by Ultan Macken
I’d read a bit and then he would correct my pronunciation. He’s certainly well up in Irish. There are millions of different words that I was pronouncing incorrectly and he pointed out each and every one to me.
After school I trotted back to the house for my dinner and then procured your two letters. When I saw them my heart nearly stopped because I thought that something might have happened. But all was well. After dinner, I went back to Críostóir and we went walking until 7 when I had tea and Críostoir and myself talked until 10.30. I mentioned about going to Galway on Saturday and was trying to think up a real good ‘one’ when he said, I probably wanted to get in to see my girl. I see the post car coming and I must be away. I love you, love you, love you. Please keep thinking that always and know I miss you like hell. Goodbye love and keep missing me until Saturday, a red letter day in the lives of men.
Goodbye love, God bless you,
Your lonely,
Wally
In the following letter, my father refers to their need to do something about their situation:
Rosmuc.
Thursday morning 10.40
My own darling Peggy,
Thanks for your nice long letter of yesterday. It shook up the old heartstrings. I note that all the bad weather is not converging on Rosmuc alone. I think I wrote you a fairly gloomy letter yesterday. I think it all depends on how you dream during the night and what you are waking up to.
I admit the necessity of doing something and the futility of 30/– a week and we’ll have to step out and go places. We will too. I hate trying to write about things like that because I kind of imagine that what I say may sound insincere. And it isn’t you know, darling. It’s driving me nuts and that’s a fact. Thank God for tomorrow because it means a salvation of sorts. I’m not surprised to hear about Liam Ó Briain’s knowledge of my visit to Galway for as I told you he saw me on the bus.
My day off yesterday was completely lacking in interest and barren of adventure. Posting your letter, I returned to the house and read a bit of mythology – which incidentally is extremely obscene in parts – and then went down to the school at 1.30. I started to talk English to the kids and as true as the Bible, there is only one of them who can talk it at all … most of them don’t understand a word of what they read. English is a foreign language to them.
It’s no wonder that the country places are overflowing with pisreogs [superstitions]. Last night was very calm and as I walked home to my digs, I stopped now and again and the sounds that greeted my ears were uncanny to an extreme.
I love you darling until the cows come home and when they do, we’ll have palaces and silks, jewels and laces. We are bound to reach our goal because there is no power on earth to prevent us.
One o’clock today darling,
Your Wally
There are so many letters from Rosmuc it shows how much my father hated being away from my mother. Here’s another one:
Rosmuc.
Monday 10.15 pm
My dear darling Peggy,
Your letter was like a spring well to a man straying in the desert. I hope you won’t be mad with me darling when I wasn’t in on Sunday, but really I couldn’t do it. There was no car to be found and no bus. I can see that you are lonely too and I realise perfectly that choked up feeling.
Yesterday was terrible. It was Sunday and we had to go to mass. The Church is three miles away over hill and dale and believe me it is some walk. You have to leave at 10 a.m. and you just get there at 11 by the skin of your teeth. May K. went to mass with the daughter of the house-hold. I saw her there and we walked back to the digs. She met a teacher friend of hers and she spent the day with her.
I did the lonely exile act and I went down to the sea and played the mandolin and charmed the rocks until dinner-time. After dinner, I climbed a mountain and there was a bitter wind blowing, so I crouched down behind a huge rock and gave myself completely to you. I closed my eyes and went back to the very beginning of you and me. I traversed step by step our happy-unhappy love and I enjoyed all once again its moments of beauty and felt again its pangs of pain. I think I must have gone into a kind of trance because when an hour – maybe two hours – had passed, I woke suddenly and found that it was bitterly cold and that a slight drizzle was beginning to fall. So I kissed you goodbye and scampered back down the mountain. I seem to be able to find you best when I go there. So now you know where to let your spirit wander …
I will have to go and post this and I want to drop a line to mother also. Please don’t forget me darling and love me and write to me because you can’t possibly realise how marvellous it is to get a letter from you. I love you, love you, my God, if we could only find a more expressive language than this.
