An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  Go where glory waits thee,

  But, while fame elates thee,

  Oh! Still remember me.

  When the praise thou meetest

  To thine ear is sweetest,

  Oh! then remember me.

  But often it was misery to return from the heights, and I shuddered at the difference between the two worlds, the world in my head and the world that really existed. The fever in my blood would drive me out of the kitchen, where I had been reading or singing Moore’s Melodies to the club-like atmosphere of the pool of light outside the shop-window, and everything would go well for a few minutes till I said something wrong or used a word that no one understood, and then the whole group jeered me, and called me ‘Molly’ (our word for ‘sissy’) and later ‘Foureyes’, and I realized that once again I had been talking the language of the heights, which the others did not speak, and that they thought me mad. Sometimes I didn’t know but that I was mad.

  The trouble was that I was always a little bit of what I had picked up from book or song or picture or glimpse of some different sort of life, always half in and half out of the world of reality, like Moses descending the mountain or a dreamer waking. Once I had read about Robin Hood, I had to make myself a bow out of a bamboo curtain rod and practise archery in the Square. Going along the street, remembering Chopin’s Funeral March, I was never just a small boy remembering a piece of music; I was, like any other imaginative boy, everything from the corpse to the brass band and the firing party. When I induced a couple of younger boys to assist me at cricket and stood with a homemade bat before a wicket chalked on a wall, I was always the Dark Horse of the school, emerging to save its honour when all seemed lost, and I even stood my ground when a policeman came stalking towards us, and the ‘school’ took to its heels round the nearest corner.

  ‘What do you mean playing ball on the public street?’ the policeman asked angrily.

  ‘Excuse me, this is not a public street,’ I replied firmly. ‘This square is private property.’

  That day the bobby was so stunned at being cheeked by a small spectacled boy with an imitation bat that I got away with it, but most of the time I didn’t get away with it. I got in trouble for being cheeky when I was only acting out a part and was called a liar when I was still half in, half out of the dream and only telling the truth as best I could.

  It was still worse when I interfered to prevent what I thought an injustice. This was more than mere imitation of the head boy of the school, more even than the gentle nostalgic sentiment of Moore applied to a half-barbarous society – it was the natural reaction of a mother’s boy who knew what suffering and injustice really were, but it was more dangerous, because the one thing a Sir Galahad needs is a more than theoretical knowledge of the Noble Art of Self-Defence. Sometimes surprise was enough, as it was sometimes enough for Minnie Connolly when she bawled at a brutal carter, but often it was not, and before ever I got in the deadly straight left I had developed from shadow boxing before the mirror, I got a knee in the groin or a kick in the shin or had my glasses knocked off, and went home, weeping and determined that for the future I would carry a Chinese dagger, preferably poisoned.

  And yet I could not help brooding on injustice, and making a fool of myself about it. I must have been several years older when I heard that a young fellow I knew – a wild, handsome boy whose father beat him savagely – had run away from home and was being searched for by the police. The story was told in whispers. He would be picked up and sent to a reformatory. That evening I found him myself, lurking in an alleyway, his long face dirty with tears, and tried to make him come home with me. He wouldn’t, and I could not leave him there like that, lonely and lost and crying. I made it clear that I would stay with him, and at last he agreed to return home if I went with him and pleaded for him. When I knocked at the door he stood against the wall, his hands in his pockets and his head bent. His elder sister opened the door, and I made my little speech, and she promised to see that he wasn’t punished. Then I went home in a glow of self-righteousness. feeling that I had saved him from the fate I had always dreaded myself. I felt sure he would be grateful, and that from this out we would be good friends, but it didn’t happen like that at all. When we met again he would not look at me; instead, he turned away with a sneer, and I knew his father had beaten him again, and that it was all my fault. As a protector of the weak, I was never worth a damn.

  11

  Christmas was always the worst time of the year for me, though it began well, weeks before Christmas itself, with the Christmas numbers. Normally I read only boys’ weeklies, but at this time of year all papers, juvenile and adult, seemed equally desirable, as though the general magic of the season transcended the particular magic of any one paper. School stories, detective stories and adventure stories all emerged into one great Christmas story.

