In an extract from Memoir, his new book, out next week, novelist John McGahern recalls how the bliss of his Leitrim childhood was shattered at the age of nine by the early death of his adored mother
My mother's faith must have been a strength, but even this was used against her when my father accused her of losing her faith in God. No matter how strong that faith was, it could hardly alleviate the human pain of losing everyone who depended on her whom she loved and held dear. She had no one to communicate this to after her 42 years in a world where many loved her.
Each day when I came from school, I went upstairs to her room, seldom immediately. The girls generally raced upstairs as soon as they were in the door, but as quickly they tired of the room and were away outside to play. What I wanted most was to be alone with her. I either sat on the edge of the bed or on the low windowsill. I told her the school news, and then our talk would wander. When I had to tear myself from the room to go and gather sticks or feed the ailing white bullock on the hill, I'd return as soon as these tasks were done. The Rosary was now said in her bedroom. Katie would bring my brother upstairs and we'd all kneel around the bed.
One evening when I was sitting on the low windowsill, she said, "Will you promise me something?"
"It's to say Mass for you?"
"No, no, though I hope you will one day. It's something else. Will you promise?"
"What is it?"
"Will you promise first?"
"I can't promise without knowing."
"I don't want you to be too upset if I have to go away. And I want you to do all that you can to help the others and to keep them together."
"Go where?"
"If God calls me and I have to go."
I thought first it was to Dublin, as in those long months when we were in the barracks without knowing where she was, but this was unimaginably worse. This way she would never come home.
"No, no."
"You know I'd be safe with God and I'd be waiting for you all in heaven."
"No!" I ran from the sill to the bed. "God has lots in heaven. I have nobody."
We talked until she promised me that she would not die. Soon we'd go together on the train to town. She'd come to my first Mass and she'd be the first person I'd bless with the new priest's hands when she came to the rails. With the substitute in the school and the long summer holidays stretching ahead, she'd be well again by September. We'd walk again past Brady's pool, past Brady's house and street, and the street where the old Mahon brothers lived, past the deep, dark quarry, across the railway bridge and up the steep hill past Mahon's shop to the school.
Katie had to call me several times before I left the room that evening. I left it uneasily and didn't think I'd be able to face Katie and the others, and as I dragged myself away I noticed that she too was trying to hide her face.
Pat came almost every day to the house and always climbed the stairs to her room. He'd cough loudly as he crossed the narrow wooden corridor to the room, and never went further than the bedroom door. "How is the patient?" he always asked, clearing his throat. She nearly always said she was improved or a little better, and this heartened him. He'd mention the coming summer and the good weather and how all these things take time. They were very fond of one another. Only once did she answer, "Not so good. Sometimes I think I'll never get out of this. I don't know what will happen." He was shaken and didn't speak for a long time, clearing his throat several times. "There's no use in that way of thinking, Sue. If you were to go on like that you would be surely calling it a day soon."
"I don't want that but sometimes it's not in our hands."
"You'll be all right, Sue. Far worse than you who thought they were finished are walking around today without a care."
Maggie came on her bicycle one evening in great excitement. She had heard of a young woman who won the gold medal in her finals in the London Hospital and was home. She wanted me to go with her to see if we could get her to come and nurse Mother. They lived only a few miles away on the far side of Garradice. As we cycled along the narrow roads around Garradice, it seemed as if everything would be made whole again if we could persuade this girl to come.
An old woman in black came to the door. I was left holding the bicycles again, but this time there was no rain and the light was of the lengthening evenings. Maggie explained the purpose of the visit, pointing me out.
"She came home for a rest. She's worn out by the bombings and all that's going on in England."
"Couldn't I have a word with her anyhow?" Maggie pleaded.
A confident young woman came to the door and her mother disappeared into the house. She was plainly reluctant at first. Maggie pleaded with her, pointing me out, explaining how young my mother was, a teacher, with children; there was a maid, she'd get all her meals, she'd have no housework. I could hardly bear the tension, and then my heart sang when I heard them agree hours and wages. We cycled home full of happiness.
