Other People’s Countries by Patrick McGuinness

Author:Patrick McGuinness [Patrick McGuinness]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

‘AU PREMIER’

IN SOME ROOMS it is unthinkable to do anything other than whisper. My great-grandmother Julia’s room was one such place, and it has taken me the thirty-eight years and the several refurbishings since her death to get used to speaking normally in here. It is still the room where quietness happens: I write here, I’m doing it now, at an old sewing-machine table from Lucie’s workroom, and the children repair here when they are overwrought or want to read or doze.

Julia’s room had been furnished in the 1890s and last decorated in the thirties, though in a style that deferred to the 1890s. I don’t mean belle époque 1890s, the kind I study at university and write about: all Mallarmé and Laforgue, absinthe and can-can and Toulouse-Lautrec. No. I mean religious-provincial-industrial 1890s. Crucifixes, brown wallpaper, and furniture so big it had to be built inside the room it dwarfs.

It was wallpapered with a dark, off-burgundy velvet flock, its pattern so dense that the room pulsed. There was a heavy Walloon oak dresser, a Voltaire armchair in which Julia sat reading her missel, a brown chaise longue and a round table with two chairs where Julia ate her meals. There was a crucifix on every wall and an elaborate trinketry of religious bibelots on every surface: Lourdes water in plastic Virgin Mary bottles, bone-china saints, antique devotionals jostling with the purest Catholic kitsch: plastic Padre Pio plates and Jesus statues with crowns of fairy lights. Rosaries were everywhere, and even today the things keep turning up, coiled up like millipedes inside matchboxes, on windowsills, behind radiators, in old biscuit tins and bedside tables. Julia went to church three times a day, and when she was too old the priest visited her most afternoons. If I ever imagine my missing Irish childhood, it involves some very similar décor, though less silence.

Julia was utterly devout and seemed to have been planted in the nineteenth century despite having lived through most of the twentieth, not just because of the wooden clogs she wore, one of which is still in the understairs cupboard, but because of the values that flowed up through her. She was illiterate, and had worked as a chambermaid in the Hôtel des Ardennes from her early teens to her late sixties. To think of her, born in the 1880s, living in the house with Johnny and overhearing his Rolling Stones and Beatles records, gives me the same slightly heady feeling of temporal overlap I used to get when, as a child, I watched Westerns which featured both horses and early motor cars, the horses tethered beside parked cars outside a saloon or a bank. Julia had lived through both wars, lost one son to German bombers and waited five years for another to leave Stalag XIII, and spent World War Two in an internment camp working the fields for the Vichy French. On her lap, or kissing her face, it’s the mix of chasmic distance of experience and comforting physical closeness I remember.

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