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.

Yet it was with Marie, a quiet classmate of whom the nuns thought highly, that I managed to indulge the addiction to fear which I had contracted while trespassing with my mother. One day I persuaded her to try skipping school with me (this was called ‘mitching’), but I forget how we spent the stolen time. Perhaps I took her to visit some of my old acquaintances, like Mrs O’Reilly, several of whose doddery charges, I now realised, were amiably off their heads. Or perhaps our truancy was on one of the days when we walked down the coast to a stretch of rusted railway tracks which had been abandoned when the cliffs along which they ran became eroded. There were places where access roads to the beach ran under, and at right angles to, the tracks. They must once have been supported by some sort of girder but were now as airborne as telephone cables. Stepping out along yards of slim, unpropped and possibly crumbling track was pleasurably frightening, especially when Marie, standing some way off on terra firma, kept calling to me to come back, be careful, watch out, and remember that the road below me was paved with stones.

‘You’ll be killed,’ she moaned satisfyingly.

Eileen would have been no good as a companion here, where the risk was real, since she wouldn’t have let me run it. Besides, she was always busy now with her fairy tales (which I had outgrown), her garden and my small, but demanding, brother. Amazingly though, Marie let me persuade her to come with me on a more dangerous venture. There was a large cave at one end of the White Rock beach, used as a lavatory by swimmers. Its smell protected it, since nobody, other than myself and the anxious Marie, was prepared to walk through to the back, where the smell stopped and a number of underground passages fanned out into the dark. At least one was so narrow that we had to crawl through it on hands and knees and to come out backwards, since we couldn’t turn around. Another still narrower passage with a high roof led along a slippery clay shelf running halfway up an underground cliff, past the side of a possibly deep pool. The whole area was sculpted from compacted reddish mud, and we learned later that it had been a copper mine, though it had looked to us like blood on our first visits. Following the advice provided by adventure stories read in schoolgirl magazines, we brought along bicycle lamps, matches and candles, by which we would know, if they flickered out, that the air was no longer healthy. They never did, but the place was eerie, litter-free and, as far as we could tell, known to no one but us. Exploring it was an end in itself. We hadn’t expected to find bones or treasure, and had no practical purpose except to test our nerve and defy the adult world’s advice about being cautious and avoiding ‘useless, commercial trash’, which was how my parents described the school stories which, on the contrary and to our delight, had turned out to be so helpful. They didn’t supervise my reading at all closely, so I had often been enthralled by books found on their shelves which were clearly too grown-up for me, since their more exotic meanings remained opaque. Among these were The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Mr Norris Changes Trains, No Orchids for Miss Blandish and a novel by someone called Rayner Heppenstall, whom Seán must have known, for his novel was in galley sheets in our attic. Not quite understanding proved tantalising, and perplexity drew me on. It was a little like the excitement I felt when venturing into the copper mine, and reminded me too of the games I played with Jasmine. The books could have been written by near-aliens, or by the kindly, harmless, semi-human animals which she had invented for us to imitate so as to escape our banal selves. I don’t know whether my parents would have minded the odd selection I had made among their books if they had noticed it. Probably not, since most of my favourites were perfectly orthodox – I revelled in the adventure stories of G. A Henty, Baroness Orczy, Dickens, Hugo and Dumas Père, as well as in the polite world of Jane Austen and the entertainingly ordinary one of Richmal Crompton. The failure to warn me against less suitable books may have hinged partly on Seán’s dislike of the Censorship Board and partly on a Rousseauistic assumption that, just as falling into a fire was the best way of learning not to play with it, reading incomprehensible books would encourage better choices. At any rate, my parents’ only prohibition targeted ‘English trash’, by which they meant a paper called The Girls’ Crystal. They had not read it, but as it was for English children they suspected it of peddling alien values.

My third friend was Diana. A Protestant of a different sort from Jasmine, Diana was prim, slightly younger than myself, totally without a sense of humour and apt to deliver little speeches about manners, hygiene and the most appropriate way to blow one’s nose. It amused me to tease her by pretending to be a wild creature who had never even seen a handkerchief, but her readiness to believe this spoilt my fun. Which of us, I had to pause and wonder, was mocking the other? Surely she couldn’t be as prim as she seemed. Could she? She could. And yet it was she who got me into trouble with my school nuns. She lent me a book which was a source of unexpected scandal. The surprise was that this hadn’t happened until now, since some of my parents’ thinking would undoubtedly have upset the nuns. What I had not foreseen was that her book about someone called Darwin would do so even more. It was the first time I had come across his theory, so I elected to give my geography class the benefit of my discovery. The geography nun, who was older than the others, had decided, possibly with an eye to arranging short rests for herself, that in the course of the term, each girl in our class should prepare a brief talk on any topic she liked, so long as it had a connection with geography. I submitted the title ‘The Galapagos Islands’, which did not alert her to what was coming, so it was only after I had laboriously anatomised the unfamiliar heresy known as evolution that she began to worry. Perhaps she hadn’t been listening at first, for she let me talk on for quite a while before asking if what I was telling the class was supposed to be fact or fiction. Perhaps she had just remembered that my mother wrote fairy tales.

