Nothing in my early life prepared me for the unfolding of events that I will recount. Not that I believe everybody’s life is a series of events or episodes that follow in a predictable, or even likely, set of consequences one from the other. However most people, when they reflect, can see a pattern that holds the sequence of their lives together. What transpired in my early adulthood taught me to take nothing for granted.
I need to tell you something of my early life, in order that you can put in context that which I will relate. I was brought up on a small farm on the side of a hill in the South of Ireland, the second of two children. My sister was eight years older than I was. In Ireland of the time, the early years of the State, a family of two was unusual. As a teenager I had speculated that the neighbours might have thought that my parents were either closet Protestants or that they were circumventing the moral law of their Church.
Our farmhouse was small. When I was about four, my father had the thatch replaced with slates and he told a neighbour who came to inspect it: ‘That’s the job done once and for all.’ One night, years later, a storm blew the slate roof into the yard.
In the flag-floored kitchen there was a large dresser opposite the window. The fire on which my mother still did some of the cooking was on the floor under the open chimney. The black kettle hung on the crane that she moved over the fire to boil water. I have never in my adult life experienced anything like the feeling when, as a small boy, I came into the kitchen on a winter’s day cold from playing outside. I would put some turf on the fire and turn the bellows to coax it into life. With hands held out, I would sit and watch the smoke rush up the soot-lined chimney and wait for the red-hot heart to send long yellow tongues of flame dancing upwards. In no time my shins would burn and I’d have to move back from the intense heat.
In due course my father boarded up the chimney, but not before he put a flue up it for the range that replaced the fire and became the new source of heat for the kitchen and for the family’s cooking. This made life easier for my mother and, like the new slate roof, the new range marked us out as socially a cut above the neighbours, some of whom came in to see this wondrous manifestation of the modern world.
My bedroom was a small room under the roof that I entered by climbing a ladder out of the kitchen. My bed was a cross between a bunk and a settle bed, and when I lay down in it I was in a world of my own. I kept my favourite things: a book of English schoolboy stories, a toy train engine and a rubber dagger under the clothes at the foot of the bed. The chimney-breast ran up at one end of my room and kept it warm in winter. During a hot summer it was too warm and I would sleep with no covering.
The yard outside, which was on a slope, had a cow house, a house for the horse for which the term ‘stable’ would have been pretentious, and two more of what auctioneers are wont to call ‘out offices,’ one of which we called ‘the dairy.’ From time to time my sister and I were sent to feed scraps to the variety of hens that inhabited the yard that most of the time pecked at nothing I could see. There were ducks that knocked around together and never appeared to do very much except occasionally to root for parasites among their feathers. All of these domestic birds fouled the yard and my father had no time for them. When my mother defended their presence as providers of fresh eggs, my father repeated the old refrain of farmers to their wives: ‘There wasn’t a hen yet that didn’t die in debt.’
Later on my father erected a single-span hay shed with lean-to, and concreted most of the yard. Then he insisted that my mother confine her fowl to a hen-run at the back of the house, which had the advantage of keeping them safe from the fox. If the gate of the run was left open and hens wandered down the yard my father would make a kick at them as he passed. I was never quite sure if he intended to connect or if he was simply making a show of his disapproval of their being there.
In those, my very early years I took an interest in all matters concerning the farm and my father allowed me to do little jobs around the yard and sometimes I went down the fields with him. My sister, however, considered it beneath her to involve herself in farming; we were like two only-children living in the same house.
In the September after my fourth birthday my sister, for whom I was obviously a damned nuisance, dragged me the mile or so for my first day to the local Boys’ National School. Later that afternoon, at home I referred to the teacher by the name I heard the older boys call him in the playground, ‘Fuckpants Fogarty’ and without explaining to me why, my father gave me a thrashing I have never forgotten. ‘The Master,’ by which name I referred to him ever after, was a man whose approach to education was seen in a phrase he used frequently ‘you egregious eejit.’ Eejit I understood but ‘egregious’ I had to look up in my mother’s dictionary. He was a man for whom discipline was an end in itself and which he imposed by fear and violence.
My mother was also a National School Teacher, who grew up on a small farm similar to my father’s. When they were married she taught full time in the next door parish, and returned to teach there after my sister and I were born. She had her hens and sold surplus eggs and she bred turkeys for Christmas. The idea was always to save money to buy more land. No land came up adjoining or nearby, so in due course my father bought an out-farm a couple of miles away. He went first thing every morning to the out-farm to herd cattle and in term time, when he got home my mother, sister and myself had left for school. During the holidays I sometimes went with my father to herd and it was one such morning during the summer holidays that I decided I would not be a farmer.
For my father the primary call on the family finances was land. For my mother the priority was education. I believed for a long time that religious observance was first for my mother but as I grew up I came to realise that in fact this was not the case. In retrospect, as a teacher she conveyed the impression of orthodoxy in order not come into conflict with her zealous school manager, the parish priest. However, it was my father who took sudden fits of religious zeal. Out of the blue he would insist that we said the family rosary every night. This would continue for a week or so and then nights would be missed if he was out late or even if he fell asleep at the fire. My mother would never arrange to say the rosary in his absence and slowly the practice would lapse until weeks later something he perceived to be unholy or scandalous in the family or in the community would prompt him to start again. My father left school at fourteen, and believed that school was a trial to be endured before coming to the real business of life, farming. He was hidebound by local social convention and his determination to do nothing that might cause the neighbours to talk.
The neglect of his education meant that what little writing my father had acquired he lost by lack of use. My mother did any writing that had to be done, including when necessary writing cheques in a fluent hand, that she then gave to my father who signed his name laboriously as on a headline copy. He did read the newspaper and had no difficulty in doing what mental arithmetic was necessary to ensure that he farmed at a profit and that nobody would put anything over on him. He dealt astutely when buying and selling, and paid nobody to do anything he could do himself. He did most of the building, plumbing and carpentry around the farm to his own satisfaction, and when the electricity was extended to the yard he even learned to do his own electrics without electrocuting himself or anybody else.
