As a matter of historical fact I know that I was born in 1903 when we were living in Douglas Street, Cork, over a small sweet-and-tobacco shop kept by a middle-aged lady called Wall, but my memories have nothing to do with living in Douglas Street. My memories begin in Blarney Street, which we called Blarney Lane because it follows the track of an old lane from Cork to Blarney. It begins at the foot of Shandon Street, near the river-bank, in sordidness, and ascends the hill to something like squalor. No. 251, where we lived, is one of the cottages on the right near the top, though I realize now that it would be more properly described as a cabin, for it contained nothing but a tiny kitchen and a tiny bedroom with a loft above it. For this we paid two and sixpence – sixty cents – a week.
Up here we were just on the edge of the open country, and behind the house were high, windy fields that are now all built over. A hundred yards farther up the road the country proper began, and there a steep lane called Strawberry Hill descended past my first school into the classy quarter of Sunday’s Well. The Women’s Prison was at the foot of this lane, where it turned into Convent Avenue, and beside the Women’s Prison was the Good Shepherd Convent. The convent had a penitentiary for ‘fallen’ women and an orphanage, and it was in the orphanage that Mother had been brought up. At the foot of Convent Avenue on the left was a house where Mother had been a maid for eight years with a family called Barry, and where she had been happier than at any other time in her life. To the right was a shop the owner of which had once wanted to marry her. All these places were full of significance to me – the convent because my mother and I often visited it to see Mother Blessed Margaret and Mother of Perpetual Succour, who were her friends there, the Barrys’ house because of the elegance of the life that Mother described in it, and the shop because of a slight feeling of resentment at the thought that if only Mother had been sensible and married a rich man I should have had a pretty elegant life myself.
That was the exalted end of Blarney Lane. At the other end it descended to the river and across the bridge to the North Main Street, where Mother took me shopping, and beyond the North Main Street, over another bridge to Douglas Street, where we had lived, and where my mother’s brother, Tim O’Connor, had a cobbler’s shop just across the street from Miss Wall. My memories of the cobbler’s shop are hazy; I can remember my uncle only when he was dying in the South Infirmary of dysentery he had contracted in the Boer War; and yet I seem to have a very vivid recollection of him – tall, thin, and fair-haired, unlike Mother, who was small and had very dark hair – because he seemed to be always gay. One of the things I have inherited from my mother’s side of the family is a passion for gaiety. I do not have it myself – I seem to take more after my father’s family, which was brooding, melancholy, and violent – but I love gay people and books and music.
Not that Tim had much to be gay about; his wife, as I remember her, was common and jealous, and disliked Mother’s politeness and gentleness, while Mother never ceased to resent the hysterical scenes Annie O’Connor had made over Tim’s grave. Mother disliked and distrusted any form of demonstrativeness, and when Annie married again it was only what Mother had expected of her. How she thought Annie could bring up two children unaided I do not know, but she and Father shared an attitude which seemed to be commoner then than it is now, of regarding all second marriages as a form of betrayal.
On the other hand, Tim had objected to Mother’s marrying my father, Michael O’Donovan. The two men, who were old friends, had been in the British Army together, and were stationed at Charles Fort, near Kinsale, where Tim’s girl, Annie, and Mother visited him together. Mother came back to visit Father. Though they were friends and drinking companions, Tim told Father that he was not good enough for Mother, and Father, to give him his due, did not hold it against him. ‘I’ll get her in spite of you, Tim,’ he said, and he did. Certainly neither Tim nor my mother had much to boast of in their marriages. Maybe there is about these men and women of Mozartean temperament a certain unworldliness that makes them get the worst of any bargain.
