The English Daughter

by Maggie Wadey

  On top of the hill is a circle of ancient stones. Agnes knows this is a fairy ring. So far, she’s neither seen the little people nor found any trace of them, only sheep droppings and flowers in the grass. But knowing this is a fairy fort, she approaches with respect, solemnly and quietly, perching her bum on one of the stones and placing her feet neatly side by side, pointing in the direction from which she’s come. From up here she can look down on the grey roof of her own house. To one side, on the side the sun comes up, is the small pastel-blue splash of Lough Eorna. Agnes knows that Lough Eorna was once a huge field of barley that was flooded by God’s wrath, and she knows that two young girls drowned there when the ice gave way beneath them. On the other side, the side where the sun sets, is Lough Derg, as vast, as blue, as mysterious as a lake in a saga. Agnes knows that St Patrick himself had walked there and blessed the Nenagh river. Because of his blessing, swans still come down in their tens, sometimes hundreds, until the mouth of the river has the appearance of being heaped with snow. The swans dip their beaks to drink like pilgrims at a shrine. Between Knigh Hill and the lough stands Lisduff House, a house so large the Kavanagh children imagine it a palace. To the south, in the direction in which the child’s feet are pointing, is a circle of blue hills, among them a mountain my mother knows by name: Silvermine Mountains. Agnes knows no more about it than its name, but she’s heard that rocks have veins and she imagines deep cuts being made into them, and rivers of silver gushing out to coat knives and forks and spoons with, to make rings and necklaces to fit on women like chains.

  The Silvermine Mountains were beyond the Kavanaghs’ reach. Even the loch, only a couple of miles distant, seemed far off. In his entire life John Kavanagh – eight of whose children would grow up to emigrate to England – never moved beyond a radius of about fourteen miles, with Knigh Hill standing almost exactly at the centre of that circle. The little girl sitting up there on the fairy fort believed this to be the most beautiful place in the world. A place St Patrick had blessed. She knew she never wanted to leave.

  2

  Since 1878 Mrs Griffin had stood guard over the girls’ entrance to the school in Puckaun. An increasingly stout figure buttoned tighter and tighter into black bombazine – a dress rumoured to have belonged to her grandmother – Mrs Griffin had begun teaching as a girl of sixteen. By the time my mother was one of her pupils she was in her late fifties and had long ago acquired a reputation as a dragon. Indeed, as Agnes knew, ‘dragon’ was what her name meant. Not only that, but Mrs Griffin had been born and raised on Silvermine Mountain, so it was a good deal easier to imagine her a little dragon, scuttling about on iron claws, than to think she had ever been a human child. Mrs Griffin had no children of own, only a dead baby born when she was a young married woman and rumoured by the children to be carried always inside her black bag, along with her dog-eared prayer book and a box of clove-scented lozenges. But Agnes didn’t think that any of this this excused Mrs Griffin’s dragon-like habits in the classroom. The child took with her to school an unusually lively sense of fairness that had been nurtured at home where, in spite of the mother’s passion for her first son, there was never any sense that girls were inferior to boys and the last three children were, as it happened, all girls: Cathleen, Agnes and Nancy. These three made their own tight little circle inside the larger world of the school.

  My mother hadn’t recalled Mrs Griffin for over sixty years. Even to find her name come back so readily surprised her. She thought the Puckaun National school was ‘quite old’ and that it had fifty or so pupils. The oldest boy at Puckaun school was fourteen, almost an adult in the eyes of my mother, who began her schooling at the age of four. She disliked the boys at school. She couldn’t say why. It wasn’t as if she wasn’t used to boys – having three older brothers at home – she just didn’t like them. One had a fancy to her and when school was out he chased her around, which she hated but endured in silence, as if it was something to be ashamed of, beating him off furiously but ineffectually with her schoolbag. No one ever came to her rescue except Nancy – who was half the boy’s size – which only added to his fun. Agnes and Nancy. Nancy and Agnes.

