Thoughts for a stranger on St. Patrick’s Day

Whilst visiting Catherine, I casually enquired if she knew anyone in a parish located in south Roscommon.  Not only did she know the area but to my alarm, her lips quivered and her breath shortened with emotional turmoil. 

After a time she remarked, ‘Ah, sure every cripple has their own way of walking’ and proceeded with her story. 

Over sixty years ago, in the late 1940’s a wife left her husband and removed herself to the farthest end of the county.  To leave a wife was commonplace.  Many families were reared by their mothers whilst the father went to the UK or America for work.  Some fathers returned regularly, others not at all.  Occasionally as children got to employable age, they went to join their father and found they had half siblings or that they were going to live with ‘a widowed cousin’ and her family.

Leaving a husband was very rare and for the middle class; deeply shameful.  Appearances were to be maintained and when a family was in a position of respect or power, any deviation from the norm was viewed with appalled fascination.

 Fortunately for our Runaway Wife, not only did she have a profession, she was acknowledged as an accomplished and beautiful woman.  She was also materially comfortable.  These attributes were a gift and a curse.  There would be considerable gossip to be sure.  Added to this mix was a conundrum, The Runaway Wife had a protector; The Parish Priest. 

The Runaway Wife continued her work as a teacher until her retirement in the 1960’s.  She became a school principal, won several accolades for music, bought her own car and home and when I met her in her eighth decade she was poised, elegant and erudite.

Fast forward forty years to Ireland in the 1980’s.  A teacher in a Convent school was dismissed for breaching the ethos of the school by having not one, but two children with her partner who was a separated married man.  This young woman appealed her case and failed right up to the High Court of Ireland.

Now I never experienced any difficulties during my school days but over the years I’ve heard highly emotive and painful recollections from individuals who really did experience physical and emotional abuse from teachers, their peers or indeed members of their own family.  

I’ve also experienced the singular pleasure of meeting some retired teachers who made a point of apologising, in person, to former pupils for any harm they may have inflicted on them as children.  I sat for hours listening to young adults explaining how one ‘bad’ teacher affected their entire perspective.

The Runaway Wife suffered her own indignities as did her progeny.  Few dared to confront the adult but speculation was rife and meted out to the children.  They would ask their mother ‘what is a bastard?’ response; ‘a child without a father’.  The children knew they had a father but couldn’t provide evidence of his existence without saying ‘he’s at home’ therefore making themselves transient visitors in their current abode.  ‘What’s sex?’ was another query; remember this is in Ireland in the 1940’s.  Response; ‘Sex is the difference between a man and a woman’.  Each question had an answer but somehow there was something in the ether which was inexplicable.

No one has the franchise on emotional pain.  When I carelessly asked Catherine about that little parish on St. Patrick’s Day, she opened her mind and her mouth and said it was time that this memory came out.  As she spoke, I saw a frightened little girl who had lost her father, home, siblings and friends simultaneously.  I heard her puzzlement and fear and she was unable to separate fact from fiction.  Who was the villain?  What was the cause for the flight?  Sixty years later she was looking for an answer but then quoted Rudyard Kipling’s IF.....

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Stoicism me Arse!