During the first year of my life the steep climb up to Ballinaspic was among my mother’s favourite walks. (‘Sure the creature must be mad entirely to be pushin’ a pram up there!’) Yet by November 1932 she could push me no further than the Main Street. Suddenly she had been attacked again by that rheumatoid arthritis which had first threatened her at the age of twenty. By my first birthday she could no longer walk without the aid of a stick and by my second she could no longer walk at all. On the 29th of that December she was twenty-six.
There was of course no cure. But doctors in various countries were doggedly experimenting and, escorted by her favourite brother, my mother went to England, Italy and Czechoslovakia for six months, pretending to hope yet sure, inwardly, that she would never walk again. She spent the whole of 1934 either abroad or in Dublin, leaving me to be looked after by Nora under the vague supervision of my father. In theory this abrupt and inexplicable disappearance of an adored mother, when I was at the crucial age of two years, should have damaged me for life. Perhaps it has, but I am never troubled by the scars. I was by nature adaptable, my routine was unbroken, Nora was devoted and sensible and my father was attentive in his didactic way. (A family legend, possibly apocryphal but very revealing, tells of his bewildered grief when I failed, at the age of two and a half, to assimilate the rules governing the solar system.)
In December 1934 my mother returned to Lismore as a complete cripple, unable even to walk from the sitting-room to the downstairs lavatory, or to wash or dress herself, or to brush her hair. Between them, my father and the steadfast Nora cared for her and for me.
Now there were major money worries. My mother’s search for a cure had cost a great deal and my father was heavily in debt to numerous relatives. Both my parents found this deeply humiliating, innocent though they were of any imprudence or extravagance. My father was almost panic-stricken and it was my mother who calmly took up the challenge. Probably a practical crisis, and the discovery of her own unsuspected ability to manage money, helped her at this stage. She soon began to enjoy pound-stretching; I still have some of the little account books in which she neatly entered every penny spent on food, fuel, clothes, rent and so on. My father then happily returned to his natural money-ignoring state and for the rest of their married life my mother held the purse-strings.
By this time my parents had realised that they could have no more children, which for devout Roman Catholics meant resigning themselves to an unnaturally restricted marriage. In our sex-centred world, this may seem like the setting for a life-long nightmare. Having been thoroughly addled by popular pseudo-Freudian theories about libidos, repressions and fixations, we tend to forget that human beings are not animals. It would be ridiculous to suggest that the ending of their sexual relationship imposed no strain on my parents, but they certainly found it a lighter burden than we might think. Religious beliefs strong enough to make sexual taboos seem acceptable, as ‘God’s will’, do not have to be merely negative; faith of that quality can generate the fortitude necessary for the contented observance of such taboos. Restrictions of personal liberty are destructive if accepted only through superstitious fear, but to both my parents the obeying of God’s laws, as interpreted by the Holy Roman Catholic Church, was part of a rich and vigorous spiritual life. This area of their experience – I felt later on – put them in a mental and emotional world remote from my own, where they were equipped with an altogether different set of strengths and weaknesses.
Not long before her death, my mother told me that after getting into bed on their wedding night neither of my parents had known quite what to do next. So they went to sleep. In the 1970s it is hard to believe that two healthy, intelligent human beings, who were very much in love, could have devoted their wedding night exclusively to sleep. But perhaps they were not exceptional among their breed and generation. My mother had been curtly informed by her mother – who had brone seven children and endured countless miscarriages – that sexual intercourse was at all times painful and distasteful. And my father would certainly have considered any investigation of the subject, even in theory, to be grossly improper before marriage.
Sex apart, an inability to have more children was agonising for someone as intensely maternal as my mother. It also put me, at once, in danger. All the emotion and interest that should have been shared among half-a-dozen became mine only. By the time I was five most people considered me a peculiarly nasty child and mistook the reason why. In fact my mother was such a strict disciplinarian that throughout childhood and adolescence I remained healthily afraid of arousing her anger. But what she could not avoid – my being the sole object of her maternal concern – was the encouragement of a ruthless egotism. However, this trait was no doubt useful at the time as insulation against the adult suffering around me. Elizabeth Bowen once wrote, ‘Perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.’ My mother – reading Bowen’s Court – once drew my attention to that remark. She did not comment on it, but I have since wondered if she meant it to comfort me. During childhood, I never stopped to sympathise with my parents’ situation. Indeed, only when I became a mother myself did I appreciate how my own mother must have felt when she found herself unable to pick me up and hug me, and brush my hair, and tuck me up in bed.
After my parents’ deaths I came upon the letters they had written to each other, almost daily, during their six-month engagement. On the whole these might have been written by any happy young couple to whom marriage promised nothing but fulfilment. My father hoped to found a model county library service and write novels; with my mother to inspire him he felt certain these must be masterpieces. For relaxation he looked forward to some deep-sea fishing and an expanding record collection. My mother hoped to have six children at two-year intervals (three of each, if possible, though she conceded this might be difficult to arrange) and to use them – one gathered, reading between the lines – as guinea-pigs on which to test her various theories about physical and mental health. She also hoped to find time to study in depth, under my father’s guidance, the early schisms within the Christian Church – a subject of ineffable tedium to which she remained addicted all her life. She felt, too, that in her role as county librarian’s wife she should initiate a Literary Debating Society (she had not yet visited the town) and perhaps a Music Society. For relaxation she looked forward to walking tours in West Cork and Kerry, presumably on her own while my father deep-sea fished and their systematically increasing offspring were being looked after by some capable Treasure. This correspondence had just one surprising feature. Neither of my penniless parents ever mentioned money, or promotion, or buying a house or a motor car, or in any way planning financially for the future. Both seemed to assume that they would spend the rest of their lives in Lismore – my father wrote ecstatic descriptions of the surrounding countryside – and judging by these letters they were utterly without material ambition.
