Looking Under Stones

by Joe O'Toole

  There was an almost farcical sense of purity of clan. All physical characteristics would be attributed. Good qualities would invariably be assigned to a Moriarty, whereas the less attractive ones would find home with some of the distaff side who had married into the Moriartys. Hence my double chin and jowl are a legacy from the Fitzgeralds, my grandmother’s people. The Moriartys were blind to the fact that they were not of great physical stature. Some of my uncles were tall men, which clearly came from the Fitzgeralds. While the O’Tooles were never given credit for my above-average height, they would be blamed for the fact that my complexion tends to be more strawberry than peaches-and-cream. Any of the clan with poor eyesight blamed the Martins, my great-grandmother’s family. At the same time, there would be a cautiously complimentary consensus about these families. Mind you, it was based on a belief that as they were smart enough to marry into the Moriartys there must be some good in them!

  Those Martins referred to above were from the Lispole side. They were very bright, intelligent people. Two of them, Father Martin and Sister Augustine, were accomplished linguists who had studied in various European universities. Sister Augustine, who was my great-grandaunt, lived to a venerable age; one of my earliest memories is being taken to visit her in Drishane Convent, near Millstreet. I was frightened by her stature, remoteness, reputation and by her nun’s habit, and could not wait to get out of the place. But I remember my awestruck reaction on hearing of the distance she and her brother had travelled to complete their education. Teresa, however, was quite dismissive of them.

  ‘Mother’s vocations, the pair of them!’ she snorted. Harsh, instinctive and judgemental. All that was really wrong was that they were not Moriartys.

  My grandmother – a Fitzgerald – sang the praises of the Fitzs and never conceded to the Moriarty supremacy. She looked taller than my grandfather, but whenever I got them to stand back to back, Granda had a trick of stretching his neck upwards for an extra inch and also inclining his head in a manner which seemed to raise the poll of his head somewhat higher. My grandmother was a striking and handsome woman, who took pride in her slightly Roman nose, turning her head slightly to show it off and to give the full profile of her face. She reigned supreme over her family of eleven living children and their partners. Until the day she died, her hair was almost waist length, but she always wore it up, and the only time it would ever be seen down was just before she retired for the night, when she would unclip her locks and give them 100 long brush strokes, fifty to each side. She dressed extremely well, but she was notoriously difficult to please. Being a draper herself, she prided herself on her knowledge of cloth and cut, and one of the most embarrassing experiences imaginable as a young boy was to accompany her to a clothes shop. On one particular day, in a shop in Tralee called Vogue, she drove the assistants demented with her demands. They had every dress in the shop around her and she was still not satisfied. The shade of one or the detail of another was always wrong and she kept looking for the combination which they did not stock. Not only that, but she would be quite critical of them, as if it were their fault. It took some guts to approach her and to suggest that ‘this might suit you’. Eventually she would purchase, with bad grace and with every assistant in the shop exhusted. No wonder they always skirmished when they saw her coming.

  She was spotlessly clean and insistent that everything and everyone about her be the same. It would be impossible for her to walk into a room without running her fingers along a ledge or a sill to check for dust. That was instinctive. This was a quality that she brought with her from the Fitzgeralds, because in all truth, the Moriartys could ignore a fair amount of untidiness and dirt before they would be motivated to start cleaning. Unfortunately for me, it was the Moriarty gene that found its way to me. When someone relayed to her a comment made by some town girl, ‘Those Moriarty lads are good-looking enough, only there is always a smell of carbolic soap from them,’ she went mad.

  While it was true that she was domineering and difficult, she was also prodigiously hardworking, generous and compassionate. She could be giving you a present of a ten-shilling note while tearing strips off you for losing a shilling in a transaction. The Moriartys were full of contradictions and opposing qualities, but I have always felt that most interesting people are. Predictability is such a boring quality and is usually the defining mark of those who demand that the world be as they are, consistent. Consistency simply adds to the greyness. None of the Moriartys were ever consistent or predictable or boring. They fit in well with the general Corca Dhuibhne psyche of being earthy, bawdy and passionate. They were loud and they were fun. Everything was done to the limit: working, talking, drinking, arguing, laughing, bargaining. They never gave an inch. As a young child I remember having the life frightened out of me by my Uncle Jonty flying off the handle and getting carried away in argument with a dealer.

