Authors: James Lawless
‘So you see what could happen if little boys ask too many questions, they wouldn’t be able to keep the secrets and
they would tell the tales. You could wind up like the barber.’
‘But the barber wasn’t a
little
boy, Mam.’
***
What did I do all that time when I was growing up? I have hazy images of summer holidays when I was home from boarding school being told to play outside – always distant from her. I played marbles, rolling them away from home. Some kids travelled home by marbles. The marbles led them all the way along the side channels of streets like lodestones to welcoming hearths. When I tired of rolling, I held the marbles up to the light and imagined mysterious universes captured inside the coloured glass.
There was one time I remember – perhaps the only time – being conscious of a feeling of belonging. It was before I reached the age of knowing, before I wandered away from the tribe, before I developed an orphan mind. It was to do with the sea. All Liberties’ children love the seaside. We got the train from Amiens’ Street Station. My mother, my aunt Peg, and a few of the Liberties’ children and myself were all packed tightly into a train compartment. There was vying for the window seat and the winner (a boy with scaled bald patches on his head whose name I can’t remember) controlled the leather strap that raised or lowered the window. The prize for the winner was a squint.
As we walked along the beach I saw a woman’s shoe in the sand. When I told my mother, she suddenly looked sad. ‘I don’t suppose that’s all she lost,’ she said. And I remember moving away from the group, and the wide expanse of sand with the tide out, miles and miles like a desert and nowhere to hide or shelter from the wind that always blows across the Irish sea. And the little pretty girl in a bathing suit. We had buckets and spades and had been
digging wherever we found a whirl formation in the sand in a quest to discover the mysterious sculptor. The little girl was behind me. She told me not to look around. I heard a hissing sound drilling a hole in the sand.
I had to look.
The straps of her pink pleated bathing costume were removed revealing two raw little nipples with no breasts to cling to. The bathing suit was pulled down to just above her knees as she squatted, still holding her bucket and spade. There was a temporary look of hurt in her freckled face, but she quickly pulled up her swimsuit and shook her dark pigtails and, with a smile that is registered immortal, bounded off along the strand.
The girl’s name was Sinéad.
***
Sinéad Ní Shúileabháin’s people were well known in the Liberties. They shared a common republicanism with my mother’s people and were frequent visitors to the Woodburn shop. Sinéad’s mother died of consumption when Sinéad was very young. She was brought up by her father, Jack the tailor. I remember as a child someone mentioned the tailor’s donkey and I spent a long time wondering how a donkey could fit into a flat. My mother sometimes sent me over to the Ó Súileabháin’s with a message or something from the shop. ‘Ah Derek,’ Jack would say, greeting me always with a smile. ‘How is your mother? Is she bearing up?’ ‘She’s fine,’ I would say, not quite clear what his meaning was. ‘Will I give you a bar?’ he would say, and I thought at first it was a bar of chocolate he meant, but he started straightway into
The Bold Fenian Men
, sewing as he sang.
I remember a musty room with chalk-marked cloths cut into the shapes of triangles and squares strewn across the
linoleum floor as if awaiting a geometry class; brown paper patterns hanging from hooks in the ceiling; a delineator and a heavy shears with its adjustable brass screw; boys’ short pants pressed and made ready to be sold to drapery shops throughout the city and the new suburbs; steam gushing from an iron making the room appear like a train station; the hum of the sewing machine or the silver thimble on his finger and the halfmoon glasses hanging down his nose as he worked on the ‘special’.
Jack Ó Súileabháin could make cloth curve and fall in all the right places to nullify the imperfections in the human frame. Some say he was an artist, but cloth covers up and art lays bare. I discovered in my reading that Jack made Patrick Foley’s wedding suit. My mother recommended him, but Patrick was concerned that the ‘singing arthritic’ (Jack developed rheumatism in his fingers) might mar the cloth. However, the suit fitted Foley so neatly at the shoulders and hung so well on his frame, that no one knew that the diplomat had a hump.
When Jack’s wife died in nineteen fifty-four, he and Sinéad left the Liberties and followed the
peregrinatio
to the suburbs – he had accrued a fair amount of money by sheer hard work. They took up residence in Rathfarnham, a few roads away from where my mother and I now live.
The origins of Jack Ó Súileabháin’s anti-Englishness are not clearcut, but for the convenience of folklore (myths like their causes and effects uncomplicated), they are rooted in the Tan war. It was said the Tans attacked his home looking for rebels, and that they threw his mother onto the street and she only wearing a nightdress (not unlike my dream), and then they came at her with her own scissors and cut her long mane of auburn hair into shreds. Patrick records my mother telling him that the later recounting of such an outrage had a profound effect on a
young Gearóid Mac Suibhne who swore that there would be retribution for all crimes committed against ‘his’ people.
