A Guest at the Feast, page 7
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Recently, I went back to St Peter’s for the first time in thirty years. Since 1972, when I left the Catholic boarding school at the age of seventeen, I have had many dreams about it. One of these dreams is that I have to face exams again with no preparation and no work done. The dream takes me in detail through all my subjects. I know I can probably do the English, because I am a writer, and maybe know more than the examiner. And perhaps in Spanish I could also at least know how to read the paper. And there are certain parts of history I could do. But maths and Irish and geography also have to be done and they are a nightmare, I have prepared nothing. I will probably not be able to answer a single question. I don’t wake up screaming, it’s not that sort of dream, but I wake feeling uneasy and strange and oddly guilty that I have done no work for my exams. Then I remember that I don’t have exams and never will again.
The other dream is set more explicitly in the school building. I am me now, I control my own life, I do what I like every day, I travel a lot. If I don’t want to get up in the morning, no one will make me. In the dream, I have to return to St Peter’s College and spend a final year there. I have to forget about travelling and running my own show; instead, I have to fit in with all the other students who are seventeen and eighteen and all male. I have to go and find my bed and learn the timetable and know that this will be my life until the following June.
Strangely, this dream is not a sad dream or a frightening dream. It is comforting. My life will be structured and organized for me. I will have no decisions to make. But when I wake up, I am glad nonetheless that it was just a dream and I don’t have to go back to St Peter’s College after all.
There was a new entrance to the school and new buildings where the old gardens used to be, but the minute I walked into the old school building I knew where I was. At the end of a corridor was the library. I had spent hours in this room reading because I did not do sport. Most of the other students thought this was a sort of punishment.
I recognized everything, every change, but it was all paler somehow, as though the colours had been muted, and less real, less solid. Some things had changed. The darkroom where I had learned photography was gone and the two small oratories where the priests had said mass were also gone.
The big changes were that the priests had now gone, and the school was run by lay people; the other big change was that the school was no longer a boarding school, it was only for day boys. When I was a student, there were 300 boarders; now the dormitories are empty and some are derelict. The Department of Education wants to build new extensions to the school as the numbers increase. It is cheaper to build than renovate, so the old classrooms at the front of the buildings will be left there. I thought this was a bit sad as we walked the corridors in search of my class photo from 1972.
It was a relief to drive out of the building back to the town, back to the real world. I suppose old ghosts must linger in those old buildings, but I didn’t see any. In the end I felt nothing much and that surprised me more than anything. Maybe over the next thirty years I will develop some new dreams.
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There were two houses, one owned by an aunt, my mother’s sister, another by an aunt and uncle, on my father’s side. Both were on hills in Enniscorthy, each house was part of a terrace of four. They must have been built at the end of the nineteenth century. Both houses had two rooms upstairs and two rooms downstairs and a back kitchen that had been added much later. Munster Hill, where my mother’s mother lived with my two aunts, had been built for office workers in the nearby flour mill and was owned by the mill until one of my aunts bought it for a small sum of money in the 1960s.
I do not know for whom the four houses in the other terrace on Bohreen Hill had been built. My father was born in Bohreen Hill and all through my childhood his brother and sister lived there.
Both houses – Munster Hill and Bohreen Hill – require their own archaeologist, someone who would notice that they did not have toilets indoors at the beginning, a student who would find traces of the outdoor toilets at the back of the small concrete yards. This is more obvious in Munster Hill than Bohreen Hill. Someone who would study the extensions that were built, realizing that the bathroom added in Munster Hill halfway between upstairs and downstairs matched the bathrooms of the other houses in the terrace and must have been built by the mill, most probably in the 1950s. It has the look of a more planned extension than many of these additions to such houses.
The extension to Bohreen Hill was added in the early 1960s. It interests me more now because it has not been touched since then. The same lino, the same bathroom furniture, the same glass in the window and light fittings, all this has been gathering a resonance of smells and associations for more than fifty years. It began as bright hope, and now has a sour drabness. It is waiting to be swept away, thrown out on a skip to be replaced by a new set of floor coverings and modern furniture, new colours. It is hard to imagine that it was ever all specially chosen.
The bathroom in this house is on the ground floor, down a short corridor behind the kitchen. There is another door off the corridor to the right that leads to a small room with a window looking on to the yard. This was a room built to hold papers and books. Before it was built, and indeed during all the years afterwards, papers and books spilled over into the two downstairs rooms. These were my uncle’s; my aunt longed for the day when they could be contained and did not spread like ivy on to every chair and table surface and on the floor.
In the planning of the room for books and papers and the new bathroom, my aunt grew more ambitious. She wanted two bay windows as well, one in the front of the house where she and her brother sat in the evening, one in the back room where the dining table was. This would mean months of hammering and disruption. For my aunt, it meant the end to the darkness and dinginess of small windows, it meant that the house she was born and brought up in would be suddenly opened to light. For her brother, it meant change and it meant hope invested in interior decoration, which was, he believed, the height of silliness. If the house was good enough for everyone until now, why change it?
