All of These People: A Memoir

Now there are things I know that explain part of the sadness. Some of it, at least, had to do with the hard circumstances of life. My grandmother reared nine children on a country schoolteacher’s paltry pay. For much of the time she lived under the same roof as her parents- and brother- and sister-in-law. It was a house without retreat or space for the young mother in a country where women were told that suffering was their noble duty.

I did not know my grandfather, Bill Keane. He died when I was a baby. My mother remembers: ‘He used to sit you on his knee when you were a baby and tell stories to you. By that time he was sick with throat cancer. Very sick. And he could only really swallow things that were very soft. He used to drink ice cream that had melted but it was still agony for him. He was a lovely man.’

Everybody I ask says the same thing. A lovely man. Bill taught at Clounmacon school, seven miles outside Listowel. He walked there and back every day of his teaching life. A few years ago I met two elderly nuns who remembered him. One of them said: ‘He was a gentle teacher. You know, in those days some of them could be wicked blackguards. They beat the children something terrible. But your grandfather wasn’t like that. He loved teaching and he loved words. The way he could get across those words of great writers to you was something magical. He had a great way of talking.’

I formed a picture in my mind of Bill Keane in that country classroom, before him the children of the surrounding farms, many of them boys who would soon leave to plant their father’s fields or to work as labourers on other farms, barefoot children of a pre-industrial Ireland held in thrall by the teacher’s stories.

Next to the kitchen in Church Street he kept a small library. My father and Uncle John B were introduced to the great writers like Hardy and Dickens through that little cupboard. The Keane house also had a name as a place where visiting actors were sure of a welcome. At that time theatrical companies still toured Ireland bringing the works of Shakespeare to the small towns and villages. The great Anew McMaster came and recited verse in the small parlour and inspired my father to become an actor. Words filled that house.

But my grandfather Bill was not what you would call a practical man. The best description I have of him comes from a poem written by my uncle, John B.

When he spoke gustily and sincerely Spittle fastened Not merely upon close lapel But nearly blinded Those who had not hastened To remove pell-mell. He was inviolate. Clung to old stoic principle, And he dismissed his weaknesses As folly. His sinning was inchoate; Drank ill-advisedly.

Bill would stop for a drink on his way home from school in the houses of people who knew and loved him (Yerrah, Bill, come in for the one). He stopped at crossroads where he met the local characters (J can only stop a few minutes.. At Alla Sheehy’s pub next door (J must be off now in the name of God. Well, just the last one so).

My grandfather worked through to his retirement. He cared for his family and every one of them remembered him with love. He was a thinker but also a dreamer. Sometimes he could spend money on drink that Hanna depended on to pay bills and provide for the children. It was not a permanent crisis but it added to the pressure on my grandmother.

He clashed with the Catholic priest who was the ultimate manager of Clounmacon school. Part of my Uncle John’s later aversion to organised religion sprang from what he felt was the unforgiving attitude of the Church towards his father. He told me once of how the priest had arrived at the house and gone upstairs to where my grandfather was lying sick in bed and harangued him to get up and go back to work.

Bill Keane did get revenge of sorts, or at least he proved he was not cowed by the Church imperial. Once when seeing a particularly unpleasant priest – a man with a reputation for brutality in the classroom – on the main street, Bill walked past without doffing his cap, the customary greeting. As John B’s biographer describes it:

‘The priest rounded on him. “Don’t you know to salute a priest when you see one?"’

To which my grandfather replied: ‘When I see one.’

My uncle wrote a play about his father. It may have been the bravest thing he ever wrote. In those days autobiographical drama was rare in Ireland, the fear of bringing shame on a family in such a small community was too great. In The Crazy Wall John B describes a man attempting to build a wall in his garden. But the builder, clearly modelled on his father, is not a practical man. The wall twists and turns. It is badly made and eventually crumbles. John B later told an interviewer: ‘When things were not going his way, my father built a symbolic wall around himself, to shut out the harsh realities of the world; he once dreamed he was going to take off around Ireland, but it came to nothing. He wanted to write the great book, and that, too, became a futile exercise.’

The relationship between my grandparents went through difficult times. Hanna must have suffered when her husband retreated into himself and when the bills came and there was no money to pay them. But when they walked out together, well into old age, those who saw them remember a couple in love, strolling arm in arm along Church Street and out towards the country lanes. They were alert to the higher values – love, compassion, the beauty of words – but hemmed in by the Free State and its poverty, the puritanical hectoring of the Church, the leeching bitterness of the Civil War and the exceptional demands of rearing many children in a small place. When I visualise my paternal grandparents I imagine two sensitive people, people of restrained nobility. But somewhere in that large family with its many pressures I believe my father became lost.

