by Maggie Wadey
At this point my father loses patience and stands up to remind his mocking brothers and sister that Pisa was actually seventy-five miles away from where he was stationed and – had they forgotten? – there was a war on. In fact, some twenty years later, when he returned to Italy on holiday with my mother, Pisa and its leaning tower was one of the first places they visited.
The winter of 1950–51 was the snowiest for more than half a century and Lincolnshire, as so often, was scoured with bitter winds. But never mind the climate,
I doubt a council estate in Spalding would have satisfied Agnes for long, and where her daughter was concerned she’d never been content with the school down the road. Recently, Dorothy expressed surprise that it was Agnes, not David, who’d made the decisions about my schools: ‘How on earth did she find out about them?’ she asked, the implication being, ‘I didn’t know she had the nous.’ But from the beginning my mother chose carefully: Froebel, Montessori, PNEU, exceedingly civilised, even rarified and child-centred educational systems. In Spalding, true to form, she’d found me an excellent – and expensive – preparatory school. Which might explain why my hard-pressed father couldn’t afford the cost of new curtains. My mother nevertheless insisted – or so the family story goes – that a life in which we couldn’t afford new curtains wasn’t worth living.
At that time, every night after supper my father cleared the table and sat down to moonlight, drawing up plans for bathrooms, kitchens, home extensions, anything that needed council approval. He had already tried – and failed – to economise by giving up smoking (I’m not sure my mother joined him in this trial) and he felt pretty sore to see delivery boys on bicycles puffing away as they rode by. What more could she want? My mother was crystal clear. What she wanted was a new order of things. She wanted my father to shoot his bolt, ride his horse, fire that rocket.
It was a spectacular row, the first and only one I ever overheard. I heard my father accuse my mother of imagining she’d been born with a silver spoon in her mouth and he was here to tell her she hadn’t. My mother, characteristically, became emotional not gradually but at the flick of a switch. Repeatedly she missed the point my father – with diminishing patience – repeatedly made: they must wait until his examinations were done and he was qualified. It was only reasonable. But he was like a man pissing in the wind. My mother pointed out that, since he claimed to be unable to afford even to go down to London to sit the exams, they might wait forever.
Later in life, when as an adult I ask my father what he was like as a young man he tells me,‘Oh, very hot, very quick-tempered. Your mother, too. We had some right old ding-dongs. And those rows took some time to recover from.’
But on this occasion, my father bowed to the inevitable: something had to be done, and he was the one to do it. Without hope, with exaggerated laboriousness – with one of his just-five-a-day fags in his mouth – he sat down and looked through advertisements for positions with the civil service abroad. Work was difficult to find at that time. As it turned out, he was surprised: ‘Knock and it shall be opened unto you.’ Two applications he made were unanswered, but the War Office quickly offered him a posting in Egypt. It was a triumph. When he asked my mother how she’d feel about living abroad she answered that where he went, she would follow.
So it came about that, just a year later, in 1951, my parents and I walked along an avenue of mimosa to the shore of the Bitter Lakes in Egypt. Some of the best and happiest times of our life together as a family came about because my mother had insisted that life without new curtains wasn’t worth living.
I lie awake in the early morning watching a pattern of sugar cane leaves shaken across the whitewashed wall of my bedroom. My earthly paradise has been restored to me – and, I believe, to my parents. I am nine years old, brown as a nut and skinny as a feral cat. From the kitchen comes a quiet murmur of voices: my mother is instructing our young Sudanese servant in the preparation of béchamel sauce. Said’s black skin has a copper sheen, his white robes are immaculate, his cummerbund discretely fancy. He is the first black man my mother and I have ever seen. His deep, edible colour is part of what we love about him. The blandness and stodginess of our food amuses him. Sometimes my mother, listening and watching in that sharp-focused way of hers, takes lessons from Said: yoghurt, garlic, eggplant. These strange ingredients enter her sphere for the first time. Said does everything. Cleaning, shopping, gardening. When we have a supper party – as we are doing tonight – he goes secretly next door to borrow extra chairs, and crockery he considers more suitable for the grandeur of the occasion. Our guests may recognise their own plates on our table but no one complains. It’s common practice. Besides, a good servant is like gold dust. The English wives would cut out their tongues before they offend a good servant.
If I turn on my side, I can see through the open door into my parents’ bedroom where one of my mother’s best Horrockses dresses is laid out on the bed. Under the little dressing table is a pair of white, peep-toed high heels. She had chosen her clothes for this posting without any help from anyone – except Dorothy to tell her what they looked like from behind – including her first pair of shorts, from Barkers Ladies’ Wear in Horsham. Tonight is my parents first turn as hosts in a formal middle-class milieu. Fayid isn’t Cheltenham, it isn’t even Port Said. But my mother takes pride in getting things right and if she feels lost then there’s always the colonel’s wife to observe and emulate. She’s aware of passing a test, a large part of which is to ‘manage’ on whatever resources are available, and to do so graciously. These are the virtues of an army wife and it appears they come naturally to her.
