Maggie's Breakfast Read online

  Maggie’s

  Breakfast

  Published 2012

  by Poolbeg Books Ltd

  123 Grange Hill, Baldoyle

  Dublin 13, Ireland

  E-mail: [email protected]

  www.poolbeg.com

  © Gabriel Walsh 2012

  Copyright for typesetting, layout, design

  © Poolbeg Books Ltd

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  1

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-84223-525-6

  eBook ISBN 978-1-84223-534-8

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Typeset by Patricia Hope in Sabon 11.4/16.5

  Printed by CPI, Mackays, UK

  www.poolbeg.com

  About the author

  Gabriel Walsh was born in Dublin. He later went on to study in America and France. Gabriel has lectured at colleges in Los Angeles and Cork and was a staff writer for Universal Pictures in Hollywood. He has worked on different occasions with actors such as Jack Nicholson, Gene Wilder and Robert Redford. He wrote the original screenplay Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx which received a Writers Guild of America nomination. He also wrote the film Night Flowers which received an ecumenical award at the Montréal World Film Festival.

  Acknowledgements

  There are times, when I look up at the sky, I see mingled among the stars faces of people with whom I shared some of my hopes, joy and pain. Often these faces appear brighter than their adjacent celestial neighbours. In wonderment and awe I see my parents Paddy and Molly, they who deposited me here on earth. I see the shadow of my sister Rita and the silhouette of the kind nun at Goldenbridge Convent, both of whom had the religion of love. In another part of the vast infinity I see Maggie Sheridan and hear the arias she sang on the operatic stage; and I remember gratefully how she pointed me in a direction that took me to many defining destinations. I also see the face of Sally Faile, a friend who helped keep me afloat when I was sinking and floundering in the confusion of my youth. In another illumination I see the face of Melanie Cain, a partner in pursuit of fantasy and art, and also the mother of my beloved daughter Juliana, who became and is the Supernova of my existence.

  Gabriel Walsh

  Dublin

  During the First World War thousands of sixteen and seventeen-year-old boys in Ireland enlisted in the British army. To facilitate this and because of the need for bodies in the trenches, the English conveniently ignored age requirements at the time of enlistment. No one, it seemed, was too young or too old to die for the Crown. Many Irish who enlisted did so because of the dismal poverty in their own country. There weren’t many alternatives to “taking the king’s shilling”. Countless Irishmen chose to die on the battlefields of France and Belgium instead of in the poorhouse in Dublin and elsewhere in Ireland.

  At the time of the ‘Great War’ my father, Paddy Walsh, was one of the thousands of young Irish boys who joined up. At the age of seventeen, Paddy Walsh survived the carnage without a scratch on his body and remained a soldier in the British army for several years more than he might have originally intended. Paddy experienced first-hand in the Great War what most people would not want to see or remember. His prolonged stay in the army doubtless had something to do with the sense that he had no place to return to. It is more than likely that his reason for leaving Ireland had been to do with the fact that as the second son he felt unwanted at home. Second sons didn’t inherit from their fathers and were generally considered to be akin to the dog that slept in the yard rather than the one who got to sleep in the house. For my father the reality and pain of abandonment at home overwhelmed the images of the death-trenches that awaited him on the battlefields in France when he decided he wanted to be a soldier.

  One summer he was made aware that his father back in Ireland had taken ill and, with the same determination that had impelled him to leave home in the first place, he decided to return to County Kildare and revisit his past. When he returned there wasn’t anybody to greet him at the isolated railroad station that served the crossroads of the village he came from, Maganey near Athy. After standing alone at the station and maybe even wondering if he should go home or not, Paddy Walsh picked up his bag and started walking to the cottage where he was born and where, before he left, he lived with his father, sister and two brothers. While crossing the field towards it, he heard several rifle shots and bullets went whizzing by his head. When he made his way to the rear of the cottage and looked in the back window he saw his older brother John, heir to the small farm, rifle in hand, still trying to find his target. Within seconds John was outside and the brothers were in a fistfight but my father with his military agility separated John from the rifle. The two brothers eventually retreated back to the cottage where my Uncle John wanted to burn the English army uniform my father wore but Paddy would have none of it. The uniform was a symbol of freedom for him. It meant travel, adventure and in an odd but obvious way it meant identity.

  For a week or so, while my grandfather recuperated from his undiagnosed ailment, my father spent his days at home and his nights at the local Three Counties pub (named because of its proximity to the counties of Laois and Carlow) talking about the differences between England and Ireland and the Irish and the English. Under the influence of a few pints, the subject was civilly accepted.

  The day my father was set to leave his father’s cottage and rejoin his army outfit in England, he came across Molly MacDonald, an attractive twenty-year-old country girl. When he saw her washing the windows at the railroad station he couldn’t resist the urge to talk to her and he did so unhesitatingly. For Paddy at age twenty-three, Molly might have been the most beautiful woman he had seen in a long time, although at the pub he did boast about seeing and meeting beautiful women while serving in France and Egypt. I often wondered what he said on that day to my mother, who as it turned out was a package of pain and penance wrapped in a natural rural beauty.

