by Maggie Wadey
It so happened that in the summer of Mary Rose’s wedding, when the girls had been at Carney School for three years, Mrs Keane was mysteriously away for several months. She returned speaking a tongue the children had never heard before. She told them she’d been to summer school in the Gaeltacht, in Donegal, where she saw the sea for the first time. This new language wasn’t new at all but ancient, the language of the old kings and poets of Ireland. It was their true language: Gaelic. Gaelic had in fact been virtually extinct in north-west Tipperary since 1815 and many an otherwise qualified teacher spoke not a word of it.
Agnes quickly discovered a natural feeling for this new/ancient tongue. She was drawn to its soft, somewhat monotonous sound, which seemed to her like the sound of wind moving through the trees. She enjoyed the new verse and songs they were taught. Mrs Keane told Mrs Kavanagh she believed Agnes would benefit from going on to the convent in Nenagh. Nothing was said to the girl herself but Agnes, who hung on her teacher’s every look, picked up on the idea that she was intended for the convent and this had its effect. She had no very realistic picture of the convent, but the word conjured an idea of privilege and refinement.
Watching Agnes attack her homework, her mother could see she was exhausting herself, her legs in knots and lips moving as she went over and over the vocabulary she’d been set to learn. Agnes was the only one of the children who had this fretful will that pushed her to overreach herself, wanting the impossible: perfection. Kate recognised herself in this and a new idea of her daughter’s possibilities began to form in her mind. Catching her mother’s look, Agnes was gratified. It encouraged her to work even harder.
For many young teachers and pupils this was a time of hope and inspiration, a time of national pride and of romance. The children were told their future was not as second-class British citizens: Ireland was Irish now, the country belonged to them and they should be proud to be part of the rebirth of their motherland.
On May 24th, 1923 the civil war came to an official end. In the new Ireland, attendance at school, and with it literacy, increased dramatically. Outside the Gaeltacht, however, and in spite of the best efforts of the Gaelic League, Irish did not become the people’s first language. Few of the children would find Gaelic of any practical use whatever. Indeed, most of them, even those who, like my mother, felt a natural empathy for it and enjoyed reading the old myths and poetry, never spoke it again, anywhere. Gaelic became a language of self-conscious nationalism, used in the Dáil and engraved in public places – a curious echo of the use of Latin in the Catholic services.
One of those places where the Irish language was used was on the stone memorial at Knigh Cross. I had noticed the inscription that moonlit night after leaving Joan Cleary’s farmhouse, but had not thought to ask anyone its meaning. It’s worth remarking now that my mother, as a Gaelic speaker, would have been in no doubt about who was remembered there and why. Naturally enough, the story of the O’Brien cousins made me especially conscious of being my mother’s English daughter.
One day in November 1925 there was great excitement at Knigh Cross.
There was a crowd milling around down there and Annie, with the three youngest Kavanagh girls kicking their heels after Mass, got caught up in it. Some kind of ceremony was going on. Someone hushed the children: didn’t they know a memorial to the O’Brien boys was about to be unveiled? There were musicians playing brass instruments and a lot of people hanging out on the fringes: almost without exception men, but young and old, local and people from elsewhere, and the excitement – if that’s what it was – was kept just under wraps by a very different mood at the centre of the crowd: a mood of intense sadness and solemnity. But it was the band the girls were interested in, a brass band making a sound such as they’d never heard before. Rude, raucous, comic and melancholy, it delighted and agonised them. In spite of the severe looks they got, they couldn’t stop themselves laughing and clapping their hands to their mouths. The novelty of it was heady stuff. The girls went running excitedly up the lane to home, wondering why the others hadn’t come down because surely to God the band must have woken the dead. But it was probably what happened next and not the ceremony at the Cross that forever set that afternoon in the girls’ memory.
