Trespassers
Page 6
There was, however, no lack of handier targets, and heading the list was the Censorship Board, which would ban so many books over the years by distinguished foreign Catholic writers that it became a laughing stock. Seán attacked it relentlessly and, among his papers when he died, I found a letter from an Irish government minister, dated in the Thirties, granting him the right to import six copies of one of his own banned books for his own use. The letter by then was brittle with age and, judging by its prick-marks and puncturings, must at some time have been pinned up for use, perhaps, as a dart board to keep his saeva indignatio well honed.
He wasn’t the only one lacerated by that. On the contrary, he had been unusually lucky, not only in getting away to Harvard, but earlier, too, during the fight, when thanks to his couriers’ prudence he escaped being caught and interned as hundreds were. Emboldened, perhaps, both by this and by the contagion of US optimism, he had come home, borrowed money, chosen a congenial site and built a house. This was so odd a venture in those depressed years that people used to line up outside our gate to stare over it at what they called ‘the queer new house’. Its queerness, even in retrospect, escapes me, though perhaps the asymmetry of the windows was unusual then, as were its open-plan interiors and uncovered joists, about which the gawkers must have been told, since they could not see them from where they stood. Maybe the builders had given them a tour?
‘Djez see the inside?’ I can imagine them marvelling. ‘Ye’d swear it was only half finished, but the builders is after tellin’ us that the owners is all set to move in.’
Curiously, the only really modern house in the neighbourhood belonged to another Corkonian, a retired music teacher called Breen. White, terraced, curvy and vaguely naval, its design made ours look positively dull. Perched on a ridge rising above and behind Captain Disney’s ponderous, whelk-grey mansion, the Breens’ house could, on bright days, look ready to levitate and take off into the clouds. Disney, from whom Seán had bought our acre of land, lived in what was said to be the dower house of ‘the Talbot Estate’, a place whose seat had apparently disappeared.
There was nothing cloudy, though, about Breen’s response, when asked for his opinion of my musical ear. He said I hadn’t one, and that my dream of learning to play the violin should be discouraged. Indeed, there would be no point wasting money on trying to teach me any instrument more complex than a tin whistle.
Though disappointed, I continued calling on him and his wife, Daisy, when on my way to visit their neighbour, ‘old Miss Smythe’, a friendly spinster who, it strikes me now, must have been much younger than I realised. Women like her had been twice bereaved, once by the Great War and again by the drift to England of their kind. She owned a great number of cats and a garden where she grew interesting oddities, like yellow tomatoes and white raspberries: relics perhaps of a childhood spent somewhere equipped with gardeners and greenhouses. With hindsight, I can see that she was recognisably of Ascendancy stock.
During my first years in Killiney, I had nobody to play with while other children were in school, because Eileen, who wouldn’t send me there until I was eight, was teaching me the three Rs herself. Having worked as a teacher in Boston, she used a phonetic method to teach reading, which seems to have gone in and out of fashion since her day. I can’t imagine why. It worked wonderfully for me, who learned so fast that I had empty hours left to fill every afternoon, and whiled them away by dropping in on tolerant neighbours.
At first I mooched ‘up the Gut’, a lane where floors were earthen, TB was rampant and people were allegedly prone to gut each other on Fridays after closing time. When I caught lice there once too often and the Gut was banned, I began calling instead on a retirement home for old ladies run by a Mrs Gracie O’Reilly. Dotty inmates there were as lonely as myself, and maids told tales about them behind their backs. A Mrs Leahy was known to them as ‘Leaky’ because of her incontinence, and an old lady, nicknamed ‘the Little Flower’, was said to be a saint.
Sanctity was an obsession of the time. Father Traynor, a friend of Seán’s who appears in several of his short stories, was known, seriously and gravely, in Gougane Barra as ‘the Saint’. As I was not yet at school, he gave me my first Communion, and I wore a new, brown wool dress instead of the usual mini bridal costume. Curiously, I don’t remember being disappointed about this, perhaps because Traynor was a lively and entertaining man whom Seán claimed to have frequently helped climb back over the seminary wall after dances in their Cork youth. Traynor was convinced, Eileen told us, that clerical marriage would soon be permitted and he planned to avail himself of the latitude.
‘God help him,’ she sighed and shook a wisely sceptical head.
