Mary Woodward is an accomplished poet whose works have graced the pages of esteemed publications such as Stinging Fly, Southword, and Poetry Ireland in recent years. Her notable achievements include the publication of a full collection titled “The White Valentine” by Worple Press in 2013. Poems from this collection received high commendation in the Forward Prize, further solidifying her reputation as a skilled wordsmith. With a distinct voice and a penchant for capturing the essence of emotion and experience through verse, Mary Woodward continues to captivate readers with her evocative poetry.

Made in Ireland

By Mary Woodward

Yes, she says, she is used to doing the housework. And can cook and make bread.

Yes, she can do laundry.

No, she says, she is never ill. Never missed a day of school.

The job is hers. She is the assistant housekeeper for the priest, Father Casey. Kitty realises this means she is the maid who will do all the hard work; the whole community knows Annie-Jane, the housekeeper for twenty years, must be finding the cleaning and washing, the drudgery in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, beyond her. Kitty assures them she will be with them by the end of the week, theirs for only 2 shillings a month – and one evening a fortnight, and one whole Sunday a month, to herself.

‘That’s grand,’ says Kitty’s mother, relieved her eldest daughter is to be respectably employed, though Kitty knows that this is second best in her mother’s eyes: what she wants is Kitty with her head shaved, hands clasped, making her final vows. Kitty still feels guilty about the terrible time last year when she’d been caught by her parents, stealing the egg money and spending it on Lux soap and Woodbines, but it isn’t a guilt severe enough to propel her into a convent. Skivvying for the priest will be enough, allow her to hold her head up when she goes into town, will give her a place in life.

And anyway she is to have her own room. Kitty cannot start to imagine the silence of a room to herself, even the coolness of an entire bed to herself. Noise and intimacy have been the conditions of her existence with her siblings, and this new Kitty separated off, shut behind a door on her own at night, will have to be met and dealt with. When she thinks about the room all she can imagine is space, and a window looking over a garden; she looks out and there is honeysuckle, and fuchsia, sometimes maybe even white roses.

Kitty makes sure she arrives promptly at six the next Friday evening, out of breath and red faced after her long walk in the autumn heat. She has had to wear her coat because it is too big for her small case. It’s too big for her also, made for a strapping American cousin who never walked across a field in her life, and thick enough wool for a Chicago winter. But it is Kitty’s best thing, and she will not think of leaving it behind, knowing if she does it will be torn and muddy the next time she sees it.

‘Go on right to the top, up all the stairs,’ says Annie-Jane, meeting her at the front door. Kitty climbs the stairs. Apart from the staircase in the big shop in Boyle she has never climbed a staircase in her life and it is a wonder to her. There are even pictures on the wall as she goes up, Our Lady and the Sacred Heart, and on the landing there is a little table with a shiny wavy green plant in a blue and white china pot. She is impressed. Past the plant there is an open door and another set of stairs, narrow and twisty.

It is dark. No more pictures. Her room is a space in the loft: there is a narrow iron bed made up with a brown blanket and a striped pillow, a small blue painted cupboard and a wooden chair. A big jug and washbasin on the cupboard tell her she will have to carry water up all those stairs to wash. But only a jugful. She is used to fetching water by the bucketful several times a day from their well at home. She ignores her reflection in a small spotty mirror near the window cut into the angles of the roof, and wipes dust off the windowpane. The view is of the back of the high stone barn behind the house. She hangs her coat on the nail on the door and carries the jug down into the kitchen to fetch water for a wash.

And after that Annie-Jane says, ‘I’ll show you where everything is and how things are done, so you’ll be ready for the morning.’

Kitty realises Annie-Jane is very proud of the house. It is her life’s work, after all. And she knows full well Kitty will never have seen electric light or taps or a real cooking range. There is even a telephone in the study, though she doesn’t take her in there, just to the door.

‘So people can get them quickly in an emergency. Isn’t that grand?’ says Annie. Back in the kitchen she indicates the area where the sink and the washing things are, saying ‘scullery’ as if it is a foreign word. Kitty has heard it before but Annie-Jane is right. She has never seen a kitchen like this.

She understands the routines well enough. The early rising, the breakfasts just so, the seeing to the chickens are simple. Even the custodianship of the cast-iron cooking range, the scrubbing and wiping, the blacking of every inch, she finds easy, though all she’s ever done at home is swing a pan over the turf fire. But Kitty is a modern girl, a daughter of the twentieth century, and she is eager to take on such newness. She likes this freedom, the release from her crowd of noisy squabbling young siblings and her exhausted, anxious parents,

She and Annie almost have the house to themselves. She hardly sees Father Casey, nor the other priest who lives here. They make plenty of work for her, cooking and tea making and washing, but her anxieties about how to conduct herself in their presence pass. It is Annie-Jane who takes in their meals, and serves at table, and who answers the bell when they ring from the study. It is Annie-Jane who answers the front door and fetches them for visitors. Kitty sees them, in their black suits, in the hallway and sometimes on the stairs, but they do not tax her with conversation, just kindly polite greetings.