The few personal memories I retain from my first five years are mostly painful. Our house – or half-house – was separated from the road by a six-foot stone wall, sprouting valerian. When attempting to pick a bouquet for my mother at the age of three I fell and broke my nose. A few months later, driving with my father in the library van, I broke it again when he had to brake suddenly because of wandering cattle. I also remember being excited by the exotic springtime glory of the giant rhododendron tree which overshadowed our unkempt lawn. (I have seen none finer in Europe outside Kew, yet it was felled in 1972 because it took up too much space …) Behind the house were a small yard, a large garden and an enormous orchard securely enclosed by ten-foot stone walls. Here my movements were unrestricted and my chief companion was Billy, a rotund black pony who grazed the orchard, gave me rides and pulled us around the countryside in a trap. (At this stage we had no dog; my mother’s beloved Kevin had been stolen a few weeks after my birth.)
In the spring of 1935 it was decided that for character forming purposes I needed ‘young friends’. My mother therefore arranged various juvenile social occasions and my most vivid memory from this period is a feeling of fury when other children disrupted the elaborate fantasy-world I had created in the orchard.
For my fourth birthday party cousins and an imposing cake were imported from Dublin. But at three o’clock, when the local guests began to assemble, I was missing. Nora quickly traced me to a derelict shed, overgrown with briars, at the end of the garden. My detested beribboned party dress of salmon-pink silk – I can see it still – was torn and streaked with green mould stains, and my back, in every sense, was to the wall. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ fumed Nora. ‘Stuck out here all mucked up with that gorgeous dress rooned an’ your visitors waitin’ inside an’ even your blood relations down from Dublin!’
My reply was to become a clan slogan. ‘I don’t want any bloody relations,’ I replied succinctly. ‘I’m staying here.’
Nora, it seems, was familiar with this impasse. Compromising desperately, she assured me that if I consented to grace the party with my presence I need not wear ‘party clothes’; whereupon I meekly trotted indoors. One changes very little. I still dislike ‘party clothes’.
In March 1936 our obese landlady died and my mother and I moved to Dublin for six months while my father was house-hunting. I stayed in turn with my mother and maternal grandmother and with my father’s parents.
My mother’s mother was known as Jeff to her face, for some entirely obscure reason, and as The Battle-axe behind her back for reasons not at all obscure. She was an exceedingly disagreeable women who spoiled me methodically by way of tormenting my mother. As I was not allowed sweets she offered me sweets at every hour of the day and night and was piqued when I spat them out because they felt and tasted unfamiliar. As my normal bedtime was six o’clock she reorganised the household to prevent my getting to bed before eight o’clock. As comics were frowned upon, lest they might impair my tender literary taste-buds (a paternal directive, this), she bought me a daily comic. And so it went on, a spiteful campaign in which I was the unwitting weapon and her daughter the helpless victim.
My mother dealt with the situation by telling me, ‘Different people have different views. While we are staying here we must respect your grandmother’s views.’ Thus she evaded direct condemnation while making it clear that on our return home the usual disciplines would be reimposed. For a parent who values consistency there is nothing more provoking than the deliberate undermining of a child’s régime. Yet my mother’s self-control never cracked. No doubt this restraint further incensed Jeff, who enjoyed nothing more than a good fish-wifely brawl.
Much as I relished Jeff’s spoiling I was never quite at ease in that semi-detached red-brick Victorian house. My mother’s parents had lived in it all their troubled married life and it had bad vibes. Family opinion blamed Jeff for the fact that her husband – handsome, charming and warm-hearted – was an alcoholic; but this may have been unfair. She can have done nothing to help him control his drinking, but it is doubtful if even the happiest marriage could have saved him from the bottle.
There was an amount of instability in my grandfather’s background. His own father – the son of a senior civil servant at Dublin Castle – had fallen in love with the kitchenmaid, got a chamber pot thrown at his head when the betrothal was announced and soon after emigrated to America with his unacceptable bride and the statutory shilling. Three years and three children later the young couple returned to Dublin, my great-grandfather having found the American way of life insufficiently civilised. For the rest of his life he practised civilisation by drinking too much port and collecting coins while his wife – an energetic and courageous woman – ran an Academy for (very) Young Ladies. As she had been illiterate on her wedding day her husband perhaps deserves some credit for having taken the trouble to teach her how to read and write. Mercifully, Providence spared her any more children after the return to Dublin.
At the age of fourteen my grandfather had to find a job and with wild illogic his father objected to his working as a messenger-boy for a firm of silk importers. It was perfectly in order for a wife to work eighteen hours a day to support an idle husband, but for a son and heir to run errands – no! Unthinkable! This son and heir, however, did not intend to run errands for long. On his twenty-first birthday, after a two-year training course in Lyons, he was made assistant-manager of the Dublin branch of his firm. And three years later he was managing-director – a good catch, then, for my unendowed grandmother.
The trouble on her side was religion. Her mother, the daughter of a Scots Presbyterian cotton magnate, had come to Dublin on a holiday, fallen in love with a dashing Roman Catholic cabinet-maker – presumably when he was working in her host’s house as they would scarcely have been moving in the same social circle – and urged him to emigrate to Edinburgh. This he devotedly did and a clandestine courtship ended with an elopement – in a snowstorm, it is said, but I suspect this of being a period embellishment.