Our house is a two-bedroomed, whitewashed bungalow built of mud bricks, with a flat roof that lets the rain in. It is nevertheless a spacious, airy place with a simple kind of elegance and a veranda groaning under a riot of purple bougainvillea. Set in a shady garden, it’s bordered at the back by a sweet-water canal thicketed with sugar cane where little white egrets delicately stab at the water. This evening I’ll help Said unlock the water channels around our flower beds, sending up a scent of sweet earth and peppery zinnias, flowers the little red-cheeked goldfinches love, gossiping as they feast. I am instructed to pick a few for the dinner table, a task I’m proud to perform. But actually I rather resent tonight’s dinner party because my favourite routine of the day will be cut short: the time when my father returns from work, undoes the buttons of his shirt, gives us each a kiss, and lights up. Then, side by side, the three of us sit under the bamboo awning. We talk and laugh quietly, waiting for the sweet relief of the evening breeze to start up, and for the swift Egyptian twilight to fall.
In the kitchen I hear Said’s low laugh and a little snort from my mother. I sigh and stretch luxuriously across my little bed. Tomorrow, Said will be paid, and then he’ll disappear for three or even four days. When he returns, his robes and his woolly head will smell of hashish, he will be shamefaced and exhausted, with a greyish tinge like a veil of ash drawn over his beautiful skin. My mother will return his graceful lies with her own graceful acceptance. She tells me that Said is a young man in a foreign land, far away from family and friends. She tells me it’s hard to keep to the right ways when you’re a long way from home, living amongst people who neither know you nor care.
* * *
6. Rumours that Ireland – neutral in WWII – was sheltering German U-boats led England to threaten taking the Irish ports. This would have involved invasion of the country and mass repatriation of Irish nationals..
7. Certainly it was the case that, during the Irish civil war, the public records office in Dublin was destroyed in a blaze.
8. Anne was Dorothy’s fourth child by her second husband whom she had married after the conception of their son – something she made no secret of.
6
Over the last few months I’ve done this so often, walking up here on Knigh, watching the days slowly lengthen. It’s summer, and I should have been long gone. Once, after the first thrill of
encountering this place, I felt I was being held at arm’s length: what I saw was mesmerizing but unreadable, like the face and body of a man who’s not yet your lover, may never be your lover but is close as your held breath, full of things untold. Then, as I came to know it, with a shift of light, a change of perspective, it uncovered the encoded traumas of its past. Still nothing here frightens me. Even at night I’ve come up here alone and felt only benign spirits.
But, I know that silence and darkness aren’t necessarily benign. Sometimes they close in on you, muffling your ears and your eyes, making you inhabit a smaller and smaller space, pushing you deeper inside yourself until you feel you’ll go mad. Now, in twilight, I go slowly up the white track behind the house and then, having climbed through the hedge, I go to sit on the circle of stones on the skyline where my mother used to sit as a girl, placing myself at the centre of that imaginary circle she drew around Knigh. The place she knew, mistakenly, that she would never want to leave. This evening, I’ve come to say goodbye. On the horizon, the ever-present loch mutates from duck-egg blue through ultramarine to silver, swaying above its forgotten, drowned islands.
The last few days have disturbed and exhausted me. I’ve been avoiding phone calls, failing to visit people. As ever in a crisis, I’ve gone to ground. During Kate’s lonely last years, did her neighbours manage to help and comfort her, I wonder? When guilt was added to disappointment she probably went beyond helping. It was in her nature to turn away, to walk up on to the hillside here above the house, alone, to see the hares. As it’s mine, too. ‘Dear Lord, and don’t you have a look of your grandmother about you!’ Annie had exclaimed the first time we met. But I couldn’t have lived my grandmother’s life, and clearly the grown-up Agnes didn’t believe she could, either. In my own case, if by some miracle I’d survived the physical ordeal of nine births, other things would either have died or never have been born in me. Perhaps something died in Kate.
Now I suspect that what Jim’s remarks had really been suggesting was madness, or rather, depression. Depression and agoraphobia are both diseases of the mind and heart. But sometimes disease lets in things we otherwise resist, lets us see things we otherwise deny. And who’s to say when she came up here alone at dusk my grandmother didn’t see other things: stars as well as hares, moonrise, and all the countless little births and deaths that make up the natural world, both material and immaterial. But if she ever did feel the great beyond tug at her skirt, if she found a stinking corpse or a bright swan’s feather there was, it seems, no one’s doorstep she wanted to lay it on. Whatever she saw, she kept to herself. Unlike me.
And there’s the rub. What I find, I tell. The shut-off place my mother went to came, as in Kate’s case, with secrecy. My shut-off place is associated not with secrecy – not in the long run, that is – but betrayal. Whatever I see there, whatever I find, I feel compelled to lay on her doorstep, on the world’s doorstep. What else is this book but both an intimate, secret act of love and loyalty and the last act of betrayal in this story – an act my mother is powerless to ward off.