The nurse came the next day. She was shocked by the state of the bedroom, perhaps by the house as well, and spent the whole morning cleaning and rearranging the room. Dr Dolan came, and he and the nurse spent some time talking on the cinder path a little way up from the house after the visit. It was decided that the baby would no longer sleep at night with our mother but with Katie. Rosaleen now slept with our mother, and a small bed for me was moved into the room. At six in the morning Mother woke Rosaleen, who then woke me to go down and light the fire. When I had the fire going and the kettle boiling, I took the hot water upstairs where we helped Mother mix a white powder. Rosaleen thinks it was probably morphine. I then went downstairs to put more turf on the fire so that it would be lit for Katie when the house rose. A new strictness was imposed by the nurse. I could no longer go to the room as soon as we came from school or stay very long when we were allowed to climb the stairs to her room. My mother seemed to spend a great deal of time sleeping during the day.
The good weather came in June. The goats were back on the hill. The little fortress of a flower garden in front of the house remained intact, but no one tended it any more and the smaller flowers were barely visible in the grass. Sometimes I went up the railway tracks to the Keegans. In this good weather Jim and Christy and the father were nearly always in the fields or on the bog, and I was sure of finding Bridie alone in the house. She made much of me and gave me tea with slices of fresh buttered bread with jam or honey.
"Your mother is still in bed?"
"Still in bed. She has a nurse now."
"I know. She's a long time laid up. She didn't look all that well when I was over to see her last week."
"She got wet that bad evening we went to the priest's."
"You got wet on that evening too and you are not laid up."
"No, but I wasn't sick. She'll be better soon. We were very lucky to get the nurse."
"What would you do if she didn't get better?"
That was unimaginable. This was not the pleasant, happy visit I had come for. "She'll get better. After the holidays she'll be back in school with us."
"Say, if she wasn't able to get back?"
"She'll be back. There's oceans of time yet for her to get better. There's the whole holidays."
"Say if she died?"
"She can't die. She's too young to die. Only old people die."
"Our mother wasn't old when she died. I had to give up school before I was 14 when she died. God calls people away at every age."
"She can't die!" I went silent as I heard footsteps and voices approaching the house. Jim and Christy and the father were coming in from the fields. They all welcomed me. Ordinarily, I would have wanted Bridie all to myself, but at this moment I was never more glad to see them.
As I went back down the sleepers and white stones of the railway track, Bridie's questions would not go away; "What if she doesn't get better? What if . . ." was too terrible, but the doubts and fears kept coming. Why would Bridie want to torture me? What terrible thing was she trying to say? I sat down on one of the sleepers in the middle of the track and put my head in my arms. I wouldn't have cared if the train was coming.
Dr Dolan arrived every day. Another nurse was hired to be with her during the night, and Rosaleen and I went back to our old rooms. The fire was never raked but kept going by the nurse during the night. If there was any fighting and shouting, we were warned to be quiet. Pat and Maggie came every day from the town. Uncle Jimmy came. Aunt Katie. Father McGrail. Master McMurrough; and on Saturdays and Sundays other teachers came, some of them cycling distances. My father never appeared.
We were less protected now. The three Brady children waited for us by the pool each school morning, and we went home with them after school. The Whelans wanted to fight us as soon as we left the Bradys. I fought one of them and was beaten. I didn't tell anybody. I felt too humiliated, but word must have gone round, and after that Hugh Patrick Brady, who was older, came with us all the way past the pool to the iron gate opening on to the footpath of cinders. Sometimes when he was gone the Whelans would return to the gate and shout down to the house, challenging us to come out and fight. Now that our mother was no longer at school we were seen as vulnerable and weak.
On the last Sunday in June I was invited over to Aunt Katie's. Breedge and Rosaleen, Margaret and Monica were going to Brady's for the day. I think it was a way of clearing the small house, lightening Katie McManus's work and possibly ensuring quiet as well. As soon as I came from serving Mass, I cycled towards the town and out the Willowfield Road. The narrow road ended at McGarry's gate. Their thatched house overlooked a small lake with an island and several swans. Many wildfowl gathered on the lake and stood out like clusters of dark fruit on the unruffled water.
The canal also ran along their fields and was full of eels and bright yellow roach and small perch. I had a wonderful day with my first cousins, exploring the shores of the lake where Emmet had a setline for pike attached to a bottle floating outside the drowning leaves. We ran, we jumped, we played marbles on the earthen floor of the living-room and caught many small perch in the canal, and I came home very late, dog tired and happy to find myself the centre of a storm of anxiety.
"Where were you all this time? What kept you? Your mother nearly left us while you were away. She was asking for you and we couldn't find you anywhere."
She had nearly left us and I wasn't there. She had not gone. That was relief, but, mortified, I climbed the stairs. She was not gone. She was there. We kissed, and I sat close to her on the edge of the bed. "I didn't mean to be so late."
