One evening, back in the 1950s, a friend invited me as a guest to an RAF Association evening. There she introduced me to lots of people and we enjoyed a real social evening, playing table tennis, and chatting and drinking. A few days later I had a letter from one of the young men I’d met that evening, inviting me to the Association’s annual dinner dance.
This was my first ever ‘invitation to a ball’ and, like Cinderella, I didn’t have a ball gown! Nor did I have the money to buy one. The only solution was to borrow. The problem, however, was that I was shorter and fatter than any of my friends. Would a fairy godmother appear in time? She did, in the form of Sue, a close friend, who came to my rescue. She had another friend called Yvonne who was only slightly taller than I was and whose vital statistics were, like my own, rather generous.
Yvonne offered me the loan of a dress. It was an exotic creation, black and frothy, with layer upon layer of tulle over taffeta in the skirt, hardly the right design for a short dumpy person, and one I’d never have chosen for myself. Nevertheless, it looked absolutely fabulous. It was the kind of dress you’d notice without paying too much attention to the person wearing it. I felt just like Cinderella in her ball gown as I waited for my escort to call for me.
After I’d returned the dress to Yvonne, she asked me if I’d like to go to her Mum’s for tea and she invited Sue, too. The moment the Mum opened the door she greeted me with the question: ‘What was your father’s first name?’
It was a strange, blunt, unexpected kind of greeting to which I replied: ‘William. William George.’
Then, to my utter astonishment, she said: ‘I could have been your mother. Your father and I were almost married when I met Matt and fell in love with him instead.’
I stood there, mesmerised; looking at this woman, I thought of my own home. She was everything my mother wasn’t, confident, well-dressed, owning a beautifully furnished house in a leafy residential Dublin suburb, an outgoing, social person, very much mistress of her own life, and exuding an aura of happiness and fulfilment.
I looked at Yvonne and I thought of myself. She had such beautiful clothes, including several really gorgeous evening dresses, independence and her own lovely home. She was married and, again, she seemed happy and content, a person in her own right. She could share her friends and her confidences with her mother.
I longed to hear more about my parents’ early life together. Why were they so secretive about it? This lady could speak freely in front of her daughter about a serious affair she’d had with my father before she met the man she married. My mother had no life of her own. She was a second-rate citizen, part of my father’s goods and chattels, a submissive, nervous, docile woman, always dressed in drab, old-fashioned, navy-blue clothes. Her main function seemed to be to bear children and clean and cook all day long. She was completely dependent on my father and subject to his every whim and fancy, a gentle woman, who wept often and who never expressed a view or contributed a positive idea of her own. Her children all loved her, but pitied her, too.
Without being aware of it, my reaction to her situation was to become an early version of a feminist. I recognised this in myself only when my daughter brought a young man home and introduced me to him as: ‘This is my Mum. She hates men and she hates Americans.’
I was flabbergasted, taken aback, at a loss for words, which is rare for me! Nik lived in Colorado
He quietly said: I’m not American. I’m French.’
I waited for him to continue and then I just stood there, doubled up with laughter. When I could speak coherently again, I moderated Anna’s statement.
‘What I hate,’ I told Nik, ‘are Americans who come here and boast about how superior everything is in their country, and men who belittle and tyrannise their wives.’ It was a significant moment of self-revelation for me, a moment when I began to sit back and study myself objectively.
To return to my story, however, I couldn’t wait to see my father’s face when I told him that I’d met an old flame of his. His eyes twinkled the way they did when he was in a benevolent mood. It wasn’t often any of us chanced upon the key that unlocked this side to him!
‘Yes,’ he said dreamily. ‘We were about to marry when Matt G came along and stole her from me.’
My parents never spoke of their early days together. If we asked questions, we were silenced quite promptly. From Margaret, the wife of the headmaster of the first school I taught in, I learned about their courtship and marriage. As a 12-year old in 1917, she accompanied her parents when they visited my grandparents. Her father, a Scotsman, owned the Kilkenny Woodworkers and my father was to be sent to work for him, in an attempt, apparently, to separate him from my mother. They were first cousins and, therefore, neither family would condone a marriage between them.
When it was time for the visitors to leave, my Uncle Henry drove them to the station in the pony and trap and my father asked to go with them. My mother was waiting for him at the station and Margaret remembered them kissing and cuddling. I guess they were also making their plans, for my mother later followed my father to Kilkenny. My cousin, Aileen, recently told me that her mother told her that one day, when my grandparents were out, she’d discovered my father coming down the stairs with a suitcase full of his belongings. He gave Aunt Aileen half- a-crown to buy her silence and she kept his secret.
He and my mother were married in Kilkenny Registry Office before fleeing to England
I said, in unmistakable tones of disapproval, ‘You were married in a Registry office!’
That horrified me at the time because we were brought up strictly as members of the Church of Ireland
At the time, discovering their secrets from other people somehow knocked them off their pedestals for me. Most parents fall from their pedestals at some stage but the pieces can usually be reassembled through love and understanding. The repair may lack the pristine freshness of the original but it is often a lot more solid. Now, as a parent myself, I can look back with understanding and feel a great sadness for my mother. She had a really hard life, and I often wonder if she regretted not being married in church in a white wedding dress, carrying a bridal bouquet and sitting down to a wedding-breakfast with her family all around her.
Their church was the centre of my parents’ lives and they had great respect for their Victorian parents. It must have been hard to defy their parents. I think they regretted doing so. Theirs wasn’t a happy marriage but women in those days had to put up with whatever misery life doled out to them. Again, who am I to judge whether it was a happy marriage or not?
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