Last Summer in Ireland

Mother never forgave him.

And now the garden blossoms again. Another week and it will have reached the same point of growth he left behind that June morning. Some sprays of flowering cherry are out already, and the apple trees in the shelter of the house, and the hawthorn, the May blossom, blooming late in the very last week of the month.

That was one of the worst rows they ever had. If you can call it a row with someone as silently imperturbable as my father. Over the three ancient hawthorns on the right-hand side of the front garden and the broad damp area in front of them. Mother insisted the hawthorns were making the whole corner wet. Nothing would ever grow there, she said, and the gnarled roots were unsightly. Why didn’t he cut them down and clear the place up? He wasn’t surely going to let some ridiculous old superstition stop him. She’d never heard worse, a man with a bit of education talking about fairy-thorns.

But he didn’t cut them down. For a long time he searched around, hoping to discover the source of the spring he was sure was there. But all he found were two large pieces of worked stone that might once have fitted together. So he sank the two pieces in the bare ground among the hawthorn roots to make a sitting place for me. Then he created a small water garden, planting fern and marsh marigold, irises and kingcups.

I have one of those kingcups on my table in the window where I write my letters to Matthew and scribble notes for my work, a brilliant golden eye, looking at me, unblinking, bringing back memories long hidden away. All through my childhood, that small marsh garden with its two smooth, worn pieces of stone was where I played. I had almost completely forgotten the long hours I would spend there absorbed in conversation with one of my ‘friends’.

These friends were seldom actual children from my class at school, or from the cottages and farms nearby. My mother didn’t encourage Sandy or me to bring playmates home. But not having a real person never seemed to trouble me. I’d settle myself on one stone and talk to whichever friend had come to sit on the one opposite to me.

Once there was a little Red Indian girl. That must have been after I’d read the story of Pochahontas and her journey to England. Later, there was a girl who’d been with the children of the New Forest, but who didn’t get into the story. Then there was a Scottish lass who served in the kitchens of Dunluce Castle where my father had taken us on a summer outing.

The more I thought about my stones, the more I recalled the peaceful hours I’d spent sitting lost in reverie. How precious those solitary hours had been. As precious in their special way as the comfort and joy brought by those imaginary friends. Out of sight of the house and my mother’s critical eye I felt safe, yes, but there was more to it than that. There was a calmness about that small corner that made it seem quieter than the rest of the garden. It had, too, a feeling of security that enfolded me without any sense of enclosure. Certainly, I was never happier than when I was there, talking to my friend or just sitting dreaming, wandering through an inner world all of my own making, a world that grew and extended with everything I read or saw and with every story I ever chanced to hear.

And indeed, the slope where my stones rested in the shade of the old thorns was as special to my father as it was to me. He had little cause to go there, there being no grass to mow and no shrubs to prune, but he had done one thing that left me in no doubt at all about his feelings. He had named the dwelling he had long dreamed of building ‘Anacarrig’, and in the tongue of the olden days, ‘Anacarrig’ is ‘the small marsh of the stones’.

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On the night Mother died, I phoned my dear friend Joan to tell her the news. Joan lives in the ground floor flat below us – a sturdy, silver-haired lady who has lived through eight decades, but only owns up to the fact on rare occasions because she says people treat you as if you have lost your wits if they find out you are over eighty. And Joan is most certainly in full possession of hers. She is more shrewd and wise in her judgement of people and what happens to them than anyone I have ever known.

Matthew and I carried down all our houseplants for her to look after while we were away. We found her waiting for us by her door, a freshly opened bottle of whiskey in her hand.

‘Drink up, my dears, it’ll help you sleep,’ she insisted, pouring generous measures for us both. ‘The most important thing to do in the face of death is to celebrate life,’ she pronounced, as she eased her stiff limbs into her special upright armchair. ‘You must be willing to accept how you feel. There’s no use pretending you’re coping if you’re not. If misery is inevitable, relax and get on with it. It will pass. All things pass, however ghastly.’

With her strong voice and Cheltenham Ladies’ College accent, Joan could strike you as quite overbearing when she holds forth, but I had long ago grasped the true character of what lay behind the briskness of manner. Joan’s life had been full of difficulties and her struggles had left their mark, but she was a musician of great talent and when she played for you she revealed herself, a woman of deep sensitivity and compassion.

