Country Girl

Siobhan always knew when I was up to mischief. Even as a small child my absence was noted, primarily due to the cessation of constant chatter  and/or hysteria. The silence would have drawn comment and she would put down whatever was in her hands and stand at the bottom of the 3 flights of stairs with her ear cocked.

“That little lady is up to no good” she would think and call up the stairs……

“Sheee eeelll, are you rooting up there?”

I would almost fall into the press where I WAS rooting and caught in the act shout back down “NOOOOO, I’m just playing” and leg it.

When she would have negotiated the very top of the stairs I would be sitting blithely and nonchalantly reading a book on my bed. She knew well enough I was a consummate actress and feigning unconcern she would walk across to straighten the curtains and peep out the small windows into the square.

“Well, whatever you’re at you may come down now, it’s teatime.”

It was from rooting that I found everything. I had my favourite places and they included cupboards I had to stand on furniture to access, drawers, sideboards, and wardrobes. It was in the spirit of discovery that I managed to find our Christmas presents – ( thus sabotaging Santa for both my brother and I )  surprises, jigsaws, letters, and other contraband. My favourite place to root was the corner of my Mothers wardrobe behind the carefully folded blouses and shirts and beneath the boxed navy lace hat she wore with her “Going Away” outfit on her honeymoon. When I grew bored of trying it on over a cropped blonde wig (it was the 70’s ) and admiring myself in various mirrors  wearing her shoes clopping around the room, I would find the real treasures, the holy grail.  

In one glorious day I found a set of plaster and rubber moulds with paints that was an intended birthday gift -  I seem to recall they made Wizards and Elves -  a pack of sanitary towels that I dismembered on the carpet in wonderment having not a clue what on earth they were for, and my favourites, the books. It is only now that I realize she and I shared a love of books and painting and I have the sketches and paintings she did as a child here in the room with me as I type, their pastel colours and faint outlines poignant now on the wafer thin paper. At the onset of the disease that was to cripple both her and us, my sister bought her a big metal box of paints and brushes -that I covet still -in the hopes that some form of expression may have helped her. She could always see pictures in inanimate things and faces in the clouds.  When a wall was stripped of paper to be repainted she drew all over it -  small dogs , women, and squiggles.  She was a reader, and went to bed nightly with a book. It is because of this that I read “Down All the Days” by Christy Brown and “The Country Girls” by Edna O’Brien before I was ten  – both of which were banned in good Catholic Ireland at the time. I was only caught out when she realized I had been turning down the pages before I hastily replaced the book from under my mattress. Of course she knew that is where I kept all my hidden things, a blue padded 5 year diary with a padlock, plastic beads and bracelets, sweet wrappers  and comics.

I fell in love with Edna when I was a very little girl and remember her looking cool and decadent, smoking at various outrageous house parties or on tv interviews , her auburn hair loose and tousled, or teased into a beehive, always looking like she had just got up from a lovers bed, or was about to get into one, speaking up and out, having  the dangerous combination of both opinions and balls, both of which were feared at that time. She was an amazing writer with a fluid easy style that I loved, and managed to draw you in instantly.

In 2012 Edna O’Brien wrote –

“Broken Piano” in all its connotations kept saying itself to me, and yet I thought of life’s many bounties – to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter, to have read in the newspapers that as a writer I was past my sell-by date, and moreover a bargain basement Molly Bloom, yet, regardless, to go on writing and reading, to be lucky enough to be able to immerse myself in those two intensities that have buttressed my whole life.

I got out a cookery book from Ballymaloe House in County Cork where I had stayed a couple of times, and partook of delicacies such as nettle soup, carrageen moss soufflé , lemon posset with rose scented geranium and gooseberry frangipane with baby banoffees. It was where I had seen for the first time, and been astonished by Jack Yeat’s paintings, thick palates of curdled blues, that spoke to me then as deeply of Ireland as any poem or fragment of prose could do. I looked up the recipe for soda bread and did something I had not done in thirty odd years. I made bread. Broken piano or not, I felt very alive as the smell of baking bread filled the air. It was an old smell, the begetter of many a memory, and so on that day in August, in my seventy eighth year, I sat down to begin the memoir which I swore I would never write”.

I had ordered the book from the library and when I got the automated text to tell me it was ready for collection, I stood up from my full cup of coffee and an untouched pastry and walked straight out of the coffee shop. I would have knocked people off the path to get it. I brought it to Siobhans room  last night and after I had dispensed with the necessary ablutions I said to her that I had a treat. I reminded her of Edna, and the press, and all the outrageous things I had got up to and then told her I would read it to her.

“Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin”

I was 3 chapters in when the carers knocked the door with the giant hoist.

To be continued..............