Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  I took the irrevocable step. Without knocking, I barged into his room. It was one of the few times that I saw him look vexed, and his first instinct was to raise his arms and his hands to ward me off. He knew why I had come. His things were on the bed: his good navy suit, two pairs of overalls, shirts, brown hobnailed boots with the dung dried on them, and junk—bicycle parts, copper piping, wet batteries and dry batteries, and other paraphernalia—which he had intended to sell to a scrap merchant in Limerick.

  The little window was wide open, but the smell in the room was still fusty. I do not recall any words spoken. What I did was to kneel down and grasp him by his ankles, imploring him not to leave. He stood there like a statue, never once trying to break free. I clung to him, tighter and tighter, until the moment he rolled down his sleeves and looked at me with what I can only call utter defeat.

  My mother was exultant and cooked him the chop that was meant for my father’s tea. We ate in silence, my mother and I at one end of the table, having bread and jam, and Carnero tucking into the chop, which had a plump red kidney attached to it. The tension was unbearable. I knew that I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.

  Summer Holiday

  I go into the kitchen in my grandmother’s house and I walk around it, unsure. It was dark even in daytime. There was a very low window that admitted little light, a remainder from times past, when fewer windows meant less rent to the English landlords, except that I did not know that then, aged eight or nine.

  I used to walk around that kitchen to get to know it and not feel so lonely in it. Away from the hearth and the open fire, on which pots and a kettle hung on the iron swing gate, there was a table, never completely laid or unlaid, saucers put to dry on the upside-down cups for the next round of tea. There was muslin over the milk jug to keep off flies and gnats, and the country butter was overyellow, its strong smell whiffing out from under the glass dome with which it was covered.

  Next to a wall was a settle bed that was a trunk when closed, where a workman had slept in past times and would have had to wait until all the others had gone upstairs to bed. Men sat on it at my grandfather’s wake, smoking clay pipes as they passed a whiskey bottle around, talking in low tones. Death was upstairs. My grandfather’s white face seemed all the whiter because the starched white sheet was drawn up to his chin, and the gray-white mustache looked unnatural on a dead face. The raised veins on the back of his hands were an alphabet that branched together, and there were scabs and brown moles on the crinkles of the skin. Someone had threaded a rosary between the lifeless fingers. Two tall candles were burning on a low table that was covered with a white linen cloth, and the smell in the room was of melting wax and disinfectant, since the linoleum floor had been scrubbed by the woman who laid him out.

  On the nearby dresser there was Delft and pans of milk off which the cream would be skimmed. My aunt did it daintily, with the tips of her fingers, and the cream, which would have been delicious on blackberries, was kept to be churned to make the next consignment of strong-smelling butter, most of which she brought to the shop in the town in exchange for groceries. Full of idleness and not knowing how long my incarceration might be, I pined for home. To avoid the kitchen with its smells and my grandmother moaning, I passed the days in the little plantation, where my aunt had sown red dahlias that contrasted so happily with the dark, funereal yew trees.

  Late in the evening my aunt would be out of doors milking, feeding calves that she made pets of, and yelling, “Chook, chook, chook,” to hens that were unwilling to go into their cramped coop. I would sit with my grandmother in the encroaching dark. She had a necessary thriftiness and knew the hours of light that any one candle could give and was slow to put the taper to it. It was then the crickets began to screech like mad. They lived in holes in the mortar surrounding the fireplace, but with candlelight and the devilment in them they would fly out in swarms. They always landed on a wet towel or a wet tea towel that was hung up to dry, landing there to suck up the moisture. They lived on that. In the dog-eared almanac, in a drawer, there was an article about crickets which said that their screeches came not from their throats but from the brisk attrition of their wings. Neither of us knew what “attrition” meant. My grandmother would rave on about the hardships she had endured and what proud patriots I was descended from. One, nicknamed “Da Stick,” had fought in an insurrection, was injured, and long afterward fitted with a wooden leg. I never knew which insurrection it was, as there were so many down the years, all, as I knew from school, botched, both through lack of weapons and the treachery of informers, brothers or cousins informing on their own. Her son Michael had been chief of the 3rd Brigade in East Clare, a fearless soldier on the run from the British army, with a price on his head. He had kept a diary, which she would pull out from a nook in the wall as if it were the Book of Psalms. She read aloud, her voice trembly:

