Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  The negative influences with which he was obsessed were British newspapers, evil literature, communism, and foreign soccer players. The cinema too was a hotbed of iniquity. Only instructional films, such as The Fight against Tuberculosis, or those showing the maneuvers of various local defense forces, were recommended, and at his bidding protests were organized outside cinemas; at different times Orson Welles, Danny Kaye, Larry Adler, and Arthur Miller were all denounced for their leftist tendencies. Even Cole Porter in time was censored. When, for Hospitals’ Request, the words “Always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion” were played on the radio, the archbishop insisted that the following week they be replaced by harmless instrumental orchestra music. For his “modesty campaign” he used to be driven in his deluxe Dodge through the streets of Dublin at night, looking for any sign of miscreance, and if there were nude mannequins in a shop window of a department store, he ordered that they be removed next day. When, mistakenly, tampons were introduced without consulting him, he immediately issued an episcopal censure to the government, so that an unfortunate parliamentary secretary for health had to explain that the sale of tampons was to be discontinued, as they were in danger of stimulating girls at an impressionable age and could eventually lead them into acquiring contraceptives (which were also illegal) to satisfy their dangerously aroused passions.

  The craze for fashion was whetted when in the papers I saw advertisements for dinner gowns in banana cream, coatees embroidered with pearls and diamonds, black muskrat stoles, and whitener for “Milady’s teeth.” But I had saved only enough to get a pair of gold sleepers, believing the words of the song, “And if your love wears golden earrings, she belongs to you…” It was to Dr. Masterson I went, as I knew his name from the prescriptions, which were almost impossible to decipher. He was a gruff man. The method was rudimentary. A needle was bored through the earlobe, into a cork at the back, then wriggled and rewriggled to make a hole large enough for the little sleeper to be fitted. Before he began, he said that if I squealed at the first one, he wouldn’t do the second. His dispensary was crowded and pierced ears were a frivolity. For a week or so, little crusts of dried blood could be seen on my earlobes, which the dummies examined and fretted over.

  I was on my bicycle when I saw a group in Baggott Street that had surrounded a tall woman dressed completely in black, like a nun. It was outside the Unicorn restaurant, and being so tall, she had stooped to address them. Someone said that this was Maud Gonne, the fairy queen about whom Yeats, laboring in ecstasy, had written poem after poem. She was the Woman of the Sidhe, who long ago on horseback, with her dog Dagda behind her, rode all over Donegal to give heart and fire to the evicted peasants as their cabins collapsed under the assaults of the battering ram. It was the nearest I would ever come to a myth, because not only had she served as Yeats’s muse, she had also married Major John McBride, a hero of the Boer War, and one of the men executed in the doomed 1916 rebellion. History and literature had meshed and were embodied in her loftiness—“Pallas Athene at Howth station, waiting a train.”

  As she walked away, an older man, shaking with emotion, recited the prophetic poem that Yeats had written to her:

  …A crowd

  Will gather, and not know it walks the very street

  Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud.

  Some years later I would meet her son, Sean McBride, who had all his mother’s aristocratic air and mien, his temples like hers, white as alabaster, and his accent slightly French from having grown up in Normandy. He took me to lunch in Jammet’s, Dublin’s grandest restaurant, and afterward he smoked a cigar and had a cognac, while I had a peppermint frappé, my first ever. I was married by then and lived in County Wicklow, and McBride offered to drive me part of the way, toward the Wicklow Mountains, to Kilmacanogue. I was too frightened to let him hold my hand on the journey. That rectitude, combined with my longing, was what made him the protagonist in my first novel, The Country Girls, the aloof and mysterious barrister whom Kate would moon over and lose her heart to, in fiction.

  As Christmas was approaching, the head of the transport company announced that railway stations no longer needed to resemble Victorian ones and, moreover, to banish the ghost of rationing stations, would be lit up to generate a “festive atmosphere.” Ornate greeting boards, hanging flower baskets, fairy lights, and garlands went up. The tallest tree ever seen in the capital was in Westland Row. But I was going home from a different station, “Kingsbridge of the bitter winds,” with the borrowed volume of Sean O’Casey’s autobiography in my suitcase. I had the same old tweed coat with, however, an added touch of flamboyance, a gentleman’s scarf of white silk with sumptuous fringing that I had bought in a secondhand shop for a song. As I arrived home, the welcome was effusive, and my mother felt the gold sleepers, as if somehow they reminded her of her own youth.