My abiding memory of my sister, in those early years, is that she considered me at best a nuisance or at worst, superfluous. On the occasions when my mother charged her with some responsibility for me, like delivering me to school on my first day, it seemed that I was no more to her than a bothersome encumbrance, and she made no effort to hide it. In fact on such occasions she might tell me so and would push or drag me if I weren’t coming or going quickly enough, and give me a clip on the ear if I challenged her in any way. I notice that so far I have not used her name. This doesn’t surprise me as to me she was always ‘my sister.’ Her name was Marian and I can only speculate that her attitude to me resulted from the fact that for eight years she had things all her own way. Whatever the cause of her disapprobation I learned to avoid it as much as possible. I was not entirely innocent, however. I sometimes put one over on her in some way, in circumstances where I perceived that she could not retaliate. No doubt such provocation on my part made her even more determined to keep me in my place.
The village was about a mile from our house. It was a community of independent minded people who lived in close proximity, bound by a kind of negative intimacy. The single main street was an assortment of as many as thirty dwellings interspersed with a number of shops. There was a grocery shop-cum-Post Office where the Post Mistress controlled the postal and telephone services for the district. She was a source of intelligence for those in whom she chose to confide; a purveyor of confidential information both harmless and dangerous.
There was a shop-cum-pub that sold everything; groceries, hardware, clothes and almost anything else that a person might want. This was where my mother dealt. As a child I never got beyond the partition that blocked off the counter and extended across the shop floor to divide the bar from the rest of the shop. From the shop side you could smell the stout and hear male conversation and the occasional guffaw from the other side.
In my childhood I knew little about the other two pubs in the village. One was run by a widow and seemed, on reflection, to have had a select clientele of older men. (In those days women didn’t go into bars. Drinking, apart from a drop of port wine with Christmas cake, was mainly men’s work). The other pub was undoubtedly the busiest one in the village. It served the drinking needs of most of the village and surrounding countryside. The publican was well known to be his own best customer, and in due course his excesses led to a widow running this pub too.
There was a small drapery shop that had closed down some years before. The window was covered on the inside with whiting and the name over it had been painted out. There was a large padlock on the door and grit, bits of straw, hay and litter, driven by the wind accumulated in the doorway. Nobody lived over the shop and there was never any activity of any kind around it. The story was that a spinster woman had run the shop and when a plumber lifted floorboards to trace a leak he discovered the skeleton of a baby. The Guards investigated and shortly after that the shop closed and the woman disappeared. Nobody seemed to know where she had gone. Every possible rumour, Dublin, England and even prison, was purveyed as fact. There was an air of mystery about the premises, which fell further and further into disrepair, and nobody ever went near it or spoke about it. Village children said it was haunted and that passing it at night you could hear a baby crying. One day talking about heaven and hell in religion class in school, one of the senior boys asked if the baby under the floorboards was in limbo.
‘What baby, under what floorboards?’ the Master barked.
‘In the shop beside Dunphys.’
‘Get on with your work,’ came the reply, in a tone that said that that was end of the matter.
The boys’ school and the girls’ school were side by side set back from the street. Almost all the children walked to school, taking the most direct route, even if this meant crossing fields and ditches or climbing gates. Human nature is a lazy commodity; people will wear a path across a patch of grass, or even through a flower bed, rather than walk a few yards further on a pavement. The children that had to walk a good distance to school envied the children of the village, but balanced the account by considering the village children inferior beings; an inferiority based on their abysmal ignorance of farming. In an unlikely kind of way I, although from a farm, found that I had more in common with the village boys than with the country ones.
The church was at the end of the village. It was surrounded by the graveyard where previous generations were buried. There were more and more gaps in the genealogies traceable on gravestones in recent times as people from the village died in Dublin, England and America.
The lives of the people were governed by both the seasons of the Church’s year and by those of nature. People, however, thought in terms of God rather than nature and they understood everything they said or did as either being in conformity with the teaching of the Church or against it. The Church was the most important institution in the village followed a close second by the GAA club, and the Parish Priest, Father Walsh, ran both.
The ritual of Sunday Mass was as natural as breathing, and nobody, as far as I knew, balked at attending,. At the occasional mission, priests from outside came into the parish and frightened the living daylights out of people, with threats of hell-fire by describing hell and its torments in great detail. At these missions my father never missed on the men’s nights, and although my mother went on some of the women’s nights, to the annoyance of my father she would raise questions at home afterwards about what had been said. He would put an end to the conversation abruptly with a comment like: ‘Do you think you know better than the priests?’
In due course when I was old enough to go to a mission evening with my father I would check my life off against the sins the priests inveighed against, and usually found that I wasn’t too bad, but I wasn’t too good either. I comforted myself that I had a long life ahead of me during which I had plenty of time to make amends and circumvent the wrath of God. My father pointed out that most of my sins fell into two categories: telling lies and being deficient in the way of piety and religious practice. When boys at school were getting excited at the prospect of becoming altar boys, I enlisted my mother’s support to decline the offer to the chagrin of my father.
At school I had no difficulty keeping up with schoolwork, and I was puzzled by how some of the other boys, even in the senior classes could not answer simple questions. I wanted to prompt them, but I knew that it was a risky business.
When I came to sixth class, my secondary education became a matter for decision. Most of the boys from school went into the ‘Tech’ in the nearest town for their secondary education. My sister had been to the convent in town and by this time she was at teacher training college. My elders and betters decided that in my case I had a good chance of gaining a scholarship to boarding school two counties away. On more than one occasion I heard my father proclaim that, scholarship or no scholarship, sending a boy who was going to farm to boarding school was a waste of time and money. This was before it became evident to him that I had no intention of farming and I have no doubt that, as the greater contributor to the family’s income my mother insisted upon my going away to school. In the early summer I sat the exam, won a scholarship and was destined for boarding school on September.
