An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  Frequently, I carried a boys’ paper in my satchel as a sort of promise of better things, and Downey watched me closely because he knew my weakness for glancing at it under my desk, as a man in mortal agony will glance at a crucifix. Once, he caught me with a paper called The Scout and held it up before the class with a roar of glee. ‘Ho! ho! ho!’ he chortled. ‘Look who we have here! Look at our young scout! We’ll soon knock the scouting out of him… Hold out your hand, you little puppy!’ I think he took more delight in catching us out than in beating us, because his stupidity was even greater than his brutality, if that was possible, and he seemed to regard all small boys as criminals with minds of extraordinary complexity and cunning, and greeted each new discovery of a plot with a sort of Te Deum of ‘Ho! ho! ho’s’, like a dictator who has just cracked a fresh liberal conspiracy.

  The religious instruction never fell below the high standard of secular instruction set by Downey. We were prepared for our First Communion by a well-to-do old lady on Summerhill, who wore a black bonnet and cloak such as my grandmother wore on state occasions, and who was welcomed by Downey with the sugary amiability he otherwise reserved for his boss, the parish priest. She came to the school with a candle and a box of matches, stuck the candle on the desk before her and lit it. Then she put a half-crown beside the candle, and, when we had watched these fascinating preparations long enough, offered to give the half-crown to any small boy who would hold one finger – mind, only one finger! – in the candle flame for five minutes. Then, having studied us carefully, apparently waiting for offers, she cocked her head and said sharply: ‘And yet you’ll risk an eternity of hell when you won’t even put your finger in the candle flame for five minutes to earn half a crown!’

  I think at any time I would cheerfully have risked an eternity of hell sooner than spend a day in that school, and one of the few painful recollections I have of Mother is the morning she tried to pull me out from under the table to make me go to school, and I pulled the table along with me. On the other hand, when the impersonal brutality of doctor and dentist (there were no painless extractions for me) left me free, it was heaven to stand at the foot of Gardiner’s Hill, sucking a sweet, and listen to the chant of the other victims roaring the multiplication table on the first three notes of the scale, as though at any moment they might burst into ‘Yankee Doodle’, and catch a glimpse of Downey shooting past the front door, brandishing his cane. It enabled even a born Sir Galahad like myself to understand how, through all eternity, the blessed can contemplate the sufferings of the damned with no diminution of their own ecstasy. Anyone who was lucky enough to get out of that inferno, even for a day, had no time to spare for the sufferings of others.

  Beside Downey, the assistants were all shadowy figures, like the kindly teacher we unkindly called ‘Tom Louse’ who taught us Moore’s lovely song To Music, with its promise that when we grew up and life became harder, we would welcome such strains as these. In that atmosphere it made the future sound very unpromising. But one day an assistant came who made an immediate impression on my imagination. He was a small man with a lame leg who trailed slowly and painfully about the classrooms, though whenever he wanted to, he seemed to glide round on skates and had a violent temper that sent the blood rushing to his head. In spite of his affliction, he was like that, light and spare and clean. He had a small, round head and a round face with a baby complexion on which a small, dark moustache and the shadow of a beard looked as inappropriate as they would have done on a small boy. His eyes were strange, because one eyebrow descended till it almost closed the eye, and the other mounted till it made the eye seem to expand. Afterwards, when I saw him do it with landscapes, I decided it was probably only a painter’s trick of focusing a picture. His voice was the queerest part of him, because it had practically no modulation: each syllable emerged, harshly articulated and defined, with no perceptible variation of pitch, as though it were being cut off with a bacon slecer; and when he raised his voice, he raised his head as well, and pulled in his lower lip till the chin seemed to sag. That too someone explained to me later as a device for curing himself of a bad stammer, and it sounds probable enough, for though I did not realize it until later, the most striking thing about the Daniel Corkery of those years was his self-control.

  One afternoon, at three o’clock, when we should have been going home, he kept us in, wrote a few words in a mysterious script on the top of the blackboard, and went on to give us our first lesson in what he called in his monosyllabic articulation ‘Eye Rish’, a subject I had never heard of, but which seemed to consist of giving unfamiliar names to familiar objects. With my life-long weakness for interesting myself in matters that are no concern of mine, I noticed that he never referred once to the words on top of the blackboard. I waited politely until he was leaving, and then went up to him to ask what they meant. He smiled and said: ‘Waken your courage, Ireland!’ – a most peculiar thing, as it seemed to me, for anyone to write on top of a blackboard, particularly when it didn’t seem to be part of the lesson. He might, of course, have had a reason for not explaining it to the class, because the English were still in control, and neither they nor his other employers, the Roman Catholic Church, would have stood for much of that nonsense.

  In singing class, instead of the Moore songs I loved, he taught us a song by someone called Walter Scott, which struck me as very dull indeed, and must have had a tune as uninteresting as the words, since a melomaniac like myself has forgotten it:

  Breathes there a man with soul so dead

  Who never to himself has said

  ‘This is my own, my native land?’