  That next morning, not having to mount the bicycle, I slept till noon, and she wakened me with a pot of tea and fingers of toast cut very daintily. She was curious about Dublin, the style in the shop windows, the altars in the numerous churches, the friars in their brown robes hurrying through the streets to minister to the sick, and our cousins who, though they came each summer and ate like gluttons, were too stingy to give us a cup of tea.

  Later I went out into the fields. It was frosty, the grass crisp and dry, and you could hear an animal’s moan a mile off. I had forgotten how much I loved those fields, my breath almost blue in the clean air, our two dogs trotting along beside me and sometimes scampering off when a rabbit had darted from some hole and in a crazed stupidity came first their way and then ran for its life. Birds flew and dipped with a jauntiness, sometimes perching on the telegraph wires, from which there came a low, zinging throb. Then suddenly they would take a bold flight off to somewhere else and possibly resume their concert. I knew that I would always come back to Drewsboro and yet that I would never come back entirely. I felt carefree, stayed out a long while, went up the hills to see the river, the icy water crystal clear, with wild swans shivering in the rushes.

  My mother’s eyes were seething, even before she spoke. She was holding the volume of Sean O’Casey’s autobiography, open at the incendiary page. Was this how I spent my time? Was this their reward for the sacrifices they had made to get me to Dublin? I was flustered, having read only the first forty pages, which were about family and the trade union movement and the backstage rivalries in the Abbey Theatre. I nearly fainted as she started to read aloud:

  It was commonly reported by those who were close up to the inner circle, that, if a monk was to be kept from straddling a judy he had to be shut up in a stone coffin and let out only under the supervision of a hundred halberdiers while he was having a snack in the first, second and third watches of the day, but as this guardianship of the ladies was too costly and too troublesome, the monks had it all their own way, and there wasn’t a lassie in the whole wide world who didn’t know a codpiece from the real thing, even when her eyes were shut and her mind wandering.

  She was about to burn it. I begged her not to, saying it was not my book and that I must return it. I begged her and I hated her.

  Back in Dublin, debauchery was thriving. An unemployed laborer from Crumlin was fined two pounds for offensive behavior in the Olympia Ballroom after he had been caught jitterbugging. The end of the world was predicted. One thousand pilgrims who had traveled to Knock Shrine in County Mayo were warned by a Father Declan of Inchicore of the mounting avalanche of infidelity and apostasy that threatened to submerge the world in blood and tears. In a pastoral letter the Pope was forced to admit that it was “the darkest hour” in history since the Deluge. A third message from Our Lady was due to be conveyed to the children in Fatima, prophesying this Armageddon. Chapels were packed. On the appointed day and at the given hour of three o’clock, in a swish golf club outside the city, players and caddies lay on the damp turf pleading for mercy. Except that the hour passed uneventfully and people resumed their wicked ways.
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  Funds permitting, I would twice monthly, on my half-day from the pharmacy, go to a stage show in the Capitol Theatre, billed to be Ireland’s answer to the Folies Bergère. It was a veritable Mecca, the stage with gauze backdrop and lurid Technicolor, peroxide blondes with flashy suspenders kicking their thighs and their legs to the heavens, their flesh so beautifully, so evenly bronzed; their faces, in contrast, a stark alabaster white. They were the mere backdrop to the main event, when a crooner, in a fawn suit and with a dazzling smile, strolled on, the goddesses already having formed a semicircle, their arms making a balustrade for him to lean on. Then he came downstage to ravish rows of us besotted women and girls, who had paid one shilling for this thrill. The collective swooning in that audience would be impossible to measure as his first song came as a signal to each yearning one of us:

  Brush those tears from your eyes

  And try and realize

  That from now on

  I’ll always be true.

