SION It was in London that I met her, a slender beauty; Irish too, they told me, only she had lived practically all her life in England. Her name, Sylvia Beaumont, did not strike me as being very Irish, nor did her manner, so in complacent selfdeception I made no enquiry. I was rather lonely, in fact, an exile, and she became my friend. It was herself who first mentioned Ireland. We were standing far back in a queue which had formed before a picture theatre. Cork, did I know Cork? Cork? said I, quoting glibly, wasn't I born and bred there? Then in an undertone she mentioned Blarney Street and I looked at her with surprise. Sylvia, Sylvie Beaumont, Sylyie Bowman, I said, and racked my memory to connect the name with somebody I had known. Great Lord! I said then, and I saw her give me a look of half-puzzled recognition. Between us we pieced things together, all in a series of exclamation marks. There was Blarney Street which we both remembered as two long rows of ramshackle old houses that wandered dejectedly up the hills, and Orrery Hill rising up behind it where there were fields from which both of us had been hunted one harvest by a wild dog. Sylvia reminded me, too, that when we were children there was no clock in all our row, and we used sit on her doorstep, playing gobs, and waiting until the man we called “Ten to One” would pass so that we could tell the neighbours that it was near dinnertime. The Bowmans kept a parrot that had been bought in Liverpool by Sylvia's father. He used say that it was the only created thing that would keep pace with his wife's tongue, and, sure enough, if you passed the doorway you would hear the one talking in the other's intervals, and Mrs. Bowman would say that sailor's wives had a cruel existence, and the parrot would blast her eyes and call the gossiping women old soakers. It was of Sylvia's mother I was thinking and not of herself. Her mother, I reminded her, had stood up one day on a chair—because she was a tiny woman—taken the swearing parrot from his cage and wrung his neck as you might wring a chicken's. And then Mr. Bowman had come home from sea and he had wept, because he was inordinately proud of his English wife and his American parrot. He had said that she was jealous of his parrot, and would give the poor bird no food while he was away—which was not true, because she had always fed it regularly. Sylvia laughed with me when I recounted that, and there were tears of delight standing in her eyes. I think now that her parents must have been the strangest couple that I have met. Eddie Bowman was a simple, quiet Corkman who had been all his life on the coalboats that ply between Cork and the English ports. He was low-sized like his wife, and he was given to melancholy tippling. Mrs. Bowman was a little wasp of a woman who had turned Catholic when she married and who complained bitterly that Catholics were not clean and that priests were covetous and thoughtless, and that if her husband only saved the money he spent on drink she might have a lodging house in London and educate her children proper like real ladies. She detested the people of the locality and she grew hysterical one day that a woman drove her hand through another’s window and paraded up and down before the house holding her gashed hand in the air. Of the family Sylvia's mother was the one I remember best, because she and my father were always talking of England; he had served for a while in England, and he was very proud of it, and between them they used praise all England and all Englishmen. In the winter months she spent her evenings with us. My father read the shipping news on the evening paper to her, and she was forever expecting news of her husband's boat, the “Orestes,” which might well have been given the Greek name for its great age. As Sylvia and I talked, my impressions of those evenings came back and converged, as it were, into one picture: myself sitting with Sylvia in front of a big fire, looking at a picturebook; around us my parents and Sylvia's mother, who would have her youngest child on her knee, and outside them again the blowing of wind, which broke with a splash like water against the old walls and made eerie circles of sound about the chimney. Waiting for the evening paper they would talk, and Mrs. Bowman would ask in a sort of timid way what would become of her if anything should happen to her husband. My mother would say then that indeed she shouldn't be thinking like that and that God was very good. Mrs. Bowman would say yes, He was, but we must be prepared for such things, and that it was only right that we should be prepared. Here she was, for instance, sitting by the fire with the two little angels, Sylvia and myself, playing before her. We would hear the voice coming up the road, the newsboys call, and my father would bring in the paper and open it. His face would grow pale of a sudden. .... I think now that she must have been a fine actress, because I can remember her with her two hands half raised as though to ward off something, looking from my father's face to my mother's and bringing a moment's silence into