All of These People: A Memoir

As in Bowditch Hall. We have remained upright –

Though, to be frank, the Christmas dinner scene,

With grown men in their festive gear,

Was a sobering sight.

I went to visit him. It was the first of many visits to many hospitals. They would go on for thirty more years, in one part of the country or another. The hospital was halfway between the Guinness brewery and Heuston railway station where we used to catch the train to visit my maternal grandmother in Cork. Éamonn didn’t look sick. In fact he looked better than I remembered him being for a long time. In hospital he couldn’t drink. He was sharing a big room with some other men and seemed to be popular with them.

My father could have charmed the Devil himself. His way was to start out very quiet and humble, and then dazzle people with a few stories or recitations. Before long the whole place would be talking about what a great character he was. In Ireland people love a good storyteller. Éamonn was a gifted mimic and would mock the more pompous consultants (the power of the Irish consultant class was matched only by its self-regard). But what I could not see then, and did not understand for decades, was that my father was trying to fight back; his hospitalisation was not a weakness, nor should it have been something to be ashamed of; it was a brave attempt to change.

In those days our national attitude to alcohol was extraordinarily perverse. There was hardly a family in the country that did not count an alcoholic somewhere among its members. The hospitals were crammed full of men, and women, suffering from alcohol-related illnesses. Recognising the crisis as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, the Catholic Church campaigned for the cause of temperance. Regular appeals were made for men to join the Pioneer Movement, a church group which promoted total abstinence from alcohol, and children in secondary school were urged to take the pledge not to drink.

Yet awareness of the problem did not extend to honest public discussion, or any campaign by the state to provide treatment for the alcoholics who were victims of our most pernicious national disease. Nor was there any state support for women who were the victims of physical or emotional violence. ‘You made your bed now lie on it,’ a priest told my mother once. Alcoholism belonged in the land of silence. If there was a drunk in the family they were all urged to shut up and get on with the suffering. Most families did. It was a nowhere land where nothing could be confronted, where a woman dare not leave because of social pressure, or the simple fact that she had no job and depended on the man for economic survival.

My mother was lucky in that she had a profession. And when she could take no more, when it seemed as if my father could not succeed in giving up alcohol, she decided to leave.

We left at the beginning of January 1972. We were moving south to the home of my maternal grandmother in Cork. The last Christmas was harrowing. My father drank heavily. I see a toppled Christmas tree, a broken chair, fish and chips scattered on the ground; I hear his voice raging downstairs alone, mad at everything. There were bitter, painful scenes. And afterwards there was regret and apologies and the promise of better times. But I no longer believed. I feared him then. I was angry with him. I wanted to run away. I did not want to say goodbye. I was so lost, so screwed up and scared, that more than anything else in the world I wanted peace.

How long does it take for a heart to break? Mine did not break instantly. It broke every day. Year after year. So that by the time I was old enough to understand that word – ALCOHOLIC – I took it as the definition of everything broken and hopeless. My hope departed incrementally. Year after year, slowly, surely, definitely, a little more went.

And how long does it take for the habits of a lifetime to form? My own: lurking anger, the habit of sadness, and that fear which goes on even now. All of my life I have been quietly afraid. I can still lie in bed, after my wife and children are asleep, and feel full of anxiety; this in a house full of ease and warmth. To this day the sound of a key turning in a door at night, feet shuffling on the street outside my window, can set my heart racing.

Now, I would give anything to know, to be able to talk with him about what he felt when he looked into my eyes then. What did he see looking back at him? Did he see the twitching eyes, the strange, strange child I had become? So many times I wanted to shout: ‘In Jesus name why can’t you stop?’ But I was never bold enough for that.

For me the story of my father and I doesn’t have ‘sides’. There isn’t his side of it or my side of it; a wrong or a right side; a good or a bad side. There is what I lived through and what I remember of him. I loved him every day. I was proud of him. But I was also scared of him. Can you understand that? To be all those things at once, the negative not cancelling the positive, but all of it so muddled up that I couldn’t tell light from dark. I had no lamps, no compass, no maps, and there were no explanations. In those days I practised survival not analysis.

Da. That’s what I called him. Da. It’s a softer word than ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy’ or ‘Father’. Da lingers, a solitary syllable at the end of the world, a word to convey everything I felt about him in those days, a word full of tenderness and loss. I can’t describe the impossible loneliness I felt at the moment of goodbye. Lucky for me he was asleep when I looked in and saw him. I mouthed the word ‘Goodbye’.

