Six at the Table Read online

  Eventually the morning arrived when I was the only one in the family eating porridge for breakfast. Mum forgot to make it one Sunday night and the next morning I had to munch my way through a bowl of flimsy Corn Flakes. Then she gave up making it altogether. She said it was a lot of trouble preparing and reheating it just for one. But cold milk poured over thin flakes didn’t satisfy me the way porridge had. Even the novelty of watching two Weetabix soak up all the milk in my bowl and turn into a firm brown swamp didn’t compensate. I tried warm milk on every cereal we had, but nothing worked. I couldn’t re-create the pleasure only porridge could provide, so I gave up trying. School mornings had finally lost their smallest hint of enjoyment for me.

  Ham and Cabbage

  On my first day back at school I was separated from Maeve. My best friend. The only friend I wanted. She was ‘O’Reilly’ and I was ‘Maher’ – ‘O’ and ‘M’ – we should not have been separated according to the system that had worked in our favour from our very first day at school. I was miserable sitting in my cold wooden prefab beside strange girls I had never played with before. I was with Brady, Collins, Flynn and Farrell, when I should have been with Murphy, Nolan, O’Donnell and O’Reilly. I’d never had to make a new friend before, I’d always had Maeve. I didn’t know how to start all over with new girls, nor did I want to. I felt completely isolated and excluded.

  Not prepared to take it lying down, I spotted my chance when the Principal, Sister Joseph, was on yard duty during break time. I ran to her and in my most polite way asked if I could speak with her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If you can walk with me back to my office. I’m very busy.’

  And so I trotted alongside this tall, straight nun as she strode across the school grounds.

  ‘Sister, I want to be moved into 3B,’ I said to the side of her flapping veil. ‘That’s where all the “M”s are, that’s where I should be. I don’t know why I’m in 3A.’ I tried to keep any whine out of my voice. I was talking to the Principal one-to-one, as a girl who knew her own mind.

  ‘There wasn’t enough space in 3B this year and so we decided it would be best for you to be in 3A. You can make lots of new friends and you can see Maeve at break time,’ she replied, very businesslike.

  This was completely unsatisfactory and not going the way I had imagined. I’d been sure there’d been a typing error that had been overlooked, a clerical mistake. I was unaware, until now, that my removal from my usual comfortable group was part of a greater plan.

  ‘We decided that it would be better for both yourself and Maeve to broaden your horizons and make new friends,’ Sister Joseph continued, reinforcing her point.

  By now she had reached the door to the building that housed the Principal’s Office. Her hand was on the handle and she turned to me, her stern look indicating that I was not to follow her inside. This was as far as my grovelling and pleading had got me, to her front door and no further. And when that heavy door thudded in my face, tears filled my eyes. I sloped back to the grey and noisy yard. I’d been singled out for special attention of the wrong kind. The feeling of injustice stung me. This was just not fair.

  The whistle was blowing just as I got back to Maeve playing hopscotch. She seemed happy lining up with her new friends to march back to 3B while I resentfully looked at the girls who were to be my classmates until next summer. More tears threatened to choke me as I made my way up the creaky steps of the prefab. I couldn’t let Sister Brigid or anyone else see me cry, so I sniffled and swiped surreptitiously at my blotchy face until I felt I must look normal again.

  Sister Brigid was a cold beaky nun whose veil prevented even the smallest lock of hair from escaping. While other nuns let a curl or a bang soften their faces a little, Sister Brigid maintained a strict and severe appearance; her veil sat stiffly on the pasty flesh of her face. She kept a brass bell on her desk, which she used as a communication tool. She rang it throughout the day for numerous reasons: to signal the start of a lesson; to signal the end of a lesson; to get our attention if we appeared to drift off; to call for silence when murmuring threatened to drown out her own voice; to indicate that a change of girl was required, as the role of reader moved around the room. Her bell became very annoying during the first few days of school and she continued to use it consistently for the entire year.

