The Shelter of Neighbours (26 page)

But my mother loved life there, too. They lived in a small cottage – maybe it was a council cottage – but there was plenty of room for the three of them. And also for hens and turkeys, a cow, a pig, a garden, where they grew potatoes and cabbage and onions and lettuce. Blackcurrants for jam, strawberries for cream, apple trees for tarts and pies. On Saturdays, Ben and Bea and my mother, whose name was Gretta, drove to the nearest town, in the pony and trap, for the messages. My mother – I imagined her with curls, which she had always had in my experience, though that was because her hair was permed, like all grown-up women's – sat up in front and drove, with Ben beside her and Bea in the back. That was on the way into town. On the way home, she sat in the back, too, on the leather side-seat, and ate biscuits. Strawberry Creams were her favourite, followed by Custard Creams, and she was given a pound of them in a brown paper bag every Saturday. The horse was called Brock, a big placid chestnut.

She went to the local school, where she was a success. It was a mile and a half away, along the tree-lined road, and when she was twelve, Bea bought her a bicycle. This was a proper lady's bike, black and big.

‘That was the happiest day of my life,' my mother told me. ‘I couldn't believe I was getting this bike. I'd never owned anything, to tell the God's truth, in me life till then.'

She kept that bike, the same one, until she got married.

The schoolteacher wanted her to go on to the secondary school. My mother was very good at arithmetic and history and English. Auntie Bea and Uncle Ben would have supported her. (She didn't mention a scholarship. Maybe she didn't apply for it – you had to fill in a form, and sit a special examination at Easter to be in with a chance; they mightn't have known about that down there.) And she could have gone to school in town on her bike – it was six miles away, but she could have done that.

‘I said no,' she said, without rancour or sentiment. ‘I wanted to go home, to be with my father and brother. I didn't see the point.'

I wondered why she wanted to go home, if she was having such a good time in Wexford. And I sighed for her failure, her lack of ambition, and started a daydream about what her alternative life would have been. The life she would have had if she'd stayed with Ben and Bea, and gone to secondary, and moved on from there. She might have become a teacher, and learned to drive, and got her own car. A nice new house with a big window in a suburb, instead of the old brick house with narrow windows we had, near town, where nobody wanted to live any more. Maybe, if she'd gone to secondary, she wouldn't have married my father? Maybe she wouldn't have had me? Maybe I wouldn't exist?

What actually happened was that she got a job in a grocery shop and met her best friend, Teasy, there. They cycled all over Dublin, all over the county. On their day off they'd go out to Enniskerry and have tea in the tea shop there; they'd go to Sandymount, and Dún Laoghaire, and Blackrock. There is a photo of them, in their gabardine coats and headscarves, standing beside their black, practical-looking bikes, laughing. They were terrible gigglers.

‘So what happened to your bike?' I asked.

‘Och, alannah, I don't know what happened to it,' my mother said, with a certain air she had for moments like this, an air of nostalgia, sentimentality, which I found embarrassing. ‘I suppose I left it in some shed after we were married.' She meant, in some shed at the back of the first house they lived in when they married, after she had met my father on the beach at Sandymount one scorching Sunday in July, where she and Teasy had cycled with some other pals for a picnic. He had got talking to Teasy's fiancé, Christy, who was of the party, playing rounders on the sand – they loved rounders. ‘I didn't have much use for it after Daddy got the car.' She never learned to drive. Daddy drove her everywhere she wanted to go at weekends, and on weekdays she walked. We could walk most places we needed to get to from our house.

I could have walked to Marymount but it would have taken more than half an hour – too long, in the morning. It was about two miles away. I could cycle it in less than twenty minutes. Down, down, I felt I was going – and the gradient was, subtly, downhill, since the school was nearer the coast then we were, though not on the coast. Down Charleston Road, down Appian Way, which was too narrow for all the traffic it had to support, even then, then down the wide, elegant Waterloo Road, and finally the best part – a quiet, perfect, traffic-free road, called by what seemed to be the elegant and lovely name of Marymount Road.

