At the age of twenty I was released from an internment camp without money or job. The Civil War had just ended, and since I had taken the loser’s side I found that ex-jailbirds like myself did not get whatever positions were available under the new government. But all teachers were now required to learn the Irish language, so for a few months I taught Irish to the teachers at the local Protestant school in Cork – St Luke’s. This brought in only a few shillings a week, but I now knew how to teach and I liked the work.
I also liked Kennelly, the headmaster, an irascible little Kerryman who wore pince-nez. I suspect he was a fearful bully and disciplinarian because he always snapped at everyone who came near him, including his pretty daughter, and snapped loudest of all at the school manager, Canon Flewett.
‘All clergymen are the same, Mr O’Donovan,’ Kennelly would say as he saw me part of the way home. ‘Catholic, Church of Ireland or Presbyterian, you can never trust any of them.’
It was part of his innocent vanity that I could never teach him Irish because he remembered it all perfectly from his childhood in Kerry. But he was a man with a real flavour, and I enjoyed watching him when someone got him mad, keeping what he thought was a perfectly expressionless face, though his little nose took on an autonomous life and expressed a whole range of emotions that no pince-nez could stand up to. In spite of his snappiness he was extraordinarily gentle with me; he even brought me home once or twice to supper with his wife and daughter, but I was so embarrassed that I do not even remember what nonsense I talked; and when he saw me home it was to advise me in a fatherly way to have nothing more to do with politics.
‘With you it’s not a question of politics,’ he said, referring delicately to the fact that I was still wearing Father’s old trousers. ‘It’s a question of how much a man can take, and you’ve taken enough. You can’t afford to take any more.’
One of the pleasantest revelations that life has offered was that on his retirement that stout anti-clerical rushed himself into Holy Orders and worked gallantly as a missioner in the East End of London through the blitz. All Irish anti-clericals are spoiled priests, and you must never trust any of them.
Late in 1923 my old teacher Daniel Corkery told me that Lennox Robinson, the dramatist, who was now Secretary of the Irish Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, was organizing rural libraries and looking for young men and women to train as librarians. The moment he said it I knew that this was the very job for me and that I was the very type of person Robinson was looking for. It was not so much that I wanted to be a librarian, or even knew what being a librarian meant; it was just that never in my life had I had enough books to read and this was my opportunity.
I met Robinson in the restaurant of the Cork railway station at Glanmire, where he was waiting for a train to Dublin and drinking double brandies. He always looked like someone’s caricature of him, long and mournful and disjointed, as though at some time he had suffered on the rack, and he had a high-pitched, disjointed voice that sounded like someone’s reading of an old maid’s letter from Regency times, with every third word isolated and emphasized.
The only sort of job he could offer me sounded hopeless. I should have to spend a year or two studying librarianship somewhere in the north of Ireland, and the salary would be thirty shillings a week, though at the end of my training I should qualify for a librarian’s post at two hundred and fifty pounds a year. The latter figure, of course, was fantastic; I couldn’t imagine what anyone would do with five pounds a week, but even in the twenties I knew that nobody could live away from home on thirty shillings a week. I could manage it at home, but not in lodgings.
I have met some tough bargainers in my life, but none quite so ruthless as Robinson. He merely looked ineffectual and sad, and God did not choose to reveal to me that within a few years he would be begging for a job from me and I would not have the sense to look ineffectual and sad, so I went home in great distress to my mother.
She, poor woman, did not have much sense either, but she saw clearly that a job in a library was about the only job I was qualified for, and she timidly offered to add half a crown, or even – if she was lucky – five shillings to the salary till something better turned up. I hated to accept her offer because I knew how she would have to earn it.
But, shortly after, she got a loan to buy me a decent little cardboard suitcase and packed it with my spare shirt and underpants and a few pairs of stockings she had knitted herself. I have a strong recollection that she packed a holy picture as well, for fear I might not find one in an out-of-the-way place like Sligo, and I set out for Dublin on my way to the west, like Cu Chulainn setting out for Armagh at the age of seven, though I was fourteen years older and had nothing of the heroic spirit.