Then there’d be the letters. Every morning at breakfast three girls would be appointed to hand out the letters. The more letters you got from people the more loved you were—QED. But if you got letters from boys then you were the cat’s pyjamas.
The girls handing out the letters would go from table to table and everybody would be praying for a letter—any letter. Maybe a girl would pass one right by you to the girl beside you and you’d want to get up and pull her hair because she’d be torturing you, pretending there was a letter for you.
I was fighting with a girl up in the bathrooms one day and she said, ‘You and your Protestant boyfriend, and he doesn’t even write you a letter!’ I took a bucket of water and threw it at her and most of it missed and went arcing out into the corridor and the nun came in and sent me to bed without any supper.
One girl was found writing passionate love letters to herself. She was taken away from school by her parents that week. We all said, ‘God, the poor thing’ and thanked God it wasn’t us because all of us had planned the same thing many a time.
Boys and clothes and pimples and Evelyn Home were a tide you couldn’t swim against. Your best friend would start getting letters and go all dreamy and say ‘Tom, oh Tom’ in the middle of the night, pretending she was asleep, and you’d be half laughing at her and half embarrassed.
But she’d have a picture of him in her prayer book and make up poems to him and cut out pictures of clothes from fashion magazines and write ‘Mrs Tom O’Hara’ in her copybook and push it over to you saying, ‘How do you think it looks?’
Finally I decided. I sat up one night under the bedclothes with a torch and wrote a letter to Jack Hickey. I said I was having a grand time and how was he. I said I hoped his parents were well and his little sister. I said we were just about to go into our Annual Retreat, and then crossed that out as he wouldn’t know what it meant, being a Protestant. I said, ‘It would be lovely to get a letter from you if you had a mo. Bye for now, Liz.’
In the morning the letter looked rather forlorn and silly but I gave it to one of the day-girls anyway with a bar of chocolate if she’d post it and keep her mouth buttoned. She couldn’t have told anyone anyway without committing a sin. The next day we were going into our Annual Retreat.
The Annual Retreat was when all of us, nuns and pupils, kept silent for three whole days and three whole nights. We kept silent in order to contemplate, meditate, think about our past sins and make resolutions (usually impossible ones) for the future. We were supposed to think about God and sin and the devil and the saints. We didn’t have any classes and we all went round trying to look very solemn and holy.
In fact, during retreats we all went mad on sex. You couldn’t think about anything else. We’d be in a turmoil reading the holy books the nuns gave us to uplift our minds and trying to glean information on the forbidden subject from the Legion of Mary Handbook for Young Ladies.
Priests would come in from outside Orders to give us the retreat. A different priest every year. We’d have talks from them in the school chapel about four times a day and then confessions and rosary and Mass and Benediction and night devotions. A veritable orgy of religion.
One priest who came was called Father Moriarty and he was from Limerick and he used to sail on the Shannon with his rich parishioners. He was young and tanned and all the girls were dying with love for Father Moriarty.
Father Moriarty was all for modern Catholicism. He had all the nuns in a flat spin when he asked for a blackboard and chalk to be brought into the chapel. In the chapel Sister! Then he came sweeping in for his evening talk. The evening talks were just for the senior girls and they were always to do with sex.
Well this evening Father Moriarty came in and whipped off his black soutane and stood there under the sacristy light in white shirt and black trousers and said, ‘Tonight I’m going to discuss some of the problems attached to the sexual act. First VD.’ I thought VD meant Veni Domine, Lord come, like in the hymn books, but there was a great shhing in the chapel and every girl was convinced that Father Moriarty was talking directly to her and we followed his every word and complex diagrams with intense concentration.