"It doesn't matter, love. How were the McGarrys?"
The nurse was in the room. We did not speak of what had nearly happened while I was away or of our dream of life together. Constraint was now all around us. Her voice was low and she looked very tired, but I would have sat there for ever.
After a long time the nurse came towards me and touched me very gently, indicating that I should leave. My mother was sleeping deeply.
My father must have heard from Maggie or Pat that the end was close. Margaret and Monica went by Brady's pool, by Brady's house and street, and the street where the old Mahon brothers lived, by the deep, dark quarry, across the railway bridge and up the
steep hill past Mahon's shop to the school; but the rest of us were kept from school. A lorry was coming to take us to the barracks. It must have been decided the night before, because the brown hens weren't let out in the morning and were packed into crates for the journey. Pat and Maggie were in the house and the two workmen who hadn't been with us for weeks were there. The morning was a perfect late June morning. Everywhere birds were singing. Pat heard the lorry coming and went out to the road to direct it through the open gap and down the cart path to the house. The lorry had just enough space to turn and park on the cinders between the house and the flower garden. There was only the driver.
The driver handed Pat a note which he gave to Maggie to read. Maggie told him what was in the note in a voice so low and rapid that no one could hear. The men began to take the furniture out of the house and to lift it on to the back of the lorry, moving what was downstairs first: the table, chairs, the yellow dresser, pots, buckets, basins, the flour bin, the milk churn, tea chests filled with cups and plates and saucers wrapped in towels and dishcloths, the lamps emptied of their oil, the religious pictures from the walls. Then they began to clear the upstairs rooms: the wardrobe, the chest of drawers, the mattresses, the bed clothes, the white enamel pots. This was slow and difficult because of the narrow, rickety stairs. My mother's bicycle was lifted on to the lorry with my small bicycle.
The iron beds were left till last. The joints had rusted in the dampness and the sections would not pull apart. Bicycle oil and brute strength were tried. Neither worked. A hammer was found. They started to beat the sections apart. The sound of the metal on iron rang out and the thin walls of the house shook in the beating. A man swore at the noise the beating made. When the sections were finally separated, they fell with a light clang. It must have taken no more than an hour or two hours to clear the small house, but it seemed like a whole day.
I stood beside the overgrown flower garden watching the lorry fill, trying to put off the time when I'd have to climb the stairs and cross the landing and enter the room to see her for the last time. Earlier I had said goodbye to the cows and the white bullocks and the goats on the hill, and when I went towards the old jennet he galloped away thinking I had come to harness him for work. Breedge and Rosaleen and little Dympna had been to the room, as had Katie with my baby brother. Breedge and Rosaleen were excited by all the moving and commotion and tried to draw me into their gaiety. I looked at them in incomprehension and silent hatred: how could they not know what was happening? The window of the sickroom opened and the nurse motioned to me to come to the room. It could not be put off any longer. Inside, the house looked much larger emptied of all the furniture. In a terrible numbness, I climbed the stairs, crossed the landing by the open doors of the small empty bedrooms, entered the room and went towards the bed. Maggie and the nurse were in the room.
"The lorry will be going soon, Mammy."
"Not for a little time yet, love."
Her voice was so low I was hardly able to hear.
"I came to say goodbye, Mammy."
Her eyes were fixed on my face; she seemed to be very tired. I bent to kiss her. She did not move. I was bewildered. Both Maggie and the nurse turned away. I tried to hurry. If I did not get away quickly I'd never be able to walk out of the room. I wanted to put my arms round the leg of the bed so that they wouldn't be able to drag me away and they'd be forced to leave me with her in the room for ever. I went out the door, crossed the landing, went down the stairs and out into the blinding day.
My uncle put his hand on my head but, blessedly, did not speak. "Will the lorry be going soon?" I started to pester the driver.
"Any minute now. We are almost there." The crates of alarmed clucking hens were the last to be put in among the furniture in the back of the lorry.
I could not tear my eyes from the upstairs window. I wanted to rush to the room. But how would I ever be able to leave a second time? The engine started. Katie, with the baby in her arms, sat into the cab with the driver. Breedge, Rosaleen, Dympna were lifted into the lorry. I climbed up beside them. The end board was raised and the pins dropped into place. The high crate was closed. Dympna sat between Breedge and Rosaleen on a mattress, and they were warned not to let her stray. The two workmen and Pat and Maggie were gathered outside the door.
