A Guest at the Feast, page 4
I could also give smart answers. I could say something that would make the whole class laugh. None of the teachers minded this much or noticed but it drove poor Mr Dunne out of his mind.
‘Here you are now,’ he would say, ‘with your smart answers, your funny remarks and you haven’t a brain in your head.’
And then his tone would grow ominous.
‘And I’ll wipe the grin off your face, I’ll get that smirk off your face.’
Tommy Brick would lose his temper and roar in his Kerry accent (we were in Wexford on the other side of the country): ‘Christ Almighty, ye drive me up the walls!’ Sometimes, to my delight, he would put the f word before the word ‘walls’. He looked as though he meant it. Brother Curtin had no temper but was a terrible stickler for spelling. He wore too much hair oil. Brother McInerney was a morning grouch. But it was with Brother Carbery the real problems arose.
Brother Carbery was my teacher for the final year in what was called national school, which I left when I was twelve. This year was important because if you did badly you got put into the B-class in secondary school and no one from my breed, seed or generation had ever been in a B-class. Boys from poor parts of the town got put into the B-class and boys from the country from small farms got put into the B-class. Brother Carbery understood the social humiliation of the B-class and he constantly informed me and my classmates that the B-class was my destination.
My parents lived in a world of their own, and since these were the days when teachers and parents kept miles away from each other, they had no idea of the looming threat of the B-class. (My father, as far as I knew, did not teach much in the B-class.) They thought that I should, like the rest of my siblings, try for a scholarship. Since Brother Carbery was training the brightest boys in the class for a scholarship, they told me to join his special class. This meant I was going to have to go to him and ask him. My stammer became much worse. I waited for days until we were all writing an Irish composition (we were always writing Irish compositions) and he was marking copybooks and I approached him. He was a strange man; he merely nodded coldly and said you know the time and the place.
He waited for a few days before he picked on me. Nouns in the Irish language come in declensions, and he had been explaining the most recondite of these declensions. He knew that I did not know a declension from a hole in the wall. He began by asking me to form a simple genitive, which I couldn’t do properly, and then each question he asked became more complex. Each time I failed to answer he would find someone who knew. Eventually, he told me to go home.
My mother pounced on me as soon as I arrived home. Why was I not at the scholarship class? I told her Brother Carbery put me out. She went and found my father, who said that these declensions were very difficult and he didn’t even teach them himself until the final years of secondary school. My mother got into a rage. The last time she had done this was when a teacher, a colleague and friend of my father’s, a more feared teacher called Chick Walshe, hit my older brother across the face. She wrote him a vicious anonymous letter. She was proud of the fact that this had quietened him, and that he had blamed another woman whom my mother did not especially like, confiding to my father the identity of the imagined culprit. She often asked my brother to report any further outbreaks to her.
Now she went and got her hair done and put on her best high heels and set out for the monastery. For days afterwards, she gave anyone who called a vivid account of her interview with Brother Carbery. She told him first of all that she had no interest in anything he had to say, she was here to talk and not to listen. And she was here to tell him that if I didn’t get a scholarship, declensions or no declensions, she would blame him personally and write to the head of the Christian Brothers in Ireland about him.
It was deliciously unfair. Brother Carbery stood up to her at first, she said, but then suddenly, out of the blue, he said he was sorry, he apologized to her, and thereafter peace broke out. He brought her tea. From then on, I sat in the scholarship class, immune from difficult questions about declensions, and immune indeed from the scholarship as well. Soon, Brother Carbery was coming to visit our house, finding times, I noticed, when he thought my father might not be there. We used to hide upstairs during his visits and fight over who would answer the door to him. And send someone down to listen outside the door to what my mother and the Christian Brother could possibly be talking about. He obviously enjoyed being shouted at, one of my relatives said, and he’s back for more. There are men like that, she told me, but I did not believe her. We watched him walk calmly down the street after his visit. My mother, in the kitchen, smiling to herself, refused to say why Brother Carbery continued to come to the house. It was all a mystery.
*
I remember when they came to the town. They were not like other Traveller families of the time who would come to the door begging, the women wrapped in old rugs, often carrying a child. Unlike other Travellers, this couple and their children wanted to settle, and they did not deal in horses or scrap, and they did not seem to have an extended family.
The woman’s face was strong and open. There was a peculiar charm and kindness in the way she greeted you in the street, no matter who you were, even if you were a child. She smiled at you without wanting anything in return as she moved up and down John Street, Court Street, Rafter Street. She often had her children with her, and sometimes her husband. They drank a bit around the pubs and she wore a rug wrapped around her, and her hair long and straight. (At that time the Catholic women of the town all had hairstyles known as ‘perms’.) I cannot remember whether this woman begged sometimes or not, but it did not affect her popularity. She was liked and admired for settling and for sending her children to school.
Years later one of her sons, the eldest I think, had got into trouble with the cops. Anyway, he was taken to Dublin and he started a jail sentence. I had been too long away from the town and I couldn’t place him, but he must have been one of the small children who followed his mother through the streets.