  ‘By Jesus, I’m telling you, you’ll never leave this town in one piece, I’ll bury you,’ he threatened, with the fire burning out of his eyes. Jonty maintained that the buyer was cutting inside a deal he was doing with a local farmer for a few heifers. The buyer knew him well and said, calmly, ‘You won’t Jonty. There’d be nobody left in West Kerry if you buried all you threatened. Come in here to Fred’s and we’ll sort this out.’ And that was the end of it.

  ‘Who is the best-looking man in West Kerry?’ roared Uncle Jimmy, his eyes popping and his red hair flaming, as he pinned me, a child, to the floor of my grandmother’s kitchen.

  ‘You are, Uncle Jimmy.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I escaped in tears as my grandmother made for Jimmy with the wooden spoon, barely getting a swipe across his arse before he bolted in high spirits out the door. There was no controlling him. She used to lock the door at one o’clock in the morning to try and teach him a lesson. But he just came down to our house in the Mall and slept there. By the time I was ten he had had enough of the constraints of small-town life and emigrated to Connecticut, where he is now retired and conservative. I took great pleasure in relating that story to him in front of his wife and son just a few years ago.

  My arrival was quickly followed by my sister Mary Sabrina. After that came Anita, Phyllis and Grace, so as the eldest and only male I became the white-haired boy who could do no wrong and was spoiled rotten. Our parents never reared us to know our place. ‘You can be anything you want,’ they always said. We were taught to respect people at all levels, low and high, and to give appropriate deference to authority, but we were expected to feel the equal of all, even those in positions of importance. We were never to be in awe of anyone. Even though it was never expressly stated, Myko and Teresa managed to infuse us with the certainty that high office did not bestow intellectual superiority. The great advantage of this was that we were never cowed and never felt the slightest inhibition in challenging the views or actions of those who might be seen to be our betters.

  In fairness to my parents, this attitude worked both ways; we were always to respect the most ordinary of people, and the merest hint of us acting or speaking with any kind of a superior tone was cut down abruptly and immediately.

  ‘Who do you think you are? You’ll soon hit a brick wall and learn your lesson.’

  Anyone working for Teresa or my grandparents, or for any of my uncles was treated like one of the family and God help any of us who either spoke to them or addressed them without due respect. In fact, when I was very young and a lot of my aunts and uncles were still around, I did not distinguish between family and those who in the Dingle of the time were referred to as ‘servant boys or girls’.

  Similarly, all of the customers were equally important and were to be treated as such. It was superb preparation for life. It was learning to accept people for what they were rather than for their status or positions and as a result we were rarely overawed by personages, their offices or their titles.

  ‘UNWILLINGLY TO SCHOOL’

  At four years of age I was brou
ght, screaming and roaring, to Sister Rose’s Junior Infants class up at the convent. The whole idea of school held very few attractions for me. Sister Rose was one of nature’s truly wonderful people, universally and justifiably loved. She did her very best to calm me down and to reassure me. ‘Aren’t you the big boy! Come over here and sit with Pat Neligan.’ But Pat Neligan didn’t want anything to do with this cantakerous new arrival. From a pocket in her habit she produced a few sweets. ‘Look at the lovely surprise I have for you.’

  None of this cajoling made the slightest impact on me. But the poor woman was a trier. At the back of the classroom stood a painted wooden rocking horse. It had a leather saddle and stirrups and was a real beauty. ‘I know you’re going to love this,’ Sister Rose said confidently as she lifted me up on its back. But nothing doing, I jumped off and made a break for the door. As she attempted to hold me, I gave the poor nun an unmerciful kick on the shin and ran out of the school, down to my grandmother’s, which was only a hundred yards from the convent. There I was received with the support and understanding which only grandparents have and to which I was certainly not entitled. It was not a very auspicious start to a career in education. As for Sister Rose, she forgave me and welcomed me back to the class at a later date.

