‘Aha, Gerril!’ she said. ‘The same thing will happen you as happened Madge Murphy.’
‘What happened her?’ Mother asked with genuine interest.
‘She had a baby!’
‘Well, that isn’t true, anyway.’ Mother said heatedly. (She never liked people to flout her intelligence.) ‘How could she have a baby when she isn’t even married?’
Joyce, who was eating his supper, looked up at his wife as she was about to reply, and said shortly: ‘Let the child alone! She’s better off as she is.’
However, that could not keep Mother off the subject of sex, on which her experience with the Bowens had made her an expert. Mrs Joyce was having her sixth and Mother, who was nothing if not conscientious, decided to enlighten Patricia, the youngest but one of the children, about the facts of life and the untrustworthiness of midwives. She explained to Patricia that she had personally known a midwife who had promised to show her the baby as soon as she bought it and, instead of that, had taken it straight up to the mother, concealed. Patricia, who wasn’t much more than a baby herself, listened with growing stupefaction and then said: ‘But you don’t buy babies.’
‘Don’t you, indeed?’ Mother asked good-naturedly. ‘And how do you get them?’
‘You make them, of course,’ cried Patricia indignantly, and Mother laughed heartily at this example of childish innocence. Her laughter made the little girl furious, and when they reached home she rushed in to her eldest sister, and, pointing an accusing finger at Mother, yelled: ‘She says you buy babies!’
‘Ah, she only says that because you’re so young,’ Kathleen replied good-humouredly.
‘She doesn’t!’ screamed the infant. ‘She believes it!’
I never had the heart to ask Mother if she had taken example by the child and really learned the facts of life. The one dirty story she knew suggested that she had, but I was never quite certain that she knew what it meant. My impression is that she accepted the evidence in the spirit in which she accepted the evidence of her birth certificate and marked the case ‘Not Proven’. Once in Geneva I overheard an extraordinary conversation between her and a Swiss manufacturer’s wife whose son was leaving for Paris and who was very concerned about the sort of women he might meet there.
‘It is such a dangerous place for a young man,’ said the Swiss woman.
‘Oh, the traffic!’ exclaimed Mother, delighted to have found a kindred spirit. ‘It took the sight from my eyes.’
‘And it isn’t only the traffic, is it?’ the Swiss woman asked gently. ‘We send them away healthy and we wish them to come back healthy.’
‘I said it!’ Mother cried passionately. ‘My boy’s digestion is never the same.’
A certain simplicity of mind that is characteristic of all noble natures, says some old Greek author whose name I cannot remember.
The real nightmare began only after the Joyces moved to a house in Mulgrave Road, near the North Cathedral. Mother no longer had a bedroom, and slept on a trestle bed in the corridor. The painters were still at work in the house, and one of them, after trying in vain to get Mother to walk out with him, proposed to her. He told her he thought she’d make ‘a damn nice little wife’. Mother didn’t mind the proposal so much, but she thought his language was terrible.
‘What was that fellow saying to you?/ Mrs Joyce asked suspiciously when the painter left the room.
‘Ah, nothing, only asking me to marry him,’ Mother replied lightly, not realizing what she was doing to a woman with five daughters and a probable sixth on the way.
‘A queer one he’d be marrying!’ growled Mrs Joyce.
A few days later some nuns of the city order called and addressed Mother under the impression that she was the eldest of the family, which seemed such a good joke to Patricia that she told her mother. It drove Mrs Joyce into a tempest of fury.
‘A nice daughter, indeed!’ snarled Mrs Joyce. ‘A creature that doesn’t know who she is or where she came from. She doesn’t even know who her own mother was.’
This was too much for Mother. Insults directed against herself she could stand, but not insults to her mother’s memory.
‘My mother was a lady, anyhow,’ she said. ‘You’re not a lady.’
After that, Mrs Joyce made her life a hell. The clothes her previous employer had made fell into rags, and Mrs Joyce refused to replace them. Instead, she gave Mother a ragged coatee, which she had bought from a dealing woman for a few pence, and an old skirt of her sister’s who had just died in the Incurable Hospital. After each meal served to the lodgers, Mrs Joyce rushed in to gather up the scraps, so that there was nothing left to eat. Hunger was no new thing to any of the orphanage children, but starvation was a new thing to Mother. Instead of candies and biscuits, the medical students now gave her an occasional sixpence, and she bought a loaf of bread which she concealed, and from which she cut a slice when Mrs Joyce went out. At night she was so tired that sometimes she never reached her trestle bed in the corridor. Once, walking across the yard with the lamp, she fell asleep and was wakened only by the crash of the falling lamp. Another time, she fell asleep crossing the Joyces’ bedroom with a lighted candle, and when she woke up the curtains were in flames about her.
Then her long beautiful hair grew lousy, and Mrs Joyce ordered her to cut it off. Mother did not perceive that this was the chance the woman had been waiting for all the time. Slight her beautiful, educated daughter indeed! She would show the medical students what a girl looked like when she was ragged and starved and without hair.