‘It’s science, Mother.’ You had to keep saying the word ‘Mother’ when you addressed a nun.

‘What sort of science? Let me see that book. Where did you get it?’

‘From a friend, Mother.’

‘A friend? What school does she go to?’

‘Glengara Park.’

‘That’s a Protestant school. Did you know that?’

‘Yes, Mother, but her parents are friends of my parents.’

That gave the nun pause. ‘Well,’ she decided, ‘I’ll have to get advice about this. Let me keep it for a few days.’

It turned out that evolution was erroneous and forbidden, and that the chaplain wanted a word with me. This news, I suspected, would not please the nun, who disliked priests or government inspectors or indeed anyone looking over her shoulder. Intrusiveness, even by other nuns, upset her, but her resentment applied most specifically to men.

‘Men,’ I remembered her exclaiming on an earlier occasion, while drawing a large, free-hand map of Ireland on the blackboard, ‘never give up a privilege. They hate letting women near the altar.’ Her hand wobbled with feeling as she said this, and I noticed that her Ireland was looking more and more like a cross between our rather chubby chaplain and a teddy bear. I was puzzled at priests – who else could she mean? – wanting to keep her away from the altar. ‘They don’t think,’ she warned, turning to address us, ‘that we can think for ourselves.’

I understood this bit, for my mother too liked to think for herself and, if advised to do something one way, would often do it in another. Sending me to school three years late was an example of this, and so was her failure to kit me out in the right uniform. Sometimes I wished she would do things like other people.

‘Who’s the little girl wearing England’s cruel red?’ a nun named Mother Fidelia had called out at assembly on my first day, ensuring that every head turned to stare at my scarlet hair ribbon.

‘You knew,’ I reproached Eileen when I got home. ‘You must have known it was the wrong colour.’

She was unabashed. ‘Ask that nun,’ she challenged, ‘where was she when your mother was fighting for independence.’

She was torn, though, for, while there was romance in despising the new ‘bourgeois’ Ireland, she wanted me to do well in it, so was unsure whether to scorn or join the new order. Ambition, for me, won, though there would be U-turns, like the times when she sent me out on to the road to collect droppings for her rose-beds. Due to the petrol shortage, horses, carts and old, mildewed cabs had by then been brought out of retirement, so my bucket was soon heavy with steaming, yellow horse dung, some of it still sweetly grassy and fresh. When I told her how worried I had been, lest someone from school see me scraping it off the tarmac, her response was always, ‘You should get rid of human respect.’ To help me do this, she might then sing The Red Flag, which had been written, she reminded me, by a County Meath man. I wasn’t sure whether she was indulging in self-parody, or if the parody was an excuse for savouring the corny but rousing words:

‘Join in,’ she sometimes invited, forgetting or choosing to forget that I had no ear.

During the Civil War, she and fellow members of Cumann na mBann – the IRA women’s auxiliary force – had sung that regularly while slow-stepping behind coffins at Republican funerals. Didn’t that prove that the English had no monopoly of the colour? Nor of aggression. Nuns, after all, could be very aggressive. Perhaps this came from living in a pack. Like wolves?

‘Be sure you tell me,’ she advised out of the blue, ‘if any of them give you trouble.’

‘Any of whom?’

‘Nuns.’

Confused and at cross-purposes, we stared at each other. In those days confusion was as common as mist.

Somewhat at random, I asked, ‘What is a community?’

I had been hearing the word at school which was strictly divided between ‘community rooms’ – off-limits to pupils – where the nuns ate and slept, and those where we had lessons. Any girl, it was whispered, who ventured into the nuns’ domain was violating the privacy of the brides of Christ and could be expelled. Perhaps even excommunicated? To see nuns in their underwear or with cropped heads uncovered would be a sacrilege.

Yet, it mightn’t be. A girl called Ann in the class below mine lived in a house whose garden bordered the convent grounds. Sometimes, she confided, she hid in the bushes which formed a barrier between the two properties and watched nuns bathing in a sea-water pool. The high tide filled it, surging in over rocks.

