by Alice Taylor
But her sister, Ellie, was a different cup of tea altogether! When Nonie became crippled with arthritis Ellie moved in and took over. They were two very different women, both mentally and physically. Whereas Nonie was small, frail and self-effacing, Ellie was a tall, strong, forthright woman with a fine head of chestnut brown hair flecked with grey. Her husband had died and she had no children, so she felt free to come back to help Nonie for a while. It was always supposed to be a temporary arrangement but over the years it evolved into a permanent one. To Ellie, the church had to be taken care of to the best of her ability, but she took no nonsense from anyone, including the priests. Yet beneath her gruff exterior and forthright manner she was quick-witted, droll and funny. She was very deaf, but you could carry on a long conversation with her without becoming aware of the fact. Whether she lip-read or simply guessed what it was you were saying you were never quite sure.
Part of the front room of their little house had been turned into a sweet shop and as the school was farther up the hill beyond the church there was a constant flow of children straining up to the high counter to reach across with big brown pennies in pursuit of toffee bars, Black Jacks, Love Hearts and Peggy’s Legs. Ellie took over that job from Nonie too and enjoyed chatting with the children. Another job she inherited was the daily opening and maintenance of the dispensary, where the doctor saw his patients. Slowly over the years, Nonie’s arthritis worsened and she was confined to a wheelchair, so Ellie’s workload increased. By then Ellie was into her eighties but she still continued doggedly with the same routine.
She opened the church before half-past-eight Mass every morning and had all in readiness when the priest arrived. If he happened to run late she made him aware that it was hardly good enough! The altar boys were trained by her and she lined them up like small soldiers and put manners on any little guy who thought that he had the right to do it his way. She made sure that their altar clothes were kept in good order and insisted that they wear special canvas sandals while serving Mass. The First Communion children were lined up to her satisfaction on their big day and any unseemly behaviour by an overenthusiastic camera-happy parent was frowned on. When the bishop came for Confirmation, she felt that it was up to him to accommodate her rather than expecting her to rush around trying to have things organised to his satisfaction. She took all the fuss accompanying weddings in her stride but took a very dim view of the bride who removed all the flowers when the ceremony was over. The graveyard also came under her jurisdiction and she loved it when people took good care of their grave. Like Nonie, she too had a map of the graveyard in her head. If a family failed to maintain the family grave she would shake her head in disgust saying, ‘That woman thought she reared them well and now there she is, after all she did for them, and she’s buried in weeds.’
She looked after Nonie with firm kindness. Sometimes Nonie would forget that their younger brother was dead and would lay the table for three. When Ellie arrived back from locking up the church this would annoy her intensely and she would demand, ‘Who is that third setting for?’ ‘Jimmy,’ Nonie would tell her vaguely. ‘For God’s sake, woman, that man is dead with ten years. Do you think he’s going to rise up and come down from the graveyard to have tea with us?’ In this way she brought Nonie back to reality and for years kept her anchored in the real world. She would not allow Nonie to get lost in a world of confusion and would sit down and talk her back into their world.
As long as I knew her, Ellie wore the same long fawn gabardine coat and a strong pair of brown leather laced-up shoes. For Mass, this was topped with a round brown hat with a dull velvet ribbon that was more sensible than stylish. Everything about Ellie was solid and practical, with no pretensions. One day while walking up the hill with her I remarked, ‘Ellie, you carry an amazing workload.’ ‘One day,’ she told me, ‘I will drop down stone cold dead and that will be that.’ And that was exactly what happened. One morning we arrived to find the church still locked and it set alarm bells ringing: there could only be one reason – Ellie had to be out of action. Indeed, she had got a heart attack and was rushed to hospital where she died that evening.
Her death triggered off a whole chain reaction of events. There was no one to look after Nonie, who went into a nursing home, where, without Ellie to keep her connected, she quickly lost touch with reality. The little sweet shop closed and there was no one to look after the dispensary. And for the church it was the end of an era. Ellie was the last Chapel Woman.