She won. It became, in those early years when it shone, not only the house she lived in, but the space she had imagined. It was hard to believe the way it had looked before. I have no memory of those rooms before the bay windows were built, and no memory of the house before the bathroom and the room for books and papers were added. All that I must imagine.
I suppose new wallpaper must have been added as well and allowed to fade. Flowers and birds were the customary design, but nothing too loud. I have no memory of the wallpaper. Even though I have been recently in the house in Bohreen Hill, I still cannot conjure up any wallpaper patterns. I see a pale cream colour, or a faded white, a great blankness that oversees the furniture, all of which I remember.
I wonder if they put new doors in when they redecorated Bohreen Hill. My earliest memory of that house is locking myself in to the back room by accident, using a key that was in the door. A locksmith or carpenter had to be found. I have no memory of there being keys in the doors of that house after that.
Both houses had narrow staircases with a small landing and then a turn. To the outsider, they might have appeared similar, made from the same plan. But for a small boy there was a very notable difference. The house in Bohreen Hill had a staircase with two very steep steps, steeper than in any other house I had ever been in. You needed help from an adult, or you needed to put your hands on the step above and haul yourself up. The steps of the stairs in Munster Hill were, on the other hand, perfectly normal.
In all the redecorations, the electric votive lamp in front of the picture of the Sacred Heart, which flickered like a sort of underdeveloped neon, was left in place in both houses.
On the mantelpiece in the back room in the house in Bohreen Hill there was a calendar that had to be changed manually every day, which no one had time to do. So my first job on arrival was to change the date before attending to the small glass ornament that sat beside it. If I shook it and then left it down, cascades of snow fell on the scene inside. And beyond that, perhaps on the mantelpiece too, or on a small table, was a statue of the Virgin, which had been purchased in Lourdes, with a key that, if you turned it, caused the statue to play ‘The Bells of the Angelus’. While you could shake the snow ornament as much as you pleased, the rule was not to turn the key of the statue too hard or force it in any way because it could break.
By this time, my grandmother in Munster Hill had died and one aunt had married, leaving another aunt alone in the house. She was almost twenty years younger than my aunt in Bohreen Hill. She was glamorous and looked marvellous, she loved buying clothes and discussing her wardrobe. The fitting room of a large department store in Dublin was the place of her dreams. She played golf and went to the pictures and still worked in the office of the mill, which moved from the town centre in these years to the bottom of Munster Hill, close to the spot where the Urrin River flows into the Slaney.
The books in these two houses told you everything. My aunt in Munster Hill had hardly any books, a large red Bible, a collected Shakespeare, some anthologies of poetry and stray hardbacks and paperbacks that had been assembled by chance. In Bohreen Hill, on the other hand, in the front room downstairs and on the landing at the top of the stairs there were large glass bookcases that contained history books and patriotic books, maybe some Irish novels and poetry, but no Joyce or anything like that, not even any Frank O’Connor or Sean O’Faolain.
This was a serious house where serious things had happened. Munster Hill, when I went there first, was a house of women talking about clothes and holidays. You would get mandarin oranges from a tin with whipped cream, or bananas. In Bohreen Hill, you would get lemonade and biscuits, but there would never be talk of clothes or shopping or golf.
Despite the bay windows and the extension, the past lingered more purposefully in Bohreen Hill. The fact that my grandmother died in the house in Munster Hill made no difference to it, but the knowledge that on Easter Monday 1916 my grandfather had lifted the floorboards of the front bedroom in Bohreen Hill and had taken out some rifles he had hidden there for use in the Rising, this made the house a more serious place. The idea also that my father’s younger brother had died of tuberculosis in the house in Bohreen Hill and that it had to be vacated for a week or more after his death by the whole family, while it was disinfected or cleaned or purified, or whatever the word is, this made it a place whose past grew more palpably interesting to me as its décor and its furniture and its knives and plates and glasses did not change, moved gradually from new to old.
In 1967 my aunt in Munster Hill got married. Because she and her husband were popular, they received vast numbers of wedding presents. Myself and my younger brother made our way to Munster Hill every evening to witness the arrival of the presents, many many pairs of sheets and pillowcases, many many sets of towels, some Waterford glass, including a vase, which is in my house in Dublin now, and some sets of cutlery. But it was the big presents that interested us most, a standard lamp, a three-piece suite, a set of small tables, a few sheepskin rugs. The house was transformed by the wedding, not as much by the arrival of a husband, but by the arrival of all the wedding presents.
Slowly, the business of heating began to preoccupy everybody. No one, in the early years, considered oil-fired central heating. It was too expensive to install and to run. My aunt in Munster Hill had an old paraffin oil heater in the kitchen, which must have also been there in my grandmother’s time. It was battered, blue-grey in colour with a small piece of glass on one side to show that it was lighting. It gave off strong heat and heavy fumes. In the other rooms there were fireplaces, and coal fires were lit in the living room at night and maybe in the early afternoon on a Sunday.
But this was not enough. After great hesitation, a storage heater was put into the back part of the hall of Bohreen Hill, and then, years later, a storage heater in the front room downstairs. There was never any heating upstairs or fires lit upstairs. Also, there were two-bar electric fires in both houses but these were seldom used and much frowned upon as they ate electricity and dried the air.
