Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  The nun I was poised to fall in love with was different. She was younger, her cheeks extremely pale, ivory-colored, with sometimes the merest tincture of wine-red on her cheekbones when in frustration she became inflamed if we failed to grasp the geometry theorem that she had just written on the blackboard.

  I would watch for her. I would wait for her. I would rush to her assistance when she came down steps with a load of books and copybooks, often, too often, beaten to it by other strapping girls who were also smitten with her. Yet one evening, when I passed her unexpectedly in the recreation hall, she gave me what I can only call the intimation of a smile—but it was an encouragement. In the chapel I saw where she knelt, the slope of her long back an escarpment, her collarbones the pillars of the Parthenon, these newfangled comparisons I had gleaned from a book I had found in the glass bookcase that was opened on Sundays when, for one hour, we were allowed to read for recreation. There were devout books, the lives of saints, the sermons of Cardinal Newman, and the wholesome novels of Canon P. Sheehan describing the dull lives of families in County Tipperary. The book I picked out by accident was an encyclopædia of gods and goddesses, full of strange and unlikely occurrences. Dionysus, god of wine and moisture, visiting King Dion in Aetolia fell in love with Carya, whose jealous sisters were about to betray her to their father, when Dionysus struck them with madness and turned them into rocks. Male gods disguised themselves in such cunning ways, appearing as the North Wind or bedraggled cuckoos or in the fleeces of ewes to ravish nymphs and goddesses, whereupon miraculous conceptions ensued that were, however, unlike that of the Virgin Mary, who had conceived by the Holy Ghost. These long-ago gods, with their cunning and their debaucheries, were so different from our stern God who lived above in the tabernacle where one day I would have to stand as a punishment.

  To my astonishment, when the Halloween parcels were handed out, I received one. It was a cone-shaped glass bowl filled with delicacies, covered with red transparent paper that came to a crown at the top and was tied with a white satin bow. It had been sent directly from a shop, and on a white card was printed a woman’s name and her compliments. I remembered my mother and I visiting her just outside Galway city, in Salthill, and how smartly dressed she was in a fitted suit as she sat watching us eat, not touching a pick of the food that had been prepared for us. She told us something that nearly caused my mother to faint. For her operation, which she called an “op,” and which I suspected concerned women’s ailments, her husband had been allowed into the operating theater for a moment beforehand, where he saw her naked. She took pride in telling this. Why she had sent me a parcel I would never know, but my popularity soared as I handed out slices of chocolate cake each evening and gave girls in the dormitory monkey nuts and hazelnuts to crack on.

  The air was damp, and that, along with cold nights, as we shivered under one blanket and a cotton eiderdown, meant that girls got chilblains, sore throats, and coughs; some were confined to the big lonely dormitory and given a cup of senna for a cure.

  One evening at Benediction the coughing got out of hand. At the very moment when the priest, his hands covered in a white veil, held up the monstrance that contained the Blessed Sacrament and a choir nun was pouring her ecstasy into Stabat Mater, a bout of multiple coughs eclipsed all else. It was sacrilege. Afterward the Head Nun asked for those who had been culpable to put their hands up, and my hand went up automatically, but I was alone. For punishment I was told that I would have to stand in the chapel the following day when the other girls went out for their walk.

  Standing by the rails that led to the altar, I feared that my nun might come in to say a hurried prayer, and seeing me, she would wonder what my most heinous sin could be. The chapel, without lit candles and other girls, felt lonely, and the smell from the chrysanthemums that were on the altar steps also had a sad smell of clay.

  But it was worth everything, the standing, the humiliation, and my smarting at the injustice of the fact that other girls had not owned up. At evening rosary, I noticed that my prayer book had been put back the wrong way. Girls kept prayer books in cubby holes at the back of the chapel, and the nun must have discovered mine with the name “Drewsboro” on the flyleaf. There was a holy picture on yellow parchment. From a golden-hazed sky, watery rays of light, needle-thin, poured down onto a host of angels who were also suspended in a kind of ethereal light. So holy was it that it could serve as a little portable altar. But it was the words written on the back that made me gasp: O Lord, rebuke me not in thy wrath, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure. What did it mean? It didn’t matter what it meant. It would carry me through lessons and theorems and soggy meat and cabbage, because now, and in secret, I had been drawn into the wild heart of things.

