~
“In December it grew mild again and the word spread round that we were finally leaving. We kept up a pretence of occasional sniper fire, pretended sorties into their lines which they pretended to repulse. At night the lines of men would snake down to the beaches, the boats would fill and push off silently, leaving those of us behind to fill the gaps. We crawled from trench to trench, from ridge to ridge, positioned unmanned rifles and set them ofif with tripwires. If they noticed the difference they didn’t pretend to care.”
~
Old men and young women in those coalmining towns, all of the young men gone, the collieries still, the miners digging in some tunnel under Flanders. Trenches have to be dug, a widow told me, and who better to dig them than Welsh miners? The crowds in the halls made a sea of black bonnets with the occasional soft cloth cap over an ancient face. The long beach at Llandudno reminded me of home and a fisherman with his long black rod stuck in the sand told me on a clear day you could see the Mourne Mountains. I felt sadness then, plain sadness, and realised the emptiness was turning into something more concrete. I thought of the approach to the Boyne and the Maiden’s Tower and the Lady’s Finger and my father’s factory on the shore. And I learnt a lesson that would stand with me for forty years, forty years of being something other than what I was. I put that sadness to use on the stage that night, in a tiny, cramped mineworkers’ union hall. It was hunching there behind the theatrical flats, waiting for me, a diminutive hunched succubus of loss, curled like a sad child, an accumulation of dust behind the lights, a penumbra, someone else’s ghost. I have no existence, it seemed to say, make me live. And I took it with me and walked on-stage and put that ache inside me to work. I was the Colleen Bawn with an ache inside her, I pleaded for my poor, pathetic life with all the anguish of my genuine loss. I could use my own wounds, I realised then, as props, as supports, as emotional sluice-gates, and I could see their effect in the rows of rapt female faces in front of me. I could create my own wounds if I needed more, as the parts, the emotion, the occasions demanded. I would create more wounds, a wound for each new part: wounds of anger, bitterness, jealousy, resignation, rage, since sadness and loss were only part of the picture. I would become a St Sebastian of wounds until the biggest wound of all would put a kind of end to me. And as the play ended and the applause grew around me, I knew I would never properly know love, and never have children.
~
“We laid bombs in the latrines and set them with delayed fuses. On the last night a low mist hugged the ground and we could see the moon glowing through it like an expanding penny. We unwound our puttees and tied them round our boots, broke everything we couldn’t carry and made our way down the hill towards the beach, where the small red torches flickered to guide us towards the waterline. We waded through the water and clambered on the boats with as much silence as we could manage. Behind us a kind of fictitious battle sputtered, a blast from a shit-hole covered the empty trenches in excrement and a desultory flash returned fire from the other side. It was as if the whole event had never happened, had been an imaginary fight against an imaginary opponent with imaginary ordnance and imaginary dead. And as if the bones we had left covering the hillsides had been dreamed in some nightmare that was now ending. As if the dream, in that contradictory peninsula, had been dreamed in the daytime, and this quiet, water-lapping night, illuminated by desultory booms from the battleships, was our waking.”
~
I knew the baby was coming before she did, in a small town on the Severn estuary; it would be an estuary child like I was. We had a late supper of fried kippers and left the rest of the cast to their night of bottled Guinness and cider. I helped her upstairs and said, “It will be tonight, can’t you feel it?”
“No,” Maggie said, “I can just feel the weight of me, the appalling sowlike weight of me. When did I become a sow, Nina? And where is that bloody beekeeper that left me like this?”
“He didn’t leave you, you left him,” I said, “and didn’t you tell me he’s waiting in Somerset? Come on now love,” I said—I had the English argot now, love, sweetie, darling—“lie down and sleep and wait to see what happens in the morning.”
But it didn’t happen in the morning, did
it, it
didn’t wait till morning. It happened that night, around half past two I awoke and the bed was wet. “My waters have broken,” she said, and her stomach was heaving. I put my hand on it and could feel the shudder, the almighty tightening of some inside muscle, and I ran downstairs and found Ethel in a clinch with Myles na gCopaleen among a sea of empty bottles and cigarette butts. “Get a doctor, Ethel,” I told her, “it’s happening.” “At last,” she said obscurely, then made for the door.
