Barefoot Pilgrimage. Andrea Corr
I think I have to stop now … This is turning into confession.
Oh no … Don’t think about it … no.
Bless me, reader, for I have …
I am back in Dundalk, that choppy-haired, blood-lipped, slip, red bra and Doc Marten boots time, and (though you didn’t know it … or is that what I did to make you love me?) … I was troubled. The pain of a pop star … you’re breaking my heart.
Bosom, when she refers to it, says things like:
‘Do you remember the time you drank tea, Bosom?’
Mammy must have been really worried because she came into the front room, stole my teapot, replaced it with a bottle of wine and practically locked us in.
Anyway, it’s like my ears are on inside out and I’m so sick of myself that I rarely see, but the times that I do see, I take for a sign. For instance …
I raise my coal worn eyes from my feet and realise they have opened on the Friary Church and I think I must go in … I am supposed to go in. And then lo and behold, I just happen to sit in the pew queue for confession … So …
I’m in.
The dragging wood and my heartbeat reveals the spectre behind the grid. Bowed, white-furred head, not looking, but I’m looking and I feel just awful about having to say – to lie! – ‘It’s been three years, Father.’
And before he could get the most gentle ‘Why, my child?’ out of his still-quivering-in-the-wake-of-so-many-prayers lips, I blamed him for the whole lot of it. (God … was I going through the Change?)
‘I find it difficult, Father, as a woman [I had to verify that coz even if he was looking, it would still be hard to tell] to hold my head up high in this church.’
‘Oh no,’ he said.
Yes I do. My grandmother Alice was preached at to bear all the children God thought fit to bless her with … She had number ten at the ripe young age of forty-seven and if there was a break of more than a year between children, which apparently in Alice’s story there was not, a mortified woman could be asked why she was not bringing more baby Catholics into the world and was everything all right at home, so to speak.
But back to Alice (who would later take to her bed for two years, and who needed electric shock treatment to jolt the bloodless depression out of her, once and for all) … Not once did Daddy see her sit at the table with them and eat the food she had made. She waited. A benevolent and loving servant. A womb with no view.
I wish I could read your memoirs, Alice … I want to hear of some blessed sunshine days … There must have been some? Episodes of light beyond the low-hanging dusty grey of the honeymoon you spent cleaning Corr’s Grocery before it opened in Dundalk. And the extraordinary sign-off in the postcard from James Corr, your then betrothed:
Lough Derg, 1926
Dear Alice
Having a grand time here. Came yesterday and going back tomorrow. Big crowd on the Island.
Goodbye
James
Ah, maybe I’m not being fair though, James. Maybe it’s because everyone can read a postcard.
Daddy did make his mammy laugh, though. I know that. Because her love would shine out of her kind, blue Irish eyes. I remember that.
Father …!
Are you still listening to me?
When God smiled on one such as Alice, and blessed her with a new baby Catholic, she was not permitted to receive the Eucharist (take Holy Communion) before she was ‘churched’, a baptism of sorts, to cleanse her of ‘the sin of concupiscence’.
Oh no …
Do you mean that that did not happen, Father?
Oh nooooo …
And something stopped me and I felt … I feel so bad for raining on the old man’s parade. He’d likely given sixty of his eighty years to his church.
I am sorry for that.
And now that I’m on this, I’m sorry for the Irish men of that time, too. Having to confess their ‘impure thoughts’.
The origin of thought is pure, surely? Pure as love. Until it is corrupted and manipulated by guilt and oppression.
And we see how religion can give God a bad name.
Inherited Wickedness continued …
I think I’ll begin this one with:
Sorry, Caroline.
Baa.
Poor Caroline, Caddles the Waddles, was just too close for her own comfort (never mine). We two being quasi-Siamese, if you plee-ease …
We shared a double bed. We wore the same clothes. A different colour (she blue and me red) sufficing to express our individualities.
We shared a name when being called:.
‘Children!’
Because that in itself would bring us both, of course, having been together. And Mammy had read that book about the economising housewife (a real page-turner, apparently).
We had a secret language in which we invariably communicated through pursed-lip hums …
MmMmMm (happily, stands for both ‘Caroline’ and ‘Andrea’)
Mm (yes)
M Mm Mm Mm m (Are you asleep? Almost a double syllable given to the ‘eep’ – all authentic languages having their exception to the rule.)
She cried when I was late for school. Worried face and high, uptight stance above me, still pulling my socks on, happy, at the hot press.
I, to my shame, did not react the same way to Caroline’s everyday childhood troubles.
I can only excuse myself now by saying that I had no experience in worrying. She literally worried for me. She, being fourteen months older and ‘the youngest mammy ever born’, as they called her, took the instinct and personal need away. She did enough worrying for both of us.
This tale comprises two parts, which make up the one wicked whole. But they should demonstrate what it is I am expunging here …
A tale of two sisters (if you like).
Part 1
At the doctor’s one day, myself and my twin twister Caroline were arrested in our play to realise that we hadn’t just come on this errand for the ride and must not be going shopping, which meant that we wouldn’t be joining forces in breaking Mammy down into getting us a Chester cake (I have not eaten one in over thirty years, but I can taste it now …)
Before we knew it, Caroline was up ye get, hop-upping onto the bed and taking her shoes off, wherein Dr O’Reilly examined the wee worried feet. He diagnosed:
‘Fallen arches.’
‘I’m worrying for two, Doctor, what do you expect?’ she said.
No, that didn’t happen. I think I just don’t want to say this one …
Now his diagnosis wasn’t so bad in itself, obviously, but it was the remedy that got me … The cure.
‘So what do we do, Doctor?’ Mammy asked.
‘She will have to wear built-up shoes, Jean.’
That’s all it took … A sudden flash of an image in my brain of Caroline wearing Daddy’s 70s platform shoes to school. The shoes that the itinerants, collecting, had rejected and thrown out of the