Father played the big drum in the Blackpool Brass and Reed Band, and as I was the only child, I had often to accompany him, much against my will, on his Sunday trips to the band room or on band promenades at holiday resorts. The Cork bands were divided into supporters of William O’Brien and supporters of John Redmond, two rival Irish politicians with little to distinguish them except their personalities – flamboyant in O’Brien and frigid in Redmond. The Blackpool Band was an O’Brienite group, and our policy was ‘Conciliation and Consent’, whatever that meant. The Redmond supporters we called Molly Maguires, and I have forgotten what their policy was – if they had one. Our national anthem was ‘God Save Ireland’ and theirs ‘A Nation Once Again’. I was often filled with pity for the poor degraded children of the Molly Maguires, who paraded the streets with tin cans, singing (to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’): ‘We’ll Hang William O’Brien on a Sour Apple Tree’. Sometimes passion overcame me till I got a tin can of my own and paraded up and down, singing: ‘We’ll Hang Johnny Redmond on a Sour Apple Tree’.
The bandsmen shared our attitude. There were frequent riots, and during election times Father came home with a drumstick up his sleeve – a useful weapon if he was attacked by Molly Maguires. There were even more serious incidents. Bandsmen raided a rival band room and smashed up the instruments, and one of Father’s most gloomy songs listed some of the men who had done this:
Creedy, Reidy, Dessy, and Snell,
Not judging their souls, they’re already in Hell.
The night of the battle we’ll show them some fun;
We’ll hang up the ruffian that stole our big drum.
Almost all the bandsmen were ex-bandsmen of the British Army, as Father was; and I think it may have been something of a tragedy to them that when once they returned to Cork, music became less important than the political faction for whom they made it. Father was devoted to the policy and personality of William O’Brien, who had married the daughter of one of the great Franco-Jewish bankers. It was Sophie Raffalovitch’s mother who had started the romance by sending to O’Brien when he was in jail a verse of Racine with an eagle’s feather enclosed, but I am glad that when Sophie O’Brien was old and poor in France during the German occupation, the Irish Government protected her and paid her an allowance. Once, when there were threats of a Molly Maguire attack, Father, an enormously powerful man, acted as bodyguard for William O’, and William O’ thanked him personally and handed him a pound note. All the same, for several years Father had been big drummer of a Molly Maguire band. It was a superb band, and Father liked music so well that he preferred it to politics. For the sake of the music he even endured the indignity of playing for Johnny Redmond. Naturally, whenever he attended a demonstration at which William O’ was criticized, he withdrew, like a good Catholic from a heretical service. What made him leave the Molly band and join the Blackpool Band I never knew. It was a period that for some reason he never liked to talk about, and I suspect that someone in the band must have impugned him by calling him a turncoat. That is the sort of thing that would have broken his spirit, for he was a proud man and a high-principled one, though what his principles were based on was more than I ever discovered. He was the one who insisted on the ‘O’Donovan’ form of the name, and it must have been his absence at the Boer War that explains my being described as ‘Donovan’ on my birth certificate. He would not permit a slighting reference to William O’Brien, and reading the Echo, the only evening paper in Cork and a Molly one, was as much a torment as a pleasure to him. ‘There were about 130 people present, most of them women, with a sprinkling of children’ was how the Echo would describe any meeting of O’Brien’s, and Father would raise his eyes to Heaven, calling on God to witness that anything the Echo said was untrue. ‘Oh, listen to George Crosbie, the dirty little caffler!’ he would cry with mortification. In days when no one else that I knew seemed to worry about it, he was a passionate believer in buying Irish manufactures, and often sent me back to the shop with a box of English matches that had been passed off on me. He was a strong supporter of Jim Larkin, the Irish Labour leader; for months when he was out on strike we practically didn’t eat but we always bought The Irish Worker, Larkin’s paper, and I was permitted to read it aloud because my dramatic style of reading suited Larkin’s dramatic style of journalism. According to Mother, there was a period in my infancy when Father didn’t drink for two years. He had drunk himself penniless, as he frequently did, and some old friend had refused him a loan. The slight had cut him so deep that he stopped drinking at once. The friend was wrong if he assumed that Father would not have repaid that or any other loan, but, still, it was a great pity that he hadn’t a few more friends of the sort.
