In 1984, when my husband Dermot and I were first married we bought a little terraced house in Walthamstow near the Bakers’ Arms, then very cheap, now very trendy. Our phone number was only one digit away from Percy Ingles, the local bakery, and that first Christmas we got a slew of phone calls from people wanting to order a Christmas cake.
“Well,” we’d answer jovially, “we’ve never made one before but we’ll give it a go!”
We thought we were hilarious.
Soon after we moved in I gave birth to the first of our two sons. The neighbour to the left made him a hand-turned wooden rattle with the words Life Love and Happiness inscribed in poker-work. The neighbours to the right chose that moment to buy a puppy—inaptly naming him Prince—that, come the following summer, had grown into a large, ferocious and permanently hungry thug. The garden wall was only four feet high in addition to which Pat, a builder, habitually heaped surplus building and plumbing supplies against it onto which Prince easily scrambled and from which vantage point it would have been simplicity itself for him to leap into our garden and swallow our baby whole. So, judiciously and, I admit, a little spitefully, Dermot erected a tall and dog-proof trellis and I planted a Russian vine to shield the view.
Pat hailed from Tipperary, as did his wife Noreen*. Pat was geniality itself, although his side-line of doing up multiple old Volvos in the street made it impossible to park anywhere near the house which is inconvenient when you’ve just had a caesarian and, while I liked Pat, I did hold this against him. He also sometimes parked his digger outside our house and, on being woken from a much-needed snooze, I would silently curse its bucket as it passed the bedroom window.
The couple’s adolescent daughter, Tiffnee, was a self-professed animal lover in as much as she loved to have an animal about the place she could torture. Prince, purportedly Tifnee’s dog, was infrequently fed and never taken for a walk. She also had a cat. That first summer the cat had five kittens which she proudly displayed to me by hanging them from the washing line by their claws, exhorting me to hold up my baby so that he could watch as they dropped, one after another, to the concrete floor. The winner, she explained, was the kitten that hung on the longest. I demurred, saying that in my opinion it was cruel to hang kittens up by their claws and that their pathetic mewing supported my position. She explained that they were mewing because they enjoyed it and it couldn’t harm them as, as everybody knew, cats had nine lives.
Tiffnee could regularly be heard heaping abuse on her poor mother, calling her ‘stupid cow’ etcetera. Noreen, burdened as she was with a pronounced stammer, was very meek if you met her in the street but should she find herself alone in the house she would give vent to a long, loud, heartfelt rant, easily audible through our paper-thin walls. A large proportion of her invective was aimed at me—my ‘Englishyness’, my ‘stuck-upness’, my ‘middle classness’, my ‘BBC husband’, my ‘precious baby’— but her loudest and fiercest tirades took as their subject matter my
“FECKIN TEN FOOT TRELLIS!”.
On a beautiful summer morning I spread a rug on the little postage stamp of lawn out the back and sat with my baby, making the most of the sun. We hadn’t been sitting there long before I remembered that I’d left the milk on the step where it was going to go off. Leaving my baby on the rug, I nipped to the front door to fetch it. Unfortunately, I’d left the back door open, creating the kind of vacuum so abhorred by nature, and no sooner had I bent down to pick up the two bottles of semi-skimmed than the front door slammed shut behind me. I stared at my front door, a bottle in each hand, horror-struck. I knew the neighbours to the left were out at work. I knew Pat was out at work, I’d seen him drive off that morning in his digger. And I knew Noreen was in, I’d heard her giving off about me all morning. Was I really going to have to knock on her door, throw myself on her mercy? If I hadn’t left our baby sitting on a rug in the garden I’d have happily tramped the streets until Dermot came home from work that evening but I had. I put the milk back on the step and knocked on Noreen’s door.
“I, I was hoo-hoovering,” she stammered after a couple of rings.
She was clearly both surprised and unhappy to see me standing there.
“I’ve locked myself out I’m afraid,’ I said, sounding preposterously middle class and ‘Englishyfied’, ‘might I climb over the wall from your side?”
I followed her down the passageway and through the living room. She clearly hadn’t been hoovering, in fact I’d have been surprised to hear that any hoovering had taken place in living memory. And somebody in this family was definitely a hoarder. I wound my way though a narrow alley between piles of God knows what towards the back yard. Noreen opened the back door causing Prince to bark ferociously.
“That’s the trouble, now, with t-too high a-a f-fence, too high a f-fence,’ Noreen said, dragging Prince by the collar and shutting him in the house.
For once, I had to agree with her. I scanned the trellis, trying to find the best spot to attempt a crossing. How was I to find a foot-hold amongst that unstable scree of down-pipes and scaffold boards and scale the fragile trellis without the whole lot collapsing? Nowhere looked exactly promising but towards the bottom of the garden the trellis had been thoroughly invaded by the Russian Vine (as, embarrassingly, had the exterior and interior of Pat’s shed) and the stems had thickened sufficiently to provide some support. So I shinned up a pile of guttering, grabbed hold of a likely looking chunk of the vine, apologised to Noreen for any inconvenience caused and propelled myself, pole-vaulter style into my own flowerbed. I stumbled to my feet, seized up my baby, hugged him to my wildly beating heart, shouted apologies and thanks through the trellis to Noreen and went (uneventfully this time) to rescue the milk.
