The recent success of Cyril's Cinders, a harrowing insight into the horrors of Irish childhood, has prompted the author's sister to write her own account of her own infancy, mutilated by sexual repression, alcoholism, the Catholic Church, a harsh, unloving father and an abused and humiliated mother. We are delighted and pleased today to print excerpts from An Abbess Ballooning:
The greatest message that I remember from my childhood came from my mother. My father was beating her at the time. It was the breakfast flogging which he would administer to the entire family before he would depart - as I discovered later - to have intimate relations with Kelly's heifer, though needless to say in those days we simply thought that sex was what flour arrived in. My mother was across my father's lap, her skirt above her waist, as he was beating her with the poker. "The lindlords," she hissed through clenched teeth. "We are the most distrissful people that ever was known because of the lindlords. Blame the lindlords."
Massacred millions
My mother, of course, blamed the landlords partly because she was a good Catholic, and partly because it was so. The landlords massacred millions of people during the Famine - slaughtered them, mowed them down with machine-gun fire, napalmed them, and raped and ravished their way through fields of plenty, exporting food while our poor ancestors chewed grass and licked gravel. No good ever came out of a landlord's house that wasn't in a coffin, my mother used to say, and she was right.
My mother didn't understand that the other enemy of the Irish people was the Church. Well do I remember the priests of our parish chortling over vast banquets and helping themselves to the food of the poor, excommunicating anybody who dared to defy their will. Their tables groaned inside their dining-rooms with rich, fat hams, goose pie, suet puddings, wines and the choicest of whiskeys. The nuns were even worse. They revelled in an odd sexual cruelty at the convent school where I was educated.
Educated! The word brings a rueful smile to my face. Educated indeed. The first action of the day by the head nun was to confiscate the lump of turf from each girl as she filed into class. This would later be sold back to our parents as a compulsory purchase scheme (known as peat's pence) to pay for the nuns' holiday home in Jamaica. The nuns would then examine our shoes to ensure they would not be so shiny that we could be able to see one another's reflected privates, though of course we were too naive to understand why the nuns insisted on scuffed shoes.
Naivety; that of course is the great enduring quality of the Irish people, plus a steadfast stoicism, which enabled us bear the successive burdens of British rule, landlordism, the bishops, the parish priests and the legions of nuns who oppressed us; naivety was why, after our shoes were examined, we used to permit Sister St Sappho of Fatima to remove our eyelashes, one by one, using a red hot needle. In the interests of hygiene, she insisted; and when our eyelashes were gone, she would yank out the hairs beside our ears.
Domestic science
In class we were made to sit with our hands in full view throughout, and woe betide the girl who wished to scratch an itch. Of course, after the eyelash amputation we were normally in tears when the first lesson began. On most days, this was domestic science, in which we would be taught how to run a home for our menfolk. We were regularly beaten to give us a foretaste of what an Irish marriage was like, with dark hints about what would happen to us when night fell. Of course, we were robbed of our potential as astronauts, physicists, psychiatrists, philosophers or Arctic explorers, for this was an oppressively patriarchal society, in which a woman's future must always be in the home.
Because of the poverty to which we were doomed by landlordism, the British, the monks, the nuns and the bishops, our cookery classes had make do with make-believe cuisine. We would pretend to weigh pretend flour on pretend scales, and we mix our pretend ingredients to make pretend scones in a pretend oven. Well do I remember the not-pretend beating I received from Mother St Tribadism for burning my scones - though of course that was nothing compared with the beating my father gave me for not having any pretend-scones to give him at the end of the day. Still, I was first in the cookery class for my pretend baked ham with pretend apple sauce and pretend baked potatoes, for which of course I received first prize: a trip to Lourdes - pretend, of course.
Instead of going to Lourdes, I was given the privilege of cleaning the convent kitchens, a duty which began at four in the morning. My father accordingly moved our family beatings that much earlier - to 3.30 in the morning, after which I would depart in the darkness to the convent and the rest of the family would retire to bed while my father drank whiskey.
Morning beatings
He was normally so hungover at breakfast that he would have forgotten he had given the rest of the family their morning beatings before dawn, and would administer them again. According to my sister Maria Goretti Immaculata Assumpta Regina Coeli, the only words my mother would utter during this second beating (with three more beatings to come), her skirts over her waist, was "Blame the lindlords, blame the lindlords."
It might be thought I was the lucky one, but I was not, for Mother St Tribadism would insist I engage in practices with her which would have been more appropriate between my father and Kelly's heifer. Needless to say, I knew nothing of such things, except that if I resisted her, she would hang me by my toenails from the convent tower.
I would get home at midnight, when my father and I would catch up on the day's beatings, and my mother would piously intone the rosary by the flickering hearth, crying between the Hail Mary and the Glory Be, "Blame the lindlords, blame the lindlords." And then the real cruelty would begin . . .