Here is a quote from one of de Valera’s more remarkable radio broadcasts delivered in 1933:

The Irish genius has always stressed spiritual values … That is the characteristic that fits the Irish people in a special manner for the task of helping to save western civilization.

Being a year old when that claim was made, I knew nothing of the risk that saving the West might become part of a Fascist agenda – as it might have that same year, when Irish citizens, enticed by the Blueshirt movement, were flirting with Fascist plans. Luckily, these foundered when General O’Duffy, the potential Führer, lost his nerve.

A more tenacious spectre, however, was haunting our young Free State. When hopes of achieving a pious, all-Ireland Republic also foundered, hypocrisy – ‘the tribute vice pays to virtue’ – grew exponentially. Coercion ensured that our population would at least seem to be amassing enough prayer-power to help save the West – and that my age group would grow up in an age of pretence.

So how trust anyone’s memories?

I have been rereading Seán’s defiantly named memoir, Vive Moi, which he rewrote towards the end of his life. To spare my mother’s feelings, an edition published in the Sixties had made no mention of his love affairs.

Later, though, when he sensed love and identity slip away, he wrote an expanded version for publication after his death. This one too, though, missed completeness, not just through the paradox of that planned, posthumous gasconade, but also because, while wistfully reliving old loves, it failed to consider how they had affected my mother, or how best he and she might, in the time left to them, manage their mutual unhappiness. Instead, as his narrative advanced, her image receded – rather like those of the old comrades who vanished from group portraits in Stalin’s Russia. She was stoical, as women of her generation often had to be. Her health, perhaps because of this, broke down, and Seán, who, it now turned out, both needed and was exasperated by her, lived with her until 1988, when she died. Then he fell apart, got dementia, lusted impotently after a youngish woman who encouraged him so rashly that he lost his bearings, fought with his housekeeper, ran into the street inadequately clad – some said not clad at all – to rage like Lear at the human condition and shock the neighbours who wrote to tell me this.

When I flew back from California where I had been living, they invited me to tea so that I might be warned against the dangerous woman and hear how effectively they had concealed Seán’s sad antics from the editor of a national newspaper who lived in the same street. They were proud of having preserved decorum by keeping the incident out of the press. Virtue’s tribute had yet again been paid, and I, for once, was glad of this because, although Seán had fought hard against the wretched Censorship of Publications Act and other petty curbs, he also, when in his right mind, cared as much as anyone about privacy.

Which is why, when I was growing up, I knew none of his secrets. These emerged piecemeal, sometimes indecorously and, as often as not, confusingly, as secrets tend to do.

Confusing moments, as it happens, can be the ones which stay with you.

The rue Montpensier in Paris runs along the side of the Palais Royal garden, a place pulsing with memories of intriguing ghosts. It belonged to Philippe Égalité, the revolutionary duke who was guillotined by fellow revolutionaries in 1793, and whose illegitimate daughter, Pamela, married Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a blue-blooded Irish rebel whose story has striking echoes of her father’s. Lord Edward too plotted against his own class, and was then betrayed and apprehended with such violence that he died of his wounds in a Dublin jail. Just as compelling is the memory of Desmoulins, the firebrand whose speech delivered from a café table top outside the same Palais Royal sparked off the French Revolution. And so is that of the looting and arson which later revolutions unleashed there in 1848 and 1871. The memory which comes to me, however, when I find myself in the rue Montpensier, focuses on Seán. It is of a baffled moment when he and I came out of one of its restaurants, and having lunched too well and probably drunk a little too much, and being dazzled by sudden sunlight, I took a while to notice that he was weeping. This must have been in the autumn of 1953, so Seán, who shared the century’s age, was also fifty-three. He was embarrassed and apologetic, so I refrained from asking what was wrong.

I was shaken, though, for, being socially backward like most of my compatriots, I had always relied on him to be worldly and in control. He had been my mentor when it came to affairs of the heart, and thinking back I see that I must have known more about his than I let myself know I knew, though I remember guessing that his tears had to do with a woman.