That evening, when Mother served the dinner, Mannix looked at her in astonishment. ‘What the hell did you do that to yourself for?’ he shouted, and when she had told him he went on: ‘For God’s sake, girl, will you get out of this house before that woman does something worse to you? Can’t you see yourself that she hates you?’
‘But why would she hate me?’ asked Mother.
‘Because she’s jealous of you. That’s why.’
But Mother could not see why anyone should be jealous of somebody as poor and friendless as herself. I doubt if it occurred to her to the day of her death that the Mistress of Studies was also jealous of her. With that simplicity of mind the old author praised, she never really understood the hatred that common natures entertain for refined ones.
She was now ashamed to leave the house, even to buy food. And then something happened that showed how far she had really sunk. The Good Shepherd nuns had at last learned that the lodgers in the house were medical students, and medical students were notorious for their depravity, though this instantly ceased the moment they got a degree. It is a superstition from the early days of scientific medicine, and it has not yet died out. One day two nuns came to the house in a covered car, and ordered Mother to return to the orphanage with them. She refused, and they reminded her of the penalty she was incurring. Any girl who left one of the pleasant homes provided by the nuns without permission was not allowed to return to the orphanage, which was the only home most of the girls had. In the same way, one who refused to leave immediately when ordered was not allowed to return. Mother still refused to go back with them, and when they left in anger, she knew she had now no place in the world to go. When I tried to get her to explain this extraordinary conduct, she said, almost impatiently, that she could not go back in that state among clean, well-dressed girls. Possibly behind her refusal to return there was an element of almost hysterical vanity, but that cannot be the real explanation. My own guess is that it was despair, rather than vanity. Children, and adolescents who have retained their childish innocence, have little hold on life. They have no method of defending themselves against the things that are not in their own nature. I think that, without knowing it, Mother hated the nuns for what they had made of her innocent life, and had already decided to commit suicide. Her parents were dead, Margaret had died while she was at Bowens’, Tim she had seen only once for a few hours in all the years, and she had nothing left to live for.
For
eight or nine months longer, it dragged on like that. The eldest girl took pity on her, helped with the housework when her mother wasn’t looking, and even checked her mother when the scurrility went too far. The youngest also helped in her own enlightened way, hiding Mother’s brushes and mops and dusters in order to be able to ask: ‘Minnie, what are you looking for? I get it for you.’ Even in her own misery, Mother laughed at the baby’s goodwill. But one winter day Joyce came in at one o’clock for his dinner and it wasn’t ready. His wife ordered Mother out of the house. She put off the apron she had been wearing, put on her black straw hat, threw the ragged old coatee over her shoulders – the hat, jacket and skirt were all the possessions she had left in the world – and went out into Mulgrave Road. She saw people stop and stare at her, and realized the extraordinary figure she cut. She ran up a laneway by the North Infirmary and threw the ragged jacket there, but people still continued to look. She ran for shelter to the Dominican Church on the Sand Quay, and prayed.
She knew now that only one hope remained to her, and that a miracle. None of the nuns – not even her favourite, Mother Blessed Margaret – could overrule the Mistress of Studies, and if she went to the orphanage she would be turned away. She knew too many to whom it had happened. The only one who could overrule the Mistress of Studies was Reverend Mother. It was she who had arranged for my grandmother’s funeral. But lay sisters, not Reverend Mothers, answer convent door bells, and from one o’clock until darkness fell Mother waited in the church, most of the time on her knees, praying for a miracle to happen. She had decided that if it didn’t she would return to the river and drown herself. It was only when she was telling me about this period of her life that I ever heard her use such an expression in any matter that concerned herself, for not only did she believe suicide was wrong, she thought it demonstrative, and she was almost fiercely undemonstrative in grief or pain. Nor, when she talked of that afternoon, as an old woman, did she exaggerate it. Father and I, with our deep streak of melancholia, would have added something to it that, by making it more dramatic, would also have made it less terrible. It is an awful moment when gaiety dies in those who have no other hold on life.
On the dark, stepped pathway up to the convent, she met two ladies who were coming away from it, chattering, and paid no heed to them. She went up the steps to the front door and rang, and immediately the door opened and Reverend Mother stood inside. In sheer relief, Mother broke down and began to sob out her story. Reverend Mother did not recognize her at first; then something seemed to strike her. ‘Aren’t you the girl we told to come back from that terrible house?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Mother.
‘And why didn’t you come?’
‘I had no clothes. I was ashamed.’
‘It’s strange I should have answered the door,’ said Reverend Mother. ‘I was just seeing off some friends, and something kept me here thinking. I was just walking up and down the corridor.’ Clearly, she was aware of the coincidence, but Mother knew it was something more.
She brought Mother into her own parlour, sat her before the fire to warm herself, and rang the bell for the Mistress of Studies.
‘Minnie O’Connor has come back from that terrible house to stay,’ she said quietly, and then as the Mistress of Studies burst into a stream of abuse she added: ‘Don’t scold, Mother!’
Turning to Mother, the Mistress of Studies cried: ‘If you’re in that state, you can go to the workhouse. You will not stay here!’
‘She is not in that state, and she will stay here,’ Reverend Mother said firmly, and that night, for the first time in years, Mother had enough to eat, and bathed, and slept in a clean bed.