My great-grandmother’s dowry would have been substantial had she married suitably and no doubt adequate had she married a cabinet-maker of her own faith. As it was, the statutory shilling again had to suffice though she did not herself become a Catholic. Sadly, her disinterested love was ill-rewarded; at the age of thirty-four she was left a widow with seven young children. When she despairingly contacted her family they offered financial help on condition that her four Catholic sons be brought up as Presbyterians. She herself must have been a convinced Presbyterian or she would have adopted her beloved husband’s faith. But on their wedding day they had agreed, as was then the custom, to bring up their sons as Catholics and their daughters as Presbyterians. She therefore declined her family’s offer of help and set up as a sempstress to provide for her children.
Despite their aura of smelling-salts, Victorian women were a gallant lot – often widowed young, never helped by the state, without formal training yet indomitably resourceful when obliged to support innumerable children. In this case three boys and a girl died young of the tuberculosis that had killed their father. But my great-grandmother survived into her eighties and was affectionately remembered by my mother as a tall, thin, gracious old lady with an ineradicable Scottish accent. Regularly on Sunday afternoons she read the bible to her restive Catholic grandchildren before providing lavish teas at which they could eat their fill of home-made shortbread and oatcakes and honey.
My mother and her siblings were not often allowed to eat their fill. Even when my grandfather was earning £3,000 a year – which in those far days meant affluence – my grandmother obsessively rationed the children’s food. Avaricious and covetous by nature, she could not forgive her own mother for having put honour before wealth. (I have always uncharitably suspected her of becoming a Catholic simply to spite my loyally Presbyterian great-grandmother.) And her sadistic withholding of plentiful food from hungry children was probably a way of taking her revenge on her husband for his generosity (admittedly not always prudent) towards less well-off friends and relatives.
Jeff had a tight-lipped aversion to gaiety and pleasure, however innocent. As a very small child I became aware of her total lack of humour though I could not then have defined what so often made me uncomfortable in her presence. I also became aware of the animosity she felt towards my mother, which possibly explains an odd little incident which occurred in the autumn of 1936.
Jeff wore a wig, having been afflicted by total baldness as a girl, and though it was a most superior wig it did not deceive me. Sitting on her lap one afternoon I looked into the garden and saw her black Persian cat – strangely named Zog, after the King of Albania – stalking a bird under an apple tree. Then suddenly I knew that I was about to be very wicked. I remember thinking that there should be a choice – surely I need not be wicked – yet the compulsion to hurt Jeff was so overwhelming that it seemed to leave no choice. I turned and touched the wig and observed, ‘That’s not real hair.’ And as I spoke I was so appalled by my cruelty that I began to shake all over.
Both my parents were present, sitting side by side in the background, and at once I glanced towards them. Yes, they had heard. My father looked grieved and my mother wrathful as she murmured something in his ear. Obediently he stood up, carried me out to the hall, reprimanded me sorrowfully and smacked me once very gently on the bottom. This was my first and last domestic experience of corporal punishment – if that is the right term for a chastisement that was virtually indistinguishable from a caress.
When we returned to the sitting-room Zog had caught his prey and was devouring it on the window-sill. Jeff cuddled and consoled me exaggeratedly while upbraiding my parents for treating their little innocent so harshly. I had never before heard grown-ups disagreeing openly about child-control and was fascinated by the new vistas of adult fallibility thus opened up.
Not long after this I nearly joined the angels by drinking half a bottle of neat whiskey. Had I gone on a similar binge in Lismore I would almost certainly have died. As it was, an ambulance rushed me to hospital where I recovered with a speed that ominously foreshadowed an infinite capacity for strong liquor. But the most significant aspect of my adventure was lost on me at the time. I had come upon this half-bottle not in the sideboard, amongst the genteel decanters of sherry and port, but at the bottom of my grandmother’s wardrobe.
Given Jeff’s views on sex, as transmitted to my mother, she must have been an insipid bed-mate. It is therefore not surprising that my grandfather quietly maintained a second establishment in Paris, where his business took him with convenient regularity. Not long before his death he told my mother that five children had been born of this union – obviously his true marriage, in every sense but the legal.
At the age of forty-nine my grandfather was ‘requested to resign’ because of his hard drinking. My mother then had to return from Munich, where she had just begun to train as a singer. Her two elder brothers had already completed their education, but the younger boys had to be transferred from their Jesuit college to a free day-school. Then the Ford had to be sold, the servants dismissed, the telephone disconnected and the silver pawned. My grandfather could afford to go to Paris only very occasionally – when his mistress sent him the fare – and he was continually exposed to his wife’s contempt. A proud man, he felt his degradation keenly. No one then thought of alcoholism as a disease and he was very conscious of being despised. He drank even harder and borrowed more and more frantically. Meanwhile the family was being kept by his port-sodden father, who had recently inherited a comfortable income from one of the sisters amongst whom his patrimony had been divided when he embraced his kitchenmaid.
My grandfather was declared bankrupt two years after his dismissal – or ‘resignation’, as the nicer members of his family chose to call it. A year later his father died and on the way back from the funeral he paused to light his pipe, sat unsteadily on a wall by the Royal Canal, toppled over, struck his head on a stone and was drowned in eighteen inches of water. Very strangely, for the spot was nowhere near their home, my mother chanced to be passing and witnessed his body being lifted onto the pavement. He was already dead. But for the first ghastly, absurd moment what most upset her was the stench of the slimy weeds that clung to the corpse’s impeccable morning-suit. Even when bankrupt her father had remained something of a dandy.
My mother and he had been exceptionally close – hence Jeff ’s dislike of her daughter – and I heard him spoken of so often during my childhood that I now find it hard to believe I never knew him. Obviously father and daughter were very alike though luckily my mother’s penchant for gracious living was tempered by an awareness that one cannot live both honestly and graciously on a few hundred pounds a year.