With hindsight, his marriage to my mother strikes me as providing a small but telling illustration of how people in de Valera’s Ireland felt obliged to live.

As was true of large parts of that society itself, disappointed idealism and a soured personal experience of its quarrelsome and rebelly past contributed to the glue which held them together. When Eileen died, it was seventy years since she and Seán had first met as eighteen-year-old enthusiasts in a Gaelic class in Cork City. Ironically, in those days, de Valera was soon to become one of their heroes.

Did Seán ever let himself see how badly and often he hurt her? I’m not sure. Did I? Of course I did, but when their estrangement was at its worst, I was living abroad and trying to stretch the postgraduate scholarships which were enabling me to spend as many years as I could at the universities of Rome and Paris. So I limited my trips home and, when I did make one, I felt unable to help, except once, about two years after the scene in the rue Montpensier. By then I was entangled in my first serious love affair, which Seán manoeuvred me into ending by claiming that Eileen had threatened to leave him unless he got me to leave my lover – a French, North African, Jewish, Communist activist, scandalously unsuitable in the eyes of the Ireland of the day.

‘Your mother’, said Seán grandly, ‘is punching above her weight. She doesn’t realise that she couldn’t survive without me. And what’s worse, having issued her threat, she’ll be too proud to climb down. So it’s up to you to get us out of this mess. You’re the only one who can.’

This struck me as a mean passing of the buck.

‘Why should I believe him?’ I asked myself, and felt outrage both on her behalf and my own. But though his appeal might be a bluff, it seemed dangerous to call. Between us, I feared that he and I could indeed back Eileen into a corner and provoke her into some sort of craziness.

Could we though? Truly?

What made me think we could was a small secret of my own, a shy memory of how, when I was six, I had been in love with her. There is no other term for my feelings at the time. Shortly before my brother’s birth, I became excessively attached to her, and something – I forget quite what – tipped this state of mind towards recklessness. Perhaps she had been talking too happily about the new baby she planned to bring home from the Hatch Street Nursing Home or had shown off her preparations with too much pride. There was, I remember, a softly draped and canopied cot in which I would have enjoyed sleeping myself, if it had been big enough, with next to it a Moses basket heaped with crocheted coatees, bonnets and tiny shoes. All new! The sight made me so jealous that I went straight into her garden, where I picked and ate a selection of brightly coloured berries which I had been warned were poisonous. ‘Attention-seeking’ I suppose this would now be called or, more charitably, a ‘cry for help’. In the end it failed as both, when the berries turned out not to be poisonous after all. Nobody knew I’d eaten them, and I don’t even remember being sick.

In 1955, though, what the embarrassing, old memory brought home to me was the danger of making people jealous.

At the same time, I began to wonder whether, despite what Seán thought, Eileen might do very well without him. Better perhaps. She could still go beagling in Wicklow with her friend Lily and to point-to-point races and country-house auctions. Couldn’t she? For all I knew she might be happier? Maybe. But I couldn’t risk being wrong, even though she was still an attractive woman who, I knew, had in their early years as a couple been its live wire.

But now he was a successful writer and public figure, while she was a middle-aged housewife, and I wasn’t worldly enough to judge her chances of – well, what? – didn’t people speak of ‘Making a new life’? In Ireland, that didn’t happen often. Not then. Not for women.

And Seán back then was still dangerously good-looking. Someone might snap him up. They would certainly try. Quite recently I had noticed women brighten in his presence. He was burning with energy, long-legged and lean, with good cheekbones and an amused smile.

There are photographs to prove it.

For all I knew, however, he might have invented the story about her threatening to leave him. He was a fiction-writer, after all. Impish and a bit of a tease! When bored at a party, he was quite capable of opening a woman’s handbag, if he found one left on a chair, and shamelessly examining the contents. I had seen him do this more than once. If caught rifling through it, he would laugh easily, claim that this was research, then chaff the bag’s owner about secrets he would pretend to have found. Next, he might argue that writing and living needed to feed off each other. A good way to write a short story, he sometimes told young writers who came to tea, was to bring two narrative ideas together, make them interact and see what would happen. How could I be sure that he wasn’t doing this very thing with Eileen’s life and mine? ‘Leave him, or she’ll leave me,’ was how he had started our conversation. ‘I’m appealing to you for her sake.’

