Country Girl: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

baize tops, cards scattered all over, and in the slanging match that followed political memories, so raw and so real, were resumed. It was the old story of Ireland partitioned, the six counties cut off from the motherland and raging argument as to who was to blame. Some were for de Valera and others for Michael Collins, the “long fella” and the “big fella,” the pith of the argument being that de Valera had sent Michael Collins to England to negotiate a treaty, knowing that he would come back having had to accede to the detested partition that the English demanded.Raging grievances against the foe were now mixed with raging grievances against each other, and calm, or the semblance of it, was only gradually restored by one or two reasonable people resorting to clichés about the terrible dark times that Ireland had been through, and sure, wasn’t the country only just trying to get back on her feet? The card game was resumed, but somehow the sparkle would have gone out of the evening.
    It was borne in on me at that very young age that I came from fierce people and that the wounds of history were as raw and vivid as the pictures on the packs of cards that had been flung down. The North was an area on a map, and yet the way they harangued, losing their reason and hurling accusations at each other, I felt it would one day darken our lives.

Classroom
    The classroom had to be swept each morning, the wooden floor sprinkled with water to keep down the dust that rose in little swirls. From the holes in the floor one could hear mice trotting underneath, and sometimes a snout or a brown tail would peep through and girls went berserk, pulling their legs up under their clothes and huddling. The smell of dust was always there, but in summer it would be mixed with the smell of flowers that were in jam jars along the windowsill. Girls that brought flowers were “pets” of the teacher, and the flower smell that lasted longest was that of stocks, which had a perfume even when withered.
    On my very first day at school, the teacher picked me up in her arms; the brooch she was wearing was identical to one my mother had, a nest of flowers in a leaf-shaped silver recess. Hers had strawberries and my mother’s were violets. She asked me in Irish if I was happy to be at school, and if I would shine and win a scholarship, and proudly she spoke the answer for me in Irish. There was a box for black babies in Africa, and as a surprise she allowed me to put a penny in the slot; the china skull of the black baby, with its braided hair, nodded a thank you. A letter from a leper colony in Uganda, yellow from turf smoke, in which the school had been thanked for monies sent was nailed to the wall. Next to it, on parchment more yellowed, were the reproachful words of the Englishman Sir John Davies, the King’s Deputy, written in the 1600s:
    For if themselves [the mere Irish] were suffered to possess the whole country as their septs have done for so many hundreds of years past, theywould never, to the end of the world, build houses, make townships or villages or manure or improve the land as it ought to be. Therefore it stands neither with Christian belief nor conscience to suffer so good and fruitful a country to lie waste like a wilderness, when His Majesty may lawfully dispose of it to such persons as will make a civil plantation thereupon.
    Irish history was the subject she most liked to teach. She strode through the classroom, in and out between the desks, where we sat in pairs, the small white pots of watered ink in an enamel inkwell, and a dent in the wooden slope to hold pen and pencil. With hyperbole she spanned centuries, invoking sieges and battles—Slievemurry, Gorey, and Athenry—bemoaning the seven-hundred-year conquest, the cruelty of the Invader, the Saxon sheriff. She reeled off the names of heroes whose heads were impaled on the gates of Dublin Castle, and yet, and yet, Malachi retained his collar of gold. Hitting with her ruler