I cannot understand my grandparents, or my father, without looking at the country in which they lived. My father grew up in a state ruled over by former guerrilla fighters, men who had fought the British and then fought each other. In war photographs they are dressed in peak caps and trench coats, country boys with expressions that are half eager, half desperate, men with a price on their heads, who would be shot out of hand if captured, wild rebels in the mountains. But in my father’s country they were transformed. Éamonn de Valera had helped spark the Civil War by rejecting the Treaty with the British and providing political leadership for the IRA; his successor, Seán Lemass, was a man who had shot dead an unarmed British agent at point-blank range. But now they wore grey suits and dark hats; their rebel years behind them, they said their prayers and listened carefully to the raging whispers of the bishops.

When I was younger I judged them harshly, our spent revolutionaries. But after seeing war myself, especially the self-murdering insanity of civil war, I see them in a different light. I think they were tired men, trying as best they could to create a country after nearly a decade of conflict, battered by the economic depression that followed the Wall Street Crash, and then allowing themselves to be dragged into an economic war with Britain which they could not win. In the original shooting war against the British they had been hunted like wild animals; they had killed and been killed; in the Civil War men who had fought together, in some cases members of the same family, turned their guns on each other. The Civil War overshadowed everything in my father’s country. How could it not: that memory of ambush, executions, torture? It may be fanciful to believe, but I think some of them were more than tired; they were in a state of lingering shock, frightened by what they had discovered in themselves during those terrible years of war.

My father said: ‘We hated each other more than we ever hated the British.’ I don’t know how true that was. But he did grow up listening to stories of atrocity: men shot dead as they surrendered, others tied to landmines and blown to pieces. By the time my father was politically aware, he would have known that two parties dominated the landscape: there was Cumann na nGaedheal, the party of Collins’s people, and Fianna Fáil, the party of de Valera. They barracked each other with bitter words. ‘Murderers’. ‘Free State traitors’. ‘IRA assassins’. The toxic rasp of hatred went on and on in the lives of the people. They fought about it at political meetings, football matches, anywhere crowds gathered.

Yet both parties were profoundly similar. They were deeply conservative, both bended the knee to the Catholic Church and both would, in time, use fierce repression to protect the new Irish state from would-be revolutionaries. More than anything our new state suffered from a chronic failure of imagination. Having achieved freedom, our leaders were too tired or too blinkered – or a combination of both – to do much more than manage the shop. Innovation and inspiration were decades away.

Though they were devout supporters of Collins, the Keanes were independent-minded enough to recognise the absurdity of the political situation. During one particularly bitter election campaign my Uncle John B and his friends decided to put up a mock candidate who went by the name of Tom Doodle. The idea was to inject laughter and reduce the bitterness of the hustings. Doodle was the pseudonym given to a local labourer. His slogan, depicted on posters all over the town, was: ‘Vote the Noodle and Give the Whole Caboodle To Doodle.’

John B had organised a brass brand and a large crowd to accompany the candidate to his election meeting. He travelled to the square standing on the back of a donkey-drawn cart. It was a tumultuous affair. In a speech that satirised the clientelist, promise-all politics of the time, Doodle declared his fundamental principle: ‘Every man should have more than the next.’

Some time in the 1940s, not long before he left the town, my father was wandering around Listowel square, thinking and dreaming. It happened that there was a mission under way in the Catholic Church. The visiting Redemptorists were well known peddlers of hellfire and damnation and would send scouts into the square to round up any locals who malingered outside the church. When one of the priests approached my father, warning him to get into the church fast or face an eternity roaring in the flames, Éamonn responded with a remark that would earn him the status of local legend.

‘My good man,’ he said to the raging priest ‘your fulminations have the same effect on me as does the fart of a blackbird on the water levels of the Grand Coulee dam.’

With that he said goodnight and walked away. It was typically opaque, a very ‘Éamonn’ response.

My father’s country was a place of paradox. It was full of poetry and music, there was laughter and satire, but also repression and darkness. For every story told there were a hundred suppressed. There was magic there, but madness too.

Éamonn nurtured a dislike of the clergy all of his life. There were individual priests and nuns whom he liked but he loathed the organised Church. These gentlemen lived in fine palaces and generally behaved with all the humility and decorum you would expect of imperial pro-consuls. In 1937 de Valera framed and succeeded in having adopted a new Irish constitution. For the first time in Irish history the pre-eminent position of the Catholic Church ‘as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens’ was guaranteed by law. This meant the Catholic hierarchy could exert influence on everything from football matches (it succeeded in banning a visit by a team from communist Yugoslavia) to the welfare of mothers and children (it stopped a state-sponsored scheme to provide free healthcare to new mothers and babies on the grounds that it was socialist). In my father’s home town the parish priest shut the gates of the local church against the coffin of an unmarried girl who had died after giving birth.

There were more immediate personal issues at play too. At school my father and uncle witnessed and experienced terrible brutality. The local secondary school was run by priests, among them a notorious brute, Father Davy O’Connor. Under any normal state of affairs he would have been jailed but was instead treated with fawning respect by the cowed townspeople. It says much for the place that even a Catholic priest, writing in the still conservative early 1970s, described St Michael’s College as a place with ‘an unenviable reputation for strict discipline’.

