The English Daughter

by Maggie Wadey

  This is the story of my grandparents’ courtship as their children were told it. I don’t quite understand what was at stake – why John couldn’t live at home with his wife, for instance. Perhaps it was inconceivable that Kate and his mother should live together under the same roof. And though I understand that my grandfather might want to go his own way, to make his own life, it surprises me he’s prepared to do so at the cost of abandoning his mother and his inheritance. By the time of their first child’s birth, the young couple were facing into a century of massive upheavals. But my mother, in telling me the story of her upbringing, didn’t mention – except very glancingly – the great events that formed the turbulent backdrop to her childhood. Like most ordinary people her life was formed by, yet innocent of, the epic flow of history.

  When my mother was ten months old she was set down for safety inside an old rubber tyre. As she sat kicking her fat little legs, turning her own chubby hands under her amazed gaze, all around her the haymaking proceeded. The rhythmical sweeping of scythes came closer and closer until at last, to the older children’s mock-surprise, she was revealed like a baby found under a thorn tree. But for an endless-seeming time before that the baby had been marooned in a world of her own, the others out of sight and out of mind beyond the grass, their voices faint and far-off, just herself inside the circle of tyre in a circle of yellow grass under a circle of sky. Beetles shimmied up the stalks, from time to time a ladybird landed with a little rattle, and filigree spiders ran over the infant’s hot, damp head. The field lay aslant the south-western side of the hill, a wide green lap of bounty at the very centre of the world. The baby considered her toes and smiled.

  The rubber tyre surprised me. ‘What sort of tyre?’ I asked. ‘A car tyre?’ My mother laughed. ‘No, no! There were no cars, or lorries.’ A pause. ‘Some of the old farm vehicles, they had rubber tyres, great big things.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘I don’t think I really remember sitting in the thing,’ she said. ‘But I was told. And then, when Nancy came along, I had to mind her in it while the others worked.’

  Agnes Teresa, the eighth of nine children, was born when the oldest was only eleven years old. Three boys and five girls, with a sixth girl already in the making – a fact known only to the mother. The whole family took part in the hay-harvesting. To Agnes, aged one, this was a blur of meaningless activity, but by the time she was four she would understand every aspect of the harvest and she knew it was about to begin again when, some twilit night in early summer, a little old man turned in off the road to sit on the Kavanagh doorstep. Scholar O’Connor – Schol, as he was known – was regular as the swallows. It was time: his bones told him the dry spell would continue. It took him an eternity to ease off his decomposing boots, groaning and cursing, and releasing an awesome stink.

  Once hot sweet tea and tobacco had done their work, Schol – who could never remember where he’d had his last meal – opened his mouth and out came yard upon yard of the old ballads, ballads that told the fate of the Sons of Usnach, of Conchobar and the beautiful Deirdre, of the four children of Lir who were turned into swans and whose only consolation was that their voices were so sweet there was no music on earth to equal them. To say that Schol had once upon a time committed these poems to memory does the case no justice: the man was made of them, the stuff of them had formed his muscles as much as his mind, he walked and worked to their rhythm. The older children could have cried for boredom. But upstairs in bed Agnes felt a fleeting touch of swan’s wing brush her cheek. She knew that tomorrow the haymaking would begin.

  At noon, Kate Buckley and two of her daughters would go up to the house to make tea and cut squares of bread. Agnes wasn’t big enough yet to help her mother carry the bucket of tea back out to the workers. She could see how it would be – with her so small beside her mother, they’d be all at sixes and sevens and the precious tea would end up spilt. But this was the task she longed for, to put her small hand close to her mother’s large one there on the handle where it had been wound with string so as not to cut into their fingers. Instead, she had to take the bread, crammed into her apron pocket, and as they returned to the field her stomach growled with hunger. She ran in circles round her mother and Bridie, like a dog. After some minutes, her mother said mildly, without looking at her, ‘Whatever that child’s got, I’d like to bottle it.’