the kitchen. What would happen her, she would say, she didn't know, but at best, and she prepared and all for it, the shock would drive her out of her wits. It was easy to see that even then the thought of it was exciting her, for she would lift the child on her knee so that she could fix it with her eyes, and you would know that she was already thinking of it as an orphan. Then she would turn upon Sylvia with a jerk and tell the child to look at her straight between the eyes. Sylvia could only obey, because at times like this she was terrified of her mother, and her mother would look deep down into Sylvia's eyes as though she were attempting some sort of hypnotism, and ask her what would happen when herself and her little sister had been left orphans, and in exile, far away from everything they held dear. What would become of them? How could they expect to be brought up properly when their father was lying oceandeep, and who knew but it might be better they should drown with him rather than live on for the career of shame that had perhaps been kept in store for them as it had been kept in store for their betters. She would say all this and much more, and her little features would contract and become the colour of brick, and she would hiss some of the things she told Sylvia between her teeth as if, in truth, she hated her. Then, suddenly, losing all patience, she would lean across the hearth and give Sylvia's hand a vicious slap, calling her a barbarous wretch and telling her she had no feeling. My mother would interfere at this point and tell her she shouldn't say things like that to the poor innocent children, and Mrs. Bowman would say, no, she shouldn't, and kiss Sylvia and call her Little Angel. But it was only then that her excitement really began, because, in consoling Sylvia, she said whatever happened she would get lots and lots of money from the shipping company as other widows did, and then she would buy them both lovely new black dresses for weekdays and Sundays. Then they would be for all the world like ladies’ children, and they would go away to London with her, and have a little lodginghouse in Soho with a piano all to themselves. They would have a teacher who would teach them to play “La-la-la-la-la, La-la-la-la-laddy,” and they would learn how to dance waltzes like the children of the gentry “La-la-la-la-laddy.” At that she would lift up her hand triumphantly and bid us hark to the storm outside. She was a great actress. Sure enough though, Blarney Street is well up the hills, and when a wind comes on it preys on the old decaying houses, and it rattles the shutters which are hung outside the windows to protect them from the full force of the blast. Sometimes, as we waited, the newsboy's call would be blown to us from a great distance and my father would have to wait quite a while at the door before he could come back to us with the pink wet sheet. Then Mrs. Bowman would lean across to my mother and tell her in a tense whisper what she would do if all that compensation money came to be hers, and my mother, whose imagination was hard put to mount above my father's weekly wage, would grow excited, too, and listen with attention and say that two hundred pounds would surely be a great sum to spend. My father would come back and fumble at the paper. We all listened as he read out the headings, and the news of the storm, and the shipping news. When he finished Mrs. Bowman would have dropped into silence and would be looking into the fire over Sylvia's head and mine. My father would then begin to talk. He would tell us all sorts of things about the places he had been in, about England and the colonies, and Mrs. Bowman would interject only an occasional word or a sigh, and that to start him off afresh. When she left us about ten o'clock, folding Sylvia within her apron, she would sometimes turn to weeping and say that she had always been a good wife to her husband. Sylvia must have been about eight years old when we left Blarney Street. I was eleven. We were going to a house in the country, and Mrs. Bowman wept bitterly as she embraced my mother and myself. She said that now she would have nobody to talk to, and that the people around were not nice and disliked her for being an Englishwoman. We had never met again, so, between Sylvia and myself, there was a good deal of way to make up, and first I asked for her father. We were sitting together in the cinema, and neither of us paid much attention to the flickering of the pictures across the screen. Her father, she told me, was dead, and I could only say “O.” He had been drowned some nine years before. She crept up closer to me and caught my hand which was about her waist. We talked again of home and of how beautiful it was there, and she told me that she dreamt of it often. She felt that she could never be happy outside of Ireland. Neither could I, and I told her so, but it was not often that I found it so difficult to bring enthusiasm for home into my voice. I was embarrassed, and I was glad that in the darkness she could not see my embarrassment. Source: Irish Tribune, 1926-08-06, pp. 9-10