‘I saw Mother Fidelia,’ Ann told us, ‘wearing a long, thick nightdress and bobbing up and down in the water. That’s all any of them do. Maybe they think sport is worldly.’

‘Or maybe the nightdress is too tight?’

It wasn’t tight, she told us. It floated to the surface when the nun bobbed down.

I saw her other listeners try, as I was doing myself, to visualise this. We couldn’t help being fascinated. A taboo was being broken. And taboos in our twelve-year-old world – we must by now have been twelve – focused either on sex or, as in this case, on its rejection. That was what cropped heads and forbidden community rooms came down to. Sex was the satanic snake whose clammy neck the Blessed Virgin’s triumphant foot crushed in paintings hanging in convents all over the city. It was at once absent and present. Just visible under the hem of her lapis-blue gown, its sly emergence seemed to be part of herself.

Finding this thought too furtive for words, we averted our eyes from each other, and fell silent.

Turning to the safe topic of sleeves, a girl called Stella insisted that these could be too tight to permit swimming. ‘That,’ she reminded us, ‘was why women used to be allowed to serve underarm at tennis. Their sleeves were too tight at the armpits for them to raise their arms. You see that in old photos.’

‘How high did the nightdress float?’ another girl wondered. ‘Did it leave her legs bare?’

The imagined sight of Mother Fidelia’s legs, fish-pale in murky sea water, was fascinating. The limbs, Ann claimed, had been tightly joined and as neat as a mermaid’s tail. Mermaids must have died out like garments with tight armholes.

‘Isn’t that what your evolution heresy says happens?’ Stella remembered. ‘What, by the way, did the priest have to say about it when you saw him?’

‘Not a lot,’ I told her. ‘He asked why I wanted to think my ancestors were monkeys, and when I told him that that wasn’t what the book said happened, he didn’t listen.’

A pious girl said, ‘You’re lucky he didn’t burn it. Looking into things like that could be dangerous. So is spying on nuns.’

Ann, wanting the last word, said she had every right to sit in her parents’ garden and look wherever she chose. This was true, so, though letting property rights trump religion made us uncomfortable, we didn’t argue. She, who had actually glimpsed bare nunnish flesh, seemed less prurient than the rest of us, who had only imagined it – so how could we?

The religious order which owned our junior school wasn’t the only one to have snapped up big houses which had been sold off when the Free State took over. Its grounds sloped down to the edge of the sea, and relics of old finery subsisted indoors, especially between the tall windows of what might once have been a ballroom. The chief relic, a mirror surrounded by gilded carving, stretched from the top of a marble console table to a lofty ceiling. It might once have been part of a larger display which had been removed by the nuns as being too worldly. The mirror itself could not be removed, and they were clearly glad of this for, when interviewing parents, they boasted happily about their school’s charm. None of them, they were keen to point out, owned anything personally (‘Not even our clothes,’ they would say, and point to the ones they were wearing), for they had each taken a vow of poverty. That, though, did not prevent their rejoicing in the convent’s good fortune in having attractive surroundings for pupils to enjoy.

Mother Fidelia, as head of the junior school, was particularly prone to rejoice. She was a pretty nun about whom I sometimes dreamed. Her flowing habit reminded me of Maid Marian’s clothes in the film of Robin Hood, and, though sorry that the black habit was a touch funereal, I felt that this was compensated for by the strangeness – even mystery – of someone as pretty as she being a nun. So my feelings about her were mixed. Once or twice I began to develop a crush on her, only to remember and resent the ridicule to which she had exposed me on my first day in school. She hadn’t done anything like this again, because Eileen had made it her business to let her know that she would not tolerate my being bullied. She had visited the school, talked pleasantly about her experience working as a teacher in Boston and London, and established herself as someone who might, if provoked, make trouble. At first I didn’t understand that this was what she was doing even though, as she herself told me later, it was I who had signalled to her that this nun was dangerous. The incident with the red ribbon was only a small part of the picture which Eileen had been building up from my chatter. Having herself taught in a convent school in London, she was aware of the furtive and blatant improprieties that could go on in such places. In the English school, she told me years later, the head nun, a hard-nosed Kerry woman, had actually ordered one of the lay teachers to open the sealed envelopes containing state exam papers on the day of the maths exam, go through the questions with the girls and give them the answers. The teacher, being not only lay but also English and young, was so stunned by the experience that she did as she was told, then resigned from her job.

‘There was a conflict of loyalties,’ Eileen explained. ‘You get that with nuns. In the mind of a woman like that, keeping English rules would always take second place. She’d see helping Catholic pupils to do better than those in secular schools as her first duty.’

