by Maggie Wadey
Danny’s eyes roll.
‘Well I’m married to an actor,’ I say. ‘So I have to tolerate more than that.’
Annie laughs and exclaims, ‘Oh yes, he’d be kissing them too, wouldn’t he?’
This is the moment Jim O’Brien chooses to slip quietly into the room, returned from a funeral, in his dark suit like an old photograph of the rural Irishman come to life. At the little window, wild stock – or ‘poor man’s flowers’ Annie calls them – show their pale faces like spirits of the long dead. As we came into the house I’d noticed their spectral presence, their innocent yet luxurious scent. When I remark on them, Annie says, ‘Your grandfather liked to take a sprig for his buttonhole on a Sunday morning – and my mother liked to give it to him!’
My grandfather’s sudden appearance sends a flush of excitement through me. He’s here at last, through the eyes of someone who saw him, spoke to him, heard his voice.
‘What was he like?’
‘Blue eyes,’ says Annie immediately. Then she has to think a moment. ‘He wore a hat,’ she says. ‘Always a hat. John Kavanagh was a gentleman.’ And Agnes was his favourite. Out of sight of Mrs Kavanagh, it seems my grandfather gave the children cigarettes, sweets, if he had them. It was Agnes who got the most and according to Annie what she did then was to put them in her knickers and shin up the apple tree so she could look down on the rest of them. Yes, Agnes was her daddy’s girl.
‘And you know, I expect, Maggie, that it was Paddy could do no wrong in his mother’s eyes.’
‘I do.’
As a child, Jim had thought Paddy the proper little gentleman with his knife, and nicotine stains on his fingers, well out of school when he wasn’t much more than twelve but already as tall as his daddy and never mind his limp, working the woods and the vegetable garden. With a somewhat intimidating nod to me, Jim makes the following observation:
‘Your family lived better than we did.’ His voice is unexpectedly light, thrilling, giving the odd impression it’s not he who’s speaking but someone else. ‘Isn’t that so, Danny? Didn’t they live better than your grandparents?’
‘Indeed they did. They were the ones had the pig, the cows, the vegetables.’
‘No fish?’ I ask, thinking of the torture of boiled fish that every English child, Catholic or not, was once routinely subjected to on Fridays.
‘Fish!’ exclaims Danny. ‘No one in Tipperary would have known a fish if they’d met one walking up the lane. No, it was bacon we were made of.’
‘The stuff with bristles!’ exclaims Jim.
Danny claps his hand to his forehead.
‘Hairy bacon’! Don’t remind me,’ he groans. ‘Yes, your family lived better than we did.’ With faint, not entirely benign amusement, Danny adds, ‘The Kavanaghs had notions.’
‘Will I tell you,’ offers Annie, tapping the back of my hand, ‘about the day your family first came here to Knigh Hill? This is how I know it from my mother:
‘It was November 1913. Cold but dry. The family who’d lived there in shape-shifting form for as long as anyone could remember had been put out from both house and job. They scattered into local cottages and, to be true, my mother was glad they were gone. She was hopeful of a new young family to make friends with, and curious as a cat.
‘Your grandmother was a young woman in those days. She came up the hill with a bundle on her back and a babe in her arms, walking strongly out front, with her eyes fixed on the house, a house with six windows and a good slate roof. A long way behind her was coming a man driving a donkey and cart and in between, a string of children, all of them dark-haired save one little girl like a fairy with fair curls and white legs, and that was your aunt Josie who grew up and married a man who ran away to Canada. So your grandmother went on up to the door of the house, but then she stopped, and looked back the way she’d come. So the children all pushed past her to run around inside. They shouted and called out: “Mam, there’s a grand big fireplace!” and “Mam, there’s three grand big rooms upstairs!” One of them stuck her head out the window and called down: “Mam, it stinks up here!” Because you see the house was sound enough but filthy. For a long time your grandmother just stood there, looking back. Then she went down on her knees and kissed the doorstep. She did! She put her lips to the doorstep and the little one at her skirts – Agnes, it would have been – let out this great wail.’
The first thing my grandmother did was to drag everything out of that house and burn it to ashes. Then the walls were limewashed, inside and out. When it was done, Annie’s mother saw Mrs Kavanagh smile for the first time, and she covered her face with her hand to hide the fact she’d nothing much left in the way of teeth.
