The Teacher at Donegal Bay

‘No, Patrick, no,’ I protested, laughing. ‘If I have any more, I won’t be able to stand up in church, never mind kneel down.’

He laughed aloud, clutched me by the arm and turned me to look across the crowded kitchen.

‘Jenny, is that yer girl over there forenenst that good-looking dark-haired lad?’

‘Yes, that’s Claire and her brother Stephen,’ I nodded. He winked at me, and pressed his way towards the next refillable glass.

Jamsey watched his brother work his way across the room and was silent for a moment.

‘Gawd Jenny, we’re all gettin’ aul,’ he began, sadly. ‘But that girl of yours is powerful like her granny. In luks, I mane,’ he added quickly.

‘I’m glad you added that, Jamsey,’ I said, laughing. ‘My mother could be a bit sharp.’

‘Ach, say no more, say no more,’ he muttered hastily. ‘Shure, don’t we know well enough she’d no time for the likes of us. But yer Da was a differen’ story. Ye’ve got very like him, Jenny. D’ye know that?’

‘It’s my grey hair, Jamsey. I see it’s in the fashion round here as well.’

‘Ach, away wi’ ye,’ he laughed, dropping a heavy hand on my shoulder. ‘Shure you’ve only a wee wisp or two at the front, an’ me has no hair atall, no moren a moily cow has horns. Tell me, d’ye like England, Jenny? Is it not too fast fer ye? Boys, I go over for Smithfeeld Show ivery year and the traffic gets worser. ’Twould run ye down and niver stop to cast ye aside.’

After the warmth and noise of the big kitchen, the chill of the October day took my breath away when we stepped outside. I shuddered so violently that Claire came and linked her arm through mine. ‘Get Daddy,’ I saw her mouth to Stephen, as the whole party set out on the short drive down one glen and into the next. A little later, the four of us walked up the rough path to the small grey church. Down by the gate, the cars were parked erratically on the grassy verge of the minor road, as if their occupants had gone fishing in a nearby lake or were playing football in someone’s field.

From behind the massed clouds that had threatened rain as we left McBride’s farm the sun suddenly appeared, casting one side of the deep glen into such dark shadow that the whitewashed houses gleamed like beacons. The church was in the light. Beyond its low hill and the curve of the Coast Road, full of the whiz of Saturday afternoon traffic, the white-capped rollers sparkled as they crashed on the rocky shore.

We followed the coffin into the empty, echoing church, its pale, peeling walls dappled with sunlight that fell through the high, undecorated windows. As we filled the first row of dark wooden pews, the undertaker’s men manoeuvred in the tiled space below the pulpit and placed the coffin on trestles so close to us I could have reached out and touched it.

We waited for the minister to appear and ascend to his vantage point. The silence deepened and the damp chill of the air and dead cold of the hard wooden bench began to eat into me. But, as the minister threw up his arms and made his opening flourish, I forgot all about being cold. At the first resounding reminder that we are all born to die, I heard, not the words, but the accent. Sharper and quite different from Jamsey’s slow drawl, his speech and his turn of phrase took me straight back to childhood, just like Jamsey’s had.

I did try to listen to the words from the pulpit but all I could hear were voices from the past, telling jokes and stories. Tears sprang to my eyes and I had to dab them surreptitiously while pretending to blow my nose.

‘She tried to take that away as well,’ I said to myself.

I stared at the wooden casket in disbelief. Yes, it was true. As far back as I could remember, she had tried to stop me visiting our relations in the glens. If it hadn’t been for my father I wouldn’t even have known they existed.

I shivered, tried to concentrate on the sermon, on the carved oak of the pulpit, on the scuffed wooden top of the untenanted harmonium. Anything to keep my mind away from what she had done. I wanted to weep as inconsolably as the child I had once been.

‘Brethren, let us pray.’

I breathed a sigh of relief as we shaded our eyes and bent our heads discreetly forward. It was so long since I’d been to a Presbyterian service I’d forgotten about not kneeling down. I hadn’t even warned Claire or Stephen, but they seemed to be taking it in their stride. I glanced sideways at Claire and found her grey eyes watching me from beneath her shaded brow. She smiled at me encouragingly.

I couldn’t think what on earth she and Stephen were making of the funeral service with its emphasis on repentance and the shortness of our mortal span. Their grandmother had never to my knowledge repented of anything and she had lived to the ripe old age of eighty-eight.

We stood up to be blessed and remained standing while the black-coated figures hoisted up their burden; one oak coffin with brass handles as specified by Edna Erwin, late of this parish, as per Harvey’s letter of instruction.

