Fathers Come First E-Book

Rosita Sweetman

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 304

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Rosita Sweeman's Fathers Come First is a coming-of-age classic set against a Dublin-city backdrop. Elizabeth is both gauche and perspicacious, walking the edge of her stereotypes while hobbled by the pressures of acceptance – social, physical and sexual. In a world informed by a Catholic upbringing, she wonders whether her indiscretions belong in the letterbox or the confession box. Curious, unflinching and disarmingly honest, teenager turned twenty-something Lizzie speaks to the changes and continuities in Irish society across forty years. It is a novel as relevant today as when it was first published.

Leseprobe

Fathers Come First

ROSITA SWEETMAN

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

DUBLIN

To my darling Chupi and Luke

Part One

—1—

There are important things to remember. All the time, though, the remembering and the importance changes. Depending. Depending where you are, who you’re with. Why.

I used to think sleeping with men was very important. I used to say to myself: Well now, when I’ve done that, that will be really something.

I used to think growing up would be important. I’d think: When I’m twenty, life will seem very solid. Life will be like a library, or a church. Full of shades and subtleties and things stacked away, neat and jumbled, both.

I used to think church one of the most important things. God was enormous and took up most of the sky and shouted. God sat over the altar in church and watched you. Church made your face change, made it stiff and long. It made women whisper and your stepmother very tetchy if you asked to borrow her handkerchief.

I used to think my stepmother terribly important. I used to lie awake at night and swear by the Holy God and Sweet Jesus and Dear Our Lady, that I would leave home, run away, hide. I would hope and think of my stepmother wandering the whole earth looking for me, begging me to return. People would say, Well if you’d been nicer to her you know…

I used to think what people said was important. I used to ask friends, ‘What does Valerie really think of me?’ I used to cry and say, ‘Nobody really likes me’ and wait for all the girls to come and hug me and say, ‘We do, we do.’

Later on I used to think what men said was important. I used to spend hours thinking about what they might or might not say.

I used to feel a fool, a failure, a factory reject if they didn’t say, ‘You’re the greatest, the most beautiful, the sexiest girl we’ve ever met.’

I used to think being a wife, a Mrs, vastly important. Perhaps so important that you didn’t think about it too much—all effort was bent towards it, like rivers and streams move towards the sea, quickly or slowly, naturally.

I never thought jobs were that important. Jobs were for important people—like men, so’s they could bring home fur coats and delicatessen food to their wives and talk about difficult things at dinner parties. I thought, Jobs, oh well, jobs.

I never thought money important. Money was a huge safe that men had the key to and you just had to get a man and then you got the money. Some men got a lot, some a little; you just had to choose the right man. First there were fathers, and then there were boyfriends, and then there were lovers, and then you thought, Well then there’ll be husbands. Certainly money wasn’t important.

You start off I suppose thinking you yourself the most important thing in the whole world. You get given a big breast and you suck it right into your face and hold it with your baby hands and you’re satisfied.

Then your parents become important. They watch you, and you them. They give a little and then stop and then give a little more. It’s not like the breast. You don’t feel that full, that satisfied, ever again.

You get cranky and you always stay that way because once you knew what enough really was, so you carry that idea round in your head, but you never get it again. Really you never learn how to get it again.

But. You’ve got your mother and your father. They’re very careful of you. They know about your disappointment and they try to help you. They’ve been through it. You don’t realize that till much later—you think they’re just dog-in-the-mangers. Meaners.

My mother died when I was four. I think that must have been quite important. I didn’t have the breast then and I didn’t have her. When I was nine my father brought in another mother. That’s what he said. Inside myself I said: No, that’s a stepmother, that’s different.

—2—

I was nearly expelled from my boarding school once for writing: My stepmother is a devasting bitch in a copybook. The nun who found it first corrected the spelling to devastating and then she told me quietly, little knives jumping from her eyes, to follow her to the Mistress of Studies’ room. The Mistress of Studies wasn’t there so the nun told me to go to the dormitory, collect my black veil and do an hour’s penance in the chapel, kneeling on my bare knees with my arms outstretched, like Jesus, in front of the altar. I thumped up to the dormitory and charged back and knelt with a clattering vengeance on the chapel floor. After a while I thought ‘Well at least Jesus had nails supporting his arms—and my knees hurt,’ and I began to cry, but softly so the nun wouldn’t hear and be proud of herself.

