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For Ewan – Tales from the Purple Handbag

Dearest Ewan

You’re reading these words so I must be dead. Thus, from the other side (or from nowhere at all), I send you my eternal love. All you have to do now is take your seat in the confessional box and draw the curtain. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

I’m not Marina at all. I’m Molly from Limerick, and saddled with the name of Maureen Immelda Dympna O’Dowd. Baptised into the Holy Roman Church and proudly paraded as the first child of Attracta, a scullery maid, and Declan, a farm labourer. A respectable, but dirt-poor, married couple. A couple of years after my birth Declan went off to America to forge a new life for us, but he must have suffered memory loss. We never heard from him again, so my mother became a tragic victim who’d been abandoned by a feckless bounder. Thus she became a bitter woman who never missed an opportunity to tell me what a millstone around her neck I was.

In the mid-1950s, like many others, we crossed the channel for England where there was full employment. We settled in Oxford, my mother found work as a college servant and we rented a small college house off the Iffley Road. You’d have thought that the change in our fortunes would have jollied my mother up, but it had the opposite effect. The only thing that gave her any pleasure was her devout subservience to our church, but all that bobbing about and mumbling wasn’t for me, and I failed to toe the party line. I refused to attend Mass and I was rude to the priests and nuns when they turned up to give me pep talks. So you see, even in those far-off days, I was deemed to be a heathen.

In Limerick my education was more than a bit lacking, so everyone assumed I was as thick as brick. Oxford was supposed to be the seat of learning, but dumb Molly spent her school days sitting in a corner being ignored. I didn’t give two hoots. I became swept up in the magical world of cheap romantic magazines and the cinema, convinced I would marry a millionaire or become a famous film star. Trouble was, my fanciful life made real life boring, so in defiance I threw out all the rules of chastity that we girls are forced to absorb like the drip from a leaking gutter. In simple terms, I became a tart. So there I was, Ewan. On my back, with legs akimbo, piping anyone on board who cared to climb the gangplank. Subsequently there were many, many men in my life, but only four had any real importance. A fish porter, a Rabbi, a Judge and a Catholic priest. Sounds like the cast of a dirty joke, doesn’t it? Ha! Just you wait to hear the punch lines.

The Fish Porter’s Tale
1959

I left school the minute I was fifteen and studied the ‘sits vac’ column. My first job was in a handbag shop in the Oxford Covered Market. After a few weeks I was bored out of my skull, and that old market was freezing cold, even in summer. I really wanted to be one of those girls who sold perfume and makeup in Elliston and Cavell’s department store. You know the sort. All snooty and posh and refined. I went for an interview. I pretended I was eighteen, I snooted and poshed and refined my way through it all, and I got the job. Well, here’s you arrived, Molly, I thought. That’s showed ’em. Five pounds a week, a little black dress, and free lunches.

The owner of the handbag shop was old Stavros, a Greek in his fifties; a lonely, childless widower who wore expensive shoes and stank of garlic. When I gave in my notice, he said, ‘Me very sad, Molly. You lovely girl. Me miss you. Here. A present for you to remember old Stavros.’ He reached up to a shelf and handed me a huge purple handbag. ‘For you, my flower, and remember, if all go down drain pipe, there always job for you here.’

Anyway, I started selling makeup on the Monday and on the Wednesday I fell in love on the stockroom floor with the manager of fancy goods. Some blabbermouth found out and that was me out on my ear. Without a reference I had no choice but to sink my pride and crawl back to old Stavros. Of course he took me back, but with strings attached. I had to blindfold him and give him hand jobs, but it didn’t take up much of my time and he was very grateful.

Then I met Nico, the fish porter. God, did I fancy Nico! He used to ride around on a bicycle with a big metal carrier on the front. Every day, when he passed the handbag shop, he always made an excuse to stop and check his tyres, and make big eyes at me. Stavros told me, ‘You stay away from that Nico. He Albanian. They bad family. He worse than all the rest. He no good for you.’ But of course I took no notice. Well, you don’t take any notice of anything when you’re fifteen, do you? In any case, all the other girls chased after him, so I had to make sure I was the one who caught him, and caught I truly was. In those days most blokes who got a girl up the duff did the honourable thing. At least with a shotgun pointed at their heads, they did. Anyway, my baby’s father disappeared off the face of the earth before you could say wedding cake.

