Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  Home life was punitive. There were no rows, just silence and routine. In the logbook, which I now read when he took the children some afternoons in his vintage Railton for a drive on Wimbledon Common, I would discover his ongoing fury with me and with the world. He used to stay up till three or four in the morning, listening to music and, as he insisted, writing, except that I saw no evidence of it. There were only these caustic entries. Arthur Koestler, according to him, had sold out on his Marxist principles, and those who executed the Rosenbergs should themselves face the electric chair. I read how I was puffed up with newfound fame, my ravenousness for literary circles ever-deepening, the world blind to the fact that my book owed its being to the husband who had sacrificed his own talents to serve mine and indeed had martyred himself. I would be allowed to get on with the scribbling, while, in return, he was given complete control over the children, their welfare, and every aspect of their lives. A Faustian pact, of which I was hitherto unaware.

  There was no way out.

  It was after my second novel, The Lonely Girl, had been published that Father Peter Connolly, a professor of English in Maynooth College, wrote a long piece about both novels, praising the nature sections, the composite picture of rural life and convent education. In an anonymous letter, one of many which I received, I simply found a newspaper clipping with the heading “Priest praises her.”

  A cultural organization in Limerick called An Tuarim decided to have a public meeting so that my own people could voice their reservations to me in person. The hall was packed to overflowing, people still pouring in half an hour after we were due to begin, kneeling, squatting, while I sat on the platform next to the chairman and Father Connolly, feeling none too confident. The physical oppression in that hall, as was later reported, was such that for a while it seemed as if Ireland, just as James Joyce had described her, was indeed the sow that would eat her farrow—by which he meant piglets—or, in my case, would eat the “enigmatic thirty-year-old literary bonham.”

  Mr. Dillon, the chairman, opened the meeting by saying that at least I had probably read the books in question, something that was perhaps not true for all those present. He then went on to say that it was a rare thing for Ireland to talk to an Irish writer in public before he, or she, was dead or embittered. Father Connolly then stood up, holding The Country Girls, and began by suggesting that it be read in full before judgment could be passed. He was aware, he said, of the accusations of immorality, but in his estimation, it was amoral rather than immoral. He stressed the nature section, the sense of place, the ribaldry of rural life, adding that if there were passages less palatable to some, was it not the duty of literature to portray life, warts and all? He then spoke of the conversation he had had with me before the meeting and the reasons for my reluctance to live in Ireland because of its narrow-mindedness and robust censorship. The audience was not amused by his saying that Ibsen had been castigated by his own people in Norway.

  At his request questions were invited, questions that inevitably turned into speeches. A woman began the proceedings by saying that the sexual imagery was unnecessary, shocking and indecent, and was there for no other reason except to coin money. Father Connolly felt it incumbent on him to get to his feet again and warned of the besetting temptation of judging a book by one or two paragraphs when a reader might well profit from what was “solid, substantial, and serious.” He repeated his phrase of its not being immoral but amoral, and the audience seemed skeptical. The next questioner was also a woman, and she was shaking, saying what a sad day for Ireland this was. How much of my own life had I put into this stuff? How true or untrue were the descriptions of the convent? Had I no thought for my family and the shame I had heaped on them? Did I not think the decent and wholesome thing to do would be to donate my earnings to a charity? Then a dauntless young woman, wearing a green dirndl skirt and waving a green placard, jumped up and gave a spirited rendering of “They’ll Be Hanging Men and Women, for the Wearing of the Green.”

  Mr. Dillon believed there was not enough male input, and so a man in the front row in a coat and hat put it to me in strong terms: Why did I live in England? Why did I write in England? Was there not enough experience for me in my own village and community? Was there not a rich furrow to uncover? I said that unfortunately, having drawn on this rich furrow, I was being punished. A woman, almost apoplectic, said that it was quite clear I had turned my back on a Christian society in order to live a life of sin and promiscuity. Father Connolly objected, saying he would like to remind people that this was a public meeting and not the confessional.