  By the time Agnes is seven she understands how everything on the farm lives and dies. She hasn’t been taught to wring a chicken’s neck yet, but she dislikes the noisy, stupid creatures and watches as her mother goes about it: catch it, hold it between your knees, a quick sharp twist – ‘like twisting a firelighter’ – and the neck snaps. Nothing to it. The pigs, who’d given her so much fun when they were sharp-eyed little piglets who screamed when they were tickled, grow fat and spiteful, and are taken for slaughter at the Slatterys’. The Slatterys live on the other side of the hill, out of sight, but not out of earshot. The Kavanagh calves are pulled by whoever happens to be around at the time. Agnes quite enjoys this scary, bloody business that turns like a miracle into milky peace. The job they all hate, painting the sheep with a vile sticky stuff to get rid of parasites – taking special care with the area under the sheep’s’ clinkered tails where the maggots hang in white clusters – is taken strictly in turn by everyone over the age of eight.

  In a large white farmhouse at the bottom of the hill beside Knigh crossroads live the Clearys. They are famous for advertising their surplus hay for sale in the local newspaper. Their name is the first thing Agnes remembers ever seeing in print: CLEARY, on a page beside a picture of ladies’ underwear. And when she’s a little older she puts Rody Cleary down as the most dashing man she could ever imagine, a strong farmer with a watch on a silver chain.

  Sometimes, the figure of a child in a white smock appears over the brow of the hill. This is Annie O’Brien, the carpenter’s daughter, come to collect eggs or milk to tide the family over. Annie’s father is a famously good carpenter, the son of a carpenter who was himself the son of a carpenter; nevertheless he is frequently in the business of waiting, empty-handed, on his money. Agnes likes nothing better than to see Annie receive the Kavanaghs’ bounty. She especially likes to see Annie’s eyes go longingly to the baking board, and then to observe the girl’s gratitude when Mrs Kavanagh gives her a piece of cake. She wishes Annie would ask for butter. Having helped her mother make it, Agnes knows there’s plenty of it, but butter is a luxury the O’Briens can live without and it doesn’t do to owe more than you have to. Agnes thinks of the pork salting in a tub of brine in the outhouse and hopes that when winter comes Mr O’Brien will still be in the business of ‘waiting, empty-handed’ for his money so she can impress Annie with the gift of a slice of luscious shiny fat. Meanwhile, she stands at her mother’s side to watch as Annie goes carefully away, treading as if the jug she carries contains liquid gold. Her figure in the patched white smock dwindles away through the yellow field accompanied by butterflies. The mother explains that butterflies are attracted to the colour white but Mary Rose, her oldest child, says white isn’t a colour at all. Her mother doesn’t reply.

  Once long ago before Agnes was born, Mary Rose had done a terrible thing. She’d picked her little brother Patrick up by one arm and one leg and swung him round, laughing, and she‘d broken his leg against the hearthstone. At first, no one realised the gravity of what had happened. But when the following morning Patrick’s leg was blown up like a purple balloon the parents panicked. Dan was sent racing down to the Clearys’ and Rody Cleary brought the tram cart up with his wife on it for womanly support. They loaded the boy on to it and got him down the hill to the surgery at the blacksmith’s where, two hours later – after one of the Slattery boys had raced into Nenagh on his bicycle looking for him – the doctor arrived. Ever since, Patrick had worn a leg iron, and Mary Rose was the one who had done it. Patrick, her first son, was the mother’s favourite, both before and after the accident. But even that word ‘favourite’ doesn’t do justice
to the power of her feelings. Sometimes, it’s as if Patrick is her only child and the others are foundlings. Even as a boy, Patrick didn’t complain about his leg and it makes no difference to his appetite for hard work.

