10

Molly arrived in May 1944. She was fat and forty and placidly uncritical of our house and its inmates. She baked delicious soda bread, of which she ate immoderate quantities, and could cook two dishes well. (Irish stew and bacon and cabbage.) Her reactions were prodigiously slow; half-an-hour after something had amused her she would disconcert those who did not know her by bursting into apparently unprovoked laughter. Yet she was such an enormous improvement on her immediate forerunners that in June I was measured for my school uniform. Two battered trunks, still bearing French luggage labels of the 1890s, were lowered through the attic trap-door into the kitchen and going away to school became a reality.

I began mildly to dislike the idea as August dwindled. With Molly in the kitchen and my freedom restored the environs of Lismore seemed to have a lot more to offer than the environs of any convent school. Yet the novelty of the adventure still appealed and I was not seriously fretting.

Miss Knowles, the Jubilee district nurse, had by this time become a valued family friend and I was overjoyed when she offered to escort me to school, in loco parentis. We were to travel to Waterford by train and this, oddly enough, was the first train journey of my life.

The carriages and corridors were gay with the scarlet and dove-grey of the school uniform and long before we got to Waterford I had begun, unexpectedly, to enjoy the sensation of belonging to a distinctive community.

This says a good deal for my schoolmates. Of course they ignored me; as a new girl I was officially beneath contempt. Yet there was no antagonism in the atmosphere; clearly I was not unwelcome. The school stood isolated on a height beyond the city, behind smooth high walls. Its grey stone buildings, solid and dignified, spread themselves in spacious, well-kept grounds that were brilliantly patterned and richly scented by September’s flowering of roses. A not unpleasing air of monastic austerity and formality prevailed. One was aware of entering a world of orderliness and precision, certainty and calm, where the unpredictable could not happen, unless by some act of God. And even an act of God, one felt, would soon be made to conform to the relevant rule or regulation.

Yet there was no aura of dour oppression. In the wide, bright hallway we joined a dejected group of obviously new girls who were waiting with their parents to be received by the headmistress. All around us the golden parquet floor shone like a lake at sunset and the walls had been freshly painted cream, with pale green woodwork, and opposite the handsome oak hall-door was an alcove holding a gaudy life-size plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The broad staircase swept upward to the left of the door as one entered and when my eye followed its stately curve I saw, whizzing down the banisters, a wiry girl with frizzy ginger hair and a demoniacal grin. As she slowed slightly to negotiate a bend she glanced down the corridor that ran at right angles to the hall, saw a nun approaching, promptly swung outwards off the banisters, hung for a moment by her hands, dropped six feet into the hall and lurked behind a pillar looking blasé.

I held my breath. What grisly punishment would be meted out to her? The nun could not have failed to notice … But it had all happened in such a way that the nun could pretend not to have noticed, without any loss of face, and as she passed the pillar she simply paused to say a suave ‘Welcome back!’ to the ginger acrobat. This little scene neatly epitomised the whole spirit of a school where the pupils had enough respect for the staff not to defy them openly and the staff had enough respect for the pupils not to repress them.

By then it was my turn to be presented to the headmistress – traditionally known as The Hat. She was small and thin and red, like a carrot. As we shook hands I wondered if her toes were as red as her fingers. Perhaps she was a secret drinker, I thought, noting the ruby nose and remembering Jeff. All in all, she looked one of Nature’s less agreeable blunders. And I felt she was coming to an identical conclusion about me. However, our instant mutual antipathy worried me not at all. A liking for The Hat might indeed have inhibited my rule-breaking; that we had at once recognised each other as Natural Enemies was much more satisfactory.

In the second-floor junior dormitory Miss Knowles helped me to unpack and another new girl, having read my luggage labels, introduced herself as Sally Dowling. Our fathers had done time together in Wormwood Scrubs (the Irish equivalent of having been in the same house at Eton) and she, too, was the only child of comparatively poor parents – and her mother was a semi-invalid. With her raven-black hair, aquiline nose, deep-set grey-green eyes and almost copper-coloured skin she looked not unlike a Red Indian. She was eighteen months younger than I, but we were to be in the same form for she was very clever. She also had a lot of quiet self-assurance and when Miss Knowles had said goodbye she appointed herself – gently, not bossily – as my guide and mentor. It was hard to believe that she, too, was a new girl. That very evening she and I established the foundations of a comfortable, easygoing, dependable friendship. Our devotion to each other was deep, but undemanding, undemonstrative, unsentimental, almost masculine; and throughout the next two years we never once even came near to quarrelling.