‘Are you settling in happily now, Kitty?’ they both ask during the first week.

‘Yes father, thank you father,’ she mumbles, and bobs as a token curtsey. At school when the priest came for the catechism exams they had to curtsey. She thinks it looks silly now. How can she go curtseying on the stairs?

She is too tired to think at night whether she is happy or not. She is certainly busy, which is nearly as good to Kitty. The florin in her hand on the last Friday in September seems a fortune. She’d work as hard at home and get nothing. And she need not spend it. She is given as much food as she’ll ever be hungry enough to eat, and she is never off duty when the shops are open. So she saves it for Christmas. Then she will have six shillings and can buy presents for them all at home; to her surprise she gets her December pay early and with it another shilling as her Box.

‘The fathers are pleased with the way you’ve helped me, Kitty, and so am I.’

So Kitty arrives home on Christmas Eve with silver wrapped bars of chocolate and a handkerchief for her mother, and a jar of marmalade for her father. And returning to the quiet of the priest’s house is not hard. She is not needed at home now they are all growing up, and poor old Annie Jane is so pleased to see her back, almost as if she’d thought she might never return.

‘You don’t find it too quiet here then, Kitty?’ she asks one evening after supper was cleared and Kitty is wiping down the table in the kitchen. ‘It must seem very dull after your busy home.’

‘I like it,’ says Kitty, ‘I don’t mind the peace at all.’

And she doesn’t. She likes the way she is trusted with her work. Sometimes when the soda bread is baking, and the vegetables cleaned for the evening meal, and the laundry drying cleanly across the yard on a proper washing line, not slung wildly across the hawthorns as at home, she feels pride in her ability to do all this, to shoulder so much in the house, to spare poor old Annie the hours at the tub and the range, to create this atmosphere of order and niceness. What would they do without her? The priests haven’t a clue, neither of them could so much as make a cup of tea, and Annie-Jane is almost at the point where she’ll need a stick to get around. Yes, Kitty feels significant and valued.

‘Can we ask more of you, Kitty?’ says Annie one February morning.

‘Of course,’ says Kitty, expecting her to ask her to walk into town or to take a message.

‘Father Casey has bought a car,’ sad Annie with the look of someone imparting great news. ‘And he doesn’t want to drive it himself. He’d be too nervous.’ She pauses.

Kitty waits.

‘And I said maybe you could be taught to drive it? I’m told you were a grand cyclist at home and not frightened of the roads.’

A car. There are only half a dozen in the area. The Doctor has one, and the surveyor in Boyle and one of the big farmers, and the Principal of the college. Of course Kitty will learn to drive it. She can hardly wait.

The car arrives that Friday afternoon, stands in the yard gleaming like a well loved black cat, wheel spokes glimmering, petrol fumes and the leathery smell of the seats perfuming the air round its open windows. The boy from the dealer’s in Sligo stands jangling the keys. Father Casey and Annie Jane wait to one side, too anxious to move closer.

‘A real Irish Ford,’ the lad says. ‘Made in the factory in Cork three years ago. And carefully driven by one owner, a big lawyer in Grange. You’ve made a good choice, Father. Hop in now, and I’ll show you what’s what.’

He opens the driver’s door and pats the driving wheel. Father Casey coughs nervously and does not move.

‘Go on, Father,’ says Annie Jane. He edges in as if it is a dangerous ride at a funfair. The boy leans down and places the black shoes on the clutch and accelerator. He turns the key in the ignition, pushing the priest’s hand to nudge the gear stick into first and release the handbrake. The car shifts towards the gate; Father Casey takes his feet off the pedals; the car stops. The dealer’s lad says he will have to run if he is to catch the train back to Sligo.

‘But you’ve got it, Father. Up into second and then third for going faster. The handbooks is on the back seat, They’ll tell you everything And don’t forget petrol. There’s enough in her for a couple of trips to town.’

He shakes all their hands and is gone.

‘Did you catch that, Kitty?’ says the priest, passing her the handbook. Kitty wriggles into the front seat, and with the priest and Annie in the back, she repeats what she has just watched and they are out the gate and down the lane at five miles an hour with no trouble at all, save a little lurch or two. At the bottom she manages to turn, with only a little bit of trouble with the reverse gear, then takes the car back, triumphant. Laundress, hen-mistress, cook, Kitty can now add chauffeuse to her list of professional skills. She turns off the ignition and holds the key, its little leather tag saying Ford Motors warm in her palm.