Running into the house, they found Mary Rose, sitting with their mother, holding her pale, almost transparent hands out to the fire. Kate got up sharply and shooed the girls away, but Mary Rose, who kept up a steady whine of complaint, didn’t even seem to notice. At least, she didn’t turn to look at them. Then the door closed the girls out. This had never happened before. Having raced up the hill in a frenzy of excitement, it took some time for them to cool down and accept that their own story was dead in the water. They sank down on their haunches outside, their backs against the wall. Inside, the almost inaudible voice of Mary Rose went on and on. The girls were silent a long while before Cathleen said, ‘’Tis a lovers’ quarrel, so.’ Something to that effect, and the others might have been reassured, only just then a wail started up inside that made the hairs on the back of their necks start up.
‘Let’s go back down to the Cross,’ said Cathleen, in a different tone
of voice.
But the last pained notes of the band had already sounded, and the crowd could be heard quietly dispersing, just the shuffle of their feet, no voices or laughter, for all the world like cattle going along the lane between bare hedges. On the hillside below them, the girls heard the Slatterys’ door slam shut.
By the time they went to bed, the children understood that Mary Rose had run away from her husband and nothing – not even Father O’Meara in an unrecognisably granite mood – would persuade her to go back. After a couple of hours of low-keyed bullying, Mary Rose had slammed out of the house shouting, ‘I wish to God I knew as little about marriage as he does!’ Agnes wished the same, because once Mary Rose couldn’t hide her face any more they all noticed something wrong with it. The rest of her was skin and bone, but her face was fatter, swollen-looking. Caked with white powder and wearing a martyred expression, she had the look of a ghoulish plaster Virgin.
The following morning, with Mrs O’Brien and her daughter, Mud Foley and old Mrs Grace all in place offering what comfort they could, Mick Gavin came marching into the house without taking his boots off and with the fingers of one hand gripping his three-year-old son’s shoulder. His son was a pint-sized version of himself topped with a few bruises and a mouse-coloured fringe.
‘He’s all yours,’ said the proud father.
‘There’s more than the boy is mine!’ cried Mary Rose in a thin, high voice.
‘Then you can whistle for it,’ said Mick. But in the doorway he stopped and added with a grin, ‘I’ll be generous now. You can have the piano.’
‘Now she must cut her coat according to her cloth,’ said Mrs Kavanagh, indicating to the children to go away.
After that she said nothing on the subject whatever. But Agnes could hardly fail to draw a lesson from this. The phrase her mother used may have reminded her of her sister stooping anxiously over the kitchen table cutting the creamy white stuff that had been a marriage gift from the Ballyartella Mills. Agnes knew her mother wasn’t speaking literally. But of course, when you’re a child you can’t always read the meaning of things.
Before anyone could shake a leg, Mary Rose had thrown off the role of martyr. It was a role which, frankly, she seemed born for. But within a year, she’d not only regained her health – both physical and mental – she’d left home, left Ireland and gone to England, to Manchester. She became the person I’d known her as all through my childhood: ‘Manchester Mary’. She left behind her little son, Sean, to be brought up by her parents. When visitors came, Annie remembers my grandmother pushing him forward for inspection, saying, ‘I make sure he’s clean.’ A chilling remark my mother had, in fact, told me, but which I’d chosen to forget.
*
Hackney, 2005. My daughter and I are sitting in a pub called The Eclipse, in East London. A cold
night. We’re both tired, she from being the mother of two small children, I because I’ve been working hard and, as they say, I’m ‘not as young as I used to be’. There’s a fire in the grate and a cat asleep on a shabby armchair in the corner. Chic old-fashioned. The pub, on the road where my daughter lives, is a small middle-class enclave in an area of extreme, largely black, poverty. A month ago, on the street a hundred yards up from my daughter’s front door, there’d been a shooting incident in which an eighteen-month-old child was injured.