Maggie was shaking. Pat looked lost, but as the lorry bumped along the cart path to the gap on the road, I saw him turn towards the workmen. On the main road the lorry gathered speed, but with each pothole we hit, the furniture shook and jumped and would have fallen if it hadn't been roped to the crates. The hens clucked their alarm for the whole of the journey, only falling quiet on rare moments. We went through the railway gates, past Maggie's open shop, down High Street, past the barracks where my father lived when he came as a young sergeant to the town, across the canal, and we blessed ourselves at the blue-and-white statue of the Virgin outside the convent where our mother first taught. We went through Fenagh, Keshcarrigan, Leitrim village, crossed the shallow, angry Shannon at Battlebridge, and into the narrow roads leading to Cootehall. The girls were still excited by all the moving and newness, and after a while I joined them in putting my hand out through the crate to comb the rushing air with my fingers.
We were in Cootehall: the church, Henry's field, Lenihan's Bawn, the barracks. We went past Charlie Reegan's bar, the post office, Packie McCabe's, turned in the short avenue of sycamores to the barracks. Beyond it stood the black and red navigation signs at the entrance to Oakport, the slow river and glittering lake and the dark woods of Oakport in the far distance.
On the white gravel my father waited with all the guards, Guard Walshe, Guard Cannon, Guard Murray, and two of their wives, Mrs Walshe and Mrs Cannon. The two women were wearing light summer dresses, and Mrs Cannon's long bare legs were in white tennis shoes. All my father's silver buttons and stripes and badges were shining as if it were a court day, the high collar unclasped. He lifted each of us off the lorry and kissed us before setting us down on the gravel. The two women were crying, and it worsened when Katie got out of the cab carrying our baby brother.
"The poor children. The poor children. The poor children." This pitying was almost as hard as entering and leaving the upstairs room.
The ropes that held the furniture together were loosened. The three guards removed their tunics to help carry the furniture and boxes into the barracks. My father alone remained in full uniform. Mrs Walshe left for her own house below the quay.
Mrs Cannon stayed. There were already a few hens at the barracks picking about in the big rhubarb beds in front of the lavatory. The brown hens were closed into their henhouse in the crates until they grew used to their new place.
The whole mood of the day lightened as soon as they started to carry in the furniture. There were even quiet jokes and laughter as pieces were edged through doors and around corners and up the wide barrack stairs. My father alone remained gravely silent. Mrs Cannon stood smoking and talking to Katie in the big barrack kitchen, and I became fascinated by the pale, bleached hairs on her bare legs above the tennis shoes, and stealthily, guiltily, let a coin roll towards her across the cement to try to see further up the short dress when I bent to lift the coin.
The barracks had been empty for so long that the big rooms gave back echoes. The girls started to call out and to listen for the echo and to laugh when it came back, and then called out again even louder, until my father roared at them to be quiet; then they began to cry. The furniture was soon all taken in. The lorry drove away. I moved outside into the day.
The barrack boat had been tarred and was floating in the inlet down from the dayroom, tied up to the clump of sallies. All the arable part of the big barrack garden had been tilled, and the rich green mass of potato stalks, with their tiny white and purple blossoms, moved like water under the various breezes. That night I slept with my father in the big iron bed with the broken brass bells, the single window looking out on the river and Oakport. I was too numb and heartsick to care where I slept.
Strangely, we were not sent to school the next day, or the next, and it was on that third day that the news of her death came. We were in the big barrack living-room when we heard the telephone ringing down in the dayroom. The dayroom door opened and Guard Cannon's steps came up the long hallway.
He knocked timidly. "There's a personal call for you, sergeant." My father went down to the dayroom, shutting the door behind him. Guard Cannon stayed with us in the living room. His face was grave. "Is it from Corramahon?" Katie asked, and when he nodded she burst into tears and, as if a dam had broken, I joined her, weeping uncontrollably. She was gone. She would never answer to her name again. She was gone for ever.
McGahern reads memoir
John McGahern's Memoir will be published by Faber on Thursday, £16.99
The author will read from Memoir on Book On One, RTÉ Radio 1, this Monday to Friday at 11.25pm and will be interviewed by Myles Dungan on Rattlebag, RTÉ Radio 1, on Thursday
McGahern's play, The Power of Darkness, will be broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday, September 4th, at 8pm.
John McGahern: A Private World, a documentary produced by Philip King and directed by Pat Collins, will be shown on RTÉ1 on Tuesday, September 6th at 10.50pm