The English Daughter

by Maggie Wadey

  *

  London, 1988. The violinist gets to his feet, cradling the fiddle and standing like a man cheek to cheek with his beloved, facing the audience. There is a pause. Then a cascade of icy notes. My husband, my parents and I are sitting in St John’s Smith Square, Westminster, part of a well-heeled, quietly attentive audience more familiar with the habits of concertgoing than of Christian rites. It’s winter, Christmas. I look towards my mother, hoping to catch her eye, but she’s hypnotised by the music, by the place, the powerful sense of occasion. I recognise that dazed, slightly disbelieving look on her face. The musicians are very young. They make of this overfamiliar music something so fresh it’s startling. Cold, passionate, clear. The sound ricochets in flying volleys around the baroque interior. I become confused as to which season we’re in. Does the music represent winter, or spring? Those shivering chords must surely represent ice, but is it forming, or melting? My surroundings become insubstantial, no more solid than the music streaming around and over us and which, like a wafer becoming flesh, has taken on such dense physicality I feel I could climb up on it, up towards the icing-sugar cupola and dissolve into the blue air. Then applause erupts on all sides and I’m brought back to earth. The moment of being adrift in time and space is over. My mother turns her face towards me. We’re here. Now. There’s a crackle of programmes and the soft animal rustle of clothes and limbs being rearranged. A salvo of coughs. ‘Winter’ is over and we are about to hear ‘Spring’. I think to remark on this to my mother but she has leaned forward a little, her face rapt, lips parted as if preparing to drink the music in. I’ve lost her again.

  4

  I have a mental image of the Mass Stone that once stood in the middle of the Clashnevin fields, offering Kate her rare moments of privacy. During the time of the Penal Laws (late seventeenth to late eighteenth century – also in England through the seventeenth century) the practice of Catholicism was proscribed and ‘priest-hunting’ treated as a sport. Priests said Mass out in the open where, paradoxically, they were hidden, hidden in fields and on hillsides away from their official places of worship, surrounded by the natural world like their pagan ancestors. Here on the Mass Stone the priest set out the tools of his trade: missal, rosary, Eucharist. These priests and their shivering congregations were ‘the secret people’. In this way the Irish people came to be bound especially close to their priests – some of whom became folk heroes because they had been persecuted in the name of their faith.

  The spirit of Catholicism was strengthened, but its physical fabric suffered: chapels, abbeys and monasteries, many used for worship since the Middle Ages, fell into decay. At the turn of the nineteenth century these ruins were a great tourist attraction. Parties drove out from Dublin, travelled from England and Europe to visit ivy-clad heaps of stone which were seen as representing the wild and the romantic, at that time highly fashionable concepts. No doubt they averted their eyes from the rural poor – or else looked at them in the same spirit as equally wild and romantic. Later Victorian tourists included the still-ruined Irish chapels on their itineraries, posing amongst crumbling walls with their servants and donkeys to have their photographs taken – just as I had posed my own daughter under the ivy-covered archway of the crumbling chapel at Knigh that summer when, in another life, we were passing through on our way to Donegal.

  This is the chapel I’m looking towards now as I hesitate with my hand on the gate. Today I understand its dereliction, still I’m reluctant to go wandering amongst ghosts and stones in the graveyard again. Across the road is a substantial, whitewashed farmhouse. Looking at it, I realise this must be the home of the Clearys, the family from whom my grandfather used to borrow the tram cart. It was Rody Cleary whom my mother put down as the most dashing man she could ever imagine, a ‘strong’ farmer with a watch on a silver chain. Stones and books can’t satisfy me any longer. I need flesh and blood. Or at the very least, a cup of tea. I dive across the road towards the house.

  The iron fence and the gate here are white, too, and the latch of the gate is stuck in paint. I go round to a side entrance. The prosperous, bourgeois appearance of the front of the house gives way to a working farmyard. The disused stables running along one side house rusty pieces of machinery, some broken furniture and bales of hay. A gate into the fields is fixed with rope and a cat slinks away at my approach. I stand at the back door contemplating a blackened saucepan which, in some minor domestic emergency, has been dumped by the drain. A curtain is drawn across a small window and the sound of a television blares out. The five o’clock news with a bulletin on the war in Iraq. I tap on the door several times.

