Your name would have brought you some attention among the Eileens, Maureens, Marys and Brids. Two thin white vowels, strangely unIrish and yet so easily pronounced, as if more Irish than the Irish names. Your father’s visits would have brought you more. Most of the nuns would have baulked at the excesses of the Troubles but would have supported the Free State side and have been overcome by the mystique of your father’s name. He looks a little like a statue, standing in the doorway. Two of them, though, would have refused to be impressed. One from Clare, with Republican connections, whose tight mouth whenever she passed you in the corridor would have said enough. And one old, quite beautiful creature, an avid reader of Tolstoy, who would have regarded the presence of gun-carriages in a school yard as an immoral intrusion. She is old and tall, like a long translucent insect underneath her habit. The thin bones on her hands and the shining white skin on them and her cheeks, which is all you can see of her beneath the black, seem to contain more reserves of energy than any of the younger novices. Her hands are hardly warm, they hardly linger on your hair for more than a moment; each of her movements is as brief as it can possibly be, as if her body is reserving itself for a boundless, ultimate movement. And the reserve, the iron quiet that she imposed on her life has had its recompense in the cheeks that face you at the top of the class, as smooth and pallid as those of a young, inactive boy, in the grey eyes under the black and white bonnet which reflect the impersonal rewards of a lifetime’s confinement. Her presence is hypnotic, as are her maxims. ‘Keep your hands,’ she tells you, ‘to yourself. Keep your hands from yourself.’ You cannot understand the contradictions of this dictum, but through your efforts to understand them it assumes a sense of truth that is, for you, greater than words. It hints at the mystery behind movement and gesture. You say the maxim to yourself in situations that have nothing to do with hands. You know the ideal is hands folded and demure on the lap of your unfolded legs, neither to nor from yourself, and you know too that this is not the final answer which, you suspect, has nothing to do with the dimpled, fleshy hands before you. Are there other hands, you wonder, unseen ones which these real hands must train to lie at rest, ready to suddenly bloom into a gesture of giving? The hands of the soul, you think, and stare at the nun who has repeated her maxim once more and is sitting, hands unseen, at the top of the classroom. Her name is Sister Paul and it expresses that maleness which must be the ultimate goal of her sisterhood.
Lili is your seat-mate. She is pert and alive, master of the social graces of that classroom. If anyone is the favourite it is she, catching the glances of nuns with the downward flickering of her eyelids. And even now I can see the small alert girl who would have arbitrated the loves and hatreds of that class, whose clothes would have been imitated, cut of hair, colour of ribbon, style of bow. She had a lisp and the lisp becomes in her an enviable possession. She is enthralled by you and your cream-blonde hair and yet can dominate you with her quickness and her tongue, for yours was more than anything an ordinary childhood.
You sit by the window and stare at the trunk of the beech. Sister Paul’s voice wavers, like a thread held in air. Lili, to see the trunk, has to lean past you. You watch the shadow of its severed umbrella blacken less and less of the yard as the morning progresses. The first break passes and the second break, until the final bell rings and you run into the yard once more and find your space against the bark and if the armoured carrier is there, you are carried off in that and if it isn’t, you begin the long walk down the Trimelston Road home.
THE WIND SWEEPS down the long avenue, at one end of which there is a half-built church in a new kind of granite and cement which make the half-walls rise sheer and inhuman. How large it will be and what a God it will hold. There is a group of boys playing near nettles chanting ‘Up Dev’. One of them is standing in the nettles, crying and leaping to retrieve his cap which either the wind or the other boys have flung away. You stagger with Lili through the wind. It is a spring wind and pulls the green of all the sycamores in the one way, towards the sea. There is a line of coast houses behind you and the sea, which seems hardly disturbed. You walk a few steps and turn to the sea and then face the wind again and walk. Lili is laughing and clutching her gymslip. The wind makes another sweep, you close your eyes against it and a melody suddenly courses through you like a long pendulum sweeping the tips of the sycamores in a heavenly arc. It runs its course and finishes, and just when it seems past recall it comes again, its long brass tones fortified by another one and you listen and walk while the two melodies boom through you. There is a rhythm of which each tree seems a distinct beat and the bass song, too deep for any human voice. It recurs and recurs with each sweep of the wind which pulls your slip against you, gripping your knees and thighs as if it were wet. Then it leaves you finally and the wind dies down and you are relieved. You turn once more to the coast houses and the unruffled line of blue and then walk on with Lili, not saying a word. The boy has retrieved his cap and is standing near the nettles, smearing his legs with dock leaves, crying softly. Lili stops, looks at him as if she might console him, but then walks on. ‘Crybaby!’ she whispers.
You walk past him, looking at his green-smeared knees. You have little that is defined or personal about you. You have not yet reached the age of reason. The melody flies and your soul waits for its return. You are like a mirror that catches other people’s breath. One nun refers to you as that plump, blonde-haired girl, another talks of your slender, almost nervous quietness. You willingly become each, as if answering the demands every gaze makes on you. The most persistent attitude towards you is one of pity, touched by a warm, moral, faintly patriotic glow. You are the child whose father must rarely see her, immersed as he is in the affairs of the Free State, whose mother is busy, abstracted. Through you they see your heritage, the glow of newspring and newspaper reports, the profusion of rumours and heated discussions beside which you must seem something of an afterthought. You grow through the very stuff of those frustrated politics. You are Lili’s most treasured possession, the prize that all her classroom graces have won her; though you are most at ease when unnoticed.
Are you already choosing between these images as to which of them you will eventually become? A choice that must be unconscious, but within which must lie the birth of real decision, as those glances we throw as a child are the breeding ground for the tone of gaze as an adult. Or are you, behind the screen of your ordinary childhood, holding each of them in balance, nurturing each to take part in the eventual you? For you did become all of them. You hold your hands folded, a modest distance from your body on the classroom desk. Your knuckles are still only dimples, but from those particular dimples a particular knuckle will eventually emerge. As you walk down the Trimelston Road the sea is always in front of you, a broad flat ribbon at first and then, as the road falls, a thinner strip of blue serge until eventually, when the coast houses rise to your eyes, it finds itself a thin, irregular grey thread.
ONE