‘So she got away with cheating?’

‘The lay teacher’, Eileen guessed, ‘may have despised her, then felt ashamed of this and so been too deferential. I, being Irish, could have stood up to the nun, but the English woman couldn’t.’

‘But you didn’t denounce her either?’

No, Eileen admitted. She hadn’t. She too had left soon after that to come back to Ireland.

I guessed that the old Irish hatred of traitors was the reason, but didn’t ask. Instead I said, ‘Well, there are no English people in our school.’

‘Just as well.’

‘Yes.’

Later, though, it struck me that there were one or two pupils from England who at the beginning of the war had been evacuated to the school and who, because their parents were far away, were vulnerable to bullying. One of the boarders had told me that Mother Fidelia patrolled the dormitories armed with a cane and sometimes savagely beat girls whom she caught talking after lights out – even more savagely if she caught them going into each others’ beds.

Mother Fidelia? I was astounded.

‘She’s different with us,’ said the boarder, ‘from how she is with you. And she’s especially hard on the girls from England.’

One night, hearing me talk in my sleep about cruelty and possibly worse, Eileen woke me up. I fell asleep again, however, almost as soon as she left the room, and plunged into a dream in which Maid Marian was beating me and turning into a nun. Confused by my own feelings, I began to feel guilty. Apparently I then went back to talking in my sleep, but when Eileen questioned me about my nightmare at breakfast, I said I had forgotten what it had been about.

I hadn’t, though.

In school the day before, there had been whispers about some trouble that had broken out in the dormitories, about which the boarders didn’t want to tell us. They were clearly shaken, and a girl whom I shall call Jill, one of the evacuees, was led into our classroom. We had been drawn up in a circle and she was now made to stand in the middle. She had pink weals on her legs, was wearing a dunce’s cap, and her face was completely distorted and swollen. This terrified us. Such treatment had not been seen before. Not anyway by me, but not, I think, by any of the other day girls either.

‘She’s bad, a very bad girl,’ said pretty Mother Fidelia gravely. ‘I want each of you to say so in Gaelic.’ Then she pointed to the member of our class who was to start doing this and did.

‘Is cailín dána í,’ the girl said sullenly. It was clear that she disliked doing so. ‘She’s a bad girl.’ Our Gaelic wasn’t up to dealing with situations of any complexity – and anyway we didn’t know what this one was about.

‘Louder,’ commanded the ruthless Mother Fidelia. ‘Say it again.’

The girl did, and so did the next and the next, until half the circle had agreed that Jill was bad and so, by implication, deserved what she had so clearly got. Then it was my turn. Impotence numbed and strangled me. I felt that I had somehow brought this on the victim by indulging fantasies about the horrible chameleon nun. She was, I now saw, a horrible woman, and the gleam of evil in her was what I had mistaken for charm. Whatever she was up to had nothing to do with keeping order, lessons, or the ‘duty towards God’, which I had heard her claim as her reason for punishing bad children for the good of their souls.

‘Say it,’ she ordered me impatiently when I hesitated, and gave me a look which at once reminded me of Eileen’s warning about her being dangerous but also of the useful fact that I – was the nun forgetting this? – had back-up. ‘Is cailín maith í,’ I said fast and loudly before I had time to change my mind. ‘She’s a good girl.’ The pious bully, being as aware as I was that things could now turn nasty and even get into the press, spat out the word ‘stupid’ and moved quickly on to the next pupil. I knew I hadn’t done much. My attempt at solidarity was not only inadequate, but might have hurt the victim by reminding her that other people had more support than she. This, of course, is speculation, and I never knew what she felt, as she neither blinked nor looked either at me or anyone else. She was totally expressionless, seemed inert and frozen and probably wasn’t thinking of us at all. Why would she? We couldn’t help her. Her parents were in England and must have been telling each other that that nice, friendly Mother Fidelia was looking out for their daughter who must surely be better off in neutral Eire than she would have been living with them under German bombs. By now, however, the war was coming to an end, and that stickler for etiquette, de Valera, had already astonished the world by paying a visit to the German minister, Dr Hempel, to condole with him on Hitler’s death.

Meanwhile I left the school, though I forget quite how this came about. The incident with Jill must have taken place shortly before the start of the summer holidays – the nuns’ sea-bathing indicates that. What must have happened was that Eileen’s intuitions about Mother Fidelia, sharpened by whatever ravings of mine she heard when I was asleep, led her to remove me before the end of term. So I never heard how the trouble between nun and victim was resolved, because by the autumn I was attending a new school which had just opened in Monkstown, some miles north of my old one. It was run by Sacred Heart nuns and was calmly efficient, unlike the anarchic and intermittently brutal one I had left. It was also slightly out of line with the mainstream of Irish education. This pleased Eileen, even though the divergence was to the right rather than the left. Despite her devotion to The Red Flag, she was relieved to find that my new teachers would be as different as possible from the erratic peasants in habit and wimple on whom she and I now turned our backs.

