For six months or so after we came to Harrington’s Square Mother looked after old Ellen, brought her breakfast in the morning or tea in the evening, collected her old-age pension from the post office at St Luke’s, and did whatever shopping the old woman wanted done. It wasn’t much, God knows, for her house was even dirtier and barer than Grandmother’s, but Mother was full of pity for her, as she was for anyone who was old or helpless or sick. Her friend, Minnie Connolly, from the other side of the square pursed her lips and shook her head over it. ‘I only hope she doesn’t repay you the way she repaid others, Mrs Donovan,’ she said. By ‘others,’ of course, she meant herself.
And, sure enough, one day when I followed my ball into Ellen’s front garden, she was waiting for me behind the front door with a stick, and chased me, screaming and cursing. The honeymoon with humanity was over. Ellen had tolerated Mother rather longer than she had tolerated other specimens of the human race, but her patience could not be expected to last for ever. She even accused Mother of stealing her old-age pension! ‘What did I tell you, Mrs Donovan?’ asked Minnie. ‘The woman is bad.’
She was bad, but that wasn’t the worst feature of her character. She had a little house to herself, and usually there was a printed notice in the front window saying ‘Rooms to Let’. The people she rented the rooms to were not old women of her own age but young married couples. This was in the days before council houses, and the real bait was not so much the accommodation as the prospect of permanence. The young couples, coming up the road hand in hand, knew that the old woman, leaning on her gate post, could only have a short while to live and that whoever was there when she died could not be dispossessed. And potentially it was such a nice home, with a tiny garden in front where you could grow flowers, a sitting room from which you could see everyone going by, and a back yard and toilet to yourself. Lust and hunger have no greater grip on human beings than the need for a home.
Now, there was something in the old woman that made her want young people in her house, but there was also a fiendish possessiveness and jealousy that made her realize clearly what they wanted, and no sooner had they settled in than she set herself frantically to getting rid of them. She had no scruples about what a poor, friendless old lady in her position might or might not do. First, she would lock them out at night; then she would throw away the bit of food they might have left in the kitchen; then she would scare the child from going to the back yard. If that didn’t shift them, she took them to court and accused them of keeping a ‘bad’ house or of stealing her money. Like all power maniacs, she was mad about the law, and had considerable skill in taking in magistrates. All she had to do was to put her hand to her ear when they asked her a question and give them a witty reply. Her tenants could rarely afford a lawyer, and they probably knew that even if they won, she would continue to harass them in ways no law could control, so after dark one night you would see a donkey cart outside her gate, a small boy driving, and no light but the butt of a candle; and, taking their handful of possessions, the young people would slink back to whatever slum they had emerged from. By the time the last couple came we knew the pattern well.
8
But the most extraordinary of the neighbours was Minnie Connolly, who lived with her brother and mother, and later with her brother and his wife in the house across the square. She was a laundress, too, like her mother, and had once been maid to an old Quaker family, and while the older generation of the family lived, they were, as Minnie described it, ‘good to her’, meaning that they sent her an occasional postal order, which, with whatever else she earned, just kept her this side of starvation. As I knew myself, the line was often indeterminate. When Mother was at work, Minnie was the only person I would stay with, and I often sat for hours in the steaming little attic where she did her laundry, and turned over the pages of the religious books of which she had a small library. I remember with particular vividness a manuscript prayer book of which the binding had been removed. It was written in an exquisite hand – some Catholic of a hundred or so years before who had not been able to afford a printed book, or despised those he knew, had written it for his own pleasure. I confided all my ambitions to Minnie, who listened with her almost toothless mouth primmed up in amusement and replied ironically in phrases like: ‘Well, you don’t tell me so!’
Minnie was a regular visitor to our house, and her favourite topic was priests. ‘Mrs Donovan,’ she would say, pulling her old shawl round her as she sat on a kitchen chair in the middle of the floor, ‘if you were at eleven o’clock Mass yesterday, you’d never do another day’s good.’ ‘Who was it?’ Mother would ask, knowing that there was a good story coming. ‘Was it Father Tierney?’ ‘Wisha, who else, woman?’ Minnie would cry. ‘Himself and his ghosts!’ Tierney, a white-haired, unctuous old man who saw ghosts everywhere, was more a source of interest than of edification to Minnie – not that she didn’t believe in ghosts or had not had strange experiences herself, but she pooh-poohed Tierney’s, and when he died, having failed to leave his money back to the Church, and no Month’s Mind was said for him, it was as juicy a bit of gossip to her as if he had been found dead in the arms of one of the Holy Women. Some young English Protestant who wanted to marry a local girl had gone to Tierney for instruction, but Tierney had refused to listen to his explanations and ordered him to kneel down. The young man had told Minnie, and she did an excellent imitation of the old priest climbing a ladder to take down a large book and muttering incantations over the unfortunate boy before sending him away as wise as he had come. Later, when an attempt was made locally to get Tierney beatified, and bits of his underpants were being distributed as miraculous relics, she was savagely sarcastic about it all.
