Out of India (5 page)

In bitter English lodgings she tried to keep alive some sense of the dignity of the past. She kept in her mind the image of the wide Mall in Castlebar, with the ample proportions of the Georgian façades, and her convent school at the end, in a mansion of some small-town grandeur formerly owned by the family of Lord Lucan. She recalled, in Westport, the little shop of her relatives, so snug and neighbourly by the running stream. She thought of her lazy young summers, scrambling the sunny scree above Clew Bay. She remembered her young brother, a boy-soprano standing out from Father Egan’s choir at sung Mass to sing
Panis Angelicus
. She felt again in her bones the hard ascent of Croagh Patrick amid blustery showers, a crowd straining against the stones, united not only in religion but also by something beyond religion that connected their loneliness with the Inis Fail – the Island of Stones – of her homeland and with the coming of the Tuatha De Danann and the making of the hero-land. My mother was sentimental rather than religious,
pious towards fables, though religion also entered into those fables. She knew her forebears on both sides of the family, tenant farmers with too few acres and small-time shopkeepers. She could count their lines for several generations. ‘We are descended,’ she later told me often enough when she was slightly tipsy, ‘from the High Kings of Connacht.’

The nuns, and wretchedness, had whacked into her a notion of Holy Ireland.

But in her heart she knew that it was all a sham. Real Ireland left other feelings, more like wounds. She recalled the times of grief, one by one, when her mother brought forth a still-born baby or a little babe so tremulous in life that it expired within a few days. Wrapped in a lace shawl the tiny body let go and fell into a silence from which it had hardly emerged. Five times that had happened out of a total of twelve births. She remembered the gaunt cow out at her uncle’s smallholding on the road to Bohola from whose TB-ridden milk her brother had caught the disease and died. She recalled the dangerous conviviality of her father, a farmer turned tailor who liked a drop and a flutter on the horses. Many times she had led him home with his arm about her shoulders and a soft look in his eye. She remembered another relative, an uncle dragged by the heels behind a Black and Tan cart, his head bouncing on the bumps of the roadway.

Most of all she remembered her father dead. He had been to Galway races on horseback. Returning in a state of jovial confusion, he had fallen from his horse somewhere between the Twelve Pins and Lough Corrib. The horse had bolted leaving her father with broken ribs and a punctured lung. He lay by the path for some time, into the evening chill, before a traveller found him. He lingered for a while but died from shock and pneumonia. He was not yet forty.

The death of the father left a hole in the family that had
to be filled, by his widow’s prayers of course, by any luck that might come their way, but most of all by grinding labour. My mother, as the eldest remaining child, became responsible for the young ones, washing, dressing, feeding, guiding, a counsellor for their doubts, a balm for their hurts, too tender for slaps but making their tears into her pain. Inside of two years she was worn to a scarecrow. She no longer skipped or sang or played tag or dares at the end of the Mall in the noisy ring of schoolgirls. By nightfall, she was too tired for the dancing that she loved best of all. She began to smoke, for the sake of her nerves. But still the household bills outran the family income. She took the packet-boat from Dun Laoghaire to Liverpool.

Talking of Ireland, she always used to say, ‘It’s a terrible place. It kills its own people. Anyway, the people are just a race of pygmies. What do they know of living?’ After she left her homeland she returned only twice in a very long life, and then only for the shortest of visits.

In one respect my mother’s early life gave her an advantage. She doted on children and had plenty of experience in looking after them. Within a short time in England she had progressed from skivvy to mother’s help and then to nanny. She put herself in the hands of a London agency that specialized in providing, for a low wage, clean decent country girls with a religious education for the successful families of the Home Counties. She wore cotton print dresses with white cuffs and collars and a long grey coat nipped in at the waist to show her neat figure and slim build. She would stop before a shop window to pull a blue beret aslant above her light grey eyes and then go on with a certain swagger. She began to think better of herself.