Was this true though? He could be manipulating me, just as Irish governments manipulated voters when they appealed to national pride, then forestalled further argument by banning abortion, divorce and contraceptives, and stepping up the censorship of films, newspapers and books.

All this to show that the Irish genius stressed spiritual values!

The notion that we were peculiarly virtuous was related to a view of history which held that not only the Reformation but also the Enlightenment had been disasters from which Catholic Ireland had been happily preserved. In return for this grace, we owed it to God, ourselves and the world to try to deserve it.

Citizens who failed to live up to the required image were rumoured to find ways of hiding their failures. And reportedly some of the ways found were so ruthless that when wind of them leaked out, the exposed cover-up risked generating a scandal greater than the one concealed.

For what if it came to be known – for example – that records had been tampered with to hide the fact that someone was a sibling’s child by their joint father? Things like that did happen. In villages near ours, they were rumoured to happen often, and gossips claimed that it was common for official records to piously misrecord incestuous births by ascribing parentage to an unmarried mother’s own mother or married sister. Today, Irish newspapers do report cases of incest, but back then the priority was to keep the Irish name untarnished. As a result, our only knowledge of that practice came from the Old Testament. But, as Catholics rarely read that, few learned of the misbehaviour of either God’s chosen people or our own neighbours, and I only did so because I had Protestant friends.

So de Valera was able to go on hoping that our piety might yet re-Christianise Western civilisation, as Irish monks had done in the sixth century.

Did we swallow that? Not quite. Did we disbelieve it? Not quite either. One can live in a blur.

Yet Seán and a handful of friends tried, when they could, to draw attention to the undemocratic connivance of elected politicians who, even up to the late Fifties, took orders in secret from unelected bishops. They had no pipeline to this conspiracy. As investigative journalists must, they pieced together the few facts which were known and with the support of groups like the Irish Association of Civil Liberties – which Seán, Christo Gore-Grimes, and Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, among others, had founded in 1948 – managed to pierce some of the veils and scrims behind which laymen and clerics lurked, while running a country in which cant had become a necessary product, and humbug a civic duty.

To survive in such a place, and report unwelcome truths, you needed to develop guile. Seán did, and the one time he used it on me was when he persuaded me to test myself and my French lover by staying apart for a year to see if we would keep faith with each other.

We didn’t, of course. Each of us blamed the other. And my parents’ marriage staggered on for another three decades. Then they died within three years of each other.

So how – to come back to my question – when looking back on a delusive and deluded country, can I trust my own memory, or tell whether I saw anything clearly in the first place?

Wondering about this, I try to remember my young self.

‘She’s easily flustered and highly strung!’

That was what my mother warned my husband to expect when she met him first, which was two years after I and my Frenchman broke up, and four years after I began to doubt Seán’s omniscience and savvy.

I had had doubts about these earlier, when he gave me a golden rule to help me decide whether or not to go to bed with a man. If I was to avoid self-dislike and moral squalor, I should, he advised, do so only when I was at least starting to fall in love. Properly, truly in love, he specified. This, in the Ireland of the day seemed benignly permissive, but it paralysed me. Am I in love, I would ask myself when the moment arose, then take my emotional temperature and freeze. Young men, taken aback by this, could be scathing. A handsome, charming but, to my mind, too matter-of-fact young Frenchman called Robert took me to dinner and then to the Bois de Boulogne, where he hired a boat and attempted to make love to me as we drifted into the dark. When given the frozen treatment, he said sourly, ‘So, you’re holding on to your little capital, is that it?’