Charleston Road, Waterloo Road, and Marymount Road were lined all along their edges with trees. Great chestnut trees when I started school in the autumn. Once or twice a ripe chestnut got me on the head. Cycling along these roads was magical. I soared, as on wings. I tried tricks – after a while I could cycle for most of the way without putting my hands on the handlebars, and it gave me a great sense of achievement to do this. I wanted to show off, to boast about it at home, but (wisely) I didn't.

The school was fine. Although I knew nobody when I started, I got to know plenty of people soon enough. Those girls on the bus, the girl who sat beside me in class. Others. I didn't, though, make a best friend. Everyone seemed to have one already – most of them had arrived in the school with a best friend in tow, it was unusual to go to secondary school on your own. My old best friends were far away, living another life in St Bridget's. I hardly ever saw any of them.

Yvette, the only girl in the school from my immediate neighbourhood, was in another class.

The teaching in Marymount was excellent. I realised that when I was there, and even more so now. When I hear people saying they don't remember anything they learned at school, I have to admit, to myself, that I remember a good many things, and most of them I learned during that first year in Marymount. Big chunks of the Gospel According to Saint Luke, which we learned off by heart. Many passages from
The Merchant of Venice
, ditto, and also from
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, which the seniors put on at Easter. We second years were in the choir, singing ‘Trip away; make no stay; Meet me all by break of day', and other songs. ‘So we grew together like to a double cherry,' I can hear the girl from fifth year who played Helena saying – she was a tall, poignant-looking girl, and the play was so sad, the parting of the friends.
Seeming parted, but yet an union in partition
. I was cycling every morning under the cherry blossom, quoting these lines, wishing I could play Helena.

The menu of subjects lived up to its promise. It was a Christmas stocking of Hector Grey novelties – Latin verbs and French pronunciation, Shakespeare plays and experiments in science.
Bully one, bully two, bully three
on the hockey pitch in Sandymount, fragrant with churned-up turf, cut grass.

But the lack of a best friend – which didn't worry me while I was there – was going to be a problem.

In March or so, I was invited to a birthday party, at the house of my best friend in primary, Deirdre. By now she was settled in and had new companions in St Bridget's, and I had to put up with that. They were at the party, but so were plenty of my old classmates. One of them, a small girl called Mandy, whom I knew from my very earliest days in primary, had changed. She used to be a teacher's pet, cherished because she was exceptionally small (the sort of girl who grows to be less than five foot, as an adult – petite). As a little girl, she was doll-like, though she did not have the fairytale good looks of, say, Yvette. She was famous for never missing a day – she got a prize for this on the last day of school, a silver cup – and for never turning up without her uniform on.

She had grown a bit taller, and was beginning to plump out. Something else had happened to her that happens to girls as they turn into women. She had learned to talk a lot.

Yakety-yak for the whole party.

Her subject was school. St Bridget's. (She called it Biddy's, without explaining what it was. Like people who talk too much, she took it for granted that everyone was familiar with the locations, the connections, the entire context of her life. Or maybe they just have so many stories to tell that they haven't time for boring explanations and trust the audience to fill in the gaps.)

Mandy was a brilliant storyteller. Half the party guests were at her feet, literally, gathered round her in a circle, riveted to her words. Her tales were character-based, and the characters were all teachers with names like Muggins and Bertie and Smutty and Pug. Muggins was an old nun who was crazy, just crazy, and Pug was the Irish teacher who gave the class Cadbury's chocolate every Friday if they did their homework and Pug was getting married in June and came to school one day with two odd shoes on, that was the day after her fiancé had proposed to her – can you imagine? – one shoe a brown moccasin teacher-kind of shoe and the other black patent with a little bow on it, we were in absolute stitches, we were breaking our sides, we just couldn't stop ….

It was this sort of stuff. Nothing much when you thought about it afterwards. But she created a vivid dramatic picture. And the picture was of a school that was not so much like the schools I read about in the Enid Blyton books, as a school that was even better than them. More full of life and laughs and fun. More replete with eccentric teachers. A school where the nuns and teachers were a constant source of amusement, like an ongoing circus, and where the girls never stopped breaking their sides laughing.

