Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

We drove down from there into the second valley and along a road that forked into a littler road toward a vast stretch of bog. Once loose, the sheep rushed through a tangle of bushes that were at the entrance, and though haltered, it ran and ran, and the last we saw was its strange mad jigging, no doubt in an effort to free itself of the rope, just jigging on the first knoll that it came to, gray like a boulder, against the dark of the bog and the deep night.

  Not a word was spoken as we drove home, along deserted roads.

  Things began to go missing. The pink cardigan that I saved to wear in the evenings was gone, and so was the gold chain and cross that had belonged to my mother. Then it was his things, shirts, jackets, and finally the coffeepot. He guessed it was Nancy’s doing, and one Sunday when she and Tom had gone by bus sixty miles away on a pilgrimage, we went across to their quarters, which were in the yard. There, on an old blanket, as for a bazaar, were the several items, along with things we had not even yet missed.

  Nancy was summoned and told she was sacked. She marched around his study, screaming that it was an injustice; her hands spoke, her fat arms spoke, every bit of her body spoke, as she vowed that she would not be turned out onto the road or dumped in a bog like a stray sheep. She alternated between fury and anguish; then, seizing her trump card, she reminded him of his dismay, his heartbreak, the morning he got up to find his wife with their child had fled.

  She painted a picture of him going from room to room, opening wardrobes, only to find that some were empty, then the stripped cot, searching for signs that would tell him it could not be true, and then driving like a madman to the post office in the village to make a phone call that was all in vain. She recalled his sitting in his study for months and months, leading the life of a monk, while she was the only one to give him his meals, to cheer him up and to sing, “How much is that doggie in the window?/The one with the waggly tail.” Then, rounding on him, she said, “You had no one, only me, until you met her.” Her husband had appeared in the doorway, totally abashed, bowing, holding the blanket with the stolen booty, which somehow, when he opened it out, looked pathetic. They were given a reprieve.

  The day we brought them to Dublin was their first time ever to the city. Nancy wore a straw hat bedecked with artificial cherries and a linen jacket that she was bursting out of. As we entered the outskirts of the city, they were disappointed to find the houses so small, higgledy-piggledy and too close to one another. When Tom sighted a tall black man, he slapped his thighs with excitement and wanted to get out and have a conversation about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which he had seen with a traveling picture show, believing that the man in the street and the man in the film must be cousins.

  We had lunch in a tearoom in Grafton Street, and as there was a pianist, Nancy requested “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” and hummed it to her own satisfaction. She had a gift for me. It was a white flannelette dribbler piped with a blue border, and spreading it out on the table, she winked. Cunningly, she had concluded that I was pregnant, as she saw me in the early mornings going up into the woods to be sick and knew the reason for it; but nothing was said.

  It was in the study that night that I told my husband, and the transformation in him was miraculous. His happiness was boundless. There was something so gentle and astonished in his whole being, all his hostile traits put to one side, a new life, the life he had been meant to have; the old, sad world put down to sleep.

  My sister Patsy and Ruth, the woman’s editor whom I had worked for, came on me unawares. I was in the garden putting down a row of young lettuces. They both had beaver-fur coats, absurd in the heat, and it may have been to impress Ernest, who was down at the lake, tarring and painting the boat for a trip we were to take. They shook hands, apologized for coming unannounced, and then, embracing me, my sister called me “Poor Coppers,” saying she would wait in the car, as Ruth had something important to tell me. It was an envelope with my mother’s handwriting, and she read it to me there and then:

  My dear Ruth,

  I do not remember if I have written to you since this unhappy incident of Edna’s. I meant to but everything I did for the last weeks seems to be all out of mind. Well, Ruth, wasn’t this an awful tragedy. Poor dear Edna, whom I loved with all my heart and soul. She has broken my heart and I cannot just tell you how I feel. It was the greatest shock I ever got and still I can hardly believe Edna could be so cruel to us. What has come over her or is she accountable. Her father asks me to write to you and go and see her with Pat, so Ruth please do go and see how Edna is and what you think could be done to get her away from that awful man. If she could be got to get out of there, then she may see reason. Ask her would she like to see me and when and where and tell her from me I love her as I always did, only I can’t understand why she was so cruel to break my heart and her father’s. He too loved her and is as deeply grieved over all that she has done to us and worse to herself. God help and pity her and I feel sure He will. I know you too got a shock but Ruth, there is no one feels this as a mother does and Edna whom I thought could not do a wrong, as she was so full of fun and so good-hearted but I suppose she is not to blame. She has been foolishly led astray and was too innocent for the man she met. I will look forward to hearing from you and I know you will do this for me and let us know exactly what you think of Edna. Poor Eileen has taken this thing very badly too and it seems she had been worried over it for a long time but to us it came as a complete shock as we never knew of any of it until the last minute, otherwise we would have stopped it in time. I even went to meet the bus two evenings to meet her as she wrote to say she was coming home but at the same time I now believe she had run to Lake Park and had no notion of coming home, it was only to prolong time to get to that terrible man. From my heart I say may God help her in this awful trial and tell her,

  Ruth, that my love remains the same for her and beg her to see me.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Lena O’Brien

  As she was reading it, I stared down at the row of lettuces, so pathetic in the dark bed of clay, darker still where I had watered them.

  “I’ll see,” I said, taking the letter from her.

  “But I can’t go back to them without an answer,” she said.

  “I don’t have an answer,” I said, thinking that she would understand, but she didn’t. She was annoyed at being thwarted and ran off in the direction of the car, refusing the offer of tea which I so plaintively made.

  It was a sunny morning and I was about six months pregnant, the feet regularly kicking on the wall of my stomach. I had brought out two kitchen chairs into the yard, their seats facing each other, a basin of hot water on one and a basin of cold water on the other, to wash my hair. Afterward I sat on one of the chairs, running a towel through my hair, totally unaware of my surroundings, as I was coming near the end of Madame Bovary. It was the deathbed scene of Emma Bovary, her sitting up in bed like a galvanized corpse, hair undone, eyes fixed and staring, when the blind man (the presager of death) passes under her window, singing a trite love song that causes her to rise up briefly, “her heart bursting through her ribs in a terrible upheaval.”

  I could not stop crying. Why could life not be lived at that same pitch? Why was it only in books that I could find the utter outlet for my emotions?

  When Ernest discovered the draft of a story I was writing, which many years later would come to be called “Small Town Lovers,” an argument flared up. The opening line was “It was a country road tarred very blue and in the summer, we used to walk there.” He erupted, saying there was no such thing as a blue road, but I knew that there was. I had seen them, I had walked on one, the hot tar smearing the white canvas of my new shoes. Roads were every color, blue, gray, gold, sandstone, and carmine. He was categorical about it. It was as if by saying it, I had defied some inalienable truth. He had to be right about everything, and if he was crossed, a look of hatred came into his eyes, but to be crossed by me, a literary flibbertigibbet, was ridiculous, believing as he did
that he owned me.

  But in secret I clung to the blue road, while knowing that somewhere in the distance, like a glacier, it would come between us.

  I wrote my mother the first letter that I dared to write since I had run away:

