Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  Still, it was a day out, the very first since we had arrived, three months ago, at Waterloo station, which I found to be grimy and sooted, the waddle of the pigeons so ungainly, not supple like birds at home. It was November, and seeing the wreaths of paper poppies around the several monuments as we went in a taxi from Waterloo station to SW20, I thought England so dolorous.

  Yet now I was seeing Piccadilly Circus: its teeming life, newspaper vendors at street corners shouting out the catchy headlines, and already early editions of an evening paper were being thrown from vans that stopped, regardless of other traffic. This was the hub of things. In Bond Street I inquired the price of a bronze horse, which I suppose was by Giacometti, and got, from a smartly dressed male assistant with beautiful lapis cufflinks, a supercilious reply. In a shop in Regent Street I tried on different pairs of high-heeled suede court shoes, such as the dancing teacher used to wear. Oh, the protocol, my stockinged feet placed on a sloping dais to be measured and a stout woman, no longer young, remarking on the fact that my feet were two different sizes, which made her job harder. I chose black suede ones which laced over the instep. It was not the narrow corded laces that I was used to but a ribbon of black taffeta, which she tied in a bow. Walking around on that carpet, I thought I would levitate. As I saw myself in the long mirror, the stout woman complimenting my calves, I was already wearing these shoes to literary soirees. Hearing the price, I almost fainted.

  “Twenty pounds!” I repeated.

  “Guineas, madam,” she said tartly, and realizing that there was to be no sale, she unlaced them hurriedly and put them in the white box, with tissue paper that was the color of clean gray ash. I have never forgotten those shoes.

  The lunch was in El Vino’s in Fleet Street, which I took to be the last word in literary sophistication. It was very crowded, and we sat at a small table near the window. He ordered a bottle of red wine, along with steak-and-kidney pie. I was terrified that we would be caught out. He did not take to my new hairdo, and from time to time ran his hand over it to smooth it out and in that way to affirm his attraction. I had to tell him that my husband had heard our conversation, because of listening in on the extension in his bedroom, which I had not at first realized. I found out only because of one of the entries in his logbook, which he kept in a yellow strongbox that was always locked. I had found the key to it in the well at the top of his bookcase and read the many entries that had grown rancorous with the years: his lifting me from behind a shop counter, launching me into a world of literature and refinement, bringing me against his better wishes to live in London. Though void of intellect or cognitive powers, I was already passing myself off as a writer. I told my publisher only of the bit that concerned him, in which my husband asserted that he would publish any nonsense of mine solely because of his infatuation. He looked flustered, filled both our glasses, then held my hand gravely, realizing it was too dangerous for the friendship to go on. I would finish the novel, and that would be the link between us, and I thought of the picture of that pair of outstretched hands, destined to be divided, that was on willow-pattern plates.

  At a quarter to two each day, when it was time to bring my husband his tray of Earl Grey tea and two slices of slightly burned toast sprinkled with olive oil, I put the jotter aside, hoping that the next day’s chapter was safe inside me. Then after the children got back in, I made bread and sponge cakes, knowing that the smell cheered things up, but also knowing that I could not live forever in that mock-Tudor house that looked out on a common, mired in fog.

  There were no rows and no scenes; the friction was mounting just beneath the surface. Sensing this at dinnertime, the children would do daft things, laugh uncontrollably, or tell tall tales from school; a fight that had developed into a bloodbath, big boys “milking” smaller boys, and the luring of a girl, called Janice Budding, into the shade. Their father read, usually from the New Scientist, which he subscribed to. As he became more and more concerned about the poisons in the atmosphere and the poisons in food, our diets were strictly monitored. A favorite book of his was The Culture of the Abdomen by Mr. F. A. Hornibrook, from which he would read passages at random:

  Carlo and Sasha, mid-1960s.

