1949 (6 page)

The young woman who left the train at Westland Row wore a snug cloche that covered her bobbed hair. Two years of bleaching with lemon juice and glycerine—a complexion treatment Madame insisted upon—had faded her freckles to invisibility. Men cast admiring glances at the slim, silk-stockinged legs revealed by her knee-length skirt. Women noticed the continental cut of her lilac-colored spring coat.

Ursula Halloran was a different person from the girl who had left Ireland two years earlier. She had arrived at Surval with the blinkered viewpoint of an island dweller and a full set of prejudices she believed to be truth. In Europe she had encountered other people's prejudices, other people's truths.

“All human skin,” she had once remarked to Felicity Rowe-Howell as they stood at their easels in art class, mixing flesh tones on their palettes, “is some variation of brown. Creamy-beige or pinky-beige or yellow-beige or bronze or mahogany or ebony. Considered objectively, there's not much difference between any of us.”

Fliss had laughed. “Try and tell that to my father. He believes we English are vastly superior.”

Ursula tensed imperceptibly. “Do you agree with him?”

“I never really thought about it,” said Fliss, putting down her brush. “Some of us are downright ratty. My brothers view women as little more than an exotic form of masturbation.”

Ursula had struggled to conceal her shock, but in time she grew accustomed to Fliss's risqué remarks. Some of the European girls at Surval were much more explicit.

They unwittingly had made Ursula aware of the childlike innocence of the Irish.

 

As she emerged from the train station in Dublin, Ursula raised one gloved hand to shade her eyes from the spring sunshine. There was none. The air smelt of recent rain and rain to come.

She stood still for a moment, feeling Ireland seep back into her pores. An Ireland lacking the luxuries Europeans took for granted and many of the basic amenities as well. Ireland with its fixed ideas about good and evil, Celt and Saxon, Catholic and Protestant. Republican and Free Stater.

 

A rank of taxicabs was waiting at the curb. Ursula signaled to the lead driver. “Number sixteen, Middle Gardiner Street,” she directed.

“Would you not walk from here?” the man asked in surprise. “You'd have to carry them suitcases but it would cost ye nuthin'.”

Ursula smiled. “I prefer to take a cab, thank you. And will you please go the long way 'round?”

“How long, miss?”

“West along the quays as far as Smithfield Market, then back to Parnell Square, then over to Middle Gardiner Street.”

He said dubiously, “Do you know where you're going at all?”

“I do know,” she assured him.

“It'll cost ye,” he warned.

As they drove through the familiar streets north of the Liffey, Ursula recalled the city sounds of her childhood. Iron-shod hooves ringing on cobblestones as carriages and jaunting cars and heavily laden drays competed for space. Bicycles hissing along. Tram bells clanging. Small boys shouting raucously, drunks bellowing as they emerged from pubs, neighborhood women calling to one another from open doorways.

Street traders crying, “Coal blocks!” “Dublin Bay herrins!” “Five oranges for tuppence!” “Rags bones and bottles collected!” Organ-grinders with hurdy-gurdys. Veterans of the Great War busking on corners, playing fiddles and tin whistles or singing the ballads of an earlier age.

Now, Ursula observed, the horse-drawn vehicles were slowly giving way to automobiles. Otherwise it appeared to be the same northside Dublin she had always known. Pungent and rowdy and idiosyncratic. A place where many people lived and died impoverished; where tuberculosis and enterids and typhus cast long shadows. How strange that it had changed so little, when she had changed so much!

The postwar era was a time of grinding poverty for Dublin's lower classes. Infant mortality was endemic. The poor had no sanitation; they fetched their water from communal outdoor taps and survived on little more than cabbage and potatoes, or bread with a bit of dripping. The pawnbroker was almost a member of the family. Men's suits were pawned on Monday and reclaimed in time for Mass the following Sunday.

Short-term survival, not long-term economic recovery, was the preoccupation of the Free State government. During the Civil War roads and bridges had been destroyed and numerous buildings burnt, doing great damage to the infrastructure of the country. Much of Dublin waited to be rebuilt. It was hard to know where the money would come from. As a result of its dominion status within the commonwealth, the government looked with increasing desperation to Britain.