I remember the morning my real mother died. Our house was a very old house with tiny stairways, full of dark corners and cupboards that opened suddenly, pouring out their blackness.

The main stairs went from the hallway up to a landing where I slept, then the hallway turned past a high coloured-glass window up to another landing and flowed into a long passage. My mother’s bedroom was at the end of the passage. She’d been sick for a long time. Her room was always dark and she lay very still in her bed. Strangers came in and out of our house, doctors and nurses. My mother was very yellow and when she held my hand I thought her bones were like eggshells.

It was about six o’clock one morning. I could hear the door of my mother’s room opening and my father’s voice calling, softly, but urgently, like electricity: ‘Nurse Sheenan, Nurse Sheenan.’ I crept out onto the stairs and looked up the passage. It was freezing cold and I was holding a teddy and a doll. My father saw me and put his hands to his lips and said ‘Shh.’ The night nurse, Nurse Sheenan, came crackling up the passage then in her stiff white apron with a navy blue cardigan over it. I went back to my room and cried and cried and held the teddy and doll and kept saying to them something like: ‘Not to worry, not to worry.’

I could hear my father’s heavy feet going down the stairs and him ringing the doctor, speaking very quietly in this new voice. The day nurse had just arrived and all the grown-ups were walking around and going up and down the stairs and closing the bedroom door after them. They forgot about me but I knew already.

Finally my father came in and picked me up in his arms and carried me down to my mother’s room and I wasn’t frightened because it wasn’t my mother on the bed but a lady from a holy picture because the nurses had dressed her in a nun’s habit and put rosary beads and a crucifix in her stiff yellow fingers.

All the next day people came to the house and one of the nurses gave me my lunch and she made custard that was all lumps and I began to cry then because all the people coming into the house were crying; the stairs were full of their shoes and boots going up and down, and on top, this sort of sighing and crying like a wind.

The day after my mother was buried my father sat up all night in the kitchen and drank and shouted things out into the blackness of the backyard. He broke some plates and cups and banged his fists on the kitchen table. That’s when I first saw pain. I saw the madness of pain, how it bunches behind the eyes and in the throat and chest and how it must be annihilated or killed or thrown against something—killed, or it will kill you.

The next morning my father was very quiet. His chin was stuck with a piece of cotton wool where he’d cut himself shaving and his breath smelt of mouthwash. He took me away for two weeks’ holiday. We stayed in a very damp hotel somewhere in the West. I never told him I’d seen him with his pain. Never talked about it, and don’t even now.

My stepmother used to get me to try to talk about my real mother. She did that when she first came. I would just say, ‘Oh I don’t remember her at all.’

She would come in wearing her hat and her coat trimmed with imitation fur, and her high heels. She always smelt of powder. A sticky, pink smell. Even her breath smelt like that. She was always trying to kiss me then; I’d hold my breath and stiffen my back to get away from that smell.

I used to wonder how my father could share the same bedroom with her, even the same bed. I found them once in the same bed. It was a few weeks after they got married. I pretended to be sleepwalking because I wanted to get my father to come and tell me stories and put me back to bed. I came into their room and saw their bodies and the bedclothes all bunched up and the room smelled funny, musty. I bumped into a chair and my father turned round and saw me at the end of the bed and I could see his face floating and hers floating, and my father carried me back to bed but he didn’t stay; he didn’t even wait till I was back to sleep; he crept out and back to her and the musty bedroom.

They married the day I was nine. They had a small wedding in the local church. She was dressed in a turquoise suit and a hat with a veil over her eyes and nose. My father wore his dark pinstriped suit. I didn’t speak to her the whole day and just said goodbye to my father when the taxi came to take them to the airport. They went to Majorca for two weeks. That was her idea.

It was also her idea that I go to boarding school. Right up to the day I was dispatched, with new uniform and brand new trunk, my father was quiet about it.

