Mirror Image

By Philomena Green

When the silence of my childhood was let out in the sun everything exploded around me and I was propelled back to the bastard child living in poverty stricken rural Ireland during and after WWII.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philomena Green
• Release date: Sep 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301511419

Philomena Green

Philomena Green grew up in rural Ireland. She studied in England, where she received a nursing degree before coming to the US. Since retiring from nursing she has written three novels, several short stories, and many essays and poems. In 2002 she published her first novel, YELLOW ROSES AT CHRISTMAS, for which she was a Fresh Voices award finalist. (Available on Amazon.com). Her other passions include writing poems and tall tales for her grandchildren, traveling, music, golf, hiking, and volunteering. She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her husband, Jan.

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The Smashwords Edition of

Mirror Image

Copyright © 2012 Philomena Green

All rights reserved.

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Editing by Harvey Stanbrough

Original cover drawing of author by Sir Stanley Spencer

Formatting and Cover Design by Debora Lewis

ArenaPublishing.org

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This book is dedicated to the memory of my cousin Robbie Foyle of Dumfries, Scotland.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind

~Emily Dickinson c.1868

Acknowledgments

To my children, Liam and Deirdre, love of my life. They never faltered in their pursuit of my real identity.

To my husband, Jan. He followed all the trails with infinite patience and sensitivity.

To all the people who helped make me who I am today.

To my editor, Harvey Stanbrough, who generously shared his wisdom.

To my formatter, Debora Lewis, who answered my countless questions with infinite patience and gave unstintingly of her time and talent.

To the poet, Desmond O’Grady whom I’ve never met, who set me on the right road to find my own Tipperary.

Chapter 1

The summer my young children returned from visiting their father and his wife with the news that I had no parents of my own was a turning point, though I didn’t know it at the time. All hell broke loose in my gut as I fumbled for answers to their curious questions. I obsessed on what I’d done to my children, and how my unknown origins would affect them. I soon discovered that to Liam and Deirdre it was no big deal. I was Mom, whom they loved. All was forgotten as they finished grade school, then high school, and left for college. I was happily remarried, living in the Midwest.

During and after WWII foster children in Ireland were marked by the length of time they remained with a family before the woman in the motorcar came to get them. I knew with the instinct of a child that I didn’t belong. I looked different, mousy and sallow, to my sister’s blond hair and apple cheeks. Much as I tried I never felt equal with my McCarthy siblings. The terror of abandonment became my constant companion as I waited every day for the woman in the motorcar to come for me. Quiet, except for occasional tantrums, I tried with all my heart to be a good girl, and when I was old enough I offered up intense prayers to the Virgin Mary to save me from the convent (orphanage).

Denial became part of the fabric of my being, and from a young age I made a running attack on life as something of a fraud. Despite the slights that always cut to the quick, I knew that it was better to pretend to be part of the McCarthy family than having the stigma of being a bastard child.

I was part of the Irish Diaspora of the 1950s and 1960s, a massive dispersion of young people to Britain that shaped the Irish migrant identity. We were a generation who sent their meager wages home to stave off hunger for those left behind. Though I moved on, most of the people I knew integrated into British society. Much has changed since I left Ireland, and each time I return, I’m in awe at the number of immigrants from many countries seeking work there. Despite the economic downturn that hit Ireland in 2010 the country has advanced from a society in which ten percent of the annual income came from postal orders from its emigrants abroad to one of the most educated societies in the European Union. Today you don’t have to be rich to get a good solid education.

The mother I never knew named me Philomena after Saint Philomena, patron saint of sick children. Since we already had a Philomena in the McCarthy clan, who was known as Mena, they called me Lily. In nursing school the name Wendy came into my life at a wedding where I was the mystery bridesmaid for another Irish student. With that name I forged an identity as far from my Irish roots as possible. However, as I have since discovered, you can get out of Ireland, but you can’t get Ireland out of your soul.

From the age of fourteen I made my way through the labyrinth of domestic jobs in fancy English homes. With survival at the forefront there wasn’t time to reflect on who I was or where I was going, but as Faulkner wrote, The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.