While we were in church the wind died away completely. When we emerged, a few handfuls of people marked out by our formal clothes as mourners, we stood blinking in the sunlight. McBride cousins in dark suits and well-polished shoes, elderly ladies wearing hats and hanging on the arms of sons or grandsons, a few people from Balmoral Presbyterian Church, discreet in grey or navy. Together, we found ourselves by the church door, bathed in the sudden warmth of the low sun.

Borne aloft on the stout shoulders of the undertaker’s men, the coffin glinted as we scrunched along the gravel on the south side of the church, tramped across the rich green sward beside the recent burials, and stepped cautiously onto the newly beaten path that meandered between the overgrown humps of unmarked graves and the tangles of long grass still laced with summer wildflowers.

Here, in the oldest part of the churchyard, in a burying place far older than the church that now stood empty behind us, we waited till the last able-bodied person had made the journey to the graveside. Beside my own small family stood Harvey and Mavis, their son Peter, and Susie their younger daughter. Beyond, the dark figures of Jamsey and Patrick McBride with their wives, Loreto and Norah. A dozen people altogether. Most of whom she disapproved of one way or another.

Words were spoken and the first shower of earth from the chalky mound piled up beyond the damp trench spattered on the shiny surface of the oak casket. Suddenly, the air was full of a rich, autumny perfume. The sun’s warmth playing on the mass of waiting flowers had drawn out their sweet, spicy smells.

Standing there by the open grave, I felt a surge of pure joy. Joy in the brilliance of the sky and the sparkle of the sea, joy in my own reconnection with this place I had once known so well, and joy in the three people dearest in all the world to me, who stood so close by my side, so ready to comfort me as I so often comforted them.

It was a moment of totally unexpected wellbeing I shall never forget. As I listened to the fall of earth and pebbles and the familiar words of the committal, I could think only of the joys of my own life, the happiness of my home and family, the success of my work, the pleasure of friends, the problems and difficulties survived and overcome. As the damp earth obliterated the polished plaque on which my mother’s mortal span had been clearly visible, Edna Erwin, 1902-1990, I remembered yet again that this moment of joy might never have been if she’d had her way. However mixed and variable its character, my happiness these many years could just as easily have been buried in my past.

I stood in the sunshine, the rhythmic crash of the breakers and the peremptory call of the jackdaws etching themselves into my memory. It was twenty-two years, almost to the day, since the weekend that had changed the course of my life. It was time I went back and found out what really happened that weekend.

Chapter 1 (#ud7bf8e47-ac43-5dd6-bb30-a024f7697fec)

BELFAST 1968

The door clicked shut. As the footsteps of my sixth-formers echoed on the wooden stairs, I put my face in my hands and breathed a sigh of relief. My head ached with the rhythmic throbbing that gets worse if a fly buzzes within earshot or a door bangs two floors away. There was aspirin in my handbag, but the nearest glass of water was on the ground floor and the thought of weaving my way down through the noisy confusion of landings and overspilling cloakrooms was more than I could bear.

I made a note in the margin of my Shakespeare and closed it wearily. I enjoy the history plays and try to dramatise them when I teach, but today my effort with Richard III and his machinations seemed flat and stale. Hardly surprising after a short night, an early start, and an unexpected summons to the Headmistress’s study in the lunch hour. After that, I could hardly expect to be my shining best, but I still felt disappointed.

I stretched my aching shoulders, rubbed ineffectually at the pain in my neck, and reminded myself that it was Friday. The noise from below was always worse on a Friday afternoon, but it came to an end much more quickly than other days. Soon, silence would flow back into the empty classrooms and I might be able to think again.

I looked around the room where I taught most of my A-level classes. Once a servant’s bedroom in this tall, Edwardian house, the confined space was now the last resting place of objects with no immediate purpose. Ancient textbooks, music for long-forgotten concerts, programmes for school plays and old examination papers were piled into the tall bookcases which stood against two of the walls. Another tide of objects had drifted into the dim corners furthest from the single dusty window: a globe with the British Empire in fading red blotches; a bulging leather suitcase labelled ‘Drama’; a box inscribed ‘Bird’s Eggs’; a broken easel; and a firescreen embroidered with a faded peacock.

There were photographs too, framed and unframed, spotted with age. Serried ranks of girls in severe pinafores, accompanied by formidable ladies with bosoms and hats, the mothers and grandmothers of the girls who now poured out of the adjoining houses which made up Queen’s Crescent Grammar School.