  The woman who finally opens the door to me is not the bent old lady I’d unconsciously been expecting and, I suppose, hoping for: a figure from the past, an archetype, an old woman from a folk tale. True, the figure standing in front of me is a little stooped from the physical demands of her work, her face is weathered and her cropped hair dyed a reddish-black. But her hands are wonderfully unmarked, she wears a pair of battered jeans and grey trainers, and is, I calculate, five or so years older than I am. She looks at me with her head cocked on one side and questions in her bright eyes. I apologise for disturbing her. I tell her that once upon a time my family lived on Knigh Hill.

  It turns out that Joan Cleary is from ‘away’, from Limerick, and that she came here to Knigh only in the seventies when, as a ‘not-so-young bride’ she married Jim Cleary, Rody’s son. She doesn’t herself remember any of the Kavanaghs but her husband, God rest his soul, was born and raised in this house and he knew them. She herself had gone to my uncle Pat’s funeral, here at Knigh Cross. Hearing Joan say ‘your uncle Pat’ sends a frisson through me. But I’m confused. Pat was still alive in the seventies?

  ‘Oh, he was,’ says Joan. ‘I’d say it was the eighties that he died.’

  I stare at her in shock.

  ‘Why did you go to his funeral?’

  Joan laughs.

  ‘And why wouldn’t we, when it was just here in the graveyard?’

  Joan considers me a moment, then stoops and picks up the greasy pan.

  ‘Will we go in and find my address book?’

  Joan’s address book proves to be exactly like my own: a bundle of ancient pages bound together with elastic bands inside a split, marbled cover. Every inch of every page is covered in indecipherable runes, some in pencil, some in biro: red, blue, green. She’s searching for the address of a woman called Catherine Ryan, now living in Cork.

  ‘She’d be able to tell you about those times, all right, your grandparents and so on,’ she tells me. ‘Everyone else is gone.’

  But what’s an unknown woman living in faraway Cork to me? I feel my heart slow and sink down in my chest and Joan perhaps senses this. She puts a hand on my arm. She speaks that universal word of comfort.

  ‘Tea,’ she says. ‘We’ll have a cup of tea.’ As we move from the hall into the kitchen she apologises for the state it’s in, saying: ‘The cows must always come first. And there’s your grandmother kept the floor so clean you could eat your dinner off it! She was known for it.’

  The kitchen is indeed an amazement of disorder: pots and pans, papers and bills, biros, the weights to a set of scales, loaves cooling on a rack and dishcloths wrung into damp knots littering the work surfaces. This dark room is illuminated by just one small window and by a red light burning beneath the Sacred Heart on one side and a blue light beneath the Dove of the Holy Spirit on the other. A little wigwam of brickettes smoulder in the cave-like hearth. There’s a seductive smell of baking and peat and tea with a homely bass note of cow shit coming in at the open window and I yearn to be taken care of, to be, in a word, mothered.

  Some hours later, after half a home-made loaf with jam and butter, two slices of fruit cake and several pots of tea, I’ve learned that Joan has been running the farm virtually single-handed for the past twenty years. When she first came here her father-in-law, Rody Cleary, was still alive. Rody Cleary owned this land, and land e
lsewhere, and had been a prominent man on the local council during the 1920s and ’30s. Joan remembers hearing from him that Pat Kavanagh was ‘trouble’.

  I recall my mother saying, ‘Perhaps Pat drank it all away?’ But I’m finding it difficult to ask the obvious questions, to proceed as if I am an interrogator here on some kind of official business. Besides, Joan – a woman with fields of cattle who has just got up to fetch a plastic bottle of supermarket milk from the fridge – has already moved on to talk more generally of farming, motherhood, and the greater world. I notice that when she smiles, she favours the side of her mouth that has a couple of teeth missing.

  ‘And whose daughter is it you are?’ she asks.

  ‘Agnes’s.’

  ‘And where was Agnes coming in the family?’

