LITMIR.BIZ

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doors with their pitchforks and worse. I loved to hear these stories; they were thrilling and my father was a wonderful talker.

      For instance, he told me that he was in the IRA as a young man, and he had a little silver gun, a revolver, which he kept down his sock. He said he was one of Michael Collins’s men. He would tell wonderful stories, about men in Cork and the IRA, during the 1914–18 war and the twenties, which left me spellbound. He told me about escorting the Black and Tans out of prison. One day he was walking down a lane with my mother, hand in hand, when they were courting, and a ‘Peeler’ (an English policeman) jumped out of the bushes and confronted him on the road. My father said the Peeler made him strip down to his combinations (old-fashioned long-johns), and then he searched him, which was all done in front of my mother. It was hugely embarrassing for my mother, humiliating for my father, and then it all got ugly so she ran away in fear. When my father was bending down to undo his boot laces, he took out his little silver gun from his sock and shot the Peeler dead. The local men hid the body and it was an ‘unsolved crime’. He was later decorated by the President of Ireland for shooting the policeman. When he died he was buried with full military honours, with the IRA flag draped over his coffin and shots fired over it. He was a hero in many people’s eyes, including mine.

      At the age of four I was sent to the Nuns of the Presentation Convent in Clonmel. They lived in a huge, gloomy grey-stone place, with a cloister in the middle in Irish Town, an outer part of Clonmel. I hated and detested it right from the very start until I finally left for England, at seventeen. All four of us sisters were sent to the Presentation Nuns, while my brother Peter Joseph, who everyone called P-J, went to the Christian Brothers. The nuns were cruel and vicious, and we were ‘murdered’ (by which I mean belted and walloped) regularly by them; and sadly P-J was equally cruelly treated at his school. Worst of all was Sister Margaret, who was tall, gaunt, with glasses, and who had a ghostly aura about her. She was particularly horrible, especially to me, or so it seemed. She was the Devil incarnate, and I used to come home crying to my mother after a bad day at school saying, ‘I’m going to kill her,’ and my mother would snap at me, ‘You mustn’t talk like that. You should try to be patient – why do you think she’s a nun?’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t know, but I guess her family hates her.’ And my mother would ‘tut’ and then say, ‘Nobody loves her, she has no family probably,’ trying to make me feel sorry for her (which I didn’t), as she always seemed to have it in for me, unfairly. We all knew that nuns were often farmers’ daughters, who were shoved out into a convent when there were too many to marry off or feed and clothe – so they solved the problem by hastening them into the folds of the Church.

      Anyway, I was always in trouble at school. I was a bit naughty, I admit; I remember there was a very goody-goody girl with a long plait, the end of which I stuck into an ink-well, and it went all black. I got into trouble for that, although I tried to play the innocent at the back of the class. Of course, I shouldn’t have done it, but I think I was always in need of exerting myself against unfair authority. Sister Margaret would take us for knitting, sewing and the like, and one day she was teaching us moss stitch. I was sweating away, struggling to keep my stitches on my needle, while Sister Margaret prowled up and down the rows between the desks. She was in her long black uniform, with big sleeves, and a huge crucifix clunking round her waist, with her big starched hat, and a white starched bib down her front. On her hand she had a huge silver Bride of Christ ring. She hovered over me menacingly as I was struggling with the knitting, thinking, ‘Sweet Jesus, I’ve lost a stitch. What am I going to do?’ ‘Having trouble, are we?’ snarled Sister Margaret, and she got her big ring and ground it hard against the side of my head. It hurt like hell. But if that didn’t make me contrite enough, she’d take out her pencil, which had a sharp point, and would push it into my ear lobe as hard as she could. My eyes would spring with tears and I’d yelp. Then she’d drag everything off my needles in fury and throw it onto the desk, in front of everyone. Then I would be told to stand on my seat, and as we had glass partitions everyone in the adjoining classrooms would see me standing there, humiliated and blubbing. It was terrible. I would run home and tell my mother what had happened, but she’d just say I should ‘pray for Sister Margaret’s body and soul’ and I would say, again, ‘But, Mammy, I want to kill her, so I do.’ I swear my ears were pierced before I was fourteen years of age.

