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From: "Jean R." <>
Subject: [TRANSCRIPTIONS-EIRE] Childhood Memoirs,Protestant Anglo-Irish Daily Life -- Elizabeth BOWEN (1899-1973)
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:07:11 -0700

SNIPPET: Elizabeth BOWEN (1899-1973), celebrated writer, was born in Dublin,
but spent most of her life in England. After inheriting the family home,
Bowen's Court, in Co. Cork, she lived there part of each year. This memoir
of her comfortable childhood winters in Dublin presents a matter-of-fact
picture of the Protestant Anglo-Irish daily life. "On Sundays we went to
St. Stephen's, our parish church, a few minutes' walk along the canal. St.
Stephen's Georgian facade, with its pillars and steps, crowns the Upper
Mount Street perspective, and looks down it into the airy distance of
Merrion Square. To the ascending sound of bells we went up the steps -- my
mother with a fine-meshed veil drawn over her features, my father already
removing his top-hat, I in my white coat. The Sunday had opened with
mysterious movements about the staircase at Herbert Place -- my mother's and
father's departure to 'early church.'

About this Matins I went to there was no mystery. I could be aware that this
was only an outer court. None the less, I must not talk or look behind me or
fidget, and I must attempt to think about God. The church, heart of and key
to this Protestant quarter, was now, at midmorning, packed: crosswise above
the pews allotted to each worshipping family ran galleries, but always
unmistakably Sunday light, and gas burned where day did not penetrate far
enough. The interior, with its clear sombreness, sane proportions, polished
woodwork and brasswork and aisles upon which confident feet rang, had
authority -- here one could feel a Presence, were it only the presence of an
idea. It emphasized what was at once august and rational in man's relations
with God. Nowhere was there any intensity of darkness, nowhere the point of
a small flame. There was an honourable frankness in the tone in which we
rolled out the General Confession -- indeed, sin was most felt by me, in St.
Stephen's, as any divagation from the social idea. There was an ample
confidence in the singing, borne up by the organ's controlled swell.

Bookless, (because I could not read) I mouthed my way through the verses of
hymns I knew. Standing packed among the towering bodies, I enjoyed the
feeling that something was going on. During prayers I kneeled balanced on
two hassocks, and secretly bit, like a puppy, sharpening its teeth, into the
waxed prayer-book ledge of our pew. Though my inner ear was already quick
and suspicious, I detected, in the course of that morning service, no
hypocritical or untrue note. If I did nothing more I conformed. I only did
not care for the Psalms, which struck me as savage, discordant,
complaining -- or sometimes, boastful. They outraged all the manners I had
been taught, and I did not care for this chanted airing of troubles.

My mother attended St. Stephen's out of respect for my father's feeling that
one should not depart from one's parish church. He mistrusted, in religion
as in other matters, behavior that was at all erratic or moody; he had a
philosophic feeling for observance and form. But she liked St. Bartholomew's
better because it was 'higher,' and once or twice in the course of every
winter she would escape and take me there. Archbishop TRENCH and his
daughters were her cousins; the happiest days of her girlhood had been spent
at the Palace, and for the rest of her days she remained High Church. She
spoke of 'Prods' (or, extreme, unctuous Protestants) with a flighty
detachment that might have offended many. I was taught to say 'Church of
Ireland,' not 'Protestant,' and 'Roman Catholic,' not simply 'Catholic.' It
was not until after the end of those seven winters that I understood that we
Protestants were a minority, and that the unquestioned rules of our being
came, in fact, from the closeness of a minority world. Roman Catholics were
spoken of by my father and mother with courteous detachment that gave them,
even, no myth. I took the existence of Roman Catholics for granted but met
few and was not interested in them. They were, simply 'the others,' whose
world lay alongside ours but we never touched. As to the difference between
the two religions, I was too discreet to ask questions -- if I wanted to
know. This appeared to share a delicate awkward aura with those two other
differences -- of sex, of class. So quickly, in a child's mind does prudery
seed itself and make growth that I remember, even, an almost sexual shyness
on the subject of Roman Catholics. I walked with hurried step and averted
cheek past porticos of churches that were 'not ours,' uncomfortably
registering in my nostrils the pungent, unlikely smell that came round
curtains, through swinging doors. On Sundays, the sounds of the bells of all
kinds of churches rolled in a sort of unison round the Dublin sky, and the
currents of people quitting their homes to worship seemed to be made alike
by one human habit, such as of going to dinner. But on weekdays the 'other'
bells, with their (to my ear) alien, searching insistence had the sky and
the Dublin echoes all to themselves. This predisposition to frequent prayer
bespoke, to me some incontinence of the soul..."

-- Excerpts, Elizabeth Bowen, 'Sundays,' from "Seven Winters: Memories Of A
Dublin Childhood." Of note, a fine 20th-century oil on canvas portrait of
Elizabeth BOWEN at Bowenscourt by Patrick HENNESSY can be seen at CRAWFORD
Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland.

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