CHAPTER FIVE Shelter (#ulink_46d9d4c7-11f6-5d23-aae5-71aa692736a8)

…You had a lovely hand,

Cursive, flourishing, exuberan,, gratefu,, actual, generous.

‘Daddy Daddy’, PAUL DURCAN

My father used to write to me regularly. He had beautiful handwriting. His script was neat and flowing. He wrote about the plays he was performing or the film parts that might be coming up, he asked about how I was getting on at school. The letters d.v. appeared a lot.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked my grandmother.

‘It means hopefully,’ she said.

Every fortnight he would send magazines along with a postal order for pocket money. The magazines were Look and Learn and World of Wonder. They were packed with articles about history and adventure. I have them to this day. Once I showed them to my son Daniel. He read them with intense curiosity, seeing them as I had all those years before. ‘Gosh,’ he said.’He gave you a lot, didn’t he?’

Usually I would see him at Christmas, Easter, the summer holidays. I waited for him in hope. You didn’t always know if he would make the visit. He would want to, I know that now. But somewhere between his best intentions and the railway station, alcohol might intervene. I would watch the crowds coming off the train, and search for his face, heart beating with excitement. If the crowd passed by without any sign of my father it could mean he was still sitting on the train which in turn meant he was probably drunk. Or it could mean that he hadn’t made the journey.

If he was there, but drunk, I would panic. What if he met my school friends in town? They might see him stumble, or come over to say hello and hear him slur or smell the whiskey. I learned the power of shame. I knew people saw. I wanted to hide my father. I wanted to make him better. The last thing on earth I could do was accept him.

When he was sober we had happy times on his visits. They shone like the brightest diamonds. He would come to my grandmother’s house for tea, laden with presents and stories. Once in Killarney he bought me fishing gear and we wandered across the fields to a quiet spot and lay on the grass for hours under the hot sun. I cannot remember what we talked about, but I do know that I wished those hours would last forever and that when it came time to say goodbye I experienced the fiercest grief. That was how the world was after separation. I had my moments with him but we were far from each other, my father and I.

Through all of these times my Cork grandmother’s house was the port of shelter. I had been going there since I was a baby. Some of my earliest memories of smell and colour come from her garden. In autumn it smelt of blackcurrant and apple. I pressed my face to the bushes, sweet and musty, and saw the apples scattered on the grass. Never before had I seen so many. They were green but a lighter green than the grass. I picked one up and bit hard. My teeth stuck in the skin. Suddenly I was spitting, bits of peel spewed out. I yelped at the bitter taste. That would have been in the early 1960s when my grandmother, May Hassett – or May H as I called her – was still a young woman, in her early fifties, and only recently widowed.

All the other pictures of the garden are from a later time: the three apple trees, two on the left hand side, the other in the middle of the garden, and the ground always covered with fruit from the end of August until deep into October. Come on, lads, for the love of God, pick them up before they’re spoiled. I’ll make apple jelly. The high hedge between us and Freddie Cremin’s garden – busy Freddie who lived in fear of marauding children trampling his garden and who we swore cut his grass every day, rain or sun, and who was kind to my grandmother. Beyond Cremin’s was White’s where young Brid White lived, a year older than me with dark hair and wide excited eyes, and to whom I silently swore eternal love.

Behind the trees was the green shed where I smoked my first cigarette. My late grandfather had used it for keeping his tools. May H saw the smoke curling out of there, and said nothing. That was her style, by and large. Where her grandchildren were concerned my grandmother was mellow; not lax or careless but knowing when the blind eye was wisest. May was softhearted but never sentimental. I think suffering had made her a pragmatist; she lived for what happiness the present could bring. She was the family’s first real traveller, heading off to visit her relatives in America and travelling by Greyhound bus from New York City to the deserts of New Mexico, carried along by an unshakeable conviction that if she was nice to people they would be nice to her. She travelled several times to America and to her relative’s summer home in Barbados.

I longed to emulate her. On Sundays a group of us children from the road would cycle up the hill to Cork airport and hope a plane might take off or land while we there; I saw those departing planes of childhood as a promise. Some day, I told myself, I will climb on board. I will be going somewhere.

My parents gave me the passion of idealism. May H encouraged common sense and warned me against taking myself too seriously. ‘If you can’t have a laugh you’re finished,’ she would say. The greatest enemy, she said, were the ‘dreaded nadgers’. By this she meant ‘nerves’, as Irish people were apt to call any kind of emotional disturbance. If I worried too much, or failed to see the lighter side of a predicament, my grandmother would caution me against the nadgers.

