SCENTS RECALL.
For me expensive perfume always brings to mind Christmas in summer, coffin ships, and emigration. It’s not that I have ever sailed in a coffin ship, nor even, apart from a move some years ago from England to Ireland, that I have any great personal experience of what it means to be an emigrant; but Miss Shanahan wore expensive perfume and she broke my young heart when she emigrated to the land of ‘Christmas’s in summer.’
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself so let me start at the beginning, when I was eight years old and went into her class at St. Francis Primary school in Ashleigh. It was a mixed class of boys and girls and although the girls were delighted to have a woman teacher, especially one as young and darkly glamorous as Miss Shanahan, we boys were getting to an age when we wanted a man teaching us. After all we reasoned what could any woman know about football?
But that was an initial judgement on our part. In fact Miss Shanahan had abilities and talents which more than made up for her lack of sporting knowledge. Not only was she beautiful and elegantly dressed, and constantly surrounded by a cloud of expensive perfume, but she had a love of, and facility with words which fired our imaginations. In her soft Irish brogue she could paint word pictures so vivid and real that even the most cynical among us were irresistibly drawn into an imaginary world redolent with colour and excitement, and far beyond anything we could hope to experience in the reality of our whitewashed classroom, or the rows of terraced houses beyond its high windows She was unlike anything we had experienced before and in no time at all every boy in the class was totally smitten with Miss Shanahan… including me.
She told us that she grew up in Cork, a city in southern Ireland, and described the many Atlantic liners that passed her bedroom window when she was a girl, and breasted their way through the green waters of the great ocean that lay beyond. We could almost smell the salty air, and taste the spray on our faces. Then, with tears in her eyes she would relate stories of the dreadful ‘coffin ships’ that so many years earlier had borne their cargoes of human misery and despair away from the familiar comforts of their homeland, epitomised by what she called ‘ the sound of Shandons bells’ to a new, and more challenging life in a distant land called America.
“Some of them died on the voyage” she whispered sadly and then, tugging at the silk scarf she always wore around her neck, she added with pride throbbing in her voice “ But many more of them survived to build themselves a new life in that great and wonderful land.”
Then she would tell us stories about how they lived and worked in the great city of New York, a melting pot for so many races; how they built the Brooklyn Bridge, and how they became policemen and firemen to fight the gangsters and the fires.
“Did they meet Red Indians?” we asked excitedly.
Like all eight year olds in the 40’s brought up on a diet of Saturday matinees we fondly believed that Indians resplendent in feathered headdresses, war paint, and mounted on piebald horses surrounded even Ellis Island itself and would, given half a chance, scalp some immigrants before they even properly landed in America!
Miss Shanahan simply nodded and accepted our idiosyncratic sense of North American geography without correction. “ Later…. Well yes later some of them did meet Red Indians.” She told us how they moved west onto the Great Plains, their struggles to settle the land and build the towns and cities which are still there today, and added “ We know there were Irishmen with General Custer at the Little Big Horn.”
Thus released from formal limitations, and nourished by her extraordinary visual imagery, our own imaginations were let free to fly unfettered wherever they would.
In my case it was Miss Shanahan who, in those first few weeks, inspired me to write my first great novel! It filled all of sixteen pages of a penny copy book and it depicted in lurid detail the destruction of a north country Atlantis buried not deep beneath the sea, but under the barren Yorkshire Moors. She had asked us to write a story in a setting we had actually visited and, although I had never been to the ocean I had, on one occasion, visited an aunt of mine who lived in North Yorkshire.
I presented Miss Shanahan with my completed, and rather crumpled manuscript, at the end of school one Friday afternoon, and could hardly believe my ears when she announced that she would take it home with her and read it over the weekend. I felt it would be a bond between us, a bridge spanning the miles that would separate us for the next two days.
On the following Monday morning she called me to her desk and enveloped me in a cloud of her perfume. “That story you wrote was absolutely excellent” she informed me. “You have a very special gift. You must make sure you always use it. Now, if you don’t mind I would like to hold on to it for a while, keep it here in my desk so that I can read it again and again. May I do that? Will you let me hold onto it for a while.”
Would I let he? In that moment I would have agreed to anything she asked. I was so smitten all I could do was gulp, nod my head, and blush with pleasure.
Of course I was not the only one in live with Miss Shanahan. Everybody knew that Mr. Thomas the head teacher was in love with her also. You only had to watch the amount of time her spent in our classroom as opposed to any other in the school to realise that. And judging by the amount of additional colour in her cheeks, and the glow in her eyes whenever he was there, it was clear that she was not indifferent towards him either.
Each evening they walked together to Ashleigh Bus station and caught the same bus home. The girls in our class would sometimes giggle and speculate whether Miss Shanahan and Mr. Thomas had ever actually kissed one another, and when they would marry. Listening to such talk invariably made me feel a little uncomfortable and rather angry.
Then towards the end of the summer term Mr. Thomas did get married…. but not to Miss Shanahan, to someone else! Although Miss Shanahan continued to dress elegantly, and wear expensive perfume, it seemed to everyone that some of the colour and sparkle disappeared.
The girls, of course, who claimed to know more about these things than boys did suggested that she was suffering from a broken hear and would, in all probability, waste away and die of it like some tragic film heroine. Along with the other boys I could only wait for this inevitable end with silent dread.
One afternoon I went back into the classroom to collect a library book from my desk and found her sitting at her own desk staring into space with tears in her eys. At frist she seemed startled by my sudden appearance but then, as if recalling herself from sad reflections to practical realities she reached down into the drawer beside her and held out the still crumpled exercise book.
“I’m clearing out some of my things,” she said. “ Perhaps you had better take this back now.”
I stood there as mute and stunned as I had been when she first asked if she could hold onto it for a while. I wondered if I had done something wrong, offended her in some way but, reading my thoughts, she explained, “You see I’m leaving St. Francis’s at the end of this term. I’m going to teach in another country.”
“Are you going to America?” some of us asked when she told then rest of the class later, but she shook her head and sighed as deeply and sadly as she had when telling us about the coffin ships.
“ No…..no. I’m going much further than that. In fact I’m going to a country we call Australia. It’s a place we haven’t talked about very much but it is on the other side of the world.”
Somehow we sensed that this was one of its great attractions for her. Then, as if wishing to emphasise how different she wanted her life to become, she added, “ It’s a land where they celebrate Christmas in the middle of summer!”
THE END.
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