However, my new friend was of no help when I woke for the first time in my cubicle. I had slept well, but as I opened my eyes homesickness engulfed me. It was almost a physical sensation, like being knocked down and rolled over and over by a wave. And it was all the more devastating for being unexpected. When saying goodbye to my parents I had felt just a little wistful, yet now my loneliness seemed to be even more acute than three years earlier. Then homesickness had been mitigated by the sheer horror of the place and its denizens, much as lumbago takes one’s mind off tonsillitis. But here my personal anguish was unadulterated and I lived through the next week in a stupor of misery. Even to think about those seven days, thirty-five years later, is painful.

Then one morning I woke and something had slipped into place and I felt happy all through. There had been no gradual recovery; on the seventh day I had felt no less miserable than on the second or fourth. So it was with a sense of incredulous relief that I lay in bed on that eighth – Wednesday – morning, looking at the early sunlight streaming onto my pale gold cubicle curtains and realising that I was happy.

This happiness lasted for the rest of my schooldays. Undoubtedly it was in part a result of freedom from those incongruous domestic responsibilities which I had had to shoulder, for much of the time, during the past few years. At school I was leading a life appropriate to my age and I enjoyed every moment of it. I also enjoyed not being the only pebble on the beach. My parents tried to avoid spoiling me, but any only child – particularly with a strong-willed, perfectionist mother – inevitably receives an unwholesome amount of attention. At home everything to do with me was of prime importance and in itself this constant exposure to parental concern was an infringement of privacy, though never so intended. At school I missed my own room and my long, solitary hours out-of-doors, yet in a sense I had greater liberty to be myself. I was no more or less important than some hundred and twenty other girls and this anonymity pleased me. My parents were agreeably surprised by my enthusiastic letters home. They had expected me to resent the lack of physical freedom, at least during my first term. But I was a more adaptable animal than they knew. And they had been clever in their choice of school.

A grimly authoritarian régime would either have broken my spirit or provoked me to run away – probably the latter. But Waterford’s Ursuline Convent allowed enough scope for me to lead my own kind of life without inviting disaster. (The Hat threatened to expel me three times; but this, I now feel, was because of my private feud with her rather than because I had unforgivably challenged The System.) The atmosphere was relaxed without being permissive – to this extent, a replica of home – and I liked most of my schoolmates and all my teachers. Also, I greatly enjoyed disliking The Hat.

I soon developed a passion for a senior girl and became weak at the knees if she smiled graciously at me when we chanced to pass in the corridors. This was known as ‘having an affec’ for so-and-so, the so-and-so in question being described as one’s ‘affec’. My affec was an amiable sixteen-year-old to whom I wrote countless sonnets in praise of her beauty – an attribute which existed chiefly in my beholding eye. Most of these sonnets were seething with subliminal sexuality, as I was fascinated to discover when I came upon them recently in a rusty tin box. Frances also caused me to expend much mental energy on devising schemes which would lead to our meeting more frequently in the corridors. Not that one ever actually talked to one’s affec; that would have been a major breach of both school regulations (the age groups were rigidly segregated) and school tradition. It is interesting that we schoolgirls voluntarily reinforced this particular school rule with our own code, almost as though we were unconsciously aware of the need for protection from our burgeoning sexuality. By immemorial custom, everyday communication was restricted to the humbly adoring look and the regal smile of acknowledgement. However, school dances were held twice a year, on the feasts of St Angela and St Ursula, and then each affec asked her admirer, or admirers, for one dance (no more), during which verbal exchanges were permitted. But these occasions seldom or never generated immortal repartee.

I was a keen but undistinguished player of netball, hockey and tennis, and I founded a clandestine rugger club for those whose athletic tastes were more robust. We played in an out-of-bounds ploughed field and had two seven-a-side teams called Clongowes and Castleknock. Most of our fathers had been to one or other of those colleges and during the Leinster Senior Cup competition the whole school became hysterically involved. As we had no wireless at our disposal illicit telephone calls were made to Dublin to find out who had won each round. When I boasted of an uncle who in prehistoric times had once, during an influenza epidemic, been selected as a substitute for the Irish team my stock soared and even the seniors looked at me with respect.