  ‘One but last. Nancy was the youngest and only Pat stayed.’

  And so we sit on, like two badgers in a den, supping our tea and chewing the fat until, on the third attempt, I finally get to the door to leave. I’m both thrilled and appalled to have so abused this generous woman’s hospitality. Catherine Ryan’s address, being far away in Cork, slips forgotten to the bottom of my bag. But directions to both Billy Foley, caretaker of the graveyard records, and Danny Grace, a historian and teacher, neither of them more than five minutes away, are committed to my memory like magic formulae.

  ‘Call on them now,’ Joan urges. ‘Evening is a good time to find people in.’

  But as I walk towards my car a massive orange-coloured moon is sailing up over Knigh Hill and looking at my watch I see that it’s a quarter to nine. Too late to call on anyone. Besides, I’m desperate for a drink. The four roads leading away from the cross are empty under the moonlight. Opposite me stands the tiny little house where generations of the Graces (Danny’s relations) lived and worked the forge, where generations of doctors held a weekly surgery from 1858 until 1991. It’s where I’d always imagined my grandfather came running looking for help when Mary Rose broke Pat’s leg, but I now know the accident must have happened when they were still living on the Scohaboy Bog, which probably explains the delay in treatment that left the little boy crippled for life.

  Now the Graces’ house, which I see has been given the name ‘The Dispensary’, is up for sale. And here, beside my car, is a stone I’ve taken little notice of before but I now walk round to read, by moonlight, the inscription. It’s in Gaelic, so all I can understand are the names: John and Thomas O’Brien, and the date: 1920. My mother would have been nine years old at the time of whatever event the stone commemorates.

  In the village I stop to buy a bottle of Guinness. The bar turns out to be a very small, very dark cupboard where, for some reason, my request is utterly incomprehensible to the sweet-faced girl behind the bar – and to the three men rooted to it. They stare for all the world as if I’ve just asked to be given the Holy Sacrament and then the men, half-rising, lean a little towards me, swaying in unison, so that I have to sway, too, in order to see past them to the shelves behind the bar and, swaying together, we have a few moments in which we might as well be trying to land a man-sized jellyfish or manoeuvre a mattress down the stairs, until finally I spot a bottle of Guinness and triumphantly point to it. The faces around me are illuminated with something like joy and the girl exclaims, ‘A bottle of Guinness is it?’ – at least, I suppose that’s what she says, because it turns out I can’t understand her either.

  In the cottage, I kick off my shoes. Tired but restless. I’m often restless on these long evenings alone. A tad bored. I also frequently drink a glass or two too many and then I read less of the journal of the Borrisokane Historical Society than I’d intended and watch the tele instead. Like tonight. Always the Irish station, and these programmes are usually in the Irish language. To me it has an odd sound, soft but muffled, as if the speaker’s scarf has got stuck in his mouth and he, too, has had too much Guinness or whiskey to notice. Tonight we’re in a pub somewhere in Cork, and there’s a lot of bulky human bodies shifting around across the screen and the general din of human conviviality, all disorganised and aimless, then the camera lurches to one side, finds a group of musicians and locks attention like a dog with a cat in its sights. Then a woman begins to sing, a voice so pure and true it makes your heart turn over and your eyes sting, a voice so much her own that it sings for everyone: the first voice ever, and me the first and only listener. When the song ends I go and throw open the upper half of the back door and lean out into the moonlit night, tearful, hungry, elated. Am I at home, or away?

  5

  At sight of me, the woman claps her hands together.

  ‘Well and aren’t you a Kavanagh!’

  I’ve found the little girl who used to come over the hill to the Kavanaghs’ with a jug to borrow milk; the little girl my mother and her sisters used to pick up in the donkey cart and give a ride to school. Annie O’Brien is still small but now she’s eighty years old, a little stooped, and wearing a confident dash of bright orange lipstick. Small she may be, but she has natural authority: an X-ray look, a voice that’s easy on the ear and an air of barely repressed amusement. A woman managing and enjoying her own life. Taking my hand she exclaims, ‘Such a look of your grandmother you have!’ – which probably surprises her less than it surprises me.