  Started ploughing, had one scrape done after dinner, when I sighted lorry of Tans turning Lyon’s Cross. Just in the centre of the field in full view. To run would be foolish. Kept on ploughing going towards them ’til I reached headland. They were then one hundred yards away, but in shade of some trees. I cleared fence and retreated to Allen’s wood and sat there peacefully watching them searching for me. Slept that night at John Mack’s, at 3 a.m. heard lorries, hid in bed, then sent Billy Mack to warn Turner. Billy returned to say they had Turner’s house surrounded and it looked bad. Retreated across Bo River to Griffins and waited the urgent news.

  By then my grandmother had always succumbed to tears and would get me to decipher the next page and the next, as the ink of many years had faded to a dunnish brown. I craved only one thing, which was a spoon of golden syrup that slid so easily down the throat.

  One night long after my grandmother had gone to bed, my aunt Delia, otherwise a gentle woman, decided to play a prank on me. She had a visitor who was also called Delia, and they kept saying, “Fancy, two Delias in the same humble parish.” The other Delia had been to America, and that’s where the word “fancy” came from, as did the word “darn” instead of “damn.” The other Delia was forever boasting of the harmony with her dear dead husband, how they sat of an evening by their friendly fire, giving each other necessary encouragement and saying, “Whatever the darn crops do, you and I will relax.” Yet they were known to fight bitterly, and often he left the house at night and was missing for days.

  So, as I sat there, my eyes glued, listening to their every word, my aunt suddenly said that my mother was not my real mother. Those were her words. My real mother, as she said, was in Australia. I went shivery and then stone-cold. They went on laughing and embellishing their story. I said my mother was my mother. They said I was too young to recall when the swap-over had happened. They built it up, relishing the fun of it and the fact that I was getting more and more agitated, standing, as I remember, and hitting out with little fists, little useless fists, as this Australian mother began to materialize. Peg was her name, she had brown hair and a heartlessness, evidenced by her giving me away. She lived on a sheep farm out in some remote place, and occasionally sent a five-shilling money order toward my keep. One day I would be sent to her and separated from the mother that I loved so much that I used to promise to die at the very instant she did. The place to which I had to go in my mind, admitting to having no mother, was awful, summoning terrors, great and small. Things in the kitchen began to go blurry, as did they, and in a violent frenzy I ran out to escape them, intending to run the five miles home on dark roads at any cost, to find my mother and hear the sweet, reassuring phrase from her lips, “I am your mother, you are my child.” They caught me at the first wicket gate by the sleeve of my cardigan, and I was brought back and put to sit on a rocking chair, half lying down. A towel was put on my chest and over my mouth, to stifle what must have been my roaring. I kept saying, “I want to go home, I want to go home.”

  Next morning my aunt had to cycle to the crossroads
and wait for the mail van as word was sent to my mother to send Carnero to come and fetch me home. No reason was given. The man who drove the mail van was implored to break his journey between post offices and to go up to our house specially with the note. I had already packed my few belongings in a small suitcase and spent the day at the plantation, because my grandmother, upon being told that I had homesickness, started grumbling, saying how spoiled I was and how thankless I was, considering the treats they had given me, jelly and blancmange of a Sunday. The day wore on and on.

  Birds for miles around were making their evening excursions, swooping down into the rain barrel where midges had swarmed, and the crows were already roosting in the trees for the night. In the dusk I still waited, and so certain was I that Carnero would come, I kept hearing the scrape of the lych gate on the slate pier where it was hung. I could picture him laying his bicycle down on the ground and taking a shortcut over the high grass, cursing the fact that the dew would ruin the Sunday shoes he had just polished.