      Although my mother was quite tough, she was also very skilled and she could do anything with her hands. As she was a dressmaker, she was very nimble with her fingers, so at school I was wearing a black gym frock, with box pleats and a red sash, which had been let up and down endlessly as it had been worn by all my sisters before me. When I was about fourteen, the gymslip hem came just to my knees. Anyway, on this particular day Sister Angela, who was dumpy, with a big bust and wire glasses, was taking us for singing. She was a strict old thing, very punitive and cold, and I didn’t warm to her. ‘Stand out, Mary Francis,’ she suddenly shouted at me, ‘and look at the Virgin Mary – she’s about to weep at your immodest legs.’ I was jolted out of my musical reverie and looked at the statue on the wall and wondered what on earth I’d done now. Sister Angela came and stood over me and then made me get out in front of the class. I wanted to die. She then went and got a big sheet of brown paper and knelt down and stitched it to the hem of my frock, right down to the ankles. I felt so humiliated. My best friend, Jo Mulochny, who sat beside me, looked at me with big eyes and mouthed at me, ‘Jesus, your mother’ll go mad!’ It was well known that my mother was proud of her family and skills.

      At the end of the class Sister Angela snapped at me to stay behind, but I didn’t – I ran out of the door like a bat out of hell, brown paper crackling as I went. It was pouring with rain, and I had to walk a mile home from school. So I was half walking, half running, with all this brown paper slapping round my legs, all wet and flapping. When I got in my mother was sat at the treadle sewing machine in the kitchen and I said, ‘Look what she did to me.’ My mother jumped up and said, ‘Jesus wept, who did that?’ ‘Sister Angela,’ I said, crying. ‘She humiliated me over my gym frock. She said it was “immodest”.’ Well, that was it. My mother was enraged. She couldn’t bear any of us being humiliated like that. She was a proud woman, especially about her dressmaking and mothering skills. She didn’t care if we got belted, as she thought we probably deserved it, whatever happened, but this kind of deliberate public humiliation was the last straw for her. ‘That’s it!’ she said. And it was – it was war. Her feather hat was on in a trice – she never went anywhere without her hat and her gloves – then she said ‘Come on!’ and we were out the door. My mother had a lame foot, but she was on fire, so we had to march right back to school, with it still raining, and my brown paper still slapping off my legs. She was going so fast that I was half-running, half-walking, as she was half-dragging, half-pulling me behind her. My mother was fuming, incendiary and about to explode.

      When we got to the nuns’ part of the school, to their living quarters, on a big, long corridor, we could hear them all singing piously at prayer. Butter wouldn’t melt at all, so my mother rapped loudly on the door, and a little nun came limping out, the wizened housekeeper, Mother Anthony, leaning on her stick, all serene. In fact, she was the Reverend Mother, and she knew my mother well because my mother had gone to the school there, before me, also when she was little. I was tugging at my mother’s coat, whispering, ‘Mammy, let’s go, she’ll kill me tomorrow.’ But my mother was adamant, and firmly planted to the floor: ‘No, she won’t. You leave this to me.’ So when Mother Anthony said, ‘Mrs Powell, how nice to see you. What can we do for you?’ my mother exploded. ‘Look what Sister Angela has done to my daughter. How dare she humiliate me and my family!’ On and on it went, and I was so red, so embarrassed, I wanted to die.

      Mother Anthony kept calm in the face of this and simply said she would deal with it, but my mother was not to be put off. ‘You get that Sister Angela out here right now,’ she insisted, eventually. Out Sister Angela came, looking sheepish and bland, and my mother let rip. ‘Did you do this to my daughter’s frock?’ Sister Angela said not a word, but looked terrified. ‘Get a pair of scissors and undo it now!’ The paper was all dripping and flapping round my legs by now, creating a puddle on the floor. So Sister Angela removed the paper, obediently, but after that, and until the day I left, she totally ignored me. She made sure I was shoved down to the bottom of the class, however. But I was happy, because she left

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