Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  Another day she sent me to the town for tuppence-worth of chops. I noticed that father and son smiled when they heard the humble request. I stood between the big haunches of meat that hung from the ceiling, their skins white and larded, with amber flypapers flapping in and out between them. From a gauze-fronted safe the son pulled out some scraps of meat that might have been for dogs and wrapped them in a double fold of white paper, then cleaned his hands in his half-apron, which was of black oilcloth.

  Hilarity reigned in the classroom. It was tuppence-worth of chalk I had been sent for. I was an amadán. She made me stand in front of the fireguard, holding the open sheets of blood-spattered paper for everyone to behold, and afterward, when I sat down, girls sympathized with me, except for the few who threw bits of crumbled rubber and toffee papers in my direction.

  My brother and sisters, being older, had gone away to boarding school, so walking home alone was full of hazards. There might be tinkers, or some wild man, hiding behind a wall who with a twirl of the finger would spit the words “I want to do pooley in you.” Once I arrived home to find that my mother was not there; I could tell by seeing the second gate swinging open, hens on the flag, starving and pecking at bits of lime, our back door not locked—all proof that she had fled to her mother’s after a frightful row. It meant my having to stay with the Mac family in the gate lodge, an older couple who smelt of wintergreen oil, the husband scratching his head and asking his wife how long they would have the nuisance of me. Her hair was snow white and as wavy as the waves of a sea, and seeing that I was sniffling and sad, she would let me sit up that bit late to say the rosary with them. I slept in the attic room, reached by a ladder, and through the skylight window I looked for sky, for stars, and begged for my mother to come home, which she always did, vowing that we would be a happy family from then onward, as my father had taken the pledge. As a celebration, she would make an orange cake, and when it was almost baked, she would take it out of the oven and allow me to plunge a knitting needle into it, which I could then lick—the taste of the warm, orangy dough so delicious.

  Our hens began to lay well, as we knew from the jubilant yodel they let out after they had laid, and then it was up to the yard to gather the eggs from under them, in their dank, clammy nests, their eyes with a shine of beads. She cleaned the eggs with a damp cloth and a bit of bread soda, and brought them in her basket to a new shopkeeper in the town. She had credit there, her name being the very first to be entered in his big, important ledger, which looked like a dictionary. I was allowed to get a two-pound pot of blackcurrant jam. It was where the footpath ran out, jumping down onto the road itself, that I dropped it. There it was, a spew, purple and black, pieces of glass everywhere, the tiny blackcurrants like goat droppings. A woman from the nearby garage came out, to sympathize, and then brought a worn goose wing and a bit of cardboard to sweep it up.

  It so happened that I had become smitten with film stars, whose photographs came in cigarette packets which I collected from all the men who smoked. Women did not smoke. The photographs were so bewitching that I would make up little dramas about them, and my two chosen stars were Clark Gable and Dorothy Lamour. I twined them in a romantic situation, swearing love, et cetera, when foolishly Dorothy mentioned her suspicions regarding Greer Garson, who lived nearby, also in a shaded mansion. Clark was fuming. Did she not trust him? So things got heated and Clark left in a huff, announcing that he was going to the ocean. Greer then seized her moment to walk across the lawn, seemingly to console her friend, but in truth to persecute her. This playlet got to be known, and one day when I was coming from school a man called Tim called me into his shop and then into a small office where a second man sat on a high stool. A bottle of whiskey lay on the slant of the brown wooden desk, and the two men were skittish. They asked me to put my play on, which I did, interposing the dialogue with the pictures on the cigarette cards, the performance lasting about five minutes. As a reward, I was given a threepenny bit. It felt warm in the palm of my hand, and it had the image of a hound on it. I handed it back to Tim, so he could take it off our bill, and for a minute the two men looked away, not knowing what to make of it, and I tied the threepenny bit into my handkerchief so as not to lose it.