  Near the Slatterys, in a dark little cottage, lives old Mrs Foley, who has ‘the evil eye’, and Agnes has an idea where she keeps it: in the breast pocket of the man’s jacket she wears. The jacket is pockmarked with burns from the pipe Mrs Foley – known as Mud Foley – makes a habit of putting away whilst it’s still smouldering. She doesn’t put her pipe away to mutter ‘Goodmorning’ or, which is more usual, ‘The Devil take you,’ but only to say her confession to Father O’Brien of whom she has a high opinion, always saying of him, ‘There’s a man who can tell the difference.’ Mary Rose claims that, on the morning she broke Patrick’s leg, she’d seen Mud Foley standing at the edge of Knigh Wood looking towards the house.

  Agnes is very small when she’s given charge of the newest – and the last, another fact known only to the mother – addition to the family, baby Nancy. Nancy has taken Agnes’s place inside the rubber tyre. Sitting at the centre of the cornfield late one August afternoon, Nancy takes it into her head to crawl out and explore the larger world. Her ambition takes her away from the sunlit field and away from the silent harvesters working all around her in a haze of golden dust. When Agnes looks up from her gleaning – a task she’s been employed in for the first time – Nancy is gone. The little girl turns her back on the awful absence and scratches feverishly at the corn-stubble. She looks over her shoulder. No Nancy. She thinks of Mud Foley. She thinks of the little people. The fear is so extreme it hurts and she lets out a wail piercing enough to bring the adults running. The baby can’t be found. Nancy, a placid fat little nine-month-old, has never been known to move before. Has she been bundled up by mistake inside one of the stooks? Is she lying scythed in half under the mown corn? The mother thinks of sibling jealousy, and rabid dogs. She thinks, too, of the paid strangers who’ve come to help, drawn out of the surrounding unpeopled countryside as if by magic at the clatter of the mowing machine. Her eyes run over them, counting. Were there only five, or should it be six? She shields her eyes with one hand and looks towards the wood. It’s nearly an hour before one of the labourers finds the baby tumbled happily into a ditch, her fist full of the cow dung she’s been cramming experimentally into her mouth. The mother darts forward and slaps her baby daughter, then she slaps Agnes, and everything goes back to normal.

  Except that, in Agnes’s mind, the aura of danger always hung over Nancy. Nancy herself didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word.

  Agnes is cautious, sensitive, quick to learn and, like her mother, surprisingly quick-tempered. ‘Surprisingly’ because both mother and daughter move in an aura of calm and reserve, both give the impression – a true one – of delicacy. Disliking her own temper, the mother is determined to stamp it out in the child. Agnes suffers much bitter recrimination and punishment for her lapses – which only strengthens both her reserve and her temper. The most usual punishment is for her to be sent upstairs alone and without her tea.

  The bedroom window looks directly down on to the slate roof of the outhouse where her father and brother Pat store their tools. The door to the shed stands open and from inside Agnes is aware of the little click of stones and hisses of impatience that tell her Cathleen and Nancy are playing fives without her. If she presses her face to the glass and squints to one side she can see into the yard. There are coals on the lid of the bread-oven but her mother isn’t there, only the poultry pecking and tiptoeing about. Mrs Kavanagh keeps duck, geese and chicken – no turkey because she believes them troublesome to rear in the Irish climate – and, as pets, guinea fowl. When Agnes is let free she means to offload her temper in chasing those idiotic guinea fowl, sending them scattering, shrieking and dropping their glossy feathers in their own dirt.

  A movement takes Agnes’s eyes. Turning the other way, she sees her mother drop to her knees between the flower beds with newspaper spread out around her. She is using a trowel to lift the corms of her begonias and the even more precious gladioli. Later she will store them in shallow boxes made for her by Pat. Now Nancy comes spinning out of the shed and hurls herself at the swing, kicking off with one foot, sending up a cloud of dust that settles on the flowers. A bolt of agony goes through the child at the bedroom window. She can’t stand it a minute longer. She’ll go down to her mother, touch her skirt, try to provoke a smile and then beg to be let out. Please, Mammy, please, please. But no tears. Agnes is too proud for that. Besides, tears disgust her mother.

