Angela Patten

When I was growing up in Ireland, there were many words and phrases I accepted and absorbed without considering their literal meaning. Catholicism was rife with inexplicable words like apostolic, immaculate, transubstantiate, not to mention the fruit of thy womb and holy purity. I can still recite the Catechism by heart but I don’t remember asking for or being offered explanations of the words themselves.

So it was with the Purchase Houses. I thought that was the name of a street or an estate—Saint Patrick’s Close, Glenview or Avondale. The Purchase Houses were newly built, and we used to visit them when there was one on view and we were out for our Sunday family walk. They were so much bigger and brighter than our little Corporation house with its two small bedrooms for the six of us—parents in one and we children in the other. We argued bitterly over which bedroom would be ours, who would have to share with someone else, and the fairness and unfairness of it all.

Now it dawns on me like an epiphany—the name meant that the Purchase Houses were for sale with a mortgage from the bank. They were out of reach for people like us who only rented, never owned, and could never hope to do so. My father was paid in cash on Fridays and my mother managed the household finances from the various pockets of her big leather handbag.

Dad paid for everything on the spot and disparaged the system of “hire-purchase” or rent-to-own which I mis-heard as “Higher Purchase” with divine connotations. So we went without things like television until he had saved enough money to buy one outright.

Later, as a scholarship student at secondary school, I visited the homes of girls who lived in those lovely houses, some with their own name on the gate—Glengariff, Rosmeen, Drumshanbo. The names cast a spell of class distinction that did not require translation. It fixed my sense of inferiority firmly in place and I could never bear to invite those girls to our house, known in the game of Bingo only as “number 4 on our hall door.”