  I went away

  But I didn’t mean to stay

  And I will regret it until my dying day.

  By then the handkerchiefs were out, and sometimes he would sing the last verse again, as a sop, while the chorus girls, the goddesses, shrugged and pouted in a mimicry of huff.

  At the stage door, where we, the adorers, hovered, he would emerge smiling, whistling, proud of his little audience. One or two might be lucky enough to get a hurried autograph. I was disappointed to note that his handwriting was slovenly. As I watched him go down the lane, it never occurred to me that he might single me out, except that he did. It was brief. It was a beckon of the head to detach myself from the others and his asking if he should call the following Sunday around two, then making a note of my address on the North Circular Road. Already I was negotiating the minefield of getting my sister and Anna out of the flat, and my hopes hinged on the fact that they did corporal works of mercy, visiting sick people in hospitals.

  Sunday, and the coast was clear. I had made a sponge cake and laid a tea tray. “Nice place,” he said, as he climbed the three flights of stairs covered in dark linoleum and entered the kitchen, which doubled as sitting room. He was in a shabby suit, unshaven, and without the pancake makeup, but still irresistible. He had never seen a tea cozy before. It was one of my mother’s, made of mohair, with a mohair picture of a white cottage and a small red hall door. He thought it was nifty. “Nifty” was a favorite word of his.

  As we sat on the sagging horsehair sofa, exchanging sweet nothings, an unfortunate thing occurred. The door of a washstand, in which we kept saucepans, colanders, frying pans, and a drum of Vim, crept open of its own accord, revealing our ramshackle domestic life. He didn’t seem to notice, as he was already exploring the nape of my neck, my throat, saying ordinary, but in that context amazingly poetic, things, and I was thinking to myself how lucky to have been singled out after weeks of patient pursuit. The hooks of my brassiere yielded to his touch with a willingness. When he removed my silk stockings and flung them into a nether corner, two unnerving thoughts arose, one that my sister or Anna would return early and the other that the stockings, which had been twice to the invisible menders, would not survive this brawl and could not be repaired with nail varnish.

  But circuitousness could go only so far. He was now begging for the comforts of the bedroom, and as his entreaties intensified, so did my balk. I was skirting matters, jumping up to make tea, except that he had no interest in tea. He drew me back down quite roughly, and I was now on his lap, trembling, him telling me not to tremble because it would not hurt. The dilemma, I tried to tell him, was that my sister or Anna, both highly religious, would be returning at any moment. Why hadn’t I mentioned that earlier? We could have met somewhere else. There were quiet dells in Phoenix Park. He was getting testy. In a moment of sheer madness, I suggested he might sing “Brush Those Tears from Your Eyes.” Sing to you! There was nothing for it but candor. I spoke of my fears, and sensing them, he cradled me in the crook of his arm, called me “Baby,” and said there was nothing to be afraid of as “he could go through me like butter.” It was shocking altogether.

  Pointing to the wall clock, I said they were due back by three, which allowed for a mere eleven minutes of canoodling. Holding me fiercely, he said he was “game ball” and it could all be over and done in less. Love’s dream, that mystic linking which binds souls as well as bodies, had snapped and I hauled myself out of his embrace. What did I want? “What do you want?” he asked, saying my name, which he must have remembered from the day he gave me his autograph, prior to this first rendezvous. The spell was broken. He saw that it was a waste of time, moved to the kitchen chair, took out his bicycle clips and snapped them around the ankles of his navy gabardine trousers. Then, standing before the mirror that was next to the holy water font, he took out a broken white comb and ran it through the spill of his beautiful, soft brown hair. “Tolloll,” he said, as he had got his smile back, and hurried out and down the stairs.

  The phrase was new to me, and I reckoned it was Dublin slang. I would come across it again before too long, when I began to read James Joyce and found a Mr. M’Coy spoke it to Leopold Bloom after some aimless conversation. Naturally, because of the fiasco that had happened, I was too ashamed to go back to the Capitol Theatre, so my free half-day was spent in bookshops and at bookstalls.

