The Imperfect as a Site of Contestation in Contemporary Ireland
Luz Mar González-Arias
I am the thin fault that runs through the seam, a wave of quartz surfing through granite, condemned to masquerade I am where history breaks and divides Brittle and weak
Mary O’Malley, ‘Weakness’
‘Madame Memory is a great and subtle dissembler’, says Alexander Cleave, the protagonist of John Banville’s 2012 novel Ancient Light (3). Although now in his sixties, Cleave’s memories take him back to his teens when he had a love affair with Mrs Gray, 20 years his senior and the mother of his best friend Billy. However, from the outset of his narrative Cleave is aware
Financial support for the research carried out for this essay was provided by the R&D project ‘Multiplicities’ (FFI2013-45642-R), funded by the Spanish National Research Programme, and by the Research Group Intersecciones (GrupIn14-068), funded by the Government of Asturias.
L.M. González-Arias (*)
Dpto. Filología Inglesa, Francesa y Alemana. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, University of Oviedo, Asturias, Spain
© The Author(s) 2017
L.M. González-Arias (ed.), National Identities and Imperfections in Contemporary Irish Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-47630-2_1
of his mind’s limitations to faithfully reproduce what happened in those early days: ‘Images from the far past crowd in my head and half the time I cannot tell whether they are memories or inventions. Not that there is much difference between the two, if indeed there is any difference at all’ (3). These statements complement Banville’s own position with regard to the possibilities of language to represent what we call ‘reality’. In his speech on receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature 2014, the author referred to ‘the sentence’ (literary or otherwise) as the ‘most momentous invention’ of civilization—‘It is with the sentence that we declare love, declare war, declare oaths. It is with the sentence that we declare the self’, he contended. However, for him the beauty of the sentence resides in its lack of precision: ‘every full stop is an admission of failure’, he confessed, since ‘[r]eality is ultimately beyond us’ (‘Speech’). Cleave’s belief in memory as being imprecise and his realization that the line separating invention from reality is quite a blurry one thus echoes Banville’s view of past and present as edited through language, that is, as categories of fiction.
The idea that history is located somewhere between fact and imagination may seem poetic, certainly artistic, and even a suitable trend of postmodernism—with its preference for imprecision and fluidity—but it has also long been shared by scientific thought. In his essay ‘Speak, Memory’, neurologist Oliver Sacks explains that humans ‘are landed with memory systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections’. From a neuroscientific perspective we have no direct access to the past, all routes in that direction being in some way mediated and of a highly subjective nature. Sacks exemplifies this thesis using his autobiographical writings. He eloquently explains that some of the memories he could vividly recollect about his childhood, and which he wrote about as being based on first-hand experience, were in fact false memories that his brain had constructed as the truth, that is, events he had not gone through himself but read about in letters and then imagined as lived experiences. However, these impressions were, shockingly, as precise as those originating in events he had actually witnessed and experienced. Thanks to neurological testing we can be sure, Sacks explains, that once ‘a memory is constructed, accompanied by vivid sensory imagery and strong emotion, there may be no inner, psychological way of distinguishing true from false’. He describes how, by means of functional brain imaging, it can be demonstrated that the pattern of brain activity generated by images that correspond to such memories— in the sensory, emotional and executive areas of the brain—is identical
to that triggered by memories based on actual experience. Neuroscience thus provides us with evidence that memory may be as close to ‘reality’ as it is to the world of the imagination. It also accounts for memory’s connection to the creative activity of story-telling, since our past is necessarily mediated through language: ‘Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine’ (Sacks).
The same mechanisms that writer John Banville, his character Alexander Cleave and neurologist Oliver Sacks describe when talking about personal reconstructions of the past also apply to collective memories and national histories, equally imperfect, equally malleable, that is, equally subject to processes of edition, re/interpretation and even invention. What we refer to as ‘cultural memory’ may be considered as the external dimension of our individual human memories but, unlike the latter, ‘the contents of this memory, the ways in which they are organized, and the length of time they last are for the most part not a matter of internal storage or control but of the external conditions imposed by society and cultural contexts’ (Assmann 5). Cultural memory in this way provides the answer to the issue of what we, as a people, must not forget in order to construct and maintain our sense of who we are, our sense of belonging. It therefore becomes relevant to decide what mechanisms are at work in the construction of our collective pasts, who determines what to remember and how to remember it.
But then, what actually qualifies as ‘the past’, collective or otherwise? During his visit to the University of Oviedo, John Banville expanded on what he described as his ‘fascination’, even his ‘obsession’ with the past, and wondered at what point what we call the past actually becomes the past.1 His question implies that the distinction between past and present is a difficult—if not impossible—one, and echoes Jan Assmann’s contention that ‘[t]he past is not a natural growth but a cultural creation’ (33). However, and for the sake of analysis, it can be argued that the past is produced at ‘[e]very substantial break in continuity or tradition … whenever that break is meant to create a new beginning’ (Assmann 18). In the Irish context, the Celtic Tiger—born in the 1990s—and its fatal decline— initiated in 2008—has translated into profound transformations in the economic, cultural and physical landscapes of Ireland to the point of constituting one of those ‘substantial breaks’ as indicated by Assmann. The unprecedented economic expansion and its associated societal changes, such as the arrival of migrants to a country traditionally schooled in
emigration, the proliferation of buildings sites, improved communication systems, consumerism and, added to this, the effects of globalization and an increasing Europeanization have had a strong impact on previous constructions of Irishness. Above all, the boom-and-bust era has, necessarily, called into question many of the idealizations upon which the identity of the island had hitherto been based. The sole comprehension of utopian national mythologies and the facile simplification of Ireland as a new victorious economy have proved unable to tackle such urgent issues as the degradation of Irish landscapes in the name of ‘progress’, the religious scandals and the crumbling of previously sacred pillars of Irishness, namely the family and the idea of nation. Addressing the shadowy side of the Tiger appears to be particularly relevant in twenty-first-century Ireland, characterized as it is by a deep sense of instability.
