I hate my brother. I know this isn’t a very conventional way to start a letter and I should be asking you how you are and whether your house won the last hockey match, and telling you about my health and what the weather’s like, but I’m so boiling with rage that I can’t think of anything else right now. I know you don’t think that Harry is that bad, but really, Frances, that is just because you’re an only child. If you had a brother like Harry I know you’d hate him too. He’s always been annoying, of course. He loves lording it over me and acting as if he’s ten years older than me instead of only two, and he loves the fact that he’s allowed to do whatever he wants (well, practically everything), while I always have to ask for permission and never get it (well, hardly ever).
But this time he surpassed himself. We were having roast chicken for dinner, which is my very favourite thing to eat as you know, and when Father was carving it I asked if I could have some of the breast, which is my very favourite bit of roast chicken. And as usual Mother said, ‘Now, Mollie, wait until your father and Harry have been served.’
Father said, ‘Oh don’t worry, Rose, I don’t mind,’ but Harry said, ‘I certainly do.’
If Mother and Father hadn’t been there I’d have told him to shut up, but as they were there I just made a face at him when they weren’t watching. Which clearly wasn’t enough to stop him tormenting me, because even when Father had given me and Phyllis a little bit of chicken breast (the rest of my serving was leg, which I do like too, but not as much as the breast), Harry kept going on and on about how good food was just wasted on girls and that as the men of the house he and Father needed to keep their strength up. And even when Mother said, ‘Harry, don’t tease your sister,’ he didn’t stop.
I don’t know why it made me so angry this evening. It wasn’t as though it were something new. Things like this happen at meals every week. Harry is always served before us girls and he always gets the best bits. But for some reason today it was particularly infuriating. Phyllis wasn’t impressed either, especially when Harry started on about the ‘men of the house’.
‘You’re hardly a man,’ she said dryly. ‘You’re still in school.’
‘And Phyllis is going to be at university next year,’ I said. ‘While you’ll still be stuck in a classroom. Nothing very manly about that.’
Harry looked annoyed at this, but before he could respond, Father said, ‘Now, children, do stop bickering,’ and Mother started telling us about Aunt Josephine’s extremely boring plans to start painting watercolours. Actually, I should probably have been more grateful for this news, because maybe if Aunt Josephine starts spending all her time painting views of Dollymount Strand she’ll have no time to call around here every day and tell us exactly what we’re doing wrong. If I didn’t have such an awful brother myself, I wouldn’t believe that someone as essentially decent as Father could have such a dreadful sister. They’re not a bit alike.
But I’m getting distracted. The rest of dinner passed peacefully (if boringly), and then Mother played some new songs on the piano, and we all sang (well, me and Phyllis did. Julia only wants to sing hymns at the moment, and Harry just rolled his eyes when Mother got out the sheet music). But then, after we’d sung ourselves hoarse, Mother announced that Phyllis, Julia and I had to help her with some mending. You know how dull mending is, and this evening Father had to go through some documents or other from the Department, so he wasn’t even there to entertain us by reading us the latest chapters of that epic novel of his. Which meant that the mending was even more dull than usual.
I don’t understand why there’s always so much mending to do. It’s not as though we all go around ripping up our clothes on purpose. But somehow there’s always something to be mended or darned or hemmed or some other fiddly little job, and it’s always me and Phyllis who have to do the worst ones (Julia only has to mend things like old tea towels where it doesn’t matter so much if the stitches are perfect or not. Even though she’s twelve, Mother is convinced that she’s a poor little baby, who can only perform the most simple of tasks. She certainly didn’t think this about me when I was twelve). Some people send out their mending, but Mother says that’s a waste of money.
‘I have three perfectly good menders in the house already,’ she says, and then laughs as if it were a hilarious joke. I told her that I would gladly go without a hideous new school hat if it would help her afford to get things mended but she said I had to have a new hat for school, and besides, my hat isn’t hideous (this is a lie).
So anyway, there we were, sitting by the fire, sewing some buttons that had got loose on my least favourite blouse (me) and fixing a skirt hem that had come down (Phyllis) and a towel that had got a hole torn in it (Julia. I think she might tear them on purpose so she can always have something easy to do on mending evenings and Mother isn’t tempted to give her something more complicated, like a lace petticoat). And then Harry marched in with his friend Frank Nugent, who had mysteriously appeared in our house from nowhere as far as I could tell, and THREW A PILE OF SMELLY SOCKS IN MY FACE.
‘Go on, darn these,’ he said, and sniggered in a particularly enraging way.
Frank didn’t snigger. In fact, he looked a bit uncomfortable.
‘I say, Harry. That was a bit …’ he said, and that was when Mother came in.
‘Harry threw these horrible socks at me!’ I cried.
‘I just told her they need darning,’ said Harry calmly. His face was so innocent you would never think he had been gleefully throwing socks around just a few seconds earlier.