She said I was getting out of control, that I was with grown-ups too much or else running round on my own. She said I was more like a boy than a girl—that was to him. Once she said to one of her friends, ‘She’s like a little wild animal.’ I heard her.

She just wanted the house to herself, and my father to herself. She was always crooking his arm and rubbing his ear and smiling cracking-powder smiles.

Everything was a smile. She’d throw out your jeans that you’d had for two summers and say, ‘But they were rather old weren’t they?’ She’d pull at your dress at one of their damn cocktail parties (she said my father had become a terrible recluse), and she’d say, ‘Tsch, tsch, Liz is such a tomboy, everything always torn.’ Then she’d smile at her friends.

She didn’t smile when I took two dresses her sister had sent for me from America and burnt them in the rubbish incinerator the gardener had set up in the backyard. She’d wanted to take me out in one of the dresses for Sunday lunch at one of the big hotels along the seafront.

She came and found me with bits of red taffeta and chiffon and blue nylon gently floating round the yard, a smell of burning rubber filling the garden. She screamed with rage and pulled me by the hair into my father’s study holding a bit of the dress in one hand and shouting at him, her words battering his face, and he just said, ‘Now, now,’ and I knew then I wouldn’t get punished but that she’d never forgive me either for not being the kind of daughter she wanted. She wanted someone to dress up like a doll, who would simper and trail round her friends’ houses, particularly her new friends, friends of my father’s.

Even when I did become a model and a doll, later, she wasn’t happy; she felt I was a kind of tart or something.

I feel sorry for her now. She never had a daughter of her own and she couldn’t accept me, nor me her, and my father just sat in the middle writing his books.

She was the sort of person whose accent changed completely when they were in a temper. ‘Your temper will be the death of you,’ she’d say to me and bang the table, and maybe I’d say nothing or maybe something like, ‘Good, I’m looking forward to being dead,’ and then she’d be round the table and pulling my hair and shouting, ‘Ya common little hussy.’

She used to have a saying for every situation: Once bitten, twice shy. You’ll be better before you’re twice married. Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Blah blah blah. I think she must have had a book of sayings like this. I used to imagine her sitting up at night memorizing them.

After a bit I used to chant them with her; as soon as she’d said the first word, I’d know which saying it was going to be and I’d sing-song it out: ‘Every cloud has a silver lining you know dear.’ She’d just look at me and then go on with whatever she was doing.

She was always doing something. Not like my father did things, slowly and carefully, word upon word of some paper for the University. No, she’d rush at things the way hens do. She’d go scatter-legged at something and knock it down and then pick it all up and start pulling at something else halfway through the first thing.

She was forever pulling at me. Before I started boarding school she pulled me into town, into tailors and hatters and cobblers. We had to go four times for fittings to the drapers who supplied the school uniform.

There were two navy serge dresses for Sundays, two mustard-coloured gymslips for every day, and two navy divided skirts for sport.

The shop smelt of deep layers of thick cloth and tweed and fluff and huge wooden counters greasy with years of polish and elbows and hands and people leaning to look at materials.

The fitters were very white-faced women in dark blue dresses. You had to stand like a rag doll while they pinched in a little bit here and a little bit there and said, ‘Ach, she’ll grow into it.’ It was a conspiracy between them and her. It was like getting frocks from your cousins that weren’t meant for you at all but just hand-me-downs and you longed for something for yourself as you were there and then.

I cried at night and thought, I’m going to boarding school because nobody here loves me.

—3—

Jack Hickey was the first person to whom I said, ‘I love you.’ We’d gone for a ride on our bikes through this new housing estate that was striding with concrete legs over the green fields of last year. Jack Hickey and I sat down on a tree trunk and he pulled out a fag and his red hair was thick and strong in the evening sun.

I said, ‘I love you.’ It sort of plopped out. We were both very surprised, I think, and didn’t say anything else that evening. Two days before I was due to go back to school Jack Hickey asked me to go to a party with him. We danced a lot together on particularly the slow numbers and then we went outside and gave each other harsh kisses and he tried to stick his tongue into my mouth and nearly made me sick.