  Happily for my mother, inside the school the sexual divide went deeper than the religious one: boys and girls were taught under the same roof, but separately. They had separate entrances leading into separate classrooms, separate playgrounds and separate lavatories. Catholic girls sat with Protestant girls – though in my mother’s day there were no Protestant girls – and Catholic boys with Protestant boys; at Puckaun just two, sons of the rector of the local Church of Ireland. The Reverend Brittain Lougheed was a young man with a parish of sixty or so souls, the majority of them gentry. Canon O’Meara, on the other hand, ministered to close on six hundred and was known for his many acts of kindness. But he was an old man, wrapped in a great old-fashioned frieze coat, wearing his wide-brimmed hat set at an angle on his white head. On weekday afternoons these two men liked to walk up and down Kelly’s Lane discussing the great issues of life and death. Outside the church gate stood a few thin trees. In summer, the men strolled in their shade, like Frenchmen in a village square. In winter they trod the leaves underfoot.

  Naturally, being of different religious dispositions, they came at most things from a different angle and sometimes, especially in the case of the younger man, they generated more heat than light. When this happened the reverend’s gentle, hard-working boys were embarrassed by the sound of their father’s light, rather high voice, clearly audible inside the schoolroom. They blushed and hung their heads, and the classroom fell silent, gleefully anticipating the Reverend Lougheed’s predictable explosion: ‘Surely to God, man, you can see my point of view!’ and Canon O’Meara’s calm response, always the same: ‘Indeed I can. But to see both points of view, my dear friend, that is the great thing.’

  Many of Canon O’Meara’s parishioners repeated his sayings like mantras: ‘To see both points of view…to mind your own business…to take your time, that is the great thing.’ These sentiments could be heard spoken with the greatest sincerity by the greatest bigot in the land and no one would argue with him.

  ‘True! True enough!’ came the Reverend’s rueful reply, upon which the men would turn and walk back the other way, their black skirts trailing the dust, their voices fading.

  Beyond the schoolhouse and the church stood the barracks of the Royal Irish Constabulary, housing four armed policemen, and on the other side of the road was Kennedy’s public house. The walls of the church had been erected around a little old thatched chapel, now vanished, that had stood on that site for generations. Agnes knew this story and sometimes during the sombre eternity of the Mass she liked to imagine the chapel, standing before the altar, a chapel inside a church and inside the chapel… Father O’Meara had told the children that the stone used to build the church was famous for ‘weeping’, and for a long time my mother believed this was a miracle that marked Puckaun Church out as special.

  But though Father O’Meara was frequently referred to as ‘a walking saint’ he wasn’t the man to bother with church walls, weeping or otherwise, and in my mother’s time the church was badly in need of renovation, both to its fabric and to some of its customs. In the front portion of the nave stood twenty private pews. Several had been made by Annie O’Brien’s father, who complained bitterly that the pious kept him in the business of waiting to be paid a devil of a lot longer than your average sinner.

  Mrs Griffin owned a private pew, so did the Royal Irish Constabulary. And the local publicans. The well-to-do, naturally, had their private pews, too. Exclusivity was jealously guarded. The majority of the congregation was left to stand in the unfurnished rear portion of the church. As a little girl attending a packed ‘mission’ – to which everyone was expected to contribute ‘in coin or kind’ – my mother noticed that not one of the privileged invited any of those standing, or kneeling on the cold stone floor, to share their comfort, not old people who groaned as they knelt, nor the exhausted m
others. And then it would be read out who had given what and if you gave too little you were reprimanded and if you gave more than you could afford you were looked down on for vanity or idiocy. Even in the house of God social distinctions mattered. Wealth, and its necessary complement, poverty, mattered. The Kavanagh family always gave an appropriate and unremarkable shilling.

  The door of Kennedy’s pub, like that of the church, always stood wide open to those seeking comfort. From its gloomy interior came a low masculine babble like stones turning over on the bed of a stream. The place was much frequented immediately after Mass, or in some cases immediately before it. This was especially true of those men needing to blunt their shame before stepping into the dark confessional – or of course to celebrate afterwards by setting themselves well on the road back to committing the same sins for which they’d just asked forgiveness. To the children who passed by – or in some cases hung about outside waiting for the head of the family to re-emerge – the pub, with its little windows darkened by curtains, had an air of shame and secrecy not unlike the confessional itself: a place of licence from which red-faced men stumbled out happier than they had gone in. Women did not go into pubs.