  A few years ago, I mentioned her on a radio programme, adding a gratuitous, ‘God rest her’. To my astonishment, some weeks later, on 19 March, I received a card, richly decorated with roses. The inscription was: ‘Roses from Sr Rose on your feast day. I’m still around, you know.’ Just goes to prove what we always said about nuns – they hardly ever age and rarely die!

  Why every child, both boy and girl, began their schooling in the convent is rooted in history. Sometime around the turn of the last century, a regulation was introduced that forbade men from teaching children under the age of seven. This prohibited male teachers, both lay and religious, from teaching the first three classes in primary school. I don’t know the reasoning behind the ruling – maybe some long-forgotten educational principle or psychological theory, or perhaps it was informed by some visionary understanding of child protection. This has led to a situation where in many of the towns in Ireland, to this day, children still begin school with the nuns and do not transfer to male teachers until age seven.

  After my initial rebellion, it took me some time to settle into school and it is probably fair to say that for me it was always something of an interruption of and interference with other plans. Every day I ate lunch with my grandparents. I was considered to be a somewhat delicate child, so each day I would be sent next door to Uncle Foxy John’s pub for a cupful of porter in a neat little whiskey glass. A dessert-spoon of sugar was stirred in and I drank the mixture before my lunch. This went on for most of my primary school years; as time went on I wanted less and less sugar! Decades later, I still get a yearning for sweet porter at odd times, but particularly on the morning after a ‘feed of drink’. At that time, porter was a recommended tonic for people in recovery from any debilitating illnesses, and in contrast to current practice, pregnant women were invariably advised to take a glass of it every evening during their pregnancy. Even my mother forced herself to drink the odd drop of porter when she was expecting, although she hated the taste of it.

  Drink was very much part of the culture in our family and extended family. In fact, my mother looked with some mistrust on men who did not take a drink. I remember well arriving home on the day of my Confirmation, proudly sporting my Pioneer Total Abstinence Association badge. As part of the Confirmation ceremony, each participant was encouraged to ‘take the pledge’, in other words, to abstain from alcoholic drink until the age of eighteen. My mother took one look at my badge and remarked witheringly, ‘You’ll take a drink like your father and all your uncles when you are old enough.’ She was right, of course, but I wore that badge for most of my teenage years. I have a clear recollection of the day I stopped wearing it. It was the occasion of my interview for teacher training college in St Patrick’s in Drumcondra. At that time, being a teacher was almost synonymous with being an abstemious Gaeilgeoir. It was important to convey the right image from the very beginning. Consequently, the waiting room seemed full of besuited seventeen-or eighteen-year-olds, all wearing a Fáinne, or Pioneer pin, or both. When I saw this, I removed my Pioneer badge and gave it to my father, who was dropping me off. I have not seen it since.

  My years at the convent school saw me through Junior Infants, Senior Infants and First Class. Sister Rose and Sister Kevin were wonderfully soft and loving women who made their classrooms bright and welcoming, but we all dreaded the move into hard-hearted Sister Evangelist’s First Class. She was strict in the old-fashioned sense, a disciplinarian of the Gradgrind school. Ridicule was part of her armoury, and we were regularly called ‘dunces’ and ‘fools’ as she meted out punishments, such as standing in the corner, or facing the wall while wearing a dunce’s hat or a girl’s skirt. She rarely smiled and offered words of praise and encouragement only to the overachievers. Underachievers didn’t matter. Undoubtedly she was a person for her time, and her style would not be acceptable today.

  For Sister Evangelist, religion and education were conduits of control, guilt and repression. She did some, but not all of the preparation for First Communion and managed to give us nightmares about possibilities, such as waking up on Communion morning with some of last night’s sweets still undissolved in our mouths, thereby breaking the requirement to fast from midnight. In another scenario, our mouths would be so dry on receiving the Sacrament that the host would not melt, or, worse still, our teeth might touch it. It’s a wonder we had the courage to approach the altar rails at all.