Jack Hickey’s people were Protestants. We were Catholics. The Hickeys lived up the road. His father and mother used to shout at each other in front of the children and anyone else who used to be around and one day his little sister peed on the carpet, just took down her little nylon panties and peed and Jack Hickey’s parents just laughed big cigarette laughs and went on talking.

They used to have drinks any time of the day or night, and the front door was always open; you could walk right into the parents’ bedroom and see the bed unmade in the middle of the day. Jack Hickey’s mother used to bathe at all times of day and then walk round with just a towel.

Protestants, I thought, are like that. Protestants are a bit funny. On Sunday not one of them got up early or put on special Sunday clothes or went to church or anything. Sunday was ‘lie-in’ day for the Hickeys and they wouldn’t get up till midday and then they’d all cook a meal together and sit around in the afternoon reading the Sunday papers.

My stepmother said Mrs Hickey was ‘a bit loud’ for her taste but my father said it was nice for me to have friends. He meant Protestant friends. He wanted me to grow up non-sectarian.

When I went back to boarding school for the summer term that year I told one of the girls that I was in love with a Protestant and we were going to marry. The news went round the school in two hours. All through evening prayers there were whispers behind me and this girl passed me a note that said ‘Ye’ll both burn in hell fire.’

Nobody talked about anything else at school but boys. Mrs Hickey once said it was no wonder, a hundred or so girls, cooped up like that nine months out of twelve and the only male around being a decrepit and banjaxed old gardener. I thought that very daring—to even think that lack of the opposite sex would be a real problem for us.

Coming back after the holidays everyone would go through torments trying to invent boys they’d kissed, boys they’d gone on midnight walks with, boys who’d pinched and squeezed and hugged. (Everyone thought, or half thought, the other person’s stories true so made up even more elaborate ones to out-tell them.) Jack Hickey was the first boyfriend I had and I was sixteen and I thought kissing was pretty awful.

The first few days of term all the older girls would be gathering into little knots in the dormitory or out on the playing fields. They’d be twisting their fingers through their hair and saying, ‘God he was gaaawrgeous,’ and, ‘Listen, wait till I tell ya,’ and they’d be describing their dresses and how they flashed a smile at him from across the room and how they had the last ‘and longest and slowest dance together and… ’

Then there’d be all the rules you’d have to learn. Like when he first came over to ask you to dance you’d have to get deep into conversation with the girl beside you and only answer his request for the next dance please after a few minutes. You’d turn and look him up and down—from under your lashes of course—and say, ‘Excuse me for just a minute’ to the girl you’d been talking to and swan off with him, barely touching him, barely answering his questions.

Once you’d hooked him you’d never turn up on time for a date but leave him standing by the Pillar, or outside the Stella, for at least fifteen minutes.

You wouldn’t talk too much but you’d listen to him and say ‘Really?’ a lot and never argue.

You wouldn’t let him kiss you the first time he tried; if you did he’d think you were ‘easy game’. The game was anything but easy. That you learnt quickly.

Some of the girls used to sneak ‘home’ clothes into school. (We were supposed to come back in our uniforms and leave all our holiday gear behind.) They’d dress up at night and show us, and then the clothes would be laid out under the mattress for fear the nuns would find them and confiscate them.

Then there’d be the letters. Every morning at breakfast three girls would be appointed to hand out the letters. The more letters you got from people the more loved you were—QED. But if you got letters from boys then you were the cat’s pyjamas.

The girls handing out the letters would go from table to table and everybody would be praying for a letter—any letter. Maybe a girl would pass one right by you to the girl beside you and you’d want to get up and pull her hair because she’d be torturing you, pretending there was a letter for you.

I was fighting with a girl up in the bathrooms one day and she said, ‘You and your Protestant boyfriend, and he doesn’t even write you a letter!’ I took a bucket of water and threw it at her and most of it missed and went arcing out into the corridor and the nun came in and sent me to bed without any supper.

One girl was found writing passionate love letters to herself. She was taken away from school by her parents that week. We all said, ‘God, the poor thing’ and thanked God it wasn’t us because all of us had planned the same thing many a time.