I wondered yet again why the things of the past are so often neglected, left to lie around unsorted, neither cleared away nor brought properly into the present, to be valued for use or beauty. I thought of my own small collection of old photographs, a mere handful that had somehow survived my mother’s rigorous throwing out: Granny and Grandad Hughes standing in front of the forge with my mother; my father in overalls, with his first car, parked outside the garage where he worked in Ballymena; and a studio portrait of my grandmother, Ellen Erwin, clear-eyed, long-haired and wistful, when she was only sixteen. That picture was one of my most precious possessions.

My husband, Colin, says I’m sentimental and he finds it very endearing. But I don’t think it’s like that at all. I think your life starts long before you’re born, with people you may never even know, people who shape and mould the world into which you come. If I were ever to write the story of my life, it would have to begin well before the date on my birth certificate and I couldn’t do it without the fragments that most people neglect or throw away, like these faded prints at Queen’s Crescent.

The throb in my head had eased slightly as the noise level dropped from the fierce crescendo around four o’clock to the random outbursts of five minutes past. Another few minutes and I really would be able to get to my feet and collect my scattered wits.

I stared out through the dusty window at the house opposite. In the room the mirror image of mine, there were filing cabinets; a young man in shirt sleeves bent over a drawingboard under bright fluorescent tubes. On the floors below, each window framed a picture. Girls in smart dresses sat on designer furniture, in newly decorated offices with shiny green pot plants. They answered telephones, made photocopies and poured out cups of Cona coffee, disappearing with them to the front of the house, to their bosses who occupied the still elegant rooms that looked out upon the wide pavements of the next salubrious crescent.

Colin would be having tea by now. Outside the large conference room in the thickly carpeted lobby, waitresses in crisp dresses would pour from silver teapots and hand tiny sandwiches to men who dropped their briefcases on their chairs and greeted each other with warm handshakes. Beyond the air-conditioned rooms of the beflagged hotel, I saw the busy London streets, the traffic whirling ceaselessly round islands of green in squares where you could still hear a blackbird sing.

Daddy would probably be in the garden. He might be talking to the tame blackbird that follows his slight figure up and down the rosebeds as he weeds, working steadily and methodically, as if he could continue all day and never get tired. ‘Pace yourself, Jenny,’ he’d say, as he taught me how to loosen the weeds and open the soil. ‘No use going at it like a bull at a gate. Give it the time it needs. Don’t rush it.’

He was right, of course. He usually was. A mere two hours since I’d been summoned to Miss Braidwood’s study and here I was, so agitated by what she’d said that I’d gone and given myself a headache when I had the whole weekend to work things out.

I glanced at my watch and thought of all the things I ought to be doing. But I still made no move. My mind kept going back to that lunchtime meeting. I looked round the room again. This was where I worked, where I spent my solitary lunch hours, a place where I was free to think, or to sit and dream. It wasn’t a question of whether I liked it or not, it was what it meant to me that mattered.

Up here, I could even see the hard edge of the Antrim Hills lifting themselves above the city, indifferent to the housing estates which spattered their flanks and the roads which snaked and looped up and out of the broad lowland at the head of the lough.

At the thought of the hills, invisible from where I sat, I was overcome with longing. Oh, to be driving out of the city. I closed my eyes and saw the road stretch out before me, winding between hedgerows thick with summer green, the buttercups gleaming in the strong light. Daddy and I, setting off to see some elderly relative in her small cottage by the sea or tucked away in one of the nine Glens of Antrim, whose names I could recite like a poem. The fresh wind from the sea tempering the summer heat, the sky a dazzle of blue, we move through meadow and moorland towards the rough slopes of a great granite outcrop.

‘Well, here we are, Jenny. Slemish. Keeping sheep here must’ve been fairly draughty. Pretty grim in winter even for a saint. Can we climb it, d’ye think?’

‘Oh yes, please. We’ll be able to see far more from the top.’

Bracken catching at my ankles, the mournful bleat of sheep, the sun hot on my shoulders as we circle upwards between huge boulders. A hawthorn tree still in bloom, though it is nearly midsummer, shelters a spring bubbling up among the rocks. We stop and drink from cupped hands. There isn’t another soul on the mountain and no other car parked beside us on the rough edge of the lane below. As we climb, the whole province of Ulster unrolls before us, until at last we stand in the wind, between the coast of Scotland on one far horizon and the mountains of Donegal, blue and misted, away to the west.

‘Isn’t that the Mull of Kintyre, Daddy?’