  Nancy runs ahead of her sisters along the Mass path. It’s her first day to school and she is carrying a few sticks of kindling. Agnes and Cathleen both carry a penny in their pockets but kindling is less likely to be lost and just as acceptable to the school as a penny. Agnes keeps her eyes fixed on her younger sister, but her head is full of a poem. She’s been learning it all summer, painstakingly and out loud, so that the entire Kavanagh family has got it by heart. It’s driven them half mad.

  Today Mrs Griffin will ask Agnes to stand up to recite the poem in front of the entire class. But Agnes is confident. The words sing in her head as if they’re remembering themselves. The path runs for a couple of miles through both Kavanagh and Slattery fields before it comes out on to the road a hundred yards or so from the village. Here, hidden from view under a thorn bush, the girls sit down and take off their boots. Nancy needs help, just as she needs help to get them on, because her boots are buttoned, which is even more difficult than laces. The girls then roll down their garters and black stockings, stuff them inside the boots and hide them in the hedge. Having staked their claim to be one with the poorest of the poor they scamper on barefoot, impervious to the rough surface of the road.

  The walls of the classroom are covered in maps so old they look like stains in the plaster. Agnes has searched them for Puckaun but so far she hasn’t even been able to find Ireland, perhaps because she’s looking for green but, as she later comes to understand, it’s coloured pink, like England. On a shelf behind the teacher’s desk is a row of shabby books covering subjects such as history, geography, bookkeeping, a little Euclid, and some poetry.

  From the other room the girls hear the regular tap of the master’s cane on his desk as the boys launch into their multiplication tables, low and quiet at first, but increasingly loud and shrill as they work their way up into the tens until the master’s voice roars at them to ‘Shut up! Be quiet! Start again! Behave yourselves!’ And off they go again, chugging along through the twos and threes and then, like a steam train, gradually building up speed until they career out of control and come off the rails.

  Physical punishment is regular as mathematical tables in the boys’ class and its administration is clearly audible to the girls. On rare occasions a boy’s reaction is audible, too, and if he has a sister she hangs her head, sharing both the pain and the shame. Mrs Griffin does sometimes whack one of the girls with the blackboard rubber but usually she needs nothing more than her tongue, the look in her eye. Her breath. Agnes annoys her. The child’s watchful habits, perhaps, her unsmiling face and immaculate apron, the way she has of setting out her slate and chalk. It’s not clear yet whether Agnes is clever or merely keen, but keen she certainly is, and the slow fading of the look of anticipation with which she always arrives is like a criticism. Mrs Griffin has her favourites, of course, one of them a tall girl who’s learned the value of a smile and a well-chosen lie. Agnes doesn’t even wonder at Mrs Griffin not seeing through this girl, not seeing that the smile is stuck on her face too long to be sincere, or that the lies are always self-serving. Agnes knows perfectly well that Mrs Griffin sees and doesn’t care. Indeed, that Mrs Griffin is tacitly approving of lies and insincerity as the best tools for improvement in life, and that that is the real lesson her girls are expected to learn.

  The school lavatory is a place to avoid, but today Agnes has no choice. The wooden seat, worn to a satiny sheen, has a hole in it over a stinking zinc box. Birds wearing hobnailed boots land and clatter over the corrugated roof. Agnes has a horror of being spied on in here. She kicks her heels against the box as spasms of pain knot and release her guts. The idea of succeeding in pleasing Mrs Griffin has a peculiarly sour taste to it. The prospect of failure tastes even worse.

  Mrs Griffin’s look follows her as she returns to her place. Over her bombazine shoulder Agnes fixes her eyes on the spine of the large poetry book but as she does so, even the poet’s name – until now branded on her memory – slips from her head like a sliver of wet soap. When told to stand up to recite, every word she’s learned goes clean out of her head. She turns stiff as a board, her mouth tight shut. The sight of the dragon’s lopsided imitation of a smile, and her bright blue eyes like bullets, turns Agnes to stone, and neither threatening nor coaxing nor even Cathleen’s wail:‘She knows it! She knows it better than her own name!’

