Russian dolls – stories within stories, women within women

Woodcut by Maggie Drury

I’ve always been fascinated by Russian dolls, ever since I saw a set on a high shelf in the kitchen of a friend’s house as a child. I never plucked up the courage to ask to play with them; I don’t know why. I had known Karan since we were babies, tucked either end of one pram as our mother’s went shopping together, and I spent hours and days with her as we grew up. Being one of only two children, Karan had more than I did, as one of five – more things to play with and, it has to be said, more love from her parents.

The Russian dolls on the shelf sparked a story that I wrote many years ago. It ended up in my collection, As Long as it Takes, which was published ten years ago this month. The story is called ‘Gillian’s dolls’, and concerns Sharon, a girl from a large family, being jealous of her friend Gillian’s Russian dolls. Gillian is an only child. Gillian and her parents are not a bit like Karan and her family, though Sharon and her family are a bit like mine. Sharon plays with Gillian’s dolls without permission, untwisting each one and lining them up in height order. She is caught by Gillian’s father, failing to put the dolls back together when she hears his key in the lock. She clumsily tries to hide them in her schoolbag. Having witnessed a scene between Gillian’s parents, Sharon drops her bag, and the dolls tumble onto the floor. Gillian’s father blackmails Sharon into keeping quiet; he won’t tell her parents about ‘stealing’ the Russian dolls if she doesn’t tell them what she has seen. It’s not until she is home that she realises that the smallest doll, the baby, is still in her bag.

‘Gillian’s dolls’ was one of the first stories I wrote with the cast of characters that came to inhabit As Long as it TakesFurther stories emerged for each character at different stages in their lives: a younger Sharon in ‘A Tea Party’; a teen Sharon in ‘Saturday Girl’; her sisters Janice and Maggie as adults in ‘Here’s Looking at You’ and ‘Self Help’. Pauline Masurel reviewed the collection for The Short Review:

As Long as it Takes is a bit like a nest of Russian dolls, with one woman packed inside another woman, each helping to contain or release the other.

I’ve been working with Russian dolls as part of my therapy – looking at how the people we were at different stages in our lives are triggered in certain situations. I am learning to contain the scared child, the fearful teen, within the casing of the adult me. And, in a way, that’s what I do with my writing – with fiction, non-fiction and poetry. It feels never ending – the work I need to do on myself, the therapy, the writing. Ten years on from publication of the story collection, I am still unpacking the Russian dolls, lining them up, putting them in height order, tucking them one inside the other, discovering new things. I am mostly writing non-fiction these days, trying to unpack the past in order to contain it within the adult me, the adult Russian doll, so it doesn’t hold so much power. There is fear as I do this; not so much when I write, but when I think of releasing the work into the public domain. Having completed the umpteenth draft of a piece I have been writing and expanding on for seventeen years, in different forms and at different times, I gave it to my husband to read. The fear of just showing it to one reader, the defensiveness with which I greeted his notes, I was that scared teen again, worried about telling tales outside of the family.

As I get older, and contemplate my remaining years, my legacy, it feels like time to unpack the Russian dolls and set them out in a public place, to work towards publication.The piece I have been working on for seventeen years has, in several iterations, been called ‘Learning to be English‘. It was the title of the column I wrote and broadcast for the BBC Radio 4 programme Home Truths in 2006; it was the title of my first self-published pamphlet; it was a piece for an anthology of second-generation Irish writers, which didn’t make it to publication; it is now the opening chapter of planned book, having grown from about 1,000 words in 2006 to 12,000 in 2024.  If I don’t publish this work soon, I’ll still be writing the same thing on my death bed, an old and wizened Russian doll, too stiff to open up and reveal the dolls within me.

If you wish to buy a copy of As Long as it Takes please contact me via the email address on this page. If you wish to buy a secondhand copy, please do so via Wob, which pays royalties to authors on sales of pre-owned books.

See more of Maggie Drury’s artwork on Instagram: @maggie_drury9 

On noise and silence

I lost my voice for a few days recently. I found it frustrating, not being able to express myself freely, not being heard, resorting to writing notes to be understood. Growing up in a large family, I learned to talk loudly, but that some things must not be spoken about at all, either inside or outside the home. There were elephants all over the house, not just in one room, but they must be ignored, drowned out by noise.