‘You’ll ring me, won’t you, Deirdre, if I can be any use whatever. Going through your mother’s things won’t be easy. You never know what’s going to come upon you, my dear, especially if it’s someone close. Things you’ve forgotten, or things you never knew, just pop up. You may find it very trying, especially as you’ll be on your own,’ she said firmly, as we stepped out into the hallway and said our goodbyes.

A week later, four hundred miles away, kneeling on a pink bedroom carpet, tears trickling down my face, I heard her words echo in my ears and longed for the comfort of her overcrowded sitting room and the hiss and bubble of its antiquated gas fire.

Armagh Gazette, it said, in Gothic script on the paper bag I held in my hands. ‘Newspaper and General Printing Offices, Office Requisites and Stationery Stockists, Largest stock of books in the City.’

At the bottom of the deepest drawer in Mother’s dressing table, hidden underneath a leather handbag full of receipts and the spare parts for her heated rollers, I’d found this paper bag: it contained two unused hardbacked notebooks. I had bought them with my prize money from the ‘Living in Armagh’ essay competition. The same paper bag the assistant slid them into, fresh and shiny as the day I bought them.

I wiped my eyes crossly and counted on my fingers. Yes, 1969. That would have been it. The Easter holiday before my A level. I could almost feel the chill of the early April day when I cycled into Armagh to see what I could find to spend my prize money on. I went into the Gazette office and at first I just couldn’t make up my mind. I was so confused by the array of exercise books, notebooks, files and folders laid out on the broad counters, I turned away and went and looked at the books instead.

I walked up and down the tall display cases where I had spent my tokens and chosen my prizes since I was old enough to read. And then, on a counter right at the furthest end of the shop, I saw the pile of blue notebooks. ‘Challenge’, they said, in gold lettering on the spine.

‘That’s what I want,’ I said out loud, and a woman buying paper doilies stared at me, as I pounced on one of them to find out how much they were. To my delight the prize money would pay for two.

My joy was unbounded. Those two shiny notebooks, full of smooth, unwritten pages, were a hope and a dream. I had such plans for filling all the space they offered me. As I cycled back to Anacarrig with the blustering east wind behind me, my jacket billowing, thinking of what I might write in them, my spirits soared so high that I felt I might take off into the dazzling sky and make a circuit of the city.

‘What kept you?’

I could see the anger in her face, because she thought I’d been gone too long. Then came the inquisition as to where I’d been, who I’d met. She hadn’t believed me when I said I’d just been looking at books and buying some notebooks.

‘Not surprising they disappeared, is it?’ I said to the empty room, as I wiped my eyes again. ‘That was in another country and besides the wench is dead.’ She was hardly a wench, but she was certainly dead.

Joan was right. You really couldn’t guess what was going to jump up and hit you and there was no use pretending it didn’t hurt. Here in my hands I held a dream that had been taken away, not just by the loss of my precious notebooks which I couldn’t afford to replace, but by all the pressures and obliqueness a mother can bring to bear on a daughter.

If I were being charitable I might try to justify her action by saying she was simply ensuring I had no possible distraction from my work for A level. But the facts wouldn’t support me even if I tried, for no matter what I wrote, she always found a way of suggesting that my writing, like my reading, was a self-indulgent activity even when school and exams were long behind me. It could have no value whatever, because she could never see any connection between it and earning my living.

‘Have a bit of sense, Deirdre. When did reading a book ever pay an electric bill? Tell me that? An’ where would you’n Sandy be today if I’d sat on my backside and scribbled at stories or read books?’

I put the notebooks down where my dripping tears could not spatter the bright covers and hunted in the pockets of my jeans for a hanky. There wasn’t one, only a screwed up pink tissue with a lipstick print on it. I unfolded it meticulously, wiped my eyes and blew my nose.

Then, suddenly, I heard my own voice echo in the empty room, a voice I barely recognised. Strong and firm, with no trace of tears or the choke I could still feel in my throat, it said: ‘So what are you going to do now, Deirdre Weston? You’ve got your notebooks back. You’ve got a life of your own. There’s no one to stop you now. What about it?’

I hadn’t got an answer, but I got to my feet, picked them up and carried them along the landing to the table in my own room. As I set them down, I nodded reassuringly to the golden eye of the kingcup I’d brought up from the small marsh of the stones. Something would come to help me.

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I still don’t know what possessed me, whether I was overconfident, or curious, or prompted by some inner need I couldn’t explain, but on the Sunday morning after the funeral, I decided to do what I hadn’t done since I’d packed my bags and left home for good. I rang Mr Neill, our one and only Protestant neighbour and asked for a lift to church.

