Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  It was the first time I had attended one of the hops, and I was excited by it. A boy called Percy asked me up for a waltz, and as we moved along to the strains of a very sentimental tune, he inquired what color my eyes were and how far I lived out of the town.

  This was an oblique way of deciding whether or not to ask to walk me home. The men were always angling to walk girls home, and if things went as they hoped, it meant they would desert the main road and go down the Dock Road or to a path under the bridge, across fields where there were unused cow houses and lime kilns. But no local girl could hope to compete with Dolly the crooner. She was a peroxide blonde with black fishnet stockings and black suede high-heeled shoes. She also wore black velvet gloves that reached to her elbows, and men, watching her hold the microphone as she delivered the slushy song, nudged each other, wondering if they would score. But she was always accompanied by a bruiser, a rough diamond who had metal rings on several fingers, enough to dissuade any upstarts. Toward the end of the evening her songs centered on heartbreak and infidelity. There was “After the Ball,” in which many a heart was broken, “Jealousy,” and “The Tennessee Waltz,” in which, gallingly, a friend steals another man’s sweetheart.

  One night, before my last term at school, I somehow guessed that Roland was going to ask me up, which he did, with the expected “Righty-ho?” I cannot remember how we conducted it, except to know that, when the dance was over and lights extinguished, we left and hovered on the street until there were no longer any car lights or any flash lamps. Not a word was said. I went with him half-willingly, and we climbed the town under a sky that was a feast of stars, outglittering each other. There wasn’t a soul in the street, the townspeople fast asleep in their beds.

  Once installed in a siding, by a galvanized door that led into a yard, I began my procrastinations. The upshot was that I opened my coat and allowed my skirt to be bunched up around me. That part of himself that he exposed he half-camouflaged in a handkerchief, and his exertions were so robust that they might just as easily have been spent on the door itself, which shook and rattled. I feared it would alert some holy Mary who might be on the prowl, with a flash lamp, for such indecency. The headlights of the car at the bottom of the hill showed the sheen of wet on the street, and everything was then hurried as he unbolted the door and pushed me into a big yard. In the bit of light from the moon I saw that the yard was full of blue chip stones, as the shopkeeper was a supplier of them.

  Roland did not convey me home.

  Back in the convent I studied constantly, not wanting to fail my final examination, as it would mean incarceration for another year. The world with all its sins and guile and blandishments was beckoning.

  PART TWO

  Big Time

  After stumbling along country roads and fields at night, the beam from the flashlight fitful and the battery forever in danger of conking out, I found Dublin enthralling: the street lighting was as marvelous as the illuminations said to have lit the sky with Laudamus, Adoramus, and Glorificamus during the Eucharistic Congress of 1932. Light flooded the pavements and glinted off the steel of the defunct tramlines, and sent a gold-threaded haze up into a line of young trees where birds roosted.

  It was a Saturday night in the late 1940s and my first walk into the city with my sister Eileen; Anna, the girl we shared digs with; and Maeve, a friend of hers, arms linked in pairs. We passed a fairly shabby-looking hotel, where they said hurlers and their followers drank after a match, and then a select grocer’s with cooked hams in the window, so tempting, the bread-crumb crusting of mustard and brown sugar studded with cloves. I was ravenous. For food. For life. For the stories that I would write, except that everything was effervescent and inchoate in my overexcitable brain.

  “There goes Bang-Bang,” Maeve said. Each night, holding a key as if it were a gun, Bang-Bang would jump onto buses, throw himself on the platform, shout warnings, then jump off again, but no one paid any heed to him, knowing he had been shell-shocked during the war.