Memories of post-revolutionary France affected the Monkstown curriculum, which was short on Gaelic, strong on plainchant and required us to curtsy to the top nuns who, like my mother, adopted a high moral tone. Cramming they despised, for they aimed, they said, to educate, and exams were nothing to them if, despite getting us late, they could turn us into ladies and true Children of the Sacred Heart.

‘You will all have to be unmade and remade,’ said our Mistress of Studies as coolly as if we had been so many jumpers whose kinked wool she needed to unpick. It was clear that she knew she could do it, but also that she would have her work cut out. We would later discover that she had been chosen as a troubleshooter and brought from one of the order’s houses in Scotland to set the new school on its feet and form us into a unit. She was a Latin teacher, too, and, as most of us had done no Latin at all, whereas my class should – if I remember aright – have been starting our third year of it, she had to start us off and speed us ahead to catch up. Which she did. She was good at her job and, now that Ireland has had two successful women presidents, it strikes me frequently that in the years when women like her had few opportunities to use their talents, there must have been many mute inglorious Mary Robinsons hidden away in convents. Our Mistress of Studies was one of them. Her name was Mother Hogan and she could have run the country.

She impressed my mother and, more surprisingly, Seán, who had till then taken no interest in my education. Now, however, he wrote Mother Hogan a letter saying, among other things, that he hoped the new school would have some lay teachers, since girls of my age might need access to women with some experience of the world to whom they could turn for advice.

Mother Hogan invited him to tea. I don’t know what they said to each other, but the meeting seemed to have been a success. They must have amused and challenged each other, for I think there were subsequent teas. She wanted him to know that nuns were less unworldly than he thought, but may have been hampered in her argument by convent etiquette. If she stuck to the rules, she would not have had tea herself, but would have sat there watching him drink his. The tray, unless she countermanded the usual arrangement, would have arrived with a single cup and saucer, and departing from custom might have been tricky. I wonder if she did arrange for a second cup. I should have asked him.

Since he was in and out of trouble over libel, and had acquired a reputation as an anticlerical who didn’t hesitate to assail the pillars of Church and State, it may seem odd that I was being taught by nuns at all, let alone by those belonging to an order which – as they would proudly inform us – had been founded to prepare the mothers of France to teach their sons to resist revolutionary thinking.

It was not odd, though, in the Forties.

I had to go to a convent because in those days schools in Ireland were denominational; almost none were mixed; and if you went to the wrong one, as my small brother did when a Protestant kindergarten opened across the road from our house, a priest appeared on the doorstep to protest. Religion was a tribal badge, and my parents wanted neither to leave the real Ireland, nor to relinquish their feeling for the ideal one whose image had animated the nationalist struggle.

Yet it is fair to say that Sacred Heart schools were less nationalistic than others. The order’s Mother House was in Rome, and the curriculum approved there could probably not find much space for Gaelic. This context is unlikely to have been mentioned over the tea cup – or cups. But I could tell that the conversation had been enjoyable. I could tell it by Mother Hogan’s brightening when she mentioned meeting Seán, and his doing the same when he mentioned her. He always liked clever women.

Frank O’Connor, Three Old Brothers and Other Poems, 1936.

Was St Patrick, Ireland’s first bishop, arrogant, and did he, like many of his successors, lift his crozier too high? My guess is that, as he was more myth than man, nobody knows, especially as I recall my father’s great friend, the Celtic scholar D. A. Binchy, telling us that colleagues of his had come to think that there could have been two or even three St Patricks. Of more immediate interest here is the likelihood that O’Connor’s poem about the pagan Oisín (pronounced Usheen) defying the saint may have been fuelled by anger against recent Irish bishops.

Politically, their lordships were often autocratic. They had condemned the Fenians in the 1860s and during the Civil War ruled armed resistance to the new, legally elected government to be immoral, thus virtually excommunicating the whole Republican side. Some went further, including the bishop of Cork, who instructed his clergy to refuse Republicans the sacraments. This rankled bitterly with Seán’s and Frank’s comrades who, when defeated, on the run, and at risk of being shot out of hand if caught with guns, must frequently have felt in acute need of absolution lest, by dying in a state of mortal sin, they go to a worse hell than the one they were in, which was after all what the bishops had ordered their flock to believe. Knowing this, a number of Cork priests, some of whom may have had Republican sympathies, disobeyed their bishop whose ukase, as Seán later wrote, ‘was considered by all Republicans an abuse of clerical power. It was never to be forgotten or forgiven.’

