There was only one thing to be said in favour of Father’s home ground – it was colourful. There were fifteen houses in the little square, and the occupants were as sharply distinguished as though they had all been of different races and religions. They had little appeal to me, because I dreamed of families that lived in the Ballyhooley Road, who kept their front doors shut, played the piano in the evenings, and did not go to the neighbours’ houses to borrow a spoon of tea or a cupful of sugar, but they are all very distinct in my memory.
In one house lodged a married couple who provided a strange counterpoint to my own parents. Mrs MacCarthy was a big, bosomy woman with a round, rosy face who was the living image of Kathleen Mavourneen in the picture in our kitchen, and must have been a girl of great beauty. Her personality was like her looks, warm and sunny, and she had a deep, husky voice. Her husband was a small, taciturn man who worked in the Harbour Commissioners. At regular intervals, Mrs MacCarthy went on batters that were as bad as those of my father in their utter destructiveness. Mother would rescue her from the road where she had fallen, and bring her home, caked with blood and dirt, and wash her face and comb her hair, while she scolded her gently. ‘Ah, Mrs MacCarthy,’ she would say, ‘indeed and indeed you should be ashamed of yourself, making an exhibition of yourself like that, and what will your poor husband say?’ But by this time Mrs MacCarthy would be threatening what she would do to that miserable little gnat of a man when he came home.
The woman who lived in the house on our left was a Cockney called Gertie Twomey. At first, I think, she lodged with my grandmother, and then took over the house when Grandmother came to live with us. She had married a nice gentle Cork sailor called Steve Twomey who had picked her up on one of his trips and brought her home in the spirit in which he would have brought home some flaming, chattering parakeet from the Congo to hang with his dispirited goldfinches and canaries. She was a tiny little woman with a face shaped like a box and coloured a brilliant red as though she never drank anything but gin, though I have no recollection of her drinking at all. In the middle of the box was a gleaming snub nose like a holy medal, and above it two small, crafty, merry eyes that seemed as though they had been sunk into the head with a metalworker’s tool. She haunted our house, perhaps because Father, as a travelled man, could talk to her about London, or perhaps because Mother, as a superior woman and a good housekeeper, might be expected to understand her scorn of the ‘natives’. She usually came accompanied by her two pretty daughters, one attached to either hand and trailing behind in the wind of her approach like afterthoughts – ‘pore little eyengils’, as she called them with a sudden brilliant glare that was probably supposed to suggest mother love – and the beady little eyes started to flicker inquisitively about the kitchen in quest of anything new or useful. She missed nothing, had no shyness about asking for anything she wanted, and distressed Mother, who preferred the shyer manner of the ‘natives’. ‘A great maker-out,’ Mother sometimes called her with real disapproval.
Gertie thought Irish Catholics impractical, and small wonder, for behind the English sentimentality and gab was a mind like a razor. I suppose she had had to become a Catholic to marry Steve, but the Catholicism had not taken. As a girl in London, Gertie had heard all about the bloke in the Holy Land who started religion, and knew that his idea was to give things away to people who wanted them, a view that was the very opposite of that held by the Catholic priests in Ireland. They acted as though the bloke in the Holy Land had intended them to get the dibs, but they couldn’t take Gertie in with that sort of nonsense. I doubt if any priest looking for dues ever got a penny out of her. He didn’t have two kids to keep, as she did, and if money ever changed hands – which I doubt – it must have been in the other direction. ‘Why,’ she said one day, grabbing a gold chain on the priest’s fat belly, ‘that beautiful gold chain you’re wearing would keep me and my two poor helpless little angels for months… And wasn’t I right?’ she added sharply, reporting the incident to Father and Mother, who didn’t know where to look. Mother out of a sense of duty would have given the priest her last half-crown, as I suspect she often did, and Father, whose views of religion were always a mystery to me, would have been afraid to refuse him. Though always very respectful to priests, he didn’t like them and thought them unlucky, like magpies, and though he went to Mass regularly, he never attended the Sacraments. He probably thought them unlucky too. At the same time, with English practicality Gertie also had English tolerance and grit. Not only did she not hold it against the priest that he hadn’t given her his gold watch and chain; she rather enjoyed the tussle for it.
However, her great entries were reserved for stormy nights when Father was sitting under the lamp, reading the Echo. Steve worked on a tub called the Hannibal that must have been about the one age with Carthage, and when a big wind began blowing up the river, Gertie, with her vivid imagination, immediately began to picture it at the bottom of the Irish Sea, herself a widow, and her two little angels orphans. On nights like these she could not remain at home. She had to know what Father, the universal expert, made out of the shipping news. We would hear her bang the front of her house, chattering like a monkey to herself or the children, and then came the hasty shuffle of her feet down the channel in front of our house as she dragged the children behind her to our squeaking gate. ‘It’s that woman again!’ Mother would say in disgust, and the string of the latch would be pulled, and Gertie would be framed in the kitchen doorway, her hair wild, her shiny face, which seemed to be haunted, reflecting the lamplight. Her right hand would be raised in a dramatic gesture.