Valerie was the envy of the whole school because she asked for a ‘special talk’ with Father Moriarty as she had ‘A Problem’. He’d said he would be available to each and all of us during the entire retreat period. Valerie was taken down to his room while he was having breakfast. She said two sisters from the kitchen waited on him the whole time and the breakfast he got would have fed eight of us—porridge and cream, bacon and eggs and toast—and he told her, ‘Help yourself,’ and handed her his side plate but her hands were shaking so much that she dropped the egg in the sugar bowl and he laughed and said, ‘Not to worry,’ and pinched her cheek and she nearly fainted, she said.
Valerie had wanted to know if French kissing was a sin. A mortal sin. (Mortal sins meant you went to hell and burnt and burnt for ever and ever.) Father Moriarty had told us that you could get this VD thing from kissing and everyone was terrified and thinking: When did I last kiss a boy?
Was French kissing a mortal sin or not? Valerie in her excitement couldn’t quite remember. The priest had said it depended on what it meant in the whole context of the relationship, and she didn’t know what context meant. We told her it meant the whole works, the situation. The priest said it might lead to sinning, it might lead to all sorts of things, but it wasn’t necessarily a sin on its own.
The next day I waited for an hour to go to confession. Most of us went to confession at least twice a day that retreat. We’d be kneeling in the chapel benches and no one would dare sit up and some of the girls would be crying and pushing their rosary beads round and round and saying ‘Oh God’ under their breath so’s you knew they were grappling with a terrible moral problem. The longer you stayed in the confessional the higher your credit rating went.
I got up to go into the confession box and the missal fell out of my hands and holy pictures scattered and I gave a little ‘Oh’ and the priest opened his green curtain and looked out and said, ‘Take your time,’ and the pictures were sticking to my hands and I couldn’t get a grip on them, and I was sweating because it was a terrible thing for a priest to see your face before you went into confession; they were never supposed to know who told them what sins. One of the nuns once told us a story of a French priest who died at the scaffold rather than tell somebody’s sins.
I put my lips right up near the grill and started whispering, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned . . .’ and then I nearly dropped out of my standing because his two eyes were wide open and looking back at me, and usually the priest would just turn his ear to the black grill and you’d pour your sins through to him, like molasses into a funnel.
Father Moriarty just smiled and said, ‘Okay now, have you any problems?’ He didn’t want to hear the sins at all. Just problems. So I told him about Jack Hickey, about him being a Protestant and the way he pushed his tongue in and asked, ‘Was that French kissing, Father?’
He said, ‘It could be the start of French kissing.’
‘Was it sinful?’
Then he said, ‘Did you feel his thing stiffening up against you as he kissed you?’
‘Whaaat?’ I said, nervous.
‘His penis,’ he said. ‘Did you feel it stiffening up when he kissed you?’
And I got up and ran out of the box and down the chapel, the tears pouring down my face and it was the talk of the school for days. Everyone thought I’d done some really terrible sin.
—4—
There was a rule in school you learned to live by. The rule was: You live by, for, and through your emotions. School was weeping over boys, and crying at the Stations of the Cross for poor Jesus hanging up between the thieves. School was begging God to forgive the sins of the whole world if you gave up Marietta biscuits for a whole week and wore your vest every day. School was fallin
g madly in love with other girls and falling out again with a white face, red eyes and loss of appetite. School was standing on your bed trying to have a look at your legs in the six-inch mirror and doing novenas to Saint Theresa to make them look like Marlene Dietrich’s. School was hearing of President Kennedy’s death and howling your eyes out and trying to get a look at Paris Match and the blood on Jackie Kennedy’s costume and saying, ‘God, how AWWWful’ and never asking why was it done but just sloshing around in the gasps and gawps of a street crowd at a car accident.
School was a continuation of, and a preparation for, our future—the future of nice middle class ladies who, having had hundreds of pounds spent on their education, would never be expected to do anything except marry, or maybe become a nun, but hardly have a career. Hardly.
Everyone accepted that somebody like Geraldine Doyle might have a career. She was odd. She was very good at maths and washed her hair with detergent and played the cello. She killed herself last year. She was found in her flat having spent two years teaching maths in a girls’ secondary school. She put her head, detergent-washed hair and all, in the gas oven, and turned it on.