  One cannot live over a cesspit in good health. How much more difficult to remain well if we carry our cesspit about inside us…. Food is taken several times daily, often too frequently and too freely and of unsuitable quality; but, as a rule, one occasion only is permitted for the ejection of its waste materials. And remember that all the time this lagging tenant of the bowel is retained the conditions favouring evil are at work; heat, moisture, nitrogenous refuse, darkness and micro-organisms. The slow poison factory is in full swing, and its output is turned into the highways and byways of the body.

  Being the younger of the two, Sasha showed his discontent in mischievous ways. He scraped off the new turquoise paint with which his father had proudly painted the lavatory seat, and another time he interfered with the red plastic fob watch by which his father set his time for his breakfast. The two hands were usually set for a time between one and two o’clock, when I would bring him his breakfast. I was surprised to find the hour and the minute hands had been moved to ten o’clock and recognized that it was a ruse, because on a sheet of paper under it Sasha had written, “Hope you get the joke.” He saw himself as something of an embryo writer and was proud that his was one of the essays on display for parents’ day, with a little gold star at the bottom of the page. In it the dreariness of domesticity was blithely bypassed:

  I live in a large cave with my mother and father and each morning my father goes hunting and if he is lucky, he catches a deer. While he is out, my mother dusts the cave.

  My novel was completed in three weeks. It had written itself, and I was merely the messenger. I copied it in a neater hand and sent it to an invalid in Hastings-by-the-Sea to be typed. I had found her name in the back of the New Statesman, and when she returned it, she said it evoked moments of her own life in the north of England long before. If ever I found myself in Hastings, she would make me welcome.

  My publisher was happy; his hunch had borne fruit, and their reader, the author Clifford Hanley, had written a glowing report, enclosing a personal letter for me with a quote from Robert Burns.

  I had left the spare copy on the hall table for my husband to read, should he wish, and one morning he surprised me by appearing quite early in the doorway of the kitchen, the manuscript in his hand. He had read it. Yes, he had to concede that despite everything, I had done it, and then he said something that was the death knell of the already ailing marriage—“You can write and I will never forgive you.”

  It was as if by writing it I had taken the ground from under his feet: I had sabotaged his inner belief in himself, and I could not completely blame him. In the six years since I had met him, when I so faithfully embodied the daftness of the literary Bessie Bunters, something had changed in me and he had played an important part in that change, and now I was poised for flight.

  Yet we went on. When the check from the publisher came, I had to endorse it and hand it over to him. I would receive a small amount from it for each week’s housekeeping. As a reward he bought me a hut, so that I could write in the garden. It was a wooden shed, fitted with a table, a chair, and an oil heater. On Saturdays, when the children were at home and playing in the garden, they would make faces in at me through the window or slip in notes saying, We are missing you, We are ill, We are interested in the distillation of gin. They were both precocious and fearful, and knew all too well that we were living on tenterhooks.

  Why I remained so passive may seem peculiar to outsiders, but not to me. I was petrified and wanted us, my children and myself, to survive.

  A phone call from a stranger inviting me to a poetry reading in Dulwich. He had heard of my forthcoming novel from a friend in the publishing house and decided to look me up. Normally the poets met in a pub on alternate Thursdays, but this was to be in his house and, unusually, on a Sunday,
since Ted Hughes was attending and it was his only free evening. At last! I had read of literary coteries: in San Francisco, the Beat poets assaulting the sensibilities of the bourgeois, Russian poets who met underground to recite their works when it was too dangerous to have them printed, and in a pub in Soho a few years before when bohemians, including Dylan Thomas, had convened. So now it was Dulwich and Ted Hughes, the living Orpheus, whom I would meet. It was clear that I had been invited alone, something I knew that my husband resented and that would incur a hefty entry in the logbook.