We have been talking about ‘Manchester Mary’. ‘So what happened to little Sean?’ my daughter asks. ‘At some point he was packed off to England and brought up by his uncle Tom.’ ‘You mean he didn’t go to his mother?’ ‘No. She was a working woman, of course.’ ‘Did he never see his mother again?’ ‘Not so far as I know. An abandoned child.’ ‘And then?’ ‘I hear he became a singer on cruise ships. Crooning. “If I were a blackbird.” That kind of thing.’ ‘Gay,’ my daughter says immediately. This makes me smile. ‘I don’t know about that. He seems to have been entirely devoid of character – like opening a book with blank pages. Only that he was mean as sin, like his father. The only time he ever went back to Ireland was to sniff around to see if his father had left him anything.’ ‘Had he?’ ‘His father was too mean to leave anyone a regret, let alone a silver spoon.’
Whilst we’ve been in the pub, the rain has turned to snow. We’ve been watching it fall against the backdrop of the darkening street, the soft whiteness covering up the grime to give a romantically Dickensian look. As we leave, there’s a group of young black boys on the corner laughing and exclaiming, opening their mouths wide to swallow snowflakes that disappear between their dark chocolate and pink lips like sweet confection.
I stand by my car to watch my daughter step inside her door, back home with her partner and her sleeping children safely tucked up under duvets. Then I drive away across the virgin snow.
Part Five
The World
1
At first the sheer size of the convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Nenagh intimidates Agnes. Its high-ceilinged gloom and marbled floors are as cold and clean as her mother’s butter pans out in the freezing outhouse. Whilst wearing their convent uniform the girls are not allowed to run, not even when they’re outside in the town. They’re not allowed to swing their arms or raise their voices and they’re expected to curtsey on sight to the Mother Superior, a figure so remote and boney, her white face so like a skull, as to seem scarcely human. Their personal grooming is to be immaculate at all times. Agnes is naturally quiet and clean, a fact which had previously distinguished her from her fellows but here – in this one respect – she’s the same as everyone else: a neat, well-mannered girl. She desperately wants to do well. She’s happy to be in a school where there are no boys. Still she feels out of place.
For the first time in her life she’s without Nancy. True, Cathleen is being put through her paces somewhere in this great mausoleum, but she’s in the year above Agnes and pretends not to know her. Nancy has a year still to go at the school in Carney, and without her Agnes feels exposed, like someone missing a layer of skin. Without Nancy she feels dull and misunderstood. Her little gestures of humour miss their mark. I recall my mother telling me that in order to go to the convent no one expected you to be an ‘intellectual’, you just had to show yourself capable of benefiting. But when she pictured the convent offering her privilege and refinement, Agnes had forgotten she’d be surrounded by girls to whom privilege and refinement – or something like it – had been given at birth: daughters of ‘strong’ farmers, girls who took piano lessons and lay in bed reading novels printed in England. Agnes is shocked by their assertive breasts and vaselined lips. It’s the nuns who put the idea of Vaseline into their heads by expressly forbidding it.
To judge by the colour of her brows and eyelashes, Sister Brigit of the Annunciation must be fair, but not a single hair of her head shows from under the white wimple that frames her face and is surmounted by a blue-grey headdress. The headdress is made from the same heavy serge material as the robe that falls in graceful pleats from her waist. From her leather belt hang two sets of keys and a string of rosary beads, black, but with a dark purple tassel which strikes an incongruously dashing note. Sister Brigit’s face is a perfect oval. Her skin, what little of it is on show, is parchment-white and of the type that lines early, but that hasn’t begun yet. Sister Brigit is nineteen and, though her calling may require her to contemplate death, though she may even – as her prayers command – be preparing herself to be embraced by her Heavenly Bridegroom, like her pupils she still believes she’s immortal. Life throbs in her blood and shines in her eyes and no amount of God can stop it. Agnes sometimes speculates on the possibility of the nun’s hair being red, like the Irish saint Brigid, that ‘ever good woman’ whose story Agnes has recently read. There’s also a poem about another Brigid, one who’s neither a sister nor a saint, but in Agnes’s mind the poem is addressed to them both:
Brigid’s kiss was sweeter than the whole of the waters of Lough Erne; or the first wheaten flour, worked with fresh honey into dough; there are streams of bees’ honey on every part of the mountain, there is brown sugar thrown on all you take, Brigid, in your hand.