Boys and clothes and pimples and Evelyn Home were a tide you couldn’t swim against. Your best friend would start getting letters and go all dreamy and say ‘Tom, oh Tom’ in the middle of the night, pretending she was asleep, and you’d be half laughing at her and half embarrassed.

But she’d have a picture of him in her prayer book and make up poems to him and cut out pictures of clothes from fashion magazines and write ‘Mrs Tom O’Hara’ in her copybook and push it over to you saying, ‘How do you think it looks?’

Finally I decided. I sat up one night under the bedclothes with a torch and wrote a letter to Jack Hickey. I said I was having a grand time and how was he. I said I hoped his parents were well and his little sister. I said we were just about to go into our Annual Retreat, and then crossed that out as he wouldn’t know what it meant, being a Protestant. I said, ‘It would be lovely to get a letter from you if you had a mo. Bye for now, Liz.’

In the morning the letter looked rather forlorn and silly but I gave it to one of the day-girls anyway with a bar of chocolate if she’d post it and keep her mouth buttoned. She couldn’t have told anyone anyway without committing a sin. The next day we were going into our Annual Retreat.

The Annual Retreat was when all of us, nuns and pupils, kept silent for three whole days and three whole nights. We kept silent in order to contemplate, meditate, think about our past sins and make resolutions (usually impossible ones) for the future. We were supposed to think about God and sin and the devil and the saints. We didn’t have any classes and we all went round trying to look very solemn and holy.

In fact, during retreats we all went mad on sex. You couldn’t think about anything else. We’d be in a turmoil reading the holy books the nuns gave us to uplift our minds and trying to glean information on the forbidden subject from the Legion of Mary Handbook for Young Ladies.

Priests would come in from outside Orders to give us the retreat. A different priest every year. We’d have talks from them in the school chapel about four times a day and then confessions and rosary and Mass and Benediction and night devotions. A veritable orgy of religion.

One priest who came was called Father Moriarty and he was from Limerick and he used to sail on the Shannon with his rich parishioners. He was young and tanned and all the girls were dying with love for Father Moriarty.

Father Moriarty was all for modern Catholicism. He had all the nuns in a flat spin when he asked for a blackboard and chalk to be brought into the chapel. In the chapel Sister! Then he came sweeping in for his evening talk. The evening talks were just for the senior girls and they were always to do with sex.

Well this evening Father Moriarty came in and whipped off his black soutane and stood there under the sacristy light in white shirt and black trousers and said, ‘Tonight I’m going to discuss some of the problems attached to the sexual act. First VD.’ I thought VD meant Veni Domine, Lord come, like in the hymn books, but there was a great shhing in the chapel and every girl was convinced that Father Moriarty was talking directly to her and we followed his every word and complex diagrams with intense concentration.

Valerie was the envy of the whole school because she asked for a ‘special talk’ with Father Moriarty as she had ‘A Problem’. He’d said he would be available to each and all of us during the entire retreat period. Valerie was taken down to his room while he was having breakfast. She said two sisters from the kitchen waited on him the whole time and the breakfast he got would have fed eight of us—porridge and cream, bacon and eggs and toast—and he told her, ‘Help yourself,’ and handed her his side plate but her hands were shaking so much that she dropped the egg in the sugar bowl and he laughed and said, ‘Not to worry,’ and pinched her cheek and she nearly fainted, she said.

Valerie had wanted to know if French kissing was a sin. A mortal sin. (Mortal sins meant you went to hell and burnt and burnt for ever and ever.) Father Moriarty had told us that you could get this VD thing from kissing and everyone was terrified and thinking: When did I last kiss a boy?

Was French kissing a mortal sin or not? Valerie in her excitement couldn’t quite remember. The priest had said it depended on what it meant in the whole context of the relationship, and she didn’t know what context meant. We told her it meant the whole works, the situation. The priest said it might lead to sinning, it might lead to all sorts of things, but it wasn’t necessarily a sin on its own.