I ran back upstairs, two steps at a time, and found Maggie sitting up in bed with the tiny ecclesiastical window behind her.
“Hold me,” she said, and I sat behind her and placed both hands around her stomach. Her knees were spread apart like the stone woman and her hands were digging into mine. “Oh God,” she said and she shuddered again, and then time slowed and the blanket slowly filled up with red and the shudders were the only time, the hard flesh on her stomach heaving with them, like a great clock that would strike and leave an echo in her body, a series of ripples, while she caught her breath until the clock struck again. But it was an odd clock with no regular rhythm. The beats gained on each other, came closer together until there was nothing but beating, and she rose on her knees and with a huge outpouring of herself gave a cry that came from where the clock struck, and her stomach heaved once more and something was over.
I heard a tiny cry, and down in the blankets, among the mess of blood and other stuff there was a tiny thing, a succubus like the bent form my own sadness assumed, but this was moving, this was a child, and I knew it was a boy. I lifted it, it was attached to her by part of her insides and it was squalling with life. She took it from my hands and the door opened and Ethel entered, behind her a doctor with his tall hat and leather bag.
“Leave it to me,” he said, and Maggie answered, “No, no, don’t leave it to him, I want her, I want Nina.”
“Get me a bowl then,” he said, “Nina, is it?”
And I slid off the bed, and went to the bathroom and washed my bloodied hands and filled a ceramic bowl with fresh water.
I went back in and Ethel was doing what was her answer to every conceivable human situation, she was lighting a cigarette, and the smoke was curling and the small baby was crying and the doctor was separating it from her. I put the bowl down and he placed the baby in my hands and said, “Wash it now.” I washed it clean of blood and brown as he took instruments from his bag and attended to her; more blood spurted but Maggie didn’t seem to feel it. Her head was towards me, looking at me, Ethel behind me and the child in my hands in the bowl. “Samuel,” she said.
~
“We boarded a steamer from the lighters and one huge last explosion shook the bay. A geyser of sparks as if from a volcano spouted above the mist, and I thought of the men who must have died beneath it, the scattered limbs and the groans in that universal language. The battleship behind us fired two salvoes even on its curve out of there, and I saw the bodies of dead fish come to the surface again, as they had on our arrival. I wandered over the deck, they were cheering everywhere, hugging, embracing as if something, God knows what, had been won. I cheered too, it would have been indelicate not to. We were survivors after all, and that uncertain element called life had been preserved in us. The dark purple line that retreated from our boat held the bones, buried and unburied, of those who should have been us and among those innumerable bones the bones of George’s finger.”
~
We made our way towards Somerset and little Samuel grew, daily it seemed. We were hardly actors now, more a family round the two of them. But one day of course it happened, a small town perched above a shabby bay. We passed a field on which a forest of small houses seemed to grow, tiny eaved roofs outlined against the sea behind.
“Whatever are they?” asked Ethel, and I didn’t even have to search for the answer.
“Beehives,” I said, and I knew baby Samuel was going from me.
The horses stopped and Maggie stepped down with her bundle in her arms and kissed me on the cheek and said, “Goodbye Nina love, I’ll always remember.”
“Remember what?” I asked her.
“You, love,” she said.
She walked towards the beehives as if she knew they were her home, and over the hill, outlined against the blue sea, came her other Samuel, a medieval hood and shawl draped round his head and shoulders, covered in a gently moving curtain of what I knew were bees. She stood before him holding her bundle, and the bees made a cloud around his head and he didn’t move, or couldn’t, because of the swarm around him. And the horses moved off and I took a last look before we rounded the corner of the road, and saw the two of them standing there, as if they would stand there, mute and unembracing, for ever.
