The Poor Mouth_ A Bad Story About the Hard Life - Flann O'Brien [0]
GRAHAM GREENE
whose own forms of gloom I admire, this misterpiece
All the persons in this book are real and none is fictitious even in part
Tout le trouble du monde vient de ce qu’ on ne sait pas rester seul dans sa chambre—PASCAL
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Copyright
1
IT is not that I half knew my mother. I knew half of her: the lower half—her lap, legs, feet, her hands and wrists as she bent forward. Very, dimly I seem to remember her voice. At the time, of course, I was very young. Then one day she did not seem to be there any more. So far as I knew she had gone away without a word, no good-bye or good night. A while afterwards I asked my brother, five years my senior, where the mammy was.
–She is gone to a better land, he said.
–Will she be back?
–I don’t think so.
–Mean to say we’ll never see her again?
–I do think we will. She is staying with the old man.
At the time I found all this very vague and unsatisfying. I had never met my father at all but in due time I was to see and study a faded brown photograph—a stern upright figure wearing great moustaches and attired in a uniform with a large peaked cap. I could never make out what the uniform stood for. He might have been a field-marshal or an admiral, or just an orderly officer in the fire brigade; indeed, he might have been a postman.
My memory is a bit mixed about what exactly happened after the mammy went away but a streel of a girl with long lank fair hair arrived to look after myself and the brother. She did not talk very much and seemed to be in a permanent bad temper. We knew her as Miss Annie. At least that is what she ordered us to call her. She spent a lot of time washing and cooking, specializing in boxty and kalecannon and eternally making mince balls covered with a greasy paste. I got to hate those things.
–If we’re ever sent to jail, the brother said one night in bed, we’ll be well used to it before we go in. Did you ever see the like of the dinner we’re getting? I would say that woman Annie is a bit batty.
–If you mean the mince balls, I said, I think they’re all right—if we didn’t see so many of them, so often.
–I’m certain they’re very bad for us.
–Well, that paste stuff is too thick.
–How well the mammy thought nothing of a bit of ham boiled with cabbage once a week. Remember that?
–I don’t. I hadn’t any teeth at that time. What’s ham?
–Ham? Great stuff, man. It’s a class of a red meat that comes from the county Limerick.
That’s merely my recollection of the silly sort of conversation we had. Probably it is all wrong.
How long this situation—a sort of interregum, lacuna or hiatus—lasted I cannot say, but I do remember that when myself and the brother noticed that Miss Annie was washing more savagely, mangling and ironing almost with ferocity, and packing, we knew something was afoot. And we were not mistaken.
One morning after breakfast (stirabout and tea with bread and jam) a cab arrived and out of it came a very strange elderly lady on a stick. I saw her first through the window. Her hair peeping from under her hat was grey, her face very red, and she walked slowly as if her sight was bad. Miss Annie let her in, first telling us that here was Mrs Crotty and to be good. She stood in silence for a moment in the kitchen, staring rather blankly about her.
–These are the two rascals, Mrs Crotty, Miss Annie said.
–And very well they’re looking, God bless them, Mrs Crotty said in a high voice. Do they do everything they’re told?
–Oh, I suppose they do, but sometimes it’s a job to make them take their milk.
–Well, faith now, Mrs Crotty said in a shocked tone, did you ever hear of such nonsense? When I was their age I could never get enough milk. Never. I could drink jugs of it. Buttermilk too. Nothing in the wide world is better for the