It was no joke to go with Father on one of his Sunday outings with the band, and I often kicked up hell about it, but Mother liked me to go, because she had some strange notion that I could restrain him from drinking too much. Not that I didn’t love music, nor that I wasn’t proud of Father as, with the drum slung high about his neck, he glanced left and right of it, waiting to give the three taps that brought the bandsmen in. He was a drummer of the classical type: he hated to see a man carry his drum on his belly instead of his chest, and he had nothing but scorn for the showy drummers who swung or crossed their sticks. He was almost disappointingly unpretentious.
But when he was on the drink, I was so uncertain that I always had the feeling that one day he would lose me and forget I had been with him at all. Usually, the band would end its piece in front of a pub at the corner of Coburg Street. The pubs were always shut on Sunday until after last Mass, and when they opened, it was only for an hour or two. The last notes of ‘Brian Boru’s March’ would hardly have been played before Father unslung the drum, thrust it on the young fellows whose job it was to carry it, and dashed across the road to the pub, accompanied by John P., his great buddy. John P. – I never knew what his surname was – was a long string of misery, with an air of unutterable gravity, emphasized by the way he sucked in his cheeks. He was one of the people vaguely known as ‘followers of the band’ – a group of lonely souls who gave some significance to their simple lives by attaching themselves to the band. They discussed its policies and personalities, looked after the instruments, and knew every pub in Cork that would risk receiving its members after hours. John P., with a look of intense concentration, would give a secret knock on the side door of the pub and utter what seemed to be whispered endearments through the keyhole, and more and more bandsmen would join the group peppering outside, while messengers rushed up to them shouting: ‘Come on, can’t ye, come on! The bloomin’ train will be gone!’
That would be the first of the boring and humiliating waits outside public houses that went on all day and were broken only when I made a scene and Father gave me a penny to keep me quiet. Afterwards it would be the seaside at Aghada – which wasn’t so bad because my maternal grandmother’s people, the Kellys, still lived there and they would give me a cup of tea – or Crosshaven, or the grounds of Blarney Castle, and in the intervals of playing, the band would sit in various public houses with the doors barred, and if I was inside I couldn’t get out and – what was worse for a shy small boy – if I was out I couldn’t get in. It was all very boring and alarming, and I remember once at Blarney, in my discouragement, staking my last penny on a dice game called the Harp, Crown and Feather in the hope of retrieving a wasted day. Being a patriotic child, with something of Father’s high principle, I put my money on the national emblem and lost. This was prophetic, because since then I have lost a great many pennies on the national emblem, but at least it cured me of the more obvious forms of gambling for the rest of my days.
On another occasion, after what had seemed an endless day in Crosshaven, I found myself late at night outside a locked public house in Cork opposite the North Cathedral, waiting for some drunk to emerge, so that I could stick my head in the door and wail: ‘Daddy, won’t you come home now?’ At last, in despair, I decided to make my own way home through the dark streets, though I had never been out alone at night before this. In terror, I crept down the sinister length of Shandon Street, and crossed the street so that I might escape seeing what I might see by the old graveyard, and then, at the foot of Blarney Lane, I saw a tiny shop still open. There were steps up to the hall door, and railings round the area, and the window was small and high and barely lighted by one oil lamp inside, but I could plainly see a toy dog in it, looking out at me. Praying that it wouldn’t be beyond my means, I climbed up the steps. Inside, a door on the right led from the hall to the shop, where the counter was higher than my head. A woman came out of the little back room and asked me what I wanted. I told her I wanted to know the price of the dog, and she said it was sixpence. I had earned a lot of pennies by standing outside public houses that day, and sixpence was exactly what I had, so I threw it all on the counter and staggered out, clutching my protector. The rest of the way up Blarney Lane I walked without fear, setting my woolly dog at every dark laneway to right and left of me with a fierce ‘At ’em, boy!’ Fortunately for myself, I was fast asleep when Father arrived home, distracted over losing me.