One night in the kitchen in late summer my mother laid out all the clothes and other items of outfit to check them against the list. My father’s comment was:
‘What, in the name of God, does he want that amount of stuff for? It’s easy to see those brothers don’t have to pay for it.’ It was the first and only reference, as the time approached, that my father made to the fact that I was going away to school.
The day arrived and, since my mother was already back to school, it fell to my father to bring me on the first day of my first term at boarding school. As it happened it was to be the first long run he would make in his recently acquired, second hand ‘Ford Anglia’ motorcar. This was something else that, in addition to being married to a schoolteacher and having a son going away to school, marked him out from his neighbours. My father, the practical man, though not impressed by the social status of any of these things, valued the practical advantages of the teacher-wife and the motorcar. However, the son at boarding-school was a waste of money and of no advantage to him or to me. I have no doubt that since the cost of my education came, not from his hard-earned work as a farmer but from my mother, he had forfeited his say in the matter. That the cost of my secondary education might have been the more profitably applied towards the purchase of farm machinery or more land, made it a bitter irony that he should be the one to bring me on my first day.
As we were not leaving until after lunch, I was still in bed when my mother came to say good-bye before leaving for school. She leaned into my bed and hugged and kissed me; I could smell the scent of her soap. ‘Work hard.’ she said into my ear as she held me, and as she stood up tears welled in her eyes. She turned at the door and her voice cracked as she said:
‘Bye, and be a good boy. I’ll write to you,’ and still the reality did not bear in on me. I got up, pulled back the curtains, got back into bed and read. When I arrived down to the kitchen my mother had left a cold meal ready for my father and me. My sister had already returned to college. My father arrived in from the yard, and after we had eaten, he went to his room and changed into his Sunday suit, collar and tie. I was already dressed ready to go. He put my suitcase into the boot and I sat in the front passenger seat beside him. The car was still a novelty and I believe he was looking forward to the journey, and it was a novelty for me too. I asked him some questions about the car most of which he answered. He didn’t travel very fast. I don’t think he would have admitted it, but he was a little nervous on the road.
There was a long silence between us which my father broke;
‘I hope you realise what a great thing your mother is doing for you, sending you to school. I hope you’ll make the most of it.’
‘I will.’ I said, not fully understanding what he meant. The expense end of it meant nothing to me; I had no anxiety about schoolwork, which largely speaking I enjoyed. Eventually we turned into a grand entrance and drove up a long avenue curving left with a line of mature beech trees along the fence on the right. There was open pasture beyond the left-hand fence, with cattle grazing in the foreground and beyond them two football or hurling pitches. Ahead there was a fine country mansion with a long two-story modern pebble dashed block attached to the near side. We drove up the avenue and parked in the large gravel sweep in front of the house. There was a portico with fine pillars leading to the front door that was open. High above it there was an alcove with a statue of the Blessed Virgin. There were other cars parked and adults and boys coming and going. I felt conspicuous and noticed other boys that I thought might be new.
My father took the case from the boot and I followed him into the hall, which was dominated by a large crucifix over an arch leading to a broad staircase straight ahead. An older boy approached us and, though it must have been obvious to him, asked my father:
‘A new boy?’
‘Yes.’
‘If you put your case over there I’ll show you where to go.’ We followed the boy through the arch and down a lino-covered corridor. Near the end he indicated a wooden bench on the right facing a heavy dark-wood panelled door. There was a woman with a boy of roughly my age already there. ‘Wait there,’ our guide said, and left us, and the woman smiled tentatively at my father who simply nodded back. Neither of them spoke. After about ten minutes another woman and young boy came out of the room opposite. In a minute or so a tall Brother, with grey hair, slender features, a surly look and wearing a cassock drawn at the waist by a black leather belt, came to the door and gestured to the woman beside me to enter the room. My father and I waited; he hadn’t spoken to me since we got out of the car. I knew he was uncomfortable in these unfamiliar surroundings and that he couldn’t wait to get home to change his clothes and set into his jobs around the yard. He was even more uncomfortable than I was.
After about ten minutes the woman and boy ahead of us emerged and shortly after the tall unsmiling Brother opened the door and said to us: ‘Come in.’ We entered the office which was furnished with a desk, three or four chairs, a filing cabinet and a leather covered sofa, all too small for the large finely-proportioned room with high ceiling and two tall windows. A modern flowery carpet covered the centre of the room, and the floorboards around the edge were varnished black.
The Brother sat down behind the desk and indicated to us to sit on two chairs facing him.
‘Name?’ was all he said.
‘Mine or his,’ my father replied inclining his head in my direction.
‘Is he your son?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then your surname.’ My father told him and he extracted a file from amongst a pile on his desk. He opened the file and turned over some sheets.
‘Have you brought the medical certificate?’ My father produced an envelope from his inside pocket and put it on the desk. The brother opened it, read the contents and put it on the file.
‘And the fees?’ My father produced a roll of money in pinks and blues; colours of notes I had never seen before, counted out some of them and handed them to the brother who checked them and put them into a black cash box on the desk.
‘A receipt will be sent in the post.’
The Brother stood up and said: ‘If you go back to the hall, one of the boys will show you where to put your suitcase.’ As we approached the door the brother shook hands with my father and gave him a reluctant smile as if to take the harm out of his rudeness. He had neither spoken to me nor looked directly at me.
We went back to the hall and the boy, who had shown us where to go, brought us to a room at the other side of the staircase where we left my suitcase with some others.