He himself did not forgive it, and when my brother and I were small, one of Seán’s best-kept secrets was that, if he was a Catholic at all, he was no longer a full-time one. As there was nothing unusual about members of a household going to different churches, and there were three within walking distance of our house, it would be years before I guessed that on Sunday mornings he and Binchy were likely to be walking out Dún Laoghaire Pier when the rest of us supposed them to be at Mass: a shift designed to avoid giving scandal to Binchy’s housekeeper, his and our neighbours and my brother and me. A similar ambivalence must have driven generations of Irishmen to take similar measures, some of whom believed in but no longer practised their religion, while others disbelieved but shrank from breaking with their community. Despite endless conversations on the topic, I don’t know to this day to which category Seán belonged and I suspect that neither did he.

He was tough when it came to criticising the actual Church and State, but all toughness melted before the memory of his and Eileen’s love affair with Gaelic culture and their first encounter with it by the shores of Lake Gougane Barra. So on wartime holidays we went back regularly to remember their youth, as old friends foregathered and danced and sang to old tunes, and Father Traynor, who planned his summer visits to coincide with theirs, said Mass in Gaelic in the small lake-island church which Seán attended, presumably more from friendship than fervour.

Years later I learned that anti-clericalism had been infinitely harsher elsewhere than it ever was in Ireland. The French Revolution, after all, had seen priests guillotined; Mexico, to this day, forbids any but Franciscans to wear clerical dress in public, and I met a man in Italy whose parents had given him the name Ateo, meaning ‘Atheist’. An Irish equivalent – ‘Atheist Murphy’, say, or ‘Atheist Ó Faoláin’ – is imaginable only as a bar-room joke. This is partly because anti-clericals often remained friendly with ordinary priests who, in relaxed moments, were apt to confide that they suffered more from overbearing bishops than the laity ever did. And indeed it was when Seán went into print with jokes about how Bishop Browne of Galway bullied his clergy that Browne launched a libel action. Such was my mother’s innocence and my own (I am going back now to when I was eight), that we were slow to see the danger of this, for I clearly remember us being cheerily hailed, when out walking, by young priests who asked us to relay their congratulations to Seán on his having stood up to the bully. We agreed light-heartedly. Soon, though, it grew clear that, given Browne’s resources and the bias of English libel laws in favour of plaintiffs, Seán could not fight him in court. Neither did his publishers intend doing so. On the contrary, in a letter to The Irish Press, they disowned and apologised for his book. And I, as a child moved by impotent fury, became an anticlerical of the extreme sort which Italians call a mangiaprete or ‘priest-eater’.

Seán had been rash – or else had been trailing his coat. ‘Truly,’ he had written of Galway, ‘I never met such a place for scandalous gossip … I wonder, is it libellous to repeat the sad tale of the bishop and the curate, as I heard it in a Galway pub?’

One can only marvel at Seán’s chutzpah. He proceeded to describe Browne as ‘an arrogant-looking man, much in favour, I gather, with the de Valera government; not so much in favour with the clergy.’ ( Who, it is clear from what follows, were forbidden to go to the cinema.) ‘At any rate,’ Seán reported, ‘one afternoon the blonde at the box-office heard a voice over the telephone asking if Father X was inside at the show. On asking whose the voice was and on hearing the thunder of “This is the bishop” the blonde said, “Yerrah g’wan out of that! Are you thrying to pull my leg?” Finally the bishop had to drive down himself, and the terrified blonde was sent in for Father X, who of course said to her, “Yerrah g’wan out of that! Are you thrying to pull my leg?” At last, so the story would have us believe, he was induced to come out, and the poor man found his bishop waiting in the foyer like a figure of the Wrath of God. One version of this awful parable for sinners is that the bishop whirled him off straightaway to his new parish at the back of God-speed …’

The above extract is from An Irish Journey, a travel book on which Seán and his old Wicklow neighbour, Paul Henry, collaborated and which Longman published in 1940, Paul supplying illustrations and Seán the text. The bit about the bishop echoes an oral tradition which contrasts with the high flown Yeatsian vision of Ireland. It strikes me, though, as I write this, that Yeats’ s Crazy Jane poems echo the oral tradition too. He could be earthy when he chose – and give hell to bishops.