For both our sakes, my mother preferred me to spend more time with my paternal grandparents than with herself and Jeff. A fifteen-minute tram-ride took me from Kenilworth Park to Charleston Avenue so I could still see my mother almost daily. But though the spatial distance between the two households was slight the spiritual distance was vast.
At Charleston Avenue there was poverty, too, but it was happy-go-lucky rather than gloomy and self-pitying. The house was shabby, dark, damp and cramped – yet comfortable. It might have seemed less cramped had there been fewer tottering piles of books on every flat surface. The uninitiated sometimes hinted that a week spent tidily arranging these volumes would make life less inconvenient – not to say perilous – for all concerned. But the initiated knew that the volumes were already arranged to my grandfather’s satisfaction and that from amidst the seeming chaos he could at a moment’s notice produce any required work, whether on the Birds of Patagonia, the History of Printing in North Africa or the Bogotrid Sect of tenth-century Bulgaria. I remember that all ornithological tomes were stacked high on the first four steps of the second flight of stairs. Lord Brougham (Collected Works of) towered beside the lavatory and countless volumes of scriptural commentary had to be removed from the bed in the spare room before I could lie down.
I loved that spare room. Narrow corridors between piles of desiccated books led to the two beds and even before I could read I got high on the pungent mustiness of ancient volumes. On summer evenings I used to slip out of bed and move cautiously about the room, picking up and stroking and glancing through volume after volume, pleased if I found illustrations but not bored if I didn’t. To see and touch and smell those books filled me with content, with feelings of joy and security and richness. And also – even at four and a half – with ambition.
I perfectly understood my grandfather’s triumph when, at the end of a long day in the second-hand bookshops on the quays, he came trudging home hidden behind a pile of bargains. This, as far as he and I were concerned, was what life was all about. Therefore I have always relished The Tale of Pappa’s Trousers.
Once upon a time Granny gave her spouse enough cash to buy himself a very necessary pair of everyday trousers. (For obvious reasons he was not normally entrusted with such large sums of money.) Wearing his Sunday suit, because he had nothing else fit to wear, he set off for wherever the cheapest men’s clothing was to be had. But unluckily his route took him onto the quays and there he chanced to notice the ten-volume 1840 edition of Sismondi’s Histoire des Républiques Italiennes, elegantly bound and without a blemish. It cost considerably more than he had in his pocket, but he judged it to be a bargain and acted with a decisiveness that had it been otherwise directed might have made him a rich man. Nearby was a second-hand clothes shop where he quickly flogged his Sunday suit and bought threadbare trousers for a few shillings. The substantial balance, added to his original allowance, just about paid for Sismondi and his tram fare home. He arrived at Charleston Avenue in a state of advanced euphoria. But as he was also in his shirt-sleeves, and very nearly indecently exposed, it is not surprising that his wife failed to appreciate the Histoire des Républiques Italiennes in ten vols.
Not that my grandmother could afford to criticise Pappa’s obsession: her own was no less uncontrollable and, at least to me, a good deal less understandable. She played bridge, almost literally without ceasing. Naturally I found this a bore, yet I do not remember regarding as abnormal the fact that she and her cronies ate, drank and slept according to the fall of the cards. They might be retiring as I crept downstairs at 7 a.m. to play beneath the overgrown laurel bushes in the back garden. Or they might be in full cry at lunchtime, in which case Pappa and I would quietly settle down to a snack of bread and very ripe Stilton. (So ripe that it had been bought at half-price.) It was not uncommon for the cronies to sleep on divans in the sitting-room, lest their departures and returns might waste time.
Who cooked and washed up? (it was evident that nobody cleaned). I can recall no maid or daily, yet neither do I remember ever going hungry. However, the permanent state of the dining-table proved the subordinate rôle played by food in this household. It was a large table and my memory is of one sordid, crumby corner grudgingly left clear of books and journals and sheaves of notes written in Pappa’s tiny, precise hand.
Pappa – when not delivering philosophy lectures at University College Dublin – was generally understood to be writing A Book. Its subject, however, was never disclosed. My guess would be that he started several books on diverse subjects and finished none of them for lack of mental stamina – or possibly for lack of physical stamina. As a captured Old IRA volunteer, he had been on hunger strike in England for six weeks during 1918, in a bid to have his status as a political prisoner recognised, and this effort at the age of forty-eight had permanently damaged his health. During the same period his wife had also been ‘inside’, as a leader of the women volunteers, Cumann na mBan, and a boundless nationalistic fervour was the couple’s only obvious common trait. Yet they were very happy together, each amiably tolerating the other’s foibles, and they gave my mother a taste of easy-going affection such as she had never enjoyed in her own home.
The flavour of that affection is well conveyed by the letter which Pappa wrote to my father for his twenty-first birthday, which was celebrated in Bedford jail. (My father had been sentenced to three years for concealing weapons and ammunition in his back garden.)
18 Garville Ave.
Rathgar, Dublin
15 Dec. 1921
A Fearguis, a Mic mo Croide – Many very happy returns of your birthday, my darling boy! Fondest love and congratulations and thousands of kisses from your mother. May God bless and protect and inspire you: may he fill your heart with his wisdom, his love and his comfort. Connie, Kathleen, Conn and Auntie join with us, your loving parents, in wishing you joy on your coming of age and hoping you will have a long and happy life.