  But when Agnes runs into the garden, her mother is gone. She is standing away just outside the wall on the hillside as a flock of thrushes sweep down around her in what looks like an ecstatic greeting. Safely arrived through the clouds from – according to Mary Rose – Russia, they settle, sighing, on the moss-soft turf, the red on their sides showing like wounds. Mrs Kavanagh loves all birds, but songbirds especially, and nothing would distract her from this rare moment of forgetfulness. Knowing this, the girl turns away, her impulse to demand forgiveness and affection gone. Besides, isn’t she out anyway? She dances away to join Nancy on the swing.

  My mother and I sat in silence a moment with that picture in our minds. My picture must have been similar to hers but, of course, no matter how hard I listened, it couldn’t be identical. Would she even have recognised it? Just then, as she spoke about her mother, there was unusual emotion in her voice. Sometimes as we talked I managed to coax an extra detail out of her, as when I asked, ‘Did Schol recite those poems in Gaelic?’ to which she retorted, ‘No one spoke Gaelic!’ And though my mother was only telling me all this because I’d asked her, still I had the impression she was enjoying it. Which made me wonder what needs of her own were being satisfied? She wasn’t idly turning over familiar memories. She hadn’t spent time with her brothers and sisters saying, ‘Remember when…?’ Even with Nancy, I didn’t think there’d been much talk about the old times. Did some of the pleasure, I wondered, come from telling me her own version with no one there to contradict her?

  One winter day, when Agnes is seven years old she is sent on an errand alone for the first time. She is to walk over the hill to Carney to visit her newly married sister who is mysteriously unwell. She has a dozen eggs, a pound of butter, and a twist of paper containing parsnip seeds. Agnes herself had shaped the butter into four pats, two square, two round, and, with the letter ‘A’ cut into a wedge of potato, she had printed her initial on top. Her desire to please was so intense the procedure had caused her great anxiety and exhausted her mother’s patience. But finally, with the butter wrapped in dock leaves to keep it fresh, and the twelve eggs all properly uniform in size and different in colour, the girl is satisfied.

  As she goes beyond sight of home, Agnes chides herself for being a little nervous at being sent off alone like this. Doesn’t she know everyone along the way, and doesn’t everyone know her? She tells herself she is Agnes Teresa Kavanagh from Knigh, Kate Buckley’s daughter. Kate Buckley’s eyes are famously beautiful, not blue – as you might expect – but dark, dark brown and, in so far as she has any awareness of her own appearance, Agnes knows she has her mother’s eyes because she’s been told so.

  A small dun-coloured bird flits across the path, then back again with a twig in its beak. Cold as it is, the birds are beginning to make their nests, which is how Agnes knows it must be St Bridgid’s Day. She crouches for a moment by the hedge to watch. The bird pauses to look at her, bright-eyed, its head on one side. Neither of them moves. In this moment of intense watching, the child is at one and the same moment a narrow dart of consciousness and the vast circle of her entire known world, the pulse of her own being indistinguishable from the great pulse of life. She looks into the eye of the world, and the world looks back. Then the bird flits away, Agnes shifts the basket on to her other arm, and walks on.

  Once past the clump of blackberry bushes on the left, Agnes is walking where
she’s never before walked alone. A little thrill of excitement goes down her spine. But with the sun up, she doesn’t think of the headless coachman who is said to drive along the lane at midnight, down to Knigh Cross and away along the road to Nenagh. The lane, known as Blind Lane, skirts the wood, a green wood of ash and oak and elm, at present still and leafless. The wood is her brother Pat’s responsibility, so maybe that’s why there are no wolves and no bogeymen hiding in its dark interior, only foxes, and local children thieving kindling and wild strawberries when Pat isn’t looking – and why should he look? Isn’t there enough for everyone? She passes several deserted cottages, little more than a tumble of stones and brambles. Suddenly the vista opens up clear to the distant horizon, and ahead of her the white lane falls like a dry river in silent curves towards her grandmother’s cottage, the place her father had said ‘No’ to, where his mother and his two sisters still live side by side without touching, like apples stored in a box.