I was now comparatively well off, but the job of librarian in Cork County was coming up, and I dreamed of it. To my surprise Russell was violently opposed to my taking it at all. There were other jobs I could get within twenty or thirty miles of Dublin and he wanted me to apply for one of these: then I should be on the spot if a job turned up in Dublin itself, and meanwhile could spend my weekends in town. He simply could not understand that I did not particularly want to live in Dublin, and he had the lowest view of Cork.
‘My dear fellow,’ he said dogmatically, ‘you wouldn’t be able to stand that hole for six months.’
What astonishes me now, looking back on the period, is that I did not even understand what he was getting at. Is it that young writers have no sense of fear? I was prudent enough. When I used the pseudonym ‘Frank O’Connor’ (my second name and my mother’s maiden name) I left myself a loophole against the sort of mistake Lennox Robinson had made when he published his silly little story under his own name while still Secretary of the Irish Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, but the real dangers I did not see at all, then or for years later. Cork was to me merely my material, the place I knew best, and it never occurred to me that that particular material could ever have any effect on me, or that I might eventually find myself in the position of Heine’s monkey chewing his own tail – ‘objectively he is eating, subjectively he is being eaten.’
And yet, during my time in Wicklow, I could see the consequences of this restrictiveness all round me. There was the problem of getting local sanction to establish our libraries, which was not made any easier by Robinson’s ‘crime’. Some of the priests would allow no libraries at all. In Rathdrum, a town up the country from us, the parish priest initially resisted all our efforts to start a branch library. At last I decided that the time had come to visit him. Phibbs and I called first on the curate, a splendid young fellow who was in despair with the parish priest and with Ireland. A couple of nights a week he went off to the local technical school and took off his coat to practise carpentry so as to encourage the unemployed lads of the town to learn a trade, all to no purpose.
‘You’ll go up to that parochial house,’ he said, ‘and see the old man at the table with his dinner gone cold and a volume of Thomas Aquinas propped up in front of him. And between you and me and the wall,’ he added, ‘Thomas Aquinas was a bloody old cod.’
We found the parish priest exactly as the curate had predicted, Aquinas and all, but there seemed to be nothing of the obscurantist about the delightful old man we met. On the contrary, when we introduced ourselves, he beamed and regretted that we hadn’t come to lunch. He took a particular fancy to me because I spoke Irish, and he was devoted to Irish and Irish literature. In fact, one of his dearest friends had been George Moore. Poor George. Of course he had been greatly wronged in Ireland, where people did not understand his work, but George had been a really dear and good man.
I didn’t, of course, believe for an instant that he had been friendly with George Moore, but if the illusion made him more tolerant of our business it was all right with me. But when I introduced the subject I saw at once what the curate had meant. Oh, libraries. Libraries, hm! Well, libraries, of course, were wonderful things in their own place, but town libraries were a great responsibility. It was all very well for sophisticated people like ourselves to read the works of dear George, but could we really thrust them into the hands of simple Irish townspeople?
I damn near told him that from the little I knew of simple Irish townspeople they could give us all odds, but I knew this would get us nowhere. Charm was the thing, and charm won us permission at last, but only if the curate took full responsibility and satisfied himself of the innocuousness of the books we sent out. Swift wondered how it was that every virtuous English bishop translated to Ireland was murdered on Hounslow Heath and his place taken by a highwayman, but I wondered what happened to those nice, broadminded young curates one met after they became parish priests.
Nevertheless I was beginning to suspect that as an authority on Irish ways I was a wash-out. And now I had another shock coming to me, because, as we left, the parish priest said to me, ‘I know you’ll be interested in this,’ and handed me a presentation copy of The Untilled Field, in Irish, with an affectionate inscription by George Moore.
‘It’s all very well for you, O’Donovan,’ the travelling teacher said testily one night as we were standing on top of the stairs together, holding our candles and speaking in low voices so as not to disturb the Soameses. ‘You don’t know what life in this country is like. I can keep it up for a few years more, but I know damn well the way I’m going to die. I’ll be dodging up to the church three or four times a day to say a prayer, and looking at the other side of the street when I meet some old friend that might be a temptation to me.
‘That’s the way my father died, and my father was a very intelligent man. He was one of a crowd in Limerick, and none of them believed in anything either. One of them – a fellow called Cremin – went to the States. They were all very fond of him. But you know the sort of thing that happens. One by one they got married and settled down and went to Mass, and they were ashamed of their old friends too, the way I’ll be.
‘And then, long after, Cremin wrote to say he was coming home. He was after making a bit of money and he wanted to retire to Limerick. Father was delighted. He couldn’t believe that the good old days weren’t going to come back. They were all delighted; they all liked Cremin, so they arranged for a big car to take them to Queenstown and meet the liner.
‘Well, Cremin came ashore as sprightly as ever. They’d arranged for a dinner at the Commodore, and they made speeches about Cremin and their youth, and he got up to reply, and, begod, didn’t he drop dead across the table!