  The debate widened then as to whether hard-core pornography should be kept out of Ireland. I said I had not read any hard-core pornography, either in Ireland or England, as it was difficult enough to try and write. This was met with some scattered applause. Another man, striving to be reasonable, asked if I would make it clear once and for all what my engagement was with my own country. Was I doing a Pontius Pilate and washing my hands of it? The audience deserved to know. I said my engagement with it was total, because for every writer the love of language begins in the place called “home.” I quoted W. B. Yeats, who had said that the sea cliffs of Sligo gave tongue to his early poems, but this was met with scorn, my sheer audacity at comparing myself with William Butler Yeats, which actually I hadn’t intended to do.

  Mr. Dillon, sensing that things were getting heated, ruled that the evening should end on a positive note, and asked that all agree on the fact that, wherever I lived, Ireland had been the source of my inspiration and would continue to be so.

  A leading article in the Irish Times paid tribute to Father Connolly’s courage and voiced the hope that the meeting signified a turning of the tide. The banning and mangling of Irish writers, so it said, had for too long “marked the more shameful aspects of the forty years of Independence.”

  My mother was drawing a chicken on the kitchen table for us to take back to London after the annual summer holiday. The entrails were in a newspaper, and blood dripped onto the tiled kitchen floor. We were due to leave in an hour or so. My husband was polishing his Railton, having not exchanged a word with either her or me all morning. My sons, in a high state of bathos, were strewing farewells to their favorite haunts, to the tree house, the fort of oak trees, the hay shed where they had romped and the hay tram from which Sasha had fallen when the horse had bolted and the farm help, Eamonn, had sworn him to secrecy. Coming upon the bruises that night, my mother asked him when it had happened, to which he had replied gallantly, “I know but I am not allowed to tell.”

  I was in the back kitchen washing up while my mother went on drawing the chicken, and I was relieved to be leaving but fearful of what lay ahead. The marriage was at breaking point. I knew that, except that I did not know how it would end, in fact believing it was for eternity. I kept rinsing and rerinsing the cups and saucers, anything to be alone, when my mother said my name tersely, said it twice. I went in and stood near her. The pope’s nose of the bird was pink and futile, and the long soft toenails were of a sickly yellow. Snipping out the heart and the liver for broth, she managed to cut the sac that contained the gallstones, and presently a green liquid with a foul smell spewed out. It meant that the insides of the bird were now poisoned. She was furious at her mistake and, throwing the scissors down, asked me curtly, “Are these children ever going to go to a Catholic school, or are they not?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Answer me,” she said fiercely.

  “I can’t, I can’t answer you,” I said, because I couldn’t. My husband made all decisions regarding their upbringing and had only agreed to their being baptized by indulging, as he said, a superstition of mine.

  She became more and more insistent, and I too became more defensive as she wanted an answer, a resolution. It ended by her gathering up the newspaper that contained chicken, guts and all, and hurrying out the back door, up to a cellar where she dumped things and where dogs and foxes scavenged at night.
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  Our departure was brought forward by an hour. The tension was unbearable. Nobody speaking, everybody weeping, my sons crying uncontrollably, their goodbyes, their embracing and hugging of the two sheepdogs, their rituals, so brutally cut short, because my mother and I had fallen out completely. My husband sat in his car quietly seething. As I put our luggage in the boot of the car and looked back at the house, I did something stupid. I went into the unkempt garden and broke off a bit of honeysuckle to have as a keepsake in my book. As if I needed keepsakes!

  My father hurried out of the house fuming and told me to go in there and put my arms around my mother and comfort her.

  With my parents in front of Drewsboro House, 1966.

  “I can’t,” I said, forcing back the tears that combined rage and desperation.

  “You little shite… always were from the first moment you were born… and always will be,” he said.

  That was the last time we went there as a family.

  It was in that frame of mind that I wrote the epitaph to my parents that would ever after dismay me, except that I wrote it when I did:

  Shall I write and tell them that I hate them, these parents on the very verge of their extreme unctions, I hate him because he murdered me, in each and all of my tiniest inclinations, so that I walked with a stoop, thought with a shudder, and spoke the utmost untruthful, placating drivel, and she, she stitched me back on, she got a big packing needle that was her heart and a big bale of coarse twine that was her will, and whenever I walked abroad, she called me back, quick, quick, to the world of stirabout and bowel movements, to the cold dark rooms reeking of vomited drink, to the cold dark rooms waiting for their next hideous commission of sin.