She also did excellent imitations of Sexton, the Dean in St Patrick’s Church, who gave extraordinary sermons in a thick Cork accent. Sexton, a big, rough man, did not like talking about matters of doctrine; he preferred to take his text from a new movie or a newspaper, and he leaned over the edge of the pulpit, bawling away in the voice of a market woman. ‘Dearly beloved brethren,’ he cried, ‘ye all saw it in the paper; the advertisement for the new film at the Coliseum. Ye all saw that it was supposed to be “hot stuff”, and there was nothing in it at all. That is what I call deceiving the public.’ I have a vivid recollection of one of his sermons when an episcopal ordinance compelled him to preach on the Commandments, Sunday by Sunday. He was discussing the Second Commandment, and obviously in agony, because he felt that the Commandments were all out of date and should be scrapped. ‘Dearly beloved brethren,’ he began, ‘of course we’re not supposed to take that seriously. Sure, we all take the Lord’s name in vain. I do it myself. If I lose my temper I say “Ah, God damn it!” There’s no harm in that at all. What the Commandment means, dearly beloved brethren, is that we shouldn’t be using the Holy Name in public, the way a lot of people do. You can’t go along King Street on Saturday night without hearing someone using the Holy Name. That’s very bad. At the same time, there isn’t any harm in that either. Sure, half the time people don’t be thinking of what they’re saying. But, dearly beloved brethren, if you do use it, don’t use it in front of children. A child’s mind is a delicate thing. A child’s mind is like that marble pillar there (slapping the column beside him). It’s smooth, and it doesn’t hold dust nor dirt. One rub of a duster is all you need to clean that marble. A child’s mind is like marble. Don’t roughen it.’ I thought it the best sermon I had ever heard, and I liked Sexton and his rough-neck oratory, but neither Mother nor Minnie could tolerate it. Minnie did a first-class imitation of him, preaching on the text that ‘Not a bird shall fall’ and announcing in scandalized tones that it was ‘all nonsense – my goodness, they’re falling by thousands all over the world every minute’. She had her crow over Sexton as well, when an impostor who called himself the ‘Crown Prince of Abyssinia’ served his Mass and reviewed the troops before the police caught up on him.
After religion – a long way after religion – she loved nov
elettes, and these she brought to Mother and discussed them as though they were police reports. I don’t think it ever once crossed her mind – which in some ways was so profound – that they might not be literally true. ‘Ah, woman,’ she would cry impatiently with a hasty flick of her skinny arm, ‘sure he was a fool to have anything to do with a girl like that. Do you mean to tell me that he couldn’t see for himself the sort of girl she was?’ I fancy that she had a great interest in the passions because she had quite an attachment to the Bad Girl of the neighbourhood and though she would anyway have tried to have an influence for good on the girl and protect her from the Holy Women, she seemed to love hearing about married men and jealous wives and officers from the barrack. She would stride hastily into our kitchen, clutching the shawl or old coat about her as though she were cold, her head bowed, but with a little smile on her thick negroid lips. ‘Wisha, wait till you hear what’s after happening, ma’am,’ she would cry modestly. ‘You’ll never be the better of it.’ (For some reason, that and ‘You’ll never do a day’s good’ were her blurbs for the dust jacket of some new romance.) Then, for an hour or more you got the whole story as if it were a novelette. ‘But if he did not feel that way towards her, Mrs Donovan,’ she would cry dramatically, letting her hand fall on Mother’s knee while she looked up from under her thick brows with a penetrating glance, ‘why did he use those particular words?’
Minnie had an extraordinarily striking face, with a high forehead, high cheekbones and sunken, dreaming eyes, thick poet’s lips and a toothless mouth. She shuffled hastily about the locality in some foot-gear that never seemed to fit, clutching her ragged old coat across her breast and with her head well down till she recognized someone she liked, and then it would be suddenly raised to reveal the most enchanting smile in the world. I do not think I am exaggerating. Sometimes it comes before me in the early hours of the morning, and it seems as though all the suffering and delight of humanity were in that one strange smile. Minnie had spent some time in the Big House, as she euphemistically called the Lunatic Asylum, and someone once told me that while she was there she wept almost without ceasing. The doctors called it acute melancholia, but what does melancholia mean, and what do the majority of doctors know about people of Minnie’s quality? Whatever it was, it had left no trace on her character, except when she saw suffering inflicted on an animal, and then she seemed to go off her head; screamed in the middle of the street and stamped off to complain to the police or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They, of course, knew that she was only an old maid and had spent some time in the Lunatic Asylum and so they paid little heed to her.
Yet that woman who had been in the asylum was one of the sanest women I have ever met, and probably the finest. Sometimes when I think of her I seem to see her holding a starving dog or a poisoned cat, talking to it gently, her whole face lit up, and I realize how vulgar are all the pictures we see of the Good Shepherd. Wherever there was sickness or death, there would come the knock, and Minnie would be outside the door in her ragged old coat, asking in her expressionless voice: ‘Is there anything I can do for you, ma’am?’, ready to scrub or cook or nurse or pray; to hold the hand of some dying man in hers or to wash his poor dirty body when the life had gone from him. If someone offered her sixpence or a shilling, she was too humble to refuse it, unless it was someone as poor as herself, and then she pushed it away with a smile and said dryly: ‘You’ll be wanting that yourself, ma’am,’ though what she was rejecting might be her own dinner for the day. When I grew up and realized that the woman I had known was a saint I understood something of her demonic pride and her terrible abnegation. At the best of times she must have been a cruelly difficult woman to get on with, for though she and Mother adored one another, and up to the day of Minnie’s death Mother shared whatever few shillings she had with her, there were long spells of not speaking, and Minnie would not glance at the side of the road Mother was on, and Mother was as hurt as a schoolgirl.