The tailor instilled in Sinéad a hatred of all things English. He indoctrinated her so strongly in lore, myth and song that no amount of education could ever hope to redress. ‘
Is treise dúchas ná oiliúnt
’
(nature is stronger than nurture)
was a favourite saying of Sinéad’s and one could hear her father’s echo in it.
As a primary school kid, Sinéad often called to our house, more to see my mother, to practise her Irish than to see me. My mother is a fluent non-native Irish speaker. She told me in one of her rare moments of
denouement
that she had been in the same Gaelic League class as Éamon de Valera.
What happens to the real offspring of a mother when she is seconded to someone else? We search for blocks to fill our own absences. Sinéad got information out of my mother that I could never get: about
Cumann na mBan
, the Irish language, the
Troubles
of the twenties and more besides.
My mother berated me for my apparent luke-warmness towards the language.
‘Sinéad is going to get a good result in her exam because she practises all the time. How do you expect to do well if you don’t speak it? I never hear you speaking it.’
‘I hear
it.
I hear
you
. Isn’t that enough?’
It was the first time I remember being deliberately cheeky to my mother. It was to do with her showing me up in front of Sinéad. Or maybe it was because I saw through her words and found something hollow.
One Christmas – I remember now it was the Christmas after that summer excursion to the seaside – I got a plastic ring in a cracker. Sinéad was visiting us. She never men
tioned that incident by the sea, and I never brought it up either. But it made me feel close to her, not in any overt sexual way (I was still prepuberty then), more like a kind of bonding, making her a sort of surrogate sibling. I offered her the ring. She laughed. She was just at the stage of shedding those soppy female qualities that she later called
weaknesses
(like calling her father, Daddy – she was now referring to him simply as Jack).
We were sitting on a bed over the shop. Tomás’ room.
‘I want you to wear it,’ I said.
‘You know we could be cousins. We are like cousins.’
By cousins I think she meant that we lived close to each other, and to give a ring to a cousin or to kiss her was not ‘on’.
But she said that I was
go deas
and that she would keep the ring but not to wear.
Her refusal to wear the ring troubled me. I felt rejected. I had saved it for her. It was meant to be a sign of something between us. I remember going outside. It was beginning to snow. I began to shiver. I was in shirtsleeves and short pants. There were goosepimples on my legs. I walked into Saint Patrick’s Park and saw a statue all grey on a bench with the snow falling on it. And then the statue got up from the bench and it was a man and he walked away. A man with a hat shadowing his face.
***
My mother did not neglect me materially. I never went hungry. I had the best of clothes. My school fees were always paid on time. Maybe I felt all her money went on me and she had nothing left for the insurance man. But I realise now, looking back, that all those years inside myself I was calling silently for a touch, a caress, a mother’s warmth.
I never knew my mother’s lap.
Again when I was small, I remember her addressing an envelope. I put my hand on her shoulder. It was a spontaneous act. I wanted to see what she had written. She had written the word
Box.
She quickly turned the envelope upside down the minute she felt my hand and shrugged me off, not roughly, just by the raising of her shoulder, enough to make me withdraw.
‘Why are you writing to a box, Mam?’
She sighed. ‘It’s for your Uncle Gus. He moves around a lot.’
It was her little concession to me. But she wouldn’t tell me any more.
Every year on my birthday and at Christmas a present arrived by post from England – a Meccano set or a chemistry set that could make bombs, stuff like that.
From Uncle Gus.
As a small boy I took all this for granted. I didn’t care who Uncle was or whether he lived in a box or not as long as I got my presents. It is only now that I query my mother about our mysterious relative.
‘Why doesn’t Uncle Gus ever come home, Mam? How come I’ve never seen him?’
‘He would lose his job. Jobs are scarce.’
‘Even for a holiday?’
‘He can’t afford a holiday.’
‘But he has never seen me, Mam.’
‘Run along now, Derek. I’m getting a headache.’
***
I can recall now the first time I heard the insurance man remonstrating with my mother. It was late one Christmas Eve. I was six or seven at the time, waiting in bed for Santa, pressing tightly on my eyes, trying desperately to sleep for fear he would not leave me anything if he caught
me awake. The song fading on the wireless below I remember had a relevant poignancy:
I feel sorry for the laddie…
He hasn’t got a daddy…
He’s the little boy that Santa Claus forgot.