The Ireland I’m about to leave is not, of course, the Ireland my mother left seventy-odd years ago. The Celtic tiger may have died, but it’s left its mark. At its height, Ireland was no longer a place to leave but a place to come back to – or indeed to emigrate to. The Liffey ran with champagne and, ironically, young women didn’t want to look Irish any more but sexy and glossy, like American movie stars. Having got the land, having got the euros, inevitably there followed the building. A new Ireland rose up, one I’m glad my mother never saw – neither in its sudden triumph nor its abrupt decline. Out there along the mystical coast of Connemara, the vandals got to work scribbling obscenities all over the sad, lovely face of Ireland. The ostentatious display of wealth was apparent everywhere. ‘Botox-Ireland’, as Tim Robinson has called it in his trilogy Connemara, describing that once magnificently remote (and famine-plagued) coast as ‘Costa del Bog’. Even Mary Grace, not inclined to hyperbole, remarked that in Donegal the speculators had lost all sense of when to stop: ‘They’ve gone MAD, mad with greed’ – an observation made all the more striking for being delivered in Mary’s lovely voice.
But no one, no individual and no country, fast-forwards in a vacuum, free of baggage. Unlike the invaders, unlike the institutions of the Church, the past – the dead – never lose their power and their presence. They are there with us, in Galway Bay, in the bars, in the bedrooms of the newly built farmhouse bungalows and in the Taoiseach of the new Ireland, spurring the living on to do what they never did, to have what they never had – and no matter where we run, no matter how far, the voice of the past follows. In such circumstances, new gods come into power: sex, Mammon, and the fantasy of invulnerability to age, poverty and suffering. But the old gods have an unpleasant way of striking back. As indeed they have done. But for a brief spell, like a cork blown from a champagne bottle, the Irish became dizzy with the present and with fantasies of an even better future. They were living the dream: the good life was here, now, ours.
‘But history is always waiting in the wings to repeat itself,’ said a speaker at the Ormond Historical Society. Adding, ‘Don’t forget the past. It has something to say to you.’
In the morning, I wake early. I place my packed suitcase and shoulder bag beside the open door. I take my mug of tea to the table with a copy of Portrait of a Parish, Danny’s book, which he’s given me as a goodbye present. I sit and leaf through it, starting from the back, looking forward to the hour or so I’ll have on the plane to read it with proper attention. One of the chapters is called ‘Teaching and Learning’ and it falls open at a photograph. Thirty or forty children, with their teacher – several of the little boys in grubby three-piece suits and the girls with bows in their hair – and not a smile between them, staring at the camera as if it might pounce.
At first I don’t recognise her. In fact, when my eyes run along the lines of names and I see ‘Agnes Cavanagh, Knigh, and Annie Cavanagh, Knigh’, I’m disbelieving. I read the caption: Carney School, 1924. I stare. And then this pale child with black hair to her shoulders transmogrifies into my mother, with a look on her face I know so well that now I can’t believe I didn’t spot her instantly, a look I’ve seen on my own face in long-forgotten childhood photos. A brooding look, defensive, shy, apprehensive, even, but at the same time dreamy, suggesting that at this moment when she’s first captured for history, her thoughts are elsewhere. And if I’d been her teacher, I think I’d have seen both anxiety and scepticism. She’s reserving her judgement, withholding herself. And beside her just as unmistakably now that I look again – is my aunt Nancy, the bonniest girl in the class, but quite without the expected hint of mischief.
This photograph was taken when my mother was thirteen and about to move on out of this tiny world to the convent. When I was thirteen I moved on, too, leaving the convent in Cyprus to go to an English boarding school where I would put on the manners, the accent and the confidence of that tough breed: the young English lady. When my mother told me that in order to go to the convent you had to show you could benefit from it, she added with a dismissive snort, ‘But none of us were expected to be intellectuals!’ Her tone of voice suggested that such a creature was as fantastic as a unicorn. But for me, determined to turn my back on the traditional woman’s role, what better than to scale that male-dominated height of academe, a philosophy department? I took the view that there was something faintly, inherently comic in the masculine: pompous and anxious. I’m not sure how much I believed this. But in my view, men already had too many advantages. If I fell into the trap of taking them seriously I was done for. It was shortly before taking up my place at university that I made my first visit to Dublin. Unknowing, uncaring, I brushed up against my mother’s Irish past.
When I stood on the towpath of the black canal in Ballsbridge, Dublin, that icy day in January 1962, I did not in fact imagine my mother as a young woman on the other side. I didn’t know she’d ever been there. S
carcely aware of my surroundings, I had walked there deep in self-centred reflection, brooding on my future: having finally passed the necessary Latin exam, I knew my place at University College London was secure. Having been independent of my parents for more than three years, I also knew I’d receive a full grant. Having, I believed, wasted my time since leaving school, life now had a sense of purpose. I was my own woman. But I was also a woman with a problem. I had discovered my entire future project was in jeopardy. Like many a pregnant young woman before me, I took the boat to England.
Now, forty years later, I’m about to drive to Shannon Airport to take an aeroplane. I close the book and place it in my shoulder bag. I gather up my papers: passport, ticket, credit card, driving licence and car-hire and insurance papers. When my mother left, she needed only her ticket. No passport, no ID, no record taken of her leaving or of her arrival. I’ve already said my goodbyes. I place the key under the fifth stone to the left of the front door and drive away.