I shall not write much of the five years that passed over my head in Ancoats. They were happy years, as I have said, and they were profitable years. At the heart of them remains in my imagination the O’Riorden kitchen, and particularly the O’Riorden kitchen on winter nights. The chirping fire, the red cloth on the table, the lamp hanging by a chain above it, the heavy curtains drawn across the window, and the thick rag mat under foot: all these elements of that interior have pierced deeply into my mind as the trappings of a way of life that was solid, unambitious and good. It was not long before I was taking my turn with Mr. O’Riorden in the readings from Dickens. On most evenings Dermot would quietly disappear, and the rustling of the fire, the click of Mrs. O’Riorden’s needles, and the solemn voice of the clock would be the only sounds to accompany our voyage with Magwich down the river or our breathless participation in that night of flood and fury that cast Steerforth upon the Yarmouth sands at the feet of David Copperfield. We would usually still be hard at it when, towards ten o’clock, Dermot would come in from his shed, his long hand brushing the sawdust from his coat, his long eyebrows quizzically raised as he asked: “Still at it? Why don’t you learn to do something?”
He was all for doing, was Dermot, and in the course of the long walks which it became our custom to take together on Sundays he would sing of the time when his doing would be so effective that he would have a fine showroom in the heart of Manchester and everybody who knew what was what would come to him for beds and chairs and tables.
Grand days those were, walking in the flat green Cheshire countryside or upon the dark moors scarred with screes and gullies that we reached by taking a train to some Derbyshire station and then setting out whither we would. We would lie upon the purple heather with the blue sky above us and the sound of water tinkling in our ears, and Dermot would break the silence to damn England and to blether by the yard about Cuculain and the Dark Rosaleen and Davitt and Wolfe Tone.
“’Tis a throw-back ye are, Dermot,” old O’Riorden would say if one of these outbursts took place in the house. “It’s because ye’ve never seen Ireland that it’s got ye by the nose. ’Tis a stinking, starving little country that I’m glad to be out of.”
And Dermot would not answer, but his pale eyes would light up with their green flecks as on those nights when he came home late from some secret Irish conventicle with a flush to his pallid cheek and his fists clenched to show the knuckles white under the skin. If the old people were gone to bed and I were sitting up alone, he would say nothing of the business he had been at, but would rave of the old Ireland that was a land of saints and scholars, and, what meant more to him, of craftsmen and artificers who wrought in silver and in gold and precious stones. “If ever I have a son,” he said one night, “I’ll dedicate him to Ireland.”
He had the better chance to catch me for his sermons because more and more I took to staying up when Mr. and Mrs. O’Riorden were gone to bed and getting on with my reading. That little kitchen library contained the whole of Dickens and of Thackeray, of George Eliot and the Brontës, a series of books called Great English Poets, and the plays of Shakespeare, which I had never embarked on with Mr. Oliver. I went through the lot like some base and indiscriminate drunkard to whom drink is drink, whether it be dregs or vintage. And there was not much that you could call dregs on O’Riorden’s shelves.
Five good and happy years, and I didn’t spend them in the service of Mr. Summerway. It was clear from the first that I was wasting my time there, for was it not my will to be rich, and how could I hope for riches in a situation where the next step up was occupied by the young and healthy Sayers who seemed set for half a century?
During those five years I worked in two other cotton houses, and in a shipping office, and in a draper’s shop, and in an insurance office, but nowhere did I see that chance for a swift and spectacular ascent which was what I wanted. I began to be plagued, too, with an itch for fame as well as wealth, and it was inevitable that, as reading occupied so much of my time, I should think of writing as fame’s portal.
I was seventeen years old when I sat down on a winter night in the cold bedroom of 26, Gibraltar Street and, using the freezing marble slab of the washstand for a writing-table, embarked upon a novel whose rich perspectives faded away into the distances of my mind clothed in all the circumstances of a Copperfield or Newcome.
That evening was notable because it was the beginning of long, gruelling work, and it was notable, too, because that was the first time I saw Sheila Nolan. I found that all the bright ideas that filled my head were spectres which retreated as I advanced upon them. They wouldn’t be pinned down. It was a barren and humiliating evening. At nine o’clock Mrs. O’Riorden came to the foot of the stairs and shouted out to me: “Come down now, Bill. You’ll be clemmed wi’ cold up there. There’s a cup of tea waiting for you.”
I tore up the few wretched lines I had scribbled and went down. O’Riorden put A Tale of Two Cities back into the handsome book-case that Dermot had made and said: “’Twill be the same in Ireland some day. Mark my words. But to hell with it. My country’s where I’m happy and where I’m let live in peace. ’Tis time Dermot was back.”
And then Dermot came in, bringing Sheila Nolan with him. Dermot was nineteen then, and very tall, every hair of him red as a fox, but white in the face. Sheila Nolan was a dark slip of a thing: dark waving hair framed her olive face that had a moist red mouth and eyes as black as blackberries, and as glistening.
She was very shy that night, was Sheila, sidling in alongside Dermot as though she doubted her welcome. But she needn’t have done that. Never in my life did I know anyone readier to love people than old O’Riorden and his wife. They saw how it was; there isn’t often need to ask questions; and they took the girl to their hearts. We all sat round the table, drinking tea; and Sheila and Dermot were rather excited. Usually, when he came in from one of his Irish conventicles, Dermot’s excitement simmered within him, for no one in Gibraltar Street was interested in his talk of saints and martyrs. But that night he had Sheila. He had met her often, it seemed, at the meetings. “And you should hear him talk, Mrs. O’Riorden!” she burst out, her eyes devouring Dermot. “Did you know you had an orator for a son?”
“Divil’s a word we get out of him here,” said old O’Riorden, “but a gift of the gab’s not unusual in the family. If me father’d been paid a penny a yard for his eloquence, we could’ve bought up County Cork.”
“The eloquence has missed a generation,” said Dermot, who didn’t often gibe at his father, even in fun, “Dad’s a renegade. He’s as good as an Englishman.”
There was a bitter taste under the words, as though Dermot had found a new allegiance and had shaken the first grain of sand from under the foundation of the old. I think O’Riorden noticed it. He said nothing.
Dermot took Sheila towards the front door to say good-night. There was a lamp burning in the passage. From where I stood I could see them, the door being open. There was a bit of a scuffle. Dermot said in a voice we could all hear: “God damn England.” I saw him seize Sheila’s shoulders in his thin nervous hands and squeeze them tight. “Say it,” he whispered, shaking her, his eyes flecked with passion. “God damn England. Say it!”
“God bless Ireland,” Sheila said in her clear voice.
“That’s better, my luv, that’s better,” Mrs. O’Riorden shouted. “You come and see us again.”
“Say it!” I saw Dermot’s lips form the words rather than speak them, and I saw Sheila shake her head. I never heard her damn England, or anything, or anybody, all the time I knew her. She was a grand girl, was Dermot’s wife. They were married the next year.