  It was quite a pilgrimage from the hinterlands of Cannon Hill Lane to the poetic environs of Dulwich. I left our house abnormally early in order to negotiate the Underground, the two changes which I’d already studied on my miniature Tube map, and the connection to the overground train for Dulwich. From the station to the strange address there were some mishaps, but eventually I found it and looked through the window, as the curtains were not drawn. A tea trolley was laden with bottles, and an electric fire, with a large crenellated papier-mâché facing, glowed a candy pink. A woman was endeavoring, not very successfully, to herd children out of that room, running her hand through her hair in exasperation. A tall, larky man answered the door, a little surprised at my punctuality. Poets were not meant to be punctual. He followed his wife upstairs and said to help myself to a drink. I drank sparingly in those, my green and salad days, but I needed one after the fret of the journey; but I discovered that the bottles on the trolley were for ornament, several shapes and sizes, including two yellow liqueur bottles with long yellow spires, totally empty. The host returned swiftly, having changed into an orange velvet jacket, and from his pocket he took a naggin of whiskey, which was obviously his tipple. From a sideboard, he hauled out a bottle of Wincarnis and poured some for me into a tumbler. He was a flirtatious man, winked a lot as he chatted. What literary titans had I met? What literary “rag” did I read? Was I following the spat in The Listener between two northern heavyweights? Did I think Ted Hughes the reincarnation of Heathcliff? What was that thing on Haworth churchyard?

  On thee too did the Muse

  Bright in thy cradle smile:

  But some dark Shadow came

  (I know not what) and interpos’d.

  Not once did he wait for an answer, so ebullient was he. He was hoping to get back to poetry himself and also get stuck into Dante for Lent. It was going to be quite an evening, what with getting the numero uno poet himself. Gigs in the pub often proved quite tricky, poets, who brought the heavies, the rough trade, demanding cash up front. The guests, apart from Orpheus, consisted of two Canadian poets, female, and a young man called Archie, an aspiring poet who worked for a mortgage broker. Archie was coming from Crystal Palace but was in a bit of a pickle about finding a babysitter.

  The hostess returned in a sky-blue jersey dress with a string of pearls, clearly annoyed with her husband, saying something would have to be done about the children on Sunday evenings, as they were invariably incontinent.

  “Incontinent,” he said with a quizzical laugh and took another swig, whereupon she held out an empty glass for him to pour some drink. She said her name was Janice and she had a twin sister called Judith, they being so alike that there was a running joke among their friends, Hello, Judith, How’s Janice, or vice versa. She asked if I had come a long way and if I had children, and as I said their names, I recalled the glares they gave me, the silent rebukes, as I left the house. She said she was determined that her children would not grow up to follow the Arts, as it was a mug’s game, to which her husband said, “Touché,” and took another long swig.

  The first guests to arrive were the Canadian ladies, girlfriends, as was obvious by the way they stood so close and held hands. The older had a plait of her hair wound around her forehead, and since this was being greatly admired by Janice, I insanely mentioned the resemblance it had to a photograph of Ivy Compton-Burnett that I had seen in a bookshop. The host let out hoots of laughter: did we know that when Philip Toynbee was given the honor to have dinner with Ivy and her friend, he fell asleep over the soup? Over the soup! Ghastly, ghastly.

  From time to time, he went to the hall door and opened it in the belief that Orpheus had materialized. He was clearly fidgety, and after a bit more small talk, and in order to assure himself that all was on course, he decided that he would ring Ted Hughes. The phone was on a side table, a heavy black receiver, and taking the number from a tiny slip of paper in his inside pocket, a number so precious and known only to the select few, he read it carefully and winked at the sheer joy of having it. We each watched him dial, and then, as he held the phone out for our benefit, we could hear it ringing at the other end, somewhere in Chalk Farm or Primrose Hill, and it was clear that Ted Hughes had already left his house and was on his way.