  I met up with Maeve in the yard after school and we walked our bicycles home together. I never told her about my failed attempt at pleading with Sister Joseph. Somehow she didn’t seem to be as bothered about our separation as I was. I knew it made me look foolish to be begging and crying about the class I was in, while she was just getting on with it, and so I said nothing.

  I said goodbye to Maeve at her house and walked home. I didn’t tell my mother what had happened, and up to then I’d told her most things. Instead, I sat silently at the kitchen table that afternoon, practising my handwriting on pages that were too closely lined to contain my big round ‘a’s and long-stemmed ‘b’s and ‘d’s. I leaned forward, my nose close to the page, my tongue stuck between my teeth in concentration, and made my way slowly and carefully across each page. I let the noises and smells of home erase the pain of the day, like the shake of an Etch A Sketch, until the next morning.

  Three pots were bubbling on the cooker. A pink gristly lump of ham bobbed around in one. In another was cabbage, and the last one held the potatoes. Ham and cabbage. A family favourite. Just what I needed to alleviate my gloom that evening.

  When the meal was ready, each of us sat down around our kitchen table to an identical plate. The light was on overhead, the window black from the night sky. A large, moist, pink slice of boiled ham, two small scoops of creamy mash – served with the ice-cream scooper – and an untidy pile of glossy green cabbage shreds. Then we kids got all creative.

  Kevin, having been mesmerised by Close Encounters of the Third Kind, moved his mashed potato into the centre of his plate and shaped it into a mountain, as Richard Dreyfuss had done in Spielberg’s film, with a large crater on top. Into this he piled his cabbage and the slice of ham – his representation of a spaceship with skinny green aliens. Next he poured tomato sauce over the mountain until it oozed down the sides like molten lava. All the while singing the five famous musical notes – ‘Doo doo doo doo doo’ – in conversation with his alien dinner.

  The rest of us indulged him and I especially enjoyed the distraction and light relief of his childish good humour. We gave exaggerated praise to his endeavour, until hunger got the better of him and he devoured it, with Mum getting up and leaning over him to cut up his meat.

  Lucy, neat and precise, had made a tiered cake with her dinner. She spread half her mashed potato in a circle on her plate, flattened her cabbage onto this to make the next layer, then placed her slice of ham on top of that and used the remainder of her potato to cream the top of her cake-meal. She then cut into her creation as you would a grand cake and ate her entire dinner, segment by segment.

  Catherine, being a teenager, attempted to give us all the impression that she found this play with food a little puerile for her taste, so she cut up her food like an adult. But on her tight, moody face there were traces of envy she could not completely hide.

  I attempted to make a swiss roll out of my dinner. I spread potato and cabbage on my slice of ham and then tried to roll it into a log and slice it in cross-sections. Unfortunately it never worked; my swiss roll always unfurled and left me with strips of meat smeared with mash and cold cabbage to eat. I envied Lucy her simple yet effective design but I could never adopt it – that was her way of eating ham and cabbage. I would just have to devise another ingenious design, next time we had it for dinner.

  Mum ate her dinner in mouthfuls between jump-ups to get tomato sauce, more milk or some salt. Dad just kept his head down and methodically cleared his plate.

  The leftover ham found its way into our lunch boxes the next day. Sandwiches made with large slices of white bread, spread with Flora and thin pieces of ham, were cut in ha
lf, wrapped in cling film and placed on one side of my lunch box. On the other side sat an apple and a treat. The treat alternated between two Garibaldi biscuits and a Jammie Dodger or, if I was really, really lucky, a home-made chocolate toffee square or a stick of Twix. All of this was washed down with some tepid milk straight from one of the hundreds of cartons that had been sitting in the school yard all morning.

  Leftover mash was saved for Friday’s tea and became potato cakes – flattened triangles of mashed potato mixed with a little flour, fried in butter, sliced open and served with melting butter on each half – scrambled eggs on the side.

  Leftover cabbage was not quite so popular. Mum never wanted to throw any food away and so she put it in the fridge. The following evening she reheated it on a plate over a saucepan of boiling water, and it sat on the table going cold again, as we avoided it in favour of the fresh alternative. Eventually, and to set an example to us children, Mum or Dad felt morally obliged to eat it, so that it wouldn’t ‘go to waste’, as ‘that’d be a sin’.

