Friday 17 October 2008

The Veil Of Tears

The fact that my parents were Irish though I grew up in the middle of East London made me highly sensitive to the particularity of language. All around me people spoke in the brash and vivid Cockney dialect. But at home my parents still used the vocabulary and speech patterns of rural Ireland.

When particularly exasperated with me, my father would invoke the memory of the language from which he, too, had been exiled, calling me an ‘amadan’ or ‘a gamalog’ (Irish words for fool). My mother, on hearing unexpected news would not say that she had received a great shock or surprise but ‘a terrible land’, as if someone had picked her up and thrown her in the air.

Being a Catholic family we regularly said the family rosary and I was always particularly struck by the words of the prayer with which it ended, the first few lines of which are as follows:

Hail holy queen, mother of mercy
Hail our life, our sweetness and our hope.
To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.
To thee do we send up our sighs
Mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.

At least that is how the version we used to say began. Nowadays, I think people say valley of tears, vale being a rather old-fashioned and self-consciously poetic usage. But when I was little I thought it must be ‘veil’ and I often tried to imagine what a veil of tears would look like. I thought it must be a bit like an large spider’s web festooned with raindrops. It is an image that has never left me.

How I miss the music of my parents’ voices! I can hear them even now, rising and falling as they recited the prayers at bedtime. It will soon be two years since my mother died of cancer. Whenever I think of her last days on Earth and the pain she suffered, I am tempted to reach for that veil of tears to cover my face from the world.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

A Veil of Tears, an interesting concept. I imagine a bilowing cloth, cold to the touch, and melting in some spots. I am sorry to hear about your mother Mr. Keaney, perhaps a day will come when nobodys' parents, or anyone for that matter, will die from cancer.

Brian Keaney said...

Thanks Deanna. Let's hope so.

Anonymous said...

The Caul or Veil is sometimes also referred to as "The Veil of Tears" due to the tendency of baser types of people to attack or even kill Caulbearers, often for no apparent reason --- such as in the Middle Ages, when they were burned as witches and heretics, mainly by the Church of Rome.

Persons of negative character may often react to Caulbearers at a very subconscious level as they sense that there is something different about these people. There are many folk tales about "the curse of the Caul" which appears to come from the fallout of negative actions against a bearer of the Caul.

I know the prayer you speak of. I think a veil of tears would look just as you described. One such covered my face at birth but but it was accidently destroyed. I think "the curse of the caul" would make a good name for your next book.