The short journey into the city was no problem. It was a beautiful sunny morning, the light spilling through the newly-leafed trees. William Neill is a retired farmer who knew my father well. He talked about the weather and the sudden surge of growth in the fields and gardens in just the way my father would have done. It was as we drove down the Mall, I realised I should never have come. It was seeing Mother’s parking space that did it.

The moment we drove past the spot, waves of nausea hit me, my light spring suit felt like tweed and the strong white shape of the Courthouse began to waver uncertainly. It was here, under the trees, by the side of the broad, green oblong that lies like an oasis in the heart of the city, close by the grey-faced church where she worshipped that we arrived well before the service was due to begin for the express purpose of ‘seeing all the style’. No one who passed within range escaped her comment. She knew everyone and everything about their affairs.

‘See you later, Deirdre. I’ll leave her parked opposite the Orange Hall in case you’re out first. I never lock her. The boyos would be afraid to steal her, she only goes for me.’

I just about managed to say a thank-you as William drove off to the parish church in a cloud of fumes, leaving me standing at the foot of the worn stone steps that led steeply up to the dark vestibule of the plain, square Presbyterian edifice I had been forced to visit week after week, month after month, for all the years I had lived at Anacarrig.

By the wrought-iron railings children were eyeing each other. Newly released from Sunday school, they shoved and pushed surreptitiously, while keeping a watchful eye out for their parents who would soon be arriving for the service.

‘If anyone speaks to you and asks you how you are or how you’re doing at school, just say, “Very well, thank you.” That’s quite enough. Don’t tell them any of your business. People only speak to you on account of me and they don’t want to listen to any of your nonsense, especially on a Sunday.’

No, it was absolutely no use telling myself Mother was dead. Her presence was as tangible as if she were alive and well. And she’d be there inside as well, waiting for me.

I still wonder why I didn’t turn and walk away then. Perhaps someone spoke to me, but it’s more likely I simply lost all power to act. I just went on into the building, walked down the aisle as I’d done so many hundred times before, and sat down in our family pew. I even bowed my head in prayer. ‘Only for a minute, of course. You don’t keep your head down and pray for this one and that one, you can do that at home. People will think you’re showing off if you do that. Just do what I do and you’ll be right.’

I jerked my head upright and stared at the wooden pulpit, the focus of all that went on in this particular rite. No cross, no candles, no stained glass. Just a large wooden box of a pulpit and behind it, blocking the east end, the pipes of the organ. As a child, my eye had gone round and round the church looking for some interesting feature to rest upon. There had been nothing then and there was nothing now, except the broad pastel spaces of the unadorned walls and ceiling. Through endless hours of boredom I had covered those spaces in drawings and paintings. Bigger than the biggest drawing book, or the generous sheets of grey paper for free expression in school, those spaces were my comfort, my defence against the torrent of angry words which poured down upon us, Sunday after Sunday.

At the age of twelve, when I learned that Michelangelo had painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it came as no surprise to me. I simply assumed he had suffered as I had and had come up with the same solution to save his sanity.

A door clicked open at the foot of the pulpit and the choir filed in self-consciously. I had once been a member of that choir and a Sunday school teacher as well. I had read the lessons on Children’s Sunday and sung solos at Harvest. I had been complimented afterwards by various old ladies and the good-natured verger and then I had been stripped down by Mother.

‘You weren’t nearly loud enough, couldn’t hear you behind a wet newspaper. You must remember half those men at the back of the church are deaf.’

‘Then why don’t they sit at the front?’

‘Don’t you be cheeky with me. You know perfectly well that no one sits at the front.’

There were never any answers to Mother, only the answers she expected from you. And woe betide you when you couldn’t come up with them.

She would sit throughout the service, her large family Bible unopened on her knee, a look of concentration on her face. Once home again, over lunch, she would declare her verdict on the congregation. It always seemed to me she was more acutely aware of the sins of her fellow men and women than the Almighty. Had He been a member of her staff and fulfilled His promises of retribution so ineffectually, He would most certainly have been given the push.

‘I don’t know how that man can sit there on a Sunday with his shoes shining, the way he’s carrying on with your woman in Lonsdale Street. Bold as brass he is, goes in and out, doesn’t care who sees him. Brings her bunches of flowers. At her age. And him with two good-looking sons and one of them the manager of Lipton’s.’