  Since time was running on, he decided that perhaps we should start, an hors d’oeuvre, as it were. The elder of the two ladies agreed and with a bold stare took a sheaf of poetry from her brown leather music bag. She read several poems, all replete with images of waterfalls and rills and cascades, all metaphors for various heightened and erotic states of emotion. There was some polite clapping, and then her friend read two short poems that were clearly indebted to Ogden Nash. My host, who had been taking certain liberties, the odd nudge, a hand on my knee, said that he had tossed off a few lines, extempore, and was throwing his hat in:

  And the green-eyed whore

  In the red-eyed dress

  At the shag end of the day

  Counts her loves

  In shillings and in sixpences.

  Oh sweet sister

  Oh green-eyed muse.

  Janice let out a shriek before throwing the contents of her glass directly into his face, and things might have worsened were it not for the ringing of the doorbell at that very moment. We held our breath. It was Archie from Crystal Palace, who had been lucky enough to find a babysitter. He was awkward, kept his coat on and kept his head down. Asked if by any chance he had seen a tall man with a spill of dark hair at the turnstile of the station, he was too embarrassed to reply. He sat on the edge of his chair, and taking a folded sheet from his pocket, he studied it earnestly. Not a single vestige of beauty or feeling or fire informed the poem that he bashfully read, but our host nevertheless decided that this was the trend, the postmodern trend, that poetry was taking. There was a sinking realization in that room that Ted Hughes was not coming.

  The younger Canadian poet read a few lines from “The Journey of the Magi” for us to deconstruct, which we struggled to do. Eureka! Our host had a brain wave: we would take a leaf from the surrealist’s book, André Breton and all that gang, and we would each write a line, then fold the paper over and pass it on to the next person, and then we would have something avant-garde to deconstruct. At that moment Janice, who had fled the room since the debacle with the thrown glass, returned with refreshments. She had a pile of red paper napkins and a cheeseboard with a brand-new cheese knife, the label hanging off it. Meanwhile, her husband took six bottles of stout from the sideboard, which he opened, winking all the while, and stationed them there for us to help ourselves. But on Sunday nights, as I knew, the Tube stopped early and the last bus from Wimbledon station to the bottom end of Cannon Hill Lane would be at ten-thirty, so I had to excuse myself.

  As I passed the river in Cannon Hill Lane, a few hundred yards from our house, the slurps of the mating frogs were deafening.

  The furor upon publication of my novel took me by surprise, although there were advance rumblings. The head nun from the Convent of Mercy sent a letter saying, “We have heard that you have written a novel. We give credence an open mind.” The sheet of paper shook in my hand, and I saw again her inquisitioner’s eyes, with that little cyst on the lower lid of the left one. A friend of my mother’s, a doctor’s wife who was visiting London, invited me to supper at the Cumberland Hotel in Marble Arch, and quizzing me about the book, she smelled a rat, so that before long my mother wrote saying she hoped and praye
d that I was not about to bring ignominy and disgrace on my own people.

  Publication day was like any other, and reviews were to come in fits and starts, instances of praise marred by soundings from home. In her letters my mother spoke of the shock, the hurt, and the disgust that neighbors felt. I had sent her a copy, which she did not mention as having received, and one day, after her death, I would find it in a bolster case, with offending words daubed out with black ink. There would, she said, be many who would turn away from me when I came home on the annual holiday. The postmistress, who happened to be Protestant, told my father that a fitting punishment would be for me to be kicked naked through the town. Stoning would be next.

  Luckily, in that tenuous state, I was unaware of the righteous correspondence that went on between Archbishop McQuaid and the then Minister for Justice, Charlie Haughey, both agreeing that the book was filth and should not be allowed inside any decent home. They shared their indignation with the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, all three men in evident bafflement that the “Literary Lounger of the London Illustrated,” who was normally sane, had let me off so lightly.

  There were occasional excitements. I was interviewed on television by the actor Robert Shaw, who had been somewhat complimentary, and afterward when he and my husband met in the green room, they looked daggers at one another. Meanwhile, the author L. P. Hartley was being interviewed about the book by Jack Lambert, pronouncing it the skittish story of two Irish nymphomaniacs.