My Christmas exams went well. I was now considering becoming a scientist, like Marie Curie, whose biography I had read in a children's series. I imagined myself sitting under a pine tree, fondling the fragrant needles and discovering radiation. In English, I was doing well, too. Our teacher, Miss Burns, had a contact in the radio station, and got us, the class, to put together a complete half-hour programme. We wrote poems and essays and plays, and members of the class got to recite them, present them, on the radio. We did auditions. Presenting was what everyone wanted to do, to be ‘on the radio'!

I didn't make the cut.

‘I don't know what it is. Your voice is a little nasal,' said Miss Burns.

I didn't know what that meant, to have a voice that was nasal. I did not like my nose, the shape of it, and wondered if, apart from looking funny, it also affected my voice.

‘But you can console yourself with the knowledge that you've written most of the programme,' she added.

It was true. I had surpassed myself. Poems, songs, funny anecdotes. A play. I'd written them all, in an orgy of writing. I liked Miss Burns and the topics she suggested, and when I heard the word ‘radio', I took off. It didn't surprise me that I'd written most of the programme. I'd done more work than anyone else and I loved writing essays and anything else I was asked to write.

So I thought, if I don't become Marie Curie, I might like to become a writer. Like Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose books Miss Burns had recommended. Or G.K. Chesterton, whom I had discovered myself and liked.

The hockey, I liked too. And in spring we played tennis in Herbert Park.

I loved, above all, the cycling. Four times a day, I flew along those roads. Like a goddess.

I did not take to the headmistress.

I don't take to heads of institutions much – that's something I know now. Maybe they are often not very nice people. But it is more likely that I am afraid of them, for one thing, and for another, I resent anyone who has any power over me.

Sister Borromeo hadn't given me any cause to dislike her. She had given me a scholarship (but that put me in her power). She told me I was a good girl whenever she ran into me on the corridor. She commended me for wearing the full uniform. I didn't want to be commended. I wore the full uniform because I loved it. I loved the blazer and the tie, and even the beret, which you were supposed to despise. There was an ongoing battle in the school between Sister Borromeo and all the pupils about the wearing of this beret. She would make announcements over the loud-speaker system they had, the Tannoy – a little box in the middle of the every ceiling.

Crackle
, it would go,
crackle crackle
. And then Sister Borromeo's voice would come through, like a voice on the radio.

‘I want to remind you all that according to the rules of Marymount, you are supposed to wear your full school uniform on the way to and from school. This includes the beret.'

This announcement would usually raise a laugh in the class. Even the teacher, whose work had been interrupted by the Tannoy, would allow herself a smile and a helpless shrug.

Hardly anybody wore the beret. (It flattened the hair, for one thing. This didn't bother me, since I still had my plaits. The hair on top was tightly pulled by my mother's efficient hands, and flat as a ballerina's.)

‘Good girl, wearing your beret!' she said, beaming, one morning when she met me on the stairs.

I said nothing.

‘Good girl, I said.' She sounded sharper and her smile was gone. ‘It's so nice to see the beret on. It suits you so well.'

I smirked then and mumbled something. And as soon as she was out of sight I whipped the beret off and stuffed it into my schoolbag, where it stayed for evermore.

The first week of term I had met Sister Borromeo in town.

I was traipsing around hunting for schoolbooks. The way they handled it was that you got lists of texts from the teachers during the first week of school – not one list, nothing as organised as that. Each teacher would write the titles of the books required for her class on the blackboard; the pupils transcribed the list in their jotters or copybooks. Then we'd go into town and go from bookshop to bookshop in search of the books. Every schoolchild in Dublin was doing the same thing for a week or two at the beginning of the first term. Long queues would form outside the bookshops as the children stood in line, waiting to get in. When you got to the counter, the tired and harassed assistants – students doing holiday jobs – would snatch your list and tell you what they had. ‘Out of stock' was a phrase you learned quickly. ‘Out of print' was another.