‘Some of them aren’t even clean,’ I said furiously. ‘They absolutely stink.’
‘Harry, you shouldn’t throw socks at your sister,’ said Mother sternly.
I threw Harry a triumphant look. But my triumph was short-lived, as Mother then picked up a grey sock and examined the heel. It was practically worn through.
‘But Mollie, they do need to be darned,’ she said, ‘so you might as well do it now. The clean ones anyway.’
Harry smirked at me in a sickening way, and I glared at him as ferociously as I could. Which must have been very ferociously, because Frank looked a little scared. Harry didn’t, unfortunately.
‘Mother, I’m going to Frank’s house,’ he said. ‘We’re going to test each other on French verbs.’
‘I’m not sure I should let you go anywhere, after this childish carry on,’ said Mother.
‘Oh, Mother, I was only teasing,’ said Harry plaintively.
‘All right,’ said Mother. ‘But don’t be late home.’
If I’d thrown socks in someone’s face and then demanded to go to Nora’s house, I would definitely not have been allowed to go out.
‘l’ll try not to be,’ said Harry. ‘Though we do have so much studying to do.’
And he smirked again at me and Phyllis, and went off.
Frank gave us a sort of apologetic wave as they left. He sometimes seems like he could be quite a nice boy really, but how nice can he be if he’s friends with Harry?
Anyway, I knew perfectly well that Harry wasn’t going to study French verbs, or anything like it. The two of them were probably going to try smoking Frank’s father’s pipe again. Nora and I caught them at it in the grounds of the church last week, and very sick they looked too. Which served them right.
But of course, I couldn’t say anything about that to Mother. After all, I’m not a sneak, even if some people deserve to be sneaked on. Instead, I had sit there and darn Harry’s stupid socks. I should have sewn up the toes so that they’d pinch his feet when he next put them on. But, unlike Harry, I’m not a spiteful, mean-spirited monster. So I just imagined sewing up the toes instead, which wasn’t half as much fun.
So that’s why I was so angry. Now that I’ve written it all down I feel much better. Writing sometimes has that effect, I find. I’ve thought about keeping a diary, but Harry would probably find it and read it, and then make my life a misery teasing me about it. And if he didn’t find it, Julia probably would, seeing as we are forced to share a room. It’s so unfair that I have to share a room with such a baby who still plays with dolls when I am practically a grown-up (or at least am no longer a Junior at school). And it’s not only her babyishness that makes it hard to sleep in the same room with her. Recently she’s started to get very religious in an annoying way. She keeps telling us we should all pray more and go to Mass every day, and has started putting up even more holy pictures and scapulars and things next to her bed. And she spends about five years saying her prayers every night.
Of course I say my prayers too, but I’m always finished in about five minutes, and then I have to put up with Julia looking at me reproachfully out of her enormous green eyes while she prays on and on and on. She was even worse than usual tonight. When she finally got into bed she looked across the room where I was sitting in bed reading Three Men and a Boat (which is awfully funny, you should see if they have it in your school’s library) and said, ‘You really should say your prayers properly, you know.’
‘How do you know I don’t?’ I asked, without looking up from the book.
‘You rush through them,’ she said. ‘I looked at the clock tonight. It was only two minutes.’
‘What were you doing looking at the clock?’ I said. ‘I thought you were meant to be praying too.’
And she didn’t say anything after that. I sometimes think half of the praying business is just for show, but there’s no point in trying to convince some of the grown-ups of that. Aunt Josephine thinks Julia is a perfect little girl. In fact, last week she asked me why I couldn’t be more like her, which even Mother thought was a bit much.
‘I’m not saying there’s not room for improvement,’ Mother said, looking at me in a way which showed she was at least partly joking, ‘but really, Mollie’s a very good girl. Not everyone can be as, well, as devout as Julia is at the moment.’
All the nuns at school love Julia, of course. It doesn’t help that she looks so ridiculously angelic with her flowing blonde hair. I never looked like that when I was her age. As you know, the rest of us Carberrys have thick brown hair that looks exactly like a set of wavy brown mops (at least, I presume that’s what Aunt Josephine’s hair would look like if she ever let it down. Which I doubt she ever does. I bet she even sleeps with it up in that complicated bun). But Father says that when he was a little boy his mother (who died before I was born) had fair hair like Julia’s. Honestly, if it wasn’t for that, I’d think Julia was somehow swapped at birth with another baby, even though she was born in this very house so I’m not sure who she could have been swapped with. She really isn’t like any of the rest of us. Not least because she’s so good. Even when she’s with her friend Christina, they never seem to do anything interesting.
