Life can be stranger than fiction

My Junior Cert class and I are choosing a film to study for the exam. To heighten their interest in Dancing at Lughnasa, I told the class that my grandaunt, Beasie, and my Aunt Margaret suffered fates even worse than the Mundy sisters in the play and film.

When her mother died in 1912, Beasie's brother took a wife unto himself and sent Beasie to live with and work for a married sister. A deal was done, a dowry changed hands and Beasie was offloaded. She proved a useful pair of hands on her brother-in-law's farm. Nobody can say whether she was happy or not. When she died, her remains were returned to her family and buried within 24 hours. There was no wake for Beasie.

Aunt Margaret, Beasie's niece, was whipped out of school a few days after her father's death in 1922. She was the daughter chosen to rear and sell fowl and lambs to pay for her siblings' education. At least three suitors presented themselves to my grandmother seeking Margaret's hand in marriage, but they got "short shrift" from my grandmother, one such proposal being entertained for approximately 30 seconds.

Margaret toiled until the time came for her, too, to move out when her brother decided to bring a wife into the house. Grandmother did not want her to marry at all, so precious and talented were her hands about house and farm. Margaret sought the equivalent of a dowry to enable her to make her own way in the world.

My father settled the unholy row over dowry money by sending Margaret, his sister-in-law, to London to stay with his sister until she got a job. Long past marriageable age, Margaret kept house for parish priests. Was she happy?

Her nephews and nieces became her surrogate children. On every birthday in childhood a letter containing a 10 shilling note was sure to arrive from London. Bits and pieces, the remainders of parish sales-of-work, were recycled and sent to children who thought they were getting Selfridges' and Marks and Spencers' finest.

My pupils believe that the Mundy sisters are the figments of Friel's imagination. This kind of thing could never have happened in Ireland, they say. My pupils are but two generations away from an Ireland, which treated some women as slaves. If my pupils were to engage in even a cursory excavation of their family histories they would almost certainly find a Mundy sister in their family cupboards.

That kind of Ireland is, thankfully, dead and gone, and with my aunts in their graves. There was no female version of Patrick Kavanagh's Great Hunger. My Junior Cert candidates now understand at least some of the sub-texts Brian Friel so powerfully conveyed in the play. A personal anecdote never fails to excite interest in literature.