To my secret satisfaction, her taunt about my having missed the excitements of war now looked like being disproved. A contingent of the Local Defence Force marched promisingly often past our gate. ‘Left, left!’ urchins jeered and, lifting small, plump knees, imitated the men as they stamped by: ‘I had a good job and I left!’ Petrol disappeared, and our car was put up on blocks. Fascinating black rubber gas masks with long snouts were supplied to us, then stored in the attic, never to be used, though blackout light bulbs were screwed in and blackout curtains hung lest German planes use our too brightly lit coastline to guide their bombing missions. A cupboard with a lock was filled with food, including tinned corned beef and Hershey chocolate bars, both of which we ungratefully despised, sent by friends in the US who feared we might be starving. Meanwhile, Eileen and a succession of handymen drew up a map of what now began to look like a garden, laid out paths, and strewed them with beach pebbles which we collected with a horse and cart in the small hours, lest it be illegal to take them. There was uncertainty about this. The handymen planted tough vegetables like kale, which I furtively fed by the armful to Captain Disney’s half-dozen cows who, considering our field to be still theirs, regularly broke through our fence to get at more. I was blamed for this, and when we learned that we might be liable if a cow broke its leg, we reinforced the fence. Cleverly, the cows returned by night. Defensively, we wove thorny furze through our palings. No good. The cows were persistent and, when chased, panicked and charged across seed beds and cucumber frames. So we planted a hawthorn hedge and hammered pointed sticks into the ground to protect it.
Having grown friendly with the cows, I declared myself to be a vegetarian, but was thwarted in this.
Meanwhile, were we at war or were we not? Confused, I tuned in to adult anxieties. What was neutrality? Did I want us to be at war? I did! I did! I yearned for the excitement but concealed this, since adults, despite wistful memories of their own war, were clearly not keen on this one.
Jobs were still scarce, and a rump IRA had again split and was again plotting. It had by now been banned, unbanned, then rebanned, and one faction, no doubt feeling a need to give signs of life, declared its own war on Britain, then seized state-owned ammunition from a magazine in Phoenix Park. Mindful of English threats to take back the ports, de Valera’s government promptly rushed through an Emergency Powers Act, bringing back internment which it had abolished seven years before.
Naturally, I didn’t know any of this at the time, but gleaned wisps of fact and speculation from listening to adults’ chat.
So for what did our ‘Free’ State now stand? Side-of the-mouth comment raged as usual on the number 59 bus, whose schedule was now truncated, as was its route. Shortages became the great subject of chat, and fuel was especially scarce.
*
What leavened our family’s social life was that Killiney was a partly Protestant village and that, although Protestants had lost power, pull and, in some cases, property, few – apart from Erskine Childers’ relatives – can have been lastingly affected by the sour, emotional fall-out from the Civil War. On the whole, any grudges they might bear for having been sidelined were concealed with such dignity that my mother was puzzled years later to hear two old Protestant friends of hers refer to ‘them’ and ‘us’. Who, she was wondering, w
ere the alien ‘them’, when it dawned on her that her friends meant people like herself. Local Protestants, unlike the ones in the North, were tolerant and liberal, but had doubts about our being so. They had a point. When it came to mixed marriages and the children thereof, the Irish RC Church was inflexible. The marriage had to be celebrated – though the word didn’t really apply – at unconvivial hours in a hole-and-corner way, and all children born of it must, the Church insisted, be brought up as Catholics. When a Protestant parent refused to go along with this, there could be social repercussions, and once, notoriously, as late as 1957, in a place called Fethard-on-Sea, there would be a priest-led, full-scale boycott of Protestants and their businesses. So it seemed that the only tyranny in the country now was that of our own Church, which from 1940 on would be incarnate in our archbishop and primate, John Charles McQuaid, a man obsessed by petty concerns, who allegedly greeted the arrival of Tampax on the Irish market in 1944 by advising the Minister of Health against permitting it, lest it sexually arouse young girls. McQuaid was said to be so opposed to mixed marriages that he did not want Catholic and Protestant schools to play hockey with each other. Such encounters, he feared, could lead to Catholic girls meeting and possibly eventually marrying Protestant opponents’ male relatives.
Were these fantasies his or ours? His lean fanatic’s face and tight, drawstring mouth discouraged negotiation, and when my generation began to think of leaving school we learned that he had forbidden us to attend Trinity, the older and more aesthetically pleasing of our two universities, on pain of excommunication. ‘A reserved sin!’ Why? Because Trinity was Protestant and he didn’t approve of Catholics fraternising with Protestants. By all reports, McQuaid was an odd fish.