Years ago, Nora’s big brother convinced her that when she was a baby, their maid had left the pram outside a shop and then taken the wrong one home and Nora believed it for nearly a year. She was totally convinced that she wasn’t a blood relation to the rest of the Cantwells, even though she has reddish hair and dark blue eyes just like her Aunt Alice. Actually, Nora always says she can’t understand how she can look so like Aunt Alice, who is very beautiful (and she really she is; men are always writing poems about her and comparing her to Ireland itself) while not being very beautiful herself. Not that Nora isn’t nice-looking – I think she looks very nice indeed – but she is convinced that her nose is too big for her face (it’s not that big), her legs are too short and that her hair is always falling out of its hair ribbon. Well, the last bit is definitely true. Anyway, at least you definitely know you’re related to your parents. You all have such excellent black curls.
But back to the awfulness of sharing with Julia. The other day, after Julia took all my things off the dressing table that we share and made a little shrine to the Blessed Virgin, I asked Mother if I could take Harry’s room if he went away to boarding school. Mother said I was being ridiculous, not least because Harry wasn’t going away to school when there was a perfectly good school two miles down the road. Then she said that if he did go to boarding school, he’d still have to have a room at home in the holidays. Which I know is fair enough, or it would be if it applied to anyone but Harry. On a brighter note, she did tell Julia she couldn’t turn our dressing table into a shrine, so that’s something. Julia put her statues and holy pictures on her bookshelf instead, which is quite all right.
Anyhow, I know it’s ages since I got your last letter, and I’m very sorry I haven’t written to you sooner, but really my life is so incredibly dull. There’s absolutely nothing to say. All I do every day are the following things:
Walk to school, usually in the rain, which means by the time I get there I am tired or wet or both.
Sit through hours and hours of boring lessons (well, I suppose some of them are all right, but most are pretty dull).
Talk to Nora about how tedious our lives are. And sometimes other things too.
Try to avoid Grace Molyneaux and Gertie Hayden (which can be tricky because Grace is Nora’s cousin and all grown-ups love her and urge us to spend more time with her).
Walk home, usually in the rain (see Number One).
Do my home exercises.
Try to avoid Mother, Father, Phyllis, Harry and Julia, all of whom seem determined to annoy me in different but equally irritating ways.
Listen to Mother play the piano and hear her remind us that she could have been a concert pianist if her parents had had the money to send her to Paris.
Read books about people whose lives are more exciting than mine (Please send me some book recommendations, by the way. I feel as though I’ve read all the good ones in our house AND the school library).
Listen to Father read from his epic novel (actually, that is quite fun).
And that’s more or less it, apart from Sundays, which don’t involve school but which, of course, do involve getting up early to go to Mass. And sometimes there is escaping to Nora’s house (or having her come to visit me). But really there is not much variety in my life these days. So you can see that you haven’t been missing out on anything due to my lack of letters.
I am trying to think of something more exciting to write about but all I can think of is that I finished knitting quite a nice scarf (blue wool, moss stitch) and that Nora has decided she wants to become a doctor. But she’s always coming up with new ambitions. Last year when women were allowed to vote in the council election she said she wanted to be Dublin’s first lady mayor, but that only lasted for a few days, so she will probably want to be something totally different soon. Oh, and Phyllis is definitely going to go to University in October, which I suppose means that I will be allowed go there too. But as that won’t be for at least four years I can’t feel too excited about it at the moment.
And I won’t get there at all if I don’t work hard at school. It’s not that I’m lazy exactly, but I must admit that I don’t always work as much as I might. I certainly don’t work as hard as Grace Molyneaux, who is absolutely determined to win the Middle Grade Cup. This is a new award that some of the staff at school have created in order to encourage us to work harder. Do you have any prizes like that in your school? I’m not sure they’re a good idea if Grace’s behaviour is anything to go by. The girl who has received the best marks all term and in the summer exams will win a special little cup, and I haven’t mentioned it in my letters before because it is extremely boring, and also I have no chance of winning it. Grace, however, has become obsessed with it and it’s made her even more annoying than usual. She’s already gloating over what she sure will be her triumphant victory.
Though being Grace, she pretends that she isn’t gloating and says things like, ‘Oh of course, a silly little girl like me couldn’t possibly win that cup! But wouldn’t it be awfully nice if I did?’
Meanwhile, Daisy Redmond, who is almost always top of the class, doesn’t go on about the cup at all. She works for the love of knowledge and not the supposed glory of a cup. But for Grace it is all about victory and she is always furious whenever Daisy gets better marks than her, even though Daisy doesn’t seem bothered either way. Grace is determined to beat her and she (Grace, that is, not Daisy) has got a special notebook in which she takes notes for all the extra study she is doing. I feel exhausted just thinking about all this school-work. All I know is that I hope Daisy wins.
Do write soon and let me know all about your adventures. Your life always seems much more exciting than mine. Maybe it’s because you don’t have nuns in England (or at least in your school) so it all seems very exotic. Some girls in school think being a nun looks very romantic and important, but I wouldn’t want to be one myself. They have to get up practically in the middle of the night and go to Mass every single day and twice on Sundays. Please write soon. Hopefully I will not have died of boredom by then.
Lots of love,
Your fond friend,
Mollie