The next day I waited for an hour to go to confession. Most of us went to confession at least twice a day that retreat. We’d be kneeling in the chapel benches and no one would dare sit up and some of the girls would be crying and pushing their rosary beads round and round and saying ‘Oh God’ under their breath so’s you knew they were grappling with a terrible moral problem. The longer you stayed in the confessional the higher your credit rating went.

I got up to go into the confession box and the missal fell out of my hands and holy pictures scattered and I gave a little ‘Oh’ and the priest opened his green curtain and looked out and said, ‘Take your time,’ and the pictures were sticking to my hands and I couldn’t get a grip on them, and I was sweating because it was a terrible thing for a priest to see your face before you went into confession; they were never supposed to know who told them what sins. One of the nuns once told us a story of a French priest who died at the scaffold rather than tell somebody’s sins.

I put my lips right up near the grill and started whispering, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned . . .’ and then I nearly dropped out of my standing because his two eyes were wide open and looking back at me, and usually the priest would just turn his ear to the black grill and you’d pour your sins through to him, like molasses into a funnel.

Father Moriarty just smiled and said, ‘Okay now, have you any problems?’ He didn’t want to hear the sins at all. Just problems. So I told him about Jack Hickey, about him being a Protestant and the way he pushed his tongue in and asked, ‘Was that French kissing, Father?’

He said, ‘It could be the start of French kissing.’

‘Was it sinful?’

Then he said, ‘Did you feel his thing stiffening up against you as he kissed you?’

‘Whaaat?’ I said, nervous.

‘His penis,’ he said. ‘Did you feel it stiffening up when he kissed you?’

And I got up and ran out of the box and down the chapel, the tears pouring down my face and it was the talk of the school for days. Everyone thought I’d done some really terrible sin.

—4—

There was a rule in school you learned to live by. The rule was: You live by, for, and through your emotions. School was weeping over boys, and crying at the Stations of the Cross for poor Jesus hanging up between the thieves. School was begging God to forgive the sins of the whole world if you gave up Marietta biscuits for a whole week and wore your vest every day. School was falling madly in love with other girls and falling out again with a white face, red eyes and loss of appetite. School was standing on your bed trying to have a look at your legs in the six-inch mirror and doing novenas to Saint Theresa to make them look like Marlene Dietrich’s. School was hearing of President Kennedy’s death and howling your eyes out and trying to get a look at Paris Match and the blood on Jackie Kennedy’s costume and saying, ‘God, how AWWWful’ and never asking why was it done but just sloshing around in the gasps and gawps of a street crowd at a car accident.

School was a continuation of, and a preparation for, our future—the future of nice middle class ladies who, having had hundreds of pounds spent on their education, would never be expected to do anything except marry, or maybe become a nun, but hardly have a career. Hardly.

Everyone accepted that somebody like Geraldine Doyle might have a career. She was odd. She was very good at maths and washed her hair with detergent and played the cello. She killed herself last year. She was found in her flat having spent two years teaching maths in a girls’ secondary school. She put her head, detergent-washed hair and all, in the gas oven, and turned it on.

Our last year at school we were allowed to wear our home clothes on weekends and school holidays.

The first night back after the holidays we’d all be up in the dormitory, our cases balanced up on our beds, our cubicle curtains drawn back and our clothes laid out.

Valerie came in wearing knee-high leather boots, and everything you had then looked tatty and worn out and you wanted to kill your parents for only letting you take what you had taken. She let me try the boots on and I stroked the soft leather against my legs and wanted the boots so much that it hurt like a knife twisting inside. That’s what it was then the whole time: I want, want, want—at night in bed thinking about the other girls’ clothes; wondering what they’d all wear next weekend; pleased to think that Margaret Daly looked a right eejit in a long kilt and white blouse and wondering how Elaine Mullen always looked so neat; squeezing the cheeks of your bottom together in bed to stiffen it and make it look pert like Hayley Mills’. Lying so tense and wondering, whispers like bats over the partition walls: Mary … are you awake? Listen, wait till I tell ya…

The first Sunday back that term somebody spilt nail varnish over Valerie’s angora twin set. The girl, Margaret Daly, cried out like she’d been stabbed and was mopping at the nail varnish like it was a bleeding wound. Valerie took the twin set and tossed it into a corner. ‘I’ll send it home to Mammy for one of the kids,’ she said.