Fr Seamus, who was then curate and who was extremely fond of her despite all her idiosyncrasies, said her funeral Mass. For many of us present it was difficult to imagine that her solid brown figure would never again plod down the altar steps and plonk herself into the front seat where she had kept an alert eye on her altar boys, and indeed on Fr Seamus as well. On her coffin was a wreath given by a Church of Ireland neighbour with the inscription: ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ It was a fitting tribute.
After the funeral an old friend of Ellie’s asked me to tidy out their house with her. We arrived with buckets and brushes expecting a straightforward sorting and cleaning job. But a surprise awaited us. In drawers and under mattresses all around the house were rolls and rolls of bank notes. We were flabbergasted. Where had all the money come from? But then we sat down and reasoned it out. Ellie and Nonie had lived thriftily all their lives. They knew no other way and even when their incomes increased with their old age pensions, it made no difference to their spending. So they simply rolled up the money and put it by and over the years they simply forgot all about it. They were not mean but just had never mastered the art of spending.
Over the years they had had many visitors with whom they walked the graveyard to locate ancestors. But one visitor who came had no blood connection whatsoever with them or our village. Nonie and Ellie had an older brother who had emigrated to America, and one day in the early seventies a young student who lived next door to him and his wife came to visit the sisters. She was a beautiful young girl and because Nonie and Ellie had limited accommodation she stayed with me. She became good friends with Fr Seamus and his young housekeeper Joan, who was about her own age. Until the sisters died, this young girl returned many times to visit them and even when they were gone she continued to return to visit their grave behind the church which they had looked after for so long. They had brought her in contact with a different way of life and she was forever grateful.
Very soon a digital map of our graveyard will go online, but there is no way of recording the stories that Nonie and Ellie could tell about those beneath the stones around them in their own final resting place.
Chapter 8
To the Manor Born
We Irish are not part of the stiff-upper-lip brigade, as our Celtic bloodline renders us prone to ride high and low waves of emotional roller-coasters. Our British next-door neighbours, with their Saxon origins, maintain a far more controlled voyage as they journey through life. Maybe it explains the clash of personality between our two nations and the reason why the English have always found it so difficult to understand the ‘Irish problem’, as they termed it. When the two nations blended, the result was the Anglo-Irish, whom the English considered Irish and the Irish considered English. But the mixture resulted in an interesting blend of two cultures.
My closest experience of the Anglo-Irish culture was when ‘Mrs C’ (Mrs Cummings) came to live under our roof – I can’t remember why we shortened her name but we always called her Mrs C. Her father had represented the West of Ireland at Westminster and she had been reared in one of the great houses in the west. But years before our paths crossed I got to know a previous husband of hers when he purchased a house down the river from our village. He was a large, dashing, handsome, bearded man, who lived a flamboyant lifestyle and bore a strong resemblance to Clark Gable. A whiff of romantic danger accompanied him when he whizzed down the steep incline in his low-slung open-roofed car from his riverside pad into the village. In keeping with his
bohemian lifestyle, a beautiful blonde was a regular visitor, but a few years after his sudden demise two different families emerged from his colourful past.
The son of his first wife took care of all the funeral arrangements and in the process we got to know a quiet-spoken gentle young man who, apart from a slight physical resemblance, could have come from a different planet to his father. I decided there and then that he must be like his mother, whom I had never met – not yet. This young man inherited his father’s beautiful riverside home and I discovered that his father had been the second husband of his mother. One sensed the parting was not very amicable. This wonderful young man must have inherited the best qualities of both parents because when he stayed in our guest house over the period of the funeral he poured tranquility on troubled family waters and built sensitive bridges between all the assembled, somewhat confusing, branches. Funeral over, he returned to London and rented out his house down the river.
A few years later I received a letter from a woman in Switzerland booking a room in our guest house and it mentioned that she was the mother of this gentle young man. Finally, I thought, I am to meet the woman who was married to our dashing Clark Gable. At our first meeting the image of Wallis Simpson immediately came to mind – a pencil-slim immaculately dressed lady of Parisian elegance. She was accompanied by a pleasant, amiable husband; one would imagine life might be a lot less stressful with him than with the late Clark Gable. They were a charming couple and as this husband worked for the UN they had lived in many countries. Now he was about to retire and they planned to move into her son’s house down the river.