  We stood to gape into the Gresham Hotel, the apogee of grandeur, with its overhanging iron and glass awning. Anna said that it was where priests from down the country stayed when they came to Dublin, so that it exuded both a sacred and a salubrious aura. The giant column of Nelson’s pillar was so tall that it was impossible to see Nelson’s face with his blind eye. Aldermen of the city had erected it in 1809 to celebrate his victory over Napoleon in the Battle of Trafalgar. But poor Nelson had yet to undergo more hazards. His column would be toppled by an IRA explosive, and the head, which was left intact, stored in a shed, only to be stolen, the thief then sending a postal order to the authorities, via an evening paper, to cover the damages for broken glass, padlock, window frame, and screws. Many, including the boxer “Strongman Butty Sugrue,” coveted that head, and very soon it was stolen again and displayed in an antique shop in London, then later returned and laid to rest on the original site. There it was booed while an official from the Corporation took it away, only to drop it as he loaded it into the lorry, and after more skittishness Nelson was taken to end his days in the calm environs of a library.

  At the base of the pillar, the women known as the “Shawlies” were putting the squashed fruits, flowers, and vegetables into their barrows, and the ground was slippy from the skins and the pulp. All Dublin knew them, shouting out their wares—“Cox’s apples… blood oranges… blood oranges”—and then repairing to the pub on Saturday night, fighting like tinkers, the expletives more and more “choice,” vowing to have each other’s “guts for garters.” One, by the name of Rosie, Maeve said, was a right card, known for her “Upperocity,” every phrase beginning with “As de Valera would have it.” De Valera was our Taoiseach, an austere figure who sat in front of the Blessed Sacrament for an hour each day, and so devout was he that he brought gifts of blessed scapulars to distribute among the heathens in foreign delegations.

  There too, prancing about, was the dotty woman in a tweed costume and a hat with a red cockade, conducting her moral crusade, holding up the crucifix of large rosary beads for passersby to kiss, half-singing, half-speaking:

  All is in the hand of Mary,

  In the mighty hand of Mary,

  All is in the hand of Mary,

  Her legion marches on.

  Opposite the pillar was the General Post Office, where the men of the 1916 rebellion proclaimed the Irish Constitution, raised the Irish flag, but soon were overwhelmed and summarily executed in Kilmainham yard. Farther along, a statue of Daniel O’Connell, the Catholic emancipator, an iron man in a black iron coat with iron angels guarding him. But I was finished with all that, with history and martyrs and fields and the seven woods and religious maniacs, being, as I believed, on the brink of daring emancipation.

  The four corners of O’Connell Bridge were flanked by tall lamps on stout cast-iron pedestals that gave it an air of majesty. We were entering the south side of the city, thought to be swisher, and on toward the purlieus of Grafton Street, which was the “acme of fashion.” There were more imposing statues, and in College Green, where not a patch of grass was to be seen, there was a sign for Bovril, so dazzling, so bewitching, that to stand before it, to absorb the red-gold glitter of each of the six capital letters, was to witness an earthly aurora borealis.

  Trinity College took up an entire corner of a street, the stone gray and somber, the windows unlit, as if it had gone to sleep on itself. Far more fetching was the Bovril sign across the way, that medley of color flickering on and off, flickers that corresponded to the hope and wildness going on inside me.

  We gazed in shop windows in Grafton Street, the styles so gorgeous, so enviable, but with no price tags on the diaphanous dresses. Then we came back on the opposite side, passing a beggar woman on the bridge who was holding a bunch of scallions, either because she had been given them out of pity or she was hoping to sell them. Her skin had a peculiar greenish hue from the rays of the lamps, and she muttered as we passed along. We stopped outside an Italian ice-cr
eam parlor to look longingly at scoops of ice cream in dainty glass dishes, with melted chocolate or red cordial poured over them, and in taller glasses there were sundaes with crests of whipped cream in flawless whirligig. Having no money was galling.

  The first awakening was to come the next day, the Sunday, when my sister and I visited cousins in Phibsboro and watched from the velvet sofa as they ate their Sunday lunch, relishing it, offering us nothing, not even a slice of the apple pie that a maid passed around on a palette knife, having already cut it in the kitchen.

  Still, that Monday morning, I set out for the chemist’s shop in Cabra Road with unwonted pride. I was wearing my best, pleated skirt and a navy cardigan, and luckily, as it was September, the lumpen tweed coat of which I was ashamed hung in the wardrobe. In the chemist’s shop I would spend the next four years, training for a profession that was not my chosen one, but convinced that I would meet poets and that one day I would be admitted into the world of letters.