He assumed I was a virgin, which by then I no longer was. The question bothering me was my emotional state, which depended on his and on the likelihood that feeling might play a role in this encounter – especially as I had just spent a year in Rome, where I had grown used to Italian readiness to indulge in patient, courteous, unconsummated foreplay, which allowed me and my male friends to warm ourselves in the glow of an old-fashioned amitié amoureuse.

The evening with Robert, an honest man and an adult, was a débâcle.

‘She’s the race-horse breed,’ Eileen warned my husband, Lauro, when they first met. She had taught in Ballinasloe, whose schools closed down during the days when the International Horse Fair was on to let everyone get an eyeful of the world-famous horseflesh. I imagined tremulous muscles quivering in a paddock, and wondered if that was really how I struck people, old schoolmates for instance. I wondered about this again when, on one of my visits back from abroad, a group of them gave a dinner for me. Women only. This made sense, since, if our aim was to remember the past, why drag along husbands? Inviting old teachers might have been interesting, though. They were all nuns, so they and we had not been close. But now – it was the Sixties – convent rules had changed. So might we not get closer? No? Perhaps not. Yet some were clever women who, if born in more prosperous times, could have had enviable careers. Would they, I wondered, have liked to know that some of us thought so? Again, perhaps not. They might even have mistaken the praise for pity.

I didn’t query either their zeal or their vocation – the divine call. But how can it be denied that the call was seldom heard once opportunities for women increased, even before the advent of the Celtic Tiger, as the Irish economy picked up?

The ones who benefited from generations of talented women being obliged to settle for teaching were, of course, their pupils. I know this because, in the Fifties, during the year I spent testing myself and my French lover, the Irish economy was at its nadir, so I went to London where I worked, among other jobs, as a supply teacher. This took me from a pretentious private outfit in St Albans to a rough one on the Mile End Road and in and out of many in between. Nowhere in this bird’s-eye view did I find the attentive efficiency of the Sacred Heart nuns. I didn’t see it later either, not in my son’s English prep school, nor in Bryanston nor at the French Lycée, which he had attended earlier in Los Angeles. This is not a puff for the nuns: their schools are now either quite gone or staffed by lay teachers, and that change must have put paid to the attentiveness my generation enjoyed, since lay teachers have a home life, whereas our only rival for the nuns’ attention was God.

Come to think of it, the Celtic Tiger’s brief prance owed them something, too, since one reason why international corporations set up businesses in Ireland was our well-educated population.

It is fair to admit though that, at the second convent school I attended, while the humanities were splendidly taught, we learned no science at all. The school was new and had no lab, so, while waiting for one to be built, the Department of Education let us substitute Thomistic Logic for the science subject which should have figured in our curriculum. Even now, I sometimes wonder if this left my thinking a little quaint.

How would I know?

At my old schoolmates’ dinner party, I marvelled as much at the intricately folded linen napkins as at the absent husbands who had presumably footed the bill for a display as immaculate as a feast-day altar. Perhaps I mouthed something about this, for a woman I didn’t recognise asked if I remembered the time I had turned up for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception wearing the wrong uniform.

‘You had on the grey everyday one instead of the white. You had to be hidden in the back. And you left your lily in the bus! Dropped it!’

‘Oh God! Did I?’

‘It wasn’t for God,’ she corrected. ‘It was for Mary! Mater admirabilis! Tower of Ivory, Hope of sailors! She should have transformed herself into a clippie and patrolled the buses looking for your lost lily. If it had turned up, we’d have had a miracle to our name.’

Hooting with laughter, voices down the table from us chorused, ‘Oh Mary, I give thee the lily of my heart. Be thou its guardian forever.’ Former Sacred Heart girls, I remembered now, had a reputation for going to the bad in later life. As this notion seems to have stayed current longer among the English than it did with us, it may have titillated English boyfriends.

So, I understood, inviting nuns would have been a bad idea.

Every year on 8 December during our schooldays, we were each expected to bring a St Joseph’s lily – one of those funnel-shaped ones a bit like a dentist’s drinking cup – to offer to the Virgin. In practice we were supplying the nuns’ flower arrangement, so it was no wonder that the loss of a lily under a bus seat was remembered. Ten shillings, I think it cost. Or five? Even that was a lot back then.