  Years later, when I had, as they put it, “gone up in the world,” my mother asked me to go and see my old schoolteacher, who had been ailing for some time. Her room had that mustiness that all sickrooms have, as the window was kept shut, along with the smell of medicines and orangeade. Her skin was very yellow, as if she had jaundice, her body skeletonlike, except for the little bowl of her belly under the sheet, and the only trace of her highly strung temperament was the way she fidgeted at the fringing of the cotton quilt on her bed. She barely spoke for some time, then, with her voice whistling through her windpipe and gripping my hand, she asked was she not the first to detect the writing spark in me, was it not she who had first ignited the fire? Then a quick dart of light passed over her eyes, as though she were hearing the sound of Cú Chulainn and his men charging up the quiet street.

  Carnero

  Our farmhand was nicknamed Carnero. He was roguish, lackadaisical, and disinclined to wash. He ate like a glutton. My mother had to carve the bacon or the chicken in the pantry, otherwise he would grab slices of it when her back was turned. He buttered his bread on both sides, muttering under his breath in defiance, “Let’s larrup it on, let’s larrup it on.” He was about eighteen. On Saturday nights, in his pelt, when he washed in the rain barrel for Sunday Mass, he would sing some of his favourite songs. One was “Oh, Miss Nicholas, don’t be so ridiculous, I don’t like it in the daytime, Nighttime’s the right time. So, Miss Nicholas, don’t be so ridiculous…” He wasn’t particularly religious. Very few of the men were. They would stand at the back of the chapel and nudge one another when the priest drank the wine from the chalice, whispering about him being a toper. By contrast, most of the women prayed fervently, their eyes raised to the whitewashed ceiling, the better for God to hear their pitiful supplications.

  Carnero went to the pub each night, or rather, one of the several pubs, depending on the welcome. Remarkably for a small one-horse town, there were twenty-seven public houses, three grocery shops, one drapery, one chemist, no cinema, and no library. Carnero struck oil when an elderly publican skidded on the cobbles in his own yard and needed help lifting the hooped wooden barrels of porter. Carnero got to be his adjutant and in return had free drink, but to ingratiate himself even more, he stole wood and timber from us and had a blazing fire in that bar that lured customers away from other premises. Every Saturday night he would bring me a bar of chocolate, dark chocolate with a white filling, or milk chocolate with raisins and almonds, along with Peggy’s Leg, which was sweet, cinnamon-colored, and sticky. Since I was fasting a lot to save our family from various disasters, I kept these things in an attaché case, which I would open from time to time, as might a shopkeeper, resolving not to eat them. The taste and texture of the Turkish delight surpassed all, and even thinking about it often made me break my resolve. I would open the suitcase and eat two whole bars in a gulp. My other indulgence was, with my bare hand, to scoop some of the trifle that my mother had put to set in a glass bowl on the vestibule floor and then, to hide my crime, flatten the surface with the back of a soup spoon to make it smooth again.

  On Saturdays in summer I would be sent to the bog with Carnero’s lunch, which consisted of thick slices of soda bread that was buttered, with sugar sprinkled on because of his sweet tooth. The tea, already milked, would be in a bottle. I loved that journey. Mad Mabel never set foot there, and there were no men or hobos lurking to try and get one behind a wall for a kiss, which they called a “birdy,” as they fumbled with one’s coat and skirt. Already, in my daft ambition to be a writer, I was studying nature so that I could submit pieces to the local weekly newspaper. There was an anonymous scribe, of whom I was jealous, who wrote articles about storms and seabirds and shelving sea cliffs. That was in the western part of the cou
nty on the Atlantic Ocean. We were inland, and I thought Drewsboro the loveliest, leafiest place in the whole world. On either side of the track there were grassy banks full of wildflowers and burdock and flowering weed, bees buzzing and disporting themselves in and out of those honeyed enclaves, and the smell of the nettles so hot. Birds swooped in random gusts, and butterflies, velvet-brown, maroon, and tortoiseshell, their ravishing colors never clashing, never gaudy, moved in the higher strata, like pieces of flying silk.

