My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress by Christina McKenna Read Free Book Online Page B

car. She was the gardener who planted and plucked and weeded to make the place look presentable.
    She was the down-trodden wife who would carry tea to him only to hear him declare that it wasn’t sweet enough,and he’d send her back for more sugar. She was the typical Irish mother of her time, dominated by the overbearing, crude actions of a thoughtless husband and cowed by the misogyny of the Church.
    This litany of labour was the indispensable, inexhaustible language of her life; it fuelled, understandably, a rush of anger and dissatisfaction that she gave voice to at every turn. She shouted and cried with all the bitter force of a wind across the tundra, never silent, never static – she externalised everything.
    It seemed that when she was on the move she was alive, goaded by his inertness. His torpor was her vigour, raging down the years.
    There was a stubborn conspiracy between them, the indolent imploding of one exploding into the frenzied action of the other. He could sit for hours on the sofa eyeing a ruminative cow in a distant field while she fizzed and surged around him. He could just about find the energy to raise his feet off the floor as she swept and mopped under him. He knew this annoyed her and would say, in his defence: ‘There’s no need for half of that cleanin’ atall, atall.’ And we’d wait for the skirl of abuse.
    My mother had three key utterances that she squawked out with such frequency that they resound in the memory still. One: ‘I rue the day I married that man.’ And she meant it, she truly did, every sinewy, rank syllable of it. Two: ‘My heart’s a breakin’.’ I didn’t doubt it. Since our father didn’t love us we made up for the deficit by forever feasting on her heart. And finally the cry that stung the most: ‘I may give this place up.’ By this she meant the prison that was home and its sorry contents – all of us.
    They were the sentiments of a wounded woman, defeated by the demands of being a wife and mother in1960s’ Ireland, who’d wed in the hope of finding contentment and joyous escape, only to discover a wilderness of despair. Now instead of just being the put-upon skivvy to a flock of brothers, she had a flock of children and a shiftless husband to boot. Because of this inequity she bickered fluently and repeatedly with the source of her pain: her husband, my father, and our lives became subordinate to her searing frustration and his cold dispassion.
    The house I was born in was the standard bungalow of its time: three bedrooms, a kitchen, a scullery and a bathroom.
    The three bedrooms were divided by hierarchy and gender: my parents in the biggest one, five girls and four boys sharing the smaller ones. Space was tight and tempers hot as we fought for our share of that space. Being the youngest girl I usually ended up as sandwich-filling between two sisters, lying straight as a rod with the bedclothes stretched across me; or I sometimes shared a narrow bed with another, wrestling for possession of a thin blanket, even to the point of holding its corner between gritted teeth to retain my territorial claim. As children we clashed for space and comfort and love, because all three were in short supply. When I left home I found that living alone was bliss.
    It seemed that my mother never rested. The kitchen naturally was the focus of most of her activity. It was basic and functional (my father did not allow money to be spent on unnecessary things like cushions or frills). There was a scrubbed wooden table and eleven chairs, a brown vinyl couch, heavily studded along base and top with a seam of brass tacks, and cracked deeply into submission at one end, due to my father’s frequent rest periods. A hulking range jutted out onto the polishedfloor, making as much noise as my frazzled mother, spitting and hissing with the wood and coal it was fed each day.
    That range was rarely idle. A kettle or