  It was about halfway on the journey when my husband stopped in order to have tea, which he had brought in a flask. We went into a cornfield where the harvest had already been taken and the ground was spiked in stubble. There were geese at the far end, and a gander with its neck craned, hissing and determined to drive us away. The story I was reading was Chekhov’s “The Steppe.” The parched plain, the sunburnt hills, the peasant women binding the sheaves of corn, and the terrible stagnancy in the story resembled the place I was in. To my astonishment, I fell asleep in that cornfield and dreamed that a group of people, including some of the characters in the story, my husband and my parents, were all crammed into some shelter, waiting. A girl, well known to be a thief, picked up a sack of potatoes and walked off with them. It might have been a religious service that we waited for, certainly it was deliverance of some kind, and then we heard that the actors who were due to come and entertain us had stopped along the way for a boozy lunch. My mother sat, utterly silent, with a hen in her lap. It was a Rhode Island Red hen, and she ran her fingers repeatedly through the folds of its feathers, searching for something she had lost. I went to her, to apologize, but found that I had lost my speech, and yet when I wakened, I let out some cry of dismay. My sons were shaking me, saying their father had started the car and it was time for us to go.

  An envelope, addressed to me, containing a huge check. It was almost four thousand pounds and was for the film rights to The Lonely Girl. Enough to allow me to flee, with the children, to rent a flat, to engage a solicitor, and so on, but I was paralyzed by my own fears. My husband was asleep. I looked at the check again and again, held it up to the light, incredulous at the large sum, then reading the name of the bank and the two signatures, which were almost illegible. This time, I would not endorse it over to him, as I had done with all the previous checks from both novels. I simply put it back on the hall table, which was of black cherrywood with a latticed panel across the front. Every detail of those culminating hours has stayed with me.

  In the early afternoon I took the children for a walk on the Common, knowing that sometimes their father would watch through binoculars, so that he could follow our movements. But he was still asleep. The children were playing a war game with two sticks—they liked war games—when, as ill luck would have it, Carlo hit another boy who was intrigued by the game and almost grazed his eye. A furious parent rushed to grab the two sticks, saying his son’s eye was destroyed for life and demanding compensation, there and then. I had only my latchkey in my pocket. He insisted on taking down my name, our address, and our phone number, which, quakingly, I gave him.

  Ernest had materialized as though out of thin air, and I was surprised that he had got up before being brought his tea and toast in the bedroom. He met us just as we joined hands to cross the road, and I saw the dagger look and thought that he had witnessed, through his binoculars, the near-accident with the other boy, but it was not that. The children were told to look at television, several hours earlier than normal, and Carlo went “whoops, whoops,” which was his favorite word at that time. He used to pick up certain words that appealed to him and savor them.

  “You haven’t signed it,” he said, pointing to the check on the hall table. There was pen and ink bottle beside it.

  “I haven’t,” I said.

  He stopped, and for a moment he didn’t say anything at all. Endeavoring to be calm, though in a rushing burst, I said, “No… and I’m not going to.”

  He stood motionless for a few seconds, realizing in that instant that I had never before openly defied him.

  “Come upstairs,” he said. I went upstairs, knowing that for years I had anticipated this defining moment and somehow I must go through with it. He stood with his back to the door, a simulacrum of power, his eyes blazing, saying that yes, the marriage was over, that I had killed it with my schizoid personality and vaunting ambition, but I was being given a last chance. I was being allowed to live in that house and see those children, provided I played by the rules.

  “I won’t sign it,” I said, and he rushed toward me, almost soundless, and sat me on the bed. His hand came around my throat, a clasp so sudden that I thought I was already dead, yet cravenly fighting for words, the words still stuck in my craw, but waiting to be said. The words “yes, yes.”