Mr Counihan’s querulous tone rose through waves of drowsiness and my mother’s sobbing.
But when I asked her about it the next day – Christmas Day – all she said was, ‘What a dreamer you are, Derek.’
***
I keep my own diary up to date. It is like a companion to me or maybe a crutch. Like trying to fill the void in your head with blobs of ink. I write:
What can be found after an archaeological excavation of the human heart? The only thing I can deduce for sure is that I live in a loveless world. Everything else is uncertain. Uncertainty is a wound one carries inside oneself.
***
Mam’s health continues to deteriorate. I want to confront her about the circumstances of my birth but I am afraid. Afraid of breaking the fine thread that holds her life together.
Christmas of the my last year in boarding school I am sitting in a church pew. There is carol singing, but I am concentrated on a family, on a baby in a crib. A little boy lights a candle near the crib, his action safely guided by his father’s hand. I contemplate a virgin birth. I think of the decapitated statue of the Virgin that I discovered in the storeroom in boarding school. I saw her insides made of chalk. I try to examine the countenance of Joseph for
signs. He is holding a lily-branch in his hand. His face of plaster shows no emotion as he looks on the child that he did not beget. I think of the absurdity of the situation. I think of Patrick Foley and wonder how he looked at me as a baby in a cradle. I think of his painting on his study wall. I was the burden carried through the storm, the heavy package that weighted down the earth.
Patrick Foley met my mother for the first time formally at Nelson’s Pillar in May, 1932.
He had spotted her earlier. He noted in his diary for that month:
Saw a beautiful blond girl coming out of Whitefriar Street church. She smiled at me as she passed. She sauntered along unhurriedly, apparently without a worry in the world.
He had run out of cigarettes and stumbled upon a shop in the Liberties called Woodburn’s (at first he thought it was an advertisement for Woodbines). To his surprise, he discovered the same girl he had seen in Whitefriar Street standing behind the counter.
‘I do remember you,’ she said. She had such a joyful giggle. I wanted to ask her out but I lacked the courage. It would be too rash, too soon; one must follow decorum – that’s why I’m a diplomat I suppose. I bought my cigs and bade her good day.
***
The following day he returned to the shop, bought a large bar of chocolate and then gave it to my mother. They chatted. The shop wasn’t busy except for some little street urchins who came in to buy halfpenny mixtures. He was taken by how she dealt with them with great patience, opening and closing glass jars. She told him, opening the
wrapper on the chocolate, that it was a treat to eat things which weren’t broken or bruised. He asked her what she meant. ‘Broken biscuits from Jacobs,’ she said, ‘and Tomás used to bring bruised fruit home from the market.’ She explained that Tomás was her brother who had been killed by the Tans. Patrick said he was sorry to hear about her brother but she said it was all right; it was a long time ago. She told him her mother had said he died ‘before disappointment’. She said they used to throw a lot of the plums into the dustbin if they if they couldn’t find a Peeler. She laughed. When he asked her if she could not sneak something from the shelf, she took a brooch from her blouse and held the pin upright. ‘As straight as that?’
He finally plucked up enough courage to ask her to come out with him. She said she would, but that it was better not to call for her at the shop. She didn’t say why.
As I cycled home to Rathfarnham, I wondered how someone as beautiful as she had not married as yet. Then who am I to talk at my age? I figure she is in her late twenties. I feel an outsider in the Liberties. Their twisting lanes and walls contain secrets unknown to me.
***
They met at the Pillar, as agreed, and proceeded to walk along the broad thoroughfare of O’Connell street, observing all the hustle and bustle as the city made ready for the Eucharistic Congress. They saw diminutive, veiled virgins being trained for procession, and boy scouts and girl guides of different countries rehearsing. There were flags and banners everywhere. They were stopped by a group of young men who were marching imperiously along the street. They asked them if they were wearing their scapulars. My mother chuckled and said no but she was wearing her suspenders. The men were not amused as they
marched away and Patrick records that he himself was taken aback by the brazenness of my mother’s retort.
He told her that his family had moved to the suburbs to avoid the consumption epidemic. He said everyone who could got out. He records my mother taking umbrage at this. She said it wasn’t true, that Muddy lived for a time in a house in Aughavanagh Road; but she nearly died from the loneliness and returned to live over the shop again after a couple of months. He realised he had offended her and apologised. By way of atonement he told her that the people in the suburbs were not as nice as Liberties’ people, and she was soon in good form again.