  For the Christmas entertainments a trunk was flung down for us to pick our costumes. Fancy dresses, capes, shawls, all smelling of camphor, for us to rifle. As I was going to recite Mark Antony’s baleful speech over Caesar’s body, I chose a velvet toga that was much too big and a roped curtain cord to hold it up. When my nun arrived, I was already rehearsing, feverishly—“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears”—and she drew me aside and said to take the speech a little less impulsively, to live the lines and enter into the pity of them, of imperial Caesar, whose wife had warned him not to go out that morning, having seen that he would be slaughtered. She helped me into the clogs that were too big for me and, from a dampish sponge, smeared white matte pancake makeup all over my face. For the performance she stood in the wings praying, and I was conscious of her being there. Afterward she beckoned, and I followed her to the reception parlor, which was exclusive to the Head Nun, yet she risked it. She had a surprise for me, which she hauled from her big, deep pocket. It was a quarter-pound box of chocolates with pictures of blue kingfishers on the paper wrapping. How had she come by it? I thought it must have been a gift to her, and instead of handing it over to the Reverend Mother, in rampant disobedience she had hidden it for me.

  That first Christmas at home I was chillier with my mother, who could not understand the change in me. I would not eat the cakes or the trifle that she foisted on me, and I went out each evening to neighbors’ houses to sit with them, while my mother longed for me to sit with her. There was a widow whose new house was halfway between the two villages, pebble-dashed, with flower beds in front. It smelled of mortar and fresh paint. In her small kitchen, our knees close up to the enamel stove, we sat, her breakfast things already laid at the far end of the table, a cup and saucer, a porridge bowl, and a linen napkin in a bone ring. She would fill me in on all the latest news, which was unvarying, publicans that were in trouble with guards for after-hours drinking, neighbors in bitter land disputes, and husbands and wives who threatened to kill one another. After a decent interval, she would say, “What about a little toddy?” and disappear, swiftly coming back with the sherry bottle under her arm and two glasses, a small liqueur glass for me and a larger cut-glass one for herself. The sherry was a dark, rich amber color, and there were soft lemon biscuits to break and dip into it and suck from. After a few drinks, she got either skittish or maudlin, missing the husband that had drowned, still cut up because spiteful people had said that it wasn’t an accident and that he had done it on purpose, to get away from her. She would then, in a bathos of tears, recite a poem called “People Will Talk.”

  I did not shed a tear going back after the holidays, knowing that my nun was there waiting for me, and the very first moment that we bumped into one another, I knew by certain signs that, if anything, her affections had deepened.

  The County Home, run by the same order, was a mile outside the town, overlooking the lake, and a cousin of my father’s, a nursing sister, was matron there. The grounds were full of old people, old men and old women, dribbling and pottering and tending to the rockery. It was not nearly as regimental as the convent, as they were nursing nuns and had a bit more pity. I had brought a Christmas cake from my mother to my father’s cousin and so was allowed to deliver
it to her. A tiny woman who did not reach my shoulder, she had a birdlike flutter, all excitement, as she laid down the tea tray, rushing in and out, calling to her charges, saying they were stone deaf, giving orders that they could not hear and going herself to get the cup and saucer and the teapot and the large slice of sponge cake with the raspberry jam filling that was on a plate covered with a white doily. She was the soul of affection and far more outspoken than other nuns. She said that had she known how hard religious life was to be and the trials and severities that awaited her, she would never have entered at all.

