Free Peeling Oranges by James Lawless Page B

we? We have plenty of time. I miss you so much. I hope you are safe over there, and that you are looking after yourself.
    Mrs Chaigneau told me that the woman next door to her has a fancy man. ‘You see her husband is a rig – you know,’ she said ‘one ball,’ and when she said it, I got a fit of the giggles. She was so serious, but when I laughed, she laughed too. People can be funny, Patrick, without knowing, don’t you think? Anyway, her husband can’t ‘do the business’. No one makes any comment.
    Oh, the basement Mrs Chaigneau lives in is terrible; its the worst part of a tenement house; it’s near the sewers, and when there’s a drought the rats come up through the floors. There is such poverty, Patrick, it would break your heart. When I called one evening, one of Mrs Chaigneau’s daughters – Pauline, she is sixteen – was getting ready to go out with her fellow. She had no money for makeup so she dabbed a wet cloth on the red ink of the Sacred Heart Messenger and applied the colour to her cheeks. And she went away singing with her home-made rouge as happy as if she were a lady.
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    Some of the women, even when pregnant, didn’t know where babies came from. My mother recounts visiting a fifteen-years-old girl in the Coombe hospital:
    She had a little misadventure. She kept staring at her navel, expecting the baby to pop out through it. She was crying when nothing seemed to be happening. Their mothers tell them nothing. My mother told me nothing really. But then I could read, but even at that, there is fierce censorship. It’s funny seeing the women coming in to the library in Kevin Street saying the book they want is on their doctors’ prescriptions.
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    In my reading of the period I learned that a church-imposed Puritanism entrapped a married woman in two ways: on the one hand she was told to increase and multiply; and on the other she was told that what she was doing was dirty and evil and that afterwards she must be cleansed. The cleansing was known as churching . After a birth the woman had to go to church to renounce Satan so that she could be accepted back into the fold once more. Until she did that she was tainted and was not allowed to touch or prepare food.
    Such ambivalence incensed my mother. She argued if women had ‘gone on strike’ and refused to continue to prepare food indefinitely in protest at such humiliation, both the Church and all patriarchy would be in a ‘right stew’:
    The reality is that the women in the tenements are saints, living saints. Some husbands give them no money, but drink it all, and then come home looking for their dinner and this and that, and beat up their wives when there is nothing there for them. It is as if their wives are to blame for everything – they are just slaves. They have such courage. They are expected to perform the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
    But even my mother had to admit that drunkenness was understandable in such squalor. Drink was cheap: two pence for a jug of porter, and the false security and warmth of a public house could be so attractive when all that awaited one was a dank room.
    Outside, the streets were littered with spittle and excreta. And as evening approached, the smoke from the soft, bituminous coal rose up and enshrouded the city in a lethal, sulphuric mist. Coughing could be heard as my mother passed each tenement on her way homeward. There was no light. People went to bed when darkness fell. There were no cradles for babies, only arms. And always, incongruously visible, the Protestant spire of Saint Patrick’s, piercing the mist.
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    My mother spent the odd night in Rathfarnham when trade was not too hectic in the shop. She was reluctant to leave her mother after the attack, but Muddy insisted that her daughter should have a break. She would be all right with a neighbour staying by her.
    My mother wrote to Patrick and told him that she had seen the poet, Mr Yeats, being pushed around in a wheelchair in