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If you knew how great a mother’s love is you would have no fear," Wendy told Peter Pan. To which Peter replied, Wendy, you are wrong about mothers. Long ago I thought like you that my mother would always keep me safe, but when I returned from being away for a long time my mother had forgotten all about me, and had another little boy in my bed." So goes J.M. Barrie’s tale of Peter Pan and Wendy.

Like Wendy, I survived on dreams, but unlike that mythical child I had neither mother nor father. I had more in common with Peter Pan and the lost boys. As far as I know I was left with the McCarthy family shortly after my birth and never claimed, thereby ending up as a permanent foster child in the Neverland of rural Ireland.

We are all our wounds as much as our successes. As I scrounged my way to adulthood I took great care to look away from the wounds that never quite heal. I became an expert at pretending to be what I was not, but always the lyrics of abandonment were the music of my heart. Unlike my foster siblings who shared a family face with their mother and father, I had no mirror image to hold onto.

We don’t know how much a child knows in her heart but denies. I was a child longing to be part of someone, but I was the outsider, another mouth to feed, like the mythical Wendy, As Mr. Darling told Mrs. Darling, We can’t keep her. This is another mouth to feed.

As I moved from my teens to my twenties and beyond, the feelings of rejection were never far away. If someone invited me to their house I’d drop to my knees and pray that they wouldn’t find out I was one of Molly McCarthy’s foster children and reject me. I avoided talking about my childhood in Ireland. If well-meaning people pursued the subject I’d tell a story of my life that wasn’t true. I didn’t even divulge the secret of my identity when I got married, fearing that my new husband would see me as a lesser person. My children changed all that; and as my mirror image changed, a whole new world opened up.

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When I graduated from nursing school I was recruited by a Chicago hospital. Back in 1960 I had no trouble acquiring a green card since there was a crucial need for registered nurses in the US. By then I had skillfully woven a life as Wendy. I was proud to be an RN. I loved the work and it gave me credibility.

The summer I got married, my husband decided to pursue a PhD in Biostatistics; so we moved from Los Angeles to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I felt more confident than I’d ever felt, when despite not having Public Health training, I landed a job at the university as a nurse-epidemiologist. My past remained buried as I forged a new life. Being embraced by my new in-laws as part of the family was a new experience for me. It was as close as I’d ever come to having a real family. If they were curious about my past they never showed it, and since they lived in Raleigh I enjoyed seeing them often. However, since my husband needed top clearance for his job at McDonald-Douglas when we returned to California I had to become a citizen of the US. Besides, I was carrying an American citizen, my son.

Submitting my citizenship application became an embarrassing sticky mess. I had to face the fact for the first time that the birth certificate I had used to acquire a British passport belonged to my foster sister. I don’t recall how the discrepancy in my papers was discovered, but it was, and the officials in Atlanta contacted me directly. At that time I had no information about my birth parents. All I remember was being exposed as a complete fraud. I stumbled through an explanation about growing up with a variety of foster children in the Irish countryside. To my surprise I had no trouble gaining citizenship. Given the opportunity, I officially added Wendy as my middle name.

I was sworn in as a new citizen in Greensboro, North Carolina on the day Bobby Kennedy was buried. Tears streamed down my face as the judge welcomed the new citizens, not with the platitudes of the privilege of being an American citizen, but with a plea to help his beloved country.

I must have known that I had a mother and father somewhere, but terrified of being rejected, I had never summoned the courage to ask my foster mother about them. Besides, since no one mentioned my parents I assumed they were bad people. The echoing slurs, Lily is a bastard! Lily has no mother! had persistently lodged within my psyche.

Even after I became an American citizen and a successful adult I was petrified to make enquiries. Had I not been such a yellow belly I might have been able to meet my birth mother before she died in 1962, and maybe even my birth father. He died in 1976.