  Then I was called in for supper. My aunt, feeling remorse, had cut up a slice of shop bread in little pieces and poured liberally from the tin of golden syrup, to coax me. My grandmother railed on about all the suffering and penances she had had to endure and was praying aloud that the Lord would come for her soon. My aunt and I both regretted the coolness with one another, because prior to that we had become firm friends. Each night after my grandmother had gone up to bed, we would sit and chat. First she talked of her dead husband, her partner, the man whose likeness was in a locket that she wore next to her chest and with whom she had conferred from time to time. He had dark eyes and dark hair.

  Her one solace was the romance novels that she could get her hands on. Unlike my mother, she loved reading, and by a miracle a retired schoolteacher in County Kerry had sent her a copy of War and Peace only a few months before. It was in three small volumes with tiny print, and the paper was so flimsy one had to haw on it to separate the pages. She had shown it to me during my vacation and asked me to print out the names of the Russian characters with their patronymics, so that she would be more familiar with them on her second reading, which would be in the winter nights to come. I came to know a Prince Andrei who wished to be unmarried; Marya Dmitrievna, who puffed heavily when dancing; a beautiful Natasha; Pierre, who picked up the wrong hat in the salon of Anna Pavlovna; and an old contrary prince at Bald Hills who tormented his poor daughter, Mary, and yet on his deathbed told her to put on her white dress, which he liked seeing her in. I had copied these snippets into a notebook, which also contained the yield got from the miller for their corn down the years and the varying price of animal foodstuffs.

  Sitting at that table, I wanted, as I am sure my aunt wanted, a truce, but neither of us was willing to take the first step. Then it happened. A shadow passed by the low window, and before I could think, was it or was it not him, Carnero was in the kitchen, in his good navy suit, saying he was gasping with a thirst. My aunt gave him a nip of whiskey in a small beaker that had come with a tonic bottle. He was holding a cushion to put on the bar of the bicycle on which he would bring me home, and already the gloom and persecutions of the holiday were fading. My aunt gave me a very clean new shilling and made me swear that I would never tell the nonsense about Peg, far away in Australia.

  All the way Carnero and I chatted, he giving me the various news since I had left and saying there had been no terrible ructions. Sometimes we had to dismount on the steep hills, as he was a quite hefty man and also had the extra weight of me to contend with. We were sitting on a little low stone bridge, the river just beneath, chugging along at a merry musical pace. It was called Bo River, the very place beyond which my dead uncle had retreated when he was on the run. A herd of cows were lying down in the field, close to one another, wheezing the soft wheezes that they made at night. In the hazed blue of oncoming night, mountain and sky had melted into one another and looked substanceless. Feeling happy and content, Carnero lit a cigarette, and in that wild and spontaneous way of his started to sing:

  As I went out to the fair of Athy

  I saw an aul petticoat hangin’ to dry

  I took off my drawers and hung them thereby

  To keep that aul petticoat war-um.

  Books

  The first book that I recall holding in my hand was a cloth book with pictures and a rhyme:

  Hey diddle diddle

  The cat and the fiddle,

  The cow jumped over the moon,

  The little dog laughed

  To see such sport,

  And the dish ran away with the spoon.

  The letters, tall and painted, were like the painted pillars of a house that would never tumble.

  Sitting on my mother’s lap, smelling her smell, feeling the itch from the wool of her cardigan, the particular heave of her chest, I studied every feature of her face, which was so beautiful to me, except for the forehead, a map of wrinkles, and on that map I wrote my first words, in praise of her.