‘I’ll go now,’ my father said and shook hands with me awkwardly. I went out to the front steps and waved as he drove away, but he didn’t see me, and I watched until the car disappeared through the gate.
Despite bouts of homesickness, in my first term I got on well at boarding school. I soon discovered that I enjoyed history best of all. During school holidays I found myself reading history for pleasure. Knowing by now my disinclination for farming, my father no longer asked or expected me to help with the jobs. I have no doubt that he gave me a pardon for having become, as he would have seen it, the fool of books. I also have no doubt that he blamed my mother for the fact that his only son would not take over the farm after his time.
It became clear early on that I would go to university, and my mother was delighted, and made it plain that she would be able to pay for it. As usual in such matters my father said little, and what he did say indicated clearly that he and my mother had a fundamentally different perspective on life that I learned later was the cause of tension between them. I have no idea if they discussed these matters, but I have a feeling that if they did, neither would be able to convince the other of their case. My father was mystified that I didn’t want to farm, when, as he used to say, ‘it would all be yours some day.’
In consultation with the Brothers, some friends of my mother and, to be fair, with me, it was agreed that I would study History and Economics at University. I still had no idea what I wanted to do afterwards, but history was for enjoyment, and economics might help me make some impression on the jobs market in due course. My time at school and my Leaving results gave me a quiet confidence that I could handle the academic end of things. My uncertainty was living in the city, despite the fact that I knew it was time for me to leave home and make my own way. My sister had already finished teacher training and had been appointed to a school in the suburbs of Dublin. As we became older we got on better and we were easier in each other’s company, so much so that, at least for a start, I was to share a flat with her. Despite her dismissal of me when we were young, now she was a mother hen to my comings and goings.
In Dublin I established the right to make my own decisions and conceded nothing to my sister’s expectations. I became involved in producing in the College Drama Society and went to the theatre when I could afford to. On Saturday nights, after the best part of the night in the pub, my friend Dec and I usually ended up at a student dance, with the usual hopes and expectations and, more often than not, disappointments.
Religious assumptions undergirded the life of the university and it was known that the President was a great friend of the Archbishop, and although the university was technically not under the control of the Church, it was very much under its influence. Furthermore every morning a flotilla of clerical students arrived on bicycles from a seminary across the city, dressed completely in black wearing clerical collars and soft hats. In college they stuck together and set sail together again after lectures. One day I heard one female student say to another, as she observed a group of these clerical students don their cycle clips:
‘What a waste of healthy virility.’
All my, life so far, I had gone to Mass on Sundays, either with my family or at school without giving it a thought. In Dublin I continued to go with my sister until one Saturday night I stayed in a friend’s flat after a party, the worse for wear, and couldn’t get up for Mass in the morning. I did have a modicum of guilt, but the sky didn’t fall down. Since the guilt quickly assuaged and the sky stayed up I missed Mass from time to time without any noticeable diminution in my state of mind or my capacity to function. My sister wasn’t too pleased when I stayed in bed on a Sunday morning; she reacted as though it might bring some sort of bad luck on the flat and anyway wasn’t it a sin, and shouldn’t I be ashamed of myself which I wasn’t.
One afternoon towards the end of my last year in college coming out of a lecture, I found my sister waiting for me. I knew something was wrong.
‘It’s Daddy,’ she said. ‘They found him down the yard.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes. A man who came to see him went to look for him and found him. He sent for the doctor and got a message to Mammy. She left school immediately, and by the time she got home he was dead. He had a massive heart attack.’ We went back to the flat, put a few things into a bag and got the bus home.
My mother cried quietly when we were together, and she cried at the graveside. Apart from that, as I might have predicted, she comported herself with great dignity as she received the hundred-and-one ‘sorry for your trouble’ expressions of sympathy. I found it tedious and repetitious, but on reflection realised that, I couldn’t expect inarticulate country people to make profound comments about the neighbour that most of them respected but could hardly be said to have liked.
My father was, I believe, well respected among his peers as a hard working and progressive farmer and as a man who drove a hard bargain. I have no doubt many of the neighbours felt sorry for him that, after all his acumen and hard work in putting together a good farm his only son wasn’t interested:
‘ That young fella,’ a fine farm o’ land into his lap and he above in college in Dublin, and God only knows what he’ll get up to after that.’
My mother had no difficulty deciding that she would continue teaching and set on conacre the land that my father had farmed so carefully. After the funeral I spoke to her about his disappointment that I would not be coming home to farm. She recounted how upset he had been at first, but that he hadn’t mentioned it during the last few years. My mother never confronted my father. When he laid down the law she would let time elapse and quietly, usually in the form of a question, she would throw light on the situation in such a way that it might make him see things from a different perspective. She did it so discreetly and gently that he didn’t lose face.
As the sea closes over a ship that sinks and the ocean gets on with its business, so a community returns to normality around a family that is bereaved. Like the ship owners in the succeeding weeks and months the family is left do deal with the loss. My mother and sister had to get back to teaching, so I stayed at home to cope with some of the practicalities, including making arrangements to sell the stock and machinery and to let the land.
In time the auction took place in the yard and for me it was vultures around the corpse of a dead animal, though my father would not have seen it so. He would have defended the right of bidders to get what they could as cheaply as possible. Although I had no difficulty about the fact that I wasn’t going to farm, I felt a great sadness for my father, not so much at the letting of the land, but at the finality of the sale of the stock and machinery.
2
University was for me a time of growing up. I learned something of the big bad world outside the shelter of my home and boarding school. I began to have some idea who I was how I might fit into this world. I realised early on that in order to survive I would need an income, and I knew that, unlike my father, I would not be able to generate it myself. I would have to have a salary; a regular weekly or monthly income from an employer in return for my services. I had not got the self-confidence to pit myself against the world as my father did. I decided early on that when I graduated I would plump for a permanent and pensionable position and in time I entered the Civil Service.