So they came to Innishannon and lived for a number of years in their lovely home where they entertained and gardened in blissful harmony until one sunny morning he got a heart attack and died suddenly, leaving Mrs C alone in her beautiful but isolated home. We assumed that she would return to her family in London. Her much-loved son, who had a wonderful wife with whom she got on well, lived there and there was also an adult daughter of her recently deceased husband with whom she had a very amicable relationship. But as I was to learn in later years, with Mrs C you always had to expect the unexpected.
A few weeks after the funeral, when the extended family had returned to their various locations, she called to see me to inquire if it would be possible for her to move into our ‘west wing’. Due to family commitments we no longer ran a guest house, but at the end of one upstairs corridor we had converted three small rooms into a little self-contained apartment. It consisted of a tiny sitting room, kitchen and bedroom – and one satirical son had christened it the ‘west wing’.
The idea that Mrs C would move in here, even temporarily, after the living accommodation to which she was accustomed came as a bit of a surprise. This, I decided, would be a short-term arrangement until she got her affairs in order and moved back to England. But she stoically downsized, selling off her lovely furniture, and moved into the little apartment upstairs. She decorated it to her own taste and brought with her some of her most treasured pieces. What she found most difficult to leave behind were her beloved books, of which she could only bring a limited number. But she came to grips with her new situation with admirable determination – and stiff upper lip – and was soon ensconced in her new corner. After a few weeks she inquired about installing a telephone, and I realised that Mrs C was here to stay.
I wondered, was this really going to work out? Would she be able to cope with living long-term in such confined quarters? What I had not realised was that Mrs C was moulded from stern stuff! During the following fourteen years that she lived in the midst of our often chaotic household, my admiration for her grew as I watched her resilience and coping skills unfold. She kept in touch with all her old friends, whom she entertained in her small kitchen-cum-dining room as if it were the Ritz. Some of these friends were titled faded aristocracy and none was in the first flush of youth. After dinner in her little corner, the aroma of brandy and cigars often wafted along the corridor and I would smile, thinking that this was a real ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ scenario.
She was wonderful company and had a wicked sense of humour. Once when I remarked about all the effort she put into entertaining her friends she told me, ‘I don’t always enjoy it, you know my dear, but one has to bring one’s penny to the pool and keep one’s brain alive.’ Keeping her brain alive was high on her list of priorities and every day she got her special newspaper that had a seriously challenging crossword, and she grappled with it throughout the day, poring over her dense dictionary until she had finally cracked it. If you called in to see her, she tested your crossword expertise. She watched every sport on TV and kept a close eye on local and world politics. She told me that she abhorred the burning of the great houses, including her own, during what were referred to as ‘the troubles’. ‘We were more Irish than they could ever claim to be,’ she declared. ‘Our family was one of the oldest tribes of Aran.’
She did not believe in putting up with any inconvenience that was avoidable and if she saw me overdoing things to accommodate what she considered could be avoided, she warned me, ‘If you put up with too much you get too much to put up with.’ I saw her put that philosophy into action when she had a visit from a relative whom she had not seen for a long time. That night when I called to see her and enquired as to how the visit had gone she told me with a wry smile, ‘Well, as soon as we got a few points cleared up all went well.’ Apparently on arrival this cousin had opened her large handbag and had brought forth photographs of a long line of children and grandchildren, from baldy babies to gowned graduates. Finally, with a gesture of dismissal, Mrs C had swept all the photographs into a bundle, declaring grandly, ‘My dear, there is nothing more boring than other people’s grandchildren.’