In this context, then, representing the imperfect becomes a strategy of resistance against the tendency to turn the collective memory of the country, in itself frail and malleable, as all memory systems are, into a record of glossy images that could never account for the darkness hidden behind its shining surface. In his lecture ‘A National Identity in Crisis? Reflections on Ireland 2000–2011’, Professor Ciarán Benson referred to artists as the only collective that the Irish population could look to when tackling the present and the recent past of the island, since the narratives of the sanctioned bearers of the nation—politicians, bankers, economists—were proving untrustworthy and corrupted. Although art has always reflected on the disquieting, the imperfect and the dystopian it can be argued that since the beginning of the 2000s such issues have acquired more and more thematic weight in the works of contemporary Irish authors. Their reluctance to praise the good health of the Irish economy and the tendency to represent instead the hidden story is turning artists and writers, as Benson contended, into the alternative historians giving body and voice to what might otherwise be left out of the official versions of contemporary Ireland.
Marina Carr’s Ariel (2002) is one such case of resistance. The play is a contemporary and Hibernicized retelling of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis. Agamemnon, leader of the Greek coalition in the Trojan War, is in need of favourable winds to safely set sail towards Troy. To appease the goddess Artemis and benefit from these winds, the blood sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia is demanded, a difficult request that Agamemnon is nonetheless ready to perform. Although at the end of the play a messenger announces to Clytemnestra that the body of her young daughter was switched for
that of a deer at the last minute, the tragedy reflects on how the rights of an individual girl are waived for a supposedly bigger cause: political and armed conflict. In Marina Carr’s version, Fermoy Fitzgerald—the modern Agamemnon—is a politician from the Irish Midlands who aspires to become the next Taoiseach. His religious thinking—a mixture of traditional portrayals of God, with a strong belief in blood sacrifices and savage rituals—becomes paramount in the unfolding of the action. Fitzgerald’s Jesus Christ is one of wrath and revenge, an image divorced from the iconography of love and fraternity usually associated with the Son of God. Interviewed on television in his capacity as Minister for Education, this Irish Agamemnon explains his own interpretation of the divine using Piero della Francesca’s painting Resurrection:
FERMOY: … A big, cranky, vengeful son a God plants a leg like a tree on hees new opened tomb. He looks ouh inta the middle distance and hees eyes say wan thing and wan thing only. Ye’ll pay for this. Ye’ll pay for this. No forgiveness in them eyes. The opposihe. Rage, and a staggerin sense a betrayal, as if he’s sayin, I’ve wasted eternihy on ye band a troglodytes thah calls yeerselves the human race. (44)
From the outset of the play we learn that Fermoy is ready to sacrifice his daughter Ariel on her sixteenth birthday and give her to God in exchange for his own political success. Ariel is thus murdered by her own father, her corpse hidden in the silent depths of Cuura Lake.
Classical myths are constantly revisited in contemporary societies, Ireland being no exception in this respect. Marianne McDonald has contended that ‘[i]n the twentieth-century, there seem to be more translations and versions of Greek tragedy that have come from Ireland than from any other country in the English-speaking world’ (37). Euripides, Sophocles and Homer are still perceived as privileged sources to be trusted when it comes to answering important questions about who we are or where we are going, be it as a people or as individuals. This is partly because the classics offer plot lines that can be used as visible surfaces upon which to inscribe political messages not necessarily present in the original myth, and provide contemporary audiences with a comfortable distance from which to talk about their own social and political contexts.2
In the midst of the Celtic Tiger phenomenon, Marina Carr’s Ariel presents us with a world that is in actuality crumbling, and does so in the National Theatre of Ireland. 3 In the words of Fintan O’Toole,
‘[o]n stage, at the sixteenth birthday party of the eponymous daughter of a rising Midlands politician, the three pillars of the old Ireland— Church, State and Family—are in an advanced state of decay’ (89). Ariel is both a cautionary tale and the harsh realization that the country’s economic expansion was not necessarily coupled with a parallel level of social satisfaction. Debates on citizenship, race and ethnicity, triggered by the arrival of migrant communities to the new Ireland, were at the time causing a deep crisis in the national sense of identity. Old definitions of Irishness and the certainties of the past could no longer account for the new political and social milieu of the island. The dysfunctional order of the family, the Church and the State in Ariel’s world became a perfect metaphor not only for the imperfections of the Republic but also for a rapidly changing Ireland that now had to deal with ‘unmapped territor[ies]’ (O’Toole 89).
