Peeling Oranges (8 page)

Some of them know Muddy. ‘Oh a grand generous woman,’ they say. ‘Many’s the credit she gave, not like some of the huckster shops nowadays. A pudding at Christmas, or a bit of coal for the fire.’

They ask me if I have children. I tell them not yet. They say the number of children you have is a sign of how much your husband loves you. Mrs Chaigneau says the woman on the top landing only has three children. Her husband doesn’t love her at all, she says

We will have children, Patrick, won’t we? We have plenty of time. I miss you so much. I hope you are safe over there, and that you are looking after yourself.

Mrs Chaigneau told me that the woman next door to her has a fancy man. ‘You see her husband is a rig – you know,’ she said ‘one ball,’ and when she said it, I got a fit of the giggles. She was so serious, but when I laughed, she laughed too. People can be funny, Patrick, without knowing, don’t you think? Anyway, her husband can’t ‘do the business’. No one makes any comment.

Oh, the basement Mrs Chaigneau lives in is terrible; its the worst part of a tenement house; it’s near the sewers, and when there’s a drought the rats come up through the floors. There is such poverty, Patrick, it would break your heart. When I called one evening, one of Mrs Chaigneau’s daughters – Pauline, she is sixteen – was getting ready to go out with her fellow. She had no money for makeup so she dabbed a wet cloth on the red ink of the Sacred Heart Messenger and applied the colour to her cheeks. And she went away singing with her home-made rouge as happy as if she were a lady.

***

Some of the women, even when pregnant, didn’t know where babies came from. My mother recounts visiting a fifteen-years-old girl in the Coombe hospital:

She had a little misadventure. She kept staring at her navel, expecting the baby to pop out through it. She was crying when nothing seemed to be happening. Their mothers tell them nothing. My mother told me nothing really. But then I could read, but even at that, there is fierce censorship. It’s funny seeing the women coming in to the library in Kevin Street saying the book they want is on their doctors’ prescriptions.

***

In my reading of the period I learned that a church-imposed Puritanism entrapped a married woman in two ways: on the one hand she was told to increase and multiply; and on the other she was told that what she was doing was dirty and evil and that afterwards she must be cleansed. The cleansing was known as
churching
. After a birth the woman had to go to church to renounce Satan so that she could be accepted back into the fold once more. Until she did that she was tainted and was not allowed to touch or prepare food.

Such ambivalence incensed my mother. She argued if women had ‘gone on strike’ and refused to continue to prepare food indefinitely in protest at such humiliation, both the Church and all patriarchy would be in a ‘right stew’:

The reality is that the women in the tenements are saints, living saints. Some husbands give them no money, but drink it all, and then come home looking for their dinner and this and that, and beat up their wives when there is nothing there for them. It is as if their wives are to blame for everything – they are just slaves. They have such courage. They are expected to perform the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

But even my mother had to admit that drunkenness was understandable in such squalor. Drink was cheap: two pence for a jug of porter, and the false security and warmth of a public house could be so attractive when all that awaited one was a dank room.

Outside, the streets were littered with spittle and excreta. And as evening approached, the smoke from the soft, bituminous coal rose up and enshrouded the city in a lethal, sulphuric mist. Coughing could be heard as my mother passed each tenement on her way homeward. There was no light. People went to bed when darkness fell. There were no cradles for babies, only arms. And always, incongruously visible, the Protestant spire of Saint Patrick’s, piercing the mist.

***

My mother spent the odd night in Rathfarnham when trade was not too hectic in the shop. She was reluctant to leave her mother after the attack, but Muddy insisted that her daughter should have a break. She would be all right with a neighbour staying by her.

My mother wrote to Patrick and told him that she had seen the poet, Mr Yeats, being pushed around in a wheelchair in Saint Enda’s park, and that his hair was pure silver. She listened to Frank Ryan broadcasting on the wireless from Madrid. It was easy to get a reception after ten p.m. She read a letter from Gearóid which bore the marks of the trenches. He and his battalion were lying about hungrily eating oranges that had been thrown to them from a passing lorry. He said the oranges were their only nourishment that day. He was never so glad of anything. The oranges kept them alive.

However, she didn’t stay long in the house. She found it too cold and lonely: ‘What is the point of putting down a fire when there is no one to share the warmth with?’

My mother continued to work with
Cumann na mBan
, but concentrated more and more on the social end of things. Her ideology was fading. A sense of universal justice was a stronger call for her now than what she perceived as the fainter peal of nationalism. She continued to study the Irish language and Irish culture but widened her ken, and after she had dispatched every romance novel in Kevin Street public library, she began to read history and philosophy and whatever little there was at the time on women’s anatomy.

Long before she came to the Liberties, Mrs Chaigneau lived near Monto, the red-light district. She told my mother many stories about the ‘unfortunate girls’ there which she regurgitated to Patrick:

Most of the girls in Monto were unwed mothers, forced into prostitution. They were really silly girls, don’t you think, Patrick? How could they let themselves get in the family way? And some of them so young. They turned the clock backwards before they even knew the time of day. The world is a cruel place. And the rich men arrived in their carriages to exploit these poor girls. They were kept captive in rooms. They couldn’t even go out to the shop. Mrs C used to do a few messages for them – to see them would break your heart, she said, some of them with bruises or a black eye, and others with worse things hidden deep. When there was no one to help them they put a can tied to a string out their windows with money in it for some of the kids to get them cigarettes, and they let the kids keep the change. Slaves they were to the madam. And there was more than one madam who made enough money to send her children off to a posh school in England. There is no justice. Nothing changes. It is always the strong exploiting the weak, isn’t it Patrick? And Mrs C said some of the users of these kip houses were our moral guardians, and she knew names, but she never told me the names.