‘You thought me odd?’ I challenged my hostesses.

‘Ah no,’ they protested kindly. ‘Just scatty.’

‘Easily flustered?’

‘No, no,’ they soothed.

But clearly my mother had been right. Then I remembered that they had seemed odd to me. Several had chosen to go to Swiss finishing schools and none to college. Hence, perhaps, the origami-inspired napkins.

In our school timetable, Latin and cooking classes had invariably clashed, as though to emphasise that choosing between them marked a parting of the ways. ‘Domestic Science’ pupils seemed to cook what they liked, for I remember them as always making meringues. White as my lost lily, these would be laid out to tantalise our Latinist nostrils as we clumped hungrily past their kitchen. We were never offered any.

On a later return to Dublin, I was taken to another women-only party. This one was for Muslim girls who were there to learn English. I forget where they were from – Lebanon perhaps? – but I was impressed, both by their exquisite silks and by the flair of whoever had picked Dublin as a safe place for chaste young women. Earlier, Spanish girls had come for the same reason and, earlier still, while walking the Dublin streets, the poet Antonin Artaud had had a revelation to the effect that to cut out reproductive sex would, by abolishing humanity, save the world from sin.

That, an acquaintance told me, was a tenet of the ancient Bogomil heresy. Dubliners, then, knew things like that. Heresies, like science-fiction, offer an escapist view and also, judging by Artaud, the opposite.

It strikes me now that I may not have wanted our mater admirabilis to have the lily of my heart, so dropped it partly on purpose. Religion, in a country like ours, could become a trap. At the end of our final school year, nobody showed surprise when one or two quite worldly girls revealed plans to become nuns. I remember our hockey captain doing so, and that when someone said she had too much team spirit for her own good, nobody laughed. In the late Forties the farewell dance held to celebrate someone’s entering a convent was sometimes still held.

So how easily flustered was I? Now that I am at an age when forgetfulness might signal the onset of dementia, I would be happy to know of other blunders made in my teens. Reports of old gaffes mean that I have got better, not worse. And what about Eileen whom I abandoned to Seán’s unreliable care? After I left, she focused her energies on choosing and elegantly translating tales from the Irish sagas and turning her garden into an asset which doubled the value of the house so that it soared during the Irish property boom. None of us benefited, though, since Knockaderry had been sold before this happened. That was my fault. She had offered to hold on to it if I would agree to come and live there after she and Seán died, and I refused. I hope she never learned what leprechaun’s gold we might have had.

I console myself with the thought that for years she had enjoyed designing and working on the garden, which must have provided pleasure and therapy – not to mention pride. From 1937, when we moved in, she worked on it with the help of a succession of handymen and fed us as long as we stayed there on increasingly interesting vegetables, soft fruits and, eventually, apples and pears.

In 1937 Seán’s mind, too, was on a house, but perversely it was less on ours than on the decline and fall of an Irish ‘Big House’ which the novelist Elizabeth Bowen had imagined from an insider’s viewpoint in her novel The Last September, while he saw it from that of the rebels in his own story ‘A Midsummer Night’s Madness’. (Maria Edgeworth had, of course, got in long before either of them with Castle Rackrent.) Though Bowen’s novel had appeared in 1929, it was only now, eight years later, that he came across it. That was the year when he and Eileen left the US for England, so he must have been too busy settling into his job at Strawberry Hill to keep up with new novels. Now, though, he did read it and was captivated. He thought of its author as ‘an Irish Turgenev’ – an immense compliment, coming from him: not only because Turgenev was his favourite writer but also, as he started to see that his own novels were less successful than his stories, he blamed this on the narrowness of social experience in the new Ireland where, as he would note in his memoirs, ‘a great levelling had begun’. Comparing this new Ireland to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s New England, his memoirs quote Henry James’s reflections on the compassion one must feel ‘for a romancer looking for subjects in such a field’. The quotation continues: ‘It takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist.’ This complexity, wrote James, was sadly lacking in Hawthorne’s New England just as it was, Seán contended, in the new simpler Ireland.