  Apples

  We were not poor. We had a nice home. I had a bedroom that I only had to share with Kevin, though it was always cold as the heating was not used upstairs, except during subzero temperatures and even then we had to ask permission to turn it on. We had warm clothes to wear (albeit a mixture of home-made and many hand-me-down ensembles); we went on holidays (in a tent or borrowed caravan). We were not deprived. But I was keenly aware that Mum and Dad always watched every penny they spent. So from time to time they announced a new scheme they had devised, an idea to save money, or at least make it spread a bit further.

  One such scheme had been to get a friend of theirs, who had a knitting machine, to custom-knit our school jumpers. For several weeks, Ethnea busied herself in her spare bedroom, sliding bobbins of navy wool this way and that across the many tiny, darting needles of her machine. Every few days the phone rang, and while Ethnea waited on the other end of the line, Mum grabbed her inch tape and pulled it along the length of our arms, or down our backs from neck to bum, or around our waists, and then relayed the measurements to Ethnea, who presumably inputted our vital statistics into her magic machine.

  Mum was thrilled when the three navy jumpers arrived and each one fitted perfectly. However, the nuns at school were not at all happy to see the three Maher sisters lining up in the assembly hall and the school yard in a non-regulation shade of blue. It was not going to be tolerated. No such precedent could be set or everyone would be at it. And so it was back to Arnotts we were marched. A small fortune was handed over for three jumpers of the correct hue. Mum was now out of pocket for wool, a thank-you gift for Ethnea and the cost of three new shop-bought jumpers. At least all was good with the nuns again.

  This year Mum and Dad settled, somewhat arbitrarily, on apples as a potential source of savings. The first money-saving scheme involved an autumn afternoon in an orchard. This was to be a productive activity; not only was there fresh air and exercise to be had, but as suburban kids, we were getting a rare opportunity to connect with nature and help our parents into the bargain. Kevin and I were too short to be of much assistance with the apple-picking. Our job was to gather as many as possible off the ground, but that meant Dad had to be put on quality control to check each apple for worms and rot. Then we were given the task of pointing out apples to the taller members of the family. I saw through this ploy. It was a made-up job to keep us quiet, and it was boring. I busied myself with eating instead. I ate a lot of apples, more than I thought anyone could possibly eat in one afternoon, and I groaned with cramps all the way home.

  When all the orchard apples we had harvested were eaten, Mum and Dad tried their next scheme. They got up very early one Saturday morning, leaving Catherine to supervise us from her bed, and drove into the Smithfield Markets. Mixing with the traders and shopkeepers who were rushing about negotiating deals and discounts, they bought boxes of apples and oranges at wholesale price. They didn’t enter into any bargaining, but they came home delighted with the savings they had made all the same. The boxes were left in the garage and we were told to help ourselves.

  Our lunch boxes were not complete without at least one small apple, now damp and smelling of egg sandwich, in the corner. Any request for a snack, or a whine of ‘I’m hu-ungry’, was met with ‘Have an apple’. Though soon Mum realised that the more fruit was in the house, the more we ate. Add to this the rapid rotting that occurred in the bottom of the boxes, the free bags of apples Mum gave away to friends and family, the early trips to the market, and the huge numbers of crumbles and tarts she had to make in order to consume the apples before the rotting set in, and this scheme did not in the end seem like such a great idea.

  Apple tart, apple purée, apple crumble, apple charlotte, apple fritters, apple amber, apple betty, apple with Madeira cake on top, sponge with apple stuck in it, apple and blackberry crumble, baked apples, apple sauce with pork, apples for school lunches, apples for snacks. Apples until they were coming out of our ears. I couldn’t wait until they were all gone. I played my part by eating several a day – even if I wasn’t hungry, when I passed a bowl of them, I took one. I was relieved to see the bottom of each box. I don’t think I was alone, for quietly the idea was dropped and the trips to Smithfield thankfully ended.