  Nothing can wring the poem out of her.

  Agnes’s punishment, the usual one, is to be made to stand out in front of the class, an example of a fool who hasn’t taken the trouble to do her homework. ‘Unless she cares to prove otherwise?’ hisses Mrs Griffin. The child shakes her head and is fascinated by the flush of vexation that washes up over the teacher’s face. Word by word the poem returns, but the lesson Agnes has learned today has less to do with poetry than with silence. Not only is silence always within her power, it IS power.

  School officially ends at three o’clock but in practice there’s still half an hour of catechism, which means that in winter they go home in the dark. Setting off early, the lucky little Protestants hear the others inside sweetly chanting: ‘Our intellect is darkened, our will is weakened, we are subject to suffering and death.’ But the very last thing of this and every other day is the hymn.

  There’s no piano so the monitor, a plump young woman with a squint, plays the whistle. Agnes thinks it must be because of the whistle they have a rather narrow repertoire. Very narrow. To be exact, a repertoire of four hymns and one song, but much anyone cares. They’d happily sing the last lesson written up on the board. With fluttery little motions of her hand, like a woman tapping a cake to see if it’s done, Miss O’Leary readies the girls and then, delicately, eyebrows slightly raised, she lifts the whistle to her lips. If you can’t sing you’re supposed to beat time with your hands and if you can’t do even that, then you listen. It’s soon obvious that listening is all Nancy can do, but she does it so well, lifting her face a little, opening her blue eyes wide and parting her lips as if expecting a sweet to drop into her mouth. A couple of the others don’t find even listening that easy and Miss O’Leary – all too aware of Mrs Griffin at her back – gets agitated.

  ‘If you’ve no voice, then isn’t it still and quiet you must be.’ Sometimes the pleading tone has effect. Some kind of fellow feeling works on the girls who have neither voices nor any sense of rhythm. They resign themselves to stillness and silence and Miss O’Leary’s face is like sunshine after rain. ‘Will you take it away now, girls!’

  And they do. For the singers, this is an experience of pure joy: the prospect of imminent freedom, the sensation of their own voices spurting strongly out of their throats, the beauty of the melody and its mysterious relationship with the beauty of the words, all these elements fuse together in an echo of Agnes’s mystic moment on the way to her grandmother’s. But
that was solitary, this is communal. Every girl is gathered in.

  At intervals during the afternoon the girls have noticed unusual noises coming from the boys’ room: crackling, sudden piercing whistles, a curious babble of what sounds like voices but scarcely human and certainly unintelligible. Now Mr MacDonald suddenly puts his head round the door and with the kind of grin on his face that turns every muscle in Mrs Griffin’s body rigid, he invites the girls into his classroom. There is a stunned silence. But when Mr MacDonald throws the door wide open and stands aside, the girls crowd forward to be confronted by a circle of raised bottoms.

  Every last one of the boys, including Tom and Dan Kavanagh, are doubled over like little Mohammedans at prayer in front of a construction of metal and wires and knobs. This doesn’t strike the girls as particularly amusing but definitely odd, and elicits some titters. In a compelling male basso Mr MacDonald demands silence, strides over to the construction and with a flourish turns one of the knobs. There’s a good deal of spluttering and crackling and then, from a great distance, like a voice trickling through an electric storm, comes the unforgettable, incomprehensible announcement – made in a rip-roaring accent the children have never heard before – that ‘we have made radio contact with the US Red Star Line SS Zeeland bound east…!’

  Agnes is paralysed by a thrill of violation.

  ‘It’s the USA!’ yells Mr MacDonald. Then he stands stock-still and with shining eyes he whispers, ‘Boys and girls, it’s the US of A.’

  The moment school ends, the children’s feet hit the road outside. As the Kavanagh girls race past Kennedy’s, Nancy bumps into a pair of familiar, muddy trousers: Schol O’Connor, the man who is ‘made of poetry’ and labours in their father’s fields. He drops on to one knee, grasps Nancy’s ribcage in both hands and peers into her ruddy face.