As for keeping him off the drink, I never did it but once, when I drank his pint, became very drunk, smashed my head against a wall, and had to be steered home by himself and John P., both of them mad with frustration and panic, and be put to bed.
Father had been brought up in the vicinity of Cork Barrack, a mile or two away at the other side of the town, and his family still lived there. For this neighbourhood he seemed to pine as an Irish immigrant in Brooklyn is supposed to pine for Galway Bay, though, unlike the Brooklyn immigrant, Father meant it. He used to take me to my grandparents’ house in Harrington Square – an uneven unlighted piece of ground between the Old Youghal Road and the Ballyhooley Road that seemed to have been abandoned by God and was certainly abandoned by the Cork Corporation. One side was higher than the other, and a channel had been hollowed out before the houses on the lower side to give ingress, while, at the end of this, one lonesome pillar commemorated some early dream of railing the place off. In England such sites are politely known as ‘non-adopted’, a word that well suits their orphaned air. It was inhabited largely by washerwomen who worked mainly for the British officers in Cork Barrack, and there were three sets of iron poles in the middle of the square to support their lines. One set belonged to my grandmother, a stout, coarse peasant woman from Aghada, who flopped about the floor in bare feet because these were what she was used to and the boots still continued to give her trouble. She had a pronounced Mongolian appearance, and the protrusion of the brows and the high cheekbones gave her a constant look of peering at things. With it went a curious shrugging of the shoulders, which I never noticed again till I saw it in an eminent writer and traced it down to a common dislike of soap and water. After a huge meal of stockfish and boiled potatoes she would shrug and bless herself and then add her own peculiar grace: ‘Well, thanks be to God, we’re neither full nor fasting.’ I remember little of my grandfather, a quiet, bearded old man. My aunt was a deaf-mute, and during the early part of my childhood I met her only once or twice, when she was home on holidays from Glasgow, where she lived with her husband – a tailor named Hanlon. She, too, seemed to pine for the old spot.
I had no nostalgia for it. The kitchen of my grandparents’ house resembled that of a country cabin, and there was nothing in it but a table and a few chairs – no pictures, or anything else that could hold the attention of a child. It was criss-crossed with clothes lines, and in wet weather it smelled of damp linen and was warm with a big fire where the heaters for the box-iron were reddened. (I liked the heaters, and I wished Mother would get a box-iron instead of her own little flat-iron.)
Hospitality there was of the same order: strictly functional, and with none of the frills of cakes and jam that a child remembers. Sometimes my Uncle Laurence, my father’s brother, came in, and Grandmother was sent out to the pub and returned with a great jug of porter under her old plaid shawl, and this was mulled with the big iron poker, and I was given half a mug of it with sugar. One night when I was about three or four and sitting on Father’s knee, almost asleep, he suddenly put me down, lifted the poker, and slashed my uncle’s face across with it. I remember the long red line on my uncle’s face, which suddenly went white, and blood beginning to pour from it, and the quiet voice in which he said: ‘Mick Donovan, if another man in the world did that to me, I’d have his life.’* Laurence was the only member of the family I liked, and the scene made a terrifying impression on me.
I can only have been five or six when a house fell vacant next door to my grandparents’. Mother did not want to take it; it would detach her from the convent, which was one of the nearest things she knew to a home, and from the neighbours in Blarney Lane, whom she liked and who liked her. It was probably characteristic of the orphan, but I never met anyone so firmly rooted in places and people. When she began visiting me in Dublin, she was at first very lonely; then she noticed a house that reminded her of one in Cork, and then she saw a woman with a child who reminded her of a neighbour in Cork, and she even observed a piece of furniture in a shop-window that reminded her of something we had once possessed, till at last she built up a world of remote analogies with comfortable and friendly memories that protected her from the unknown. She disliked my father’s family even more than I did, and, besides, the rent – four and sixpence a week – was nearly twice what we paid for the little cottage in Blarney Lane. But Father was homesick for the delights of the Barrack Stream (as the old people called the locality), and he argued irritably that with a commodious house like that – four rooms instead of two – we could take in lodgers, and everyone knew the big money you could make out of lodgers. So one day we said goodbye sadly to the old neighbours, piled all our possessions on a little donkey cart, and set out after them down Blarney Lane toward the river. I carried the kitten in my arms.