Celia de Fréine’s Blood Debts (2014) is another interesting example of resistance against cultural amnesia.4 The collection is, as yet, the only poetic articulation of the Hepatitis C scandal in Ireland. In the last years of the 1970s about 1600 women were infected with a blood product, known as the Anti-D agent,5 which came from a batch manufactured by the Blood Transfusion Service Board (BTSB) from a donor who had infective hepatitis. The women developed various diseases—ranging from fatigue and lupus to hepatitis itself—but no connection was established between the women’s initial diagnoses and the contaminated blood product. In 1994 the scandal became public when evidence was provided that the BTSB had been alerted to the possibility of contamination but had decided to ignore the alert.
In her introduction to The New Irish Poets—which anthologizes poets who published their first collection in the 1990s—Selina Guinness summarizes some of the main preoccupations of these new Irish bards. ‘In the early years of the 21st century’, she explains, ‘the immediate political terrain in the Republic has shifted from border politics to body politics, as evidenced in the Laffoy Tribunal into the abuse of children by religious orders, the Lindsay Tribunal into the use of contaminated blood products by the Blood Bank, and continuing investigations into medical malpractice, chiefly in the area of gynaecology and obstetrics’ (17). Although the roots of these scandals date back to pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, most surfaced in the public arena in the midst of heated debates on economy, citizenship and border politics that might have rendered gender issues invisible. De Fréine’s work resists this tendency by underlining the political dimension
of what might have been dismissed as a personal trauma. In a recent interview the poet referred to Blood Debts as her ‘most political book of poetry’ (McCabe and Crocker Hammer 1048) and recalled the time when journalists were only interested in who the story was about but not in what it was about: ‘I felt that the focus should be on what it was about, that is, a national scandal, and refused to acknowledge that it in fact dealt with a personal experience’ (1050). In the fifty-seven poems that make up the book, de Fréine deals with the profound psychological, social, familial and even sexual consequences of the infection, but she does not disregard the political and legal systems, which are denounced for their failure to attend to the women’s illness, which the authorities themselves had contributed to causing.
In ‘this is my body’ (64–65) the title becomes a refrain that poignantly appropriates familiar Christian phraseology to inscribe the embodied identity of the female persona. However, this woman’s body does not inspire the worship of the community and is instead described as damaged beyond recovery: ‘This is the wound / that cannot be healed’ (65). Similarly, ‘lover’ (76) makes use of the semantic field of toxicity to establish a parallelism between the contaminated waters of a harbour—‘toxins in the water could damage / the hull of any ship dropping anchor there’—and the reproductive organs of the protagonist, with whom it is now unsafe to have intercourse: ‘Lover, keep your distance’. The crossing of boundaries between a personal disease and a national malady becomes even clearer in poems like ‘blood sacrifice’ (83) and ‘a price on my head’ (89). In the former, the Ireland of the Rising is being knocked down in favour of a new urban geography in accordance with the Tiger. The dilapidation of historical Dublin is intimately linked here with the mismanagement of women’s bodies. At the end of the poem, an anonymous woman falls into a pothole left by a developer. Despite her good intentions, the poetic persona feels unable to rescue her due to the potential toxicity of her own contaminated blood. Both figures are thus victimized by the structures of power: ‘I cannot lend her a helping hand, / all I can do is watch as her blood / flows into the pool of progress’.
In ‘a price on my head’ (89) the protagonist is at the mercy of the legal establishment. Her sense of alienation and fear in the space assigned to her at court—‘a seat I recognise from many a film / one from which I’ve heard the speech / of many a man sentenced to death’—is all the more enhanced in the closing lines of the poem, when she feels like a passive object at the expense of the legal machinery:
From the dock I concur with the statements of my team answer questions posed by the judges
my head tennising between each trio. All rise as the judges retire to debate my case and place a price on my head.
Performance artist Amanda Coogan has similarly contributed to the preservation of the darkest episodes in the history of the Irish Deaf community. Born to Deaf parents, the artist considers Irish Sign Language as her mother tongue and in October 2015 she narrated These Walls Can Talk, a documentary that RTÉ One devoted to the history of the now demolished St Joseph’s School for Deaf Children in Dublin. Whereas the artist’s own father, Larry Coogan, who features in the piece, remembers his years in the institution as edifying, and the documentary acknowledges the merits of the school—namely lessening the students’ sense of isolation by teaching them a language and a trade—Amanda Coogan gives voice to the previously mute-d survivors of abusive behaviour on the part of the Christian Brothers in charge. An entire chapter of the report of the Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse,6 known as the Ryan Report, determined that from the 1950s until the 1990s the school was in reality a frightening place for many of the boys, an institution where sexual molestation was tolerated until the necessary intervention of the Health Board (Ryan). The open engagement of Amanda Coogan with this shameful episode parallels initiatives taken by other Irish artists in their attempt to redress the gender asymmetries of Irish history or to take into the public arena stories of abuse that were conveniently hidden under the carpet of supposedly more pressing political agendas. A recent example of this is the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution, which was passed in 1983 to protect the right to life of the unborn. On their website, the artists organizing the campaign7 express their disappointment and frustration at the ‘many shocking instances of neglect and mismanagement of women’s care as a result of the Eighth Amendment’. By December 2015, 1762 writers, visual artists— Coogan among them—musicians and filmmakers had signed the statement (Artists’ Campaign).