  When I got to the entrance to the bog, Carnero would be beckoning to me to hurry on, because he had “hungry grass.” The bog itself (another venue for my future composition) was a vista of colors that stretched miles and miles to the next parish, where we could see the slate blue of the church spire. The cut turf was still black, but the sides of the turf banks were a blacker black that oozed bog water, and the heather, blasted by winter winds, bloomed purple and purple-brown. A tall fringing of soft-green sedge circled the lake where waterbirds nested and let out occasional shrieks of alarm. On the brackish water a few yellow irises, sun-shot and golden, left one in no mistake but that it was high summer. He didn’t like the tepid tea, so, pulling heather by the roots and using a few birch branches, he started up a fire to heat it in a billy can. The smell of the fire in the open air was so clean and the thin smoke drifted up in sputters. I had a surprise for him. “What, what?” I kept stringing it along. It concerned Sacko, who was both his friend and his rival. I had brought a newspaper, wrapped around the bottle of tea, in which Sacko’s rash adventures were graphically relayed. Carnero lay back, rolling his tongue repeatedly over his unwashed, yellow teeth. He was agog. At that time I was too young to notice that Carnero could neither read nor write.

  Only the week before, we were in stitches reading of a Mrs. Considine, up in West Clare, who took a swing at a Mrs. Berg for the larceny of two pounds of sugar, four penny buns, and two candles. The witness, who had been wheeling Mrs. Considine’s bicycle, identified himself in the court as having kept apart “from the scenery,” but did allow that both women had scratches on their faces and also blood and loose teeth. Still another woman had been charged with a theft of a piece of mutton, worth one shilling and sixpence. Her excuse was that she had laid her own parcels on the counter and, since the butcher was very busy, had erroneously picked up the piece of mutton. “So the mutton got off the counter and walked in under your shawl?” said the district judge, who was known for his asperity, at which she pleaded poor sight and old age. She was fined ten shillings and sixpence for her chicanery.

  But the one I was about to read out was nearer home, occurred in the very shop where my mother bought jam and raspberry and custard biscuits when she was flush. It concerned Sacko, known as the “Nocturnal Thief.” He was a rover who would come and go, and after long absences would return sporting a silk handkerchief or a silver monogrammed cigarette case, saying he had been given them in return for his services to a lord or an admiral over in England. Everyone knew about the break-in at Eamonn’s shop and the eggs that had been stolen and how Sacko had been a suspect, but never was it so splendidly told as in the article that I read out to Carnero.

  Eamonn the shopkeeper, asleep on the first floor, heard breaking noise underneath and came down to find the two panes of glass had been removed from a back window, a lamp had been overturned, a number of eggs and also two goose eggs were missing out of the cardboard crate. Eamonn the shopkeeper, though worried, went back to bed. In the morning, with the help of the local guard, they applied some detective work and came to the conclusion that the rude intruder was probably a person five feet six inches in height and weighing no more than twelve stone, so as to be able to pass through the window space. Sacko the suspect, when questioned, presented himself as a blameless neighbourly man and charted his movements from midnight ’til four a.m. He had taken a walk all around the village, he had stopped at the parish pump for a slug of water, he had an engaging discussion with the nightwatchman about the prospects of an oncoming war and being a Samaritan, he had driven four stray calves that were wandering around the road into the shopkeeper’s yard, for safety. After that, he had walked a mile out of the town, to a place where a farmer had allowed him to doss, whenever he was stuck for a bed. However, his story had a “lacuna.” The cast made of his footprints matched the footprint in the backyard and, moreover, he was the only person around known to suck raw eggs. The plaintiff surpassed himself, telling the judge how he had spent the night, worn out from walking, he had gone to the shed, procured an old stick, which he rested crosswise in a corner, and sat upright with his hands folded, praying to God as he had always done in the trenches.

  “Trenches, my backside,” Carnero said, but his interest was fully whetted.

  Sacko went on to tell the judge that he had never in his life done any injury to anyone and had taken the eggs only since his rheumatism was awful bad from a life of a vagrant, sleeping in stables.

  “Anything else exciting?” the judge put to him.

  “Yes… I am a versatile man and skilled in musical accomplishments… I am a ventriloquist and a conjuror, gifts that I am sure our local superintendent does not possess… and hence tries to blacken me.”

  “They are gifts I am happy to do without,” the superintendent said, jumping up, red in the face, furious at being mocked by a lying hooligan. But the judge, who himself liked a drink, was lenient that day, or else had enjoyed the repartee, so that Sacko got off on the grounds that the break-in was not serious, and what were a few missing eggs to a prosperous person known as Eamonn the shopkeeper.