Then finally he was released. On a Saturday night/Sunday morning soon after he came home, he had a row with his father, or so it was reported, and he ran through the town, breaking shop windows. He did not break the windows at random: he broke the windows of the big stores, and the more unpleasant, uppity shops. He spared the smaller shops, or the shops owned by pleasant, nice shopkeepers. He knew the town like a sociologist; he must have watched it as a small boy arriving with his mother and father and developed a sharp sense of which shopkeepers deserved to have their windows broken and which did not.
*
In his book on the painter Tony O’Malley, Brian Fallon wrote:
In a country town, everybody knows you and your family, or at least knows about you; every death or birth is a kind of communal event, and there is a certain sense of an enveloping cocoon of fatalism, of a preordained round ending in the local churchyard. It is a difficult thing to put into words, but it is felt by everyone and permeates the small, tight world; and though the town itself may be left behind, you are marked in certain ways for life.
O’Malley spent some years in the early 1950s in Enniscorthy, where he worked as a bank clerk. He did drawings all of the time, walking out at weekends to quiet places near the town. He painted Vinegar Hill and the Turret Rocks, but his work from that period often centres on places that were not famously picturesque. When he was transferred to another town, he left a suitcase of drawings behind in Hayes’s boarding house on Court Street. He forgot about them until one day thirty years later, when an exhibition of his work was on in Gorey, he was walking through Enniscorthy and he met one of the Hayes family who reminded him that his suitcase was still in the attic.
There were drawings he had done of the hill behind Keatings’ house in Ballyconnigar on the Wexford coast, and they are of interest because the hill has disappeared with the erosion. I imagine him doing these drawings on one of those wonderful warm Sundays when a crowd had come down from Enniscorthy to the strand at Ballyconnigar with the river that changes its course each spring. And farmers with their wives and children sat uneasily on the strand in dull suits staring out to sea.
Our family stayed in a hut here one summer, and as boarders in Keatings’ another year (where we got ham twice a day), and later in Curracloe, which was nearer Wexford and was more cosmopolitan and exciting. (It had a hotel and two shops and Dublin people and is perfectly described in John Banville’s novel The Sea.)
But in earlier years until I was seven or eight our Morris Minor – registration number ZR 92 – turned left at the ball alley on the road between Blackwater and the sea and ended in what was called Ballyconnigar Upper, but was locally called Cush. Beams from two lighthouses shone in the windows at nights: the Blackwater Lightship and Tuskar Rock, which was more powerful. And there were black insects called clocks that scuttled across the cement floor in the mornings.
Each year new steps had to be cut into the damp marl of the cliff so that ‘the bathers’, as the locals called us, could make our way down to the strand. The soil was weak and it was easy each year for the winter to eat into the cliff. Where once there had been fields now there was thin air. It was getting worse each year and was a great topic of conversation for all visitors.
There was a Dublin woman living up the road from us and it was said that one of the local women didn’t like her and could make her cows shit directly outside the Dublin woman’s door.
All along this stretch of the Wexford coast there was an elaborate network of lanes, rutted, with thick bushes and briars on the ditches, and all of them led somewhere, to remote holdings, whitewashed houses with red galvanized roofs, and a sheepdog barking as you approached.
*
One day in the late 1960s, I found three forbidden books on top of my mother’s wardrobe, three novels that had been banned by the Irish censorship board: John McGahern’s The Dark, Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls and John Updike’s Couples. I cannot imagine my father reading these books, but I can imagine my mother and one or two of her friends, Catholic women in a provincial town who desperately sought a window on to the wider world, exchanging them, discussing them and hiding them from the children.
This, then, was samizdat Irish-style where women in a small town who were curious about the outside world would learn to recognize each other and would exchange forbidden texts that dealt with sexuality and adultery.
In 1971 when I was sixteen, I won a book token in an essay competition and was allowed to travel from my Catholic diocesan boarding school to Dublin to collect the award and spend the book token. I have a vivid memory of being stopped by two priests when I arrived back and being asked to show them the books I had bought. I proudly produced Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason, Kafka’s The Trial and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. One of the priests said that he didn’t like Kafka, he was too dark, and the other suggested that I should write an essay on the books when I had read them. They nodded and went off. It didn’t occur to them to confiscate the books or worry about their influence.
In five or six years we had moved in Ireland from the censoring of serious books for adults to the wide availability of paperbacks. Reading, suddenly, was to be encouraged for all. The censorship law was reformed in 1967, but the attitudes seemed to change overnight. My mother and her friends were brought up in a conservative, insecure state; in their forties they found themselves living in another place altogether, a world where everything once held dear was questioned and undermined, where Irish television and the Irish newspapers and even elements within the Irish Catholic church encouraged the open discussion of things that had been closed when they were growing up.