Soon the place which had been a midden for years was clean as a dog’s bone. Only there was no privy. Privies were seen as unhygienic. It was a question of habit. Remember, there was no running water until the 1960s and it was usual to do your business in the fields. But Mrs Kavanagh insisted on having a privy in the smaller of the two outhouses, so my grandfather dug a hole in the ground, put a seat over it and set beside it a bucket of lime. He made a little door into the back for it to be cleaned out and that was the tinker’s job once a year. Jim corrects his sister. ‘Twice a year,’ he says, which provokes laughter. Twice a year with his horse and cart the tinker took the soil away – by now a rich compost – to spread on the fields or the school garden. And that way he earned a few shillings. Months later, my father confirms the system was much the same in some of cottages in the Sussex village where he grew up – but for the helpful tinker.
‘Let me tell you something about your grandmother,’ says Annie. ‘At the time we’re speaking of – when she was still a young woman – she wouldn’t have a priest in the house. She told our mother she’d never have the Stations in her own home and the rest of us willing to kill for the honour! It made Nancy cry her little heart out. But Mrs Kavanagh said if ever she got the house clean enough in the first place, would she be able to ask the priest to take his shoes off before he stepped inside? No she would not! And him crossing the yard with his hem gathering up the muck! It had turned her stomach, she said, to see it below at Clashnevin, and the one time that farmhouse was clean enough to welcome a fly was for the priest. Every other day of the year you put your life in God’s hands just by going in at door. ‘And God,’ your grandmother used to say, ‘is not averse to death.’
This is the first time I’ve heard, as it were, my grandmother’s voice. It’s not her independence of mind that surprises me but her somewhat mordant wit. And I get the distinct impression it’s not just farmyard dirt my grandmother was anxious about but some more abstract contamination from the priest himself.
‘And Agnes?’ I ask. ‘Did she cry too when her mother wouldn’t have the priest?’
‘With Agnes it would be more difficult to say what she was feeling,’ says Annie. ‘She may have felt the embarrassment of it, you know. Only she would never have a word said against her mother.’ We have sat on into the semi-dark. I’ve begun to notice what Annie means about the chairs having no comfort in them. Now, perhaps moved by the same feeling, Annie – with a faint groan – gets to her feet, turns on the light, and fetches a bottle to the table. She fills our tumblers with generous slugs of sweet sherry the colour of peat. The heat of the drink in our bellies, the glow of alcohol along our veins is delicious and we drift a while in silent reflection.
The Kavanaghs have arrived. Although I still don’t quite see how they’ve done it, here they are, in the world of my mother’s memories. They have the land and its produce, the house and the privy. But the house itself is empty. My grandmother apparently has nothing but her ‘notions’ – not even her teeth – and, as often as it’s been said my family were decent, hard-working folk, no one has actually said they were liked. As if reading my mind, Jim, without looking at me, remarks:
‘The Kavanaghs had a reputation for meanness.’
‘How so!’ I exclaim. I turn to Anne. ‘Annie, my mother r
emembers you going up there to my grandmother with a jug for milk.’
Annie laughs.
‘And so I did! Your grandmother would offer butter, too, and apples. But you see, Maggie’ – there’s a hesitation – ‘none of that was theirs to give.’
This has to be spelt out to me.
‘You explain to her,’ Annie says, with a nod to Danny.
‘You know,’ says Danny, turning to me, ‘that your grandfather worked for the Crosses at Clashnevin. Now the house at Knigh, that place was the Crosses’ outfarm, so, when the family were turned out...’
And of course, by the time Danny has said this, I’ve understood. The man whose family had lived on Knigh Hill was James Foley, the young herd my grandfather had displaced at Clashnevin. My grandfather – ‘a powerful worker’ and ‘honest as the day’ – had taken both the man’s position and his home. The house Kate was so happy and proud to be in went with the job. Of course nothing at Knigh had belonged to my grandparents. The house was never theirs, nor even the lease, for any of their sons to inherit. No doubt the Kavanaghs had a right to most of the produce from the garden they created, and they would have owned the pig. But the cows, the sheep, the carrots and the hay from the fields, all of these belonged to the Crosses, never mind the fields are still remembered as ‘Kavanagh’s fields’. The irony of the Kavanaghs’ ‘notions’ is that, whereas the Graces and the O’Briens had lived here as self-employed craftsmen for generations, my grandfather, an outsider, came from a long line of labourers. And the ousting of the family who had lived there before them – including James’s sister-in-law, Margaret, the almost legendary ‘Mud’ Foley – not only underlined the insecurity of their position, but had perhaps sown seeds of enmity between the the Kavanaghs and their neighbours.