Patrick records my mother teasing him, saying he was not a true blue when he told her that his deceased father, a builder’s surveyor, had married a girl from Wicklow. She was amazed when Patrick told her he was an only child.
The first day of the Congress the cavalry led the procession followed by cardinals and bishops and judges and all the dignitaries until the last appeared, and they were simply listed as
the women:
‘Why do women have to be last,’ M said, ‘like the end of a snake?’ M would not march last. She could not march with Cumann na mBan, as they were declared illegal, but she could march with the Irish-speaking Conference of Saint Mobhi from the northside. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I wish I was Amelia Earhart and I could soar above them all.’
They made their way to Wynns hotel where they had tea and scones. She told him that she had been a supervisor at Jacobs biscuit factory for several years. However, when a number of girls had been sacked for joining a trade union, she left in sympathy with them.
And apart from attending night classes in
Cumann na mBan
and doing charity work in the tenements, she
worked full-time in her mother’s shop:
I am fortunate to have met this bright and beautiful girl. But somehow I feel inadequate in her presence. She is so vibrant. She thinks the idea of travelling is romantic. She had a chance, she said, of going to America a few years ago. A student in the College of Surgeons had eyes for her but her mother wouldn’t let her go. Besides, she said, with a grin on her face, she only half-liked him anyway. I wasn’t sure if such a confession was intended to generate or banish a jealousy. She made no comment about my stoop.
***
They went to the cinema. My mother was hesitant to go at first. If members of
Cumann na mBan
saw her, what would they think? She enjoyed the chocolate Patrick bought her. ‘If you keep buying me this,’ she said, ‘I’ll soon be as fat as a pregnant woman.’
Then Patrick met Gearóid.
Gearóid bumped into them as they were coming out of the cinema. He appeared out of a shadow, Patrick asserts. His hair was dishevelled and he was unshaven, his chin carrying a bristle of perhaps two or three days growth. My mother, still in the dream of the film, didn’t notice how distraught he looked. He asked her accusingly in Irish why she was supporting a ‘foreign culture’. My mother gave one of her heartiest chuckles and said she didn’t give a damn. Patrick noted how Gearóid glared incriminatingly at him before storming off. My mother realised her
faux pas.
She told Patrick that Gearóid was always very touchy, and she spent the rest of the evening brooding over the stupidity and falsity of motion pictures. Patrick observed:
She discarded her light-hearted alter ego. She retreated deep into herself, her hurt registering on her face, her arms enfolding her into a protective space.
He teased her, saying she was acting like the
sean bhean bhocht,
but she turned to him and told him – deadly seriously – that Gearóid had put a player’s eye out once with a hurley stick. She said it was put down as an accident but it was due to something the player had said, some slight he had made of the republican movement. She was just telling him that for his own safety. She could handle him all right; and Muddy. Both of them had known Gearóid since he was a child. He was like part of their family, but she said Patrick would have to be careful because he came from outside the walls. That’s why she didn’t want him calling to the shop.
A fear has entered my bones. I fear for M. I feel she is trapped somehow, stuck to Liberties’ walls and streets by the blood of its martyrs. I would like to have the strength to wrench her free from this underworld.
***
Patrick walked with my mother in the Phoenix Park after the special children’s Mass. He writes that the place looked like it was covered with snow with all the children dressed in white and the little girls in their veils, singing like angels. ‘A wonderful sight to behold.’ They found themselves joining in the singing (‘it was infectious’) of
Faith of our Fathers
and
Ave Maria.
Listening to the music and doting on the children, a tear came to my mother’s eye. ‘She would make a good mother,’ Patrick writes, ‘but would I be able to do the business?’
Because of the international flavour of the Congress, there were hundreds of interpreters in city churches. Patrick acted as Spanish interpreter, attached to the Pro-Cathedral. Men and women were segregated by the Church, so he and my mother had to attend separate sodalities. They arranged to meet afterwards at White
Friar Street.
When the Dutch girl guides concluded their procession with a fascist salute to the cardinal legate, Patrick had this to say:
Maybe it is due to my own touchiness, but I am amazed how the fascist salute is accepted as a norm by all nationalities in the Church. If they warn of the dangers of other ideologies such as communism, why don’t they equally warn of the dangers of fascism? No one has raised a voice against it.