My colleagues at work fascinated me. They included all sorts and conditions of men and women from all parts of the country. More men than women, and there were very few women at senior level since when they married they had to leave. This left behind those who in those days were offensively referred to as ‘old maids.’
These unmarried older women were reputed to be humorsome or temperamental. Most of them certainly weren’t a bundle of laughs and some of them sported more than the average display of religious medals and insignia. Generally they didn’t receive well anyone who created diversions of one kind or another that caused them to deviate from the routine of their work. I found their reputation to have some basis in fact, but not to be universal, and I got on well with one or two of them.
One evening, after work on my way to the pub for a drink before I went home, I had a strong sense that I was being followed. The feeling was so strong that I stopped and looked around just in time to see, Bridget, one of the women from the Department turn suddenly into a shop doorway. Had she kept walking I wouldn’t have given it another thought, but clearly she didn’t want me to see her. I thought no more about it, and began to think that perhaps I had been mistaken, until one day at work I had gone down to the walk-in stationery safe for something when Bridget arrived behind me. She was fumbling at one of the cartons, taking out envelopes when I turned around.
‘Hello, John,’ she said. I was amazed. She had never spoken to me before, and I was surprised she used my name, that she even knew it.
‘Hello Miss Donoghue.’
‘That’s shockin’ weather we’re havin’’
‘Indeed it is,’ I said, and carrying a handful of envelopes, she left. It seemed strange to me that she, who was middle grade, should come for envelopes herself rather than send a junior from her section.
Again I thought no more about it. I had no reason to, until one day in the front hall after work I was about to go out the door when Bridget caught up with me from behind.
‘John, can I have a word with you?’ I felt a little unnerved that she used my name again.
‘I’d like to talk to you privately,’ she said. ‘Will you come for a cup of coffee?’ In a way I was relieved that I hadn’t imagined that she had been stalking me.
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘thank you. But I haven’t a lot of time.’ I added as a way out in case I needed it.
‘I’ll see you in ‘The Pantry’ in Napper’s Lane in twenty minutes,’ she said and disappeared into the crowd along the footpath.
As it happened I knew where Napper’s Lane was, so I bought an evening paper and walked in that direction. With some difficulty I found ‘The Pantry.’ It was a small old-time café, the outside of which had not been painted for a long time and the name over the door was barely discernible. I went in and sat down at a table. Inside the café had not been re-decorated for years either. It was furnished with raw-wood tables and chairs. There was nobody else there. I could see somebody peek through the net curtain of a small square window behind the counter, and in a moment a woman came out from the back, around the counter and approached me. She had straight grey hair gathered in a bun at the back of her head. She wore a long dark green shapeless dress covered at the front by a less than clean white apron. She didn’t smile, but looked at me in an unnerving kind of way.
‘I’ll just have a coffee, please,’ I said. The ‘waitress,’ whom I assumed was the proprietor, returned with a large old-fashioned teacup of coffee and a small jug of milk. She put them down in front of me and pushed the glass sugar bowl across the table closer to me. This time she allowed what I thought was the slightest hint of a smile and went through to the back again. There was no sign of Bridget and I felt distinctly ill at ease.
I sipped the coffee and began to read my paper. In a few minutes I looked up and saw the curtain on the window behind the counter was moved aside, and then closed over quickly. The waitress was having another peep. I was checking the early racing results when Bridget standing at the end of the table said:
‘You found it.’ I stood up. Bridget sat into the chair opposite me.
‘What would you like?’ I asked, as the waitress arrived at the table.
‘A cup of tea please, Kathleen.’
Kathleen said nothing and went back to the kitchen. I put away the paper expecting to be enlightened as to what was going on.
‘Thank you for coming,’ Bridget said. ‘I suppose you’re wondering what it’s about.’
‘You could say that.’ I said, almost sarcastically.
‘Well, I want to invite you to something, but want to explain what it is before you give me your answer.’
‘Go on,’ I said in a tone that said: ‘go ahead and make your case.’
‘I’m a member a small prayer group that meets once a week, and I’d like to invite you to join.’
‘Why me?’ I asked. She put her two hands around her cup as though to warm them and looking down at the tea she said:
‘Well, I’ve noticed you at work. You are steady, hard working and not given to vulgarities or excesses of any kind.’
‘How do you know that? I might be like that at work, and one of the greatest blackguards unhung outside.’
‘But you’re not. I know.’ I was beginning to feel cross.
‘How do you know? Have you been snooping or asking people?’
‘No, I have not. I just know.’ I began to calm down, telling myself that this was a sad and probably lonely woman who has taken solace in religion. I had a strong urge to get up and go, but I didn’t want to be offensive to her, and my curiosity had been aroused.
‘I’m not a religious person,’ I said, ‘neither am I irreligious, it’s just that religion doesn’t interest me very much. I go to Mass occasionally, but I don’t say any prayers.
‘That’s all the more reason why you should join.’
‘How many are in the group?’
‘Nine.’
‘And how often do you meet?’
‘Once a week, on a Tuesday night.’
‘Where do you meet?’
‘Here, in a room upstairs.’
‘And what do you do?’
‘We discuss the way the world is going, and we pray for the world, and for people we know.’
‘Have you prayed for me?’ The fact that Bridget had approached me made it seem likely that they had. You can’t stop someone praying for you, but as far as I was concerned I was OK and didn’t need anyone’s prayers.
‘Yes we have. We prayed that you were the right kind of person to ask to join the group.’
‘What’s the right kind of person to join the group?’
‘Someone who isn’t going the way the world is going.’
‘But I’m not a regular Mass-goer.’