In order to make sense of who I am today I have to go back to the Ireland of my childhood, growing up as nobody’s child in a place called Rathordan, outside the town of Cashel in County Tipperary. To quote the poet Desmond O’ Grady in his book of poems entitled Tipperary, It’s a long way to Tipperary and when you get there nothing awaits you…. You’ll find only what you brought with you in your heart. Using the Irish translation of Tiobraid Arann he translates the meaning of Tipperary as the fountain of perception, or enlightenment, intelligence. That is what I’ll try to keep in mind. For as Mr. O’Grady wrote, What you must do is make and leave some record of what your Tipperary means to you as witness for all those behind you on their ways to their own Tipperaries.

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One Mother’s Day my daughter gave me a gift of a collage, all artistically created, with double glass and a pretty frame. In it are pictures of Irish scenes, sheep on the side of the road, soft golden furze-covered mountains in the near distance, the long lonely beach in Connemara on a cool June evening, and a picture of the house I grew up in. As a child I never thought the house was small, but in the picture it looks miniscule, like a dollhouse, with its rusty iron gate and dirt yard. Like all County Council cottages back then, it had a slanted slate roof, a whitewashed exterior, two front windows with brick trim, and two side windows upstairs. All the children occupied one of the two upstairs rooms, where we slept on straw ticks.

Nobody wanted to sleep with me because I was a bed wetter; that I also suffered from asthma didn’t help. Even now I can recall throwing tantrums because Mammy wouldn’t let me sleep on the big bed. I’d scream so hard and so loud that I’d end up being locked in the henhouse. Not only was the smell suffocating, but also the bad-tempered hens were murderous as they squawked and pecked and fussed at me for invading their space. I must have made desperate efforts to escape, for even as an adult Teresa would tell the story of the number of times I’d be fast asleep, with my bare bottom poking out beneath the henhouse door. The story never failed to invoke peals of laughter. To this day I suffer from claustrophobia if I find myself in close quarters. Somehow, by the time I was four I stopped wetting the bed, and was allowed to join the others in the big bed. It’s hard to explain the luxury of sleeping on a warm, cozy straw bed with three other kids.

As I gazed at my daughter’s lovely creation, the icy cold flagstone kitchen floor touched my bones. The grit bit into my knees when I knelt night after night on that stone cold floor to say the rosary. I closed my eyes and I was back inhaling the pungent odor of burning turf. I did my share of pushing and shoving to get close to the fire. That I usually ended up on the outside didn’t dampen my appetite for the stories. I gaped in wonder at whoever the storyteller was on any particular night. Along with the mythical tales and ghost stories there was always a generous dose of stories of brave men who gave their lives to free Ireland. I loved the tales of Cuchulainn and his faithful wife Emer, and the legend of Finn MacCool, the great leader of the Fianna, the military elite of ancient Ireland. My favorite stories were of Deirdre, the foremost tragic heroine of Irish mythology.

The Irish have never had a problem mixing their Catholicism with Pagan Ireland. As Mammy used to say, Scratch a good catholic and you’ll find a pagan. Telling stories was how the country peoples got through the long dark winters. Everybody took turns, but Paddy Wade, a leprechaun of a man from over the Ballyfaloo Road, touched us the most with his fantastical tales told in his booming voice. Mammy sat in the one old rickety chair, vigorously turning the bellows to keep the damp turf burning. She smoked her precious Woodbine, which she passed to Auntie Kit to take a draw. Sometimes she sang in that lovely soprano voice, a song like She Moved Through the Fair or Danny Boy or one of the other many tunes she had at the tip of her tongue. Whenever I hear those songs today something fizzles in my heart.

The big black kettle of water sang its boiling song as it hung from a hook on the iron crossbar. When the stories were done we sat on the floor drinking our tea and eating toast burned to a pungent crisp on the open turf fire, without butter, sometimes with bacon drippings spread sparingly. I remember the creepy feelings as I climbed the stairs after hearing so many ghost stories. I never failed to take a quick glance out the crooked narrow window to assure myself that the quarry across the road wasn’t teeming with strange characters.