As I type, my fingers slacken on the keys.

They itch to argue with him about the many powerful novels, even some of James’s own, which owe their punch to the narrowness of choice open to their protagonists. What about The Awkward Age and Washington Square, not to speak of The Golden Bowl? Need simplifies, and, in those books it is need, rather than complexity of manners, which drives their characters’ fate, as it does in Vanity Fair, Madame Bovary, Ethan Frome and great stretches of Dostoevsky’s narratives.

Meanwhile, Seán began to think of Elizabeth Bowen herself as ‘a dramatic character, strayed from perhaps The Last September, one of its young Irish girls become fifteen years or so older, married … more aware …’

The next – unacknowledged – step could have been to see himself also as a character, strayed perhaps from Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir, which he adored, one of whose great scenes shows the educated peasant, Julien Sorel, forcing himself to take hold of his snooty employer’s wife’s hand and hold on to it long enough to test his nerve. Did Seán make the analogy? His memoirs don’t say, but their musings about novel-writing conclude that ‘the Czarist Novel’ – remember he is thinking of Turgenev – ‘was written by an élite, about an élite, for an élite’ and finally admit that where this had been leading him was to stray, emotionally, albeit perhaps briefly, into a novel. Suffering from a nine-year itch (he had married my mother in 1928), he had developed a cerebral passion for his imagined ‘Irish Turgenev’. They hadn’t met, but to remedy this, an amused Derek Verschoyle, editor of The Spectator for which Seán sometimes reviewed, arranged a small luncheon party at his London club and, one may guess, prepared the ground by telling Elizabeth how keenly this ex-IRA man admired her. Seán was good-looking, and it seems that Bowen’s marriage, though solid, was unconsummated. So he and she began an affair. ‘Why’, he later remembered wondering during that lunch, ‘might I not learn as much from her about Woman as I had already learned from Turgenev about Writing?’

Interestingly, her next lover, the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie whom she would meet in 1941 and love for thirty years, considered her writing ‘infinitely more exciting … and profound than E. herself’. Inspiring cerebral passions seems to have been her forte.

Seán describes a final visit to her in London on 31 August 1939, when, as they ‘lay abed, passion sated’, her husband rang to say that the fleet had been ordered to mobilise, ‘Which means war.’ It also meant the end of their affair, since neutral Ireland would now be isolated and Elizabeth, when she did come over, would be doing so – though Seán did not know this at first – partly at the behest of the British Ministry of Information, who were eager to have her report on how Irish people felt about the English threat to take back the Irish ports.

A letter from her to a former lover, Humphrey House, describes Seán without naming him and says, ‘we are … very much in love. It doesn’t feel like a love affair. It feels like a marriage … He is the best (I think without prejudice) of the younger Irish writers. I only read any book of his last summer …’ She claims that she nearly wrote him a fan letter. Then that he wrote her a fan letter, so they met. This account of their manoeuvring is more hesitant and less Stendhalian than Seán’s, but probably slightly arranged – as no doubt is his. After all, both were writers. She says nice things about Eileen, mentions her husband and my five-year-old self, and says that, as they would both hate to upset anyone, ‘We are paying for our happiness by being very good. We are both, by nature, extremely secretive, which helps.’

The above information comes from their pens. All I knew at the time was that there was a bristle of tension in our house, that Eileen was restive and that Seán making trips not just to London but to Cork – and not to Cork City either, where his mother lived, but to Bowenscourt. Why, I heard Eileen ask, if he was going, as he claimed, to a house party, had she not been invited too? Airily implausible, he insisted that it was to be a professional gathering which only writers would attend. A likely story! And yet, given his view of Elizabeth as an Irish Turgenev, there was some truth to his claim. His interest was not only professional, but also a form of fieldwork.