  Our house was full of prayer books and religious treasuries with soft, dimpled leather covers and gold edging to the pages that glittered when the sun broke through the tiny window in the pantry where they were stacked. There were ribbons of various colors so that one could open a page at random and read the Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgins, prayers to Saint Peter of Antioch, Saint Bernardine of Siena, Saint Aelrod, Saint Cloud, Saint Colomba, and Saints Colman of Cloyne, of Dromore, of Kilmacduagh and, most wrenchingly of all, the prayers specially addressed to the stigmata of Saint Francis, that he may crucify the flesh from its vices.

  These same prayer books are now on my bookshelves in London, and sometimes I take one down and realize how thoroughly they informed my thinking and even my dreams, as my mother and I, huddled close together in bed, recited the words over and over again:

  May nothing in our minds excite

  Vain dreams and phantoms of the night;

  Keep off our enemies, that so

  Our bodies no uncleanness know.

  There were morning prayers, evening prayers, vespers, supplications, contritions, psalms, and versicals. There were exhortations about pride, vanity, filthy pleasures, the deformity of our sins being so very great they could not be fully comprehended by human understanding. The flames of Hell seemed as real as the turf burning in the fire. Sometimes, if a sod fell out, my mother would catch it with her bare hand to test her strength for the future and possible flames of eternity. Hell was far more real to us than Heaven. Heaven was golden and vaporish.

  I would go alone to the chapel and “contritely say twenty Paters, Aves, and Glorias and contritely kiss the Crucifix.” Next it was a meditation, preceding the Stations of the Cross, the dwelling on the Five Holy Wounds, the wound of the left foot, the right foot, the left hand, the right hand, and the sacred side which the Roman soldiers had pierced with their swords, causing blood and water to gush forth. Everything about it was so immediate, as if the image on each gory Station had come alive, and I could almost touch the Crown of Thorns, or the purple garment that was rent, or the towel with which Veronica wiped the face of Jesus, and hear the taunts the soldiers threw at him as they spat in his face. I could almost taste the vinegar and gall that was on the sponge from which he was made to drink.

  For home reading we had the Irish Messenger, an organ of the Apostleship of Prayer that came once a month and cost threepence.

  On the rich, matte, dark red cover there was a picture of the Sacred Heart, arms outstretched, for sinners to crawl under the folds of the copious, dipping sleeves. Years later, my friend Luke Dodd told me that his mother and his aunts availed of this rich matte cover by wetting it with their fingers, as effective as any rouge.

  The avowed aim of the magazine was to promote happiness in the home, repel the influx of “hot rhythm dance bands,” and avert the advance of communism, which had enslaved Russia, a country forty times the size of Ireland lost to “that red ruin.”

  There were also tips on how to make a ba
by’s matinee coat with picot edging and how to cast on stitches on numbers nine, ten, and eleven knitting needles for that beautiful Fair Isle cardigan. In one column called “Your Question Answered” all sorts of worries were aired. One reader in great perplexity asked whether the frying of bread in dripping on a Friday constituted a sin, since meat was forbidden, and another wondered if it was indulgent to kiss too frequently the cross that she wore around her neck. The “thanksgiving” columns brimmed with gratitude: Bleeding from nose stopped, Success of school in needlework examination, Removal of dangerous trees near house, Gangrene averted, Safe delivery of parcel, Good weather for hockey match, Father takes pledge, Money won in sweepstake.

  One could read of the adventures of Irish nuns and priests who roamed the world to reach unfortunate heathens desirous of baptism. There were pictures of nuns on rickshaws being ferried across the Han River in Hanyang and walking along a gangplank, with a skyline of Shanghai in the background. These were daughters of Erin, because “wherever a human need had declared itself, an Irish nun was there to meet it.” Priests, like Christ to the centurions, traveled in blizzards or simmering heat to breach the backwoods of America, the Australian bush, the African veldt, the leper asylums, the cities of China, the Kachin Hills of Burma, the pottery village of Bhamo—places where natives had never seen a white man before, let alone a bearded priest arriving on a donkey or a bullock cart.