  I did not stay long, because I had a plan. It meant taking a longer route around the lake and to the far end of the town, so as not to be spied upon. A statue of Stoney Brennan, with his bulbous head, whom the English had hanged for having stolen a turnip, was in a recess in the wall, and possibly in honor of Christmas, someone had streaked his cheeks with cardinal-red paint and stuck a cigarette butt in his mouth. The other sign of Christmas was the long strips of tinsel in the pharmacy window, idly whirling.

  The sense of elation was almost unbearable: to be out on the street, breathing, as I believed, the wicked air, harboring a hectic love for my nun, and on the point of buying her the gift that would be a godsend to her on cold, frosty nights. In the window of the draper’s shop, there was a mannequin of a lady, a Miss Moderna, in a black crepe dress, cut on the bias, and I would have given anything to have been slender enough to fit into it. The shop smelled of every kind of cloth, wool and linen and serge, and the woman behind the counter looked up, surprised to see a convent girl in a navy gabardine coat and school cap. She guessed that I had stolen a march. I had come to buy bed socks. A white shoebox stacked with socks, summer and winter, was flung on the counter, and I picked out a pair in wool and angora that was striped in contrasting shades of pink. The woman complimented me on my taste and said I had picked the most expensive pair of socks in the batch. All I had was two shillings, but since she knew where to find me, and was in on my transgression, she was certain to receive the remaining sixpence. Nevertheless, she wrote my name and the IOU into a big ledger that seemed to be full of names and IOUs written with a scratchy pen in heavy brown ink. She wrapped the socks in silver paper. It was not a flashy silver, more a dun silver, the same as used to be around a cake, called Oxford Luncheon, which my grandmother presented to my mother when she came on her annual holiday, never staying the full week, missing home and the mountains; somehow there was an estrangement between them, mother and daughter. The silver paper around the Oxford Luncheon smelled of raisins, sultanas, and candied peel, whereas the silver paper around the pink socks smelled of nothing. I placed it in the pew where my nun knelt.

  I knew that she had received them and possibly loved them, because not long after, and quite irrelevantly, she spoke of the difference between angora wool, which is the down of the rabbit, and cashmere from the down of the goat, both being very sought after.

  That term was one of ecstasies and doubt, the seesaw of love, the shiverings, depriving myself of the pleasure of seeing her in order to think about her and then flinging myself in front of her, like a fawning dog waiting for its reward. Our friendliest times were in the cookery kitchen, when after the class she would sometimes ask me to stay behind and help clear up. It was informal: white flour on her fingers and on her habit, stacking saucepans and colanders, as occasionally we would say small things to one another that meant multitudes. She seemed to guess that I had decided to become a nun, and that in a few years we would both be under the same roof, subject to the same rules, in our hair shirts, sleeping on iron springs, stoically immune to passions and temptations.

  Then it happened. The coolness. She began to look pinched and pale, and was bad-tempered in class. She allowed other girls to carry her books. She swept from classroom to classroom like a creature possessed. I dreamed it before it actually happened, I dreamed that she would have to go away. One evening she was seen in the back of a motorcar, along with another nun, both in their heavy knitted shawls, obviously setting out on a long journey. I believed that she was gone forever, that she had had to renounce her vows and was being brought home to her parents in disgrace; it was weeks after, agonizing weeks, when from a young postulant who came from a parish near home I learned the truth. My nun had had a crisis of sorts, a bit of a breakdown, and was sent to the Sister house in Ballinasloe to recover. There was an entire term without her.

  Yet when I did see her again, many months later, my hopes were raised. We had all assembled for the Head Nun’s evening homily, when she came in softly, so softly, whispered something to the Head Nun, and then, when our eyes met briefly, I felt that I had reason to be euphoric. But it was not so. I would never see her alone again. I had moved to a higher class, where a different, brisker nun took geometry and maths. Our paths rarely crossed, but one evening, in the chapel grounds, I saw her coming toward me, alone. There was no one but us. She was whispering her prayers, but as she sighted me, her hands came out from inside her copious sleeves and flew up in defense, as if I were an enemy. She passed swiftly, her praying much louder.

