Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  “Are they boiling a horse?” Bernard kept saying, as the smell of the stew from the kitchen became more pronounced; he doubted the wisdom of our quest. Maura, who knew my family and who was normally garrulous, came in flustered, then sat on a pouf, wringing her apron as if it were a dishcloth. She had never talked to a solicitor before. She looked from one of us to the other, wondered aloud what her husband would say if he knew, and then in nostalgic vein recalled Drewsboro, the lovely kitchen garden with different kinds of apples and pears and boys stealing them. One kind of apple in particular she remembered, with reddish flesh, as if there were dye in it, and she dilated uselessly on this. Finally he took a short statement, which she signed, hoping it wouldn’t land her in jail.

  It was a bitter cold night as we walked down a hill toward the luring lights of a pub. We were sitting in a corner and drinking mulled red wine when Bernard, dropping his guard as a solicitor and referring to the sheaf of threatening correspondence, asked why I had married such a madman. It was something I could not answer, not even remotely, and all I thought was that if anatomy is fate, as Freud has said, answering the pay telephone in the hall of 58 North Circular Road on the night that I was first invited to meet him was also fate. Indeed, as I would later learn, Bunny had a list of desirable girls whom they could ring, so finding me was merely part of a lottery. Sitting there with Bernard, who could not give me any guarantee of the outcome of the case, I was beginning to crack. I asked him who decided on the custody, and he said it was down to one person, one judge only.

  The night before the case was to be heard, the children were in their father’s house and were subjected to an inquisition that I would learn about only in time. I was in my house in Putney with the phone off the hook, a black phone coiled along the kitchen table, like a python ready to spring. Going up to bed, I was astonished to find a letter on the mat inside the door, an envelope with my husband’s handwriting. It said, “I am not fighting it any longer, your methods are too dirty and too devious. I will not be in court tomorrow morning, so the children are yours to destroy.”

  Very early in the morning, I rang the barrister John Mortimer to impart the good news, and very relieved, he said that he would send his junior. I wore nothing stylish, though stupidly I put on long, giddy earrings with feather pendants that had the dip of catkins.

  August Is a Wicked Month, published 1965.

  The first person I saw as I crossed over the path, along the grass toward the courtyard that led to the court proper, was my husband in a dark suit, curiously animated, talking with a great excess of energy to two men, presumably his barristers.

  An usher in a black gown showed me to my seat, and across from me I saw my husband arrange a series of plain white postcards on which he had written the incriminating evidence that was to come.

  My junior was kind, but somewhat at sea, staring down at his notes. My husband’s barrister then called him as witness, and with alacrity he climbed to the witness box and swore on the Bible. He was fired up, like an actor given the great part that he had always dreamed of. He told the judge that he had assembled his evidence in three categories: my character, my attitude to men, and my writing. The thought came to me that Moll Flanders, were she sitting in that court, stood a better chance of getting custody.

  My most recent book, August Is a Wicked Month, he said made Krafft-Ebing’s portrayals of perverts and lunatics pale by comparison. It had been banned in South Africa on the grounds of its being “obnoxious, indecent, and obscene.” When I saw him hand a copy to the clerk, with two fetching photographs on front and back which had been taken by Lord Snowdon, I quaked. My attitude to marriage could indeed be gleaned from it, as indeed it could from a magazine (which he now waved) with the incendiary heading “O’Brien Tosses a Molotov Cocktail Through the Stained-Glass Window of Marriage.” In the article I had said that the marriage vows should be rewritten in favor of the wife; this in a room full of males did not bode well. The pith of his argument, however, was that I did not really want the children at all, they were merely “decor” for my life. Faced with the responsibility of having them seven days a week, I would back away and disappear for months, as I had done before, having fled to America soon after I abandoned them. My junior’s face reddened at each disclosure. Fighting this custody case was another example of my revenge toward men, part of the schizophrenic side of me that felt it must fight the entire male element in the world. From being a nymphomaniac, I was suddenly a man-hater. The children, if they were to be left to me, would, he assured the judge, become mother-smothered, emotionally sick homosexuals, my favorite group of people. The judge was then invited to read a particular passage from August Is a Wicked Month, which, somewhat irked, he did; he then turned a few pages onward, closed the book, and, looking around, said, “It seems to me that boys of nine and eleven would not be interested in this kind of literature.”