The kitchen was the only room in the house with a bit of furniture. The pine wood kitchen dresser took up most of the space. A blue willow pattern platter that Mammy won at Tramore the year she got married occupied the top shelf alone. The other shelf held the few plates and cups, and the blue enamel mugs that we shared for our tea. A paraffin oil lamp hung on the wall above the table. We children sat on rough-hewn benches on either side of the scrubbed wooden table to eat our meals and do our school lessons. I remember how we pushed and shoved and scuttled ever closer beneath the beam of the oil lamp.

The politicians put it nicely when they declared that the economy was sluggish. In fact, poverty prevailed throughout the countryside during and after WWII. Cars and radios were the toys of the rich. The schoolmistress had a funny little car that made gassy noises as it passed by our house each school morning. Seamus Heffernan, the farmer down the road, had a wireless. I used to crouch beneath pots of brilliant red geraniums on the windowsill on a summer evening, listening to music and spurts of news, my mouth watering at the smell of bacon and cabbage boiling on the huge open fireplace. The telephone was unknown to the country people, but available in the cities as trunk lines.

Eamon deValera was Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and although he did much to free Ireland from the shackles of the British Empire, his attempts to change the language generally used in the schools from English to Irish propelled the country backwards. Profoundly Catholic, the country people were sure he was in cahoots with the clergy to keep them in their place. In those days the priest was feared and revered, and viewed as an extraordinary teacher. As James Joyce writes in Stephan Dedalus, The emphasis on learning the Irish language is an opportunity to withdraw the people into a past of literal, implicit faith.

We were poor, barefoot and in tattered pinafores. Taunted by the farmer’s kids, we never failed to get back at them. They thought because we were poor they had license to torment us, but there were gangs of us, boys and girls, always up for a fight, and it didn’t take long to run them home bawling. In retrospect we were rich with the freedom of youth. Happiness was playing in the haystacks and running barefoot through the summer fields. Even today the sweet fragrance of new-mown hay brings back memories of that childhood freedom. Apart from the McCarthy sisters and me we always had one or two foster children living with us. There were always different children, who stayed until the woman in the motorcar came and took them away.

Roaming through dew-drenched fields on a summer morning provided riches beyond measure. Blackberry picking was a way to make a few pence. We moved through the bushes in bands, drowning out the morning bird song with our chatter. We tricked the Tinkers at their own game by getting out at the crack of dawn, rain or shine. We’d pick the brambles clean before the curl of smoke rose from their caravans perched along the side of the road. The Tinkers were a rough crowd who thought nothing of setting their mangy dogs on us. We skirted around their piebald ponies and scrawny donkeys tied to Mrs. Ryan’s fence, and scooted across the fields as fast as our legs would carry us.

The jam factory in Limerick sent an old man in a horse and cart (no gas for trucks) to our part of the country to collect the berries. He carried an old-fashioned scale on the cart, and paid us a pittance for our hard work and scraped blackened fingers. Mammy made us line the bottom of the buckets, supplied by the factory, with sand in order to increase the weight. I still can recall the funny feeling I had in my stomach when I handed over my brimming bucket. But as Auntie Kit pointed out, with what they paid us it wasn’t even a venal sin. It didn’t occur to us that the poor old man was also being paid a pittance for taking his cart around the countryside.

There was no breakfast before we hit the hedges so we devoured as many berries as we harvested. Even now my mouth waters at the thought of sugary wild strawberries and puckering tart gooseberries. Clusters of haws, big and fat like shiny red baubles hung from the hawthorn bushes. When the blackberry crop was meager I filled my belly with haws, nibbling around the seed in the middle until I no longer felt the pangs of hunger. Back then we had no idea that they were filled with anti-oxidants and vitamin C.

Life in rural Ireland wasn’t easy, especially for cottage dwellers like us. Survival depended on the neighboring farmers, for there was no money to buy anything in town. Heffernan’s, the nearest farmhouse, or Mrs. Ryan, the widow farmer whose land backed up to our field, supplied milk to us every morning. Mrs. Ryan’s farm hand also dropped off a head of cabbage and a bag of potatoes now and then, though we did plant and grow our own cabbage and potatoes. However, our little plot of land wasn’t enough to supply a growing