That night Mother sat in the dirty, dilapidated kitchen of the new house and wept, but Father’s family were happily reunited in a neighbourhood where they were well known and – according to themselves – highly respected. At least, in Barrack Stream, Father was sure of a good funeral. Grandfather and Grandmother lived next door, my Uncle Laurence and his family lived up the Old Youghal Road, near Mayfield Chapel, and for a time my deaf-and-dumb aunt and her deaf-and-dumb husband lodged with the old people in the house next door. The homesickness of my father’s family was really quite remarkable.
Barrack Stream, though richer than Blarney Lane, was rougher, like all places attached to military barracks. There were women who went with soldiers, and girls who went with officers, and sinister houses where people drank after hours. Of course, it had its advantages for me, particularly when we weren’t plagued by lodgers. (Of these I remember two lots – a family so brutal and filthy that at last Father, who was out for most of the day and only pooh-poohed Mother’s complaints, practically ejected them himself, and an old lady so scared of draughts that she nailed up the window and padded the door till the front room stank.) A lot of the time I had an attic to myself, where I could keep my treasures, and there was an outdoor toilet, with a door suitable for climbing. From the roof of this I could get on to the high back wall and command a view of the neighbours’ back yards and of the hillside opposite as it sloped down into the valley of the city. I sometimes sat there for hours, till darkness crept up on me, and in order to enjoy the view a little longer I even climbed out of the attic window and up the roof to the ridge-pole. Besides, there was the Barrack, and the day was punctuated by bugle calls, and sometimes the soldiers went by on a route march, preceded by their band. When this happened in the evening and Father was at home, we both dashed for the front door. The regiments at the Barrack were always changing, and while the fast girls compared lovers – English, Scotch and Welsh – Father compared the height and smartness of the men, the quality of the band and, of course, the big drummers. If you went far enough afield, you could even see an occasional military funeral, with a gun-carriage draped in the Union Jack, and a band that played Chopin’s Funeral March. With the O’Donovan morbidity, I loved military funerals, and when Father was in good humour I got him to hum dead marches for me. Though he was usually ready to oblige with Chopin, Handel or Beethoven, he maintained that the greatest of dead marches was ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ as played by the pipe band of the Scots Guards. Naturally, he performed all these as though the principal instrument were the big drum, and I tested them out, pacing the kitchen with reversed sweeping brush, lost in ecstatic melancholy. Afterwards he would be bound to sing me ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’, one of his favourite songs and mine. So far as music went, he and I got on excellently.
But the move to Barrackton brought to a head my sense of the conflict between the two families whose heredity I shared. The more I saw of my grandparents, the less I liked them. Children, who see only one side of any question and because of their powerlessness see this with hysterical clarity, are abominably cruel. And an only child is worse. There was no way in which I could have avoided seeing the contrast between my mother, on the one hand, and the women of my father’s family on the other, and it meant nothing to me that one was old, another ill, another deaf-and-dumb.
Mother was dainty in everything she did. Women can observe and describe that sort of fastidiousness better than men, and my cousin’s wife, whom Mother adored, gives a tart and amusing description of her at the age of eighty-five, flouncing about the kitchen of May’s little house, demanding to be inspected and assured that her hat was not crooked or her skirt too short. When she returned from town, she would immediately take off her wet shoes, stretch them with her hands, stuff them with newspapers (she had never been able to afford shoe-trees), and set them to dry before the fire. Only then would she produce the perfect pear or the perfect peach that she had coveted in some fruit-shop window, not for herself but May. This is the side of her I remember best, because one of my earliest recollections of her is the way she would choose a twopenny Christmas card, study it, price it, put it back, return and study it again with a frown as though she were wondering if it really was a Rembrandt etching, though all the time she was thinking not of what it was but of its appropriateness to the person she was buying it for.