‘Yes, but you’re not up to your neck in all the filth and dirt that’s going on in the world today and getting worse.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just know.’ I didn’t get cross this time. Had she stalked me before the day I saw her ducking into the shop doorway? If she had she would know I went into pubs, and I didn’t think that would suit her, but maybe joining the group was designed to cure me of that.
‘Do you want to ask me anything else.’ Bridget enquired.
‘Do I know anyone else in the group?’
‘Apart from Kathleen, here, I don’t think you do.’
‘Is there anyone else from work?’
‘Not from Education, there are a couple from other Departments.’
At this stage I had had enough. Because of my natural caution, I didn’t want to make the mistake of giving an unconsidered answer. I really had no interest in joining the group, but didn’t want to say ‘no’ blankly to Bridget now. There was something decent about her. ‘I’ll think about it and let you know,’ I said, and stood up.
‘I’ll look after your coffee,’ Bridget said, and I took my paper and left. When I got to the end of the lane and back onto the street with its thorough of early evening traffic, I was conscious how surreal my last hour in the café had been. I made for the bookie’s to check the late results, went home and performed the only daily chore that I would never take in my stride; I cooked dinner.
Over the next week or so I thought about the events of that evening after work in ‘The Pantry.’ Joining a prayer group wasn’t something I was eager to do. I didn’t bump into Bridget at work but knew I was going to have to tell her soon. I was beginning to think that I might give it a try, not because I wanted to learn to pray or develop a religious side of myself, but out of sheer curiosity. I could always leave, and probably would when I had seen enough.
Next morning in work I phoned Bridget’s extension:
‘Bridget?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll accept that invitation. Just let me know when to turn up.’
‘Tuesday, next Tuesday.’ I hung up, and immediately regretted what I had done. I reassured myself that I could say after the first time that it wasn’t my scene, without offending anybody.
3
One of the reasons that I hadn’t much time for religion was that my study of history told me to that it caused as much, if not more, pain and suffering in the world as it did good. None the less I still experienced residual guilt as a result of religious indoctrination as a child. It was well known at secondary school that you didn’t let the Brothers know that you had questions, let alone doubts. You kept quiet and gave back the right answers when asked. There were enough things in school to get you into trouble without drawing down the ire of the Brothers on the one subject they claimed was the foundation for everything. The answer-by-rote system didn’t allow any exploration of the subject. So successful was early indoctrination about sin, punishment and hell, however, that, despite growing out of it, a residual niggle of guilt remained. In an inverted kind of way I thought the prayer group might kill this off .
Tuesday arrived and I began to regret that I had agreed to go to the group. In work during the day I felt a kind of foreboding. I considered ‘phoning Bridget to say I had changed my mind, but decided for her sake and, if I’m honest, for my own reputation not to be known as unreliable, that I would go.
After work I didn’t go for my usual pint but went to a restaurant for something to eat. I arrived at ‘The Pantry’ at five to eight. The door was closed and the blind on the window pulled down. There was no bell so I knocked on the door. Bridget answered, welcomed me, and I followed her through the empty café, around the counter and into the room at the back with the little spy window. She then led the way out through a door into a hall-way and up the stairs to a room that could only be described as dismal.
There was brown lino on the floor with a small mat in the middle. There were two windows, with net curtains that hadn’t been washed for years, looking out onto the gable end of the building next door. On the walls there was a varnished dado with dark floral wallpaper above it. Since it was beginning to get dusk the ceiling light in the middle of the room was on. Around the edge of the room, there were some moth-eaten, velvet upholstered dining chairs, and an assortment of other chairs, making eight in all.
There were already four other people in the room, one man and three women, two of uncertain age including Kathleen, and one good looking younger woman, unlikely, I thought, in the circumstances. When we entered Bridget said:
‘This is John.’ She didn’t mention their names and beckoned to me to sit on an easy chair. I sat down and some of the others smiled or made gestures that indicated that I was welcome. One in fact said it out; ‘You’re welcome.’ Another made a comment on the weather to which I replied in as interested a way as I could muster. Two other women arrived, one of whom announced:
‘Eamon isn’t coming. He has a dose of bronchitis.’
‘Well then we’re all here.’ Bridget said. ‘So, first I want to welcome our new member John, so we’ll start,’ and without a moment’s hesitation the group launched into a decade of the rosary.
I mumbled along, absolutely certain that I was being watched. The last time I said the rosary was at the graveside at my father’s funeral. When it ended, the whole group looked to Bridget, who made the sign of the cross a second time, cleared her throat and began:
‘Adam is still walking, but uses his stick; he says it gives him confidence. I’ve told him that if he had more faith he wouldn’t need the stick. Angela’s stomach is fine and she’s still eating things she hasn’t eaten for years. Any other reports?’ One of the other women started.
‘Mrs Donnelly’s son has got a job and he sold the motorbike.’
‘Oh, thanks be to God,’ chipped in one of the others. ‘And what’s more,’ went on the first, ‘she’s sure now he isn’t, you know…..those young men aren’t coming around to the house any longer.’
‘God is good,’ said someone else. Then Bridget stood up.
‘You won’t be surprised to hear that The Blessed Virgin has spoken to me again. I had a clear vision last Wednesday when she told me not to go public yet. The time will soon arrive for me say it out that people are to turn back to the Church and religion, as the only way to get rid of all this sex and drugs.’
‘Jesus,’ I said profanely under my breath. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I couldn’t believe I was sitting in a small room above a café with this assortment of people listening to what I considered pure fantasy, but which for the other people present was serious religious truth. Then suddenly Bridget turned to me and asked would I like to say something.
‘No, thank you.’ I said, ‘I’ll just listen for the moment.’
