The Copper Beech (4 page)

Sometimes when Maddy Ross went for her long lonely walks up the tree-covered hill to the Old Rock that stood guarding the town she felt that she handled everything wrong. It was all so different to things that happened to girls in the pictures.

Maddy had always known that there wouldn’t be the money to send her to university, so she had thought it just as well that she didn’t have any burning desire to be a professor, or a doctor or lawyer. But there was nothing else that fired her either. Other girls had gone to train as nurses, some of them had done secretarial courses and gone into the bank or big insurance offices. There were others who went to be radiographers, or physiotherapists.

Maddy, the girl with the long pale hair and the slow smile that went all over her face once it began, thought that sooner or later something would turn up.

Probably at the end of the holidays.

Mrs Kelly had been serious on that hot day, and in the very first week of September Mr and Mrs Kelly from the school came to see Mother.

Shancarrig’s small stone schoolhouse was a little way out of the town. That was to make it easier for the children of the farmers, it had been said. Mr and Mrs Kelly had come as newly marrieds to the school in answer to Father Gunn’s appeal. The last teachers had left in some disarray. Maddy had heard stories about drinking and dismissals, but as usual, only a very edited version of events, filtered through her mother. Mother never seemed to grasp the full end of any stick.

Mr and Mrs Kelly were a strange couple. He was big and innocent-looking, like a farmer’s boy. She was small and taut-looking, her mouth often in a narrow line of disapproval.

Maddy Ross had looked at her more than once, wondering what it was about Mrs Kelly that had attracted the big, simple, good-natured man by her side. They were only about ten years older than she was.

She wondered if Mrs Kelly had looked about her and then, finding nobody more suitable, settled for the teacher. She certainly looked as if something had displeased her. Even when they came uninvited to see Mother they both looked as if they were going to issue some complaint.

Maddy found nothing odd about their asking Mother rather than asking her. After all, it was the kind of thing Mrs Ross would have a view on. Perhaps she thought her daughter Madeleine was intended for something more elevated than working in Shancarrig school. It was better to sound out the opinions before making a direct approach.

But Mother thought it would be an excellent idea. ‘Fallen straight into their laps’ was the way she described it when the cousins came to supper the following day.

‘And won’t Madeleine need to be trained to teach?’ the cousins asked.

‘Nonsense,’ said Mother ‘What training would anyone need to put manners on unfortunates like the young Brennans or the young Dunnes?’

They agreed. It wasn’t a real career like the cousins’ children were embarking on: one in a bank, one doing a very advanced secretarial course, with Commercial French thrown in, which could lead to any kind of a position almost anywhere in the world.

To her surprise Maddy loved it.

She had neither the roar of Mr Kelly nor the confident firm voice of his wife. She spoke gently and almost hesitantly but the children responded to her. Even the bold Brennan children, whose father was Paudie Brennan, drunk and layabout, seemed easy to handle. And the Dunnes, whose faces were smeared with jam, agreed quite meekly to having their mouths wiped before class began.

There were three classsrooms in the little schoolhouse, one for Mrs Kelly’s class, one for Mr Kelly’s, and the biggest one for Maddy Ross. It was called Mixed Infants and it was here that she started the young minds of Shancarrig off on what might be a limited kind of educational journey. There would be some, of course, who would advance to a far greater education than she had herself. The young Hayes girls, whose father was a solicitor, might well get professions, as might little Nuala Ryan from the hotel. But it was only too obvious that the Dunnes and Brennans would say goodbye to any hopes of education once they left this school. They would be on the boat abroad or into the town to get whatever was on offer for children of fourteen years of age.

They all looked the same at five, however. There was nothing except the difference of clothing to mark out those
who would have the money to go further and those who would not.

Before she had gone into the school Maddy Ross barely noticed the children of her own place. Now she knew everything about them, the ones that sniffled and seemed upset, the ones who thought they could run the place, those that had the doorsteps of sandwiches for their lunch, those who had nothing at all. There were children who clung to her and told her everything about themselves and their families, and there were those who hung back.