  The chemist who greeted me, and under whose tutelage I would be, had a pale, pinched face and gold-rimmed spectacles, and the boss’s wife was all pie at first, then peevish, when it transpired that I had come without a shop coat. Reluctantly she took two pound notes from the till and told me to go to the drapery along the parade, to get a coat, adding that each week half a crown would be deducted from my wages. My salary was seven and six per week, and with this eventuality it would be only five shillings for several weeks to come, which did not allow for much diversion. There was little room for that anyhow, as three nights a week I attended pharmaceutical lectures on the south side of the city and, two other nights, lectures to qualify as an optician, something my brother decided would be to the family’s advantage. The optical lessons were in Kevin Street, part of the slums, so gaily immortalized in Sean O’Casey’s plays, the Joxers and Fluthers drinking their wages in the pubs, as they philosophized on the planets while their wives pushed prams, like the legendary and ghostly Molly Malone, “through streets broad and narrow,” to forage for a lump of coal, a crust of bread, a head of cabbage, anything to feed their children. Cycling through those dark streets, I saw no poetry, only loads of washing on makeshift clotheslines and on the crumbling wrought-iron balconies of the tenements.

  “Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafing,” Anna Livia said, except that my mornings were neither soft nor leafy as I set out for work on a crock of a bicycle, trying to negotiate my way between the other cyclists, the buses, and people late for work. Once a month there was a cattle mart in North Circular Road; the beasts were hectored out of the back of lorries, roaring and bawling, an almost human plaint to their cries, chafing against their new confines, some refusing to be herded, running loose, as the drovers, with their ash plants and their bludgeons, walloped them on their heads and on their shins. At Hanlon’s Corner I would have to dismount because of all this commotion, the drovers shouting and belting the poor beasts, which slithered, their wet scutters everywhere, and bus drivers honking their horns impatiently. The drovers, like myself, all hailed from the country and were either “bullock men” or “heifer men,” carefree and galumptious. Countrymen, they had come to the city as youths and taken a liking to it, working in the knackers’ yards and the mart and later driving the animals miles to the docks, lords of the streets, in their dirty trench coats and pliant ash plants. All of it brought back the reek and constraints of home, and I would remember the three unanswered letters from my mother and tremble at my remiss. Things in our house would flash before my eyes involuntarily, the orange papier-mâché bowl, with bills and Mass cards, and the bottle of ink tilted on one side, ready for the next letter and the next as she drained the last drops to set down the numerous things on her mind.

  Some have died for love

  Some for the nation

  But I met my death

  Through the Dublin Corporation.

  Such was the rhyme I recited to myself on my perilous journey to one or two of the chemist’s shops owned by my employers. In Cabra Road the clientele was poor, chiselers rapping the glass counter for “tuppence or thruppence worth of gentian violet for me sister’s worms,” whereas in the Navan Road the clients were more effete, bluff men in tweed jackets and wives with husky voices, who came, or sent their chauffeurs, to collect Dexedrine tablets, which were reputed to be “uppers” and also good for slimming. My duties in both shops at first were fairly menial. I would stack the shelves, weigh packets of Epsom salts, Glauber salts, borax, and boric acid into small paper bags and label them, and gradually acquaint myself with the prescriptions of two rival doctors, which were written in Latin. My shop coat was a feature, since it had a stiff collar not unlike a priest’s, with a panel of mother-of-pearl buttons across the left shoulder.

  Dublin was full of stories, some funny and spry, and sometimes gruesome. A blond nurse, known for her flamboyance, who drove a red MG, provided illegal abortions in a dingy room, while ostensibly offering cures for dandruff and constipation. Her methods were primitive, injecting a solution of ergot and a flushing out with Jeyes Fluid, but unfortunately she fell foul of the law when a dead mother was found on a curb in Hume Street and a newborn baby abandoned on the side of a road in County Meath. She was sentenced to penal servitude in Mountjoy Prison, not far from the chemist’s shop where I, longing for lovemaking novenas for love, was nevertheless haunted by the specter of Mamie Cadden, who to some was an angel of deliverance, to others a murderer, and who would die, declared insane, in a lunatic asylum in Dundrum.