Noreen continued to shout and rail through the wall in the proceeding months but at some point it all went very quiet. Then in that way young families do, we were moving on to pastures new and I knocked next door to say goodbye. Pat answered and we chatted amiably for a while, then I asked after Noreen, mentioning that I hadn’t seen her recently.
“Ah no,” he said, his expression changing. “She’s not been well, she’s had to go into hospital. Her nerves, you see? Has to go away from time to time. For her nerves.”
And that was the last I ever heard of her.
In 2002 my father died. Dad had already submitted evidence to the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse (The Ryan Report) and his solicitor got in touch to say that my siblings and I were entitled to posthumously pursue his claim for compensation for the abuse he’d suffered while in Artane, the notorious so-called ‘industrial school’ run by the equally notorious Christian Brothers. We travelled to Dublin to give our evidence and were told by the tribunal that, in reality, no evidence was required because the very fact he’d been at Artane meant he must have suffered abuse—physical, sexual, emotional or, most likely, all three.
The horror that was being laid bare at that time, the emerging stories of unbearable cruelty inflicted on women and children in institutions run by the Catholic Church made me think about Noreen. What had happened in her life that caused the trouble with ‘her nerves’ and had made her stand in her own kitchen hurling abuse at the wall?
I had, in the nineteen-sixties, spent a week in Thurles,Tipperary, a small rural town in those days, and been introduced to a very nice, ordinary woman. She had two children, a toddler and a baby and we spent a very pleasant hour chatting, drinking tea and eating ham sandwiches while her husband, a much older man, sat with the baby on his knee. Not long after my visit I heard that she had cut both her children’s throats and her own. They were found bleeding to death on the bathroom floor. She was known to everyone in the town and Noreen, living in Tipperary, would have heard about it, possibly have known the woman, perhaps even been a member of the the family. I wondered about what might be behind the woman’s terrible act, what life might have been like for her, living in the pressure cooker of a small country town in Catholic Ireland where everybody knew what went on and nobody dared to speak out.
I thought about Noreen and wrote a play about Noreen but did nothing about what I’d written beyond a table-read with friends. Many years later I got back in touch with Jessica Higgs, a fellow actor from my feminist theatre days, who had directed a fantastic one-woman piece—Bound Feet Blues by Yang-May Ooi. I sent Jess my Noreen piece and she suggested I create a second character. The second woman, Realtine, came very easily as she was drawn, story and all, from a woman I’d met years before who’d had a run-in with a nun and Noreen/Realtine had a successful outing at the Camden Festival.
To make it a proper evening we created Susan. Susan is purely an invention, inspired by a comment that Northern Irish friend made about a particular brand of Pentecostalism, which, she darkly murmured, was ‘a bad business.’ Northern Ireland is a place I know very well, having worked there and married one of the natives and the Protestant churches have engendered their own share of misery, (accounts of which continue to emerge) so I felt it was legitimate to have a go at them too.
The three women came together as Why Shouldn’t I Go (Jess’s inspired suggestion). The name is taken from a line spoken by Noreen as she struggles to break free of the horror which plays out constantly in her own head.
We successfully applied for some match funding from Arts Council England which we managed to successfully match thanks to the generosity of our amazingly generous friends and family and premièred the production at the Ropetackle in Shoreham as part of the Wordfest in 2019. Thus far I’ve performed it in London, Brighton, Shoreham, Manchester and Dublin in big spaces and small. I’m always very moved by the number of people, men and women, who come up to me afterwards and tell me their own stories, saying
‘That happened to my mother/my cousin/my grandmother.’
And sometimes ‘that happened to me.’
It is a truism that it is only in the act of writing that we come to know what we are writing about. I’ve no religion but my father, Brian, lost his as a result of the abuse he was subjected to at the hands of the Christian Brothers. I have come to realise that writing the stories of these women has been, in no little part, a way of exploring what happened to him. The women in Why Shouldn’t I Go? have suffered trauma at the hands of their respective religions and have had to deal with this damage as my father did—with humour, with anger, with acceptance.
Janet Behan 2025
Any expressions of interest in “Why Should’t I Go?” should be directed to
- Berlin Associates
- 7 Tyers Gate
- London SE1 3HR
- tel:44(0)73861112
Reviews
“Behan gives a mesmerising performance…Her writing is accomplished. “Why Shouldn’t I Go?” is a masterpiece about the everyday horrors that can lurk behind closed doors”*****(The UpComing)
“Jessica Higgs has directed it with a sure touch, nothing is allowed to get in the way of the stories…a sixty minute theatrical delight”***** (Reviewsgate)
Secrets fuelled by stoic silence, oozing through the cracks of life, is the stuff of much good drama. And so it is with this insightful trio of soliloquies written and performed by playwright and actress Janet Behan, in her latest exploration of religion, Ireland and stifling convention.
The three stories in this often nakedly emotional package takes us through the damaging experiences of three different middle aged women. Behan manages the ticklish task of showing the women’s facade of survival whilst ably exposing their vulnerability within… Sue Heal
© Copyright by Janet Behan 2025