In 1945 he bought a property at the foot of Killiney Hill, where he got an astronomer to rig up a telescope overlooking the beach. So, for all his inquisitorial ways, he had a soft spot for natural beauty. Human beauty? Perhaps. A biography by John Cooney, John Charles McQuaid: Ruler of Catholic Ireland, published first in Ireland, then in the US by Syracuse University Press, reports a rumour that he had been known to disguise himself and go cruising for boys. Another fantasy? Or another reserved sin? Gossip flourished. Nobody knew. The biography quotes Dubliners who, as boys, had been embarrassed by the prelate’s notorious interest in explicitly discussing sex and masturbation so as to encourage them to avoid both. And it records one lurid episode with a small boy which Irish reviewers tend to dismiss on grounds that its source was an enemy of McQuaid’s, and that there was no witness to it. But then attempted rape is rarely witnessed.
Interestingly, the outspoken biographer’s Irish critics argue that his ‘life’ of McQuaid judges the ‘Ruler of Catholic Ireland’ – his subtitle – between 1940 and 1973 by today’s standards. This, they imply, makes his assessments faulty and so does his ignorance of how Ireland was in those years. But, in the wake of the paedophile scandals now shaking the Irish Church, we must wonder whether these defenders themselves knew what, we now learn, was going on all over the country in those decades. If they did, they were guilty of connivance. If they did not, their criticisms are worthless. The Murphy report, whose findings are being discussed in the newspapers as I write, says that paedophilia was covered up for forty years in the Dublin diocese. In those years, covering up scandals would have been easy – especially in the light of another item which appeared in the press not so very long ago to the effect that Pius XII apparently made it a reserved sin – yet another one! – for anyone to accuse a priest of paedophilia. True or untrue? How to know after so much duplicity?
*
I lived in Killiney myself until the early Fifties and thereafter regularly visited my parents there until twenty years later, when they left it for the urban comforts of nearby Dún Laoghaire.
Partly perched on its hilltop, partly tumbling down it, the town seemed so sedate, sexless and sleepy that my great anxiety was, when the war ended, travel revived and foreign exchanges were arranged for me, that the Italian or French girl whose lively hospitality I had enjoyed in the Savoy mountains or the seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi would die of boredom in Killiney.
Yet it was a pretty place, just a brisk, fifteen-minute walk from hilltop to beach, lush, woodsy, part of the old Pale, close enough to Dublin for people to have gone there in the days before motorcars to build roomy houses amidst what by now were mature, semi-exotic gardens, redolent of empire and Mediterranean trips. Several had dreamy names like Capri, Khyber Pass and Sorrento, though native Irish owners tended to choose ones like Carraig Donn, Grianán, Cois Ḟairrge and, in our own case, the semi-Anglicised Knockaderry, which, in the original Gaelic meant ‘the hill of the oakwood’, in memory of an earlier house where Seán had holidayed as a boy. Our field for now had only very young trees, but across the road from it rose a wooded park, and downhill to the right, between the Vico Road and the sea, a eucalyptus wood anchored the soil above a near-vertical slope which descended to White Rock Beach, where the cliffs gleamed with mica, and the sand was finer than caster sugar. In Killiney Park, during the Thirties and Forties, children could be seen gathering sticks for firewood, then carrying them home in great bundles on their backs, which were often bent at right angles, like those of figures in a Bruegel painting. In winter, their fingers, like my own, were covered with chilblains. Fuel shortages were returning us to medieval conditions.
However, just under the crest of Killiney Hill Road was a row of workmen’s cottages, one or two of which, thanks to the Mexican Gulf Stream, had palm trees in their small gardens. These, allegedly, had been built to house English servants brought over to work in the vanished great house belonging to ‘the Talbot Estate’. What had happened to that house? And where had it been located? Nobody seemed to know, but the names of the families now living in the cottages were indeed English – Hall, Mason, Tyndal and the like – and the big house belonging to Captain Disney, who had sold us our field, was said to have been the dower-house of the same estate. Down the hill to the left, just off the road leading towards what Protestants still called Kingstown and we called Dún Laoghaire, there was a tall, see-through, lacy, stone remnant of a house said to have belonged to the Parnell family which later disappeared. Had it been burned in the Troubles, as happened to so many such houses in fact and perhaps more in fiction? Surely not, if its owners were in any way connected to the great Charles Stewart Parnell? But perhaps they had had the roof removed themselves so as to avoid having to pay rates? Information was sparse, in part because so many Killiney residents were retired and had spent their active lives somewhere else. Many of those living – or having recently lived – in the roomy villas either on the hill top or down by the sea also had English names: Judd, Johnson, Robinson, Murray, Waterhouse, Hone, Starky, Fagan, Williams, Nutall-Smith, Boardman, Gibbon and even an ancient Mrs Parnell, who was thought to be eccentric because she wore nineteenth-century outfits featuring hats, buttoned boots, long skirts and black lace such as I see girls selling and modelling nowadays in London’s Camden Market. She was often in our number 59 bus queue, but no one had the nerve to ask her if she was connected to the ruined house. Perhaps we half thought of her as a ghost.