The cab driver called, “Here we are, miss. Sixteen Middle Gardiner Street.”

As Ursula unsnapped her handbag to pay him, a fading trace of perfume, foreign and exotic, wafted into the air. Two Vincent de Paul nuns in their butterfly headdresses were walking past. They glanced at Ursula, then swiftly dropped their eyes.

Hector Hamilton, Painless Dentist
proclaimed a hand-lettered card in the window facing the street. The redbrick house was not as large as Ursula remembered. The front door with its Georgian fanlight was not as tall, nor the polished brass knocker as high. And had its facade always been so grimy with coal dust?

But when the door swung open, the cry of welcome was familiar. “Precious!” shouted Louise Hamilton as she gathered the young woman into her arms.

“Everyone calls me Ursula now,” gasped the girl, half-smothered against the older woman's capacious bosom.

Laughing, Louise relaxed her embrace. “Except my cousin Henry. When he sent your things over here he labeled them
Property of Little Business
. I stored them for you in the attic. As soon as you wrote you were coming, I dusted them off and put them in our best room. Here, you,” she called to the waiting taxi driver, “will you ever bring those suitcases inside?”

“You shouldn't have gone to any trouble for me, Louise. I don't want to dispossess one of your regular lodgers.”

“Sure and you won't. Since I married Mr. Hamilton I don't do much in the way of lodgings anymore, not the way I used to when you and Ned and Síle lived with me. How is your dear father anyway?”

The girl said casually, “I haven't heard from him for a while.”

Louise sniffed. “Too busy to write letters, I suppose. The government's still arresting Republicans; I'd be very much surprised if our Ned's not among them one of these days. But enough of that.” She put one arm around Ursula's waist. “Come through and I'll make you a nice cup of…my, you certainly are thin!” Drawing back, she gave Ursula a critical look. “You never did have a pick on you, but I thought once you grew up you would fill out a bit.”

“I'm not thin, it's my clothes. Ella insisted on my having the latest fashions while I was at Surval, and the style now is to flatten the bust and give a boyish figure.”

“God between us and all harm, why would a woman do that? You'll be wanting some decent dresses straightaway.”

“I'll make do with what I have, Louise. From now on I shall pay my own way and I can't afford to buy any more clothes.”

“No woman should be seen with her knees peepin' out,” the other insisted. “You'll never get yourself a husband that way.”

“I'm not looking for a husband,” said Ursula.

As soon as she was settled into number 16, she set out to reacquaint herself with the city of her birth. She took long walks up one street and down another. Dublin was a walking city.

The deprived areas north of the Liffey had not changed from her earliest memories; poverty was still poverty. But there were signs of change elsewhere. The Free State government was housed in one of the great symbols of the old imperialism, the splendid Ascendancy mansion called Leinster House. As the new nation worked to establish its identity, symbolism was important.

Dubliners had felt a profound sense of shock when the cast-iron pillar-boxes used for posting mail were repainted from British red to Irish green.

 

Henry Mooney sent Ursula a personal letter and four envelopes in a brown paper parcel. Each envelope contained a letter of introduction from himself, recommending “Miss Ursula Halloran, of Clare and Dublin” for employment.

Sitting on the bed in her room, she spread the envelopes out like playing cards. “Begin with P.S. O'Hegarty,” Henry had instructed. “If you make a good impression on him you shall not need the other three. I have known P.S.—that is what everyone calls him—for years. He has written several books on Irish subjects, which explains why his language is a bit flowery. P.S. used to be a postmaster with the British civil service. When they found out he was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood they dismissed him. After the War of Independence he took the pro-Treaty side, and now he's the secretary of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, with a lot of jobs in his gift. Some of his opinions may get up your nose, but I trust your teachers at Surval have taught you better than to blurt out your politics on first acquaintance.”

The Department of Posts and Telegraphs was temporarily housed in Dublin Castle while the General Post Office, destroyed by British artillery during the 1916 Rising, was being rebuilt. For seven centuries the sprawling complex known throughout Ireland simply as “the Castle” had been the seat and symbol of English domination. Now it contained the government of the Irish Free State.