I can scarcely realise that on tomorrow it will be twenty-one years from that joyous Sunday noon when I first heard your infant voice and held you as a tender babe in my arms – my first little son! Well, thank God, your conduct and character since that happy morning have never caused me a moment’s anxiety – on the contrary, my love and trust and hope and pride in you have increased from year to year and today these thoughts and feelings are a source of the greatest joy and thankfulness. I think it right to tell you this, so that you may read it on the day when you are standing on the threshold of young manhood.
As I write this, An Dail is sitting to determine the most momentous question which had ever been considered by an assembly of Irishmen – shall the Treaty be ratified or not. I tried to put the best face on it for you in my last letter, but we cannot conceal the fact that it was a profound disappointment to most of us; and the more we look at it, the less we like it. It has one very big advantage and two very decided drawbacks. In the first place it provides for the withdrawal of the army of occupation from four-fifths of Ireland and enables us to set up our own army of defence, at least 40,000 strong, in the district thus evacuated – all this is to the good. But, we have not got a Republic and an absolutely sovereign state for four-fifths of Ireland – and we have got nothing at all for Ireland as a whole. We have not got a united Ireland – the Treaty recognises and sanctions partition. The President, Cathal Brugha and Austin Stack are opposed to ratification and many regard the Treaty as tantamount to a betrayal.
It is uncertain therefore whether it will be ratified or not; or whether there will be an appeal to the country. Until ratification takes place, it is unlikely that the sentenced political prisoners will be released and consequently you may have to eat your Christmas dinner yet again in an English prison. But keep a stout heart. No matter what happens our position is greatly improved. It is difficult to know which to pray for – rejection or ratification; there is so much to be said both ways now. You must, accordingly, abate the ardour of your first enthusiasm: mine has cooled very rapidly.
Perhaps you had best spend a week in London and have a look round. You may not get the chance again for a long time. It will be interesting in the future to look back upon what London was like when it was the capital of a big empire. Time is sure to bring many changes and in a few decades London may be a very different place.
You might let me have a list of the things supplied to you by Wallace as I want to check the account he has sent in. Order from him whatever you want – food, tobacco or cigarettes: it is much quicker and handier than sending them by parcel post. Don’t hesitate to send for whatever you require. The books you requested last month are being sent today; your letter asking for them arrived after I had left for Rome. I hope that you will not have much time to read them in prison. God knows you must be heartsick of prison life, and with the prospect of a fourth consecutive Christmas in prison before you you cannot feel too cheerful. However, Nil Desperandum!
We expect Connie home tomorrow or Thursday; she didn’t like her latest prison at all. We have a friend of hers staying with us now who was her cell-mate for a long time in the NDU. We had a letter from Conn yesterday, dated 3 Dec. and quite cheery. He seems to be in good form and is confidently awaiting his release before Xmas. He says he enjoyed your last letter.
I got a pretty bad cold on my return from sunny Italy* but I am now recovered. I can arrange, later on, to meet you in Holyhead on your return journey.
With fondest love and heartiest wishes for a Happy Birthday, Your affectionate
Pappa.
The earlier letter about the Treaty, in which Pappa had ‘tried to put the best face on it’, was written on December 8, 1921, and began:
May God save and prosper the Free State of Ireland! You have no doubt heard the good news that a settlement has been agreed to between the English and Irish nations. It is not quite all that we had hoped it would be, but it is very good indeed and very much better than anything which seemed within the bounds of possibility a few years ago. And we have to thank you and the comrades with whom you fought for the magnitude of the victory. We have not succeeded in establishing an Irish Republic for a united Ireland, it is true. But we have got the real substance and can afford to wait a bit for the name. The sovereign independent Free State of Ireland will be in actual existence within a month and you will be coming back to live in that Free State which your courage and sacrifices have helped to create. So rejoice and be exceedingly glad. Let no disappointment cloud your joy or diminish your legitimate pride in what has been accomplished. On your return I shall explain fully to you the real value – as distinct from the paper value – of what we have won. I believe that the convicts will be released as soon as the Treaty has been ratified by An Dail and the English Parliament and that will be, probably, within a week.
I have asked Mamma to send you on the biggest portmanteau in the house. Cord up all your books, make sure they are fastened securely and bring them all home safely.
What had caused Pappa to change his attitude towards the Treaty so radically within exactly one week? ‘Putting the best face on it’ for a son in jail is not a sufficient explanation. Did the real ‘substance’ referred to on December 8 prove after all insubstantial? And was it in some way connected with the negotiations which Pappa had been conducting with the Vatican on behalf of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic? I have been able to find no answer to this question in the vast accumulation of letters and papers now in my possession.
The convicts were not released before Christmas and on December 23 Pappa wrote to his ‘beloved son’:
The Dail has not been able to make up its mind about the Treaty and last evening decided by 77 votes to 44 to adjourn its consideration of the matter to 3 Jan. So this means an end to all our hopes of having you home for Christmas. Poor Feargus! It is too bad, indeed; but never mind, my dear son, there is a good time coming and this is, I hope, the last big trial of the kind which the providence of God will permit to be inflicted on you. So keep up your heart and laugh English prisons to scorn. We were disgusted to hear that two extra days have been imposed on you for something which happened in Mountjoy before your transfer to Wormwood Scrubs. This is typical of English meanness, but let it pass. I was going to bring the matter to the attention of the IRA liaison officer, but on second thoughts I decided not to!
The handling of the position created by the Treaty did no credit to the Dail: they have spent too much time discussing the pros and cons of theoretical points instead of addressing themselves to practical affairs. However, no human institution is perfect and perhaps we expected too much of our representatives. Opinion is settling steadily in favour of ratification and, although nobody is madly in love with the Treaty, there seems to be nothing else to do in the present circumstances but to accept it.