She was an avid bridge player and she held and attended bridge parties with her friends. But as well as the company of her peers, she enjoyed the challenges of the younger generation and decided to teach my children how to play bridge. She instructed three of them to come upstairs to her sitting room one evening at eight o’clock for their first lesson. When they had their supper eaten they trooped up with scant regard for the correct time, but they were swiftly dismissed, dispatched downstairs and told to come up at the agreed time. She abhorred the Irish lack of correct timekeeping. Her bedtime and rising time were like clockwork, and, as we downstairs were a late-to-bed brigade, she regularly informed me that ‘The Irish are too lazy to go to bed’, a pronouncement that I now often call to mind when I am reluctant to rise from the couch late at night and get myself upstairs. A morning lie-in was not on her agenda either as I discovered one cold January morning, with snow on the ground, when I went upstairs with her daily papers. ‘You should stay in bed for a while,’ I advised her. ‘It’s a bitter morning.’ ‘My dear,’ she told me firmly, ‘that is the last thing that I propose to do. With your lifestyle you cannot have a lie-in and when you do it’s a luxury. You have to get up the following morning. But I do not have to get up any morning, so I must! Staying in bed is the thin edge of the wedge and then it’s down a slippery slope.’
Often at night I called up to her and she was full of interest in what was going on downstairs and indeed in all the village activities. One night she looked out her sitting-room window onto the village street where she observed an elderly man and woman go into the pub across the road. A few years previously they had moved in together, which had surprised many as he was a slightly doddering old bachelor and she too was well past the first flush of youth. ‘Isn’t that an interesting development, now,’ she mused, ‘but I doubt that she has him for his sexual prowess.’ And I doubted that anyone else in the village had been bold enough to voice the complexities of the liaison from that angle.
As the frailties of old age took hold, she never indulged, as so many do, in the exercise of airing her medical complaints. One day when I remarked on that, she told me with conviction, ‘My mother taught me that. She told me never to indulge in self-pity. It destroys yourself and
annihilates people.’ I had first-hand experience of the wisdom of that observation because staying with us at the time was a relative who was the same vintage as Mrs C but whose main interest in life was her pains and aches: the first thing on her agenda for every visitor was her medical report! The result was that visitors were scarce and our children, who were teenagers at the time, had to be corralled into visiting her downstairs bedroom, whereas Mrs C, who challenged and argued with them, was a constant source of interest. Like Oscar Wilde, Mrs C considered that the only unforgivable offence in life was to be boring, so she struggled gallantly against the frailties of old age and kept all flags flying.
She had a deep interest in art, and her final long-distance journey was a trip to Moscow to view Russian art. Hanging on the wall of her little sitting room was an original Jack Yeats painting; there was a family connection as her brother had been in school with the artist. While it hung there I savoured the experience of viewing it, knowing that I would never be the owner of such a significant original work.
Once when she had to go to hospital she decided on the Bon Secours, which she declared to be the only ‘civilised’ hospital in Cork. She instructed me to go out before the visit and purchase a pure silk nightdress. On her arrival home just before Christmas I assumed that she would lie low for a while to recover and was surprised one morning to meet her coming down the stairs very smartly dressed. ‘Are you off to Cork shopping?’ I enquired. ‘Not at all,’ she announced. ‘I am going to Harrods to do my Christmas shopping.’ From Innishannon!
A few years later, due to an unexpected illness, she had to go into a large city hospital. The consultant decided that the complaint was serious enough to warrant an overnight stay, but she was having none of it. ‘Absolutely not,’ she told him. ‘This place is like the London Underground,’ and promptly discharged herself, hiring a private ambulance to bring her back to Innishannon. I was summoned upstairs and asked to source a local nurse who would do the needful and also somebody to look after her little apartment. One of the pluses of village living is that you have knowledge and access to all sources of help within the community, and so Kitty and Phil came on board. Kitty looked after the apartment and Phil looked after Mrs C. We were blessed with both choices. Looking after the apartment was easy enough, but caring for Mrs C was a whole different ball game. But Phil was a born nurse and she and Mrs C got on extremely well, behaving like a mother and the daughter that Mrs C never had. Phil had the medical, spiritual and caring nature required in the circumstances and Mrs C was very appreciative of quality and knew that she was in the hands of a jewel.