Our last year at school we were allowed to wear our home clothes on weekends and school holidays.
The first night back after the holidays we’d all be up in the dormitory, our cases balanced up on our beds, our cubicle curtains drawn back and our clothes laid out.
Valerie came in wearing knee-high leather boots, and everything you had then looked tatty and worn out and you wanted to kill your parents for only letting you take what you had taken. She let me try the boots on and I stroked the soft leather against my legs and wanted the boots so much that it hurt like a knife twisting inside. That’s what it was then the whole time: I want, want, want—at night in bed thinking about the other girls’ clothes; wondering what they’d all wear next weekend; pleased to think that Margaret Daly looked a right eejit in a long kilt and white blouse and wondering how Elaine Mullen always looked so neat; squeezing the cheeks of your bottom together in bed to stiffen it and make it look pert like Hayley Mills’. Lying so tense and wondering, whispers like bats over the partition walls: Mary … are you awake? Listen, wait till I tell ya…
The first Sunday back that term somebody spilt nail varnish over Valerie’s angora twin set. The girl, Margaret Daly, cried out like she’d been stabbed and was mopping at the nail varnish like it was a bleeding wound. Valerie took the twin set and tossed it into a corner. ‘I’ll send it home to Mammy for one of the kids,’ she said.
God I’d love it, you thought, tarnished and all.
But you wouldn’t say that. Sit mum and pretend that it was the only thing in the world to do with angora twin sets that had nail varnish on them.
We’d spent the whole of that morning up in the dormitory, swapping clothes with smiles, and jumping in and out of each other’s cubicles and envying and wanting so that the air was electric blue and we were all laughing and saying how grand the other one looked, and how that little jumper looks far better on you than it does on me and not meaning a word of it.
Friendships that year became very fragile, brittle things. Everyone wanted Valerie to be her friend. Valerie was the apex, the pinnacle of our desires. Valerie had long legs and Valerie had masses of boyfriends—none of whom she gave a damn for; Valerie was as good as gold in class and all the teachers thought she was adorable and Valerie wrote poems about the teachers after class and passed them round her friends. They would have made the teachers’ hair go quite white.
The juniors would send Valerie letters. Valerie, I love you. She’d show them to her cronies at recreation and everyone would laugh and roll about and put their hands to their mouths, keeping an eye on Valerie at the same time.
That was the same term we had the woman from the Dorothy Grey cosmetics group come and give us a talk on how to make ladies of ourselves.
She was terribly slim, like a doll, and wore a light green wool top and matching skirt. She spoke so carefully that the tip of her nose moved with her lips.
She said it was a woman’s duty, her responsibility, to make the very best of herself. She said that nobody liked an ugly woman, a fat woman, a spotty woman. She said there was no need to be any of these things—with constant care and attention every woman could look attractive.
She said we must regard our faces as blank boards and etch in our beauty like an artist does a painting.
I thought of us all etching and scratching and squeezing for the rest of our lives. A long time.
She told us the kind of things a woman must never do in front of her husband. (Valerie said, ‘What about in front of her lover?’ but so quietly only those of us near her caught it. We giggled: Lovers indeed.) The cosmetic lady said a woman must never pluck her eyebrows, or cut her toenails, or shave her legs, in her husband’s presence.
One of the vulgar day-girls said, ‘What about picking her nose?’
For a minute a wave nearly engulfed us all; we were hanging on the edge of a swinging, tumultuous cliff, but the cosmetic lady gave a brief, flicking smile like a snake’s tongue in the girl’s direction, and carried on.
We sat on the edges of our chairs, listening and twisting our hair round our fingers and wanting and promising ourselves with fierce promises that we would be beautiful and we wouldn’t ever cut our toenails or shave our legs in front of our husbands. Not ever.
The cosmetic lady tried to persuade the nuns to take some samples of goods for us but the nuns said: No thank you.