‘They brought him home that night and buried him, and after the funeral Father invited a Redemptorist back to the house, and from that day till the day he died we were never without a priest in the house. And I tell you, O’Donovan, that’s the way I’m going to the too. You mark my words!’
But why should I mark them when the very same thing was taking place under my eyes in the Soames household? Neither Mrs Soames nor her son was very pious. In fact, Mrs Soames was a most superior woman. I think she had been parlour-maid in some Wicklow big house and married the coachman. In spite of her rigmarole about Phibbs being the Devil, she had a good natural intelligence, and hers was the only Catholic lodging-house I ever knew that wasn’t cluttered up with holy pictures and statues.
Then we had a Redemptorist mission in the town. The women’s turn came first, and each night Mrs Soames hobbled off to the church and she confessed and communicated like everybody else. She was no zealot, but like any other woman she did not want to be different.
But before the women’s mission ended at all it was clear that there was trouble in the house. From the sitting-room I could hear herself and Bill arguing in the kitchen, her voice shrill and querulous and Bill’s deep and mournful. When she brought in my glass of milk she was full of complaints. Bill refused to go to the mission at all. According to himself – and, knowing Bill well, I believed it – he had done no harm to anyone and had nothing at all to confess. What harm could he do, cycling out at the crack of dawn, wet or fine, miles out in the country and only seeing Bridie for one evening a week? Besides, it was too bloody silly. That was more or less the way I felt myself, but Mrs Soames seemed to feel that it was a matter of maternal discipline and that he mustn’t make a show of her before the town.
The night the men’s mission opened I heard the row going on in the kitchen. Bill, with his deep husky voice, sounded like a cow that was being driven to the knacker’s. His mother scolded and hounded him out, and then watched from the front door to make sure he did not bolt down some lane to the quays.
I followed to see the fun, but it wasn’t very funny. The Redemptorist had one of those thick pulpit voices that bellowed till it bounced and then dropped to an awed whisper. He described to us what he obviously thought was how Voltaire died, knowing he was damned, and screaming, screaming for the priest who never came. As I emerged from the church the town atheist approached me.
‘How did you like God’s representative telling those damned lies?’ he hissed angrily.
‘He probably believed them himself,’ I said.
‘He never read a line of Voltaire’s in his life,’ said the atheist in a fury.
Then I saw Bill, and his whole face was lit up.
‘How did you like that, Bill?’ I said.
‘Finest bloody sermon I ever heard in my life,’ Bill said enthusiastically. ‘Aha, that fellow knows how to talk.’
For the rest of the week his mother had no trouble in getting Bill shaved and dressed for the show. As a disciplinarian she might have taken alarm at this, but we are always blind when our temperaments are rushing us to a crisis. Nothing dawned on the poor woman until Saturday night, when Bill came home and told her he was getting married at once. The priest had given him a terrible time in confession, and asked him what he meant – a grown man with a steady job – indulging in occasions of sin with poor Bridie for fifteen years. Finally he had threatened Bill with a terrible death – by drowning, no less, though how Bill could get drowned in his daily excursions to the farm was not clear. Down, down, down he could go, and then rise again for a moment with outstretched hands, gasping for air – Voltaire himself had nothing on Bill. After a dreadful fifteen minutes Bill had slunk out of the church, convinced that everyone was looking at him and blaming him for some terrible crime he had never committed.
At first Mrs Soames was her usual sarcastic self and asked whether he had told the priest that he only earned twelve shillings a week – it may have been fifteen or eighteen, but it was in that neighbourhood. Bill replied that he had and the priest had said it didn’t matter. Only then did the immensity of the disaster become clear to Mrs Soames. Her Boy, whom she had looked after and bullied and defended from designing women, had slipped out of her hands into those of a priest, and not even the poor decent Kerry priest she could pin the blame on, but a nameless Redemptorist who was here today and gone tomorrow.
For hours I heard the voices going on in the kitchen and felt ashamed to pass them on my way up the stairs. Finally, when Bill had gone to bed, Mrs Soames came in with my glass of milk and wept and wrung her hands. She had met the fate of every strongminded woman and found an adversary stronger than herself. When she had tried to talk to Bill about money, all he had been able to do was to cover his eyes and describe the horrors of drowning.
‘And when I asked him how they would live, he said Bridie would have to go on working. And when the children start coming? I said, and all I could get out of him was “God will provide”. He will, I hear! I know who’ll do the providing, Mr O’Donovan. I will. I’ll have to take them in, and give them your room, and then the children will come and I’ll have to mind them as well.’
She left me in a state of distraction, and God knows I was sorry for her – the saddest woman who had ever done her duty by attending a Redemptorist mission. But I saw it from outside – my material, as you might call it. It never occurred to me that anything of the sort could happen to myself.