While my father was in the dining room, talking about God, my mother was always in the kitchen, talking to someone else. She didn’t sing but she never stopped talking. Gossip, my father called it. He would come in and say, “What are you women gossiping about now?”
But there was nothing trivial about the way mother could describe a car crash, limb by mangled limb. My father was full of ideas; but mother – full of stories – was always more real.
And what I love most about women is the sound of their voices. My earliest recollection is of women chattering above my cot. In adolescence, my greatest comfort was the soft, posh voices of female presenters on BBC Radio 3.
Even in adulthood those voices have carried me through half a dozen failed careers, a few nervous breakdowns, and thousands of winter colds.
Of course I loved more than my mother’s voice. I loved the apple dumplings that she steamed in a pressure cooker, and which were shaped like Christmas puddings when they came out of the bowl, although the walls of the dumpling were made of pastry and there was stewed apple inside.
I loved the lambs’ hearts she roasted in the oven and the potato cakes she buttered on winter evenings and served with fried eggs. I loved the light in her face when someone was hungry, and how she could draw out more stories than a therapist by simply putting a bowl of soup under someone’s nose.
Chicken soup
And chicken soup was her masterpiece; it simmered on the range in the kitchen every Sunday morning, and it was a Eucharist, more sublime than what the red-faced, blood-pressured fathers in the church presided over, as they doled out answers to every question in the universe from the lofty solitude of their very masculine sanctuaries.
My mother got the chicken soup recipe from her mother, and I remember visiting a cousin’s house and catching a familiar aroma. I realised my granny must have shared her recipe with her daughters, and they in turn had passed it on.
It’s what women do. They pass things on. They share a “knowing” beyond words. They understand other people without inquiring or asking blunt questions. Wisdom surfaces in them at birth and death and at all the emotional turning points in between. They know things men don’t know. They shelter men in the fabric of their knowing, and they intuit a deeper universe when a man’s world is falling apart.
But it is their voices I love most. I have enjoyed the sound of women singing on CDs, LPs, EPs, the wireless, and even in my Ford Cortina, when I was young and had a girlfriend. She sang. And she always insisted on filling the back seat with extra girls on our way home from dances, and they would sing in unison, and invariably we ended up in someone's kitchen where they fried boxty and listened to Patsy Cline and danced with each other while I sat bewildered in the corner.
I love when women sing by the fire; flames in their dark eyes, and folds of long brown hair half covering a face, as the singer hits the high notes. I love Patsy Cline and Sinéad O'Connor, Anna Netrebko and Eleanor Shanley and all the other voices that have caught my heart at the turn of a stairs over the years.
Long ago, poets were always men. Women sat beside them in silent adoration; or so the poets thought, as they smoked pipes and blathered in false posh accents.
New voices
But the women were not doting. They were waiting for their time to arrive. Waiting for new voices in the public world. Waiting for Marian Finucane and other women to break the mould of officious baritones on Irish radio. Waiting too for Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan and Caitl
ín Maude and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and a legion of other poets to spin the hurt and wound of their oppression, and weave new love songs and laments.
Sometimes men make arguments for God’s existence that are less interesting to me than a half-knit jumper. But women have been my compass, my anchor, the ground and completeness of my universe. As I grow older they are the warp and weft of all my spiritual hope, because it was women’s eyes that saw Christ resurrected, and it was women’s voices who sang the song of it – until they were silenced.