  Christmas numbers were, of course, double numbers; their pale-green and red covers suddenly bloomed into glossy colours, with borders of red-berried holly. Even their titles dripped with snow. As for the pictures within, they showed roads under snow, and old houses under snow, with diamond-paned windows that were brilliant in the darkness. I never knew what magic there was in snow for me because in Ireland we rarely saw it for more than two or three days in the year, and that was usually in the late spring. In real life it meant little to me except that Father – who was always trying to make a manly boy of me as he believed himself to have been at my age – made me wash my face and hands in it to avert chilblains. I think its magic in the Christmas numbers depended on the contrast between it and the Christmas candles, the holly branches with the red berries, the log fires, and the gleaming windows. It was the contrast between light and dark, life and death; the cold and darkness that reigned when Life came into the world. Going about her work, Mother would suddenly break into song:

  Natum videte

  Regem angelorum…

  and I would join in. It was the season of imagination. My trouble was that I already had more than my share of imagination.

  Then there were no more Christmas numbers, but I managed to preserve the spirit of them, sitting at my table with pencil and paper, trying to draw Christmas scenes of my own – dark skies and walls, bright snow and windows. When I was older and could trace figures, these turned into the figures of the manger scene, cut out and mounted on cardboard to make a proper crib.

  Christmas Eve was the culmination of this season, the day when the promise of the Christmas numbers should be fulfilled. The shops already had their green and red streamers, and in the morning Mother decorated the house with holly and ivy. Much as I longed for it, we never had red-berried holly, which cost more. The Christmas candle, two feet high and a couple of inches thick, was set in a jam crock, wrapped in coloured paper, and twined about with holly. Everything was ready for the feast. For a lot of the day I leaned against the front door or wandered slowly down the road to the corner, trying to appear careless and indifferent so that no one should know I was really waiting for the postman. Most of the Christmas mail we got came on Christmas Eve, and though I don’t think I ever got a present through the post, that did not in the least diminish my expectations of one. Whatever experience might have taught me, the Christmas numbers taught differently.

  Father had a half-day on Christmas Eve, and came home at noon with his week’s pay in his pocket – that is, when he got home at all. Mother and I knew well how easily he was led astray by out-of-works who waited at the street corners for men in regular jobs, knowing that on Christmas Eve no one could refuse them a pint. But I never gave that aspect of it much thought. It wasn’t for anything so commonplace as Father’s weekly pay that I was waiting. I even ignored the fact that when he did come in, there was usually an argument and sometimes a quarrel. At ordinary times when he did not give Mother enough to pay the bills, she took it with resignation, and if there was a row it was he who provoked it by asking: ‘Well, isn’t that enough for you?’ But at Christmas she would fight and fight despe
rately. One Christmas Eve he came home and handed her the housekeeping money with a complacent air, and she looked at the coins in her hand and went white. ‘Lord God, what am I to do with that?’ I heard her whisper despairingly, and I listened in terror because she never invoked the name of God. Father suddenly blew up into the fury he had been cooking up all the way home – a poor, hard-working man deprived of his little bit of pleasure at Christmas-time because of an extravagant wife and child. ‘Well, what do you want it for?’ he snarled. ‘What do I want it for?’ she asked distractedly, and went through her shopping list, which, God knows, must have been modest enough. And then he said something that I did not understand, and I heard her whispering in reply and there was a frenzy in her voice that I would not have believed possible; ‘Do you think I’ll leave him without it on the one day of the year?’

  Years later I suddenly remembered the phrase because of its beauty, and realized that it was I who was to be left without a toy, and on this one day of the year that seemed to her intolerable. And yet I did not allow it to disturb me; I had other expectations, and I was very happy when the pair of us went shopping together, down Blarney Lane, past the shop in the big old house islanded in Goulnaspurra, where they sold the coloured cardboard cribs I coveted, with shepherds and snow, manger and star, and across the bridge to Myles’s Toy Shop on the North Main Street. There in the rainy dusk, jostled by prams and drunken women in shawls, and thrust on one side by barefooted children from the lanes, I stood in wonder, thinking which treasure Santa Claus would bring me from the ends of the earth to show his appreciation of the way I had behaved in the past twelve months. As he was a most superior man, and I a most superior child, I saw no limit to the possibilities of the period, and no reason why Mother should not join in my speculations.