Muted rows dragged on, and Eileen must at some point have met Elizabeth because, later, she disparagingly described her as wearing yards of fake pearls. No doubt they met at one of the dinners hosted by the Irish Academy of Letters, for Seán had meanwhile introduced Bowen to its founder, the aged Yeats, whom she apparently charmed.

Seán himself was mesmerised. He and Bowen had so much in common: County Cork, romanticism and its opposite, emotional doubleness, their restless age (when they met, both, like the century itself, were thirty-seven), short stories – they both wrote them, and she drew attention in her Faber Book of Modern Stories, which appeared that same year, to the fact that ‘the younger Irish writers’ had all carried arms. This remark fitted Seán’s case almost too neatly as, having both made bombs and carried a gun, he had indeed ‘carried arms’, but, as far as I know, he himself never turned them on anyone. He was proud of his marksmanship, though, and shooting was for years to be one of his hobbies. The story of his which appears in Bowen’s Faber anthology is The Bombshop.

It may have been their differences, though, which added spice. She belonged to the Protestant Ascendancy, but then so had Erskine Childers and he had run guns for the Volunteers, then become one of the hardest of hard-liners when the movement split. He was the man whom Seán replaced as ‘Director of Publicity for the First Southern Division’: an unwieldy mouthful in sore need of being compressed into a Soviet-style acronym. DIPFSOD perhaps? Such job descriptions were fated to grow glum towards the end of the struggle, when men began to be arrested so fast that more and more titles came to include the thespian word ‘Acting’. Seán himself would, as mentioned above, end up as Acting Director of Publicity for the entire, visionary Republic in whose name he kept issuing hopeless appeals until he was released by its Acting President and could honourably give up. By then de Valera too was in jail, and Childers had been caught carrying a revolver and executed – partly, I heard it surmised long afterwards, because his dash and gallantry got up some noses. As romance peeled away, it became a nasty little war.

Did it interest Bowen? Her novels, Seán noted, regularly punish romance, and The Death of the Heart (1938) does so icily. Judging by her surprisingly overwrought letters to Ritchie, she deployed both halves of her divided self in fictional encounters between her naïve heroines and the cads who make them suffer. So treachery was another topic which she and Seán had in common. Though Ritchie was the model for the lover in The Heat of the Day (1949) who proves to be a Nazi spy, it is likely that the theme had already come up in the late Thirties with Seán. He, like many old comrades, was smarting both from the treacheries arising first from the Civil War itself and later from the spectacle of de Valera sidling into his opponents’ Dáil.

De Valera lived and learned though, and Dev Mark 2 was no doubt a sharper statesman than the man whom Seán had once unreservedly admired.

We, meanwhile, had become pariahs – or so my mother said, meaning that we had lost friends. Soon, she warned, we might have none left at all, for not only would Dev’s followers, who had been Seán’s comrades during the Civil War, now join their old opponents in ostracising us, but Seán’s articles in the papers were making new enemies. The reason why passengers on our bus looked away when we boarded it, she claimed, was because they were conformists and afraid to say boo to a goose, let alone to be seen consorting with relatives of someone who had written controversial pieces in the morning paper or blown the gaff on a clerical intrigue. ‘Letting the country down’ in public, I learned, was a mortal sin to the men and women on the Killiney omnibus, whose hackles rose when Seán criticised the government or wrote – though this must have been later, possibly even after the war – about the brutal beatings being administered to pupils of the Irish national schools. These state-funded schools were non-fee-paying, so the priests who ran them were unlikely to be disturbed by letters, such as the timid ones Seán got from parents torn between a lively fear of upsetting the all-powerful clergy and anger at the violent injuries school teachers routinely inflicted on children. Violence back then was taken to mean beatings only, and the word ‘paedophilia’ was not, as far as I know, pronounced. Later, though, I heard Seán’s friend and solicitor, Christo, say that what went on behind closed doors would make a classical Greek tragedian blench, though no paper dared report it.

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, were 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.