~
“The island had tents in rows up the hillside and more than twenty-seven battleships out in the harbour, I counted them. It was hard to walk without an automatic stoop, without bending under the nearest available cover, sliding crab ways in expectation of a bullet through the skull. I bought oranges and lemons from the Greek kids who clustered round us and asked everywhere for word of George. I wandered round the hospital tents and examined face after bandaged face. Many Georges turned to me when I called out the name, Georges with many different surnames, many different wounds, Georges with limbs removed, legless, eyeless, some of them even speechless, but none of them was him. I squeezed oranges into their lips and sucked them myself then, down to the rinds, and within a week had exhausted all of the tents, all of the Georges in them and, it seemed, all of the oranges. Then I took a boat to Alexandria.”
T
HERE WERE TWO
piers in Brighton, an East and a West, and we settled into the Cadogan Music-Hail beneath the promenade with the hotels like ice-cream parlours. And while I played the Colleen Bawn at night, I walked between the piers by day, along the shingled beach with the huge girders holding up the boardwalk and the music and sounds of wintry gaiety coming from above. The emptiness came back, but it was an emptiness beyond me now, surrounding the diminishing crowds like a mist, keeping me cocooned outside it, observing. The ladies with thin spindly shapes coming towards me with the evening sun behind them, the old gentlemen reading
The
Times
behind the windbreak provided by the sea wall.
I kept to myself, was somewhat disenchanted by the troupe now that Maggie was gone, kept thinking of her and baby Samuel in their home by the beehives, were they happy, were her expectations fulfilled. In my heart of hearts I knew they probably weren’t, that the last thing the good beekeeper expected was the return of this Somerset girl with a newborn child. But I didn’t know the mores of Somerset, nor the mores of Brighton. All I knew were the mores of Eily O’Connor and Myles na gCopaleen, where her unexpected return from the cold waters made everybody unaccountably happy. The crowds were dwindling now at the performances, we were like a bunch of circus animals about to be confined to winter quarters.
“November and it’ll all be over,” said Ethel, “and where do you go to, love? London, back to Ireland? Drogheda, Dublin?”
And I was pondering this question, how this other family would be gone and what would I do for a substitute, when the cinematograph man came.
He had seen the show and wanted to make what he called a one-reeler,
The
True Tragedy of the Colleen Bawn,
and admired my style of acting, thought it perfect for his purposes, for what he called the pictures. And after the final night, when the count of the audience was less than the count of the cast onstage, he took over the stage and set to work. We rehearsed in the empty wintry hall, where he reduced each scene to a series of wordless tableaux, gestures in front of the painted flats, which he had painted and repainted as he needed. Then he cut the play in half, excised the comedy and retained the tragedy, since tragic emotions, as he told me, were easier to replicate in a series of simple balletic gestures. He removed all of the lights from the ceiling and pointed them sideways and straight in our faces, turned them off and on, moved them and turned them off and on again. He created whole imagined landscapes with swathes of shadow. Then he brought in his wooden box with the winding handle and set to work.
We would enact each scene until he was happy, then he would move the box and enact the scene again. I found the reflective gaze of the lens a more comforting audience than the hundred or so faces that used to stare up at me each evening. I could imagine anyone behind there, any eye observing, but the only eye I ever caught reflected there was my own. What a perfect state of narcissism, I thought, what a benign mirror, and I remembered, of course I remembered, the tale my father told me, of the girl who gazed at her own reflection until the waters rose and became the river Boyne.
We did the drowning scene with the only water available to us, the lapping sea underneath the West Pier, where the great umbrella of the pier above us created a shadow to block out the sun. He sat on another boat, cranking his box, two oarsmen beside him to keep his boat abreast of ours, and with the fairground music rattling above I beat my breast and tore my flowing locks before I sank finally, underneath the freezing waters. So I died then, and came back to life again on a deckchair perched on the stony shale, with a mug of cocoa and a blanket around me to keep me warm.
“Come to London,” he told me, lighting his pipe, tightening his Norfolk jacket around him, like a scientist or a geographer, nothing like a man of the theatre. There’s a career for you there, a great one, the Bush Studios are doing three and four reelers.”
“Gladly,” I told him. “I’ll go anywhere but home.”