  Uncle John was as distrustful of the MacDonald clan as he was resentful of his brother wearing the English army uniform and he unwisely advised my father to stay away from Molly. In his narrow mind the MacDonalds were way down the scale on the social ladder. Uncle John made it clear to my father that he would never approach a MacDonald if they owned all the cows and grass in the county. John rarely ventured out of the realm of the attitudes and values of the small Irish village he lived in.

  With a certain kind of rebellion towards his father and brother and a display of romantic adventure, Paddy fell in love. With a soldier’s impatience on short leave, he proposed to Molly and spent his army salary on a gold wedding ring: the most expensive thing he had ever purchased and the most beautiful item my mother had ever seen. From my father’s side of the family, marrying a MacDonald was a greater sacrilege than joining the English army. This rejection left Paddy with a great sense of detachment that was to distinguish him in his dealings with my mother, his growing family and just about everything and everybody else he encountered in his daily life.

  * * *

  Against all opposition, Paddy married Molly MacDonald and they escaped to Dublin. They arrived at a pivotal time in Irish histor
y, when the Civil War was breaking out.

  In July 1921 the War of Independence had ended in a truce and in December 1921 Michael Collins and other members of the revolutionary Dáil Éireann (‘Assembly of Ireland’) had signed an agreement with the British government that gave independence to twenty-six of the thirty-two counties that comprised the Island of Ireland. Presumably Collins and his negotiating team accepted this as a stepping-stone that would eventually lead to the unification of the entire island. Collins and his negotiators also accepted the most contentious aspect of the entire agreement: an unpopular proviso in the document required swearing an oath to the English Crown. This was no doubt accepted with the intention of eventually doing away with it, once the new Irish Republic was established. It was considered by those in power in England that the notion of not swearing allegiance to the Crown would spread to other parts of the Empire and might eventually contribute to the diminution of England’s global influence. Lloyd George, the English Prime Minister from the Liberal party, bowed to the insistence of the Conservative party in opposition to him at the time, that the oath be part of the agreement. Also, a young Winston Churchill, a member of Lloyd George’s cabinet, advocated that the Irish government of the new Free State should swear allegiance to the Crown.

  The man who led the faction that rejected the taking of the oath to the English Crown was Éamon de Valera, the then leader of Dáil Éireann and President of the notional Republic of Ireland. De Valera went against Collins and a majority of the Irish people who voted and accepted the treaty at the time. The consequence of de Valera’s decision led to a split in the ranks of those who sought and dreamed of separation from England. The result of the break-up led to the Civil War and the carnage that ensued. The war ended in May 1923 in a defeat for de Valera and his faction.

  Paddy had been drawn to the Pro-Treaty side led by Michael Collins and, doffing his British uniform at last, for a short time wore the uniform of the army of the Irish Free State.

  It might not have been more than a year or two into the marriage when Molly and Paddy began to drift from each other: if not in body certainly in spirit. He fought for the Free State; she in her ignorance and innocence had sided with those in favour of rejecting the negotiated treaty. She might have taken this stand to exert a sense of independence of her own.

  Their flight to Dublin from the countryside coincided with a harsh and impoverished period in the history of Dublin. With money as scarce as sunshine at the end of the Civil War, the population of Dublin resembled the poor and impoverished masses of some cities in India. For my mother, frequent pregnancies and a growing family underlined the pain.

  * * *

  When they got undressed to go to bed at night my mother Molly would moan, groan and complain about how she felt about my father Paddy. With the zeal of a religious missionary, she consistently and proudly reminded him about her humble beginnings, as if they were a badge and a symbol of her suffering.

  “If we picked potatoes we planted them ourselves in our own bit of ground. Didn’t your own flesh and blood let you leave home without a penny? Disinherited like a lame dog in the back yard! Your brother John got everything when your father died, God rest his soul! I’m tellin’ no lie. That’s as true as the Crucified Jesus. Sure didn’t you run away from home yourself when you was a young fella? Didn’t ya join up with the British army and leave your own mother and father? The MacDonalds were decent people. Didn’t we own our own cottage in Maganey? That MacDonald cottage is still standin’. I’ve never heard a good word spoken about the Walshes. The Walshes thought they were too good for any MacDonald. Well, they weren’t! Some people said you were disowned because you married me, a MacDonald. I wouldn’t believe that for a minute! Me mother and father were decent people, I tell you no lie! They always did an honest day’s work. I was a clean and proper girl when you met me. I was scrubbin’ floors and cold marble steps since I was fourteen!”

  When finished with her diatribe Molly would watch and wait for Paddy to defend himself. Silence and stillness would follow and as such it encouraged my mother to feel she had succeeded in her assault on my father. Molly would wait like a satisfied cat with a mouse in its paws for Paddy to break into a rage.