‘’Ark to that!’ she would mutter as the wind howled in the yard outside. ‘The sea must be mountains high. Nothing could ever live through that.’
‘Oh, now, now, Mrs Twomey! I wouldn’t let myself be upset by a bit of wind like that,’ Father would say gravely, in the ingenuous belief that he was really comforting her instead of driving her mad. Father was an intensely conventional man, and he knew that this was how a woman whose husband was at sea on a stormy night should feel, and that this was the sort of thing you should say to her.
‘A bit of wind?’ she would mutter wonderingly. ‘How can you, Mr O’Donovan! You know that ship should have been scrapped years ago. I warned him! Now he has only himself to blame.’
‘Ah, well,’ Father would say, doing the hob-lawyer, which seemed to be what was expected of him, ‘a lot would depend on what it was like at sea, or what way the ship was going.’
‘It’s in the hands of God,’ Mother would say. ‘You should be praying for him.’
Now, this was the sort of talk that Gertie didn’t like at all. Praying was what the natives did when there was nothing to eat in the house, instead of going after the sky pilots with horse, foot and artillery.
‘God helps those who help themselves,’ she snapped. ‘I told him years ago to get off that boat. I have my children to think of, don’t I? This time tomorrow they may be orphans.’ Her eyes settled unseeingly on the children, and she asked menacingly: ‘What’ll you do when you have no father?’ At this they would burst into loud harmonious wails that for some reason seemed to give her deep satisfaction, because she beamed and patted them and assured them fondly that Mummy would look after them.
I never saw a woman who got so much value out of her troubles, but they were too intense to last. Having exhausted all the phases of her tragedy – the terrors of the deep, the temptations of widowhood, and the sad fate of orphaned children – in ten or fifteen minutes, she hadn’t much more left to grieve for and began to see the bright side of things. Or rather, she became practical, and you saw what was really behind all that English guff. She sat bolt upright in her chair, her little eyes half shut as they darted shrewdly from Father to Mother, to see how they were taking it. Mother was not taking it too well. Having been an orphan herself, she did not like to see it turned into a subject for play-acting. Father was completely mystified. He had a conventional mind, and a slow one, and he never really saw where Gertie was getting.
Compensation was now her theme – purely for the children’s sake, of course. She knew several sailors’ widows who had been impractical in the usual Irish way. They should have got more compensation, and they should have handled more wisely whatever they had got. The English were better at handling lump sums than the Irish. And, of course, though wages were bad and jobs uncertain, they did bring in the regular dibs while no one could be sure of a lump sum unless it was wisely invested. She would have a solicitor on the job to see that she got her rights, and then she would have enough to buy or rent a big house in London which she would run as a superior boarding house, furnished in style and confined to lodgers of the best class. There her children would get a real education, not the sort of thing that passed for education among the natives. The first thing she would buy would be a piano, and they would have lessons and grow up as real little ladies. There was something about being able to play the piano that raised a girl in a man’s estimation, wasn’t there?
And subtly, almost imperceptibly, as she talked her tone changed, and she was no longer practical but giddy and gay. That was where Father’s reminiscences of London came in handy, because they reassured her that everything was as she remembered it, with parks and bands and music-halls and toffs, and all at once, her red face beaming, she began to run her fingers over the keys of an imaginary piano and sang in a cracked voice:
O, won’t we have a merry time,
Drinking whisky, beer and wine,
On Coronation Day?
By this time she would be in the highest of spirits, cracking jokes and making the children laugh. But, as though she found it difficult to sustain any mood for long, that, too, would pass and she would remember her bad neighbours and her many wrongs and snap at the children to tell them keep quiet and not break their mummy’s heart. In those days I did not understand it, and I doubt if my parents understood it either, but nowadays I fancy she was thinking that even if the wind was still howling about the house, the old ship had weathered worse, and she would never return to dear old London Town but end her days among ignorant Irish Catholics, who didn’t even know what the bloke in the Holy Land had said about giving people things. Then she would accuse the children of having no heart, and when they cried she would spank them till Mother protested, and finally she would shuffle off as she had come, into the storm, dragging the yelling kids behind her and muttering rapidly to herself. No wonder Mother told Minnie Connolly that she was ‘never right’.