  There were as well the old codgers at street corners dying for talk, reeling off the names and nicknames of legendary characters, Zozimus, Johnny Forty-Coats, Paddy Bones Sweeney, along with the balladeers and poets and poetasters and pensioners with their “God be with the old days, the Glory days” and how Dublin would have been finished during the war, except for the horses and horsemen who ran their hearts out to be of service. Around the gates of Trinity College were the medical students, with their smart mufflers, among them a few foreigners from deepest Africa, who were all reputed “to be Princes in their own right.”

  First he tickled her

  Then he patted her

  Then he passed the female catheter.

  For he was a medical

  A jolly old medico.

  I got to know the various customers in the chemist’s shop, their ailments and their money worries, asking for “tick” until payday at the weekend. I acquired a straggle of admirers in the Navan Road shop, boys and young men from the nearby deaf-and-dumb institution, who would come and just stand, striving for speech, like convicts with their shorn heads and rough gray uniforms, and if they chanced to catch sight of themselves in the mirror that fronted the weighing scales, they backed away. They didn’t like what they saw. But their smiles were glorious, and they reddened when they saw me take down the big jar to nick a few sticks of barley sugar, which they sucked and sucked on, and outdid each other in craven gratitude. The boss’s wife would not have approved, but this was harmless in comparison with what my mother was advocating: my devout mother, in one of her letters, said that in his Summa Theologica Saint Thomas Aquinas had recommended poorly paid workers to steal from their rich masters in necessity. How she came to know of Summa Theologica, or a twelfth-century saint, was beyond me.

  A retired guard called Paschal, who had a duodenal ulcer, and who at first used to stand like a sentry while his prescription was being made up, got to learn of my interest in books and loaned me two of his. After some time he confided in me the fact that he was writing an article, intending to show up the country’s bigotry and ignorance. There was, as he said, the utter disgrace of Rouault’s Christ in His Passion moldering in some secret room. Friends of the National Collections stumped up four hundred pounds to present it as a gift to the Municipal Gallery, which refused to hang it on grounds of obscenity. They were not alone in their disgust, as the ex-Lord Mayor, a Mrs. Clark, described it as “a travesty that was offensive to Christian sentiment” and a Mr. Ke
ating, a painter, called it “childish, naïve, and unintelligible.” Paschal said that there were only a few enlightened people left in the country, one being the columnist Myles na gCopaleen, who had written mockingly of the farcical fate of Rouault, saying that, of course, no Irish man, with his “extensive knowledge of Sacred art and the bon-dieuiserie of the Boulevard St. Sulpice,” could tolerate such abomination in his bedroom.

  Yes, as Paschal said, regrettably the great gods were gone. Yeats dead and eventually buried in Drumcliffe; Joyce dead and buried in Zurich, next to a zoo; O’Casey living in England and writing acrimonious letters to the paper; and Beckett, “the bawd and the blasphemer,” as good as dead, having moved to Paris. It was, as Paschal said, “all down to one man,” the archdruid of Drumcondra, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, who kept Ireland free from paganism and modern aberrations. Dublin was in thrall to him, with his distinctive aura, in red cloak and red biretta, wearing the “Borgia ring” of precious amethyst presented at his inauguration by the Knights of Saint Columbanus. If he attended a religious concert, the choir sang out “Ecce Homo” as a spotlight was trained on him. His powers were primordial, what with an acquiescent government, a vast network of spies and numerous religious sodalities. Such was his empathy with the Vatican that Ireland, poor though she was, paid the expense to keep the oil lamps of St. Peter’s lit. His exigence was known to all, but the full and paranoid extent of it was only revealed in a marvelous and sometimes hilarious book by John Cooney, after his death. In it some of the more obscure vagaries of the archbishop are featured, such as the telescope he had fitted in his country seat, Notre Dame des Bois, to spy on couples and young men on Killiney Beach after dark, that and his penchant for sexually explicit medical manuals written in Latin.