Sensing my discomfort, Annie lays a hand on my arm.
‘Your grandfather was a lovely man,’ she says. ‘We knew we could rely on the Kavanaghs. Daddy’s only complaint against them was you could stand a long time at their door before you heard anything worth hearing. And never a bad word between them.’
As well as his work at Knigh, my grandfather travelled the seven miles or so back to Clashnevin to work there, as before. Seven days a week. The Graces at Knigh Cross knew the time of day by the rumble of Kavanagh’s pony and cart coming down Blind Lane, turning left towards Loughourna and then fading away towards Rathaleen along the road that crosses the railway line from Nenagh to Dublin, the line that was built in 1862 and was to carry away all but one of John’s children. Then, at seven o’clock every evening, the Graces would hear the cart go rattling home again where, as Jim remarks with a grin, ‘He had to take his boots off before ever he was allowed in the kitchen. Your grandmother was very particular like that.’ He laughs again. ‘Poor Mrs Kavanagh!’ And here it comes, as automatic, as irresistible as a sneeze: ‘She kept that floor so clean you could eat your dinner off it.’
‘Such a grand sight!’ exclaims Annie. ‘With the door stood open on a summer evening you could see the big mirror she had there and in front of it, on shelves, rows and rows of glass jars, bottles and jam jars, all sparkling clean like crystal. Poor Mrs Kavanagh, she had those jars down and washed every week. Every week without fail!’
So there it is: the crystal my mother had remembered so fondly was only jam jars. I ask Annie if my grandmother used them for anything. Flowers, maybe?
‘She did not!’
‘But my grandmother did grow flowers, didn’t she?’
In the second it takes Annie to draw breath I’ve had time to fear the loss of one of my best-loved images.
‘Dear Lord!’ Annie exclaims. ‘You could go up there in December and she’d have flowers about the place. Oh yes, she was a great one for her garden. She had it all laid out in beds with stone edging and little paths.’
And in summer, people from miles around went up the lane especially to see and smell the flowers in Kate’s garden. It was a picture of paradise. Sometimes my grandmother would come out to the gate and tell them the names. Annie still recalls them: roses, gladioli, fuchsia, wisteria, and lilies. Nothing common. She remembers there were begonias growing in a black pot by the door. Exotic as parrots in the gorse.
And in the pause perhaps we all think of it the way it is now, in a state of desolation, shifting under sheets of black plastic.
‘Poor Mrs Kavanagh,’ says Annie, on a sigh. ‘She was delicate.’
‘She was thin,’ adds Jim. ‘Thin as a heron.’
In my mind’s eye, it turns to winter. The steep track from the house is slippery. Icicles drip from the slate roof and my grandmother’s cough sounds from the outhouse where she stands long hours, deftly twisting wreaths with the winter foliage. From the kitchen, a lamp glow suggests a warm interior.
‘My mother remembered a brass lamp,’ I say. ‘A lamp on a chain that Kate would lower to do her sewing.’
‘And so there was!’ says Jim in his thrilling voice. ‘The lamp came down to your grandmother’s shoulder and it made a pretty tinkling sound when she moved.’
Only now do I learn that it was my Dunne ancestors who, with their newly acquired wealth – which sat on them as awkwardly as lizard-skin shoes – first came into possession of the treasures my mother remembered.
At that time – in the 1860s – Thomas George Stoney, of Kyle Park, near Borrisokane, was declared bankrupt. The declining gentry endured considerable hardships – most things are relative – and many decamped to Dublin, or back to England. But in Stoney’s case, a factor in his financial crisis was certainly his expenditure on famine relief. When Kyle Park went into receivership, my great-great-grandparents, Daniel and Margaret Dunne, were amongst those newly prosperous small farmers who went along to the auction. In a thrill of prescient consumerism they bought several distinguished pieces and a stack of bric-a-brac for their new house in the Curragh.
Which is how it came about that, one day in April 1914, not long after my family had arrived at Knigh, a loaded cart came up this track from Borrisokane. The children ran out to meet it. The old man, Patrick – who’d not spoken to his son since John left his house to marry – had died. His widow, Mary, could do as she pleased, and it was her pleasure to gift her favourite son with those pieces that, in just the same way, had only come to her on the death of her own estranged father. She chose carefully. The house at Knigh was large, it would take some of the bigger items that had crammed her cottage like a tight-packed ship’s hold: a bed, a clock, a mirror. A set of yellow plates in the French style. And a brass lamp on a chain. These things must have been beyond even my grandmother’s notions.