Coogan’s engagement with the political is also overt in her practice as a performance artist. In a conversation with John Kelly she describes her work as ‘unapologetically gendered’. In performance art the body is the principal medium of communication, and Coogan’s definition of herself as ‘a female artist making work from a female perspective, from the female body’ (‘Amanda Coogan’) is an explicit statement about the prominence that gender issues have in her career. Such is the case of her Madonna Series (2000–2010)—an assortment of photographs, videos and live performances on the theme of the maternal attributes of the Virgin Mary, whose iconography has been used as a powerful model of femininity in modern Ireland. Madonna in Blue (2001), one of the most celebrated pieces of the series, is a postcard-sized photograph reminiscent of the holy pictures that religious people carry in their purses and wallets. In it Coogan assumes an angelic pose, looking into the distance, head lowered, submissive. Her long blonde hair has been carefully tucked behind her ears, tamed, and the pale blue shirt she is wearing emphasizes the virginal all the more. When performed, the artist poses without moving for several hours and stands at a height, resembling statues of the Virgin Mary in churches and grottos all over the island. However, the parallelism between the sacred icon and the photograph/performance is problematized through the strong symbolism of the breast: Coogan is holding her naked right breast in her hand and showing it to the audience. Connotations of maternal nourishment fuse here with nuances of the reification, sexualization and pornification of women’s corporealities in popular culture. The blunt blurring of the boundaries between the sacred and the mundane brings to the fore the powerless position of women in these two seemingly opposite systems of representation.
The focus is shifted to the victims of the current economic recession in Bubble up in Blue (2012), a durational performance in which the artist wears nine winter coats, sewn together in what becomes a heavy burden to carry around, while spilling her own saliva—dyed blue—on the garments (Fig. 1.1). Coogan walks around the space—be it a gallery, a museum, a city street—and sometimes lies on the floor, her slow movements often keeping pace with her breathing. Performance art resists a single interpretation, often the external referent of the piece is unclear, even indiscernible, allowing the viewer to engage in the artist’s journey with his/her own existential context. However, and in spite of all the layers of meaning that might emerge from beneath the nine coats of Bubble up in Blue, the piece necessarily resonates with the stories of eviction,
rough sleeping and homelessness that abound in the post-Celtic Tiger era. The weight of the nine coats that slows the artist’s movements is a poignant reminder that not all subjects are equally mobile, or equally ‘nomadic’ if we are to use Rosi Braidotti’s oft quoted terminology, in the Ireland of the new millennium. The stream of blue bubbles constantly coming out of the artist’s mouth during this performance breaks down the traditional borders between inside and outside. Coogan is confronting her audiences with the cast off, the rejected, the abject—be it corporeal or social abjection—and disclosing what lies behind the surface. Ultimately, she is turning the socially invisible into agentive subjects that participate in the creation of meaning.
Personal and collective memory is also one of the main preoccupations of visual artist Carmel Benson, as evidenced in ‘How to Be a Child?’, her latest show, held in 2014. As explained in the exhibition programme, ‘[h]istory has entered [Benson’s] work through autobiography’, and it is to the perturbing and the imperfect in her childhood that the mature artist returns in her
Fig. 1.1 Bubble up in Blue , Amanda Coogan (2012). Still from live performance
thought-provoking exorcism of the past. The imperfections to which she refers, while national, are also intimate to the persona behind the representations. As Lia Mills explains, this work has been a long time in the making, but the exhibition is acutely ‘timely’ given the ‘recent spate of scandals about the religious orders and their treatment of women and children’ (‘How to Be a Child?’). Although the background to the work is the Ireland of the 1950s, its strong patriarchal structures surface forcefully in the present. The paintings and drawings fuse the textual and the visual to both shock and challenge the viewer. In Why God Made the World the Catechism is problematized as a formative text in the lives of Catholic children like Benson’s younger self. The artist uses its Q&A format in the painting, with the question— ‘WHY DID GOD MAKE THE WORLD?’—and the corresponding ‘right’ answer to such question—‘FOR HIS OWN GLORY & FOR MAN’S USE & BENEFIT’—occupying all four margins of the composition. The explicit sexism of the religious lesson is made all the more poignant by the two human figures placed at the centre of the painting: two little girls, dressed in white Communion frocks, ready to be disempowered by the oppressive Catholic phraseology they are made to learn by heart.