I was such an unsatisfactory scholar that a school dedicated to self-glorification through examination results would have had little use for me. It must have been plain that even at the end of six years I would pass no examination since I applied my mind to only two subjects, English and history. And even during English classes I was selective, regarding grammatical sessions as needless because one knew most of it anyway by instinct. To this day I cannot tell the difference between parsing and analysis. By the end of the first month I had dropped domestic science, art and music, all subjects for which I had no aptitude whatever. Secretly I longed to be a really good pianist like my mother, who had all sorts of impressive awards from the Royal Academy rolled up at the back of a drawer, but my music mistress believed that I suffered from some sort of musical dyslexia and would never be able to master any instrument. So I had at my disposal, almost every day, two and a half hours more freedom than my classmates. And naturally my division mistress wanted to know how I proposed to spend all this spare time.

‘Writing books,’ I replied succinctly.

‘I see,’ said Mother Ambrose. ‘Well, in that case I think you’d better work in one of the empty music rooms. Anywhere else you’ll be constantly interrupted. And I imagine you need peace and quiet for writing books?’

‘Oh yes!’ said I. ‘Silence is essential. And no interruptions.’

‘I thought as much,’ said Mother Ambrose. ‘Though of course’ – she added reflectively – ‘Jane Austen managed to write quite a few rather good books in between receiving visitors and doing the household chores. But I expect she was different. May I read your book when it’s finished?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ I said apologetically. ‘It won’t be good enough for anyone to read. It’s not that sort of book. It’s only practice.’

Each term I produced at least one full-length, lurid adventure story set in nameless Foreign Parts where the political crises were even more ambiguous than in Ireland and led to a profusion of warm sticky blood, choking emotions and gallant last-minute rescues. No doubt this ‘practice’ was a development of my teddy-bear-tree fantasies and I often became so involved that I had to continue writing during prep-time and on Saturday afternoons when I should have been mending my clothes. Mother Ambrose can hardly have remained unaware of these irregularities, but she made no serious attempt to check them. Just occasionally – pandering to my passion for long words – she would comment on the ‘unarrested disintegration’ of my underwear.

For other reasons, however, I was constantly in trouble. Such rules as were specifically designed to transform us into young ladies aroused my most profound contempt and I rarely bothered to conceal the fact that I had broken them. Yet I soon developed a fierce loyalty to the school and however I might defy its traditions within the precincts I took care to behave impeccably on the rare occasions when I emerged into the big world wearing school uniform. Both my defiance and my loyalty were uncalculated, which may explain the nuns’ tolerance; perhaps they saw that although I was never going to fit into their particular mould I had a certain objective regard for it.

Thirty-five years ago not even the most senior girls at an Irish convent boarding-school were allowed out during term time, with or without supervision, to pursue either entertainment or instruction. Entering the school grounds on the first day of term, one knew that unless something extraordinary happened one would not leave them for the next two or three months. Nor did we have visitors, because of wartime travelling restrictions, and our half-term merely meant no lessons on a Friday and lots of sticky cakes for tea three days running. Being averse to such confections this was no treat for me. Raising my plate I would say ‘Whizz?’ and whoever first replied ‘Echo!’ won the prize. This corrupt Latin greatly offended me and I aroused much derision by allowing the pedantic paternal genes to take over and attempting to restore ‘Quis?’ and ‘Ego!’ As Sally pointed out, with her usual brusque logic, this was a damn silly attitude considering so many respectable English words are corrupt Latin or corrupt something else.

Our lives were as enclosed and almost as sheltered as the nuns’. Yet within its own boundaries, both physical and mental, this school world was full and rich – if somewhat unreal to outsiders. It was made separate, distinct, self-sufficient and unassailable by the underlying strength and esotericism of its own traditions. And though it is argued that modern educational methods provide a better preparation for adult life, I still feel that there was an instinctive wisdom behind the fuddy-duddyism of the old system. A variety of ’ologists insist that the physiological and psychological changes of adolescence impose severe strains on the whole personality. Yet, as a society, we react most strangely to our new awareness of adolescent ‘problems’. Are we trying to dodge them by forcing the maturing pace? My happy, limited school provided youngsters with as tranquil an environment as possible in which to come to terms with adulthood at the pace nature intended. The reassuring atmosphere of security and stability may well have helped us more than sophisticated insights into current affairs, cultural trips to the continent, ‘projects’ here, there and everywhere, and illustrated lectures on every conceivable subject including contraception.