It’s true to say, however, that by this time the circumstances of most people in Ireland had improved. Every woman owned a blouse and a suit, grey or navy probably, though it would only be for a wedding or whatever. Otherwise ‘it never got an airing’. But a hat, yes, by this time, when a woman went out she always wore a hat. She had the suit and the hat in place of the shawl. The Kavanagh women, even Kate herself, were amongst the first in Puckaun to take up the new fashion.
As we’ve been talking, my picture of my grandmother has undergone constant revision. For all her neighbours being unable to resist having a sly dig at her, one thing seems certain: she was as formidable as she was ‘delicate’. Annie agrees.
‘Yes, I’d say your grandmother was classy. She didn’t blab on the way I do, but she could pin you down with a word. She spoke quietly and to the point.’
I tell them my mother used to say Kate was hard.
‘She used to say, “Daddy was a sweetheart, but mother was hard.”’ Annie modifies ‘hard’ to ‘strict’.
‘You have to remember,’ says Danny, ‘in those days – and to be sure it was the same in my own time – if a child didn’t toe the line it got a clip and no questions asked.’
Well, I remember my own mother giving me the occasional slap, and at least once chasing me round the kitchen with the broom. But I got occasional kisses, too, quick, shy pecks, but kisses nevert
heless. Did my mother ever get kisses, I wonder? My suggestion causes some mirth. Kisses? Our mothers weren’t so free with their kisses, suggests Danny. Still we were loved, remarks Annie. Some of us.
Annie taps my knee.
‘But then Agnes was number eight, wasn’t she? There’s many a child in a big family like that felt she didn’t get a fair shake of her mother.’
I’m travelling to Egypt on a P&O liner with my mother. Just the two of us, sharing the neatest little cabin imaginable with our hairbrushes laid side by side on the tiny dressing table. It’s 1951 and we’re going to join my father in Fayid. My mother is wearing a lovely green Horrockses sundress with big buttons along the shoulders. I have just won the children’s fancy-dress party dressed as a Hawaiian lovely in a grass skirt with a flower behind my ear. I hadn’t wanted to take part. I never did want to go to parties. My first instinct as a child (and as an adult) is always to say ‘No’. I have to be dragged towards the balloons and the jellies, the panicky games and the fake adult smiles. But apparently I’m ‘lucky to be asked’, so go I must. Once there I always enjoy myself – too much – and by the time my mother comes to collect me I’m usually red-faced and showing off, a sight which so disgusts my mother that, before we’re out of the gate, I get one of those clips around the ear. Today I’ve had an especially thrilling time and only avoid a smack because we’re in public. I’m feeling extremely pleased with myself when I’m stricken by stomach pains more appropriate to a paid-up member of Hell than to a cocky but otherwise innocent nine-year-old child cruising the Med at the expense of the British Civil Service. I make it, just, to one of the below-decks lavatories before my gut explodes noisily, revoltingly, and above all, humiliatingly. This rush into the engine-throbbing entrails of the ship happens over and over again. My mother becomes irked with the grinding tedium of it, and irritated by my persistence in the face of the impossibility of there actually being anything more in my guts for me to squirt out so unpleasantly and embarrassingly into one of the immaculate white lavatory bowls whilst the wives of other civil servants or army personnel powder their noses at the lilting mirrors. She seems determined to make little of it. What a fuss over a stomach upset! Whatever changed her mind, finally my mother calls the young ship’s doctor to see me. He is quietly but unambiguously angry at not having been called earlier. I’m already dangerously dehydrated and for a couple of days I lie in the ship’s white infirmary, in a white gown, with a white plastic tube in my arm, sweet smelling and infuriatingly smug, pleased with myself again and much preferring the role of intrepid survivor to that of the Hawaiian lovely. Arriving at Port Said, I am carried down the gangplank to my waiting father who is astonished, having expected it to be my mother suffering from the ravages of seasickness, whom he’d have to coddle. But my mother had left seasickness behind at the Bay of Biscay and, a woman some months short of her fortieth birthday, properly ‘abroad’ for the first time, has been having the time of her life. She has eaten at the captain’s table and danced under the stars. We are to spend our first night in Egypt staying with my father’s superior officer, Colonel Postlethwaite, and his wife in their rather grand house in the married quarters at Fayid where the palms hang with dates like amber ticks. When the front door opens, my father’s first words are to ask for the lavatory for his daughter. My mother must have been mortified.