  My barrister was then asked if he wished to call me as a witness, and hearing him decline, I found that I was already standing, the words tumbling out. Without going to the witness box, I said that if I did not love them and if I did not want them, I would not have fought as desperately as I had done for three years. He asked if there was anything else I wished to say, at which I merely shook my head, powerless to refute the various charges that had been hurled at me. When I sat down, not only my ears but even the gold sleepers on which the catkins dangled were also burning like mad. There was a pause as the judge consulted the numerous notes from both sets of barristers, peering into them, then brooding at times, allowing his glasses, which were on a black cord, to slip off. I believed that I was doomed. The short wait seemed interminable.

  “Pray, silence for the judge.”

  I was hearing the words, but they were like something coming from a great distance, and only by the junior squeezing my arm could I fully believe their impact. He had decided to give me custody, with due consideration for the petitioner’s rights regarding visits and holiday arrangements. The years of agony had come to an end. I looked in my husband’s direction and saw that he had stiffened with outrage and disbelief, and then he looked toward me, and I felt a terrible judgment descend on me, as with Lot’s wife when she was turned into a pillar of salt.

  I collected the children from their separate schools and told them the good news, which they barely responded to, and that evening in Putney at the supper table they were quiet and bewildered. Then suddenly Carlo, being the elder and feeling guilty for the father they had left, turned on me, saying, “Dad says you’re a snob and you’ll send us to a snob school and not a decent socialist school, where we would have grown up to be responsible citizens.” According to their father, choosing to send them to school in Wimbledon, where the traffic was greater and where they risked being run over, was part of my death wish for them. Carlo was crying as he said it, crying and befuddled. Sasha placed our three hands together in reconciliation, and all that evening we were grasping for nice things to say to one another.

  It was much later that I learned of their last ordeal in Cannon Hill Lane. They had been put in separate rooms with an affidavit sheet before them. They were given pen and ink, and their father, holding a long stick of red sealing wax, asked them to write a letter which he would bring to the judge the following day. They were to say that they wished to remain with their father and not under the unstable influence of a sick mother. They were left alone for this.

  Carlo wrote:

  Dear Dad,

  No doubt when I am older, I will want to be with you for shooting and fishing and hunting et cetera, but just now I want to be with my Mum.

  Love, Carlo

  Sasha wrote a perfunctory “Putney” and his signature.

  Their father would never forgive what he saw as their betrayal of him.

  They had gone to visit him at Christmas, which was two weeks later, and had brought gifts, but they were met with an icy reception. As for gifts, he said he knew other children, better and more loyal, and so handed back the
pullover and the mugs with the wrapping unopened.

  In the embattled times which followed, it angered him that I was writing ceaselessly and that I was given what he called undue flattery in newspapers, primarily because of being perceived as glamorous. A friend in Ireland, an author called John Broderick, was enlisted to do the dirty work there, and in a journal called Hibernia, quoting my husband’s exact words, he said that my “talent resided in my knickers.” As Ernest saw increasing signs of my affluence, his bulletins became more incensed and he was furious at the fact that I moved from the little house in Deodar Road to a larger house in that street, to act, as he put it, “the part of the chatelaine.” The new house had a front garden, with lilac and laburnum trees, like a house in the country, and the back garden ran right down to the river.

  The Thames, its name derived from the Celtic word Tamessa, meaning dark, rose in Gloucestershire and obligingly passed the end of our garden on its way to the estuary of the East End and out to the North Sea. Most days it was brown and sluggish, porter brown, with black barges and coal boats chugging quietly by, an aimlessness to it, like a still life.