  But I remember the angry passion with which he chopped off the syllables of the third line, flushing and tossing his small, dark head. I was too young to realize what he was doing – using the standard English texts to promote disaffection in the young, right under the nose of the old policeman-schoolmaster, Downey, and there must have even been moments when Downey suspected it, for though he was perceptibly more deferential to Corkery than to the other assistants, he sometimes stood and looked after him with a stunned air.

  Still, wonders continued to occur. In the smaller classroom Corkery removed some charts of an informative kind and replaced them by two brightly coloured pictures that immediately engaged my roving attention. I had a passion for tracing and copying illustrations from magazines and books I had borrowed, which was the next best thing to owning the books myself, and it made me regard myself as something of an authority on art. I asked Corkery who had painted the pictures, and he smiled and said: ‘I did’, as though he did not expect me to believe him. Really, they merely confirmed my favourable view of his abilities. They weren’t very good pictures, not the sort that would get into the Boy’s Own Paper, but they showed promise. One was of a laneway in the Marsh with washing strung from window to window across the dark lane, and in the background a misty white tower that he said was Shandon. It didn’t look like Shandon, and I told him so, but he said that this was the effect of the light. The other picture was much stranger, for it showed an old man facing the wall of a country cottage, playing his fiddle, and a small crowd standing behind him. When I asked why the fiddler was looking at the wall, Corkery explained that it was because he was blind. If my memory of the picture is correct, he had written beneath it twelve lines of verse in the peculiar script he used for Irish. I know that I learned them, as I learned everything, by heart, and though they bore out his explanation of why the fiddler did not face the crowd, it still struck me as a tall story:

  Look at me now!

  My face to the wall,

  Playing music

  To empty pockets.

  I took the poem home for my grandmother to interpret. I had at last discovered some use for that extraordinary and irritating old woman, because it turned out that Irish, not English, was her native language, as it was of several old people in the neighbourhood.

  My grandmother didn’t think much of the poem; she said she knew better one
s herself and wanted to say them for me, but they were too hard, and she contented herself with teaching me my first sentence in Irish – A chailín óg, tabhair dhom póg, agus pósfaidh mé thu (Young girl, give me a kiss and I’ll marry you). No more than Downey’s type of education did this resemble anything I had read or heard of, but I found it considerably more interesting.

  Besides, as will become clear, I am a natural collaborationist; like Dolan’s ass I go a bit of the road with everybody, and I enjoyed having a hero among the hereditary enemy – schoolmasters. I hung on to Corkery’s coat-tails at lunch when he leaned against the jamb of the front door, eating his sandwich; I borrowed Irish books from him that I could not understand, though this never hindered me from having a crack at something, and sometimes I waited for him after school to accompany him home as he butted his way manfully up the cruel hill, sighing, his hat always a little askew, one shoulder thrust forward like a swimmer, and the crippled foot trailing behind him. I imitated the old-fashioned grace with which he lifted his hat and bowed slightly to any woman he recognized; I imitated his extraordinary articulation so carefully that to this day I can render it with what seems to me complete fidelity, and for a time I even imitated his limp. I never loved anyone without imitating him, and having a quite satisfactory mother, I was not particularly attracted to women or girls, but in the absence of a father who answered my needs, I developed fierce passions for middle-aged men, and Corkery was my first and greatest love. ‘Love’ is a word that educationists dislike because it has so many unpleasant associations, but it is a fact that in many children the intellectual and emotional faculties are indissolubly knit, and the one cannot develop without the other. Any intellectual faculty I possessed was now developing like mad.

  It developed so much that at Christmas Corkery – out of his own pocket, I fancy – gave me a prize book called Kings and Vikings by someone called Lorcan O’Byrne, and this, being the only prize I ever received in any walk of life, has impressed itself on my memory. Of course, from Corkery’s point of view, it was probably further subversive action, though I didn’t realize this.

  The headaches that had plagued me for a year were explained when a doctor sent me to have my eyes tested, and I had to wear black glasses and stop going to school for months. When I resumed, it was not at St Patrick’s but the North Monastery, run by the Christian Brothers – I cannot think why unless it meant that I should be out of Corkery’s class and back in Downey’s. Mother, I suspect, may have been influenced by her friendship with Mrs Busteed, whom she met regularly at Mass, for her brilliant son, who had gone to the North Monastery, had had his picture in the paper and was now at the University, and it would never have occurred to Mother that what had worked for him would not work for me.

  It was very inconvenient, because it was miles from home, and on rainy days I reached school drenched and cold. The road led past the military barrack on the brow of the hill and then down a dirt track called Fever Hospital Hill to the Brewery, before climbing again through slums to the top of another hill. But the view from Fever Hospital Hill was astonishing, and often delayed me when I was already late. The cathedral tower and Shandon steeple, all limestone and blue sandstone, soared off the edge of the opposite hill, and the hillside, terraced to the top with slums, stood so steep that I could see every lane in it, and when the light moved across it on a spring day the whole hillside seemed to sway like a field of corn, and sometimes when there was no wind to stir the clouds, I could hear it murmuring to itself like a hive of bees.