As I say, she had a passion for novelettes which she fed to poor Mother, who, though she could never resist a love story, no matter how bad, or deny a tear to suffering virtue, had a natural distinction of taste. I suspect that Minnie had no taste, but she had a fierce, combative masculine intellect, which, if it had been trained, might have made her a formidable logician or philosopher, and she would have no hesitation about telling the Pope himself where he went wrong. What she really enjoyed about a sermon was when a priest made a fool of himself about some matter of doctrine. ‘Heresy, ma’am, plain heresy!’ she would say flatly. ‘St Ignatius Loyola distinctly lays it down.’ I am sure it was she who told Mother that the Church was going to hell with all the vulgarians who were being raised to the altars, and I seem to remember one angry speech of hers on the subject in which she contrasted Teresa of Avila with some modern saint – probably Therèse of Lisieux, who from Minnie’s point of view would be only a stage-struck child. The great Teresa would have had no difficulty at all in placing Minnie Connolly.
9
Gertie, Ellen and Minnie had very different fates. So far as Gertie was concerned, it all happened as in a storybook. One winter night, the Hannibal went down with all hands. Gertie got the lump sum, and as she had always known she would, she left Cork for London to open a superior lodging house. I remember her bouncing with glee and confidence when she came in to say goodbye, and I remember that to my astonishment both my parents seemed sorry to lose her. They too had become used to that flaming parakeet of a woman, and I think they suddenly realized that without her their lives would be poorer and less interesting.
Ellen Farrell’s was different but equally characteristic. One day there arrived at her house a newly married couple, of which the young husband would strike pity into anyone’s heart, he was so guileless and gentle. He was so unsure of himself in the part of husband and father that he talked to kids like myself as equals and called all the other married men ‘Sir’, an example of modesty that made Father his slave for life. He loved coming to his door in shirt sleeves and carrying on conversations with Father and the man in the house at the other side, and in the evenings he dug the little front garden.
Within a few weeks Ellen was on the war-path again. She locked the front door on him, and he got in through the bedroom window. She did it again and he started to break down the front door. By this time Father was beginning to see that his politeness was not obsequiousness and to say approvingly that he was ‘no balk’. When the plants began to root in the front garden, Ellen poured buckets of red-hot cinders on them. He didn’t seem in the least put out. He affected to believe that the plants only needed water and dragged buckets of it from the back yard, spilling each one in the kitchen as though by accident till he flooded the old woman out. She took him to court, but he defended himself, and the magistrate, beginning at last to get suspicious of the bonneted old lady with the amusing tongue, decided in his favour. There was great rejoicing in the neighbourhood. Ellen shouted defiantly as she left the court; ‘The Corkies has me bet at last.’ To the end she remained a loyal Carlow woman.
But it was not in her to admit that she really was defeated. She would remain for weeks in sullen silence, and then remember that when she was dead, the lodgers would be growing flowers in her front garden, and children would be playing about her fireplace, and then she would start to curse them, sullenly and bitterly, leaning on her gate post with her hand to her ear, her grey hair blowing in the wind. The young husband with his sly humour would intercept the occasional letters that reached her and re-address them to ‘The Beautiful Mrs Ellen Farrell,’ or ‘Ellen, the Tinker from Carlow, Cork’.
My memory of her end is uncertain, but I have a strong impression that it was Minnie Connolly who came to look after her when she was dying. It was certainly Minnie who wrote to the woman’s second daughter, who was married to a baker in the French provinces. The hunchback husband and crippled daughter came and sat for hours in the bare kitchen downstairs, waiting for her to speak the wor
d of reconciliation, but she only spat when their presence was mentioned. She was so deaf that her confession could be heard all over the terrace. She still retained her savage humour, and agreed to forgive all her enemies, but made an exception of Parnell’s successor, John Redmond, because, she maintained, she had it on the best authority that he had betrayed Ireland. The Catholic Church is wonderfully tolerant of political vagaries like that, and the exception was allowed to pass. Maybe the priest did not think much of John Redmond himself.
Minnie Connolly is probably astonished if she knows that the solemn little boy who read prayer books in her attic bedroom while she ironed remembers her as a myth, a point in history at which the whole significance of human life seems to be concentrated, rather as Ellen Farrell thought of Parnell. She would be still more astonished at the company she keeps, but what she had in common with Gertie Twomey and Ellen Farrell was that each of them knew exactly where she was going. Ellen was going to hell, or wherever it is people go who think only of themselves. Minnie was going to Heaven, if that is the right name for the place where people go who think only of poisoned cats and starving dogs and dying people. Gertie, of course, was merely going to London.
An Only Child AND My Father's Son Page 10