Four days later Pappa was writing again:
It will be fine to have you home for New Year’s Day! You will see the first sun of 1922 shining on the slopes of Kilmashogue and lighting up the top of the Three Rock and flecking with light and shadow the little trout stream out of which you so often fished a breakfast for yourself and Kathleen. And a good deep draught of our sweet Irish air will soon make the blood again run freely and warmly in your veins.
We are going down to Malahide this evening to see Cathal Brugha: he is greatly upset about the Treaty and thinks it ought not to be accepted on any account. Things are looking particularly ugly just at present. A double crooked game is being played against us and I should not be surprised if the Conference broke up this week. The Irish Bulletin got hold of a secret circular issued by the RIC Divisional Commander in Belfast organising a secret Orange army – and has published it! Of course the Cabinet will repudiate it but there it is and very significant, too. In addition the British Govt. is hastily pushing on the Partition Act arrangements to give Belfast full powers and in order to do so is committing all sorts of illegalities and riding roughshod over its own precious Act. So we are by no means within sight of a settlement yet. ‘Ulster’ has now been paraded on stage and the marionettes wave their wooden arms and shout ‘No surrender!’ in the approved Orange style. Of course in this case the benevolent English Govt., anxious to do its best to effect a settlement, finds all its efforts thwarted by the irreconcilable quarrels between Irishmen themselves. What can you do with a hopeless people like this except keep a tight grip on them to prevent their killing each other? If Irishmen could only come to some agreement among themselves and tell the British exactly what they do want – there would be no trouble at all. Everything that a united Ireland asked for would be granted on the spot! And so the old game goes merrily on – just for the moment. But the curtain is about to be rung down on this tragi-comedy and to be rung up on a different style of drama presenting some very novel features.
[Alas! Pappa was wrong there: contemporary Northern Ireland proves how wrong. The equivalent of his next paragraph has appeared with monotonous frequency in Irish newspapers during the past decade.]
There has been great trouble in all the internment camps since the truce. Conditions grow worse instead of better and the boys are having a rotten time. In Ballykinlar especially the British have gone out of their way to be nasty. They shot Alderman Tadgh Barry the other day just as he was waving goodbye to some released internees. A sentry pretended to think that Tadgh was trying to escape and shot him dead. There was great grief in Cork and great indignation everywhere. Friday and Saturday saw a very impressive funeral, the cortège coming from Ballykinlar by motor and being received by Volunteers and big crowds on the way down to Dublin.
We had a great day at the National University on Saturday when we installed President de Valera as Chancellor. It was a splendid turn-out with the Chancellor himself of course the most striking figure. He wore a robe of black velvet with rich gold trimmings and looked like both a ruler and a scholar; his tall figure and his thin ascetic face were fittingly set off by his magnificent robes. We gave him a great reception – and no mistaking its significance! What an extraordinary revolutionary change has the National seen! Who would have dreamed, a few short years ago, that an unknown and despised BA would on Saturday have been installed with great pomp and ceremony as Head of the entire university! Time! thou bringest mighty revenges! The IRA furnished a guard of honour and Kathleen, as Captain of the University Company of Cumann na mBan, mustered her sixty-five hefty cailin who made an impressive display. She also read an address in Irish to the Chancellor, who replied in Irish. Except for one speech, all the proceedings were conducted either in Latin or in Irish. The doctors’ gowns with their various colours ‘brightened up the scene’ wonderfully. I was resplendent in a scarlet gown with maroon sleeves and a maroon hood lined with green silk. Next to the Chancellor’s, it was the best robe in the show!
Everybody is looking forward to having you home, including Bob and Whiskers who are purring beside me at the thought. I hope you got the portmanteau and that you will find it big enough for all your books.
Fondest love from your own affectionate
Pappa.
Throughout his time in prison my father had received from Pappa as many letters as were allowable, some covering more than twenty foolscap pages and few less than ten. Each included a detailed account of the latest political developments and an assessment of how Dubliners of every shade of opinion were reacting to them. Pappa also occasionally reminded his son that ‘the average Englishman is a decent enough fellow’ – from which rather unexpected comment one may deduce that my father’s letters (now lost) were betraying that obsessional anti-English bias which he was never to outgrow. Pappa was too kindly to condemn any race completely; therefore his hatred of British rule in Ireland led him to draw a not very convincing distinction between ‘the average decent Englishman and the governing mind – for that is the only mind that finds expression in the country’s corporate institutions – and it is a strange mixture of Saxon dullness and Norman cruelty’. So much for his faith in British democracy.
These letters give a wonderfully vivid picture of contemporary life in Dublin. Repeatedly 18 Garville Avenue was raided, sometimes when the house was empty, and once the British troops helped themselves to £5 10s. 0d. which Pappa had imprudently left in a wallet in his bedroom. He got no satisfaction when he wrote to the CO complaining that the maid and the gardener could not be paid that week unless the money were restored. This was literally true – not a sob-story – and after the gardener had left in a huff there are some wry references to Mamma’s unsuccessful attempts to replace his labours with Pappa’s. Soon after, Maria, the maid, also left to get married and was replaced by ‘Mrs Bruagh’s maid, Agnes, who plays the melodeon beautifully and often entertains us in the drawing-room. She remembers you well: she says you are a nice young gentleman and not a bit proud as you spoke to her kindly one day when she was out with the Bruagh children.’ So much for attitudes towards servants sixty years ago.