In my novel The Blackwater Lightship I tried to dramatize a moment in my mother’s life that seems to me still mysterious and unfathomable. My mother’s mother believed that when someone in the family was ready to die, loud knocks would come to the door at night and the women in the family would hear these knocks. I remember my mother saying that she heard them the night before her mother died. That was 1960. And then she said that she had never heard the knocks since. This meant that when my father died in 1967 she didn’t hear them. And she implied, when she talked about the knocks, that it was something that belonged to an old belief system, something that had passed.
Thus some time between 1960 and 1967 in Ireland, my mother ceased to believe in magic, or something that was very like magic. There was no point in asking her what date she stopped believing this, or if she had really ever believed. Nothing in this story was precise like that, or easy to pin down. I am not sure what a sociologist could do with this, or an anthropologist even, but I know as a novelist that I was brought up in a house where books were important enough to be dangerous and that I witnessed a dramatic change happening to the beliefs and attitudes of the generation before mine. This was a great unsettling, Ireland’s opening itself to the outside world.
*
Sometimes an announcement would be made that we were going to Wexford town. Clean socks, a good pullover, combed hair. For me, even still, Wexford town is a most exotic place. It had a Woolworths and a bookshop and a long main street. At a certain age I was allowed to go off on my own and meet the family later back at the car. Ice cream, photographs of film stars, sweets, an orange drink that you could see bubbling in a perspex box. Woolworths was fascinating. But mainly it was the sense of elsewhere, or being away from our own town, if only for a few hours, that made the town of Wexford so wonderful.
Wexford town has a strange beauty in the washed light of the early winter. It is not hard to imagine that boats once sailed from here to Buenos Aires, that in the early years of the last century the long quays of Wexford were busy with trade and traffic. That is all over now; the harbour has silted up. But the town still looks like a medieval port town, and the atmosphere of Wexford is full of the rich mixtures that the harbour and the fertile hinterland combined to make. The town got its name from the Vikings, and clearly remained an important centre of trade, but its tone was set by the Normans. Half the names of the people are Norman, and in the plainness of the architecture, there is a Norman austerity. The other elements include not only the Gaelic, but the English and Huguenot.
Thus three writers from the town – John Banville, Billy Roche, Eoin Colfer – have surnames that are Huguenot and Norman but backgrounds that are mixed. Roche’s work is full of the sadness of the town; history for him has enough associations in just one generation. He has a way of placing a halo around ordinary speech, finding a common phrase and making it sound like a poetic moment of truth. Banville’s Wexford, which appears sporadically in his work, could be a light-filled town on the sea anywhere in the northern hemisphere. In Mephisto, Wexford could be a Hanseatic town. Banville is concerned to clarify and illuminate and make more mysterious the central matters of order and chaos, memory and imagination, language, truth and logic. Roche presents a Wexford full of talk, he is interested in spiritual topography; Banville’s tone is much grander.
The train journey along the River Slaney between Enniscorthy and Wexford remains for me the most moving and resonant landscape anywhere in the world. In that silvery still afternoon light, for several miles you see no roads and hardly any buildings, just trees and the calm strong river.
All of us have a landscape of the soul, places whose contours and resonances are etched into us and haunt us. If we ever became ghosts, these are the places to which we would return. There is a small single-lane bridge along that stretch of the Slaney called Edermine Bridge; it spans the river at its loneliest and most mysterious. If you stop for one second and look north, you can see the spire of Pugin’s cathedral at Enniscorthy rising over the other buildings of the town and the brown-green water below you cutting deep into the sandy soil, moving slowly towards Wexford and the sea.
*
It is 1971 in Wexford and I am sixteen. Those of us at St Peter’s College boarding school who want to go to the dress rehearsal of the opera have to assemble every afternoon before study to listen to a recording of the opera and have the story explained. I have a clear memory of the stereo record player being rigged up and the light from the sea shining through the long windows and the old broken-down desks and the chipped wood of the wainscotting and the peeled paint. I have no memory of the music, however. Not a note from those afternoons has lingered in my memory, not a sound. And nothing of the story. And yet I know that I went there every afternoon for a week.
When my family came to visit, I casually mentioned what we were doing and I told them the name of the opera, The Pearl Fishers by Bizet. My mother said that it had the most beautiful love duet in all opera and she tried to hum it, and she told the story of how two men, a tenor and a baritone, were in love with the same woman, and they sang the most beautiful love song in her honour. At home, she said, we had a record of John McCormack singing it. I can still see the record sleeve, blue and silver, and I know that later I listened to it. At the time of the opera, however, I had never paid any attention to it, being too wrapped up in James Taylor, Simon & Garfunkel and Leonard Cohen.
I know that I was upstairs in the balcony during the opera, but I could not have been very far back, because the lighting and the opening scene are still clear, and the extraordinary precision of the singing is still with me. I know that the soprano was called Christiane Eda-Pierre, but I have no idea of the names of the other soloists. Now, as I write this, the word motif comes back to me. In the talks about the opera each afternoon, we were told to watch for motifs, but that did not sink in then as very important. Now, as I sat in the Theatre Royal in Wexford, I recognized the motif that came before the first duet and I was ready for those soaring moments when the two voices merge and move apart and compete and merge again.