I was now for the first time in a situation where relative poverty might have been felt as a disadvantage. During the holidays most of my classmates did all sorts of exciting things like hunting and sailing and competing in swimming galas and tennis tournaments and gymkhanas. Had I longed to enter this alien world I might soon have become miserable. But I continued to accept the fact that other people led other sorts of lives and no change in my own way of life seemed either possible or desirable. Perhaps it did not seem desirable simply because I knew it to be impossible; while one half of me thrived on fantasy, the other was cheerfully pragmatic. So it rarely occurred to me that my apparently humdrum background was in any way defective. Books, after all, were my only real concern – the reading, collecting and possible writing of them – and other interests, however keenly pursued, were essentially peripheral. Anyway the idea of sailing did not greatly appeal to me; by all accounts it involved sharing a small space with far too many people for much too long and I preferred to enjoy it only vicariously in Arthur Ransome’s world. Riding of course was another matter. One of my first memories is of being run away with by an allegedly angelic pony belonging to a horsy godmother in Co Kildare. A glorious mixture of terror and elation surged through me as I clung to the creature’s mane. (I was to feel nothing comparable for the next quarter of a century, until I found myself galloping by mistake up a valley in the Western Himalaya on an Afghan stallion.) To everyone’s astonishment I remained in situ while the pony took me twice round the paddock. But then he decided to show off at the jumps …

I fell with five-year-old animal expertness and my mother, who had witnessed all this from her bath chair, was too shocked to utter. My godmother, on the other hand, was so delighted by the whole performance that she promptly offered to give me a pony for my next birthday. But this generous gesture was decisively checked. To my parents, at the best of times, there was little if any difference between the Bengal tiger and the common cob. For years I believed that we could not possibly afford to keep a pony; now I suspect that this was one of the few areas in which my mother allowed herself to be overprotective. And so when listening to horsy classmates discussing their ponies I occasionally felt a wistful envy.

In one respect, however, I did for a time suffer acutely at school as a result of being ‘different’. Children take even the most bizarre situations for granted, if these have always been a part of daily life, and easily form the habit of not thinking about certain matters that might be distressing to dwell upon. At intervals throughout my childhood I had registered receiving the neighbours’ sympathy because my mother was an invalid – and this had puzzled me. My own unthinking acceptance of her invalidism was so complete that I could not understand why anyone should make emotional comments. This acceptance was encouraged by her own determination to lead as normal a life as possible. To be a good housewife and mother from a bath chair is not easy, but in so far as it could be done she did it. In my eyes she had no aura of ‘differentness’ and her high spirits and capacity for enjoying simple things made her exceptionally congenial to a small child.

Yet she was not as other mothers were. And this realisation, when at last it came, had a disproportionately upsetting effect on me. It was as though a dam had burst, freeing my long-restrained awareness of her difference which then inundated my stability. Suddenly, I couldn’t take it. My frantic craving to be, in this respect, like everyone else compelled me to lie. Impulsively I would say, ‘When my mother and I were coming home from a long walk …’ or, ‘My mother is such a fast walker it’s hard to keep up.’ Being naturally truthful, like Alice, these aberrations troubled me. My mother and I did indeed go for long walks together – but I was pushing her in her bath chair. Also, she had been a fast walker, and I tried to convince myself that to change a tense was to tell no more than a half-lie. But I was too well grounded in moral theology for this to work, even temporarily. My intention was totally to mislead and therefore my lies were full-blooded and shameful. Here were the makings of another ‘scruples crisis’, in a different key, but mercifully it did not develop. As the shock of my objective appreciation of my mother’s invalidism wore off, I lost the compulsion to mislead. But it left me with an embarrassing residue of false information imparted, which throughout the rest of my schooldays occasionally rose up to confound me.

