The Splitting, 1971

Abstract

The Splitting, 1971 Katie Donovan When I first read Louis MacNeice’s poem “Snow” (I was a teenager in New Park secondary school in suburban South Dublin), I was struck by the line, “World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural. . . .” I was especially struck, as I read the poem, by MacNeice’s odd conjunction of snow and roses. Only now do I see the poem’s relevance to my own dislocated life. MacNeice moved between the pluralities of Belfast, Dublin, and London, and like many poets, he gave voice to the outsider. The first and most formative rupture in my singular life came when I was eight. It began with a kiss. The old Georgian farmhouse where I lived in north County Wexford was very quiet. It was a big house, more than two-hundred-years-old, and prone to creaks and even groans. But that afternoon, it was silent. My chirpy little brother Brian must have been napping. My father was out working on the farm, as always busy with drainage, cattle, sheep, and machines that kept breaking down. My mother was in the kitchen. I must have been reading or playing with my dolls. In any case I was in the sitting room and I remember surfacing out of the warm bubble of my absorption, stepping across the wooden parquet of the hall and into the kitchen with its cosy smells. Silently, she was kissing him, the man who had come to mend our clocks. The man with the big nose and very little hair. He was unspeakably ugly. She was hugging him tight and their mouths were all squished up together. I could see right away that this was something they were used to doing. Kissing very quietly, thinking no one could see. I tiptoed out of the room, out of my childhood. Later, after he had left, I accused her tearfully. “I saw you kissing that man.” Her face fragmented out of its daily mask. [End Page 9] “I didn’t want to tell you until I was sure,” she said. “We’re going to move to Dublin.” I was heaving with sobs as I sat hunchbacked on the mustard-colored armchair. In my playtime, I used to construct wooden houses with long bricks. The news felt as if one of those houses I made had been kicked apart by a random foot. My heart bristled with hate for the man who had done this to our family. It suited me to place the blame on him. “What will happen to me and Brian?” I asked. “I suppose we’ll . . . have to go and live in an orphanage. . . .” “No, silly, I would never let that happen. You will come too.” She hugged me tight, but I remained sour. I hated the idea of moving sixty miles away, to a city. Far away from the farm and our Daddy. I kept hoping that she and my handsome father would reconcile, even after the big move came and we were suddenly suburban children during the week and blow-ins down at the farm on weekends. But my mother kissed my “stepfather” every day now, and my father soon found his own new love. We adapted, as children do. Brian was only three and has almost no conscious memories of our parents living together. In a couple of years we became adept at travelling to Wexford and back by train. My father married again and we got a new brother and sister—a bonus that has increased in value through the years. But our arrangement was unconventional at the time. Nowadays, people separate or divorce quite frequently in Ireland. In those days it was against the law. My parents found a way around the prohibition. Their wedding had taken place in Toronto (my mother being Canadian-born). They were able to apply for and obtain a divorce in England. At first the transition—to Dun Laoghaire, a ferry town eight miles south of the capital—was daunting. We lived over a shop in one of the less salubrious pockets of what is still an affluent suburb. The shop was to accommodate my stepfather’s...