God I’d love it, you thought, tarnished and all.

But you wouldn’t say that. Sit mum and pretend that it was the only thing in the world to do with angora twin sets that had nail varnish on them.

We’d spent the whole of that morning up in the dormitory, swapping clothes with smiles, and jumping in and out of each other’s cubicles and envying and wanting so that the air was electric blue and we were all laughing and saying how grand the other one looked, and how that little jumper looks far better on you than it does on me and not meaning a word of it.

Friendships that year became very fragile, brittle things. Everyone wanted Valerie to be her friend. Valerie was the apex, the pinnacle of our desires. Valerie had long legs and Valerie had masses of boyfriends—none of whom she gave a damn for; Valerie was as good as gold in class and all the teachers thought she was adorable and Valerie wrote poems about the teachers after class and passed them round her friends. They would have made the teachers’ hair go quite white.

The juniors would send Valerie letters. Valerie, I love you. She’d show them to her cronies at recreation and everyone would laugh and roll about and put their hands to their mouths, keeping an eye on Valerie at the same time.

That was the same term we had the woman from the Dorothy Grey cosmetics group come and give us a talk on how to make ladies of ourselves.

She was terribly slim, like a doll, and wore a light green wool top and matching skirt. She spoke so carefully that the tip of her nose moved with her lips.

She said it was a woman’s duty, her responsibility, to make the very best of herself. She said that nobody liked an ugly woman, a fat woman, a spotty woman. She said there was no need to be any of these things—with constant care and attention every woman could look attractive.

She said we must regard our faces as blank boards and etch in our beauty like an artist does a painting.

I thought of us all etching and scratching and squeezing for the rest of our lives. A long time.

She told us the kind of things a woman must never do in front of her husband. (Valerie said, ‘What about in front of her lover?’ but so quietly only those of us near her caught it. We giggled: Lovers indeed.) The cosmetic lady said a woman must never pluck her eyebrows, or cut her toenails, or shave her legs, in her husband’s presence.

One of the vulgar day-girls said, ‘What about picking her nose?’

For a minute a wave nearly engulfed us all; we were hanging on the edge of a swinging, tumultuous cliff, but the cosmetic lady gave a brief, flicking smile like a snake’s tongue in the girl’s direction, and carried on.

We sat on the edges of our chairs, listening and twisting our hair round our fingers and wanting and promising ourselves with fierce promises that we would be beautiful and we wouldn’t ever cut our toenails or shave our legs in front of our husbands. Not ever.

The cosmetic lady tried to persuade the nuns to take some samples of goods for us but the nuns said: No thank you.

Enough was enough.

We could never have enough of husbands and along with husbands came babies. We were all going to have babies. If anyone’s parents came visiting to the school with one of the girls’ baby brothers or baby sisters, we would all stand around and say, ‘Ahh, the little dote.’ But really husbands were more important than babies. Anyone could have babies—you had to work to have a husband. Somebody told us that in Dublin there were three girls for every one man and we thought, ‘Jesus!’

On a little shelf outside the chapel at school there was a box for Black Babies. If you gave the nun in charge of chapel half-a-crown then you ‘bought’ yourself a Black Baby. I bought one and I called her Josephine Agnes. You could call them anything you liked as long as the name was a saint’s name. Then the nun would write up your name and the baby’s name: Elizabeth O’Sullivan (in the nuns’ italic handwriting) has adopted (in print) Baby Josephine Agnes (written in the nuns’ slanting hand again). Your half-a-crown was sent to the missions in Africa and the nuns there called one of their new converts Josephine Agnes. Babies were that simple.

Josephine was the name of Napoleon’s wife and at home in my father’s study I’d read a book about her. She was rather daring but the history teacher just went on and on about Napoleon and batons in people’s haversacks and dates of battles that you couldn’t remember. I tried to tell her about the book on Josephine and she just said, ‘My dear child, I think you will find you have quite enough to do without frittering away your time reading irrelevant books on obscure females in history.’ She said, ‘Mmm’ when I couldn’t remember the dates again.