Here is Jane’s view:

But now Yeats had died, and the gentry who had presided over the Irish literary revival had passed the baton to native writers whose taste was for the specific, the realistic and the down-to-earth.

That same year, along with Peadar O’Donnell, one of Ireland’s rare Marxist activists, Seán launched The Bell, a monthly magazine which promised that, with readers’ help, it would focus on ‘the realities of Irish life’. ‘This is Your Magazine’ was the title of Seán’s first editorial, inviting contributions which might help it evolve. ‘That’, wrote Seán, ‘was why we chose the name The Bell. Any other equally spare and hard and simple word would have done; any word with a minimum of associations … All our symbols have to be created afresh …’ Meaning, I suppose, that they wanted no rags of old rhetoric, either Celtic or pious. Seán and Peadar were making a stand against the Age of Pretence. What The Bell needed, they told possible collaborators, were documentary articles about aspects of Irish life which the authors themselves knew at first-hand. Isolated by neutrality, Irish writers had both a need and an opportunity to renew themselves.

So, in among fiction and verse, the magazine published pieces which reported on, among other topics, the experience of living in an Irish slum, an orphanage and a prison, schoolteaching, migrant workers, a new hat factory set up in Galway by a Jewish refugee, the art of window-dressing, and three extracts from a forthcoming book recording the thoughts of the bilingual Tim Buckley, one of the last of the Seanachaí or story-tellers who lived close to Gougane Barra. Buckley, known as ‘the tailor’, though it had been some time since he had worked at the trade, was famous for his mental independence, which locals and visitors alike crowded into his small cabin to enjoy. However, when a writer called Eric Cross made a record of the tailor’s musings and published them in English with an introduction by Frank O’Connor, the book was promptly banned as ‘indecent and obscene’. Not only were the bewildered old tailor and his wife, Ansty, now boycotted by neighbours who grew ashamed of having enjoyed the old man’s salty wit for years, but worse still ‘three louts of priests’, as O’Connor described them, came round and forced the old man to go down on his knees and burn his copy of the book in his own fireplace. Meanwhile the scandal sparked off a sanctimonious four-day debate in the Irish Senate, reading the official record of which was, wrote O’Connor, ‘like a long, slow swim through a sewage bed’.

The senators’ rancour was almost certainly due to pique at finding that traditional Gaelic-speakers, whom, as patriots, they affected to admire, were neither as pious nor as genteel as they had wanted to think. Indeed, when one speaker read out examples of what he considered to be the book’s obscenities, another demanded that these be struck from the Senate records, lest members of the public start going through them in search of smut.

The year the tailor died, we took our usual holiday in Gougane, but, though we called to condole with Ansty (short for Anastasia) he had already been buried. Seán, however, wrote one of his best stories, The Silence of the Valley, about an imaginary visit to attend his wake.

Rereading extracts from The Tailor and Ansty, first published in The Bell in March 1941, I have just come on the tailor’s thoughts about animals. ‘There is a change somehow,’ he tells Cross. ‘The animals are getting more daring and more intelligent. They are thinking more and they are learning the way we think too. They are not stupid. It is we who are stupid to think they are …’

I was nine when I first read that. It impressed me then and still does, especially as more people seem to think like that now. Here in the West, anyway, animals have come up in the world.

Elsewhere in Cross’s book the tailor observes that, though a number of people who dropped into his cabin had written books and taught in universities, ‘the airiest, wittiest men that ever walked into me were the men who walked the roads’, adding that ‘if a man does not use his own eyes and ears and mouth and intelligence, he may as well be dead. There’s no man living can’t see a new wonder every day of his life, if he keeps his eyes open and wants to see.’

This implicit rebuke to bookishness reminds me of the prolific Maupassant’s claim that he himself didn’t need to read much because he found the raw material for his fiction by looking carefully at what was going on around him. He even trained both his mother and his valet to report to him on any drama they might come across which he could use in his stories. Perhaps the men who walked the roads performed the same service for the tailor?

Remembering this reminds me of my own mother’s zestful talent for providing writer friends with copy. Eileen had a flair for spotting promising situations and working up what she heard, and I now keenly regret failing to write a tribute, while she was alive, to her bravura when playing this rarely acknowledged role which bridges the oral and literary traditions. Both O’Connor and Seán based short stories on her field reports and, at least once, years later, so would I. The piece I thought of writing about her was to have been called The Straight Woman, in memory of those music-hall actors, known as ‘straight men’, who fed comedians lines designed to help make rehearsed witticisms seem spontaneous. Oliver Gogarty, a Dublin wit and poet, actually got her to give him cues like this at one or more of Yeats’s Irish Academy dinners. Perhaps all the old wits achieved their effects by such secret preparation? I remember reading that Mahaffy, who had been Oscar Wilde’s tutor at Trinity College and was a friend of Gogarty’s, had done something of the sort. So the tradition may always have been a collaborative one which the cult of an airy amateurism led artful wits to present as artless.