  But to Carlo and Sasha it held dreams of treasure, of fleets, of merchant ships and invasions. The fact that it smelled made no difference. Once, a convoy of pigs’ heads floated by, fresh from the abattoir, white and bloated, their ears limp as empty pods. Another time it was a dead, speckled puppy, a perfect simulation of a Christmas toy. Rats that came up from the water and into the garden were a source of terror and adventure. The boys had been given a gift of air rifles from John Huston, whom we met in Claridge’s Hotel, where we had been brought by Sam Shaw for a buffet party and where Sasha, seeing all the spread laid out, said, “What’s worrying me is who’s going to pay for this big deal.” Not too long after, the air guns had been shipped from Rome, where Huston was working on a film. Pat Lobey, the builder, who was working on various things, taught them how to load and how to fire them, so they shot at cans along the back wall until their heroics were abruptly terminated as our nearest neighbor came through the side door, outraged, asking, did I not realize that bullets could ricochet and kill somebody? The guns were put away for an envisaged safari.

  With his friend Adam from his new school, Carlo came up with the bizarre idea that, even if they could not shoot at the big rats, they could drive them away by smoking cigars. Metal hooks on the back wall served as a stepladder, and with their friends, who included Roc Sandford and the ever-spirited Hodge family, they would clamber each evening to delve into the river for loot. One evening, without their noticing, the tide had swept in, so that suddenly they were marooned on a bank of higher mud and shingle, calling out, “Rescue, ship ahoy!” and another neighbor had to lower his boat into the water and ferry them in. This adventure led to an extensive essay from Carlo about tidal activity, the unwonted gales from the North Sea, and Mistress Fate.

  With Carlo and Sasha at a swish lunch in Mayfair, London, 1966.

  It is impossible to convey the exuberance of ten rowdy children in Trader Vic’s restaurant in London. It was for Carlo’s twelfth birthday, a belated salve for all the unhappiness they had been through. Never had they been in such a charmed place: ship’s lanterns and wooden canoes hung from the ceiling, waitresses such as might be in Polynesia floated around in sarongs. Chafing dishes with all sorts of Oriental delicacies were set down, and the drinks were in wide glasses with gardenias floating on top. They ate ravenously, the savory dishes followed by coconut ice cream, and they then swooped on the fortune cookies, tossing aside any messages that did not live up to their, by now, exalted expectations.

  Then came the moment for the pyromania, as they set fire to the tissue paper around the macaroons and watched the ash rising in random swirls and becoming one with the air itself.

  A second birthday party had to be organized at home, since friends had not brought presents to the hotel, and this too had its rumbustiousness. The tea, the sandwiches, and the cake were but a mere prelude to a sort of barbaric hunt, both inside and outside in the garden, the ambushing of girls who in their gauze skirts with wide sashes ran and shrieked as they were pelted with water pistols and flying meringues. These assaults were afterward ameliorated by brief and blushing snogs.

  For Sasha’s birthday party I arranged a screening of Cat Ballou, their covert practice with the two air guns proving invaluable, in imitation of the fast draw, and the hilarious sequence when Kid Shelleen, played by Lee Marvin, not only missed his opponent but drunkenly staggered as his pants fell down. Lee Marvin was to be the surprise guest at the end of the screening, as Sam Shaw had been briefed to bring him, except that Lee Marvin had gone the way of Kid Shelleen and was in the bar of his hotel, reluctant to travel.

  Either through Ted Allan or Sam Shaw, my two most influential friends, I met the director Jack Clayton, who played poker in Ted’s house on Saturday nights with a batch of men. Jack was casting the children for the film My Mother’s House, and Carlo was granted an audition, then brought back for a second one and given the lead part. The headmaster in their new school gave permission for him to be away for certain dates during the six-week shoot, on the understanding that he would have private tutoring on the set. Feeling a bit above himself and acknowledging that he was weak in Latin, he asked for tutoring in Latin and, if possible, in Greek.

