great length about the convent and about Mother Blessed Margaret, her favourite among the nuns, but Betty hinted darkly that there was nothing she did not know about nuns and chaplains and the dark goings on in convents, and Mother realized, to her great astonishment, that Betty was a Protestant as well. Nobody had ever explained to Mother that Protestants could also be poor. I have a strong impression that from this moment Mother was bent on converting Betty. Betty told Mother that Mr Bowen was a drunkard, but Mother denied this indignantly, and explained that it was just bad health.

  Mother, with her belief in the world of appearances, was always being impressed by the curious mistakes that people made. The Mistress of Studies had been mistaken about the Bowens’ house, Betty thought that Mr Bowen was a drunkard, and Mr Bowen himself made mistakes that were nearly as bad. One evening his wife, who usually opened the front door when he knocked, was upstairs; Mother opened it instead, and Mr Bowen beamed on her, put his arm about her waist and kissed her. She was taken by such a fit of giggling that she was ashamed. ‘Oh, sir, I’m only Minnie,’ she explained, and then went off to the kitchen to laugh in peace at the notion that anybody could take her for Mrs Bowen. She was longing to tell the joke to the mistress, but finally decided that it might seem forward.

  But his mistake was nothing to that of Mr Daly, one of the lodgers, who was a reporter on the Cork Examiner. He had a blue overcoat with a velvet collar that Mother thought the height of elegance and which she stroked every time she passed it hanging in the hall. One night she woke and felt a hand on her throat. Her first impulse was to reach for the statue of the Blessed Virgin, which was on the mantelpiece over her bed, but what she grabbed instead was the velvet collar she knew so well.

  ‘Oh, Mr Daly, is that you?’ she cried in relief.

  ‘Don’t shout, Minnie!’ he whispered crossly. ‘I’m only looking for the candle.’

  ‘But what are you doing in here?’ she asked. ‘Your room is the other way.’

  ‘I lost my way in the darkness, that’s all,’ he said with a sigh, and after a couple of minutes went out quietly.

  It was only then that Mother, having got over the shock, could laugh in comfort. Here was an educated man with a big job on the Cork Examiner who could not even find his own way upstairs in the dark! And she knew from the way he had sighed that this was something that must often happen to him and cause him a great deal of concern.

  Next morning, she simply could not resist reporting his mistake to the younger Mrs Bowen, and then she wished she hadn’t, because Mrs Bowen did not laugh at all. Instead, she rushed upstairs to her husband, who was still in bed, and repeated the story to him. He jumped out of bed in his nightshirt and went and threw open the door of Daly’s room. Mrs Bowen was still angry when she came downstairs.

  ‘His bed hasn’t even been slept in,’ she said bitterly. ‘I don’t think you need worry, Minnie. I fancy he won’t trouble us again.’

  She was right about that, because in the afternoon a messenger came from the Examiner for Daly’s clothes, and Mrs Bowen was still so furious that she hurled them at him from the head of the stairs. She even refused to let Mother parcel them for him. Mother was full of pity for the poor little messenger. who sat at the front gate trying to fold the shirts and suits, but, indeed, I think she was sorrier for poor Mr Daly, who had been so ashamed of his own mistake that he had walked blindly out of the house and probably got no sleep at all that night. She thought it was very unforeseen of him not to explain to her how seriously Protestants regarded mistakes.

  Then the Bowens had a baby, and Mother had one of her many traumatic experiences about him. She made the midwife promise that when she brought the baby, before giving it over to the mother, she would let her see it first, and when Mr Bowen invited her up to the bedroom to see the new arrival, Mother, after a stunned silence, turned to the midwife and called her a false and wicked woman. Mother hardly ever lost her temper, and never except under what she regarded as intolerable provocation, but when she did, she was magnificent. She reduced everybody to silence. The midwife apologized and excused herself on the ground of the baby’s having no clothes, but Mother regarded this as a very lame excuse.

  Mother, of course, was enchanted with the baby, and insisted on showing him off to Betty next door. S
he had no idea of the emotions she was rousing both in Betty and the two old maids she worked for. One Sunday morning the Bowens stormed back from church and denounced Mother for having said of herself and the baby that she was ‘bringing up a heretic for Hell’. Mother found it difficult to deny this accusation, because she didn’t know what a heretic was, even when the Bowens explained that it was something Catholics called Protestants. Mother, weeping, explained that she had never heard Protestants called that by anyone she knew, and finally the Bowens apologized, realizing that they had been victims of a plot of the Bennetts and Betty, but Mother did not lightly recover from the scene. It was quite plain now that Betty would never be a Catholic.

  Mother went a few times to the convent to visit my Aunt Margaret, who was seriously ill, her two arms swathed in cotton wool. One day she was sent for, and when she arrived my aunt was dead. The nun who brought her in to see the body told her she should not cry. Margaret was better off. The nun may have been right. It was bad enough to be an orphan, but to be a cripple as well! Margaret’s confession had to be heard after that of all the other children because the chaplain had to leave the confession box and sit beside her in her wheelchair. A little while before she died, one of the girls had pushed her wheelchair into the chapel in the evening, and then forgot all about her. The chaplain, too, forgot, and it was only at bedtime that they discovered her missing and found her at last, having sobbed herself to sleep in the deserted chapel.

  But the Mistress of Studies, who always seemed to have Mother’s best interests at heart, did not forget her and, deciding that it was bad for her to be in a Protestant home, found her a place in a respectable Catholic lodging house on Richmond Hill. It was kept by a Mrs Joyce, who had five daughters. The eldest, Kathleen, was Mother’s age, and a good-natured girl, but foolish and affected. She spent her life reading sentimental novelettes. As in the Bowens’ there were two lodgers. Mannix and Healy – both medical students of a violently patriotic temperament who sometimes came in covered in blood after some political riot – and when Kathleen waited on them they ridiculed her affected airs, but both were fond of Mother and brought her presents of sweets and fruit. Neither of them realized the damage they were doing her in the eyes of her mistress, a coarse and ignorant woman with a violent temper. Every little gift they brought Mother became a further slight on Mrs Joyce’s fine, educated daughter, and she harried Mother relentlessly, shouting ‘Gerril, do this!’ and ‘Gerril, do that!’ One evening she came into the sitting-room and saw Mannix pull Mother’s pigtail. This was sufficient to put her in one of her usual furies.