She had never known that there would be a great joy in seeing a child work out for himself the letters of a simple sentence and read it aloud, or in watching a girl who had bitten her pencil to a stub suddenly realise how you did the great long tots or the subtraction sums. Each day it was a pleasure to point to the map of Ireland with a long stick and hear them chant the places out.

‘What are the main towns of County Cavan? All right. All together now. Cavan, Cootehill, Virginia …’ all in a sing-song voice.

There were two cloakrooms, one for the girls and one for the boys. They smelled of Jeyes Fluid, as the master obviously poured it liberally in the evenings when the children had left.

It would have been a bleak little place had it not been for the huge copper beech which dwarfed it and looked as if it was holding the school under its protective arm. Like she felt safe in Barna Woods as a child, Maddy felt safe with this tree. It marked the seasons with its colouring and its leaves.

The days passed easily, each one very much like that which had gone before. Madeleine Ross made big cardboard charts to entertain the children. She had pictures of the flowers she collected in Barna Woods, and she sometimes
pressed the flowers as well and wrote their names underneath. Every day the children in Shancarrig school sat in their little wooden desks and repeated the names of the ferns, and foxgloves, cowslips and primroses and ivies. Then they would look at the pictures of St Patrick and St Brigid and St Colmcille and chant their names too.

Maddy made sure that they remembered the saints as well as the flowers.

The saints were higher on Father Gunn’s list of priorities. Father Gunn was a very nice curate. He had little whirly glasses, like looking through the bottom of a lemonade bottle. Now the school manager he was a frequent visitor – he had to guard the faith and morals of the future parishioners of Shancarrig. But Father Gunn liked flowers and trees too, and he was always kind and supportive to the Junior Assistant Mistress.

Maddy wondered how old he was. With priests, as with nuns, it was always so hard to know. One day he unexpectedly told her how old he was. He said he was born on the day the Treaty was signed in 1921.

‘I’m as old as the State,’ he said proudly. ‘I hope we’ll both live for ever.’

‘It’s good to hear you saying that, Father.’ Maddy was arranging a nature display in the window. ‘It shows you enjoy life. Mother is always saying that she can’t get her wings soon enough.’

‘Wings!’ The priest was puzzled.

‘It’s her way of saying she’d like to be in heaven with God. She talks about it quite a lot.’

Father Gunn seemed at a loss for words. ‘It’s wholly admirable, of course, to see this world only as a shadow of the heavenly bliss Our Father has prepared for us but …’

‘But Mother’s only just gone fifty. It’s a bit soon to be thinking about it already, isn’t it?’ Maddy helped him out.

He nodded gratefully, ‘Of course, I’m getting on myself. Maybe I’ll start thinking the same way.’ His voice was jokey. ‘But I have so much to do I don’t feel old.’

‘You should have someone to help you.’ Maddy said only what everyone else in Shancarrig said. The old priest was doddery now. Father Gunn did everything. They definitely needed a new curate.

And it wasn’t as if the priests’ housekeeper was any help. Mrs Kennedy had a face like a long drink of water. She was dressed in black most of the time, mourning for a husband who had died so long ago hardly anyone in Shancarrig could remember him. A good priests’ housekeeper should surely be kind and supportive, fill the role of mother, old family retainer and friend.

It had to be said that Mrs Kennedy played none of these roles. She seemed to smoulder in resentment that she herself had not been given charge of the parish. She snorted derisively when anyone offered to help out in the parish work. It was a tribute to Father Gunn’s own niceness that so many people stepped in to help with the problems caused by Monsignor O’Toole being almost out of the picture, and Mrs Kennedy being almost too much in it.

Then the news came that there was indeed a new priest on the way to Shancarrig. Someone knew someone in Dublin who had been told definitely. He was meant to be a very nice man altogether.

About six months later, in the spring of 1952, the new curate arrived. He was a pale young man called Father Barry. He had long delicate white hands, light fair hair and dark, startling blue eyes. He moved gracefully around Shancarrig, his soutane swishing gently from side to side.
He had none of the bustle of Father Gunn, who always seemed uneasily belted into his priestly garb and distinctly ill at ease in the vestments.