Prayers feature prominently in the exhibition, and are placed alongside images of female physiology. The resulting pieces approach women’s bodies not from a naturalistic perspective but from the strong connotations of sin and shame that religious thought attributed to them when the artist was growing up. ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa’ is the background text for pieces that show vagina iconography. In them, the young child’s internalized identity as a descendant of Eve is linked with the representation of menstrual blood and foetuses dropping from triangular red shapes. Mantra is an impressive piece that shows the innocent dress of a young girl, stained by the prints of two muddy adult hands, and the words of the ‘Hail Mary’, presumably written by the same girl who owns the dress, covering the whole surface. The sexual abuse connoted by the muddy hands that dirty the whiteness of the garment interrogates the religious system that not only failed to protect the innocent body of the child, but contributed to the perpetuation of her role as a helpless object in a male sexual economy. In I Confess (Fig. 1.2) the textual focus lies on the eponymous prayer, with special emphasis on ‘THROUGH MY FAULT, THROUGH MY FAULT, THROUGH MY MOST GRIEVOUS FAULT’, which appears capitalized at the bottom of the piece. The power of prayers partly resides in the constant repetition of their words by the faithful. This has a performative effect that naturalizes roles that are in fact constructed.
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would often, after being rung for, enter the room carrying the very thing that Sir Franklin was going to request him to get.
Sir Franklin once asked him how he did it, and Pembroke said that he did not know; but part of the secret was explained that very year quite by chance. It was like this. In the autumn Sir Franklin and Pembroke always went to Scotland, and that year when they were in Scotland the Berkeley Square house was done up and all the old pull-bells were taken away and new electric ones were put in instead. When Sir Franklin came back again he noticed that Pembroke was not nearly so clever in anticipating needs as he had been before; and when he asked him about it, Pembroke said: “My opinion, sir, is that it’s all along of the bells. The new bells, which you press, ring the same, however you press them, and startle a body too, whereas the old bells, which you used to pull, sir, told me what you wanted by the way you pulled them, and never startled one at all.”
So Sir Franklin and Pembroke went to Paris for a week while the new press bells were taken away and the old pull-bells put back again, and then Pembroke became again just as clever as before. (But that was, of course, only part of the secret.)
IIIt was at a quarter to nine on the evening of December 18, 1907, that Sir Franklin, who was sitting by the fire reading and thinking, suddenly got up and rang the bell.
Pembroke came in at once and said, “I’m sorry you’re troubled in your mind, sir. Perhaps I can be of some assistance.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Sir Franklin. “But do you know what day this is?”
“We are nearing the end of December 18,” said Pembroke.
“Yes,” said Sir Franklin, “and what is a week to-day?”
“A week to-day, sir,” said Pembroke, “is Christmas Day.”
“And what about children who won’t get any presents this Christmas?” Sir Franklin asked.
“Ah, indeed, sir,” said Pembroke.
“And what about people in trouble, Pembroke?” Sir Franklin asked.
“Ah, indeed, sir,” said Pembroke.
“And that reminds me,” Pembroke added after a pause, “that I was going to speak to you about the cook’s brother-in-law, sir: a worthy man, sir, but in difficulties.”
Sir Franklin asked for particulars.
“He keeps a toy-shop, sir, in London, and he can’t make it pay. He’s tried and tried, but there’s no money in toys in his neighbourhood— except penny toys, on which the margin of profit is, I am told, sir, very small.”
Sir Franklin poked the fire and looked into it for a little while. Then, “It seems to me, Pembroke,” he said, “that the cook’s brother-in-law’s difficulties and the little matter of the children can be solved in the same action. Why shouldn’t we take over the toy-shop and let the children into it on Christmas Eve to choose what they will?”
Pembroke stroked his chin for a moment and then said, “The very thing, sir.”
“Where does the cook’s brother-in-law live?” Sir Franklin asked.
Pembroke gave the address.
“Then if you’ll call a hansom, Pembroke, we’ll drive there at once.”
III
It does not matter at all about the visit which Sir Franklin Ingleside and Pembroke paid to the cook’s brother-in-law. All that need be said is that the cook’s brother-in-law was quite willing to sell Sir Franklin his stock-in-trade and to make the shop over to him, and Sir Franklin Ingleside rode back to Berkeley Square not only a gentleman who had horses and carriages and who bought old pictures and new
books, but perhaps the first gentleman in Berkeley Square to have a toy-shop too.
On the way back he talked to Pembroke about his plans.
“There’s a kind of child, Pembroke,” said Sir Franklin, “that I particularly want to encourage and reward. It is clear that we can’t give presents to all; and I don’t want the greedy ones and the strongest ones to be as fortunate as the modest ones and the weak ones. So my plan is, first of all to make sure that the kind of child that I have in mind is properly looked after, and then to give the others what remains. And the particular children I mean are the little girls who take care of their younger brothers and sisters while their parents are busy, and who go to the shops and stalls and do the marketing. Whenever I see one I always say to myself, ‘There goes a Little Mother!’ and it is the Little Mothers whom this Christmas we must particularly help.
“Now what you must do, Pembroke, during the next few days, is to make a list of the streets in every direction within a quarter of a mile of the toy-shop, and then find out, from the schoolmistresses, and the butchers, and the publicans’ wives, and the grocers, and the oilshops, and the greengrocers, and the more talkative women on the doorsteps, which are the best Little Mothers in the district and what is the size of their families, and get their names and addresses. And then we shall know what to do.”
By this time the cab had reached Berkeley Square again, and Sir Franklin returned to his books.
IV
The next few days were the busiest and most perplexing that Pembroke ever spent. He was in Clerkenwell, where the toy-shop was situated, from morning till night. He bought all kinds of things that he did not want—cheese and celery, mutton-chops and beer, butter and paraffin—just to get on terms with the people who know about the Little Mothers.