  It was usually dark when we tramped home together, up Wyse’s Hill, from which we saw the whole city lit up beneath us and the trams reflected in the water under Patrick’s Bridge; or later – when we lived in Barrackton, up Summerhill, Mother carrying the few scraps of meat and the plum pudding from Thompson’s and me something from the Penny Bazaar. We had been out a long time, and I was full of expectations of what the postman might have brought in the meantime. Even when he hadn’t brought anything, I didn’t allow myself to be upset, for I knew that the poor postmen were dreadfully overworked at this time of year. And even if he didn’t come later, there was always the final Christmas-morning delivery. I was an optimistic child, and the holly over the mirror in the kitchen and the red paper in the lighted window of the huxter shop across the street assured me that the Christmas numbers were right and anything might happen.

  There were lesser pleasures to look forward to, like the lighting of the Christmas candle and the cutting of the Christmas cake. As the youngest of the household I had the job of lighting the candle and saying solemnly: ‘The light of Heaven to our souls on the last day’, and Mother’s principal worry was that before the time came Father might slip out to the pub and spoil the ritual, for it was supposed to be carried out by the oldest and the youngest, and Father, by convention, was the oldest, though in fact, as I later discovered, he was younger than Mother.

  In those days the cake and candle were supposed to be presented by the small shopkeeper from whom we bought the tea, sugar, paraffin oil and so on. We could not afford to shop in big stores where everything was cheaper, because they did not give credit to poor people, and most of the time we lived on credit. But each year our ‘presents’ seemed to grow smaller, and Mother would comment impatiently on the meanness of Miss O’ or Miss Mac in giving us a tiny candle or a stale cake. (When the 1914 War began they stopped giving us the cake.) Mother could never believe that people could be so mean, but, where we were concerned, they seemed to be capable of anything. The lighted candle still left me with two expectations. However late it grew I never ceased to expect the postman’s knock, and even when that failed, there was the certainty that Christmas Morning would set everything right.

  But when I woke on Christmas Morning, I felt the season of imagination slipping away from me and the world of reality breaking in. If all Santa Claus could bring me from the North Pole was something I could have bought in Myles’s Toy Shop for a couple of pence, he seemed to me to be wasting his time. Then the postman came, on his final round before a holiday that already had begun to seem eternal, and either he brought nothing for us, or else he brought the dregs of the Christmas mail, like a Christmas card from somebody who had just got Mother’s card and remembered her existence at the last moment. Often, even this would be in an unsealed envelope and it would upset her for hours. It was strange in a woman to whom a penny was money that an unsealed envelope seemed to her the worst of ill-breeding, equivalent to the small candle or the stale cake – not a simple measure of economy, but plain, unadulterated bad taste.

  Comparing Christmas gifts with other kids didn’t take long or give much satisfaction, and even then the day was overshadowed by the harsh rule that I was not supposed to call at other children’s houses or they at mine. This, Mother said, was the family season, which was all very well for those who had families but death to an only child. It was the end of the season of imagination, and there was no reason to think it would ever come again. Nothing had happened as it happened in the Christmas numbers. There was no snow; no relative had returned from the States with presents for everyone; there was nothing but Christmas Mass and the choir thundering out Natum videte regem angelorum as though they believed it, when any fool could see that things were just going on the same old way. Mother would sigh and say: ‘I never believe it’s really Christmas until I hear the Adeste,’ but if that was all that Christmas meant to her she was welcome to it. Most Christmas days I could have screamed with misery. I argued with Mother that other kids were just as depressed as I was, and dying to see me, but I never remember that she allowed me to stray far from the front door.

  But, bad as Christmas Day was, St Stephen’s Day was terrible. It needed no imagination, only as much as was required to believe that you really had a dead wren on the holly bush you carried from door to door, singing:

  I up with me stick and I gave me a fall,

  And I brought him here to visit ye all.