I’ve no need to tell you about society and attitudes toward my pregnancy in those days, have I, Ewan? Our great and almighty Catholic Church, thundering in like Visigoths to tell my fortune; ranting and raving and threatening hell and damnation, making me feel like such disgrace for the tiny life I’d created. The poor child doomed to the terrible tag of bastard, and his mother worse than dog dirt. But shall I tell you something, Ewan? The church can drop dead for all I care, but thanks to their bigotry my baby was saved. Today I’d have tripped off for a quick-fix abortion in my lunch hour with no conscience at all. All my prayers answered and straight out to re-offend again. But my baby stayed locked in, and for that I’ll kiss the Virgin’s feet.

When I told my mother she smacked me round the head and called me a dirty little trollop. She made the nuns arrange for me to go off to one of those mother and baby homes, and ‘it’ would be adopted before my terrible sin put further blight on her life. Did I have a choice? Well, it may not have been a choice, but a solution turned up.

Stavros caught me crying at work, and he put his arms around me. ‘Tell old Stavros what the matter.’ So I did. ‘You can move in with me,’ he said. ‘I have lovely cottage in Beckley. You tell all those nosey parkies that you have home for your child. I never blessed with children, so you can take care of house, and take care of me, and maybe when you old enough we get married.’

Patrick was born two months prematurely, just after midnight on 1st January 1960. I sweated and cursed my way through it all, and when the baby finally slurped out there was just silence in the room. You know what it’s like when a baby’s born. It starts to cry, and everyone whoops around, oohing and aahing as if it’s the first time it’s ever happened. No one said anything for what seemed like hours. Then the midwife spoke, but she had to keep clearing her throat, and she couldn’t look at me. ‘You’ve a lovely little boy, Molly,’ she said, ‘but he’s got a wee hole in his face. It’s called a cleft lip, but don’t worry. They’ll be able to do a little operation on him, and he’ll be as handsome as his daddy.’ So you see, Ewan, that’s why I always told you you were so, so beautiful.

It was a shock, but a mother’s love doesn’t reject. I turned my soul inside out and found that elusive something that’s inside all of us. It doesn’t have a name, but it soars up to the surface with the power of a depth charge. I held him in my arms and I fell in love. I was little more than a child myself, but as I lay there, sweating from the pain and exhaustion of his birth, I had to find the strength and protection of a tigress. I simply had to grow up.

My mother didn’t come to see me, but a flock of nuns and the old bitches from Social Services descended to stare at us both. The nuns said his affliction was God’s punishment. The old bitches said he deserved better. They all tried to persuade me to give him up, but Stavros was there. ‘I am Miss O’Dowd’s fiancé,’ he said. ‘We get married soon. Patrick will want for nothing. I will be proper father to the boy. I will adopt him. I have money. He will have private education. I pay for finest surgeon in London to fix his lip. Now go away and leave us alone. We family.’ They went away.

When Patrick was six weeks old he was admitted to a private hospital in London to be operated on by the finest plastic surgeon in the country. A few months later Stavros said, ‘Now you are sixteen, Molly, we get married. Eat up and get some colour back in those cheeks. Draw your chair nearer to the fire, and take a little glass of wine with me. Here, dear, take as much money as you want. Go buy yourself a nice new outfit and get your hair done. Come, my little honey bee, here’s the blindfold.’ Trouble was, blind man’s buff was the only party game Stavros wanted to play, and it didn’t do much for me. A few weeks later he caught me in bed with the insurance man. He said I’d broken his heart. He said he loved me as a daughter, and as a wife, and he loved Patrick like a son, but I’d betrayed him. He was sorry, but he couldn’t marry me after all. He found me a couple of basement rooms in Jericho and gave me fifty pounds. I packed my bags and gathered up Patrick.

Here endeth the fish porter’s tale.