***
He reflects on my grandmother and Gearóid:
I am glad M told me about G. I thought she did not want me around the shop because of her mother, who is like Maud Gonne in her widow’s weeds mourning for her husband and her son. I thought that perhaps her mother might have objected to the age difference between M and myself. But she was polite to me when I met her. She spends most of her time in the back room and leaves most of the running of the shop to M. She never invited me into the back of the shop. She is fond of G. Perhaps she sees him as a surrogate son. (M told me his mother died young and his father was killed by the Tans). I think he is in the ‘movement’. I think the shop is being used as a ‘safe house’. I’m not sure. G is a rather surly character, or maybe it’s just that I don’t know him or understand him. He strikes me, not as an ideologist, but as a vindictivist, as one out to settle old scores. There is tension in his presence. He appears suddenly as if from nowhere. He is a denizen of darkness, fading in and out of the pitchy labyrinths around the Liberties. He speaks only in Irish to M. She told me that an English soldier said to G at the Pillar once: ‘Got the time mate?’ G refused to answer. He just pointed to the fáinne
on his lapel. ‘Hey’, said the Englishman, ‘he don’t speak English. How many of the Irish is illiterate?’ M says that if we were all as stubborn as G, the Irish language could be saved.
***
After sodality, Patrick escorted my mother home. They bought a ‘one and one’ in Rocco’s in Wexford Street, which my mother claims was the first chip shop in Dublin. She teased Patrick. She asked him if she knew the origin of the term ‘one and one’. ‘Of course’, said Patrick, ‘a fish and chip; it was before the Italians got the lingo.’ And then she said she’d like an ice cream from Capello’s. Patrick wanted to know if it was her birthday. She just laughed as they rambled up Cuffe Street.
As they headed back towards the Woodburn shop, they saw Gearóid coming out and caught a glimpse of my grandmother with her black shawl ruffled by the wind. She stood in the doorway for a moment, Patrick records, and then disappeared into the back before they could reach her. Gearóid looked disapprovingly at Patrick and rattled on in Irish to my mother. He was very irate. He said that the Northern pilgrims were being stoned in Lisburn and Belfast. When he had finished his spiel, he pushed past them rather brusquely. My mother shouted after him in Irish, asked him to wait a moment. She apologised about the film, asked him not to be angry, that there was no harm in it. He turned and scowled at her, said there was harm in it and that she was drunk on foreign capitalist rubbish. He glowered at Patrick, saying how she insulted him in front of a stranger. My mother pleaded with him, but he pulled away.
After the women’s Mass, Patrick asked my mother what the sermon was about. She said that they were told to be
helpful towards their parents and brothers. With Tomás gone, she said she looked upon Gearóid as her brother now. ‘And wives...’ She laughed and threw back her hair, ‘should inspire their husbands with the sweet fragrance of their goodness and virtue and gentle attractiveness of their example.’
The main Mass in the Phoenix Park on Sunday the twenty-sixth of June was attended by one million people. Although Patrick noted that General O’Duffy gave his Blueshirts the day off for their competence in handling the occasion, he also records how:
M lost her beige hat at the Mass. She was not too put-out by it. She brought me into Whitefriar Street chapel to show me the shrine to Saint Valentine. The saint’s casket was all aglow with light and flowers and worshippers praying for sweethearts. We walked back to the shop, hand-in-hand, flushed by hymns and candlelight. She allowed me to kiss her before I set out for Rathfarnham.
***
England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity, or so we were taught at school.
My aunt Peg perceived the abdication of King Edward V111 on the tenth of December 1936 (to marry the commoner, Mrs Simpson) as an opportunity to add more press cuttings and photographs to her royal collection.
De Valera perceived it as an opportunity to delete the crown from involvement in Irish affairs internally at least. Britain was reluctant to argue with him at such a stage, as it suffered the embarrassment of the royal scandal.
While the King had to be recognised at least symbolically by diplomats abroad, Patrick Foley perceived the abdication as an opportunity to attempt to advance in his career. This hopefully would be achieved by his helping to
secure a separate and independent identity for Ireland abroad. Ireland’s affairs, asserted Patrick, must no longer be seen as simply an appendage of British foreign policy.
He was posted to the new Irish legation in Madrid in 1935. Before this he had been granted short sojourns in Paris and Rome, but the Madrid position would be for a number of years, hopefully – suitable for a ‘family man’. He had another reason for wanting to get out of Ireland for a longer period than previously. The Civil Service at home was stagnating and simply replicated the British system. He wanted to escape from what he considered the ‘narrow and closed mentality’ in Ireland and search for opportunities to show innovation in a meaningful diplomatic sense. But rather contradictorily he writes: ‘My head rules my heart, but my heart is lonely.’