  Dear Mother,

  It was a green silk dress pleated, the little pleats gliding into one another, and there was a matching jacket with it, part of your trousseau. My life has changed and yet in many ways it hasn’t. If only I could talk to you, if only I could confide in someone. The man I am with is something of a mystery, he has his seasons and his dark moods. His father’s people hailed from Armenia, carpetbaggers, who made their way eventually to Bohemia in Czechoslovakia, where they settled. They were a musical family, music ran in their blood. A great-uncle or perhaps an uncle, who was a violinist in Prague, sawed off his right hand, rather than serve under the Gestapo. He never knew this uncle or grand-uncle except to know that he was called Herman, but he relates to him in some tortured way. He has inherited traits that he himself is a stranger to, being of Armenian, Jewish, Czech, and German and Irish stock. Sometimes I see such a dark, brooding look come over him, not aimed at me or not always aimed at me, and I cower. Love was something you put your foot down on, with regard to me, and you have won. He can be kind and thoughtful, some evenings we sit together in his study, with the lamp not on and everything fond and tender. But these are only interludes. For instance, he had this dream of my giving a party, a huge party, for which I hired a marquee and served caviar in glass bowls, along with gallons of champagne. When he wakened, he was as angry with me as if I had actually given that party and incurred such terrible extravagance. I am trying my hand at writing. I wrote about a blue road, he says, there is no such thing. My thoughts get somewhat scrambled. If I think ahead, to say ten or fifteen years, I cannot see this life going on in this way. I make jam when the medlars and the damsons are in fruit. He likes it when I make jam, it establishes me as the housewife. His friends tend to think of me as beneath him and a mope. When I recall Drewsboro, there is always frost, early mornings on our way to or from Mass, the high grass plumed and you calling out to me to pick my steps, so that my good Holy Communion, kid shoes would not get stained. When the child is born, you and I might become friends again, it might draw us together. I am so, so terrified. Your labour has got mixed up with mine. God grant that I do not disgrace myself when my time comes.

  Eventually, the impediments to marriage were overcome, since Ernest had been baptized a Catholic and his first marriage, in a registry office, was not recognized by the Catholic Church. I got my own wedding ring in a pawnshop and wondered, would it be lucky? I was twenty-three. My marriage dress, which was fawn and drab, was also my maternity dress, with a panel along the front that could be narrowed or widened depending on the bulge of the belly. It was in a Catholic church in Blanchardstown, a rainy morning in July, and two workmen were called down from the scaffolding to serve as witnesses. Afterward there was a lunch in the Bailey restaurant, with my sister Eileen and the poet Val Iremonger and his wife. It was here that I had my first taste of champagne, and I took an undue liking to it.

  Four weeks later I was in the nursing home in Hatch Street about to give birth. I felt safe there, the nurses were attentive, coming in and out, timing the length between the pains and telling me to breathe, to breathe. Though woozy from the drugs they had given me, I could feel the last stabbing bouts of pain, as the head started to butt out, and great tears of joy and emotion gushed out of me. Ernest was overjoyed to have a son, and it was as if he himself had given birth to it.

  In the days that followed, I would get out of bed and look in at the cot. In repose, the baby, christened Karl Ernest, was pale as a snowdrop, then scarlet when he cried, the little fingers flicking, with the temper in them. The morning he was circumcized a bright berry of blood showed in the bag of his diaper. I could not keep myself from looking at him, at the little tuft of black hair and, underneath it, the gap in the crown of his skull, the two halves opening and shutting, like a hatch, all the while hesitating to pick him up, because I felt so unprepared as a mother.

  The Doll’s House

  It was in London that I would find both the freedom and the incentive to write. We moved there in November 1958. I had two children now, Carlo and Sasha, who like the sheepdogs in their grandmother’s house, whom they adored, would spar endlessly and yet remained allies against a baffling grown-up world.

  After I brought them to school, I would race home in order to write, sitting at the wide windowsill in their bedroom, which was quite deep, and I wrote in jotters I had brought from Ireland which were called “Aisling,” meaning dream or vision. Once, an insect, a little gnat, crawled out of the center-page binding, and I jumped in terror, so carried back was I to Drewsboro and its environs. The wash of memory, and something stronger than memory, was so pervasive that I forgot I was in a semi-detached house in London, with a small back garden that looked out onto another small back garden and an identical row of houses with red tiled roofs. Bleak suburbia.

  The words tumbled out, like the oats on threshing day that tumble down the shaft, the hard pellets of oats funneled into bags and the chaff flying everywhere, getting into the men’s eyes and their having to shout to be heard above the noise of the machine.

  In my first month in London I had gone to a university to hear a lecture by Arthur Mizener on Hemingway. When he read the opening paragraph of A Farewell to Arms, of soldiers going down a road, the dust their boots raised and leaves that had already fallen, I saw in a marvelous instance how Hemingway had separated the oats from the chaff.

  Carlo and Sasha Gébler in the back garden of Cannon Hill Lane, 1959.

