Free Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O’Brien Page B

something on a primus stove. Her complexion without all the pancake makeup was a little ruddy. As for him, all that remained of his luring stage presence was his silverish sidelocks. They were surprised at my having been let up at all, and Dracula asked what I had come for. “I’d like to run away with you,” I said, at which the wife laughed and Dracula showed some commiseration. He asked nicely why I wanted to run away with them. I said I had written a play called
Dracula’s Daughter
and I wanted to see it on a stage. This whetted his interest so much that he said to come back another day and we could read it together. His wife, in full theatrical blaze, picked up the hot saucepan, aimed it at me, and in a beautiful, actressy voice said, “Scram.”

    I would go out to the fields to write. The words ran away with me. I would write imaginary stories, stories set in our bog and our kitchen garden, but it was not enough, because I wanted to get inside them, in the same way as I was trying to get back into the maw of my mother. Everything about her intrigued me: her body, her being, her pink corset, her fads, and the obsessions to which she was prone. One was about a little silver spoon from a set of six that she had had since her honeymoon. They were kept in a velvet-lined case, the velvet faded and milky, and they were once loaned to the vocational school when dignitarieswere coming for a function. However, when the case was returned, there was one spoon missing, and my mother got on her bicycle and went in high dudgeon to the school. There was a thorough search, in drawers, in cupboards, under tables, in the pantry, in two bins, and in the turf shed. Inquiries were sent all over the village, but somehow my mother knew in her bones that she would never see that spoon again, and she never forgave it. She was convinced that she knew who had taken it, a shopkeeper who was jealous of our semi-grandeur, and ever after there was a coolness between them.
    When, much later, I wrote about my mother, that preoccupation with her had intensified so that she permeated all worlds—
Her mother was the cupboard with all the things in it, the tabernacle with God in it, the lake with the legends in it, the sea with the oysters and the corpses, a realm into which she longed to vanish forever.

Brides of Christ
    We were in all three hundred women in that convent, a limestone bastion housing choir nuns, lay nuns, boarders, and orphans, the sinful issue of unmarried mothers. We, the boarders, were little recruits for Heaven, where we would learn to be immune to passions, to mortify ourselves in every way, and to put up with our chilblains.
    The prevailing smells were of wax floor polish and cabbage, but in the chapel it was the smell of burning incense, so exotic, and afterward that smell lingered on in the wreaths of smoke that clouded the air.
    Not long after I had arrived there, crossing the courtyard, I was halted in my tracks by the sound of whistling, and it seemed to me the sweetest and most melodious sound imaginable. I felt that it was a young boy on his way home from work, and I had the deepest longing not to be in that courtyard but to be out there, walking, walking under the stars. Although we were on the edge of the town, we might as well have been in Timbuktu. Our dormitories were on two floors, one for the junior girls and one for the seniors. Seniors had a private cubicle with a curtain at the end, but for us it was a question of washing by a basin at the side of the bed, girls splashing themselves from ewers of freezing water and trying not to let their dressing gowns slip off. My dressing gown had belonged to my mother. It was fawn and hairy, and my name tag was sewn on the back of the collar. You could tell the girls whose parents were rich by their dressing gowns, which were either quilted or satin, in pink and rose colors. My mother had stitched name tags on all my uniformand, as she said, stitched her heart into each