The burning of the Customs House and the various reactions of Dubliners to that event are graphically described; Pappa’s own reactions were – as he admitted – very mixed. Then on June 1 he writes:
In Dublin now it is positively dangerous to walk the streets. Not a day passes without four or five ambushes taking place. You are walking down say, Nassau St, when suddenly you hear a terrific explosion followed by a volley of rifle shots; you look round and see people rushing into shops, others lying flat on the ground, others running up the side streets! Trams tear along madly; horses gallop away from the cab-stands, women shriek, bullets whistle round your ears, bomb splinters are flying, wounded people lie about groaning – ‘oh! what a lovely war!’ – and for a quarter of an hour you have a lively time of it. Scenes like this occur every day here in all quarters of the city. A girl was shot dead in Trinity College Park last week during a cricket match; and two men who were sitting on a wall at Clontarf were shot at and died a few hours afterwards. The why or the wherefore of these latter happenings never appears, but all sorts of rumours are flying round – many of them of the most contradictory kind. It is easy enough to see the raison d’être of the ambushes, but the other occurrences are terrifying and mysterious. Twice this week the tram on which I was travelling was held up by the English and all passengers (male) searched. On last Sat. at the corner of Harrington, Camden and Richmond Streets you could see four long lines of trams held up for searching purposes while groups of soldiers occupied the streets and stopped all vehicles – rifles at the ready and bayonets fixed, while officers nervously brandished revolvers and held them under the noses of all and sundry including women and children. The searching would make a cat laugh – I could have had half a dozen revolvers and a few bombs on me without the slightest risk of detection. And all that is achieved by this ferocious display is to delay and irritate everybody, to dislocate traffic and business and to call down curses – not loud but deep – on the stupid military. But the situation is not without its humorous side: it is delightful to listen to the former red-white-and-blue people – the bigoted Unionists – the erstwhile ‘God Save the Kingers’, expressing their views on the present régime. My word! haven’t they changed! To hear them would do the heart of any Sinn Feiner good!
However, normal life continued too, as it does today in Belfast, and most of Pappa’s letters were devoted to descriptions of family outings, new plays, art exhibitions, bridge marathons, poker parties, long hikes in the Dublin and Wicklow mountains, cricket matches, croquet contests on long summer evenings, moonlight bathing parties at Greystones and gossip about friends and neighbours. The family news mainly concerned Conn, my father’s ne’er-do-well younger brother, who when not in jail for political reasons was a constant source of anxiety lest he might end up there for non-political reasons. And there were many speculations about Kathleen’s many admirers – which she should retain for further consideration and which she should discard without delay.
Some news items have a very modern ring: ‘The strike of the Rathmines Council workmen is still on and we are without light and without ‘bin-men’. As for the first we don’t miss it for we have daylight till 11; but not being able to get rid of ashes and house rubbish is a bit of a nuisance. And the fun of the thing is that the dispute about hours is settled and the strike is being continued solely for the wages which were not paid during the time of the strike: workmen now want to be paid even for striking.’
Despite Pappa’s horror of Partition, his references to the North all indicate that even in 1921 the average Dubliner felt it to be an alien place. On May 2 he wrote:
I was in Belfast on April 20 and 21 lecturing on ‘Ancient Irish and Ancient Greek Education’. I had little opportunity to find out anything as I know practically nobody there, but I heard one important item of information from a ‘big business’ source – over 60% of those employed in the linen trade are out of work, the American trade has almost entirely ceased, there are big stocks on hand which can find no purchasers though they are being offered at prices slightly lower than the present cost of production. The boycott is telling very markedly. Otherwise the town seemed to me just as it was when I last visited it five or six years ago. It seems to have learned nothing and to have forgotten nothing. For instance I saw two lorry-loads of young fellows apparently returning from an excursion – probably factory hands – each lorry had a Union Jack floating over it; the Union Jack floated too over that monstrosity in architecture known as the City Hall. King William on a white horse crossing the Boyne is still their beau ideal and to shout ‘To Hell With the Pope’ and to stone the ‘bloody papishes’ is still the chief duty of a ‘loyal’ Belfast citizen. They still live in the Ireland of 15 years ago and are unaware of the avalanche which is about to descend on them.
Belfast is an uninteresting place – it has only one fine street, the rest being either monotonous replicas of rows of workmen’s cottages or dingy terraces of a would-be suburbia. The energy which I noticed on my last visit was replaced by a good deal of listlessness – owing to the ubiquity of the out-of-works, I suppose. Anyway I was very glad to get back to good old Dublin. I may have to go up again in a week or a fortnight – but I hope not.
Clearly Pappa enjoyed letter-writing. A midsummer day’s solitary walking and trout-fishing in the familiar Wicklow mountains could spark off a thousand-word lyrical description of the landscape, the birds and the ever-changing Irish sky. And a sunny autumn afternoon spent strolling with Mamma around Lucan and the Leixlip demesne inspired at least another thousand words. Until reading these letters I had not fully appreciated how easy it was for Dubliners of that period to enjoy as much of country life as was desired. For a keen hiker, miles of untouched countryside were within walking distance of Rathgar – as was the sea, for a keen swimmer like Pappa.
In the autumn of 1922 my father left for Paris, to begin his studies at the Sorbonne, and he spent the next seven years in France. Money was so scarce that he only rarely returned home; most of his vacations were spent tutoring the two sons of a Russian émigré duke in the South of France. Unfortunately no correspondence has survived from those years – until 1928, when on July 9 Pappa wrote a long letter, liberally scattered with quotations from Julius Caesar and Shakespeare, in response to my father’s decision to become a Benedictine monk. In the end he expresses no opinion but concludes, tantalisingly, ‘I have a hundred things to say but it is just post-time so I shall wait till tomorrow.’ Reading between the lines, however, one discerns disapproval. And there is an unwonted acidity in the last paragraph – ‘Fondest love from your mother. Send her a little note for herself – why have I to suggest this? Does your love for her not prompt it?’