  Moondust in the Phoenix Park

  Mum stood by my bed, gently nudging me from my sleep and telling me to get up. It was dark outside and I wanted to roll over and block out this unwelcome interference. We had to get ready quickly, she said, and catch the bus. Then I remembered what day it was, what was happening. The Pope was coming to Dublin. I jumped out of bed and put on the clothes that were laid out for me. I gobbled my breakfast, with not only Kevin at the table beside me but Catherine and Lucy as well. Dad had a cold and was staying in bed for the day.

  It was exciting to be awake in the middle of the night. I carried a flask and a lunch box in a small plastic bag. Mum was loaded down with the big bag we took to the beach and a few foldaway stools. We made our way slowly to the main road, and as we walked, more and more people shut their front doors behind them and joined the procession, all heading in the one direction. There was a queue for the bus by the time we got to the stop. We joined it and stood shivering until two headlights appeared out of the darkness and pulled up beside us. We squeezed on the bus and I tried to sleep on my feet as I stood swaying all the way to the outskirts of the Phoenix Park, in a part of the city that was unfamiliar and intimidating to me.

  We ate most of our food in enclosure Yellow 15 before Mass started, and I was hungry the rest of that long day. The initial excitement eventually gave way to boredom as we stood about waiting for the Pope to arrive.

  Then a girl in the enclosure beside us said, ‘Wanna try some?’ In her outstretched hand she held a small colourful foil packet.

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied, unsure of what I was signing up for but I was bored and hungry. Into my palm she spilled a mound of irregular-shaped shards of candy.

  ‘You do this,’ she said, and she whacked a fistful into her mouth.

  Without hesitation, I copied her.

  Nothing could have prepared me for the experience I was about to have. My mouth was tingling and sore and I felt like choking all at the same time. I was stunned. I was confused. I was giddy. This was the most frightening and exciting sweet I had ever tasted. I asked my neighbour to let me see the packet again, and I looked at it closely.

  ‘It’s Moondust,’ she said, and she turned on her heel, back to her allotted space.

  The Popemobile passed by close to our enclosure. I cheered and clapped and stuck my Instamatic camera in the air over my head to get a photograph. Then he was gone and I thought of the long walk to the bus stop, the queuing and pushing to get on, the lurching bus journey back to our road and then the walk to our house. I was tired and wanted to be home already.

  Grandma’s Scones

  Our Sunday morning ritual was cast in stone. After eleven o’ clock Mass, we visited G
randma, along with Mum’s brother and his family. One of Mum’s brothers had died a few years earlier, but his wife kept up the visits and she and her family also joined the weekly crush in Grandma’s modest kitchen.

  Grandma was a widow and she lived alone. She went to Mass every morning of her life, sat in the same pew and chatted to neighbours afterwards. Then she shuffled down to Ranelagh village or, if she was tired, she only went as far as her local grocer, Morton’s, to get what she needed for her dinner. The rest of the morning she spent reading the newspaper, listening to Gay Byrne on the radio and preparing a full three-course meal for herself, which she ate at midday. Some afternoons she gardened, or she baked sponges and tarts for herself or those neighbours she referred to as ‘elderly’, though usually they were many years her junior. Some afternoons she dozed in her armchair in the sitting room, where we’ d find her when we called on a surprise visit.

  Grandma was the ideal and rare species of granny, and I was aware of this from a very young age. She never gave out to me or interfered; she didn’t criticise; she was a martyr who never complained. Even when oozing leg ulcers throbbed or large cuts were slow to heal on her thin-skinned hands, making her life more difficult, she just shrugged and carried on regardless. She was funny and most of all she laughed at herself. I only had one grandparent and I knew I got quality not quantity.

  Maeve, on the other hand, grumbled about her granny when she visited. She had too many complaints and minor illnesses for Maeve’s liking. When I called for Maeve to play, Mrs Sheehy often obliged us to play 25s with her. I loved playing cards, and as I only ever got to play them on summer holidays in our tent or at Christmas-time, I was always keen to sit down and play a hand with Mrs Sheehy. But Maeve had other plans and she’ d drag me away to play in her Wendy House in the back garden instead.