She found that her services were in demand. In prosperous houses she lived in, partly superior servant and partly almost a member of the family. She had a room next to the children and a place at the table, though not
for dinner parties. On these days she ate in the nursery or in the kitchen. For a happy period she worked for a novelist distantly related to the famous actress Sybil Thorndike, a thriller writer living in a house on the marshes amid a bohemian chaos of books. She began to read herself, something romantic but not too flighty, with a hint of tears in the inevitable pathos of true love.

Almost unconsciously she began to ape middle-class ways, digesting imperial prejudices and a new conservatism with the traditional Sunday dinners of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. She took afternoon tea out of thin china cups, adding the milk before the straw-coloured Earl Grey. She read the
Express
or the
Mail
, not that
Mirror
rag, and found herself agreeing with the opinions of Lord Beaverbrook. She wore silk stockings. In the street, she no longer looked aside when a policeman’s eye fell on her. She gave him a haughty look back. She learnt from her employers to be suspicious of Jews, and had a horror of black people, of whom at this time she knew nothing. Her Irish accent slipped away as the language of middle England took its place, so slipshod and arrogant, full of sloppy diction and imprecisions drawled around a cigarette or over the rim of a cocktail glass. But all her life she still could not rid herself of the Irishness of certain words or phrases, like ‘post office’ or ‘third-class’. Whereas she had once been voluble and quick in speech, now she let incomplete sentences drift. ‘O you know what I mean,’ she would say, and ‘Well, there you are,’ just like the English.

She went abroad, travelling with families on holiday or business. In Barcelona she was engaged by a millionaire Catalan banker as one of four ‘governesses’, of different nationalities, to look after his six children in a vast, stately apartment on the Paseo de Gracia. There was also a summer house hanging above the city heat, on the mountain top at Tibidabo. In the apartment, a Danish
governess had stalked her through the gloomy maze of rooms. Beneath an oil-painting of senator or general brown with age my mother was cornered. A meaty Danish hand clenched her buttock and then full lips tried to kiss her on the mouth. My mother recoiled in shame and horror, for she knew nothing of lesbians and indeed didn’t even know the word. The nuns had taught her that sex was a nasty business, unfortunately necessary for procreation, strictly in wedlock, to be endured but never to be indulged even in marriage. All her life, the thought of it left her disgusted and confused.

But so much work with children made her long for some of her own. She did not want a husband very much. Young men were for parties and demure flirting and picnics and dancing the night away. For ten years she had worked her own destiny and she had become too independent to welcome the rule of men with all their obsessive, wilful and infantile tricks. She abominated sexual fumblings, and the desperate panting pursuits aimed towards the bedroom. But she wanted children of her own, and according to the constitution of the society she had so carefully infiltrated there was no other way but wedlock. One just gritted the teeth and went ahead.

She prepared herself for it. India was lucky ground for her. In a sense, it provided her with a
tabula rasa
upon which she could rewrite her story. In India, all the English were strangers, imperial servants, starting on level terms more or less, without too much baggage from the past. Drawn together, a minority faced with nameless threats from a culture they did not understand and a history they misrepresented to themselves, the English felt the need for comradely bonds. The rigid stays of old hierarchies were loosened somewhat. It was possible for young people to become what they dreamed themselves to be. A son of a poor gardener became an army officer – a gentleman – and an Irish skivvy transformed herself into
the officer’s lady. To all their world, they became
sahib
and
memsahib
.

They married and entered fully into the life of the times. A handsome couple, and perhaps a happy one – he tall and quite dashing, she fey, impulsive, fun-loving. Two baby boys came in quick succession. An ayah was on hand for the drudgery of infancy, the bottles and the stinking nappies and the lacerated nights.

‘We had nothing, of course,’ she used to say, ‘but, oh what fun and gaiety!’

Mah-jong in the mornings, or the young wives’ coffee parties; a gentle stroll out of the heat of the day on the maidan with the dog Kipper; charades and fancy dress; amateur dramatics; Sunday lunches at the club –
pulao
and long drinks – lasting well into the evening; the lovely mess-nights with the regiment, candles in silver sconces guttering under the slow swing of the
punkah
, the gleam of medals on broad chests, the rich tawny red of the circulating port, the fervent affirmation of the Loyal Toast; then the forgivable larks of the young officers, so puppy-like and endearing, barging about in childish games on the carpet.