When Father Barry said mass a shaft of sunlight seemed to come in and touch his pale face, making him look more saintly than ever. The people of Shancarrig loved Father Barry and in her heart Maddy Ross often felt a little sorry for Father Gunn, who had somehow been overshadowed.

It wasn’t
his
fault that he looked burly and solid. He was just as good and attentive to the old and the feeble, just as understanding in Confession, just as involved in the school. And yet she had to admit that Father Barry brought with him some new sense of exhilaration that the first priest didn’t have.

When Father Barry came to her classroom and spoke he didn’t talk vaguely about the missions and the need to save stamps and silver paper for mission stations, he talked of hill villages in Peru where the people ached to hear of Our Lord, where there was only one small river and that dried up during the dry seasons, leaving the villagers to walk for miles over the hot dry land to get water for the old and for their babies.

As they sat in the damp little schoolhouse in Shancarrig, Maddy and Mixed Infants were transported miles away to another continent. The Brennans had broken shoes and torn clothes, they even bore the marks of a drunken father’s fist, but they felt rich beyond the dreams of kings compared to the people in Vieja Piedra, thousands of miles away.

The very name of this village was the same as their own. It meant Old Rock. The people in this village were crying out to them across the world for help.

Father Barry fired the children with an enthusiasm never before known in that school. And it wasn’t only in Maddy Ross’s class. Even under the sterner eye of Mrs Kelly, who might have been expected to say that we should look after our own first before going abroad to give help, the collections increased. And in Mr Kelly’s class the fierce master echoed the words of the young priest, but in his own way.

‘Come out of that, Jeremiah O’Connor. You’ll want your arse kicked from here to Barna and back if you can’t go out and raise a shilling for the poor people of Vieja Piedra.’

When he gave the Sunday sermon Father Barry often closed his disturbing blue eyes and spoke of how fortunate his congregation were to live in the green fertile lands around Shancarrig. The church might be full of people sneezing and coughing, wearing coats wet from the trek across three miles of road and field to get there, but Father Barry made their place sound like a paradise compared to its namesake in Peru.

Some of them began to wonder why a loving God had been so unjust to the good Spanish-speaking people in that part of the world, who would have done anything to have a church and priests in their midst.

Father Barry had an answer for that whenever the matter was raised. He said it was God’s plan to test men’s love and goodness for each other. It was easy to love God, Father Barry assured everyone. Nobody had any problem in loving Our Heavenly Father. The problem was to love people in a small lonely village miles away and treat them as brothers and sisters.

Maddy and her mother often talked about Father Barry and his saintliness. It was something they both agreed on, which meant they talked about him more than ever.
There were so many subjects which divided them.

Maddy wondered would there be the chance for them to go out to Rhodesia to Joseph’s wedding. Her brother was marrying a girl from a Scottish family in Bulawayo. There would be nobody from the Ross side of the family. He had sent the money, and the wedding was during the school holidays, but Mrs Ross said she wasn’t up to the journey. Dr Jims had said that Maddy’s mother was fit as a fiddle and well able to make the trip. In fact, the sea journey would do nothing except improve her health.

Father Gunn had said that family solidarity would be a great thing at a time like this and that truly she should make the effort. Major and Mrs Murphy who lived in The Glen, the big house with the iron railings and the wonderful glasshouses, said that it was a chance of a lifetime. Mr Hayes the solicitor said that if it was his choice he’d go.

But Mother remained adamant. It was a waste, she said, to spend the money on a trip for such an old person as she was. She would soon be getting her wings. She would see enough and know enough then.

Maddy was becoming increasingly impatient with this attitude of her mother’s. The wings theory seemed to apply to everything. If Maddy wanted a new coat, or a trip to Dublin, or a perm for her light straight hair, her mother would sigh and say there would be plenty of time for that and money to spend on it after Mother had gone.

Mother was in her fifties and as strong as anyone in Shancarrig, but giving the aura of frailty. Maddy did the housework, because until Mother had got her wings there would be no money to spend on luxuries like having a maid. Maddy’s own wages as a Junior Assistant Mistress were so small as to be insignificant.