When my father remembered his worst story of Davy O’Connor his mouth tightened. He carried the shame of it like a hump on his back. I heard it, how many times? It was as if by telling he might talk away the pain. But he could not. Even in his last years, the memory of what happened in that classroom burned within him. O’Connor screamed and beat; he used his fists and his boots and a leather strap. My father said that one of his favourite punishments was to take a boy and place his head on the windowsill, facing out towards the fields. He would then lower the window so that the boy’s head was jammed outside. With his victim trapped O’Connor would then pull the boy’s trousers down and thrash him on the backside.

So a boy like Éamonn would stand there facing the trees, hearing the noise of birds and the rush of the river only a field away, and be trapped as the leather slashed at his body, the class trapped too by the shame of it, the sheer terror that any wrong move or word could lead them to the same place.

John B told of how O’Connor had once asked boys during English class to recite any poems they knew. My uncle was already writing his own poems, and he stood and recited from memory a poem called ‘The Street’:

I love the flags that pave the walk

I love the mud between

The funny figures drawn in chalk.

When he had finished Father O’Connor asked him who had written the poem. John B replied that it was his own work. The priest immediately lashed out, knocking him to the floor. Another boy who tried to intervene was also knocked over. O’Connor proceeded to punch and kick my uncle before throwing him out of the class. On that day John B vowed he would be a writer and that no man would shut him up again.

Such incidents were not anachronistic. They reflected the dominant reality of the time. My father and my uncle were comparatively fortunate. They were not inmates of one of the Church-run industrial schools where children were not only beaten but raped as well.

It was in matters of sex that the Church really got to work and screwed up the minds of several generations. The physical and mental damage inflicted on children in the borstals has been well publicised. But the rest of the population was subjected to perverted brainwashing. Contemplate this extract from a booklet produced by the Catholic Truth Society, propagandists for the hierarchy:

…the pleasure of sex is secondary, a means to an end and to make it an end in itself, or deliberately do this is a mortal sin…Let a tiger once taste blood and it becomes mad for more…the poor victim is swept off his feet by passion, and decides, for the time being at any rate that nothing matters except this violent spasm of pleasure…Happier a thousand times is the beggar shivering in his rags at the street corner if his heart be pure, than the millionaire rolling by in his car if he be impure…the boy and girl have to avoid whatever of its very nature is morally certain to excite sexual pleasure. That is why they are warned about late hours; about prolonged signs of their God-given affection which cheapen so easily, about wandering off alone to certain places where they are morally certain to succumb to temptation.

The writer, in all likelihood a priest, went on to chastise girls who wore revealing clothing:

So girls of all sorts, the short and the stocky, the fat and the scraggy, the pigeon-chested and the knock-kneed, insist on exposing their regrettable physical misfortunes to the ironic gaze of the easily amused world around them…

His final blow is directed at morally suspect mothers. It is profoundly revealing of that twisted sensibility which governed the moral order in Ireland:

How any mother can allow her small daughter to romp and play with her brothers without knickers on is incomprehensible and quite disgraceful.

My father never talked about sex. That was not unusual for his Irish generation. Sex was the deed of darkness. But Éamonn was a romantic. He dreamed of loving the Protestant parson’s daughter. He went into the woods and wrote poems to her. But he kept these to himself. In Listowel, as in the rest of Ireland, love was something schoolboys sniggered about.

And God help the boy whom Father Davy O’Connor or one of his type found walking with a girl. These princes of the Church roamed the lanes with blackthorn sticks in hand ready to beat any would-be lovers. I think of them when I hear the snivelling apologists for our Catholic past. Sure it wasn’t that bad at all.

It was only a few years ago that I learned my father had suffered from a bad stammer when he was a boy. Fear had been the cause. Fear of Father Davy O’Connor. For my father who dreamed of being an actor the stammer might have been an impossible hurdle. But through force of will he overcame it. On his own in the woods or upstairs in Church Street he read the poems of Keats and Shelley over and over, training his voice until it was strong enough to leave the town and face the harsh judges of the Abbey School of Acting in Dublin. And when they heard him and accepted him it must have seemed to Éamonn that he could conquer the world.

When he came back to Listowel as an adult, my father was one of Ireland’s most successful actors. Walking down the main street with him, hand in hand, could take an hour or more. People wanted to stop and talk with him. Some of them were tourists who recognised him from television or the stage. But mostly the people we chatted with were locals. They called him ‘The Joker’ or ‘Ned’, two nicknames from his childhood. For all the tension that existed between him and his mother, he felt proud on those streets and I remember most of all the firm, confident grip of his hand. In those days he was going places.

CHAPTER FOUR Tippler (#ulink_f2f7f2a4-856c-580f-80d1-ded4119e54b9)

The next planet was inhabited by a tippler. This was a very short visit but it plunged the little prince into deep dejection.

‘What are you doing there?’ he said to the tippler, whom he found settled down in silence before a collection of empty bottles and also a collection of full bottles.

‘I am drinking,’ replied the tippler, with a lugubrious air.

‘Why are you drinking?’ demanded the little prince.