If Pappa at once doubted the genuineness of his son’s vocation he was quite right. The next letter to have survived was written only nine months later, on March 20, 1929, in response to my father’s decision to marry a nineteen-year-old Swedish girl who was studying at the Sorbonne under the eagle eye of an aunt-chaperon. My father appears to have detested this aunt even more than he detested the English – and with good reason. She threatened to call in the police after her niece had spent a day at Versailles – without permission – in the company of a penniless Irishman.
This romance provoked Pappa to write a full-blown Victorian homily:
I must say that my first thoughts and feelings were made up of almost contradictory elements. In the first place there was a sort of disappointment: I had thought that your whole soul was so decidedly fixed on a monastic life that nothing could have diverted you from fulfilling a purpose which you had adopted, apparently, with such deliberation and determination. I had built up a scheme of thoughts for myself founded on that as on a first principle. And then you drop a bombshell – a living one, aetat 19 – into my beautifully constructed building and blow the whole thing to smithereens in a second! But you did it in such an airy and unconcerned fashion that I haven’t the heart to reproach you. Well, perhaps it is the best thing that ever happened. And perhaps it isn’t: time alone can tell. I sincerely hope it is; I earnestly hope that it may bring you deep and lasting happiness. All the fond love of your parents’ hearts goes out to you and we shall have nothing but the warmest welcome for the girl of your choice.
Your mother was not nearly so astonished at the news as I was; and I am sure that in her inmost soul she was delighted at the thought that you were saved from the ever-grasping arms of religious communities!
One thing I am really glad of; and that is that you made the discovery of the possibility of falling in love before you had taken any decisive step towards ordination.
Believe me it is a great thing to be honestly and deeply in love; it lifts the whole soul to a higher level; and if the person loved is a good woman, then it is the noblest passion which can animate the soul of man. Love your sweetheart, then, with all the intensity of your soul – if she is a good girl and returns your love, you cannot love her too much. Pour out your affection without stint; and when she becomes your wife, wrap the whole warmth of your love so closely around her that she can never feel the cold breath of the world no matter how bitterly the winds of adversity may blow. But let your love be intelligent and unselfish. A good wife is the greatest blessing God can bestow on any man – a pearl beyond price; but that pearl must be cherished and safeguarded at all costs. There are two sorts of love – a selfish and an unselfish one. The first seeks to make the beloved minister to one’s own good: the second seeks the good of the beloved before all else.
And now to come down to earth. It is all very well to fall in love – but what about the future? You cannot ask anyone to marry you until you are able to provide a decent life for her – I don’t mean affluence nor even an easy life, nor one devoid of struggle, or even, at times, of anxiety; but a reasonable prospect of the necessary things – a sufficiency of nourishing food, comfortable housing and warm, befitting clothing. I don’t know whether you have come to any understanding with the girl, whether you are engaged or not. You have merely said you intended to marry her soon. To my mind, it is all too sudden and recent for any official engagement. It takes a certain amount of time for the growth and ripening of real love. But, if you are in earnest, you must set about making a living: you must have a definite realisable plan and you must follow it out steadily. What do you propose doing?
Love should purge you of a large element of that selfishness which clings to you. You are too apt to let absorption in your own intellectual concerns cause you to forget the position of those who love you dearly. For instance, you did not trouble to acknowledge the receipt of this month’s allowance. And that’s only one incident. This is not a reproach, but a reminder.
Write soon – and more fully. Your affectionate
Pappa.
What happened next? Did the formidable aunt win? (I cannot imagine my father – however much in love – withstanding such a female for long.) Or, when the novelty had worn off, did the nineteen-year-old bombshell lose interest in her Irish suitor – so shy, impractical and inexperienced in the arts of love? Or did my father take fright, upon reading Pappa’s homily, and decide that the responsibilities of marriage would prove too taxing? Whatever happened, he was home for Christmas that year – unmarried and unemployed – and he never returned to France. In January 1930 he began a six-month Library Diploma course at University College Dublin, in April he met my mother again (they had last met three years previously and had known each other as children), in July he was appointed County Librarian for Waterford and in August he and my mother announced their engagement.
At that time Ireland’s Civil War was not long over and the families of Dublin were still angrily arrayed on either side of an ugly barrier. How ugly may be gauged by a remark made on July 29, 1927, when my father’s brother Conn wrote from Ontario: ‘Congratulations on getting your finals. I am quite enjoying the experience of sailing on the Great Lakes. I saw in the papers here that Kevin O’Higgins has been shot dead – damn near time – the sooner they shoot a few more like him the better. The Canadian papers described him as a martyr but they had to admit he was the best hated man in Ireland.’ Kevin O’Higgins was one of the finest Irishmen of his generation – but he was a Free Stater, and the Murphys were Republicans.
My parents’ engagement therefore represented a considerable mésalliance, between the son of a rabidly Republican family and the daughter of a mildly Unionist family. But to give my paternal grandparents their due, they saw the point of the marriage within moments of being introduced to my mother. By then she – being totally apolitical – had cheerfully adopted a diluted form of Republicanism to meet the situation.
In general, however, the two families were never more than distantly polite. To my father’s family, my mother’s relations were not only politically corrupt but barbarously unlearned, hard-drinking, irreligious, foppish and extravagant. To my mother’s family, my father’s relations were not only politically irresponsible but feckless, bigoted, prudish and riddled with intellectual pretensions that never came to anything. Happily these prejudices left me unaffected. I grew up fond of both families, unquestioningly accepting their covert mutual hostility as a fact of Irish life.
*Pappa had been in Rome as Ambassador to the Vatican from the Government of the Irish Republic.