PROTESTANT KILLINEY
Killiney Protestants varied. Some had represented the British Empire in India or Africa. Others, having inherited houses too expensive to keep up, lived frugally, while still others were feudal in their ways, like Captain Disney, who invited neighbourhood children to skate and slide on his pond when it froze, organised a fête every summer in his fields, and was generous with callers at Hallowe’en. Some occasionally invited Seán and Eileen, along with other neighbours, to drink sherry on Sunday mornings after church, and some were what Eileen called bohemian, by which she meant that the wives wore slacks (which was then thought daring if you weren’t actually riding an animal), drank openly in the local lounge bar (rather than discreetly in a cupboard-sized snug) and, once the war got going, were apt to get into conversation with the officers in civvies who
came down from Northern Ireland to eat steak. According to Eileen, one of her friends, whom I shall call Lily, did more than talk. She picked men up and took them home. Eileen affected disapproval, but was soon wearing slacks herself – though never in town – and gave up letting herself be shut away in a snug. She and Lily befriended a German woman married to a Dutch journalist who lived in the village and felt isolated and lonely. After all, why not? We were neutral, weren’t we? They were careful, however, about introducing her to either Captain Disney or Colonel Williams, who lived on either side of us, or to Gracie O’Reilly’s son, Terry, who was in the RAF.
‘She’s not a great one for taking hints,’ Lily told Eileen. ‘So if we go into the pub with her, we’d better take her into the snug and keep her there. I’ll say you’re shy about drinking in public. She’d never believe it of me, and if we tell her that the officer class would refuse to fraternise with her, she might blub. She’s prone to that.’
Lily, having lived in Africa, sometimes made remarks which would now be considered racist and which, even in the Forties, could make people blush. A swarthy friend might, to her mind, ‘have a touch of the tar brush’ or have a baby to whom Lily would refer as ‘her new coffee bean’.
*
I too had friends whom it seemed wise to keep apart. One was Lily’s daughter, Jasmine (another alias), who had spent her childhood in Africa and was imaginative, independent, astonishingly beautiful, permanently angry, resented her mother (whom she called ‘that sow’), adored her father (whom she felt that mother mistreated) and claimed to despise all humans and care only for animals. She had won prizes for painting lions and possessed a pony, a goat, two ducks and a dog, but seemed never to have any pocket money and apparently lived on boiled offal, which the butcher had probably been told was being bought for the dog. Like almost all local Protestants, except Miss Smythe, she and her parents lived in a high-ceilinged, formerly elegant, cold, unmodernised house equipped with a tennis court, vastly overgrown rhododendron bushes and a winding drive which established its claim to be a gentleman’s residence. Cash, however, was short, as was the case with many Anglo-Irish families, and often when I dropped by Jasmine would have a large potful of lights on the stove which creaked and croaked like something in a horror film. It made ghostlike noises as it simmered and looked, as it rose and sank, rather like a folded grey mackintosh. At other times she would be cooking sheep’s head, and would dare me to eat one of its eyes, mocking me when I refused the dare. Her contemptus mundi was extreme. ‘Look at those corpses,’ she would say, surveying a beachful of pallid sunbathers in early June. ‘Aren’t they horrible?’ She was frankly curious, though, about bodily functions and, as she was a year or so older than I, had no trouble persuading me to join in examining the parts of each other’s bodies that we ourselves couldn’t see. However, she refused to come trespassing with me, and so clearly disapproved of the practice that I felt that she and my new Catholic school friend, Marie, could not be introduced to each other unless I found some way of warning each in advance that flesh was sacred to one and property to the other. Marie, though less than totally averse to trespassing, would have greatly disapproved of being shown Jasmine’s private parts. And I, now that I had finally started going to school to local Loretto nuns, was being cautious about Catholic rules which, it seemed to me, my parents had either got wrong or had forgotten. Catholics at the Loretto convent seemed both mildly hostile and timorous.