Read Online Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O’Brien - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Edna O’Brien
Tags: Biography, Non-Fiction, Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography / Literary
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who longed for conversion, while the altar for Mass was a wooden press, above which hung a dark cloth suspended on a bamboo pole. Two little Hanyang altar boys in their white surplices completed the perfect picture, which was in some abandoned garden, among ancient ruins, overhanging temples, and pagodas, which were infinitely more beautiful than the wooden press, but our God, which was not their God, did not dwell in overhanging ornamental temples. Having celebrated Mass, the priest, using chopsticks, would eat a small bowl of rice, and then set out on his donkey or his bullock cart to spread the holy pasturage in the next distant outpost.
The
Messenger
also carried romantic stories, which were serialized and which invariably hinged on a crisis of conscience. Take young Blanche, “a personable matron of twenty-two,” to whom Aunt Louisa had willed the Honeysuckle Cottage in County Wicklow on condition that she would never marry. Blanche gives up her lowly job as secretary to a solicitor, moves to Wicklow, tends her rosebushes, her apple trees, occasionally inviting a few friends from Dublin to visit her on summer Sundays. She is the happiest Blanche alive, until one day a wandering artist knocks on her door, a man with flashing eyes, poor but proud, and fatally persuasive. “Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.” Unable to sleep, her hair slipping outof its curling pins, Blanche paces and paces, dreading the bitter fate of life alone, because yield she mustn’t, as apart from Aunt Louisa’s stricture about wedlock, the wandering artist is not a Roman Catholic, whereas Blanche is endowed with an intense spiritual nature and the religious sentiment of her race. At the end of each episode, there would be the heading for the next thrilling installment—“Her Wild Blood” or “A Blighted Evening”—but I never got to the chapter “When the Curtain Fell,” as that edition never reached us, probably because of shortage of money. Threepence seems so little, but there were times when we did not have it. I recall with scalding shame having to ask at the gate lodge for a penny for my dancing class and therefore hating the dancing teacher, with her beautiful black suede court shoes and her calves so sleek and shapely in her navy silk stockings.
One Sunday I came upon a book in a trunk in a neighbor’s attic room. How it got there, I will never know. It was a secondhand book which had been presented to a Mary McDonald as a reward for regular attendance and industry, from the Edinburgh School Board, in 1907. The cover was also a rich dark red, like the
Messenger,
but instead of the Sacred Heart a piquant young woman held her arms out, and in the folds of her red cloak were two blank pages, suggesting the drama of her wayward life. It was called
East Lynne.
It was tastefully illustrated, depicting happy families, father in coattails and mother in long gown with leg-of-mutton sleeves, the blond child the very epitome of happiness. There were 548 pages of it, crammed with love, intrigue, faithlessness, cotton handkerchiefs soaked in eau-de-cologne, distressing dreams, secrets in sachets, and a deathbed scene in which an errant mother, who has returned disguised as a governess to her own children, equivocates whether she should disclose to her little dying son, Willy, her ghastly secret. This errant mother, the Lady Isabel, of fair damaskcheek and luxurious falling hair, was daughter of a profligate earl, who died leaving her destitute and therefore in need of marriage. Mr. Carlyle, who lived in West Lynne, though reticent and mindful of the age difference, loses his heart to her, and Isabel, while not being wholeheartedly in love, esteems him and hopes that love will ripen with the years. As she walks up the aisle of the little country church, in a thin black gauze dress because of being in mourning for her father, she little knows the sickening jealousy of Barbara Hare, who had set her cap at Mr. Carlyle.
The
Messenger
also carried romantic stories, which were serialized and which invariably hinged on a crisis of conscience. Take young Blanche, “a personable matron of twenty-two,” to whom Aunt Louisa had willed the Honeysuckle Cottage in County Wicklow on condition that she would never marry. Blanche gives up her lowly job as secretary to a solicitor, moves to Wicklow, tends her rosebushes, her apple trees, occasionally inviting a few friends from Dublin to visit her on summer Sundays. She is the happiest Blanche alive, until one day a wandering artist knocks on her door, a man with flashing eyes, poor but proud, and fatally persuasive. “Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.” Unable to sleep, her hair slipping outof its curling pins, Blanche paces and paces, dreading the bitter fate of life alone, because yield she mustn’t, as apart from Aunt Louisa’s stricture about wedlock, the wandering artist is not a Roman Catholic, whereas Blanche is endowed with an intense spiritual nature and the religious sentiment of her race. At the end of each episode, there would be the heading for the next thrilling installment—“Her Wild Blood” or “A Blighted Evening”—but I never got to the chapter “When the Curtain Fell,” as that edition never reached us, probably because of shortage of money. Threepence seems so little, but there were times when we did not have it. I recall with scalding shame having to ask at the gate lodge for a penny for my dancing class and therefore hating the dancing teacher, with her beautiful black suede court shoes and her calves so sleek and shapely in her navy silk stockings.
One Sunday I came upon a book in a trunk in a neighbor’s attic room. How it got there, I will never know. It was a secondhand book which had been presented to a Mary McDonald as a reward for regular attendance and industry, from the Edinburgh School Board, in 1907. The cover was also a rich dark red, like the
Messenger,
but instead of the Sacred Heart a piquant young woman held her arms out, and in the folds of her red cloak were two blank pages, suggesting the drama of her wayward life. It was called
East Lynne.
It was tastefully illustrated, depicting happy families, father in coattails and mother in long gown with leg-of-mutton sleeves, the blond child the very epitome of happiness. There were 548 pages of it, crammed with love, intrigue, faithlessness, cotton handkerchiefs soaked in eau-de-cologne, distressing dreams, secrets in sachets, and a deathbed scene in which an errant mother, who has returned disguised as a governess to her own children, equivocates whether she should disclose to her little dying son, Willy, her ghastly secret. This errant mother, the Lady Isabel, of fair damaskcheek and luxurious falling hair, was daughter of a profligate earl, who died leaving her destitute and therefore in need of marriage. Mr. Carlyle, who lived in West Lynne, though reticent and mindful of the age difference, loses his heart to her, and Isabel, while not being wholeheartedly in love, esteems him and hopes that love will ripen with the years. As she walks up the aisle of the little country church, in a thin black gauze dress because of being in mourning for her father, she little knows the sickening jealousy of Barbara Hare, who had set her cap at Mr. Carlyle.
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