I’m afraid that there is not one word in the whole world sufficiently large to cope with my feeling for you, love, crazy, nuts are all right as expletives but this emotion is so much deeper than that – immeasurable, indefinable and all the rest of it. I suppose, however, that we have to be content with what we have. So I will say that I love you, my God so much that there is no power on Heaven or Earth powerful enough to make me stop.
Au revoir love,
I love you always will and I am lonely for you,
Wally
Here is a letter from my mother:
The Connacht Tribune.
Tuesday June 9, 12 noon
My own darling,
It’s only now I have a minute to write you a letter, and I like to get it in the first post here so that you will be sure to get it the following day. We are very busy really. Jack and Daddy have gone off to Castlebar for the flying. So Fitzie and I are alone at the moment – wouldn’t you like to be here with me? Do you get my letters early in the day or late? I am sending you some stamps, you must have run out of them long ago.
My dear, I’m still missing you terribly. We have Saturday to look forward to. I do hope the family go away on Sunday, else I don’t know how I’m going to slither out of the procession – I always march with the College every year and Pa will probably expect me to go out again with them.
Of course if Pa and Ma go to Balla for the day, that will make things much simpler. Anyway we will have all the rest of the time, TG.
Don’t forget to tell me what time your bus arrives at, etc. I hope you are doing plenty of Irish and improving by leaps and bounds. Honestly darling I live for your letters these mornings, and I am so sorry when I have them read, because then I have nothing to look forward to for the rest of the day …
I wish we could make some plan. I have such a lot to say to you my darling and yet I cannot write coherently even now. Keep writing me long letters, they are my salvation and do tell me how long more you have to stay in that awful place – I would like to know the worst at once.
My own beloved sweetheart, I must stop and get down to my beastly work. Sweetheart I hate to stop writing but I must. I love you and I am terrible lonely.
Peggy
My mother wrote to my father again on Wednesday:
The Connacht Tribune.
10th June 1936
Darling, darling, it is lovely to even get time to write to you. Your letter was grand and long this morning – what on earth would I do without you? You don’t know how I’m looking forward to Saturday, my heart lifts when I think of it. I hope my old cold gets better quick and that my arm improves. Imagine it is 12 mid-day and this is the first minute I have had to take a break, even now I should be working as there is a pile of work waiting for me, but as I have until 10 tonight uninterrupted to get at it – it should be taken care of all right.
Darling, I’ll see you at the Augustinians at 1 on Saturday – I expect that is the best and I’ll be able to manage it DV. Last evening I went to the pictures with Molly Keegan, after a choir practice.
The picture was good – ‘Sanders of the River’ – although very peculiar, it was clever giving a great idea of the native tribes and the work of the British administration out there. Paul Robeson [one
of the stars of the film] has a wonderful voice, but he only sang twice, which was rather disappointing.
Darling, I have lots and lots to say to you – I wish it was Saturday, everyday when I get up, I say to myself, thankfully only three more days and tomorrow it will be only two. My own Wally, how I love you, it is beyond human comprehension, I love you with all my heart, my own sweetheart, I always will.
Your own lonely,
Peggy
In another letter from my mother she talks quite openly about her love and her worries:
The Connacht Tribune.
Wally, darling sweetheart,
It is in the cold grey light of an extremely frosty morning and I am filled with love. Dearest, you will never know how I love you. It is sweeping me away, making me queer, moody and cranky for nothing. I think most people go through this phase though – and I will honestly try to forget it from this on.
I find myself getting into ridiculous rages for nothing these days – the fact that you are going to be away from me for so long probably has a lot to do with it.
Please, darling, try to understand. It is extraordinary but I have not quite got over the Diarmuid and Gráinne thing yet and I was quite sure I had. [Reference to my father playing the part of Diarmuid and May Kilmartin playing the part of Gráinne. May was younger than my mother and very pretty; my mother probably felt insecure watching Walter acting as her lover in the Taibhdhearc production of Michael Mac Liammóir’s famous play. Peggy played the part of the queen – the older woman and Gráinne’s mother. This production was staged between 8–11 October 1936. I sometimes get an impression from the letters that at times my mother felt May Kilmartin could be a threat to her.]