  As he’d pull the bed-sheet over his head he’d give out one blast, in a voice both aggressive and pained: “Ditch-livin’ MacDonalds! They couldn’t afford a roof over their heads and didn’t have a penny to buy a potato!”

  The Walshes and the MacDonalds not only hailed from the same county in Ireland but from the same village as well, but the way my parents behaved towards each other, the families might easily have come from different planets.

  For generations the Walshes of the small town of Athy made saddles, harnesses, reins and straps and anything leather for things equestrian. Rumour also had it that the Walsh reputation as saddlers, in the distant past, had extended to England where at one time members of the royal family, including the king and queen, squatted their fat arses on a Walsh saddle. For some unknown reason, the aptitude and occupation of saddle-making vanished from the Walshes’ way of life. It might have been that more than one character of royal blood fell out of a Walsh saddle. Or maybe because of political changes things Irish weren’t embraced or accepted in England as they were in the past.

  More than a few people bragged that Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, had in another century lived in the area and was once a neighbour. Sadly, this rumour often encouraged young men to follow in the Duke’s footsteps and travel to England in search of fame and fortune. Several families in the locale even boasted of being related to the duke. There might also have been a grain of truth in the gossip that some of my ancestors had a relationship with his horse. Whether any of this motivated my father to enlist and leave home, he never disclosed.

  Molly had something of a spiritual impatience and appeared to be consistently regretful for having to dwell on earth too long when she believed that there was a better life to be lived in the next world. Her path to paradise had to be paved with suffering and, whether by design or coincidence, she was living in a place where suffering was not only in abundance but honoured as though it was the key that opened the door to salvation. Molly’s involvement with living in the present was so minimal that she often appeared to be a ghost that had lost its way on the road to redemption. My mother lived as if she was in competition to win an award for suffering more than anyone else. Neighbours who came in contact with her considered her saintly and definitely heaven-bound. Night-time seemed to be her enemy because it reminded her that she hadn’t died during the day and gone to heaven.

  The ritual of Paddy and Molly getting into bed at night was not unlike that of two strangers finding themselves next to each other on a crowded bus. Indifference, separateness and isolation were practised. Yet no matter how determined they were to avoid touching, the sagging hollow in the centre of the bed obliged them to slide towards each other anyway. When Paddy and Molly did make contact they didn’t complain. Perhaps because there was still a morsel of power left in the sacrament of marriage and back-to-back touching was a secret wish both shared but neither would ever admit to. The pleasure of sleeping with her back to my father was not something my mother would ever talk about. For my father Paddy, lying next to my mother might well have been his definition of Limbo. For Molly, pleasure, affection and optimism seemed to be three of the Seven Deadly Sins. Friendship, encouragement, inspiration and support were the other four. The bed Paddy and Molly slept in was held together by strings of rusty coiled wire, though the size and weight of the thing, with its strong firm legs and shiny rail-knobs, gave the impression that it had been made to last. Parts of the bed’s railings still had bits and layers of brass that told of another era. When the bed was new it might have belonged to a prosperous family and might even have been the nest where somebody rich and famous was conceived. It probably saw its share of departing souls as well. Still, even a bed of such pedigree was vulnerable to the wounds of use and abuse
. During daylight hours, when it was not being utilised, it looked like an abandoned boat floating on a calm sea, indifferent to dreams, snores and nightmares. In some respects it was now more of a memorial to what it promised when my parents first got married. The iron ribs on each side of it resembled two black horses standing side by side waiting for a funeral to commence. Yet something about the contraption still gave it an air of pride and importance. Like everything else in our home the bed was a second-hand purchase. My father bought it in a pawnshop shortly after he and Molly arrived in Dublin in the 1920’s. Indeed, by the time the bed came into my family’s possession it might well have been tenth or twelfth hand. Often the centre had to be repaired and replaced with strands of wire that held the thing together. When the wire holding the spring up gave way, it was neither unusual nor infrequent for my parents to end up on the floor next to the communal portable urinal that in itself was second-hand.

  My parents’ bedroom was like a museum for religious statues. Statues and portraits of saints of every size and colour littered the place. A small statue of the Infant of Prague on the small table next to my parents’ bed was a favourite of Molly’s. What it had to do with Prague I never knew. The statue had a gold crown on its head and was wearing a red cloak. It also held a gold stick in its hand. Several holy pictures in the bedroom were of the suffering Spanish or French saints that Molly often prayed to. Facing the wall were two other very small statues that my mother had won in a church raffle. They were from Romania but she didn’t pay much attention to them. I think it was because they were not the same kind of Catholic saints she had been brought up praying to. In my mother’s eyes saints were judged by their suffering. Molly often said that Spanish saints were more like Irish ones. Mrs. Whelan, a neighbour from across the street who went around the church at Mass with a straw basket collecting money for the church, had a different opinion. She said the saints who suffered the most were French and that the French changed their religion many times and were tortured twice as much as any in Ireland or Spain – or Italy for that matter. But for some reason or other my mother had a reverence for martyrs from Spain.