Besides, she was an excellent cook and a first-rate housekeeper, a woman to whom cleanliness and neatness came as natural as untidiness does to me. Though, apart from our beds, the only furniture we had was what went into the kitchen, she made even that room look beautiful. Over the mantelpiece hung a long mirror, and to the right of it the lamp. At either side of the window were pictures of the Battle of Bethlehem, a Boer War relic which I searched by the hour for a likeness of Father, and of Kathleen Mavourneen, with insets of the Lakes of Killarney. Facing the window was the little sideboard with one of our two clocks, and between that and the door was the bedroom wardrobe, which was too big to go up the stairs. Father used the top of it for his own treasures, his razors, clippers and pipes.
One of those peculiar romances of Mother’s that I was always so curious about – not being very satisfied with the father she had supplied me with – had been with a French chef called Armady who had taught her to make superb coffee. I think he must also have taught her to hate fried food, that curse of Irish life, because the first thing she bought when I got a job and turned my wages over to her was a gas-stove on which she could grill. In the evenings, when I induced Father and herself to sing for me, his favourites were sentimental songs like ‘Eileen Alannah’ and ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’, and these he sang in the manner of a public-house singer, all sniffle and rallentando. When Mother was not singing Moore’s melodies – her favourites were ‘How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies’, ‘Farewell But Whenever You Welcome the Hour’, and ‘I Saw from the Beach’ – she sang charming little drawing-room songs of the Victorian period like ‘The Danube River’, ‘Alabama Moon’, ‘When the Old Man Died’, and ‘Three Students Went Merrily over the Rhine’, and she sang them in good time, in her sweet, clear, girlish voice. It was, I suppose, typical of me that when I sang the same songs I tried to invest them with Father’s trills, but I got ticked off for it. Even when I sang with her as a grown man I got a sharp ‘No!’ when I strayed from the correct time. Her harshest criticism was an impatient ‘Ah, you have it out loud and all wrong.’
She was the sort of woman who is always called in when there is trouble in a house, and as she had to bring me with her in the years when I was still an infant, some of my earliest recollections of her are so extraordinary that to this day I cannot say if they weren’t hallucinations. Once, when we were living in Blarney Lane, she carried me to a neighbour’s house and put me sitting on a chair by the door. I could see into the little partitioned-off bedroom, and I watched her, in the candlelight, holding up the head of a young man who was coughing red stuff on to the bed. In a loud voice Mother said something that sounded like prayers, and he continued to cough till all the bedclothes were bright red, and then he seemed to fall asleep, and she laid him back on the pillow and knelt beside him, praying into his ear. Another time she took me with her and I saw a young man crouching under the bedroom window with his hands raised, screaming: ‘They’ll never get me alive!’ Mother went up to him, smiling, her two hands out in a gesture that was most characteristic of her, murmuring reproachfully: ‘Ah, Johnny, Johnny, don’t you know who it is? It’s only Mrs Donovan.’ The strange quality of these half-memories of her is best summed up in one incident. I remember the mother of a very sick little girl coming hysterically to the door and our running back with her to the cottage, where Mother forced back the child’s rectal passage, which had become extruded. The incident is perfectly clear in my mind, though I do not even know if what I think I saw is physically possible.
She had always wanted to be a nurse and was an excellent one. When Grandfather was dying, it was she who looked after him, and I watched her scrubbing the floor, killing the lice that covered the bedroom wall, and changing the bedclothes, while downstairs Grandmother, huge, shiftless and dirty, drained her mug of porter over the fire and moaned. ‘I’m a bird alone, a bird alone!’ she whined, and Mother, sick with disgust, told her sharply that she could at least wash her face before the priest came.