 

After my thirteenth birthday I began joyously to tick off, on the calendar in my cubicle, the days of December, and my heart seemed to swell with sheer happiness at the thought of being home again. Yet when I stepped off the train at Lismore, not having seen my parents for three months and ten days, a feeling of anticlimax and an oddly demoralising shyness overcame me. Although my parents meant no less to me than they had done in September they did mean something different. My attitudes to them had changed and I confusedly imagined it necessary to conceal this natural process as though it were some hurtful form of disloyalty. I had unconsciously transferred part of my allegiance to a world I valued all the more because parents were excluded from it. Most children who are happy at boarding-school revel in the secret-society aspect of school life. The cryptic slang, the apparently illogical customs, the usually logical rules and regulations laid down not by Authority but by generations of pupils – for me all this added up to a thoroughly satisfying existence in which grown-ups seemed insignificant and children taught each other as much as – or more than – they learned from their elders.

Inevitably this existence weakened the bonds between my mother and myself. I no longer confided everything to her or idealised her as the perfect companion. Instead, I became absurdly secretive about the most trivial details and went out of my way to try to break the links created by our mutual interests. As for my father, I now comprehended in a more adult way the strains and stresses of his life and felt correspondingly more guilty about our atrophied relationship. But this made it seem even less possible than before to take any remedial action.

Only one relationship remained unchanged. With Mark I could still discuss anything, to him I could reveal any idiocy or inconsistency, in his company I never felt it necessary to pretend to be other than myself as I was at that moment. Then, and for many years afterwards, I took my good fortune for granted, not realising how rare it is to be always totally at ease with another human being.

 

At the start of those Christmas holidays my father greeted me at the railway station with the news that Molly had just left, but had promised to send her youngest sister as a replacement in the new year. She had pronounced that in winter our kitchen would ‘perish a brass monkey’ so it seemed to us that this promise betrayed a certain lack of sisterly concern. The Emergency fuel shortage was by then acute and no doubt sub-zero temperatures had accelerated her departure. But when I viewed the situation with that new detachment gained at school it occurred to me, for the first time, that our servant problem was perhaps being aggravated by my mother’s archaic expectations. She had her standards and was incapable of compromising if those she employed could not or would not accept them. Unlike my father and myself, she understood whatever weird impulse makes the Englishman dress for dinner in the jungle. ‘We may be poor, but we needn’t live like cavemen’ was her battle-cry. A table had to be laid with the correct multiplicity of instruments placed in their correct positions, though the plates came from Woolworths and the forks and spoons were of aluminium. The maid’s uniform had to be immaculate and she had to know, or quickly learn, how to wait at table. (Her lessons were frequently a rich mine of comedy.) The kitchen might be falling around our ears, but every corner of every cupboard had to be kept spotless, and the outsides of saucepans scoured no less thoroughly than the insides, and the tea-towels boiled daily. Naturally enough, simple girls off the side of a mountain, who had never before seen a vegetable dish, never mind a napkin-ring, were confused if not positively intimidated by all this nonsense. Nor could I approve of it and in my more rebellious moments I mentally and unjustly labelled it ‘side’. (‘He has no side to him’ means, in Ireland, ‘he is a simple man, without affectation or pretension’.) To me this formality seemed both incongruous and irritating against the background of our ramshackle and poverty-stricken home; to my mother it symbolised something profoundly important. Now I can understand that she needed to uphold order and dignity as props to her own morale. But for many years no such explanation occurred to me and our divergence on this point was to become a running sore within the family.

 

My earliest Christmas memories are associated with Old Brigid, who ritually opened the season on November 1 by making the plum-puddings while grumbling obliquely about not being allowed to make a cake. Pappa sent a Christmas cake from Bewleys every year, but Old Brigid, who had never in her life been to Dublin, despised ‘them shop things’. Each year she declined cake with an offended air, explaining darkly – ‘I wouldn’t trust meself to it.’

Annually another layer of plaster fell off the kitchen walls because of over-exposure to plum-pudding steam. Yet my memory, practising romantic selectivity, presents that kitchen as a cosy place during (prewar) midwinter. Pools of golden lamplight were fringed by friendly shadows, in December a ham hung from the rafters and while the oven was being ‘got up’ the huge shiny black range roared and glowed, all amiable and animated.

