Sacred Heart girls, I remembered now, had a reputation for going to the bad in later life. As this notion seems to have stayed current longer among the English than it did with us, it may have titillated English boyfriends.
So, I understood, inviting nuns
would
have been a bad idea.
Every year on 8 December during our schooldays, we were each expected to bring a St Joseph’s lily – one of those funnel-shaped ones a bit like a dentist’s drinking cup – to offer to the Virgin. In practice we were supplying the nuns’ flower arrangement, so it was no wonder that the loss of a lily under a bus seat was remembered. Ten shillings, I think it cost. Or five? Even that was a lot back then.
‘You thought me odd?’ I challenged my hostesses.
‘Ah no,’ they protested kindly. ‘Just scatty.’
‘Easily flustered?’
‘No, no,’ they soothed.
But clearly my mother had been right. Then I remembered that
they
had seemed odd to me. Several had chosen to go to Swiss finishing schools and none to college. Hence, perhaps, the origami-inspired napkins.
In our school timetable, Latin and cooking classes had invariably clashed, as though to emphasise that choosing between them marked a parting of the ways. ‘Domestic Science’ pupils seemed to cook what they liked, for I remember them as always making meringues. White as my lost lily, these would be laid out to tantalise our Latinist nostrils as we clumped hungrily past their kitchen. We were never offered any.
On a later return to Dublin, I was taken to another women-only party. This one was for Muslim girls who were there to learn English. I forget where they were from – Lebanon perhaps? – but I was impressed, both by their exquisite silks and by the flair of whoever had picked Dublin as a safe place for chaste young women. Earlier, Spanish girls had come for the same reason and, earlier still, while walking the Dublin streets, the poet Antonin Artaud had had a revelation to the effect that to cut out reproductive sex would, by abolishing humanity, save the world from sin.
That, an acquaintance told me, was a tenet of the ancient Bogomil heresy. Dubliners, then, knew things like that. Heresies, like science-fiction, offer an escapist view and also, judging by Artaud, the opposite.
It strikes me now that I may not have wanted our
mater admirabilis
to have the lily of my heart, so dropped it partly on purpose. Religion, in a country like ours, could become a trap. At the end of our final school year, nobody showed surprise when one or two quite worldly girls revealed plans to become nuns. I remember our hockey captain doing so, and that when someone said she had too much team spirit for her own good, nobody laughed. In the late Forties the farewell dance held to celebrate someone’s entering a convent was sometimes still held.
So how easily flustered was I? Now that I am at an age when forgetfulness might signal the onset of dementia, I would be happy to know of other blunders made in my teens. Reports of old gaffes mean that I have got better, not worse. And what aboutEileen whom I abandoned to Seán’s unreliable care? After I left, she focused her energies on choosing and elegantly translating tales from the Irish sagas and turning her garden into an asset which doubled the value of the house so that it soared during the Irish property boom. None of us benefited, though, since Knockaderry had been sold before this happened. That was my fault. She had offered to hold on to it if I would agree to come and live there after she and Seán died, and I refused. I hope she never learned what leprechaun’s gold we might have had.
I console myself with the thought that for years she had enjoyed designing and working on the garden, which must have provided pleasure and therapy – not to mention pride. From 1937, when we moved in, she worked on it with the help of a succession of handymen and fed us as long as we stayed there on increasingly interesting vegetables, soft
So, I understood, inviting nuns
would
have been a bad idea.
Every year on 8 December during our schooldays, we were each expected to bring a St Joseph’s lily – one of those funnel-shaped ones a bit like a dentist’s drinking cup – to offer to the Virgin. In practice we were supplying the nuns’ flower arrangement, so it was no wonder that the loss of a lily under a bus seat was remembered. Ten shillings, I think it cost. Or five? Even that was a lot back then.
‘You thought me odd?’ I challenged my hostesses.
‘Ah no,’ they protested kindly. ‘Just scatty.’
‘Easily flustered?’
‘No, no,’ they soothed.
But clearly my mother had been right. Then I remembered that
they
had seemed odd to me. Several had chosen to go to Swiss finishing schools and none to college. Hence, perhaps, the origami-inspired napkins.
In our school timetable, Latin and cooking classes had invariably clashed, as though to emphasise that choosing between them marked a parting of the ways. ‘Domestic Science’ pupils seemed to cook what they liked, for I remember them as always making meringues. White as my lost lily, these would be laid out to tantalise our Latinist nostrils as we clumped hungrily past their kitchen. We were never offered any.
On a later return to Dublin, I was taken to another women-only party. This one was for Muslim girls who were there to learn English. I forget where they were from – Lebanon perhaps? – but I was impressed, both by their exquisite silks and by the flair of whoever had picked Dublin as a safe place for chaste young women. Earlier, Spanish girls had come for the same reason and, earlier still, while walking the Dublin streets, the poet Antonin Artaud had had a revelation to the effect that to cut out reproductive sex would, by abolishing humanity, save the world from sin.
That, an acquaintance told me, was a tenet of the ancient Bogomil heresy. Dubliners, then, knew things like that. Heresies, like science-fiction, offer an escapist view and also, judging by Artaud, the opposite.
It strikes me now that I may not have wanted our
mater admirabilis
to have the lily of my heart, so dropped it partly on purpose. Religion, in a country like ours, could become a trap. At the end of our final school year, nobody showed surprise when one or two quite worldly girls revealed plans to become nuns. I remember our hockey captain doing so, and that when someone said she had too much team spirit for her own good, nobody laughed. In the late Forties the farewell dance held to celebrate someone’s entering a convent was sometimes still held.
So how easily flustered was I? Now that I am at an age when forgetfulness might signal the onset of dementia, I would be happy to know of other blunders made in my teens. Reports of old gaffes mean that I have got better, not worse. And what aboutEileen whom I abandoned to Seán’s unreliable care? After I left, she focused her energies on choosing and elegantly translating tales from the Irish sagas and turning her garden into an asset which doubled the value of the house so that it soared during the Irish property boom. None of us benefited, though, since Knockaderry had been sold before this happened. That was my fault. She had offered to hold on to it if I would agree to come and live there after she and Seán died, and I refused. I hope she never learned what leprechaun’s gold we might have had.
I console myself with the thought that for years she had enjoyed designing and working on the garden, which must have provided pleasure and therapy – not to mention pride. From 1937, when we moved in, she worked on it with the help of a succession of handymen and fed us as long as we stayed there on increasingly interesting vegetables, soft
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