My mother could not bear the thoughts in her head, so she masked them with radio and television, all day long. The radio in the kitchen always seemed slightly off station and too loud, the companion to cooking and cleaning. The television was on from lunchtime onwards – Pebble Mill at One, Crown Court, Good Afternoon with Mavis Nicholson. I watched them, too, when I came home for lunch, watched them with Mum, or on my own if she was out. The radio was on again when Mum prepared the dinner, then back to the screen: Crossroads, Emmerdale Farm, Coronation Street, right through to end of programmes, in the days before twenty-four hour TV. Mum would fall asleep to whatever she was watching, but if one of her children dared to switch channel, she would suddenly wake. ‘I was watching, that,’ she’d say. ‘Turn it back,’ as she was in charge of our viewing, declaring any programme she didn’t like: ‘Rubbish,’ or ‘Pure rubbish.’

I, too, used to have noise wherever I was, radios throughout the house switched on whenever I entered the room, even if for a few minutes. Perhaps I wanted to drown out my thoughts, too. Having grown up with doing homework in the corner of a room where television was blaring, people talking or arguing, I had to get used to it. There was no private space, no study space, in a small house with seven people living in it. No silence. I was reminded of this when I was sent a photo of the doorstep of my late brother’s house, after someone kindly laid flowers on my behalf on the anniversary of his death. The steps and the two low walls that flank it have been painted black, but the once-glossy red of the bricks was showing through; the colour of those steps when I lived in that house from the age of four to when I left home, a week after my nineteenth birthday.

I took my O-Levels in the hot summer of 1976, and spent many hours revising on those front steps, early in the day. Dad would get up early for work, and put the radio on as he made his sandwiches and drank his tea. The radio was loud, but it didn’t wake anyone but me. I would lie in bed until I heard Uncle Bill’s van pull up outside and the front door close as Dad left. Then up with my books to sit on the front doorstep in the relative cool of the morning, the house quiet, making notes on notes, condensing my learning into one paragraph that would trigger an entire essay in the exams. It was the only time I spent in silence while I lived in that house.

This month marks sixty years since my family of birth moved into that house, and it is just over a year since the last McCarthy to live in it left this world. The house has been silent for a year, just the ghosts of all of us humans that lived in it pass through; the spirits of the dogs, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, white mice, hamsters and goldfish, too. Scenes and memories pass through my head unbidden. The last time I visited, it was all too much to bear. I said I would not go again, and handed back the keys; the only time I had ever held keys to that house. There was no need when I was young, when there was always someone home, when the back door was left unlocked. I now find I want to visit again, to sit on those steps, to remember some of the good times as well as the bad, to bring things to a close, but my requests are met with silence, as if I have no place, having left, having broken silence on some things that others would rather remain unspoken.

I can no longer cope with noise all the time. I cannot read and listen to the radio, I cannot write while the television is on, I cannot concentrate when there are voices around me. Silence is my friend these days, even though it lets the thoughts in that I would rather not entertain.

Learning (to be) Irish

It began with a poem I read, headed with an epigraph saying that there are only eighteen letters in the Irish alphabet. As a second-generation Irish woman, how had I reached the age of sixty-two without knowing this? Some Irish was spoken at home by my parents, the odd word or phrase, but apart from knowing that bainne is milk, I questioned none of it. ‘Oscail an doras,’ my dad would say. I have only recently learned that this means ‘Open the door’. There are other phrases that I recall phonetically, but have no idea how they are spelt, so their meaning remains hidden for now.

I started learning Gaeilge on Duolingo about three months ago.  Duolingo offers no grammar, only words and phrases that you learn by trial and error, so I supplemented my learning with a book, Learning Irish by Micheal O’Siadhail. I have tried translating the phrases at the end of the first chapter of the book three times, and have got no more than half of them right. Irish is a tough language to master. There are no words for yes and no, rather the verb in the question is repeated in the answer, in the affirmative or negative form. There is lenition to come to terms with – an aspect of Irish grammar that adds an h to the beginning of some words that come after certain other words, and change the pronunciation. There is eclipsis, too. I could try to explain, but as the experts sometimes do so by stating ‘see sentences in this chapter’, I am not sure that I could. 

Maria at the Cliffs of Moher in the 1990s

What I am coming to realise is that the Irish speak English in a way that’s influenced by Gaeilge. An Irish friend uses the phrase ‘Giving out’ to mean what I would call ‘Going into one’, or more precisely telling off, scolding, or complaining. This is a direct translation, so ‘Tá sí ag tabhairt amach’ means ‘She is giving out’.