The rest of the evening was taken up with discussion of the evils of this wicked world that so displeased the Blessed Virgin. They were mostly in the realm of sexuality: contraception, abortion, divorce, pre-marital sex, pornography and what one called ‘filthy films’ on television. Eventually Bridget looked at her watch and exclaimed:
‘We’re over time; it’s ten past nine,’ and without drawing breath she launched into a decade of the rosary. When it was over, apart from Kathleen and Brigid, the others dispersed quickly, all of them with a ‘good night’ to all and sundry and to nobody in particular. I offered to help to put away the chairs, but Kathleen told me they stayed where they were for next week.
‘I hope you’ll come back.’ Brigid said, adding, ‘It’ll take couple of weeks to get in on our way of doing things.’ As there was only the pair of them present, I thought of asking Brigid about her visions of the Blessed Virgin, but thought better of it. I would give the group a couple of weeks, before I asked awkward questions.
I went to the next meeting of the group and found it much the same as the first time. There was a difference, however. Bridget and some of the others seemed unnerved by my not saying anything. They probed a bit by asking questions. Did I know anyone who should be added to the group’s prayer list? What did I think of the way the world was going? They seemed to think that only religious people were moral since fear of eternal damnation made people behave themselves in this world.
Once they had drawn me into the discussion I was bold to ask some questions myself. I asked Bridget some detailed questions about the appearances of the Blessed Virgin. Without saying so she gave the distinct impression that it was impertinence on my part to probe in this way. I had no doubt the rest of the group marked me out as a sceptic and unbeliever and one to be watched.
I went back to the group again on the following Tuesday, when the usual format was observed. During the evening Bridget, in passing made some reference to where I was from. She got the name of the village right, which surprised me. The meeting took the usual form and nothing untoward was said. It seemed to me that Brigid and Kathleen had started the group but that in the running of it, apart from providing the premises, Kathleen was the sleeping partner. Although she didn’t say much she was constantly observing and she listened intently to what people said. On the way home after the meeting I walked a part of the way with Michael, the older man. I asked him about Bridget and Kathleen.
‘Bridget’s a Dub and Kathleen is from somewhere down the country. I don’t know where but if you ask some of the women, they’ll probably know and if they don’t they’ll make it up. Some of them say she spent time in jail, but they don’t know what for. I don’t believe a word of it. If those auld ones run short of a bit of gossip they invent some, and the more sensational the better.
I was astonished at what Michael said and putting it all together I suddenly tumbled to it; two and two made Kathleen the Kate O’Callaghan from the derelict shop in the village. That was surely how Brigid knew something about me. I immediately felt sorry for her that the others knew something about her past. She was entitled to her privacy, especially if, as they say, she had paid her debt to society. I was determined I would tell nobody here or at home what I knew.
Later that week I had a ‘phone call from my sister to say our mother was coming to Dublin on Saturday, and wanted to meet me. She was adapting to her widowhood, but a trip to Dublin was most unusual, and wanting to see me implied a matter of some importance.
I knew she would come to it sooner or later: she wants to talk to me about the land. She wants to sell it and wants to give me a last chance to take it on, or say unequivocally that I don’t want it. Being from a farm herself she would see the land as my inheritance.’
I had to admit to myself that there were times at work when I would like to have been my own boss, and to be able to take the dog out across the fields to herd cattle. On the way into the office, on a bright spring morning, I often thought of what it was like at home. I could hear the river that ran through the out-farm, and could see myself standing on the makeshift wooden bridge looking down into the clear water as it made its way downstream over the shingley river-bed.
My flights of fancy, however, did not include what it was like on wet winter mornings, having to work outside in heavy waterproof clothes on sodden land with cold rain driving into my face. Nor did it include spending a day hanging around the mart and bringing cattle home again because I couldn’t sell them. I could easily live with my mother; we got on well together, but I valued my monthly salary and an eight-hour day, five-days a week. In my job the public could wait, but cattle can’t. You have to get out there at all hours of the day and night, hail rain or snow, to look after them. I knew that I hadn’t got that mystical feel for land, nor could I endure the hardship that farmers endured because it was the only way of life they knew. It simply wasn’t in me.
My mother wasn’t interested in the farm herself. She had endured years of my father’s obsession about it, and since his death she had had trouble with the lettings. When she broached the subject I would make it easy for her. I would say straight away that she could go ahead and sell the land, I wasn’t interested, but I did appreciate that she asked me. I would suggest that she keep an acre or two with the house and yard, and let the locals fight over the rest at auction what way they liked. When it was all over it would be a load off my mother’s mind.
On the Saturday I arrived at the appointed hotel and sat in the foyer. I was early, ordered a cup of coffee and watched the comings and goings. When my mother arrived, she was dressed for the city. She sat down opposite me, and after we had exchanged the usual pleasantries she asked if there wasn’t somewhere more private that we could talk. We decamped to the lounge bar and found a quiet corner.
‘I haven’t seen you wearing that coat since Daddy’s funeral.’ I said teasingly.
‘I have once or twice, when I’m trying to impress somebody,’ she said, ‘especially the clerical manager. He’s critical enough of my attitude to most things without giving him the opportunity to be critical of how I dress.’
‘The trouble is that he’s as narrow as a piece of straw and he wants you to be the same. Stand up to him. He’s a bully.’
‘It’s all right. I have my own way of handling him.’
Her heart wasn’t in this conversation and I noticed that she was tense and fidgety, which wasn’t like her. When her tea came she spilled some while pouring it.
‘Apart from that, how are things?’ I asked, wanting to make it easy for her to bring up the subject.
‘This is not easy for me,’ she said with a slight quiver in her voice. ‘It should have been done years ago, if not from the very beginning.’
‘Relax,’ I said. ‘It’s OK with me.’
‘You know the derelict shop in the village. Did you know that the woman that owned it had had a baby before the one that was found under the floor boards.?’
‘I did.’
‘Well that baby is now a person I love dearly and care for very much.’
