Cormac MacConnell: Sweet spring flowers remind me of Ruby
The base of the trunk of the old gnarled apple tree was girdled and cuddled about by snowdrops. Pure white, tightly clustered together for comfort, their small heads as innocent as an infant’s dream.
As I watched, a spare thin shaft of February sunshine touched them. Beautiful. And I thought of Ruby Waterson.
When I was a child up north, living in a divided and complex society that was not all bad by any means, and sometimes brightly warm and good, there seemed to be a reality that it was only young Catholic girls who Got Into Trouble and Had To Go To England, or settle for a hurried shotgun wedding at the side altar on a Wednesday night.
Different times. And the young Protestant girls never seemed to get pregnant at all before marriage.
The Catholic mothers and fathers would mutter that Protestants had no trouble buying Durex at the chemists’ shops, something forbidden to Catholics on pain of mortal sin, and that was the reason for the imbalance.
Anyway, it was a reality. Except for Ruby Waterson. Ruby Waterson was the only daughter of a Protestant family that came back to the father’s home place from London. He was some kind of engineer in the textiles factory in town. The mother was English and almost invisible.
Ruby Waterson was a tall dark girl with brown eyes. I was only ten, but I already knew she was beautiful. Boys are like that early.
The family settled in quickly enough, but the problem was that the father had been away too long, and had forgotten the rules that mattered. He shopped in our Catholic shop when that was against the rules.
He drank pints in the pub on Saturday nights with Protestant and Catholic alike. That was against the rules too.
And he went to Gaelic football matches, and that was totally against the rules.
And that meant that the family were in a unique limbo, in our strange, narrow world of a thousand compromises.
And Ruby Waterson, a city-bred girl of 17, broke the biggest rule of all.
She started secretly going out with a Catholic boy, in a townland in which there were really no secrets. It would have been known inside the first month.
Let’s call him Terry Murphy, because he’d be alive still. He knew all the rules, but he was wild and free, and cared about no rules of any kind.
He was 20 and had a red motorbike at the time, and the pick of all the Catholic girls in the parish. But he went out with Ruby Waterson, just, I suppose, for the hell of it.
Even at ten, I knew about it from listening to the fireside chats and whispers. It would end awful bad, the people said.
It did too, and very soon too. Ruby Waterson got pregnant. She kept going to school on the bus, even when it was obvious.
The seat beside her would be vacant every morning. A shotgun marriage was not an option here, because of the gaping religious divide.
Wild Terry, anyway, having had his fun, and knowing all the rules, fled to England, and was not seen back in Ireland again for 20 years.
The Catholic parishioners were ashamed of his behaviour. Had he stayed around the Protestants would have expressed their anger physically.
Cecil Waterson never came to our shop again, he began to observe the rules when it was too late. Ruby Waterson, about eight months gone, went down to the river, and threw herself in at a spot called The Crockeen. They found her two days later, far down river.
Her mother planted a small garden of flowers on the edge of The Crockeen. She planted perennials that flame every summer. And she planted a big bed of snowdrops, right to the edge of the pool.
They would be blooming now, like mine, innocent as an infant’s dream, all cuddled up together.