Although naturally rather silent and reserved, he talked to butchers and bakers and women on doorsteps, and schoolmistresses, and even hot-potato men, as if they were the best company in the world, and bit by bit he made a list of twenty-two Little Mothers of first-class merit, and fifty-one of second-class merit, and all their children.
Having got these down in his book, Pembroke was going home on the evening of the 21st very well pleased with himself on the whole, but still feeling that Sir Franklin would be disappointed not to have the name of the best Little Mother of all, when an odd thing happened. He had stopped in a doorway not very far from the toyshop, to light his pipe, when he heard a shrill voice saying very decidedly, “Very well, then, William Kitchener Beacon, if that’s your determination you shall stay here all night, and by and by the rats will come out and bite you.”
Pembroke stood still and listened.
A
LITTLE
PROCESSION PASSED THE DOORWAY.
“I don’t want to go home,” a childish voice whimpered. “I want to look in the shops.”
“Come home you must and shall,” said the other “Here’s Lucy tired out, and Amy crying, and John cold to his very marrer, and Tommy with a sawreel, and father’ll want his dinner, and mother’ll think we’re all run over by a motor-car; and come home you must and shall.”
Sounds of a scuffle followed, and then a little procession passed the doorway. First came a sturdy little girl of about ten, carrying a huge string-basket filled with heavy things, and pulling behind her by the other hand a small and sulky boy, whom Pembroke took to be William Kitchener Beacon. Then came the others, and lastly Tommy, limping with the sore heel.
Pembroke stopped the girl with the bag, and asked her if she lived far away, and finding that it was close to the toy-shop, he said he should like to carry the bag, and help the family home. He was not allowed to carry the bag, but no objection was raised to his lifting Tommy on his back, and they all went home together.
On the way he discovered that the Little Mother was named Matilda Beacon, and that she lived at 28, Pulvercake Buildings, Clerkenwell.
She was nine years old, an age when most of you are still running to your nurses to have this and that done for you. But Matilda, in addition to doing everything for herself very quietly and well, had also to do most things for her mother, who went out charing every day, except Sunday, and for her brothers and sisters, of whom she had five—three brothers aged seven, six, and three, and two sisters, who were twins and both five. Matilda got them up and put them to bed; picked them up when they fell, and dried their tears; separated them when they quarrelled, which was very often; bought their food and cooked it, and gave it to them, and saw that they did not eat too fast; and was, in short, the absolute mistress of the very tiny flat where the Beacons lived.
Mr. Beacon worked on the line at St. Pancras, and if he was late home, as he very often was, Mrs. Beacon was always sure that he had been run over by a passing train and cut into several pieces; so that in addition to all her other work Matilda had also to comfort her mother.
The next day, when he came again to the toy-shop district, Pembroke was delighted to find that by general consent Matilda Beacon was considered to be the best Little Mother in Clerkenwell; but who do you think came next in public opinion? Not Carrie Tompsett, although she had several strong backers; and not Lou Miller, although she had her supporters too, and was really a very good little thing, with an enormous family on her hands. No, it was neither of these. Indeed, it was not a Little Mother at all, so I don’t see how you could have guessed. It was a “Little Father.” It was generally agreed by the butchers and bakers and oilmen and hotpotato men and publicans and the women on the doorsteps, that the best Little Mother next to Matilda Beacon was Artie Gillam, who, since his mother had died last year and his father had not yet married again, had the charge of four sisters and two brothers.
All these things Pembroke reported to his master; and Sir Franklin was so much interested in hearing about Matilda Beacon that he told Pembroke to arrange so that Mrs. Beacon might stay at home one day and let Matilda come to see him. So Matilda put on her best hat and came down from Clerkenwell to Berkeley Square on the blue bus that runs between Highbury and Walham Green.
VWhen the splendid great door was opened by a tall and handsome footman Matilda clung to Pembroke as if he were her only friend in the world, as, indeed, he really seemed to be at that moment in that house. She had never seen anything so grand before; and after all, it is rather striking for a little girl of nine who has all her life been managing a large family in two small rooms in Clerkenwell, to be brought suddenly into a mansion in Berkeley Square to speak to a gentleman with a title. Not that a gentleman with a title is necessarily any more dreadful than a policeman; but Matilda knew several policemen quite intimately, and was, therefore, no longer afraid of them, although she still found their terribleness useful when her little brothers and sisters were naughty. “I’ll fetch a policeman to you!” she used to say, and sometimes actually would go downstairs a little way
to do so and come back stamping her feet; and this always had the effect of making them good again.
Sir Franklin was sitting in the library with a tea-table by his side set for two, and directly Matilda had dared to shake his hand he told Pembroke to bring the tea.
Matilda could not take her eyes from the shelves of books which ran all round the room. She did not quite know whether it might not be a book-shop and Sir Franklin a grand kind of bookseller; and then she looked at the walls and wondered if it was a picture-shop; and she made a note in her mind to ask Mr. Pembroke.
Her thoughts were brought back by Pembroke bringing in a silver tea-pot and silver kettle, which he placed over a spirit lamp; and then Sir Franklin asked her if she took sugar.
(If she took sugar? What a question!)
