Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O’Brien Page B

relax.” Yetthey were known to fight bitterly, and often he left the house at night and was missing for days.
    So, as I sat there, my eyes glued, listening to their every word, my aunt suddenly said that my mother was not my real mother. Those were her words. My real mother, as she said, was in Australia. I went shivery and then stone-cold. They went on laughing and embellishing their story. I said my mother was my mother. They said I was too young to recall when the swap-over had happened. They built it up, relishing the fun of it and the fact that I was getting more and more agitated, standing, as I remember, and hitting out with little fists, little useless fists, as this Australian mother began to materialize. Peg was her name, she had brown hair and a heartlessness, evidenced by her giving me away. She lived on a sheep farm out in some remote place, and occasionally sent a five-shilling money order toward my keep. One day I would be sent to her and separated from the mother that I loved so much that I used to promise to die at the very instant she did. The place to which I had to go in my mind, admitting to having no mother, was awful, summoning terrors, great and small. Things in the kitchen began to go blurry, as did they, and in a violent frenzy I ran out to escape them, intending to run the five miles home on dark roads at any cost, to find my mother and hear the sweet, reassuring phrase from her lips, “I am your mother, you are my child.” They caught me at the first wicket gate by the sleeve of my cardigan, and I was brought back and put to sit on a rocking chair, half lying down. A towel was put on my chest and over my mouth, to stifle what must have been my roaring. I kept saying, “I want to go home, I want to go home.”
    Next morning my aunt had to cycle to the crossroads and wait for the mail van as word was sent to my mother to send Carnero to come and fetch me home. No reason was given. The man who drove the mail van was implored to break his journeybetween post offices and to go up to our house specially with the note. I had already packed my few belongings in a small suitcase and spent the day at the plantation, because my grandmother, upon being told that I had homesickness, started grumbling, saying how spoiled I was and how thankless I was, considering the treats they had given me, jelly and blancmange of a Sunday. The day wore on and on.
    Birds for miles around were making their evening excursions, swooping down into the rain barrel where midges had swarmed, and the crows were already roosting in the trees for the night. In the dusk I still waited, and so certain was I that Carnero would come, I kept hearing the scrape of the lych gate on the slate pier where it was hung. I could picture him laying his bicycle down on the ground and taking a shortcut over the high grass, cursing the fact that the dew would ruin the Sunday shoes he had just polished.
    Then I was called in for supper. My aunt, feeling remorse, had cut up a slice of shop bread in little pieces and poured liberally from the tin of golden syrup, to coax me. My grandmother railed on about all the suffering and penances she had had to endure and was praying aloud that the Lord would come for her soon. My aunt and I both regretted the coolness with one another, because prior to that we had become firm friends. Each night after my grandmother had gone up to bed, we would sit and chat. First she talked of her dead husband, her partner, the man whose likeness was in a locket that she wore next to her chest and with whom she had conferred from time to time. He had dark eyes and dark hair.
    Her one solace was the romance novels that she could get her hands on. Unlike my mother, she loved reading, and by a miracle a retired schoolteacher in County Kerry had sent her a copy of
War and Peace
only a few months before. It was in three small volumes with tiny print, and the paper was so flimsy one had tohaw on it to separate the pages. She had shown