  “Christ, there’s no stopping him now,” Carnero said, staring at the photograph of Sacko in an ill-fitting blazer with brass buttons and steel-rimmed glasses that he had worn for effect.

  Although the next item that I read out did not interest Carnero, he listened, anything to loll and keep idle. Did it, I asked him, outshine my own more pallid pieces, about bogs and bees and butterflies?

  On the west coast of Ireland between Clare and Kerry lies the mouth of the Shannon with Loop Head Peninsula on the Clare side aggressively spearing twenty miles out into the ageless and relentless foe, the Atlantic. Elemental wars of wind and water have vanquished all its supporting land fortifications to north and south and the great Shannon flood, allied with the ocean, has attacked the rear or landward end and all but isled it. Greyly and ever narrowingly the Peninsula lances out with its beetling cliffs, flanks to the Peninsula at Killala, whereon it carries a lighthouse from which, like the grand old warrior it is, it flashes the chivalrous warning, “Beware! I break the ocean, I wreck ships.”

  It was time to go back home. If on the return journey I saw the same lucky butterfly, then the composition I was intending to write would soar. It had rested on a rock, and was opening and shutting its wings repeatedly, wings like jewels, deep violet with a dusting of marcasite, and it kept doing the same thing, the opening and the shutting of the wings, like a coquette, drunk maybe from the nectar it had just tasted on berries, or perhaps to entice another of its kind.

  Then one wet night, as we sat by the fire, our dogs began to bark like mad, and we were surprised that any visitors would set out on such a night. We waited and waited, yet nobody knocked. Eventually my mother went out to the back kitchen, where a letter had been slipped under the door. It was that dreaded thing, an anonymous letter. She read the first lines aloud. Carnero was to be seen in our woods, with the doctor’s maid, each night after he left the public house. The subsequent lines were so shaming that my mother called my father out onto the step and shut the door so that I would not overhear. When they came back in, she said, in a dire whisper, that Carnero would have to be given his walking papers. If that happened, we were truly sunk. He ran the place. He milked, he foddered, he plowed, he harrowed, he killed a pig twice a year, and on summer Sundays wrung the necks of cockerels for Sunday’s dinner, which consisted of boiled chicken and a white sauce with parsley.

  Piecing together the contents of the
anonymous letter and Carnero’s terrible tryst, I went wild with jealousy and feared for his soul, having no regard for hers. The only punishment I could wreak was to refuse to accept the bars of chocolate and, moreover, not speak to him. I can’t remember how long this sulk lasted, except that we learned that the maid, having been locked in a box room by the doctor’s wife, was later summarily dismissed.

  Then one day, years later, the unthinkable happened. Carnero gave notice that he was leaving. He was going to England, where his cousins had fixed him up in a job with the railway company. One minute, as my father irately put it, he was going to Cambridge, and the next minute it was Oxford, and there was much sarcasm as to which university he would be attending. But as the day of his departure got nearer, the reality of it hit us. My mother began to panic and no longer listed his failings, his lack of hygiene, his emptying his po pot, which was a tin can, through the window at night onto a bit of flag that was permanently slimy as a consequence, his buttering his bread on both sides when her back was turned, his having not one, but two boiled eggs for his breakfast.

  I got in from school and saw my mother sitting at the kitchen table crying. She rarely sat, and for the most part fought tears back stoically. But there she was, wringing her hands and pointing to the downstairs room where he slept and where he was presumably packing. She could not understand why it was taking him so long. We listened at the door, and now and then she knocked, but there was no answer. We went back to the kitchen, asking each other, by our woebegone expressions, how in God’s name we were going to manage without him, as we waited for him to appear with a brown suitcase and extra things, perhaps, in a flour bag. She was already asking who would milk (my father never milked), and she herself had not done so since she was a young girl on a mountain farm forty years ago. Hazards untold befell us. She suddenly remembered that she had put some bread to bake in a pot oven, in the boil house up in the yard, and she ran to retrieve it.