Gogarty was a surgeon as well as a poet, and one of Eileen’s less cheerful memories was of his chatting away while taking out her tonsils without an anaesthetic. He showed them to her at once and was about to take them to the next room to show them to Seán, when she managed to rally and dissuade him, since Seán might have fainted. Doctors who examined her throat later told her that the poet had done a perfect job. And he charged her nothing.

As her stories were often about acquaintances, libel actions were a risk. Publishers, in the Thirties and Forties, were almost always English and so subject to the harsh English libel laws. Yet Dubliners continued to sue and to risk being sued, and it is hard not to think that this activity was providing them with some of the buzz and challenge that conspiracy had done for earlier generations. It was sometimes seen too as a handy source of cash. Yet not all libel victims could or did sue. Take the case of Gogarty himself, recognisably the original of Buck Mulligan in Joyce’s Ulysses, but, although meanly lampooned by Joyce, who had sponged on him and then suggested the reverse in his novel, he did not sue. Perhaps, as Ulysses had been published in Paris, he couldn’t. Instead, in 1937 he was himself sued by an uncle of Samuel Beckett’s, who claimed that his grandfather had been described in Gogarty’s semi-fictional memoir as a usurer and a man partial to little girls. Gogarty had to pay £900 plus costs, which doubled his loss. Passing on the pain, like a character in La Ronde, he then sued the penniless poet Patrick Kavanagh who, in describing a call he had paid on him, had written in his memoir, The Green Fool, ‘I mistook Gogarty’s … maid for his wife or his mistress.’ Gogarty’s objection to this seems to have been that the text brought the words ‘wife’ and ‘mistress’ indecently close. Since the unfortunate Kavanagh had only recently come from his stony, Monaghan farm, his innocence seems blatant, especially as not only Joyce but also Gogarty’s own poems had portrayed Gogarty himself as a buck. One of those included in Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse which had come out in 1936 goes as follows:

Though the poem defamed its author’s domestic arrangements more effectively than poor Kavanagh did, Gogarty got £100 in damages; the book was withdrawn, and Kavanagh, though he had been a frequent visitor to our house, must have decided that, as Dubliners were twisters, he would be one too and sue Seán for publishing a poem of his in The Bell without permission. Seán claimed that they had agreed viva voce that he could publish, but had no written proof. This must have led to speculation in the pubs, for, on running into Kavanagh in one of them, Michael Scott, the leading Irish architect of the day, asked him why he was being so litigious. The poet, in his splendidly gravelly and wistful voice, said, ‘I might make a few pounds.’ Scott immediately offered to supply these from his own pocket if Kavanagh dropped his action. Kavanagh took the money but went back on his word, so Scott said he’d sue him – and, as often happened in Dublin, the thing fizzled out. Libel threats, however, continued to amuse some and worry others, and I can still summon the perplexity I felt when, at breakfast one morning, Eileen laughed in relief on finding a sonnet in the Irish Times by a writer, called Arland Ussher, which called Seán a yahoo.

‘Thank God!’ she exclaimed. ‘Now that Ussher’s vented his rage he won’t sue over the hatchet-job of a review Seán published of his book.’

Alerted to the volatility of Dublin’s hungry jungle, Seán now arranged for the solicitor, Christopher Gore-Grimes, to vet for libel everything he was thinking of publishing. ‘Christo’, a yachtsman and a sportsman whose solicitors’ firm was well established, may have enjoyed the risk of finding himself maligned – libelled even – by writers with whom this activity brought him into contact. Honor Tracy, who was to arrive in Dublin in 1946, wrote satirical novels, one of which described a character based on him as having ‘bog water coming up through his Trinity accent’. Christo didn’t mind. And Honor, a woman of nerve, went on to provoke a Kerry parish priest who promptly sued the Sunday Times, where she had reported on the extravagance of his living arrangements and the cost of his new bathroom. The paper apologised on her behalf, whereupon she sued its proprietor and became the only person I ever knew or heard of who simultaneously took on the Irish Church, the English libel laws and Kemsley newspapers and won. In those years of few jobs and less industry, libel actions were a lively form of gambling. My admiration for her was infinite. According to Google, she was awarded damages of £5,000. Think what that would have bought in 1954.

But before then a lot of Liffey water would flow under the bridges.