by Maggie Wadey
How was that night, that long last Sunday of their lives together? I’ll never know, could never really know, even with every detail spelt out to me. ‘Pity she didn’t come to us sooner’ the doctors had said. But my mother had fiercely resisted all suggestion of being rushed into hospital. Having talked it over in calmer times I understand that my father had repeatedly begged her to allow him to call the ambulance. That she had repeatedly said no. Heart attack or not, she was at her imperious best. Not until six in the morning, not until it was ‘too late’, had she given in. Did she perhaps understand more of what had happened than she let on, wanting above all else to avoid life as an invalid? The fact is that, with my father’s support, she achieved that most lucky thing: a quick and relatively painless death. Had he acted differently it would have been a longer and much unhappier story.
A perfect early summer morning, presented like an expensive hotel breakfast, under a polished dome of silvery sky. The trees that stand along the driveway are composed all of light, gouts of bright light, green and yellow, verdigris gobbets flung down by the rain and sunshine, sparkling and shaking as if about to disperse, to vanish on the bright air. Through a gateway into the walled garden I can see a mass of wet, open, sun-warmed flowers. I am a step or two behind my mother who is walking slowly, putting her feet down softly like someone listening. The air is filled with the pulsing drone of wood pigeons. A young man with rolled-up sleeves and a shovel crusted with dark earth goes along the path. Otherwise the garden is empty. My mother’s smile is dazed.
‘How lovely,’ she says, looking towards the sunlit trees. ‘How peaceful it is here.’
The young man stops. His eyes follow hers.
‘Yes,’ he agrees, ‘it is peaceful, isn’t it.’
If the weather gets better then next week we’ll go down to Shere, my father and I. Like Russian Orthodox Christians sitting on the family grave knocking back vodka and blinis, we too have a place to go to, to sit and remember. We’ll pack sandwiches and a flask of tea, and we’ll picnic – with neither vodka nor faith – on the grassy bank of the river where we scattered her ashes. ‘If’ – she will whisper in my ear as we pass through the kissing gate – ‘if they really are my ashes.’ And the following year, though I don’t know this yet, my father and I will go to Shere again, on the tenth anniversary of her death, February 23rd, 2009, my father now aged ninety. A bright, cold day with brief flurries of snow falling on early daffodils.
As we stand on the little footbridge over the river, facing into the wind, my father will say, ‘Your mother was the only person ever really to have any influence on me.’ I am surprised and moved beyond replying. ‘I always thought she was very brave to come over here like that, alone.’ I, just as there are many occasions when I haven’t spoken out, so there are lots of things my father hasn’t said either. Different things from me, totally different. Different thoughts, different feelings. We both look down at the water rushing away beneath us. ‘When my time comes,’ he says, ‘I hope you’ll bring my ashes here, too.’
Over the years since my mother’s death my father and I have grown closer. Sometimes in his company I get my childhood self back. He and I become part of the same chattering straightforward tribe, cheerful, busy, collecting things, cracking corny jokes and whistling, happy as sandboys. Then, like a current in the air, a change in temperature, something halts me. I stand, struck silent maybe by the light, or a sound and I’m taken away, as at the call of my mother’s voice, possessed by different gods, just as it was once believed that Pan would take you if you stood too long in the midday sun. It was our own story she wanted to tell. I picked up the thread, I took it and ran, terrified I might drop it and be lost. I’ve recorded as well as I’m able what I found, including forgotten names and things that were hidden. Was that what she intended?
By the time we get back to the house, a chill winter dusk has fallen. My father puts out scraps for the foxes. But later, when I go outside to look at the night sky, I sense they’ve gone, that where they had been, hungry and inquisitive, there’s only darkness and a sense of tension. Above the trees the mineral stars don’t even blink. There’s a tug on the thread. I feel it slip through my fingers. Like all good storytellers my mother has led me here, and told me to continue alone. I let her go.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to, firstly, my guide into this story, the historian Danny Grace, from whose books I have extensively quoted; to all those who generously shared their memories and stories with me; to my friend Francis Bennett for the kind of support and advice which enabled me to complete the project; to Penny Hoare, whose encouragement and incisive editing helped me to a final draft and, of course, to my publishers, Robert Davidson and Moira Forsyth, for believing in what I’d done; to my father, who gracefully withstood one of the worst things that can happen to anyone: a writer in the family. And, as always, to my husband, whose unfailing humour and stamina got me through the dark days.
Some names have been changed to protect identities.
Bibliography
Books
–Gerry Adams, Before the Dawn: An Autobiography (Heinemann, 1996)
–Elizabeth Bowen, Afterthought: Pieces about Writing (Longmans, 1962)
–Gustave de Beaumont, Ireland: Social, Political, and Religious (first published by Michel Levy Frere, 1839)
–Clare Barrington, Irish Women in England: An Annotated Bibliography (Women’s Education, Research and Resource Centre, UC Dublin, 1997)
–Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 (Profile Books, 2004)
–Charles Foley, Legacy of Strife: Cyprus from Rebellion to Civil War (Penguin, 1964)
–R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 (Allen Lane, 1988)
–R. F. Foster, Vivid Faces (Allen Lane, 2014)
–Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor for So Long? (Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2004)
–Daniel Grace, The Great Famine in Nenagh Poor Law Union Co. Tipperary (Relay Books, 2000)
–Portrait of a Parish: Monsea and Killodiernan (Relay Books, 1996)
–Lady Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men (Dublin, 1904)
–Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart (eds.) Irish Women’s History (Irish Academic Press, 2004)
–Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (Faber & Faber, 2002)
–Brendan Kenelly (trans.), from ‘The Penguin Book of Irish Verse’ (Penguin, 1970)
–Finola Kennedy, Cottage to Creche: Family Change in Ireland (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2001)
–F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (Fontana, 1963)
–Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds (Continuum, 2000)
–Tim Robinson, The Last Pool of Darkness, Connemara Trilogy (Penguin Ireland, 2008)
–Patrick Shea, Voices and the Sound of Drums: An Irish Autobiography (Belfast, 2000)
–Eamon Slevin, A Parish History of Borrisokane (Nenagh Guardian, 1994)
–W. M. Thackeray, The Irish Sketch Book (1843)
–Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir (Random House, 1995)
–Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845-1849 (Hamish Hamilton, 1962)
Magazines and published papers
–Joe Hogan, Irish Post From ‘The Irish Homestead’ articles including: ‘Household Hints’ in March 1899; Elice Pilkington writing in April 1910; ‘United Irishwomen’ in November 1911; and ‘Are Mothers the Ruin of Ireland’ by Granis on February 1913 Carrigan Committee Report (1930)
–Niall Meehan ‘Church and State and The Bethany Home’ (supp. to “History Ireland” Sep-Oct. 2010)
–Oliver St John Gogarty (quoted in the Irish Times in 1995)
–Susannah Riordan ‘VD in the army: Moral Panic in the Irish Free State’, a paper delivered to the St Patrick’s College History Society in 2001 Magill Magazine, 1985
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