At other times the crowd of them would get together at Luigi’s Restaurant in Pindi before continuing with heated faces to the fashionable dance. Then they would ride out at dawn for a spin round the hill-top in an open cabriolet while some drunken voice attempted a melody from Bing Crosby, or that new soft-shoe transatlantic swing.

Her life went flying by, but my mother had not reckoned with Hitler and a world war.

*

What had happened to her hard-won advantages? She heard the night bombers drone out from the airfields of the fenlands nearby. Sometimes the noises of the air were so loud and puzzling she held her head in her hands. Those hands were again rough and sore, smelling of
potato-peelings and cabbage-water. Testing the breakfast porridge with a finger she saw that her nail was broken and untrimmed. She could not laugh any more. Her children seemed always under her feet, and she did not know whether to hug them or smack them. Sometimes she did both in a minute. Her gums were beginning to bleed. She retired to bed in the afternoons with migraine headaches. Was she lacking in vitamins? Whom could she ask? Going in and out with a pail of pig-swill, she saw her mother-in-law silent behind the door or bent stiffly over the washtub, as impassive as a cigar-store Indian.

‘Your grandmother was an upright and honest woman,’ she told me with bitterness, ‘but I could have hit her for her uncaring coldness to you and your brother and for her cruelty to me. Of course I didn’t hit her, I was much too afraid of her.’

*

My mother could not endure so much hard-heartedness. The cold little cottage under the iron discipline of the old woman was like an angina in her chest. To free her breathing once again she took her brood under her wing and put us all for the time being in the upstairs rooms of the Rose and Crown pub.

In the mornings my brother and I went to the village nursery school. A handful of tiny tots with flat country accents tried to push wooden alphabet blocks into the simplest elements of an agricultural vocabulary – ‘cow’, ‘pig’, ‘barn’, ‘hay’. Country schooling proceeds under different concepts, as well as a different sky, from that of the city. The retired lady who struggled as our teacher – too old for war-work – sang us rhymes in a cracked voice, keeping time with a pencil tapping a glass tumbler. The mid-morning mug of milk came warm from the day’s first milking. In the afternoons, wrapped to the nose against the wind from the east, we learnt from the village kids the timeless arts of childhood mischief, how to defeat
boredom with mud-slides and squabbles and troublemaking in farmyards. In the evenings, changed into pyjamas, we crouched on the landing of the pub, peering through banisters into the bar below.

The aroma that wafted up to us was peculiar. Damp coals, wet clothes, manure sticking to boots, a mustiness rubbed off from the coats of animals, the sourness of old farmhands who had long forgotten to bathe, all this mixed with the slop of the beer on the mahogany and the dry frowsty stink of the tobacco. But it was companionable in there, in the warm fug, with the light strained out and mellowed by the nicotine colour of walls and ceiling, with the rasp of hobnails on the scrubbed planks of the floor and the subdued, almost monosyllabic mumble of country talk, to outsiders hardly distinguishable from the soft grunts of their farm animals.

My mother liked to sit on a high stool at the end of the bar closest to the fire. The grate was small and the ration of coal not generous. She crossed her legs with some elegance and sat quietly, though the farmhands knew that she was Fred’s wife and they could address her if they wished. They were in no hurry. She lit a cigarette and waited, expelling smoke quickly through her nose, taking a medium-dry sherry or a small whisky with a lot of soda.

We grew drowsy with the soft sounds and the clink of the glasses and went to bed. But we tried to keep awake until the bell rang for ‘last orders’. Then we crept out again to the landing, getting ready to join our treble shouts to the landlord’s traditional bellow of ‘Time gentlemen, please’. This seemed worth all our efforts to keep awake. The adults, or so we thought, needed all the help they could get to steady them at the end of the day.

Once or twice while we were there, our grandfather sidled shyly into the public bar, having slipped the leash at home. Once, grandmother came to fetch him back. At
the door of the bar – my grandmother would not enter – there was a muttered altercation.

‘Tom,’ she said with icy contempt, ‘I can smell the drink on you.’