Prologue to A Hyphenated Childhood

By Ralph Cusack

When, at nightfall, my mother and I were walking home up the avenue of closely planted beech trees, whose topmost branches forever swayed in the slight but continual shore breeze from the not-far-distant sea, we would stop, our motionless feet creating a special silence, in contrast to their previous abrasive scraping on the untarred macadam of the road, and she would say: ‘There! Do you hear them? There it is again . . . Don’t you hear them?’

And I would have to admit that I did not; that I heard nothing but the silence, or, if I held my breath, the murmur of my own blood.

‘You must be deaf,’ she would say, repeating herself ad nauseam. ‘There! There! It’s perfectly clear. Why can’t you hear them? They’re everywhere.’

‘I suppose that my hearing is not capable of tuning in’ (a phrase I had recently acquired from the then current wireless mania) ‘to such high-pitched registers,’ I would reply rather grandly.

‘Only some people can.’

‘Only some people can what?’

‘Hear them.’

‘Not at all.’

We would continue standing there for a moment or two, the silence solidly weighing on me but evidently, increasingly filled with significance for my mother, ears cocked like Buffles’, our rat -tailed retriever’s, turning this way, then that, in the dark. Eventually, we would walk on. My feet, tired from playing too much tig (with her bridge partner’s children), the only meagre antidote available to my mother’s afternoon social auction-bridge, traipsed wearily on the badly rollered stones of the drive until we came to the opengravelled space before the house, above which an almost full moon sailed, free of all boughs, in the darkening, hushed sky. ‘Look at him this evening,’ my mother would say. ‘He’s got a very cross face with his mouth all puckered up like that, hasn’t he? I never saw him so angry-looking. I dare say we shall have rain. Just look at that cast in his eye!’

‘I’m very sorry,’ I would reply for the umpteenth time, ‘but I cannot see him at all.’

‘What? Are you blind as well as deaf? Have you no imagination? He’s as plain as your own face in his own light this moment. Plainer. I never knew such a child!’

‘I’m sorry,’ I would mutter, and we would go in then, the warm lamplight mercifully replacing the reflected luminescence of this ambiguous lady whose apparent disc concealed, conceals so it seems, a man; a month, a week or a day or so later we would have these infecund dialogues all over again.

And twenty or thirty or forty years later in different places, these conversations would be repeated. Later again, it is the same story: Nancy and my children say to me often when the great full-bodied southern moon staggers out of the sea, and pipistrelles and fruit bats flit across its goldened face:

‘Don’t you hear them, Ralph?’

“Do you hear them, Daddy?’

‘Do you see the way he’s leaning back looking pleased with himself, as if he was expecting a good vintage?’

‘Look at his funny eye.’

Consequently, imitating my own mother, imitating all our mothers and fathers backwards in time from this minute to the Zinjanthropus and beyond, it is I, now, who wants to inform you about what I assume I have recorded with my eyes through my mind; what I maintain I have seen, what—I like fondly to think—my senses have coordinated, my memory stored in its variously distorting, correcting, precise, nebulous, monochrome or multi-coloured pigeonholes.

Because, in view of my refusal to adopt others’ senses as my own, I may possibly have apprehended something different or validly new, or at the very least have seen the same old things from a different angle. If for no other reason than because I am another, separate creature; more or less observant, distorted—or plainvisioned—biased or objective, but, in any case, another.

Because, like all of us, isolated within, I want, at times most urgently, often desperately, to communicate, stretching out the hand of my mind, of myself, to keep in touch with those beside me; crying out loudly to those gone before, warning those behind; because, perhaps, apart from this desire to escape from isolation and its insane companion—fallacious and imagined uniqueness— like many people and all artists I am an exhibitionist, wishing to show myself, even show myself off, declaring my hand, such as it is. And also because I am filled with the shared mortal urge to try and hand on some tiny fraction of what I imagine, of what we all imagine, we have experienced, learned or lost.

If even the smallest trickle of endured experience can percolate from my locked personal solitude, if even the tiniest contact is made and kept, then the whole intricate torturing game is worth the sputtering candle. If not, then no. The answer must be no. For the future is a long time. Etruscans lived and died not so very long ago.

I shall begin well before the beginning. And end after the end. That is how it should be. And most of it will be lies, fabrications, inexactitudes, approximations, near misses, botched hits. Not that I wish it to be so.

On the contrary, it is my sworn and strict intention to set everything down precisely as it happened. But do you for one instant imagine that such a task is possible? You have only to listen to the witnesses of the simplest street accident. Although, and even if, they have nothing to gain or lose by recounting facts seen with their own eyes a short while before, they cannot even agree about whether or not the vehicle, of its nature, was mobile. It makes not a whit of difference.

Consequently, you should know that all I may set down is potentially untrue; while at the same time it is the strict truth as I experienced it, or felt it, or thought I felt it, or knew it in my heart, or was told. Thus—exactly thus—it shall be.

Ralph Cusack (1912-1965) was born in Dublin. As a young boy he studied under Evelyn Waugh. He trained as a painter and in 1943 he was a founder member of the committee of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. He settled in the south of France to grow flowers for the manufacture of perfume.  Cadenza, originally published in 1958 and published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1984, was his first and only novel.