She said, “Yes, please, sir,” very nicely, and Sir Franklin handed her the basin.
Would she have bread and butter or cake? he asked next.
(Or cake? What a question again!)
She said she would like cake, and she watched very carefully to see how Sir Franklin ate his, and at first did the same; but when after two very small bites he laid it down and did not pick it up again, Matilda very sensibly ceased to copy him.
When they had finished tea and had talked about various things that did not matter, Sir Franklin asked her suddenly, “How would you like to keep shop, Matilda?”
Matilda gasped. “What sort of a shop?” she asked at last.
“A toy-shop,” said Sir Franklin.
“Oh, but I couldn’t,” she said.
“Only for one day,” Sir Franklin added.
“One day!” Her eager eyes glistened. “But what about Tommy and Willy and the twins?”
“Your mother would stay at home that day and look after them. That could easily be arranged.
“You see,” Sir Franklin went on, “I want to give all the children in your street and in several other streets near it a Christmas present, and it is thought that the best way is to open a toy-shop for the purpose. But it is necessary that the toy-shop keeper should know most of the children and should be a capable woman of business, and that is why I ask you. The salary will be a sovereign; the hours will be from two to eight, with an interval for tea; and you shall have Mr. Pembroke to help you.”
Matilda did not know how to keep still, and yet there was the least shade of disappointment, or at least perplexity, on her face.
“Is it all right?” Sir Franklin asked.
“Ye-e-s,” said Matilda.
“Nothing you want to say?”
“No-o-o,” said Matilda; “I don’t think so.”
And yet it was very clear that something troubled her a little.
Sir Franklin was so puzzled by it that he went out to consult Pembroke. Pembroke explained the matter in a moment.
“I ought to have said,” Sir Franklin remarked at once on returning, “that the shopkeeper, although a capable business woman, may play at being a little girl, too, if she likes, and will find a doll and a workbasket for herself, and even sweets too, just like the others.”
Matilda’s face at once became nothing but smiles.
“You will want a foreman,” Sir Franklin then said.
“Yes,” said Matilda, who would have said yes to anything by this time.
“Well, who will you have?”
“I don’t think Tommy would do,” said Matilda. “He’s that thoughtless. And Willy’s too small.”
“How about Frederick?” said Sir Franklin, ringing the bell twice.
Matilda sat still and waited, wondering who Frederick was.
After a moment or two the door opened, and a very smart boy, all over buttons, came in. “You can take away the tea-things,” said Sir Franklin.
“That was Frederick,” said Sir Franklin, when the boy had gone.
“Oh!” said Matilda.
“Would he do for foreman?” Sir Franklin asked.
Matilda hesitated. She would have preferred some one she knew, but she did not like to say so.
“Too buttony?” suggested Sir Franklin.
Matilda agreed.
“Then,” said Sir Franklin, “is there anyone you know?”
“I think Artie Gillam——” said Matilda.
“Very well, then,” said Sir Franklin, “it shall be Artie Gillam. His wages will be ten shillings.”
And thus everything was settled, and Matilda was sent home with Frederick the page boy, the happiest and most responsible Little Mother in London, with an armful of good things for the family.
VI
Meanwhile Pembroke had been to Houndsditch buying quantities of new toys: for every Little Mother a large doll and a work-basket, and smaller dolls and other toys for the others, together with sweets and oranges and all kinds of other things, and everything was ready by the day before Christmas Eve, and all the tickets were distributed.
The tickets were Pembroke’s idea, because one difficulty about opening a free toy-shop in a poor district of London for one day only is that even the invited children, not having had your opportunities of being brought up nicely and learning good manners, are apt to push
and struggle to get in out of their turn, and perhaps even to try to get in twice, while there would be trouble, too, from the children who did not belong to the district. Pembroke knew this, and thought a good deal about the way to manage it so that there should be no crowding or difficulty. In the end Sir Franklin engaged a large hall, to which all the children were to come with their tickets, and from this hall they were to visit the shop in little companies of ten, make their choice of toys, and then go straight home. Of course, a certain number of other children would gather round the shop, but that could not be helped, and perhaps at the close of the afternoon, when all the others had been looked after, they might be let in to choose what was left. And in this state were the things the night before Christmas Eve.
VII
Pembroke managed everything so well that the great day went off without a hitch. At half-past two the Little Mothers with their families began to arrive, and they were sent off to the shop in companies of ten or thereabouts, two or three families at once. A couple of friendly policemen kept the crowd away from the shop, so that the children had plenty of time and quiet to choose what they wanted.
All the Little Mothers, as I have said, had each a doll and a workbasket; but the younger children might make their choice of two things each, and take two things for any little brother or sister who could not come—Clerkenwell being full of little boys and girls who are not very well.
When they were chosen, Artie Gillam wrapped them up, and off the children went to make room for others.
Matilda was a splendid shopkeeper. She helped the smaller children to choose things in a way that might be a real lesson to real keepers of toy-shops, who always seem tired.
“Now then, Lizzie Hatchett,” she said, “you don’t want that jack-inthe-box. What’s the good of a jack-in-the-box to you if your brother’s
got one? One in a family’s plenty Better have this parasol: it lasts longer and is much more useful.