  A week of filming had started, and his happiness was infectious, along with a feeling of superiority over his brother. Then came a phone call from his father to say that I had broken the law concerning the stipulations over custody, and that he was taking me back to court, having already, through his solicitor, informed the film company that Carlo would not be returning to the set. He had learned of it through a newspaper article in which Carlo was photographed with some of the other children in the cast. After I put the phone down, I was in tears. How to break it to him? He guessed and shook with rage. This, his first, big, boyish dream, he had been robbed of. “I could kill Dad, I could kill Dad,” he kept saying, and I knew by the way he shook that that murderousness was extended to me also.

  “There will be another time,” I said, but in his eyes there was a mistrust, as if somehow he had been expecting this all along.

  But there were excitements and surprise visits, as one night in their bedroom, with all their clutter and paraphernalia, painted soldiers laid out on trays for battle yet to be, Paul McCartney entered. I had met him on my way out from a party that Kenneth Tynan and Quentin Crewe had given; the party was still in full swing, and both hosts, as I later learned, were understandably seething because Paul McCartney had decided not to go up to the drawing room to join the gathering but instead to see me home.

  The children were asleep when we got in, and Elizabeth Lobey, the babysitter, while telling me they’d had their supper and their bath, was in evident danger of seizure at the appearance of Paul McCartney in our hallway in Deodar Road.

  He asked where they slept, and then it was up the stairs into the bedroom, where he picked up Carlo’s secondhand guitar and began to play and sing “Those Were the Days,” a hit song by Mary Hopkin at that time.

  Those were the days, my friend,

  We thought they’d never end

  We’d sing and dance forever and a day

  We’d live the life we choose…

  Sasha sat up dazed and, like Aladdin in the story, began to rub his eyes fiercely so that the genie in the bottle materialized. Carlo was angry at being wakened and said, “Go away, Mother, you must be drunk,” and buried himself under his big floppy quilt. Presently I was hearing an improvised song, which Paul McCartney strummed on the guitar:

  Oh, Edna O’Brien,

  She ain’t lying,

  You gotta listen

  To what she gotta say,

  For Edna O’Brien,

  She’ll have you sighing,

  She’ll have you crying.

  Hey,

  She’ll blow your mind away.

  That next day at Ibstock School a bitter feud ensued,
Sasha boasting about the visit from a Beatle and the song he had composed and Carlo calling him “Fibber, fibber,” until Sasha, to everyone’s disbelief, produced the plectrum that Paul McCartney had given him.

  Nocturnes

  It was sometime after that I decided, albeit reluctantly, to send them away to boarding school when they were eleven and twelve. I chose Bedales, which was coeducational and whose founder, John Badley, was a visionary who had cultivated the ideal of an education that encompassed “head, hand, and heart.”

  Letting go of them had been a big wrench, and the first parting as they walked with their luggage toward the redbrick building, the leaves on the trees turning russet, was well nigh unbearable.

  The house in Putney felt like a mausoleum, their bedroom still with the painted lead soldiers laid out on trays for battles yet to be and two Oxo tins with their clobber, and everywhere masterful signs saying PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH.

  I visited several times during the term, bringing hampers, which made them very popular for binges in the dormitories late at night.

  That Christmas was the happiest ever: on Christmas night I cooked a dinner for over thirty people, and one of the guests was Len Deighton, who had brought the children a gift of the seven volumes of Lloyd’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary, which had been printed in London in 1895. It was a marvel of language and information, strewn with quotations from great writers through the centuries, and when the time came for them to return to Bedales, I found that it was left for me on the dining room table.

  We were at Waterloo station, with the several Bedales pupils hollering to one another, flinging questions that went unanswered, and stocking up with Crunchies and bags of sweets. Among them was a girl called Wanda. She wore a bright Gypsy skirt, a man’s hat, and a patterned shoulder bag made from carpet material. Young men waited upon her. “Wanda. Wanda. Wanda.” Sasha whispered to me that his brother had a crush on her, but judging by the multiple acolytes, Wanda’s dance card was full.