  I cried a lot while writing The Country Girls, but scarcely noticed the tears. Anyhow, they were good tears. They touched on feelings that I did not know I had. Before my eyes, infinitely clear, came that former world in which I believed that our fields and hollows had some old music slumbering in them, centuries old. I would ask myself to dream of Drewsboro at night, to refresh my memory. Once, it was newborn calves butting one another to drink from the bucket of separated milk, another time it was of goslings, their feathers with the softness of flowers, and, fixed in my memory forever, is one in which I am holding my father’s shins on a tongs, about to consign them to a fire in a little grate in an upstairs room where a fire had never been lit. Mother, father, field, and fort, makeshift fences, corn lodged in the rain, and bread rising in the oven. Indoors and outdoors. In the month of May the hedges a carnival of pink and white, hawthorn petals blowing about like confetti.

  I saw again a dog lick the afterbirth of a calf in a hollow, lap it up, and the dark fort where Lady Drew was seen in her nightgown and where, one summer Sunday, a girl with ringlets lured me in for an “op,” short for operation. It was quite dark, and we were hidden by the low-lying branches as we took off our knickers, then pulled up the stalks of the wild iris that grew in a swamp and stuffed the wet smeared roots into one another, begging for mercy. Our cries flowed together and were muffled by the drones of bees and wasps that swarmed in and out as we swore eternal secrecy. Then afterward, when we came into the daylight, her eyes were a queer, shiny black, the light making yellow slashes in her pupils, and she said that she would “tell” unless I gave her my most prized possession, which was a georgette handkerchief with a pink powder puff stitched into it. And so I did.

  The novel’s opening paragraph centered on the fear of my father—I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily and for a minute I could not remember what it was. Then I remembered, the old reason, my father, he had not come home.

  But it was my mother who filled the canvas and who infused that first book. Even as I was writing it, I guessed she would disapprove, as she was suspicious of the written word. “Paper never refused ink” was one of her more sarcastic sayings. I recalled seeing her as she was beating hot stirabout with a pounder, and I read her lines I had co
pied from a calendar:

  When icicles hang by the wall,

  And Dick the Shepherd blows his nail,

  And Tom bears logs into the hall

  She had looked up at me, her face wreathed in steam, and said if that was writing, “they got their money easy.”

  In London twenty years later, the words poured out of me, and the pen above the paper was not moving fast enough, so that I sometimes feared they would be lost forever.

  I had received fifty pounds to write a novel. The advance was paid jointly by Knopf in New York and Hutchinson in London. Flushed with wealth, I splashed out, for my husband a pullover, for the household a sewing machine (sewing was not my strong point), for my children some plastic weaponry and tin drums, which their father objected to. For myself, a tiny bottle of perfume with an orange rubber stopper in the nozzle. It smelled almost religious. Sometimes of an evening I would dab a little behind my ears to cheer myself up, and seeing this, Carlo and Sasha would fret, believing that I was going out. But there was nowhere to go and we had made no friends. Sometimes, after they had gone to bed, I would walk as far as Morden and read the handwritten cards in newsagents’ windows—Black Cat Found… Piano Tuner Wanted… Cane Chairs Refurbished. It was there that I got the idea for my first television play, called The Wedding Dress. The message read, “Widower wishes to dispose of recently deceased wife’s clothing, as good as new, call evenings.” That play, fifty years later, would mutate into the stage play Haunted, in which a Mr. and Mrs. Berry, in isolated Blackheath, lived in the marital crucible.

  I had betrayed my husband, though not in deed. He had heard my future publisher, Iain Hamilton, and I exchange some words on the telephone that were decidedly tender. Iain, the one who had commissioned the novel, was fond of me and believed in me as a writer. But I was not in love with him. The truth is, I wanted to be rescued—a tall order for a man with a wife and children and a publishing house to oversee. We arranged to meet for lunch “up London,” as I called it. First I went to a hairdresser’s in Wimbledon, which was unfortunate, as the stylist insisted on putting small rollers in, so that the result was a frizzy old-fashioned hairdo.