  I came downstairs, endorsed the check on the back, and laid it facedown on the big sheet of blotting paper he had put there. Like a sleepwalker, I put on my coat and went out, surprised to notice that dark had fallen. It was late September 1962. It smelled of autumn, though I could not say exactly what the smell was, leaves and leaf mold and the remembered smell of bonfires from the back gardens. Smell attaches itself to a particular moment, and that autumn I knew that I was walking from the past, from the twin governance of parents and husband, but that my steps were as yet unsure.

  I went first to a police station and then a hospital. The policeman who saw me was surly; hearing my wifely story, he simply kept asking, Did he or did he not molest you, and did I want the matter taken further? Limply, I said no.

  From there, I went to the outpatients department of the Nelson Hospital at the end of the lane, where it seemed the dregs of the world had descended. People calling, people bleeding, people shouting, a drunk couple wrangling and then all of a sudden cuddling, a dog that seemed to belong to no one, bawling children, a taxi driver stumbling in, holding up his badge, searching for the bastard who had picked a row with him, and in a corner, all by himself, a dwarf with a look of utmost desolation. I was not sure why I was there. It was something to do with getting through a given number of minutes, and they would be followed by another given number of minutes, in which time passed, like walking along stepping-stones. The nurse who eventually saw me was motherly, but she said she could not prescribe sleeping tablets, and her advice was for me to go home, make up, have a gin-and-tonic, and mend the marital fences.

  I went to Waterloo station, the place I had first seen when I arrived in London. I sat on a bench and curiously felt no fear. The men around me were mostly Irish. One, a talker, kept walking around, saying the same thing, “Oh, I’m tellin’ ya, wah… oh, I’m tellin’ ya,” but whatever it was had slipped his fogged memory. They had a bottle of drink which they passed around. Another man got out a coin for the weighing m
achine and had the others in stitches as the machine spoke his weight back to him, and his friend jumped on to avail himself of the penny’s worth. I was not afraid there that night, or rather, I was less afraid than in the house I had vacated. Many years later, in a taxi to Portobello Road, the driver swore that he had been one of the people on one of those benches that night and he remembered me, cowering into the collar of my coat, remembered my accent.

  Woodfall Films was based in Curzon Street, and it was they who had bought the rights to The Lonely Girl, later called The Girl with Green Eyes. A man in their office loaned me some money and then rang Penelope Gilliatt to ask if I could go with my sons for a couple of days to her house in Sussex, where she and John Osborne lived. I picked them up from school, having brought a supply of chocolate, a Dinky car each, and some plastic swords, all of which they thought exciting. The excitement mounted when, soon after we arrived, John enlisted them to smash the greenhouse, which was already falling down. It was an old greenhouse on a cast-iron frame, and the panes of glass were covered in thick, black-green splotches of moss. The sound of the breaking glass came through the open window as we sat having tea, and I poured my woes out to two people who were evidently besotted with one another. Not long after, they left for their flat in London, linked and jocular, and I had such a stab of envy, because I feared I would never be so at ease with a man, like that. Penelope gave me two sleeping capsules that were a bright turquoise, like the beads of a necklace, except that I was afraid to take them, in case I would never wake up again.

  My husband and I had one mutual friend, the Canadian writer Ted Allan, who for me was the last word in sophistication, because he had a play that ran in Paris for over a year and starred Jacques Brel. To my astonishment, when I rang him, he began to shout and rant, asking how could I do it to their father, how could I allow a man to go to the school gate, only to learn that his children had been abducted, a man who had had the same nightmare experience from a previous wife. He said then that Ernest was asking to meet me, and he assured me that everything would be all right, that there would be no recriminations, none. The meeting was in Ted’s flat in Deodar Road; it looked out on the river Thames. Ernest seemed a changed man. He had obviously not slept, his eyes hollow, and he wore the old green jersey that zipped up to his throat. He inquired about the children’s well-being, and then Ted offered to repair to his bedroom, hoping we would appreciate the trouble he had gone to with the tea, two pottery mugs and a brown teapot with a broken spout. Ernest spoke very gently, said he accepted the fact that the marriage was over, he realized that I was young and, as he put it, needed to sow my wild oats. He said we were both reasonable people and that we would share the children, but for the time being, I should bring them back to his house, until I got a place of my own. The matter of money was not mentioned.