While Old Brigid went through her plum-pudding routine – unhurried yet superbly efficient – I knelt on a chair at one end of the massive, scrubbed-white kitchen table and slightly opened the deep drawer. Then, every time the range needed stoking, I swiftly hid a fistful of fruit. And at the end of the day, while Old Brigid was intent on settling the pudding basins into their giant oval iron pot, I transferred my loot to the nearby guichet and rushed into the dining-room to conceal it in the sideboard. This operation was inspired not by greed but by my predilection for outwitting authority. Most of the loot went to Tommy, whose parents couldn’t afford plum-pudding. (Childhood was less complicated before the consumer society had begun its evil hypnosis of the young. It would never have occurred to me to pity Tommy because his family was even poorer than my own and it would never have occurred to Tommy to envy me.)

The two unique features of Christmas Eve were the repeated appearances of unfamiliar postmen at unpredictable hours – up to 11.00 pm – and the plucking, gutting and de-sinewing of the turkey. In those pre-supermarket days one bought one’s turkey in a state of nature and to remove the sinews, without taking most of the leg-meat with them, was an art not everyone possessed. Old Brigid knew the theory of it but found my father a singularly inept collaborator. And for me the joy of watching those two struggling with the bird – one on either side of the pantry door – far outweighed the pleasure I got next day from eating it. This was the one occasion during the year when my father might be heard using bad language. If the struggle had gone on for half-an-hour or more, and then a pound of meat came away with a sinew, he was capable of saying ‘Damn!’ under his breath. Whereupon Old Brigid would cough loudly in an attempt to save my ears from pollution.

I had a circle of well-trained relatives and friends and from the age of six onwards the shape of my Christmas presents never varied – only the size. For me the glory of Christmas morning was the sight and smell and feel of new books. I don’t remember book-tokens – perhaps they hadn’t been invented – and occasionally there were duplicate volumes. But that was an advantage rather than a problem; in my privileged position I could exchange unwanted volumes for something long coveted, on our next visit to the Dublin bookshops.

Our Christmas ritual never varied. On Christmas Eve we listened to the carol service from King’s College Chapel and afterwards we broached the Christmas cake and I was allowed to drink lemon cordial instead of milk. At midnight my parents listened to Mass from the Vatican and I – from the age of nine – went to the parish church. At ten o’clock on Christmas morning – after present opening – we sat down purposefully to a gargantuan mixed grill. Normally my parents were very light breakfasters and my mother in any case strongly disapproved of fries; but this meal was designed to keep us going until four o’clock when – true to Dublin tradition – we dined by candlelight as dusk became darkness.

To me, who habitually went to bed at seven thirty, Midnight Mass was among the most exciting events of the year. That walk through the dark, expectant night, its silence broken only by other hurrying footsteps and cheerful greetings; the packed church clumsily decorated with holly; the quivering, golden blaze of votive candles around the crib; the familiar carols being sung so badly they frequently seemed unfamiliar; the platitudinous Christmas sermon that allowed one to play at keeping a sentence in advance of the preacher without often dropping a point. Then the walk home through a night that seems always to have been frosty and tingling and starry and glittering – though I dare say this is an illusion – and so to bed, after mince-pies and a hot lemon-drink, in a stupor of happy exhaustion.

We never went away for Christmas or had anyone to stay and there were no treats like going to the pantomime. At noon on Christmas Day Mrs Mansfield and her brother came by different routes for a drink and sat at opposite ends of the room affecting to be unaware of each other’s presence. Mrs Mansfield always proudly presented us with one of her own plum-puddings and my mother always evinced suspiciously eloquent gratitude. This gift was discreetly passed on to the Wren Boys who called in their droves on St Stephen’s Day. Although those were delicious puddings – I often ate their litter-brothers when visiting Mrs Mansfield – it was common knowledge that San Toy actively participated in his mistress’s washing-up and, as her scullery was ill-lit, my mother thought it hideously probable that many of the dishes attended to by San Toy never found their way into the sink. I failed to see why that mattered, after eight hours’ boiling, but my mother’s approach to hygiene was more emotional than scientific.