Then she gives it to the priest. It is to disappear into the study, maybe into a desk drawer, or onto the mantelpiece, or into a china dish on the window ledge, she can’t know because she has still never been in there; Annie sweeps and dusts it weekly, but otherwise it is a place apart. It is where the Gospels and all the parish papers are, the white paper and envelopes, black ink in a five sided bottle like the one she has seen in the Post Office. It is where they read and study and write. It is where the car key will be kept, not in her little attic space.

For the first two weeks they go for daily drives, she and Father Casey and Annie. Once Kitty has fully mastered third gear and reversing, they venture shyly into Boyle. Not on market day. It is so quiet when they arrive at six a.m. she has the whole vast space of the Crescent to chose to park in. While they walk round the town she worries about whether she pulled on the handbrake firmly enough. When they return the car is where she left it, like a loyal black donkey.

‘Now we can go shopping every week in style,’ says Annie.

The next month Father Casey says he needs to visit his mother. The old lady lives twenty miles away, out near Templehouse. It is a much longer journey than Kitty has driven before. But it is only quiet lanes like the ones she is used to. She has the car filled up with petrol at the pump near the bridge in Boyle. The carts and horses and bikes on the roads don’t panic her. You just have to be very careful. She worries about punctures and changing the tyre, but trusts someone would soon be by and help her.

But she never runs out of petrol nor has a puncture. Nor an accident. Kitty is a natural driver, confident, steady, calm. The trip to Mrs Casey will be fine. At two, after Sunday dinner, they set off. It is a beautiful March day. There are a few primroses in the ditches and lambs playing in the higher fields. Kitty takes the car along at a bold twenty miles an hour, with Father Casey only occasionally coughing in the back. He splutters into his handkerchief. She hopes he doesn’t get one of his nose bleeds which make the laundry so much more hard work. But then she hears his voice muttering over his Breviary. He is saying his Office. All she has to do is watch the road for rabbits and cows and dogs at gates. She is tempted to put her foot down harder but he wouldn’t like it. It is grand, driving: it makes her feel there is nothing she couldn’t do if she put her mind to it.

The last half mile is up a tree-lined grove to a broad shingle yard at the front of a big grey house. Saying he’ll be back soon, the priest disappears into the front porch. Kitty wishes she had brought along the Sligo Champion left in her room. There isn’t much to look at here. No-one around the house. Nothing but a few dull old bushes at the side. Not even a cat on the wall. Nothing. It gets dark. There are lights on now. Maybe they’ll bring her out a cup of tea. Maybe with a biscuit. But they don’t. Gone seven, the door opens and the priest comes out.

He gets into the back. Kitty turns the key and switches on the headlights. It is the first time ever she has driven after dark; cutting through the blackness, the beams catch the shining eyes of foxes and stoats hesitant in the bracken. The priest has fallen asleep in the back. He is not snoring exactly but she can hear his heavy breath over the engine. When they pull into the yard he starts up.

‘Back already, are we, Kitty? That’s grand.’

That summer her younger sister Ellen who is working as a maid on a big farm near home, ups and goes off to England to train as a nurse. Their mother is angry and upset.

‘Why would she do that? Leave home and her own, Kitty?’ asks Annie.

‘Yes,’ says Kitty, ‘but she always wanted to be a nurse.’

Yet Kitty wonders too. London? It is such a long way and England is a heathen country full of thugs and bad women. Still, Ellen’s letters seem happy enough. She is homesick, of course, she says, but she loves the work, even the exams, and as the months pass, her letters talk of dances and cinemas and the shops in Oxford Street, and going to the seaside for the day sometimes with her friends from the nurses’ home. Occasionally she sends Kitty a film star magazine. Kitty saves these up for Sundays, to read while she waits for Father Casey at his mother’s, though she has never been in a cinema nor seen a film, apart from once in a tent in Gurteen.

Then one afternoon Annie asks to talk to her…

‘It’s Father Casey. He’s going into hospital. His chest is bad.’

‘His chest?’

‘His chest is weak. He has to be built up. Looked after. Father Hannon and I have to be tested.’

Kitty knows what this means. Knows what a bad chest really is. Annie is not going to say any more. Kitty remembers the bloodied handkerchiefs and pillowcases she labours so hard to get white, the salt and cold water and the scrubbing. She remembers the coughing in the car. But no-one …no-one at all …is saying a doctor should check her.

That night she writes to Ellen asking her to find her a job in London near her, anything, waitressing, cleaning in the hospital. She can be there soon. She has been saving again for Christmas; it is enough for the fare. She walks into Boyle the next day to post her letter, saying to Annie she will collect the flour and sugar they need. She will tell Annie she is leaving when she gets back. She will not even wait to hear from Ellen. She will go anyway and make her own luck if she has to. She will walk to the train at Kilfree Junction and just buy a ticket to Dublin and then find the boat to Holyhead.

The car stands waiting in the yard, but she wouldn’t know where to find the key.