When my grandmother came to live with us after Grandfather’s death, I nearly lost my mind. Lodgers were awful, and the large fortunes to be made from them were clearly illusory, but at least they were not relations and I did not have to apologize for them to any other kid I brought to the house and wanted to impress. I was always trying to make an impression, particularly on one friend, Bob O’Connell, whose father was a colour sergeant and who spoke in a cultured English voice that I tried hard to imitate, but when I glanced into the kitchen and saw Grandmother at one of her modest repasts – a mess of hake and potatoes boiled in a big pot, with the unpeeled potatoes afterwards tossed on the table to be dipped in a mound of salt and eaten out of the fingers, and a jug of porter beside these – I fled for very shame. And once, when Mother was at work and Grandmother was supposed to give me my dinner, I hid under the kitchen table, yelling bloody murder and refusing to come out until Mother returned and fed me herself. Mother tried to induce her to keep herself clean, but Grandmother, deeply offended, shrugged herself in her dirty old clothes, blinked her eyes, and retorted sullenly: ‘Sure, what is it but clean dirt?’
I had already become a classic example of the Mother’s Boy. Later, when as a public official I had to be careful not to involve my employers in my literary activities and had to change my name, I took her name in place of my own. At that time all I could do was beg her to leave my father and come away to live with me, and though in those days I was little tempted to criticize her, I did frequently blame her in my own thought for timidity. I felt that she, on the one hand, and Father’s family, on the other, were the two powers that were struggling for possession of my soul, and I hated every member of my father’s family – even cousins I later grew fond of. It was not the people themselves I hated, of course, but drunkenness, dirt and violence. I made an exception of my Uncle Laurence, because he was gentler than the others and had a sense of humour that partly qualified the O’Donovan gloom. When he was leaving for the front during the First World War, Grandmother, with her alcoholic emotionalism, began a beautiful scene that would have reduced poor Father to helpless sobs, but Laurence punctured it wickedly by pretending to sob even louder, and left Grandmother with the outraged expression that Shaw once versified as
Respect a mother’s grief
And give me time to finish my scene.
Much as I pitied my aunt, I didn’t really like her either; her affliction was never anything but terrible; and her wordless rages and griefs were as horrifying as those of a chained animal. But, like Mother, I was very fond of her husband, Pat Hanlon, because he was a man of great expressiveness and gaiety, and made his affliction serve his purposes. He was a wraith of a man with small black eyes and a little black moustache, and he lurched about in a curiously disjointed way, his head rolling from side to side. I think he hated the O’Donovan atmosphere as much as Mother did. He never joined in the drinking and was very industrious. When things became too difficult, he got down off the table on which he sat cross-legged, and lurched into our house with a snort and a shrug. Then he threw himself into a chair with that loose-jointed air of his and began describing his day in the Jewish tailor’s in Patrick Street, his fingers flying, his small dark eyes flashing – really flashing – and queer animal noises that were intended to be laughter bubbling in his throat. He was a man who observed everything. I had never met the Jewish tailor, but he was as real to me as Charlie Chaplin, and just as funny. Hanlon was a superb mimic, and of everybody at once – the tailor, the customers and the work-girls. Having no sound track to bother with, he acted at the speed of the earliest films, breaking off a scene or a part in an instant, impatiently grabbing and growling at Mother, who would be in hysterics, to tell her something new, though his thin face never lost its air of faint anxiety. At the end of a story he would give another shrug as a final commentary on the futility of human existence.
It was strange entertainment for a child, but I loved it – though, because I spoke slowly and only with my two hands, I often missed the point. Mother also used her two hands, but she spoke fast and clearly and could understand Hanlon when he grew so excited that he fell back on one hand, and between hysterical fits of laughter she carried on a sort of subdued commentary to herself that told the story to Father and me. Then Hanlon would return to that dirty, uncomfortable house, having enjoyed a couple of hours of intelligent conversation with people far better equipped by nature than himself, and knowing that he had given at least as good as he got. And how many of us, with all our faculties, can feel as much when we leave someone’s house? It was a real triumph of art over nature, and something it would take me twenty years to learn.