  First Holy Communion was the biggest and most important day of our young lives. We were the centre of attention as we sat up there in the specially reserved front pews of the church. All the girls in the class wore flouncy white dresses and the boys had white suits with red sashes. These outfits were worn on the day and sometimes also on the following two Sundays, but never again for ordinary use. Their only other outing would be the Corpus Christi procession in June. It was a day of lavish, luxurious waste. Canon Lyne was the celebrant. He was a character; he could be strict and unbending at times, and people stood somewhat in awe of him. But not us children; it seemed to me that he was loved more by children than by adults. Certainly, when hearing our First Confessions, he listened attentively to our carefully composed lists of sins, and was warm and kindly to anyone who stumbled or was worried. He shared in our joy on First Communion day; he was happy for us and we were comfortable with him.

  The convent in Dingle was built very close to, but not adjoining, the church. Unusually, there was an underground tunnel that connected the sanctuary of the church to the convent. A tunnel was the stuff of fantasy to our young minds and resonated adventure and mystery. And there was some reason to believe that intrigue had happened. On the corner of Goat Street and Green Street stood a substantial house, Rice House, which, we were told, had been built by the Rice family as a refuge for Marie Antoinette during the time of the French Revolution. The story went that a tunnel stretched from the house all the way out to the beautiful cove called Nancy Browne’s Parlour, immediately below the lighthouse, at the mouth of the harbour. Now, despite the fact that nobody had ever discovered the tunnel, we firmly believed in its existence and spent many summer days exploring the area around Nancy Browne’s Parlour in fruitless search of the underground system. Nothing would convince us but that the nuns’ tunnel from the convent to the church was part of the same tunnel system.

  There was a historical basis for the Marie Antoinette story, as I discovered through some casual research. Apparently a member of the Rice family, Count Louis Rice, had enlisted in the Irish Brigade and served in Central Europe, where he developed a close friendship with Emperor Josef II of Austria. Marie Antoinette was a sister of the emperor and when she was in danger during the French Revolution, a plan was hatched to rescue her from France. There were to be four Kerrymen,
including Count Louis, in the rescue party and they would bring her to a ship of the Rice commercial fleet off the west coast of France, whence she would travel to Dingle and a safe haven. The plans were all in place and ready to go, but Marie Antoinette refused to leave without her husband, the King. But for her change of mind, those gallant and chivalrous Kerrymen could have changed the course of European history. The guillotine would have been deprived of its most famous client. Dingle could have had a royal family, and, who knows, we might all have been reared to eat cake instead of bread.

  Anyway, back to the convent tunnel. On the day of our First Communion we had the once-in-a-lifetime chance of visiting the tunnel. After receiving the Sacrament we were ushered importantly inside the church sanctuary, through the nuns’ oratory and into the tunnel for breakfast in the convent. It was an opportunity to view the secret areas of the convent which we had never seen before and would never see again. Between keeping an eye out for the ghost of a French queen and getting used to the strange environment, none of us could remember much about the inside of the tunnel afterwards. As we exited at the convent end, our first sight was of a smiling, radiant and unusually happy Sister Evangelist. Then she did the unforgivable. Before any of our parents had an opportunity of getting near, this tall figure of fear stole the first kiss from each of us. The kiss from a new communicant was considered special and powerful. It was surely an unpardonable abuse of position and privilege by Sister Evangelist to plunder it.

  The breakfast was memorable for the taste of the nuns’ homemade apple jam, a speciality of Sister Bernadette’s. She was a lovely woman, but in the segregated system of the convent she was, for some reason, treated as a sort of inferior or lesser being. It was hinted in the town that the dowry she brought with her was inadequate or some such. Whatever the view of her in the convent, the children and the townspeople loved her. Sister Bernadette treated us royally.