These were the years of draughts, or when fear of draughts became common, and there were heavy curtains against the doors in Munster Hill to keep draughts out. Work had to be done to avoid rising damp with new techniques that rendered both houses damp-proof. In Munster Hill, my aunt’s bedroom at the front of the house upstairs had a high ceiling and it meant the room was cold so she had the ceiling lowered or a false one put in, probably the latter. Then, she installed oil-fired central heating, but seldom turned it on, preferring to light coal fires and put on good winter clothes and protect herself, as best she could, against draughts.
There must be a special place for dead water, dead furniture, for that paraffin oil heater, for the broken toilet bowl in the disused outdoor toilet, for the dead three-piece suite, for the sagging bed, the ancient mattress, the rusty bath, the handy contraption with a little wheel used to whip fresh cream. You are trying to clear things away so the house can be sold. You are trying also to take photographs with your eyes, to transform the grim tension of dead space into something memorable, useful, with meaning. But nothing happens. It is easier, or almost easier, if you sit and close your eyes and let the words come. Try saying it again.
There were two houses. Both were on hills, each house was part of a terrace of four.
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There are two other houses, and they both belong to dreams. I was born in one of them and learned to navigate the world in its rooms. This house is on the edge of Enniscorthy; it is part of a housing estate that was built in the late 1930s, called Parnell Avenue, named after the lost leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, Charles Stewart Parnell. There were twenty-two semi-detached houses, set around two fingers of rising ground. Ours was at the top of one of the fingers in a cul-de-sac. The house had a view of Vinegar Hill across the Slaney valley, the hill that the Irish rebels held for three or four weeks in the summer of 1798 and where the last battle of that rebellion was fought and the rebels were defeated.
A few times each summer we climbed that hill, but it was not the legacy of the rebellion that loomed largest, but the view of the town below, and Parnell Avenue at the edge of it, so toylike and insignificant. And there was a reservoir up there too, with a roar of water underneath the concrete. If you dropped a stone down, having lifted a small metal opening, it seemed as though you dropped it down into the very bowels of the earth itself.
The names of the families who lived in each of those houses in Parnell Avenue, and indeed the faces, and the different ways of walking, or dressing, or smiling, are etched in my mind and will, it seems, never leave now. I do not have to rack my brains or, indeed, think for even a second to summon up those people. Fifty years ago, the names as you came into Parnell Avenue and moved from number one to number twenty-two were as follows: Miller; Browne (soon sold to the Robans); Hanlon; Doyle; Lynch; Mitchell; Grace; Hennessy; us; Hayton; Kelly; McCormack; Martin; Ruth; Duggan; Barry; Crane; Tobin; Doyle (soon sold to Priestly); Maher; Doyle; Mahon.
I can still see old Sergeant Mitchell on a summer Sunday standing at his gate discussing a hurling or football match with Paddy Grace or Sean Lynch, and being joined in a bantering way by Dan McCormack, and all of them excited by some player, some goal scored, or their different loyalties (Mr Lynch was from Cork), or some new set of possibilities.
I can still see the firelighters made out of twisted paper that Rita McCormack made and often sent over to our house. Or the different sort of front gardens – some tidy with just lawn, others with shrubs, or flower beds, or rose bushes. Seamus Doyle in number twenty-one had serious rose bushes and spent much of his day tending to them. He was grumpy. He had led the 1916 Rebellion in the town and was sentenced to death afterwards, which was later commuted. I wondered later if being a revolutionary when he was young, or indeed having once been sentenced to death, gave his rose-tending more impetus, or indeed had caused at least some of his grumpiness. He was my brother’s godfather. Once – it must have been 1966 – President de Valera was driven up in a state car to visit him. We all shook the old blind president’s hand.
There were five or six cement steps to our front door, which had a knocker rather than an electric bell. This door was normally painted green. And then inside the door, a long hallway with lino on the floor and a hall table to the left at the foot of the stairs. The kitchen was a continuation of the hallway, like a connecting railway carriage. And there was a back door that led out of the kitchen to a yard where there was a shed where coal and bicycles and garden things were kept.
As with half of the twenty-two houses, there were two rooms to the right of the hallway; the other half had these rooms on the left-hand side of the hallway. The first room, which had a window overlooking the front garden, was called the parlour and was seldom used. This was normal for most of the houses, although the Haytons had a dining-room table there, and the Duggans a television. In some of the houses there was almost nothing at all in this front room. It was kept bare and spare. It was for visitors, or Christmas. Ours had bookshelves in two recesses on each side of the tiled fireplace. They were filled mainly with my father’s history books. The parlour also had a three-piece suite and a fragile glass case where good china was kept. There was a carpet on the wooden floor. In later years, this room was used for studying, and I wrote my first poems there, but in those early years it was not for children. Once, when new, cream and unpatterned wallpaper was put up on the walls of this room, a former pupil of my father’s arrived and managed in the course of an evening to rub his hair, which had hair oil on it, against the wallpaper; the effort to remove the stain made it worse. There was much discussion about this.