  Dublin was a more trusting town in 1950, and secondhand books would be left on trestle tables outside the shop, with canvas awning above to keep off the downpours. Anyone who might want to could appropriate a book and walk off. It was at a stall in Bachelor’s Walk, overlooking the Liffey, that I found a slim volume called Introducing James Joyce, by T. S. Eliot. I opened it at random. The paper was a pale lemony color, the print was small, the letters in a deep, indented black. A sentence shot up at me: “All blessed themselves and Mr Dedalus with a sigh of pleasure lifted from the dish the heavy cover pearled around the edge with glistening drops.” The scene was the Christmas dinner in the Dedalus house, seen through the child’s eyes of young Stephen. There was the great fire banked high, heartiness and witticisms, the plum pudding studded with peeled almonds and sprigs of holly, merriment, glasses replenished until the sudden dispute arose about priests meddling in politics and the church’s hounding of Charles Stewart Parnell once it became known that he was an adulterer. Reading it, I realized that it could have been a Christmas dinner in our house or many a house in Ireland, maybe not with the same erudition but with the same bitterness that split people and made them spiteful and unforgiving. I bought it for fourpence and carried it with me everywhere, including to pharmacy lectures, so that I could read it at will and copy out the sentences, luminous and labyrinthine as they were. It was when I copied them that I began to realize how great they were, the short, flawless snatches of dialogue, lush descriptions of corpses and steers and pigs and kine, of sea and sea stones, and then the extraordinary ascensions, in which worlds within worlds unfolded.

  My introduction to literature. Published by Faber & Faber in 1942.

  The pawnshop with its three golden balls was in Capel Street, and it being Monday morning, it was busy. My good Gor-Ray skirt was getting known in the Crystal Ballroom, and as I hardly ever got asked up, I decided to pawn the skirt. I took the morning off from the chemist on the excuse of being sick. Only twice in the four years of my apprenticeship did I take a morning off, one for the pawnshop and one for the morning I had my ears pierced. The counter was full of stuff, old clothes and suits, basins with sheets and pillow slips, good suits, blazers, false teeth, and a skeleton that a medical student had brought. It was a sickly yellow, like the keys of an old piano. People pawned on Monday morning and usually managed to retrieve their stuff by Saturday. A man kept aiming his snooker cue at each of us, calling it Gilda, which he had named after Rita Hayworth, “the good-bad woman Gilda.” Then we were treated to a rigmarole of how he came to get it, having suffered an accident on a building site, his trousers getting caught in the wire mesh, endin
g up a cropper, unemployed, and having to wait two years for the compensation money. Quite suddenly he took issue with the pawnbroker, called him a usurer, a feckin’ usurer, and said we were all being shafted. That was the thing about Dublin, stories abounding and so many of them hinged on poverty. I got a five-pound note for the skirt along with the blue docket to redeem it, except that I knew I would not go back, as it would never feel the same again.

  What with my expiring virtue and limited wardrobe, I was storming heaven, this time not for love but for money. My prayer was answered. My sister was a secretary and worked for someone “high up” in the railway company, and I received a commission to write a weekly column for their magazine. It was to be six hundred words in length, lighthearted, and of interest to women. I would receive the exorbitant fee of a guinea. I chose the pen name “Sabiola,” not knowing how I came by it, except, I dimly recalled, it was the name of a concubine in the court of King Farouk of Egypt. An image of a vamp with bobbed hair and a cigarette holder, supposed to be a likeness of me, was featured at the top of each of these nonsensical jottings. My pieces had to contrast with more serious features, such as The Plaint of a Pensioner, Strange Rail Crashes, Tributes to Dublin Busmen, Illegal Haulage, The Knock Shuttle Service, and the dawn of the Dandy Diesel since “the sun was setting on the steam locomotive.” With no time to walk the city or interview people, my topics tended to be somewhat generalized and ranged from the joys of golden autumn evenings to the culinary skills for tossing a Shrove Tuesday pancake. I would go into the dress shops to inquire from buyers the latest trends in fashion and learned that as hair was expected to be longer, due to our incontinent skies, the Dublin ladies were soon to adopt the American craze and go “beret-mad.” It was a long way from James Joyce.