Our Christmasses, then, had always been times of contentment rather than excitement. And when that contentment evaporated for me, after my first term at school, nothing remained to distinguish Christmas beyond a lot of extra hard work in the kitchen. I tried to conceal my new anti-Christmas sentiments and never hinted that I would have preferred to celebrate by going off for a day’s solitary cycling. Just as I had earlier felt obliged to pretend to believe in Santa Claus, lest adult feelings might be hurt, so now I felt obliged to pretend to be enjoying our modest festivities. I knew, however, that my mother sensed and was saddened by my new indifference to the old traditions. And I also knew that her own enjoyment was marred by my having to act as general maid instead of being a schoolgirl on holidays. Yet she tried to conceal this regret, perhaps prompted by some irrational guilt, or feeling that since nothing could be done to improve my lot it would be psychologically unwise to offer sympathy. Now I can see that those three weeks contained the seeds of much that later went wrong between us.

 

Rather to our surprise, Molly’s ‘youngest sister’ did arrive in the new year carrying all her possessions on her back in a sack smelling strongly of poultry droppings. She never made any secret of the fact that she was Molly’s illegitimate daughter and she looked like a slim edition of her mother. Her name was Brid, which is pronounced ‘Breed’. My mother said ‘I hope she doesn’t’, but in due course she did. After what my parents delicately assumed to have been a spontaneous abortion she developed ‘an affec’ for my mother. This, in mild forms, was not uncommon amongst our adolescent skivvies, but Brid’s devotion was so excessive that she had to be forcibly restrained from spending all her wages (£1 a month) on such votive offerings as bull’s-eyes and liquorice allsorts. But these developments were all in the future when I repacked my suitcase on January 12 and said goodbye to my mother in the kitchen where she was explaining the function of a casserole to an incredulous-looking Brid.

I was glad of Brid’s presence during that brief farewell. My new antagonism towards my mother had in no way diminished my love for her – only my ability to express it. The sadness of this parting was quite unlike my straightforward loneliness of the previous September. Now I was eager to get back to school and I grieved not because the holidays had ended but because they had fallen so far short of expectations. Instead of enjoying a happy reunion I had lived – without then realising it – through the prelude to an eighteen-year conflict.

Even more distressing, at a deeper level, was my new, mute sympathy for my father’s situation. Throughout the holidays I had seen him working hard, in the evenings and at weekends, on the translation of some French theological tome. And I was shattered by the significance of this not unsuccessful attempt to fatten the family purse. For as long as I could remember my father had been writing novels, and paying precious money to have them typed, and sending them to publishers, and bearing up when they were rejected. In recent years I had sometimes thought vaguely that his apprenticeship was being rather long. Yet I had never doubted that one day a typescript would be accepted, putting me in the gratifying position of having as father An Author. (Why I should have assumed his ultimate success, when I felt no such confidence about my own literary future, is not now clear to me.) Therefore his becoming a mere translator was to me a grievous personal disappointment, quite apart from the sorrow I felt on his behalf. And my understanding that he had awakened from a dream was illogically made even more painful by the fact that those hours previously spent on enjoyable if unprofitable novel writing were now being spent on hack-work to pay my school-fees. I felt sorry for my mother, too. All her married life she had been encouraging and guiding my father’s endeavours with endless patience and tact: and presumably with a certain amount of hope.

Nor would such hope have been unjustified. After my parents’ deaths I found all those typescripts in a tea-chest, under a neat file of kindly rejection slips. I looked through them – feeling ridiculously uncomfortable, as though I were eaves-dropping on a soliloquy – and was amazed equally by the interest of their irrelevant philosophical asides and by their complete lack of basic narrative skill. Had my father not been so single-minded about writing novels he might have made quite a good essayist – though possibly not a publishable one, in an age when essays are (one hopes temporarily) out of fashion.

As my father and I stood waiting on the station platform, awkwardly exchanging banalities, I felt his inner defeat as keenly as though it had been my own. And I longed to be able to convey, however indirectly, my understanding and sympathy. But we were too aware of each other’s moods and reactions to be of any mutual comfort. We knew that we were uniquely vulnerable to each other’s perceptions and both of us were too proud and too reserved ever to let the barriers go down.