Enough was enough.
We could never have enough of husbands and along with husbands came babies. We were all going to have babies. If anyone’s parents came visiting to the school with one of the girls’ baby brothers or baby sisters, we would all stand around and say, ‘Ahh, the little dote.’ But really husbands were more important than babies. Anyone could have babies—you had to work to have a husband. Somebody told us that in Dublin there were three girls for every one man and we thought, ‘Jesus!’
On a little shelf outside the chapel at school there was a box for Black Babies. If you gave the nun in charge of chapel half-a-crown then you ‘bought’ yourself a Black Baby. I bought one and I called her Josephine Agnes. You could call them anything you liked as long as the name was a saint’s name. Then the nun would write up your name and the baby’s name: Elizabeth O’Sullivan (in the nuns’ italic handwriting) has adopted (in print) Baby Josephine Agnes (written in the nuns’ slanting hand again). Your half-a-crown was sent to the missions in Africa and the nuns there called one of their new converts Josephine Agnes. Babies were that simple.
Josephine was the name of Napoleon’s wife and at home in my father’s study I’d read a book about her. She was rather daring but the history teacher just went on and on about Napoleon and batons in people’s haversacks and dates of battles that you couldn’t remember. I tried to tell her about the book on Josephine and she just said, ‘My dear child, I think you will find you have quite enough to do without frittering away your time reading irrelevant books on obscure females in history.’ She said, ‘Mmm’ when I couldn’t remember the dates again.
Another female in our history was Marie Antoinette. She was very beautiful and the horrible revolutionaries chopped her head off, but at least she’d been able to say, ‘Let them eat cake’ when the people of Paris were starving for lack of a piece of bread. We thought that was marvellous.
We also thought Africa was marvellous. We learnt a bit about it in history; that’s why we adopted Black Babies, because we knew they were having a terrible time out in the jungle being pagans and everything, and white men went out to ‘darkest’ Africa and helped the ‘natives’ and the ‘savages’, and we had a picture in our history reader of how they got put in big stewing pots for their pains, and black fellows with very long legs and mad eyes danced around them. The white ones kept their hard hats on even in the stewpots.
A nun from one of the missions made a visit to the school one day and we all vowed we’d go to Africa. I was going to go and work in a leper colony and I asked the nurse to let me work in the school infirmary so’s I’d get used to looking at horrible deformities, but there was only gravel in people’s knees, and cold sores on people’s lips.
I imagined myself slim, green-eyed and white-coated with a stethoscope round my neck, the lepers holding out their stumps of limbs in grateful praise as I walked amongst them. There’d be a lone (young, tanned, handsome, intelligent, etc. etc.) priest there also, and we’d altruistically give up our lives and fight the jungle and the disease and the devil together.
I’d pinch myself at night in bed to see how much pain I could stand, because you’d have to be like iron to take Africa. I’d lie on the lino floor with my nightie off and clamp my mouth to stop my teeth chattering and think: If I died now how tragic it would be…
I’d imagine all the girls round my bed, my body laid out, a little smile on my dead face. All the girls would be weeping and Valerie would be crying loudest and throwing herself across my body. My father and stepmother would be led in by one of the nuns and she’d stand back and my father would have big tears pouring down his face, and he’d pick me up and push past my stepmother, saying in a choked voice, ‘Oh Lizzie, my little child, I’ve come to take you home for the last time,’ and then the girls would really shriek with crying and a big sobbing procession would go down through the town to the train bound for Dublin.
—5—
At school we were the Nice Girls.
Nice Girls didn’t do things like that, or that.
Nice Girls didn’t swear or dog-ear their copybooks or write ‘Dev is a Pig’ on their history readers.
Nice Girls always cleaned their nails before Mass and their teeth before sleep and ate up all their green veg—even leeks and cabbage. Nice Girls never whistled, nor did they sing or shout at the top of their voices even if they were at the far end of the hockey field.
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