To Republicans, the Castle was still occupied by the enemy.

As Ursula Halloran approached the wrought-iron gates opening into the Upper Yard, her thoughts, whatever they might be, were concealed behind a facade of impeccable poise. Her felt hat was from Kellett's, the leading Dublin milliners; her white gloves were spotless. The mauve suit she wore turned her eyes to a mysterious smoky gray.

“I have an appointment with Secretary O'Hegarty,” she told the guard. “Would you be so kind as to direct me to his office?”

In Ireland people were labeled by their accents, which identified both their birthplace and their station in life. This young woman's precise diction was beyond the guard's ability to categorize, but her self-assurance was convincing. With a respectful salute, he passed her through the gate.

Patrick Sarsfield O'Hegarty was a bespectacled, square-faced man with a tightly trimmed moustache. Meeting Ursula at the door of his office, he bowed her in with the courtesy of his generation and held a chair for her.

She handed him the letter of introduction. After a perfunctory reading he dropped the letter atop a pile of other papers on his desk. “My old friend Henry Mooney seems to think you would be an asset to the civil service,” O'Hegarty remarked in a lilting Cork accent. “We're receiving applications by the score but we'll always look at someone special.”

Ursula dazzled him with a brief smile before dropping her eyes. The gesture conveyed the message that she was someone special, but too modest to say so.

O'Hegarty studied her in silence for a few moments. “Well, well. I suppose you'd best tell me about yourself. Your people are from Dublin and Clare, I understand?”

Sitting with an erect back and her hands neatly folded in her lap, Ursula gave him a creatively edited version of her family history. Obfuscation could be learned.

“You're very well-spoken,” he observed. “Where were you educated?”

“For the past several years I've been studying on the Continent,” she replied smoothly, “specializing in languages. I am fluent in both French and German. And Irish of course.
An bhfuil Gaeilge agat?
^*
”

“I come from an Irish-speaking family,” O'Hegarty told her with obvious pride. “I'll arrange for you to take the civil service examination as soon as possible. The exams are competitive, but with your background you should have no difficulty in winning a place, Miss Halloran.” He hesitated. “It is ‘Miss'? To join the civil service these days a woman must be unmarried or widowed, you know.”

“I have never been married. Nor do I have plans to be.”

He dropped his chin and peered at her over his glasses. “You aren't one of those gunwomen, are you?”

“Gunwomen?”

“Females playing a role God never intended for them. Sadly, many of the women who helped the Volunteers during the War of Independence enjoyed the excitement in a most unfeminine way. All that swashbuckling went to their heads like strong drink. They took to first-aid, drill, and guns, and thought of nothing else. They were all but unsexed. One might say their mother's milk blackened to gunpowder.”
¹

Ursula said nothing. Her gloved hands were neatly folded in her lap. Only a sharp eye would have noticed that her fingers were clenched around her thumbs.

“To the gunwomen the Truce was an irritation and the Treaty a calamity,” O'Hegarty went on, warming to his topic. “In the Civil War the gunwomen fought more fiercely against their fellow Irishmen than they ever had against the Tans.
^†
In 1923 the Free State government held over three hundred females in Kilmainham Gaol, ranging in age from twelve to seventy.
²
All rabid Republicans.”

“How interesting,” Ursula said, as if the matter were of no interest.

“What are your own feelings about the Civil War, Miss Halloran?”

“Having political opinions is unfeminine,” she replied. Hands in lap. Eyes demurely cast down.

“Well said! We must find a position suitable for such an intelligent young lady. Did Henry tell you I'm overseeing the Free State Broadcasting Service? Not that I approve of wireless broadcasting, mind you. A waste of valuable funds on a fad, if you ask me.”

Trying to conceal her excitement, Ursula said, “You did say I speak well.”

“Only the male voice is really suitable for broadcasting,” O'Hegarty stated flatly. “I suppose there's no harm in women presenting programmes intended for other women, but the female voice lacks
gravitas
. There are a couple of clerical openings in the Dublin station, however. Would you consider one of those?”