***

Occasionally, my mother met some girlfriends from Jacobs, and they went to the pictures, but such friends were thin on the ground, as most of them by this stage were married with children.

She explained to Patrick how Muddy was concerned about her:

She keeps saying husband and wife shouldn’t be separated. She says I’m gallivanting about as if I’m single. When I tell her I can’t go over to you because of the war, she says in that case you should be over here, that it isn’t right, that there is enough separation in death. ‘Look at me,’ she says. She’d put years on you, Patrick. She says that the two of us should be together giving her grandchildren. This separation, it will be only be for a while, won’t it, love?

***

Her sister Peg irritated her. To the rest of the Woodburns a royalist was perceived as a rebel. My Aunt’s collection of British memorabilia was always a source of contention between the two sisters. Peg, it seemed, was not interested in romance. She ridiculed men. ‘Will you look at the getup of your man,’ she would say, or ‘will you look at him half cocked?’ They seemed to have nothing in common. Such sibling estrangement exacerbated my mother’s sense of loneliness. In a letter to Patrick, Martha describes Peg as ‘slipping slowly into a bony spinsterhood’. Her attack on the world only compounded Aunt Peg’s own loneliness. But she couldn’t see that. Her consolation was her Baby Power whiskey, that, and of course her visits to Belfast.

To fill the void in her life, my mother wrote daily to Patrick:

Tell me what’s happening in Spain. When Gearóid left he said he was going to fight the fascists. Is it really not safe for me to go and see you? Can’t I go to France? Can you come over – surely at Christmas?

Poor Tommy died. He had no resistance when the consumption hit him. He went very fast. God rest his soul. I went to the wake. They had plenty of everything. I brought a few things from the shop, but most of what they had was ‘on tick’: the loose cigarettes and the matches and the drink of course, and the saucers of snuff which attracted the women. And they talked of the bad times. And when the drink took hold, they forgot themselves for a while, and Jack Ó Súileabháin and a few others began to sing. A friend of Mrs Chaigneau’s started to give out to them for having no respect for the dead. But Mrs C told her to hush, that they meant no harm, and that they might as well sing grief as cry it, which is what Tomás used always say. And my heart sank later as I saw the horses with the white plumes pulling the hearse.

The suffering has dried up all their tears, Patrick. All they can do is sing like the penniless soldiers on the street. But I have tears, buckets of tears for little Tommy and for all of us.

***

‘How come you loved Tommy Chaigneau?’ I shout irately at my mother as I come out of Patrick’s study. She is sitting in her armchair, sitting smugly I may say, going through a bundle of her fusty old newspapers.

‘Tommy?’ she says, looking up. ‘Little Tommy.’

‘He wasn’t even your own flesh and blood.’

‘Why?’ she says. ‘Is that what you’re asking?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because he died, that’s why.’

***

Patrick and my mother met at Christmas in nineteen thirty six. They stayed in Rathfarnham. Attempts at sexual union were unsatisfactory:

Her reference to the rig made me very uncomfortable. Could she be laughing at me behind my back? She tried so hard to please me. She is patient, but so conventional. All I can see before me is M, her beauty which I must not sully. The image in my mind, however, is blank.

***

I read that Napoleon was a rig and yet he had a son whom he called the king of Rome, and Mark Twain was impotent, and so was Pope Pius VI (how did he know?). Impotence is not sterility. Erectile dysfunction is the correct term. An erection is caused by the penis filling with blood (six or seven times the volume of the flaccid penis). It was Leonardo da Vinci who discovered this.

They met again in the summer of thirty seven. And once more at Christmas in thirty eight. Years without issue.

Although Patrick disliked Spanish heat, he did like Spanish light. In Dublin he found the greyness of Irish weather weighed heavily on an already ripened melancholia:

It’s a dead day, a day that has died, or a day that never came alive. There is no joy here. There is only the pretence of joy. The dancers are arthritic and the singers are sad and consumptive.

***

‘He’s worse than
Damn the Weather
when he’s home,’ my mother wrote to Gearóid.

When Patrick returned to Spain he found an outlet for his loneliness:

I went to see L. Always afterwards I abase myself for doing so, but she releases valves, secret valves, which no one else, not even M, can find. She reduces my anxiety, if only for a little while. She endows me at least with the delusion of normality. What harm is there in that? But I feel so wracked by it, especially after reading M’s last letter about Monto. And there is a fondness growing between L and me, more on her part admittedly. She is so young, but I don’t exploit her, not like some of the wretches who visit her. And that damned Jiménez, always hovering around, a permanent gadfly. She keeps thanking me for saving her life.

Did I really do her a favour? Still, I am teaching her to speak English. It’s ironic, she loves Bible passages. She asks me to repeat them and learns them by heart. Her memory is faultless.

***

In 1939 the Civil War ended in Spain, and my mother returned to Patrick. She asked Peg to keep an eye on Muddy discreetly without entering into any arguments. As regards having children, there was plenty of time. There was no need to rush into anything, not like some of the unfortunate women in the Dublin tenements who had no choice in the matter.

***

When England declared war on Germany in 1939, de Valera and Franco kept their countries neutral. Initially, the wily
Caudillo
was anxious to join up with Hitler in the wake of early German victories – France was beaten and England was expected to collapse. Most European diplomats – including Patrick Foley – believed that the Germans would conquer England. Franco would have liked a share of the spoils. However Hitler, flushed with victory, rebuffed the predatory general.

Nevertheless by 1940, the Führer began to woo Franco, and on the twentieth of October he crossed Europe in an armoured train to meet the Spanish head of state at Hendaye.

In return for joining forces with Germany, the Spanish dictator made considerable demands. He wanted territories in France and North Africa together with military and economic aid, and would only join Hitler
after
Germany had successfully defeated Britain.