“Here’s a nice woolly lamb for Jenny Rogers’s baby brother,” she cried, taking away a monkey on a stick. “He’ll only suck the paint off that and be deathly ill.
“Now, Tommy Williams, don’t bother about those ninepins. Here’s a clockwork mouse I’ve been keeping for you.” And so on. Matilda’s bright, quick eyes were everywhere.
Only one or two uninvited children squeezed in with the others. One of these was a very determined little rascal, who actually got in twice. The first time he went away not only with toys of his own, but with something for a quite imaginary brother with whooping-cough. This made him so bold that he hurried away and fought another little boy in the next street and took away his coat and cap. The coat was red and the cap had flaps for the ears, so that they made him look quite different. Wearing these, he managed to mix with the next little party coming from the hall. But he had forgotten one thing, and that was that the little boy whom he had fought was Artie Gillam’s cousin. Artie at once recognized both the cap and the coat, and told Mr. Pembroke, and Mr. Pembroke told one of the policemen, who marched into the shop, looking exceedingly fierce, and seizing the interloper by the arm, asked him whose coat he had on. At this the boy began to cry, and said he would never do it again. But it was too late. The policeman took hold of his wrist and marched him out of the shop and through all the other children in the street, who followed them in a procession, to the home of Artie’s cousin, and there he had to give back the coat. Then he was allowed to go, because Artie’s cousin’s father was out, and Artie’s cousin’s mother (who was Artie’s aunt) was not at all the kind of woman to thrash little boys.
So the time went on until all the children in Pembroke’s list had got their toys and the hall was empty, and then the many others who had been waiting outside were let in, one by one, until all the toys were gone, and the policemen sent the rest away.
“Now,” said Pembroke, “we must shut the shop.” So Artie Gillam went outside and put up the shutters, and Matilda put on her jacket
and hat.
Then Pembroke took some money out of his pocket to pay the manager and her foreman their salaries.
“How will you have it?” he said to Matilda.
“Please I don’t know what you mean,” Matilda replied.
“Gold or silver?” Pembroke explained.
Matilda had never seen gold yet, except in jewellers’ windows. Her mother’s wedding-ring was silver. “Oh, gold, please,” she gasped.
“One sovereign or two halves?” Pembroke asked.
“Two halves,” Matilda said.
Pembroke gave them to her.
Artie Gillam, on the other hand, wanted his ten shillings in as many coins as he could have, and his pocket was quite heavy with it.
“And now,” said Pembroke, “I suppose you’re going home. Be careful of your money on the way.”
“Oh no,” said Matilda, “I’m not going home yet. I’ve got some shopping to do.”
“To-morrow’s dinner?” Pembroke suggested.
“No,” said Matilda mysteriously. “That’s all bought. Father won a goose in the Goose Club.”
“Then what are you going to buy?” Pembroke asked, for he wished to take as long and full a story home to Sir Franklin as might be.
“I’m going shopping for myself,” said Matilda. “I’m going to buy some Christmas presents.”
“May I come with you?” Pembroke asked.
“Oh yes, please, I want you to. I’m only going to spend one of these half-sovereigns. The other I shall put away. But I must buy something for mother, and something for father, and I want to buy something else, too, for somebody else.”
So Pembroke and Matilda and Artie, having turned out the gas and locked up the shop, which, however, now contained nothing whatever but paper and string and straw, walked off to the shops. They first went into a draper’s, where Matilda looked at some shawls and bought a nice thick woollen one for her mother, and also a pair of grey wool mittens for her father. These came to five-and-six.
Then they went to an ironmonger’s and bought a cover for a plate to keep things warm, which Matilda said was for her father’s dinner, because he was often late while her mother thought he was being cut in pieces. This cost ninepence.
Then they went to a tobacconist’s and bought a pipe with a silver band on it, and two ounces of tobacco. These came to one-andfourpence and were also for her father.
Then they went to a china-shop and bought a hot-water bottle for a shilling. “That,” said Matilda, “is for the old woman next door to us, who nursed mother when she was ill. She can’t sleep at night because her feet are so cold.”
“And now,” said Pembroke, “it’s my turn,” and he took the children into a greengrocer’s shop and bought a shilling’s worth of holly and mistletoe for each of them. “If you like,” he said, “I will carry this home for you.”
Matilda thanked him very heartily, but said that she still had one more present she must buy, and led the way to a little fancy shop, kept by an old maid.
“Please,” said Matilda, “I want a kettle-holder.”
The old lady took out a drawer and laid it on the counter. It was full of kettle-holders, some made in wool-work, others in patch-work. Matilda looked at them very carefully one by one, and at last chose one in scarlet and bright yellow wool-work. When it was done up in a neat little packet and she had paid for it—sixpence—she handed it to Pembroke.
“That,” she said, “is a present for the gentleman. When I had tea with him I noticed that he hadn’t got one, and of course every family
ought to have a kettle-holder I should have liked to make one for him myself, but there hasn’t been time.”
VIII
Sir Franklin Ingleside did not use the kettle-holder. He hung it on a nail by the fire-place, and whenever he is asked about it, or people smile at its very striking colours, he says, “I value that very highly; that is the profit that I made out of a toy-shop which I once kept.”