The train was full of children returning to Waterford schools in self-segregated groups. I joined the Ursuline coach and remained by the door to wave dutifully to my father. When he was out of sight I felt oddly released; yet I did not immediately merge with the rest, much as I had been looking forward to rejoining my friends. Suddenly, for the first time, I was aware of myself as an outsider. Neither at home nor at school did I quite fit in. That is one of the moments I remember with a vividness which has never faded. I was staring fixedly at the Round Hill – an ancient, tree-covered fortification from which Lismore takes its name – and I felt not at all upset by this recognition of my own apartness. Neither did I see it as anything to be smug about; but I was interested in it, because it seemed to presage numerous as yet indefinable threats and promises. Then as the train changed its tune, on the bridge across the Blackwater at Cappoquin, I changed my mood and went swaying up the corridor to join my classmates.

 

It was true that at school I remained always, though not obviously, an outsider. Yet that interlude away from home was immensely important to me. Lacking it, I would have grown up with my social adaptability untested and my knowledge of human nature derived mainly from books. And, as T. S. Eliot observed, ‘It is simply not true that works … depicting … imaginary human beings directly extend our knowledge of life. Direct knowledge of life is knowledge directly in relation to ourselves, it is our knowledge of how people behave in general, of what they are like in general, in so far as that part of life in which we ourselves have participated gives us material for generalisation.’ What I most appreciated about school was the access it gave me to this ‘direct knowledge of life’. I revelled in analysing my schoolmates’ characters, observing how they reacted on each other, speculating about why they were as they were – in other words, wondering what made them tick, as Mr Eliot would not have said. To me the works of Pope were as yet a closed book but I arrived independently at one of his most celebrated conclusions:

‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,

The proper study of mankind is man.’

Academically I was backward because sheer laziness deterred me from using what was in any case a fairly limited intelligence. But my early sharing in adult problems and responsibilities had made me, emotionally, unusually mature and this ‘grownupness’ prompted many of my classmates (all of whom, apart from Sally, were my seniors) to treat me as an older sister. Thus my study of mankind flourished because I received numerous confidences which enabled me to discern the reality behind various elaborate adolescent façades. Having been brought up to regard the breaking of confidences as a gross dishonour I never felt tempted to gossip about other people’s secrets, even with Sally, and eventually I established quite a reputation as a restorer of damaged friendships – no doubt because my amateur psychoanalysing helped me to see where things had gone wrong though neither of those concerned might know exactly why they had quarrelled.

There were other problems, too – parents who didn’t get on, delinquent brothers, family debts. (Thus I learned that the price of a yacht could be peace of mind.) And early one summer morning another thirteen-year-old came creeping into my cubicle and stood, trembling all over, by my bed. ‘I think I’m bleeding to death,’ she whispered. ‘My sheets are all soaked in blood – will you tell the dormitory sister? Will they put me in hospital? Will Daddy and Mummy come?’ Visiting each other’s cubicles was so strictly forbidden that even I had never broken this rule, but now I was too angry – with Eileen’s mother – to care. I gave the semihysterical child a few sanitary towels and a brief lecture on menstruation and led her back to her bloody bed. She was the eighth child of a Dublin doctor and it appalled me that she should have been sent off to school unaware of the facts of puberty. I pitied her all the more when I recalled my own experience – rushing into my parents’ bedroom early one morning waving a pair of bloody pyjama-trousers and yelling triumphantly, ‘Look! I’m a woman now!’

At least amongst my age group, sex was not in those days a popular topic. Twice I was questioned, tentatively, about my theory of the origins of babies, and on both occasions I replied shortly, ‘Ask your mother.’ This instinctive reluctance to discuss the subject marked my own growing-up. Two years earlier I would gaily have described what I knew of the whole process, from conception to delivery, to anyone who showed an interest. But now I felt – I could not have said why – that it was a special subject, needing to be treated with reticence and reverence and not suitable for schoolgirlish chatterings. Today there can be few thirteen-year-olds unaware of the facts of life; but I find it sad that this knowledge is being spread in ways that erode reticence and reverence. However wisely or foolishly modern parents treat sex-education, the sort of innocence my generation knew has by now become an emotional impossibility. This realisation disturbs me when I look at my own daughter. A time of innocence is surely a prerequisite for the total experience, in young adulthood, of the ecstasy of erotic love. What has never been possessed can never be gloriously lost.