The Way We Were

I hope Mary Kenny will not mind if I mention that she is ten years older than me within a day. 

More interestingly, she is just one week older than my sister. Mary was expelled from her convent school in Dublin. I’m not sure if Angela was expelled from Hillcourt but I hope so. Angela worked briefly at Asprey in Bond Street. A natural blonde but not a natural shop girl she was deployed to water the first floor window boxes, a task considered within her capability. She was distracted by someone chatting to her, took her eye off the watering can and started to water customers entering the shop. She was a secretary to celebrity, Australian, zither player and singer, Shirley Abicair. If you can play the zither you can type and Shirley was a better typist than Angela so they too parted ways. Meanwhile Mary was faring no better: “a giggling waitress and a terrible secretary in Ireland”. They both decided on pastures new and went to Paris as au pairs.

Angela went to work for the de Vogüés, introduced to them by Miss Byrne who had been governess to three generations of the family before retiring to Castlebellingham. If I may digress, Miss Byrne set up a small school for children of the Co Louth gentry which I attended before moving on to Castle Park. She had sent other girls to Paris and they always came home sharpish. Their charge, Guillaume, had attitude and made life difficult for them. Angela’s bedroom had bars on the window to stop Guillaume chucking her suitcase out. However, Angela was used to dealing with me and had him under control in no time. She spent a year with the family taking Guillaume to school and then learning French and doing a cookery course. At weekends they went to the chateau. A couple of years ago she was in Paris and Guillaume asked her and my niece to dinner. She said they started talking as if almost seventy years had not elapsed.

Meanwhile Mary’s education was broadened. She didn’t last long as au pair for Madame Chevalier, perhaps because there were seven children and she had a tendency to treat her like a domestic servant. She found other employment; “an elderly lady who was looking for a part-time au-pair and companion – mornings only, but accommodation and meals provided, besides the usual modest remuneration”. She was instructed in matters neglected by the Dublin convent; how to comport oneself in society. She was taught the proper etiquette when a wife encounters her husband’s mistress in public and such insightful aphorisms as “ the chains of marriage are so onerous that it may take three to carry them”.

Her stay in Paris launched her career as a journalist, tentatively she says, sending articles to the Dublin Evening Press receiving three guineas for each one published. She is still a prolific writer and her latest book is The Way We Were: Centenary Essays on  Catholic Ireland. I have ordered a copy and if you want to know how a wife greets her husband’s mistress you will have to read her book.