  I was happy enough for the first few months in a classroom where there was a statue of the Blessed Virgin (religious images were not allowed in the national schools), and when the best of the English compositions were shown along the partition in the classroom mine were often among them. But the monks had already made up their minds that I would never be a passer of examinations and never have my picture in the Cork Examiner, as John Busteed had. I was hurt when I was rejected from the singing class because of my defective ear because I knew perfectly well that my ear was not defective. Over-enthusiastic, perhaps – it still is, since my temperament makes me rush at things I like without paying too much attention to intervals and time – but not defective. And yet I had to sit there, listening to songs I loved without being allowed to join in them. It was very hard.

  However, I was busy in other fields. The First World War had broken out; Father was called up, leaving comparative peace in the home, though to make up for that my grandfather had died and my grandmother had come to live with us. Inflamed with emotion by the supposed atrocities of the Germans against the Belgians, I had engaged in beating them myself in my own small way. On the kitchen wall I had pinned a map of the Western Front into which I stuck flags to show the position of the two armies, and I conducted brilliant campaigns of my own that beat the Germans to their knees in twenty-four hours. Father was also conducting a campaign, the details of which eluded me till later, but it was much more practical than mine. He loved pensions, and as there was no chance of a service pension out of the War, he was quietly building up a case history of rheumatic pains that would get him a disability pension when the War came to an end. Not a very large pension; you can’t do much with occasional rheumatism, and anything more might have caused him to be sent home, but every little helps.

  Father, I am certain, really enjoyed the War in the way that a middle-aged man enjoys a second marriage – as a renewal of youth. Though he liked his brief and dangerous reunions with his family, he was an old soldier among a whole army of young ones; he could make himself comfortable where they died of misery, and he enjoyed his opportunities for wrangling, and never came home without his pockets and kit-bag filled with bits of equipment that would all come in useful if he kept them for seven years. But Mother and I had never been happier. For the first time since I knew her, she had a regular allowance, and I had regular pocket money which I divided up between boys’ weeklies and illustrated papers that dealt with the story of the War. I was interested in the War, not only because Father was engaged in it, but because there were several Belgian kids in my class at school who had been driven from their homes by the Germans. They lived in the big Montenotte house of the Countess Murphy. The Countess had been one of my big disappointments. Her companion was another of the orphans, called Kate Gaynor, but Kate’s family had apparently been well-to-do, and she and her sister had gone to the Orphanage as paying pupils. They were brought up a little apart from the other orphans and allowed to continue their piano lessons. Kate was a stiff, pompous woman with a cutting tongue, and she and Mother disagreed – in so far as Mother disagreed with anybody – about the Orphanage. Nothing would ever have induced Mother to say a word, against it, but Kate said bitterly that if she had her way all the orphanages in the world would be torn to the ground because they ‘robbed a child of natural affections’. What she meant by that, I realized later, was that in middle age it left her nobody to love but an ageing, cranky woman.

  The Countess (the title was a Papal one, for the Count, who, I think, was a brewer, had written a defence of Catholicism that was always on view on the drawing-room table) had been very impressed by my good manners and piety, and promised to provide for my education as a priest. For a little while this made Mother and myself almost insane with happiness. But one Christmas either the Countess or Kate gave me a painting book and a box of paints, and, never having had paints to play with before, I had a beautiful time with them. When next Kate visited us and inspected the painting book, she asked in a cold, disgusted voice where I had seen green cows. Mother and I were equally mortified at my lack of observation, and when the Countess died, having failed to provide for my education as a priest, I was left with the guilty feeling that I had forever forfeited my hope of advancement by failing to notice that cows were not green.

  And now the Countess was dead, and the beautiful house on Montenotte was a hostel for Belgian refugees, and whenever we knocked on her door Kate called out wearily ‘Entrez’
. She found the refugees disgusting, but I was devoted to them, first because they had been driven from their homes by the beastly Germans like the Holy Family by Herod, and second, because they spoke a different language. In the North Monastery we said our prayers in Irish, a language I had begun to lose interest in because it was obviously useless in the modern world. The Belgians said theirs in Flemish, and I was not happy till I could do the same. For some time after that I never used any other language for my night and morning prayers. The monks were wrong in thinking me a complete fool: I was really a serious student, but it was always of something that could be of no earthly use to me; which is probably why they summoned Mother to the school and explained to her that I would never be able to pass the regular Intermediate examinations, and put me into the Trades School, where I could pick up something more suitable to my station in life than Flemish. It was a blow to both of us, because, though it closed the doors of the University on me, it did not open the door of the trades. Entry to these was regulated by their own unions.