WHEN I was in my early 30s, and entering a bad period of my life, I wash living in London on my own, working as a television producer with the BBC. The man who had absorbed me for 10 years, and who I had once been going to marry, had finally left. I came home one day to the flat in Islington and there was a note on the table saying "Back Tuesday". I knew he wouldn't come back, and he didn't.
I didn't really want him to. We were exhausted. But still, I didn't know what to do. I used to sit in my chair every night and read and drink a lot of cheap white wine. I'd say "hello" to the fridge when its motor turned itself on. One New Year's Eve I wished the announcer on Radio Three "a happy New Year to you, too". I was very depressed. I asked the doctor to send me to a psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist was in an office in a hospital. "Well, now, let's get your name right to begin with," he said cheerfully. "What is your name?" "My name is ... my name is ..." I could not say my name. I cried, as from an ocean of tears, for the rest of the hour. My self was too sorrowful to speak. And I was in the wrong place, in England. My name was a burden to me.
Not that the psychiatrist saw it like that. I only went to him once more, but I did manage to get out a bit about my background and about the way I was living. Eventually he said something that lifted a corner of the fog of unconsciousness. "You're going to great trouble," he said, "and flying in the face of the facts of your life, to recreate your mother's life."
Once he said this, I could see it was true. Mammy sat in her chair in a flat in Dublin and read and drank. Before she sat in the chair she was in bed. She might venture shakily down to the pub. Then she would totter home and sit in her chair. Then she went to bed. She had had to work the treadmill of feeding and clothing and cleaning child after child for decades. Now all but one of the nine had gone. My father had moved himself and her and that last one to a flat, and she sat there. She had the money he gave her (never enough to slake her anxieties). She had nothing to do, and there was nothing she wanted to do, except drink and read.
And there was I half her age, not dependent on anyone, not tired or trapped, with an interesting, well paid job, with freedom and health and occasional good looks. Yet I was loyally recreating her wasteland around myself.
One of the stories of my life has been the working out in it of her powerful and damaging example. In everything. Nothing matters except passion, she indicated. It was what had mattered to her, and she more or less sustained a myth of passionate happiness for the first 10 years of her marriage. She didn't value any other kind of relationship. She wasn't interested in friendship.
If she had thoughts or ideas, she never mentioned them. She was more like a shy animal on the outskirts of the human settlement than a person within it. She read all the time, not to feed reflection, but as part of her utter determination to avoid reflection.
My mother didn't want anything to do with child rearing or housework. But she had to do it. Because she fell in love with my father, and they married, she was condemned to spend her life as a mother and a home maker. She was in the wrong job. Sometimes I meet women who remind me of her when I stay in Bed & Breakfasts around the country. They throw sugar on the fire to get it to light, and wipe surfaces with an old rag that smells, and they are forever sending children to the shops. They question me, half censorious, half wistful. "And did you never want to get married yourself?"
... MY mother's fore mothers knew how the tribe expected women to behave, and how it would protect them in return. But when my grandfather came aback from exile in London to work in the GPO in Dublin around 1910, and the link with Kerry was broken, no one belonged to a tribe. My mother was on her own, but without hope of independence. Nowadays she could have stayed in the civil service, even after she became pregnant. But 1940s Ireland was a living tomb for women.
For men like my father, out and about in Dublin, the opposite was true.
Broadcasting and journalism were beginning to open up. He had begun as a teacher, in the 1930s, and if he had stayed in teaching coming home in the afternoons every day, and free in the summer his children would have had a wonderful father. But he had many gifts and ambitions he was a traveller in Europe in the summers, and a linguist and a sportsman and a happy, proud patriot. And handsome as anything. There are photos of himself and my mother on the beach at Ballybunion, all white teeth and strong limbs. She was blissfully happy with how he made her feel about herself.
They were mad about each other from the start. They hiked over Howth Head and Bray Head and up the Dublin mountains and made love in the heather. He bought her a hot port one chilly evening. Her first drink ever.
They married very early on a January morning because my sister Grainne was a little bump under Mammy's dress. The second World War started. He joined the Irish Defence Forces in 1939 and loved army life. The next year my mother was pregnant again he cycled up from the Curragh to the Rotunda to greet me. But I spent my infancy in Donegal, because the Army brought my father there. The first few pages of a letter from him to my mother arranging the move survive. She was pregnant again.
A chroidhe dhil he begins. For years I could not read this letter. "Beloved heart", when they ended so badly! He is writing from Fort Dunree, up on the Inishowen peninsula. He has found a little house for the family he encloses a sketch and continues.
For Grainne and Nuala there is quiet, air, sun and sea, chickens for Grainne not to mention an occasional be. For you there are these things, plus me, plus an odd weekend trip to Derry and evenings in Buncrana.
His letter is overtaken by one from her.
Your letters usually make me feel bloody awful, but this one was not too bad! I notice that I have influenced you to the extent that you say "a bit difficult" when you mean "quite desperate". Good girl
"Ah so!" I say. "She was already provoking him with her despair." But then three children in four years! The end of the letter is missing, so the taboo on a parent's intimate life was not breached, if there were intimacies there.
He treats my mother as a partner in this letter. He's doing freelance journalism, and she's helping him. But when I knew them, he went out she stayed home. Nobody treated her as a partner. When she died, a few years after him, this letter was found in the old tin biscuit box which was her only possession, apart from clothes. She didn't own a single thing in the little flat not a book, not a record. In the biscuit tin there were the scrawled pages of book reviews she had written, in pencil and biro. They had moved house at least a dozen times. She had gone to great trouble, then, to keep this letter and the reviews.
