Rural Ireland wasn’t so different from ourselves

I wonder what I would make of it now. That’s the thing with teenage novels, they’re ripe with nostalgia for a time that’s long gone, and then you see them through an adult gaze and wonder what all the fuss was about.

That must have been what it was like for “The Country Girls”, published in 1960, by Edna O’ Brien, who passed away last week at the age of 93.

Maybe it was just as well she was living in London at the time, because it caused an absolute furore in Ireland, banned on account of its subject matter,and copies were burnt in the village where she grew up.

Who would have thought that people would be so ‘pearl clutchingly’ horrified regarding women’s feelings about sex, but this was Ireland in the 1960s, where no self respecting woman harboured such thoughts.

Can you imagine their reaction when they discovered that this was just the first in a trilogy that followed the lives and loves of Caithleen Brady and her ‘friend’ Baba Brennan. (I would have called her frenemy, but you get the impression that there weren’t many to choose from).

Perhaps that’s the reason that I never came across it either, but had I realised that it caused such a stir, of course I’d have wanted to read it.

You see, rural Ireland wasn’t so different from our own communities where religious and patriarchal values held sway. So it was almost fifty years later following the death of O’Brien last week that I finally made the acquaintance of Cait and Baba, and realised what I had missed.

Not in the least bit salacious but rather a heart warming insight into the lives of young women on the cusp of adulthood and the challenges that a strict and conservative society brings to bear.

Edna O’ Brien’s first novel became an international best seller that spoke to a lot of young women at the time, especially those who grew up in small, insular communities, where their voices went unheard and unheeded.]

But it’s more than that. It’s a snapshot of the lives of two young independent women who are challenging the boundaries and restrictions forced on them by a patriarchal system they had outgrown, and refused to follow, and a study of how the choices we make right from the start, inform the people we become.

It’s so easy to like Cait from the first sentence: “I wakened up quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily…then I remembered….he had not come home”.

Her father was on one of his drinking binges and those episodes would mark her mother’s and her own young life forever. “In her brown dress she looked sad, the farther I went the sadder she looked. Like a sparrow in the snow, brown and anxious and lonesome”

When her mother dies in a drowning accident, “it was the last day of childhood”, Cait goes to live with the neighbours, whose daughter Baba is at school with her. Baba’s father is the local vet, and her mother, while kind, is bored with her life.

Baba is indulged and perhaps resenting Cait’s closeness to her own mother, can be cruel and jealous. When they both leave for convent school, surprisingly it is Cait who is homesick: “Good-bye Home, I said, wiping the steam from the inside of the (car) window, so that I could wave and have a last look at the rusty iron gate.”

Life at the convent affords a degree of independence and friendship with other girls, despite the lack of compassion from the nuns who do a scary line in discipline when they catch the girls in each other’s dormitories. “You are not alone in your loneliness. Loneliness is no excuse for disobedience”, but for Cait, “it was nice to lie there watching the stars…waiting for something to happen in the deathly, unhappy silence”

Unfortunately, happen it does, and Baba’s rebellious streak and strong influence result in their expulsion, and with it an end to Cait’s academic future.

She has also caught the eye of a married neighbour, Mr Gentleman, who shows more than a healthy interest in her, and the vulnerable, grieving girl believes herself to be in love with him, sneaking around so she can be with him.

Rather than attend another convent, Cait decides to join Baba in Dublin where she is going to study at her father’s expense, and where Cait works in a grocery shop.

Dublin represents freedom and there are some hilarious and bawdy accounts of what their independence has bought them – they have money in their pocket and a key for the front door of the boarding house.

Before she leaves she visits her father one last time, and looks in on their old home which he lost years earlier through his drinking and financial mismanagement, yet has the temerity to tell his daughter: “You’re to behave yourself in Dublin. Live decent. Mind your faith, and write to your father. I don’t like the way you’ve turned out. Not one bit”.

In many ways that exchange between father and daughter sums up both the hypocrisy and misogyny, disguised as religious fervour, that was directed at women at the time, by a world view that held separate standards and values for both sexes. Thankfully both society and literary censorship have moved on from these dark days.