  Father was very contemptuous, watching this, and took it as another sign of the disappearance of youthful manliness, for in his young days not only did they wash their faces in snow, but on Christmas Day they raised the countryside with big sticks, killing wrens – or droleens, as we called them. Everyone knew that it was the droleen’s chirping that had alerted the Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane and pointed out to them where Christ was concealed, and in Father’s young days they had carried it around with great pomp, all the mummers disguised. It seemed to him positively indecent to ask for money on the strength of a dead wren that you didn’t have. It wasn’t the absence of the wren that worried Mother, even if he was an informer, for she adored birds and supported a whole regiment of them through the winter, but the fear that I would be a nuisance to other women as poor as herself who didn’t have a penny to give the wren boys.

  In the afternoon she and I went to see the cribs in the chapels. (There were none in the parish churches.) She was never strong enough to visit the seven cribs you had to visit to get the special blessing, but we always went to the chapel of the Good Shepherd Convent in Sunday’s Well where she had gone to school. She was very loyal to those she called ‘the old nuns’, the nuns who had been kind to her when she was a child.

  One Christmas Santa Claus brought me a toy engine. As it was the only present I had received, I took it with me to the convent, and played with it on the floor while Mother and ‘the old nuns’ discussed old times and how much nicer girls used to be then. But it was a young nun who brought us in to see the crib. When I saw the Holy Child in the manger I was very distressed, because little as I had, he had nothing at all. For me it was fresh proof of the incompetence of Santa Claus – an elderly man who hadn’t even remembered to give th
e Infant Jesus a toy and who should have been retired long ago. I asked the young nun politely if the Holy Child didn’t like toys, and she replied composedly enough: ‘Oh, he does, but his mother is too poor to afford them.’ That settled it. My mother was poor too, but at Christmas she at least managed to buy me something, even if it was only a box of crayons. I distinctly remember getting into the crib and putting the engine between his outstretched arms. I probably showed him how to wind it as well, because a small baby like that would not be clever enough to know. I remember too the tearful feeling of reckless generosity with which I left him there in the nightly darkness of the chapel, clutching my toy engine to his chest.

  Because somehow I knew even then exactly how that child felt – the utter despondency of realizing that he had been forgotten and that nobody had brought him anything; the longing for the dreary, dreadful holidays to pass till his father got to hell out of the house, and the postman returned again with the promise of better things.

  12

  The principal difficulty about the world in my head was that there seemed to be no connexion at all between the idea of education I formed from the boys’ weeklies and education as it was practised in the schools I knew. There was the boys’ school at St Luke’s, for example, where the headmaster was called Downey, a fierce, red, sweaty bull of a man with a white moustache, a bald head he was for ever wiping with a huge white handkerchief, and a long cane that he flourished joyously. The boys had a song about him that was probably first sung about an Elizabethan schoolmaster, but it fitted him perfectly:

  Tommy is a holy man,

  He goes to Mass on Sunday,

  He prays to God to give him strength

  To slap the boys on Monday.

  This was probably true, because he combined the sanctimoniousness of a reformed pirate with the brutality of a half-witted drill sergeant. With him the cane was never a mere weapon; it was a real extension of his personality, like a musician’s instrument or a ventriloquist’s dummy – something you could imagine his bringing home with him and reaching out for in the middle of the night as a man reaches out for his wife or his bottle. He was a real artist with it, and with his fat, soft, sexual fingers he caressed your hand into the exact position at which a cut would cause the most excruciating pain. He sent the boys out for canes on approval, and tested them carefully, swishing them and peering at them with his small piggy eyes for flaws that would be invisible to anyone else, and when one of them broke in his hand, as happened occasionally when he was flogging some slow child about the bare legs, one glance was enough for him to size up the possibilities of the two pieces so that he could carry on the job with the more formidable one. When, in those odd moments of recollection that afflict the most conscientious of men, he stood at the front door and looked out at the spring sunshine with a puzzled frown, as though wondering how it had got out and what it was doing there without his permission, he still kept the cane pressed close to his spine, where it continued to wave gently from side to side, as though, like a dog’s tail, it had a life of its own. Sunshine, it seemed to say, wouldn’t last long if only Tommy could get at it.