The real Brigit’s hands are plump and smooth as a baby’s. Her voice is the most ethereal in a choir made up of ethereal voices, nuns’ bodiless voices, that rise in angelic purity to Heaven, their eventual destination. When they step outside the convent the sisters murmur, ‘Averte domine oculos meos,’ and the Mother Superior adds, ‘Ne videant vanitatem,’ and so they set off cheerfully into the worldly temptations of Nenagh, which is after all a busy market town with a splendid courthouse and a population of four thousand, all of them sinners. Not that the Sisters of Mercy patronise the shops. Like the others, Sister Brigit has no personal belongings other than her prayer book, missal and rosary. Even her name isn’t her own but a name God gave her when she entered the convent.
Sister Brigit has a little group of swooning devotees amongst the girls, but Agnes isn’t one of them. That is to say, her devotion is secret, even almost from herself. She doesn’t realise that when she’s with her, her eyes never leave the nun’s face. The first time Sister Brigit, faintly enquiring, turns her calm blue on Agnes, the girl takes several seconds to absorb the disquieting fact that, like a cat on the wall, she can be seen too, that she herself is an object of scrutiny and appraisal.
Before the end of the first term Agnes has made two friends. Real, close friends, so you don’t mind if a blob of their spit lands on you by mistake, friends who get the giggles with you during Mass, friends whose eyebrows you envy but you feel superior to because there’s only two of them and they’ve no brothers. Friends whose maths is even worse than yours. Together they swelled with silent, and not always kind, laughter, like dough rising, until they burst. When she and her friends walked through the streets together they went arm in arm. As friends do.
Una and Mary Brophy were born eight months either side of Agnes. The sisters were confident and pretty, brown and stocky as pit ponies. Most afternoons when school was over the three girls went back together to the Brophys’ public house on the corner of Pearse and Kickham Street. The only entrance into the Brophys’ living quarters was through the shop, through the bar and up the back stairs in a fug of beer and cigarette smoke. When the mother asked for a side-entrance to be made so the girls could come and go without having to push their way through the men doing their drinking, the father had said, and surely to God, woman, wouldn’t he be losing half his trade who were only there to get a smile out of his daughters?
Mrs Brophy, an older, stockier version of her daughters but with a satirical cast, was a countrywoman from Kerry, which meant she had a reputation for boldness. As a cook, however, she was unadventurous. She had a shop full of fancy ingredients and her daughters often pointed this out to her, but she resisted their allure. Agnes liked to linger in the dim, paraffin- and
boot-polish-scented interior to look along the shelves: tins of apricots, Spam, packets of jelly, macaroni – whatever that was when it was at home – ready-made jam and, even more shocking, cake mix. ‘Dear Lord!’ my grandmother exclaimed when she was told. ‘What kind of woman uses cake mix?’ A woman like Mrs Brophy was the answer. But Mrs Brophy was majestically confident in her own skills, both culinary and economic.
‘Potatoes with butter!’ she would announce triumph-antly banging the dish down on the table. Or, her smiling face wreathed in steam: ‘Bread with milk and sugar and who would be arguing with that, God bless it!’
When Ellen Brophy wasn’t selling fancy goods in the shop – she rarely pulled a pint, saying, ‘Will you be expecting me to stand there all day listening to a load of men gossiping?’ – she lay on the sagging sofa upstairs with one cat on her tummy and one under each arm, reading English murder novels and working her way through a bag of liquorice allsorts. When Agnes had become a familiar feature around the place, sometimes, torn between fascin-ation and disapproval, she would perch briefly beside Mrs Brophy, reading over her shoulder whilst pretending not to. It didn’t escape Mrs Brophy’s notice what an asset Agnes would be in the shop.