  It’s with Danny Grace I’ve come here to the O’Briens’ little house at the back of Knigh Hill, the house where Annie and her brothers were born.

  I imagine everyone has a similar first impression of Danny. Energy, warmth, vigour. These qualities make him seem bigger than he is. His strong voice booms from a barrel chest and his head, with its thatch of thick fairish hair, is slightly too large for the rest of him, giving him a still-boyish look though he’s a man in his fifties with a craggy face and the hefty body of middle age. For all his cordiality, Danny is very observant, very much a listener, revealing little about himself except to say of his books, ‘The research is fine, it’s the writing that’s difficult.’ With a laugh, ‘And in summer, isn’t there always the temptation of tennis?’

  Born in 1948, one of eleven children, Danny was raised in a small house not so very far from the O’Briens’. Knigh Hill, the Cross, and the woods were his childhood playground just as, a generation earlier, they’d been my mother’s. But whereas my mother upped and left, for Danny, Knigh has remained the centre of his world both physically and intellectually: ‘a home bird’, as his wife describes him. A graduate of University College Dublin – and I of University College London – Danny is also, like me, a writer concerned with the past.

  When Danny answered the door that afternoon, I introduced myself in the usual way:

  ‘My family were at Knigh. I’m Agnes Kavanagh’s daughter.’

  The look in Danny’s eyes intensified.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Then what in God’s name are you doing standing there on the doorstep?’ he demanded. ‘Come on in.’

  Which is how it has come about that, on the following evening, with the introductions over, Danny and I take our places at Annie O’Brien’s table. The walls of Annie’s dark and high-ceilinged living room are papered with a design of grey bricks, the floor covered with a lino which, at first glance, looks like wood. The O’Brien father was, as my mother had remembered, a carpenter. The dresser is his work. Also the table, which Annie has covered with a cloth but in her mother’s day was kept bare and scrubbed white. The old chairs, eight of them she remembers, five at the table and three there along the wall, they would have been her father’s work, too. But, ‘There was no comfort in them! No one thought of comfort in those days.’

  A red light burns under the image of the Sacred Heart. As Annie goes about laying out teacups, a plate of bread and butter and a packet of Jaffa cakes, her humorous eyes move like a conjuror’s hands, quick and sassy. Annie spent thirty-five years of her life ‘away’, but hers is a very different emigrant story from my mother’s.

  When she was already a not-so-young woman, Annie went to live in Dublin, leaving her m
other to manage an otherwise entirely masculine household. One cold wet morning in Rockwall she saw an advert for California, a poster that might have been a child’s drawing, with sunshine and a golden bridge, and she went there like a girl dancing after the Pied Piper. But she couldn’t settle. She was lonely and out of place and took the first opportunity to go to New York. There she found herself a job as a waitress for a big financial company on Wall Street.

  When the tables had been laid up with stainless-steel cutlery from Sheffield and linen napkins from Ireland, and the men had not yet arrived to eat their steaks and their ice cream sundaes, Annie, neat and chipper as a sparrow, would stand at the windows on the eleventh floor to watch the pedestrians on the street far below darting through deep shadow like people in a narrow mountain canyon, and sometimes she would think of her brothers out on the hillside watching their sheep. But Annie loved the big, brash, noisy circus that was New York in the fifties and sixties. She roomed in a house in the Bronx, the Jewish quarter, which doesn’t surprise me. There’s still something not just Irish American, but Jewish American – Jewish New York to be precise – about Annie: confident, wisecracking talk, fast as an express train.

  Yet, when she was sixty-seven, Annie, unlike my mother, came home, to this little cottage on the hillside above Lough Derg, to live with her only surviving brother, Jim. Although she tells me their parents’ marriage was happy, and that they were happy children, none of them followed their parents’ example and married.

  ‘The truth is,’ Annie is saying, ‘many of the fellas couldn’t afford to marry and by the time they could, they were too old. And me,’ she adds with a gravelly laugh, ‘I carried a torch for a man I couldn’t have.’ She looks from me to Danny. ‘You’ve a very tolerant wife,’ she observes. ‘Allowing you to go out at night with a woman.’