And, oh Wally, I love you so, and I know you love me. If only we could do something – soon. Let’s get married soon, darling, if only we could both go off next week and do that – wouldn’t it be grand? You know, Wally love, people in love – meaning me – are very selfish. I am jealous of your work now – ridiculously jealous of the Taibhdhearc – and all that sort of thing. But DV it will all pass, I know it will. I was so happy yesterday, so secure in the feeling that I had you, you had me, and everything was all right with the world, and then suddenly last night for no accountable reason, that old pall of gloom descended on me again.
College too, last night, made me feel lonely – for the time when I was a carefree little jib [a first year university student] – ahem – and full of hope for life, a great career – I used to think that I was going to do marvellous things, like writing books and seeing the world – Darling, if we could only get out of this – if we were married really, we’d get on so much better.
I don’t know whether I’ll give you this letter or not – it is rather incoherent, I’m afraid, but I just had to get in touch with you some way. If I do give it to you, dearest, please burn it when you have read it. I promised then I wouldn’t be cross anymore – to God I mean – and I won’t either, wait until you see, but I can’t help being cynical about the old Taibhdhearc – it is a petty and small-minded place.
My own darling, I love you, every bit of your dear self,
I always will,
Peggy
So for those two years, 1935 and 1936, they saw each other as often as possible. By the end of 1936, my father was growing restless. He was still earning 30/– a week and he realised that he could not continue like this if he ever hoped to get married. At that time, his two sisters, Eileen and Birdie, were working in London and they advised him to come to London where, they told him, he would have no trouble getting a job. He made up his mind to go and arrangements were made whereby his sisters obtained a job for him as a door-to-door life insurance salesman. It is possible that one of his sisters also worked for the company.
One night when Walter and Peggy were down at his house having tea, Walter’s mother asked him what he was going to do about Peggy. So he told her his plan was to go to London himself first and then, having found a place to live and earned some money, to invite her to come over and join him. His mother had a very clear idea of what they should do: ‘Why don’t you get married first?’ she suggested.
They looked at her and my father made the decision there and then. He was always a very decisive man and in this case, once his mind was made up, they just had to organise it. Of course, my mother then had to make all the plans and see that everything worked out.
6
MARRIAGE AND LIFE IN LONDON
It was the right decision, as my father would not have been able to survive in London without Peggy and she would have been equally bereft without him. My mother knew that her father would never give her permission to marry so she had to plan the elopement. They contacted Larry Delacey, their friend at the Irish Times, and he knew of a priest, Fr Leo McCann, who acted as an unofficial chaplain to people in the theatre business. They made contact with Fr McCann and he agreed to officiate at their wedding. My mother had to get a letter of freedom from her parish priest, Canon Davis. She went to see the canon, told him of her plan, and asked him to provide her with the letter of freedom. His response was immediate: ‘What’s your father going to say to me when I tell him?’
The canon was a close friend of her father’s, but he knew Walter and his mother, and believed that Peggy’s future husband would look after her well, so he gave her the letter of freedom and wished her well.
The last production they appeared in together at the Taibh-dhearc, before they eloped, was between the 8–10 January 1937. My father and May Kilmartin were in the first play, An Feilm, a new play written by Seán Ó hÓgáin, and my father also played the man of the house in T.C. Murray’s play, Sovereign Love, with my mother playing one of his daughters.