I am sure that Irish turns of phrase have influenced me as a speaker and a writer, in spite of my years of denying I was Irish. I wrote about this in my first self-published pamphlet of prose and poetry, Learning to be English, and it was the subject of my first professional writing gig, as a columnist for BBC Radio 4’s Home Truths. This outlined how I went from being one of many Irish children at my Catholic primary school in Surrey, to being one of a few at grammar school. This was the time of IRA bombings on mainland Britain, and as we lived just a few miles from Guildford, the pub bombings by the IRA in 1974 were all too close. In fact, many years later, my brother told me that he usually drank in one of the pubs that was bombed when he was on day release at Guildford Technical College. The only reason he wasn’t in the pub that day and at that time was that he had flu. What I remember is my Physics teacher saying to me, in front of the class, ‘I see your lot have been at it again.’ I told no one at home what she had said, just silently decided that it was safer in that school to pretend that I wasn’t Irish, and become an English girl. Hence the title of my pamphlet, and of the piece that was broadcast on Home Truths: Learning to be English.

In common with many second-generation Irish people, I feel I have a dual identity, not quite one thing or the other. Neither fully English, nor fully Irish. Since I began to reclaim my Irish identity, in my thirties, I have been learning to be Irish, reversing the process of learning to be English that I went through in my teens. Like learning Gaeilge, it’s something that I may never master, that I shall carry on learning throughout my life.

My collection of short stories about Irish women living in England and their daughters is available here: As Long as It Takes.

All Aboard for Morningtown for the last of the aunties

‘Auntie’ was the honorary title reserved for the closest friends of the family. Children in the 1960s were never allowed to call adults by their first names. Neighbours were Mrs Hubbard, Mrs McLoughlin, Mrs Sullivan, and so on – except for Auntie Joan and Auntie Pam, close friends to my parents, and with children that we played with all the time. It truly was a time when back doors were left unlocked; front doors, too, in warm weather. They were left wide open, so that aunties would just walk in without announcement, the first sign of their visits being a head and shoulders passing the front or back window on their way to the front or back door.

The woman gathered in the kitchen for coffee, Maxwell House or Mellow Birds, which my mother preferred. And I would sit on a stool in the corner, trying to be invisible, so I could listen to their talk and try to make sense of it all. What was a ‘prolapse’? What did ‘paying the milkman in kind’ mean? I would puzzle over these things, sometimes making up my own interpretation of the stories told. Eventually my mother would notice that I was there. ‘Little ears are flapping,’ she would say, and send me out to play.

I learned so much in that kitchen, and gathered material for stories and poems I would write thirty, forty and fifty years on. That time, those women, continue to haunt my writing.

Auntie Joan died a couple of years ago, and now Auntie Pam has gone, too. When I learned of Auntie Pam’s death, her daughter asked me and my siblings for any memories that could be retold at the funeral. Looking back through my notebooks and published work, Pam and her husband Uncle Dave featured strongly. In one story a thinly disguised Auntie Pam cuddles a young child whose dog has just been run over by a car, just as Auntie Pam did to me the day our dog died when I was 10 years old. I have a strong memory of my face being held to her bosom, and of the scent she wore. I can remember the colour of her lipstick and, on happier days than that one, her loud, uninhibited laugh.

Click on the image to hear Morningtown Ride by The Seekers

In ‘Rock On’, a performance piece that I debuted at the Confluence Sessions in Rochester, one of Pam and Dave’s parties is described. Pam was showing off the new radiogram and and TV that Dave had won on the TV game show, Take Your Pick. The audience would shout out ‘Open the box!’ or ‘Take the Money!’ to the contestants, and Uncle Dave had opened the box to find he’d won a big prize. The music played on the radiogram on the night of the party ranged from ‘Morningtown Ride’ by The Seekers to The Rolling Stones. It may have been from another party, another year, but I recall Pam in a long, halter neck dress with a drink in her hand, swaying to Demis Roussos, for all the world like Beverley in the Mike Leigh play Abigail’s Party.

Auntie Pam is the last of my childhood ‘aunties’ to go. I don’t have a picture of her, except those that I hold in my memory. Of her dancing at the Irish dances at Surbiton Assembly Rooms. Of her holding up my baby daughter with delight, the first time I brought her ‘home’ to Epsom. Of her showing off the radiogram at her party, singing along to ‘Morningtown Ride.’