Country Girl: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

a pitchfork, vowing to do herself in, until eventually a father or an uncle or an older brother had had to seize her and tie her with rope and drag her to the waiting horse and cart. She would not be seen or heard of for many months, and then she would return home and we would see her at Mass, so very quiet, peculiar-looking and mumbling to herself.
    One day I was getting clothes off the line, which was on a hill not far from our back door, when she surprised me. Her shadow and her gabbling preceded her, a tall streelish figure with a stick, raving, raving. She asked me to say her name, and when I said, “Mabel, Mabel,” she burst out laughing, sensing that I was frightened, and went off on a spiel.
Mabel gone. Nomore Mabel. Mabel dead. Blood blood blood. Ha ha ha. Mabel no more.
    “I’ll get you a drink of lemonade,” I said, anything to escape her. She refused it, did not want charity, moreover she had important business to do. Then she pulled my mother’s stockinette bloomers off the line with such force that the clothes-pegs came off with them, and she left, slashing the air with her stick, saying again she had business to do, to burn down the barracks and the sergeant and all the buggers in it. It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.

    Each summer a father and son came from Dublin. They were wealthy cousins of my mother’s, and she cherished the distant hope of a little legacy. The preparations were myriad; the house was scoured from top to bottom and new recipes were pored over. She discussed menus with them almost as soon as they arrived, and there were the usual jokes about their “avoirdupois,” except I did not know what it meant. They always brought either a tin of Roses assorted sweets or a box of chocolates, which was put on the sideboard. Much was made of their gift, too much. They ate so well that after their big feed in the middle of the day, when they went out in the fields for a “constitutional,” they flopped down in a cornfield or a hayfield and dozed, yet they were always ready and peckish for the evening meal, which was usually cold meats with piccalilli and sausage rolls, a delicacy she was proud of.
    The legacy was never mentioned, though she drew hope from the fact that the father had mentioned how he had given her name and address to his solicitor. We also hoped that they might leave me a ten-shilling note on departure. I could see its coloring, a golden, prosperous pink, with a picture of a ladywearing a veil. No sooner would their car have disappeared outside the second gate than we ransacked their bedroom, put our hands into pillow slips and bolster cases, turned over the mattress, searched under ornaments and statues, but found nothing. My mother would shed a few tears because, with all the largesse, we now owed money in three shops, and reverting to one of her two faithful platitudes, she would recite, “Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.”
    Once a year, just before Christmas, there would be a card party in our house. They were held in different houses, and the eventual prize was a goose, which families took it in turn to provide. It was there I had my first glimpse of feuding over politics. Card tables and card chairs were set down in the kitchen, and in the pantry, covered with a slightly dampened piece of muslin, would be the two-tiered plates of sandwiches, with a choice of ham, mutton, or egg. There would also be dainties on a different plate. A fad of my mother’s at that time was doughnuts, so the smell of hot oil and warm sugar permeated the kitchen. The game was Forty-five and at first everything was jovial. Partners were decided and people sat at the different tables, their consignments of change set down beside them. It may have been that someone cheated, or reneged, or that a player had mistakenly played against their own partner, but inevitably a row erupted, fists hitting the green