  Because of my seeming devoutness and obedience, I was given the honor of playing Our Lady of Fatima in the school play. It was not a speaking part. All I had to do was stand with hands folded as in prayer and gaze at the three shepherd children of Fatima, who knelt below and to whom I was secretly to impart the third secret. My throne consisted of four wooden butter boxes, all covered in pale blue tulle. I, too, was draped in blue tulle. Another girl, who stood at the side of the stage, informed the audience of the first two secrets, which were to do penance and pray for the conversion of godless Russia. The third secret was preceded by lights, to represent a trembling sun, a sun that moved outside cosmic laws, a sun surrounded by scarlet and purple, which had stretched the abilities of stage management, who had only a flash lamp and some bicycle lamps to rely on. While I was pausing to impart the third secret, the three children recited the rosary as the audience waited, or were expected to wait, in thrall. The prophecy itself, which was most significant, was conveyed by the narrator, who somehow divined the secret words I had transmitted to the children. It predicted a dreadful calamity upon the Church and the martyrdom of the Pope, at which there was wailing from a chorus of girls in their navy gym frocks and the shepherd children lay on the stage, disconsolate. My sole duty was to stand utterly still, not to wobble, as befitted the profundity of my message. Many compliments were bestowed on me for the first two nights, but it was the third night that mattered most, because priests and the Bishop of Galway were attending. Nerves and excitement spiraled. Even as I climbed the butter boxes, I felt unsteady. They seemed not so solid as they had been before, and the distance between myself and the shepherd children seemed enormous. I began to shake, to shake uncontrollably, gripping the blue tulle, which was in itself sacrilege, since I was supposed to remain with my hands folded. I could see the children underneath were also becoming a bit distraught, but I was unable to stop it. All I begged was to get through those forty-five minutes and not disgrace myself, and I had almost regained composure when it started up again, only worse: the sun trembled and indeed made movements outside cosmic laws, as I too began to see things, lost consciousness, and like Humpty Dumpty came tumbling down, to the dismay of the children and flurry as the narrator and a nun hefted me off. The curtain had to be brought down. My understudy, who was not wearing tulle, mounted the butter boxes, and the performance had to start again.

  In my cubicle, where I had gone to hide, I could hear the applause, and later a lay nun brought me a jam tart, and though I could not be sure, I imagined it was from my nun, to indicate that she had lived my shame with me.

  He was known to be a hobo, and yet, when he arrived off the evening bus in the town, things perked up and word went round that Roland was here. Even his name, Roland, had the ring of legend. He was from somewhere in County Limerick and came to stay with a bachelor in the town who owned a hardware shop and kept several greyhou
nds which he half-starved, yet in his booming voice he would call out, “Roland, give the dogs some water.” It was at the Sunday-night “hops” that Roland came into his own, in his navy blazer and open shirt, bell-bottomed trousers, and hair slicked back with Brylcreem. His technique, as it was known, was feigned casualness as he watched the form, then tugged at some girl’s arm, this being an invitation to dance, along with the usual “Righty-ho?”

  The “hops,” for which admission was sixpence, was in aid of a new altar for the chapel, which was to be in Italianate marble with mosaics of gold and modeled on an altar in the Vatican. The parish priest stood near the entrance, where one got the ticket, and afterward he sat on a chair inside the hall to ensure that couples did not make free with one another when dancing. The floor was slippery from some new miracle powder that had been discovered, and it was no longer having to endure the awful smell of paraffin oil with which they used to douse it.

  I was waiting for the results of my exam. After the shame of Fatima and my nun’s coolness and other restlessnesses, I made up my mind to cut my education short and sit for my final exam one year early. It entailed endless studying, including with a torch under the covers in my cubicle at night. I kept reading, devouring all these facts. I had graduated to a private cubicle and, because of my endless studying, became something of a favorite with several nuns. When I got styes or nervous turns, the Head Nun would call me aside and give me valerian, which she dropped from a little pipette into a beaker, that and boric powder to bathe the eyes.