As the gloom of winter gave way to spring, our journeys to and from school would become more tolerable. Progress home was slow as we dawdled by the hedgerows, plucking and examining anything of interest. We also understood the respite our weary mother enjoyed in our absence, and were in no hurry to even glimpse the dismissive face of father. So we trudged together, my two brothers in front and me trailing behind with my classmate Marie.
Marie was tall and kind and smart. Her face was stippled with a mass of orange freckles and crowned with a shock of russet hair that sprang out furiously from her head. With Marie I plundered the hedges for primroses or bluebells to carry home to mother, ignoring the objection of briars and nettles that tried to frustrate my trespass. And even if sometimes I did end up with the scratches and stings of my endeavours, it was worth all the pain, just to see my mother smile, which was all my heart desired.
There was something special about those sunlit journeys, as we lingered on the hot road, when the wind held its breath and the bees buzzed alongside us. The sun seemed hotter then: a glorious, golden gasp that caught the opulence of nature and held it close for my inspection. I saw it all with the clarity of an optometrist inspecting an iris. So close to everything at three foot ten.
The boys would amble on ahead, getting farther and farther away, pivoting round from time to time to urge me on. I’d see them whirling and shouting, but I was too engrossed, and they’d give up; the shouts of protest dying in the act of their turning back to the road.
As the days grew hotter we plodded and sweated under the cumbersome weight of schoolbags. We’d often heave them off and sit by the sunstruck roadside, eyes intent on the bubbling tar. Few cars or mortals plied the roads in those days so we had the country lanes to ourselves. The density of that reflected silence was ours as well:
Absence with absence makes a travelling angle,
And pressure of the sun
In silence sleeps like equiloaded scales.
That silence was broken only sporadically by birdcalls and the needling hum of a tractor. The fields marked our progress, and throughout the year we marked theirs, from glossy upheavals of winter soil to calming intervals of green. The swathes of ripened corn in summer gladdened our hearts most of all; the golden prize of the long holiday was finally within reach.
Occasionally we’d be delayed by a strapping lady on a bike, grey hair standing on end and a navy-blue raincoat billowing out in concert with the breeze. We’d hear her approach, her breath coming out in great gusts of effort as she laboured up the hill behind us. We were a little afraid of her, so none of us dared look round until she spoke. Then she’d heave herself off the mighty conveyance and continue on foot beside us, wheeling the bike as she talked.
Mary Catherine was a pious lady who always enquired as to how we were, and assured us with breathy conviction that whatever day she happened upon us was the feast-day of a favourite saint.
She invariably had an oilcloth shopping bag, patterned with red and grey diamonds, swinging from the handlebars. When she had finished her spiel, she would hoke in it for a few moments while we waited expectantly, and produce a crumpled bag of brandy-balls. We were then each rewarded for our patience and indulgence.
There were many Mary Catherines in those days: rural women who, without the distraction of a husband and children, could devote their time to venerating the Sacred Heart and marking off the feast-days of saints on calendars. When I now consider my mother’s demanding life, answering everyone’s needs but her own, I realise how much more fortunate those single ladies surely were.
Yet Mary Catherine was gregarious in her own way. There were dwellings I passed on those journeys that had the power to intrigue and entice me: whitewashed hovels at the end of winding lanes that willed me to stop and look for signs of life. They were inhabited by strange, solitary individuals who, I suspect, lived on windfalls and tins of corned beef. These people were generally ignored by the community because they had not married and had children.
One such house belonged to an eccentric named Jamie Frank, a bachelor who wore a cap way back on his head and seemed to exist in a mysterious, interior world. When we’d meet him on the road he was barely aware of us, so engrossed was he with his own inner dialogue.
Sometimes when we’d pass his house we’d see him unhook the half-door and emerge, bearing a lidless teapot to empty on the dung-hill. He had the queerest walk; his pelvis jutting out, legs straying way in front, with head and shoulders lagging behind, like some sort of ambulant chair. Jamie never seemed to have company. Unlike Mary Catherine he hadn’t found the need to call on the friendship or protection of saints; that protracted discourse with the self seemed to serve him just as well.
He usually kept a goat tethered to a post in one of his fields and one day, in an uncharacteristic act of delinquency, we stopped to hurl pebbles and abuse at the beast. It bucked and jumped in an agitated frenzy while we stood about, laughing and jeering at its wild antics. We were confident, you see, that the sturdy rope would protect us from all harm.