A few of her book reviews were published in the paper. That was the only money she ever earned for herself, apart from the children's allowance. That was what she talked about the money. But it wasn't for the money that she kept the crumpled drafts in the biscuit tin, when she had nothing else. She could have been respected, if things had been different. She could have done something other than be the drudge she was.
It seems that very early in the marriage she was overwhelmed. She foundered, and either he didn't see it, or he saw it but couldn't help. It must have happened quickly. A woman who worked for my parents when they came back from Donegal told me Grainne and I were always identically dressed in pretty clothes. What I remember, from only three or four years later, is the teacher in Miss Ahern's school in Malahide calling me in to her office and fingering my dirty cardigan. "Couldn't your mother find anything better to send you to school in?"
She was to have 13 pregnancies altogether. Nine living children. She never had enough money. She did her best for years. She made crab apple jam. She gave us jam sandwiches and a Milk of Magnesia bottle full of milk for our picnic. She bought us wellington boots for the winter. She fine combed our hair, us kneeling before her, bent into the newspaper on her lap. Think of all the clothes she must have bought, washed, dried, sorted out, put on our backs ... We lived in a rented bungalow meant for the farm labourer, on an estate in north Co Dublin. The bungalow was surrounded by fields with ditches and hawthorn hedges in what was an isolated landscape, then. The railway line from Dublin passed the other side of a turnip field. Sometimes Daddy jumped from the train and rolled down the embankment as a short cut home. But he began not to come home. He was a clerk in the Irish Tourist Board after the Army, but then he began to get work in Radio Eireann, and to get jobs like the "Radio Train" to Killarney that took him away. His life became more exciting all the time. He brought his joie de vivre home with him when he came striding across the field to where we were playing making "houses" and "shops" from stones and mud around the house. We would hear the bright whistle of Beidh aonach amarach, and we'd run to jump up on the fence to see him. "Daddy's home! He's home!"
HER life got harder. The Calor gas cylinder under the two rings she cooked on would run out, and she had no phone or transport.
She washed clothes in the bath, with yellow soap and a washboard. We were no consolation. Once when my father had gone down the country on a job, she broke the unwritten rules by daringly going into Dublin, and going to Kingsbridge station, and surprising him by being at the barrier, when he got off the train. He was with people. He leaned down to aim a kiss at her cheek before hurrying off with them. "He didn't even take the cigarette out of his mouth," she told me, not once, but over and over again, in years to come.
I imagine her making her lonely way back to us children. She was still in her 20s. She would have taken the bus out to the terminus then walked out past the last street lamp, then down the dark country road to the estate's gate lodge, then ducked under a fence and followed the path we'd worn in the tussocky field across to the bungalow ... Nothing there but children.
Another time it was late at night, but I was awake in my bed because I was counting my Communion money for the 20th time I heard him come in and then her shrieking. "That's not my lipstick!"
That would have been near the end of the 10 perfect years she always claimed they had. Around then, one of his women (she had a daughter by him that she called Nuala, oddly enough) came out to our place to bargain with my mother. This woman had money. She offered Mammy a large allowance to let him go with her to Australia. I remember this woman leaving hurriedly along the path through the field, and my father running after her, and my mother running after him, crying. Then Mammy fell in a heap in the grass. It was a summer's day, and the cattle were already sitting quietly around the field. She was a rounded shape in the grass, like a small cow.
MY family's house in Clontarf was packed and clamorous. My father was Terry O'Sullivan" through and through now the idealistic schoolteacher and lieutenant in the Army, Tomas O'Faolain, who had written to his "croidhe dhil" with such affection and energy about the arrangements for the moving of their little family to Donegal, had been overtaken by another identity. Partly it was the size the family grew to, along with my mother's refusal to be satisfied with serving it, that killed his enthusiasm. But mostly, he was alienated from a domestic role by the opportunity which Lemass's Ireland happened to present him. He was not a journalist in the ordinary meaning of the word. He was a small god in the world, which was then very new and innocent, of people who wanted publicity ....
WHO knows where he got to? He had lots of things going on. All of us were dependent on him. Grainne "Grainne's the pretty one," my mother would always say was exceptionally smart and attractive and had jobs as personal assistant to various managing directors this was as high as a young woman could expect to go in the world of work at the time. I "Nuala's the brainy one," my mother would say had temporary jobs and my scholarship was coming up. My next sister down, Deirdre "Deirdre's the nice one," my mother would say, thus finishing off any general confidence the three of us might have had was engaged to be married, and had an office job. But emotionally we were in thrall to him. Then there were the brothers, always in difficulty or in trouble, then any general confidence the three of us might have had was engaged to be married, and had an office job. But emotionally we were in thrall to him. Then there were the brothers, always in difficulty or in trouble, then my little my little sisters and then my youngest brother. None of them got much attention. But they were members not just of a family but of quite a self consciously distinct even a superior family, all the same. I have a brother who used to be in the British army. He sits in a room in London now, and drinks and reads ... "I loved my mother and revered my father when I was a boy," he has written to me in a letter that captures all our confusion. "They were mother and father, and does a child know any different? Sure it made me bed wet when he came home pissed and pummelled my mother. Her cries for help were heartrending, and made me try to sleep in a chest of drawers. You didn't get to see lathe much, but I loved him from afar.