She never made much of her own misery. Other girls, as she said, had had a worse time. But she never ceased to speak of what happened as a miracle and, in the way of those to whom miracles occur, never by so much as a harsh word attempted to blame the Mistress of Studies. Not that she did not realize that for the future she must be on her guard. I feel sure it was significant that when, a week later, the Mistress of Studies found her another nice home, in a public house off Blarney Lane that was a lodging house for cattle dealers, Mother, without even unpacking her bag, returned to the convent and told the Mistress of Studies that it was not a suitable place for a young woman. It was also significant that, a few days later, the Mistress of Studies was replaced by Mother’s great friend, Mother Blessed Margaret, whom I knew and loved when she was an old lady. Old or young, she, like Reverend Mother, was a lady.
4
Mother Blessed Margaret’s way with the girls was to say: ‘There is a situation free in the Xs’ I think you might try it and see what you think of it.’ So Mother took a situation with the Stewarts, and after sticking it for six months did not think much of it. Mr Stewart came from the North of Ireland, and was a tight-fisted, small, dark, dingy man. Every morning he ground and prepared his own coffee on the landing. His wife was very tall, thin, ailing, devout and fussy. There were two daughters. Kathleen, the eldest, took after her father; Nan was small, with frizzy hair and a good-natured friendly manner, and was forever singing Methodist hymns. Mrs Stewart, as Mother described her, had a lot in common with Trollope’s Mrs Proudie. Once when a girl called Ethel Richards was staying with them, Kathleen and Nan chaffed her about her young man.
‘Do tell us what his name is!’ one of the girls cried.
‘Oh!’ Ethel said ecstatically. ‘That name above all other names!’
At this, Mrs Stewart sat up in her chair, red with horror and indignation.
‘Ethel!’ she cried. ‘Unsay those words!’
Mrs Proudie could scarcely have phrased it better. But for Mother it was too like the dingy atmosphere of the Bowens’ house. Then Mother Blessed Margaret got her the job that for eight years was to provide her with a real home, and for the rest of her days with memories that I can only describe as enchanted. It was in a house whose gardens reached to the convent wall, so that Mother could talk to the nuns across it, and it was occupied by a butter-and-egg merchant named Barry and his unmarried sister, Alice. I do not think life can ever have been as good anywhere as it seemed to Mother there, but for the orphan girl who had never asked anything but that people should value her, it was happiness enough. Ned Barry was a man of forty, tall and fat, with a hook nose and high colour. His main weakness was vanity, but he was the kindest of men and the gayest, and she loved gaiety even more than she loved kindness. When she told me about him, later in life, I did not guess what now seems so obvious – that she was very much in love with him – nor did I wonder, as I now find myself doing, whether he was not just a little attracted by her, She admitted that he had been ‘flighty’ with her, and she was not the sort of woman who admitted, or permitted ‘flightiness’.
He gave great stag parties, and after them the men had to be carried up to bed, and Mother brought them their breakfast of whiskey and soda in the morning, while their wives sat in the hall waiting for them to get up. There was a piano in Barry’s bedroom, and sometimes the party was resumed there by men in their nightshirts who played the piano and danced hornpipes by the hour. To judge by Mother’s accounts, all the men were unbelievably good, brave and generous, and often there would be as much as twenty-five shillings in tips on the hall table in the morning. Twenty-five shillings was big money for a poor girl who up to the age of eighteen had had no wages at all, and she saved it, though I suspect my Uncle Tim, who was now an apprentice in a cobbler’s shop in Barrack Street, lightened it considerably.
One day he called to the house to ask for money and to say goodbye. That night he stowed away on a cattle boat, was discovered and brought before the captain, and then put ashore in an English port. He tramped across England to Colchester, where he enlisted, and Mother did not see him again for some years till Alice came to her in great distress and said: ‘Minnie, there are two soldiers here, asking for you, and I’m afraid they’ll run away with Towser.’ But when Alice discovered that one of them was Mother’s b
rother, she set to making supper with her and produced a bottle of her brother’s whiskey.
She was like that, a magnificent woman with a great head of golden hair, and she had all her brother’s good nature. From the beginning the two girls were never mistress and maid. Alice had had a succession of servants who were drunkards or thieves, and was glad of Mother, and Mother had had a succession of heartless mistresses, and was grateful for one who treated her as a friend. Alice confided her love affairs to Mother, and I have no doubt that if Mother had love affairs, she confided them to Alice. Alice had few friends, and she and Mother spent the summer afternoons taking long walks or sitting under a hedge by the river while Alice painted a water colour and Mother read a book. When the two went to town together, people stopped in the street to stare at Alice’s beauty, and Mother was as proud as though it were at her own. But Alice had periods of depression that sometimes lasted for a whole week, and all that time she did not speak, and after the first few months Mother, believing that Alice was going insane, gave notice. Alice apologized, and Mother became even more devoted to her than she already was to her brother. I can answer for their mutual affection, because by a curious coincidence I was able to bring them together again when they were elderly women, and they rattled on delightedly like two schoolgirls who had not met for a whole vacation.
An Only Child AND My Father's Son Page 7