When my father resigned his position in the Taibhdhearc, Frank Dermody gave him a great reference. It is dated 8 February 1937, the day before they married in Dublin:
To all whom it may concern
Walter A. Macken has been employed as leading man and business manager (at 30/– a week!) in the Gaelic National Theatre (subsidised by the Free State Department of Education) since July 1932, entering the theatre while still attending the Patrician School, Secondary Education Branch, Galway. Since then he has taken leading parts in thirty full-length and thirty-six one act plays – including well-known plays of George Bernard Shaw: ‘Arms and the Man’ etc.; Molière: – ‘Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme’ etc.; Sheriff: – ‘Journey’s End’; Gogol: – ‘Marriage’ etc.; W.B. Yeats: – ‘Caitlín Ní hUallacháin’ etc.; J.M. Synge: – ‘Riders to the Sea’ etc.; William Shakespeare: – ‘Macbeth’ etc.; Henry Gheon: – ‘The Marvellous Life of Bernard de Menthon’ etc.; Sierra: – ‘Two Shepherds’; Eugene O’Neill: – ‘Where the Cross is Made’; Lennox Robinson: – ‘The White-Headed Boy’ etc.; Lady Gregory: – ‘Jail Gates’ etc.; Dunsany: – ‘Night at the Inn’ etc.; Douvernois: – ‘Le Professeur’; Chekhov: – ‘Three Sisters’; Tolstoy: – ‘Michael’; as well as several original plays by Irish writers.
Mr Macken is in my opinion the most outstanding character actor (comedy and tragedy) in Ireland today not excluding the Abbey Theatre. My contention may be substantiated by a perusal of many press notices which he has received. As regards his personal character I have always found him to be honest, upright and trustworthy in every respect. Although his departure will be an irreparable loss to this theatre, nevertheless he carries with him into what we are sure will be a brilliant theatrical future the best wishes and recommendations of myself and my co-directors, knowing as we do that his success will also reflect credit on this theatre which he in no small way helped to bring to its present influential position in Irish Theatre.
They made their plans for their elopement and made all the arrangements during the Christmas holidays of 1936. They set the date – Tuesday 9 February, 1937. My father would travel to Dublin by train a few days beforehand and my mother would leave at the weekend. She packed one small suitcase with her essential clothes and looking around her bedroom regretted that she
could not take her violin and many of her books. Then she sat down at her desk and wrote a letter to her father. In it she explained to him how she loved him, but that she also loved Walter Macken and now they had decided to get married. It was a long letter and written lovingly, but sadly I do not have a copy. However, my mother told me about it in later years.
The cover story she gave to her family was that she was going to Dublin for a weekend break, although I am almost certain her sisters, and maybe even her brothers, knew what was happening. She then left her home and went to the railway station. She took the train from Galway to Dublin and arrived at Westland Row, now called Pearse Street. My father met her there; I think it was probably Monday 8 February and he brought her to a hotel right beside the railway station. They probably had tea in a local restaurant and then they retired to their separate guest bedrooms. This was 1937, and there was no question of an unmarried couple sleeping together.
I think my mother would have been missing her friends and her family, but would eventually have slept. She was woken up at about 2 a.m. by Walter knocking on her bedroom door. She opened the door and he came in. My mother described to me what happened:
He had got one of his feverish things, he was pouring sweat. [This was a type of nervous flu that my father got as a direct result of stress.]
I had to sit him down and calm him down. I asked him what was wrong with him. He looked at me and said: ‘This is an awful serious business you know, what we are doing tomorrow. It is marriage and it’s for life, that’s what frightens me.’
When she had calmed him down, he went back to his own room. The following morning they went out to the church in Fairview, and there waiting for them was Fr Leo McCann, the best man, Gearóid McKeown, and best woman, Josephine Delaney. It was the first time that Gearóid and Josephine had met and they later married, although their marriage eventually ended in divorce. After my parents’ marriage and mass, they all went to a local hotel and had a wedding breakfast, including the priest. Whenever Fr McCann met my mother or father down through the years, he would say to them, ‘When I tied that knot, I tied it well!’ After breakfast they made their way back to the railway station where they caught the boat train to Dún Laoghaire and then took the boat across to Holyhead. From there, they boarded the train to London and my father’s sisters met them there. They brought them to their flat in Ealing and helped them settle them in. They had a week to celebrate their wedding before my father started his job at the insurance company. My mother had taken one hundred pounds from her bank account at home and they had a great time, going to the cinema and eating in restaurants.