I had never heard my mother being so emotionally frank before, and I immediately reasoned that there were only two people in the world that she would say that about: my sister and myself. She left a long silence, presumably to allow me time to come to terms with what she meant. I remained silent trying to take in what she had said. I watched her and it was clear to me she wanted me to speak next. Then after a long silence I did.
‘Which of us is it?’ I asked in a detached way that surprised me.
‘It’s you,’ she said, and she began to cry uncontrollably. I felt the blood drain from my face. I couldn’t speak. I was dumbfounded. I hadn’t known the meaning of the word until that moment. I couldn’t take it in, despite the fact that the words were unequivocal. My immediate concern was to comfort my mother, whom I had never seen in such a state. I stood up, went to her side of the table and put my arm around her shoulder. She raised her hand, put it on mine and squeezed it.
You needn’t worry,’ I said, ‘nobody here knows you.’
I went back to my seat and passed her my handkerchief. For a country girl off a small farm, I always felt she had a dignity and a quiet confidence, which I had never seen undermined before. Everything of this dignity and confidence was in tatters before me. This in itself disturbed me greatly, and I didn’t know how to help her to regain her composure. It was a good five minutes before she did. Then she said.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m very, very sorry. Will you ever be able to forgive me? If you can’t, I’ll understand.’ She began to cry again. When she composed herself again she began slowly:
‘Before you decide to hate me for the rest of my life, let me tell you the whole story. You’re entitled to know.’
So numbed and unreal did I feel that I wasn’t able to say anything anyway. I had a weird sense that I was outside myself, somehow looking in at these two people, one of whom was extremely distressed, sitting in a hotel lounge.
‘After your sister was born I couldn’t have any more children. This was a terrible blow to your father. He wanted a son to continue the name and in time to take over the farm. This was extremely important to him, in fact he was obsessed by it. He slowly lost interest in me, and when he’d loose his temper over something he’d throw it up at me:
‘You’re no good to me you can’t give me a son.’ It wasn’t easy. He became humoursome, sometimes he’d go into the village and come home late, drunk. Sometimes he would lapse into silence for days, a kind of sulk to punish me. One night he came home from the village:
‘Kate O’Callaghan is going to have a baby. If it’s a boy we might adopt it.’ I didn’t answer him, so he brought it up again a few days later. In the meantime I had had time to think and felt not only would I like another child anyway, but it might make him happy and easier to live with.’
‘I’m not against adopting,’ I told him, ‘but could we not adopt from somewhere we didn’t know the mother. Anyway you’ve no idea who the father might be.’
‘I’m the father blast you,’ he shouted, ‘are you stupid or what?’ I’ll never forget those words. I had no idea.’ My mother began to cry again.
‘I really don’t know what to say.’ I said, ‘you’ll have to give me time to take it all in.’ My mother knew that I would prefer silence to unnecessary talk, so there was another long period when neither of us spoke. I tried to think clearly about the questions I should ask, but my mind kept going back to the derelict shop and it took time for me to put it together in my head that Kathleen of ‘The Pantry’ was my mother. In fact she wasn’t my mother. My mother, in every sense of the word that had meaning for me, was sitting opposite me in this hotel bar. I looked up the bar and became aware of the unconcern of people around us. There was nothing written on my forehead or on my mother’s forehead to reveal to the world the momentous information I had just been given.
‘Does Marian know?’
‘No, that’s something I want to talk to you about. I believe that you have the right to decide whether she should be told or not.’
‘Was my father the father of the baby whose skeleton was found?
‘I don’t know. That baby apparently was born after you and I have no way of knowing. I thought about it at the time. The only way I could have known was to ask your father and I didn’t want to suffer the consequences of his anger if I had done that. He would have punished me severely, told me it wasn’t any of my business and believed it. Anyhow I decided I didn’t want to know.’
‘Was my father having an affair anyway, or do you think he impregnated Kate O’Callaghan in the hope of having a son?’
‘I have often wondered that myself, and I honestly don’t know. In retrospect I believe that either was perfectly possible, or both. He might have been having an affair and decided this was the way to have a son. I simply don’t know.’
After another long silence my mother said:
‘I know it’s too soon, but in time I hope you can forgive me.’
‘For what?’ I asked.
‘For not telling you all of this sooner.’
‘I am almost as surprised at how my father treated you, as at what you have told me. I have no doubt from what you say that even if you had wanted to tell me sooner he would not have let you.’
‘ I tried to convince him many times that at least we should tell you that you were adopted, but he wouldn’t have it. He always became angry and threatening. Finally I gave up. I knew it was the right thing to do but I couldn’t predict the consequences of your father’s anger if I told you against his will. After he died I resolved a number of times to tell you, but I got cold feet until now.’
By lunch-time we were both talked out; both emotionally exhausted. I asked my mother if she would like something to eat. She said she couldn’t eat but would like more tea. I had no appetite either, so we ordered a large pot of tea, and sat on and had as near-to-normal conversation as was possible in the circumstances.
We left the hotel at about three o’clock to put my mother on the bus to meet my sister. My mind was bogged down in her revelation, as I tried to focus on its implications. I was my mother’s stepson, but really her son, or I was her son but really her stepson. For the first time in my life I articulated to myself in my head: ‘I love her, I could not have had a better mother and nothing of what she told me had been her fault. Yes she could have told me sooner than she did, but I understood why she didn’t.’
I had no sense of my mother having wronged me, and yet she was still distraught, but fortunately there was nobody else at the bus stop. As her bus approached, she looked up at me and with her eyes red from crying she said:
‘I’m sorry. I’m very very sorry. I hope you can forgive me.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ I replied. ‘There’s nothing to forgive you for.’ For the second time that day I hugged her and for the first time in my life I said to her:
‘I love you.’
She got on the bus, turned and gave a timid wave. I began to cry. I stood and watched until the bus disappeared from view.