We were wrong. To our sheer astonishment and fright the animal broke free and hurtled towards us over the field, head down, avenging horns held low. We ran, yelling and screaming for dear life as the goat gained on us. We had no option but to dive into the yard of our Great-aunt Rose.
Old Rose was my father’s reclusive aunt. She ‘couldn’t be doing’ with noisome children, so you didn’t bother her unless it was a real emergency. In my memory she is for ever ancient: a feeble dry stick with a crooked back, dressed always in black. Her rheumy eyes and dismal face had spent so much time judging the actions of others that she’d forgotten how to live herself. We were afraid of her, there was no doubt, but that fateful day we were forced to make a desperate decision; it was either Aunt Rose or the goat’s revenge. We cried out for her help.
She hobbled out when she heard the racket, and chased the brute away with a few whacks of her knobbly blackthorn stick. She was never without that stick; it seemed like a natural extension of her arm. The danger past, she beckoned us into her gloomy lair.
And so we entered a cottage strewn with the detritus of decades gone: every surface furred with dust, the walls smoked yellow, the cobwebbed cornered windows; all was pervaded by the smell of smouldering turf and stewing tea, forgotten milk and bread. In short, the house reeked of a life in decay. We timidly sat down on a worn couch, the tumult of our narrow escape pulsing in us, and watched her make the tea she knew would calm us.
I remember the kitchen in the same way you’d recall a memorable visit to a museum in a foreign city. You take account of things because you know with near-certainty that the experience is unlikely to be repeated. Fear also has a habit of sharpening our recollection of things we’d prefer to forget.
Aunt Rose’s kitchen was the wicked witch’s den of fairytale. The soot-caked kettle hung over the hearth, boiling itself into a frenzy, and her black cat sat on guard to one side of it. When its mistress unhooked the kettle to wet the tea it roused itself and stretched, before padding to the door. We were motioned to the table with a curt nod and dumbly watched her fill the cups. It was easy to see she was not used to entertaining or being with children; this new experience put her out. I watched the rivulets of blue veins on the withered hand swelling with the effort of gripping the teapot. A plate of biscuits and ginger cake materialised from a deep drawer in a glass case and trembled their way to where we sat in the greenish glow of the recessed window. Shyly, we proceeded to eat.
I was frightened of Aunt Rose. We all were. I imagined that if the dead came back to earth they would probably look like her: the skin cracked and shrunken, the yellowed, joyless eyes and lipless mouth, the crooked body swathed in black. (I could not have known it then as I sat in the silence and the gloom, but before long those musings would come back to haunt me.)
After these quivering exertions the old woman returned to the stool by the hearth and composed herself. The stick was propped back in the corner and the shawl tightened about the bent back. These trusted gestures steadied her as she contemplated the flickering embers and the weight of our intrusion. I wonder what thoughts she had then and can only conclude that she looked on us as a nuisance she could well have done without. We munched the cake and biscuits and drank our tea in a conspiracy of silence, savouring this unexpected treat, wondering all the while about the charging goat that had driven us to her door.
This one incident jangled the rhythm of those days of habit. We’d steal past the billy-goat after that; one movement from it was enough to send us fleeing.
Normally I left Marie at her gate to the yelps of her excited Jack Russell. I’d continue over the Forgetown bridge, rounding McCrystal’s corner and going down the lane. More often than not I’d be clutching the sweaty stems of the wildflowers I’d picked for mother, the emblems of my love for her.
When I look back, I see those reasons for dalliance – Jamie Frank, Mary Catherine, old Rose – as jerky images on an old-fashioned cinema screen. I hear the sluggish whirr of the reel and see the blend of motes and smoke in the steady beam of the projector’s light. In my imagination Jamie becomes the silent poisoner, carrying the guilty evidence of his crime to the dump in that lidless teapot. Mary Catherine is the breathless angel gliding up that hill to enfold us in her wings, and Great-aunt Rose is the wicked witch hobbling out to censure us with her arid heart and accusing eye.
They’re all gone now, to another place: all those mysterious people, the ones who passed their days largely ignored, trapped in those desolate shacks, flooded with loneliness, with only the ticking clock and crackling fire for company.
I did not understand loneliness then. These people were regarded as misfits to be feared, but now I realise that at some point in their lives they had, for whatever reason, taken the wrong turn, had wandered off that main road which buzzed with life, where maidens sang and children danced, where the birds and banter flew – and had somehow lost their way. The saddest part, however, is that no one in the community made the effort to go in search of them and gently guide them back to that sun-filled road.