‘Jesus Mercy, think of poor Auntie Katie above on the Lee Road with her wonderful education, one of the cleverest women in Cork, and where did it get her?’ My grand-aunt Katie was my grandmother’s sister-in-law and had been a progressive and highly admired national school teacher and one of the first women headmistresses in the city. But in her later years she was overtaken by mental illness, and ended her days in the city’s mental hospital, a place that would have sat well in Stalin’s Gulag.

My grandmother’s antidote to nadgers, and the inevitable incarceration that would follow, was to believe that no situation was so bad that it could not be remedied with the application of common sense, humour and a cup of Barry’s Gold Blend tea. Over the long term, that faith was challenged by the death of a beloved child, but even afterwards and up to the end of her life my grandmother retained a gift for laughter. Her voice is with me constantly, especially when I am agonising over some drama in my adult life. The only thing you can’t get over is death. All the rest you can manage.

She was born May Sexton in Cork city in 1910 when Ireland still dreamed of Home Rule and a future as loyal subjects within the Empire. May lived in a neat terraced house looking down on the city in the middle-class suburb of Ballinlough. Her father was an accountant with an old Cork firm; her mother was an orphan from a moderately well-to-do family, whose guardian before her marriage was a major in the Indian army.

My great-grandfather, John Sexton, was a quiet, gentle man, who went on the very occasional skite and once terrified his family by disappearing on the night the Black and Tans tried to burn Cork. He had been trapped, unable to get home from the pub because of the roadblocks. ‘I remember we watched the red glow of buildings burning that night. We were terrified. We were sure the Tans had got him. My poor mother was distracted with worry,’ May recalled.

May had one sister, Grand-aunt Kitty, who helped to radicalise my political consciousness. I spent an unhappy couple of weeks with her one summer and we spent hours arguing over politics and religion. Kitty was a generous person but well to the right on issues of faith and fatherland. She stoutly defended Mussolini and General Franco as ‘fine Catholics’ and regarded my political views as communist and blasphemous (by then I was a teenage socialist).

My grandmother and her parents were people of Cork’s genteel suburbs and, like the majority of their class, lived comfortably enough in the embrace of the Empire. Cork had been a British military and naval base for two centuries. There were several British military barracks in the city and nearby at Crosshaven and Cobh were the great naval bases of Haulbowline and Fort Camden. The harbour was also an important stopping point for transatlantic liners from the Cunard and White Star lines. It was here that the Titanic made her last stop before heading out to disaster in the North Atlantic.

My grandmother grew up in the world of dry sherry in crystal glasses, china cups for the visiting priest, the lace table cloth at Easter and Christmas, and the voice of Count McCormack on the gramophone. When you and I were seventeen and life and love was new./ That golden spring when love was King and I your wonderful Queen…

She saw McCormack once, on the day he sang at the Eucharistic Congress in 1932; it was the largest public demonstration in the history of twentieth-century Ireland, an assertion of papal power in the still young independent state. May travelled up by train with her husband-to-be, a young car mechanic and veteran of the War of Independence, Paddy Hassett. ‘You could hear a pin drop that day. I never heard a voice so sweet.’

McCormack sang the Panus Angelicus and a grateful, pious nation swooned. On the way back to Cork my grandparents had an argument. When she spoke about it later May could not remember what it had been about, but she gave him back his ring. The estrangement lasted until they reached Cork and, undone by his sad, apologetic face, she asked for the ring once more. ‘We never argued again after that,’ she said.

I never knew Paddy. He died when I was a baby. I have only the things my mother has said to me over the years. They are impressions of character, and specific images: He was the kindest man. I never heard him raise his voice. He worked so hard. He only went out once a week to play cards at the Catholic Young Men’s Society, that was his entertainment. He loved the opera. When they came on tour he’d go and sing along because he knew all of the arias. You should have seen him there with the tears streaming down his face and the passion in his voice…

Both May and Paddy were passionate about their home city. Visitors call Cork people clannish, slow to welcome the outsider. ‘They’re only jealous because there’s none like us!’ May would say. The city is divided by the River Lee. In the middle there is an island connected by several bridges and on either side hills rise up, giving the whole place an atmosphere of closeness that locals find intimate and reassuring, and visitors often condemn as claustrophobic. More than any other place I have lived, it is Cork I regard as my home. It is my city and though I may never live there again, I have great sympathy with something my father told me the writer Frank O’Connor had once said: ‘I could never get over the feeling that although I had left Cork, Cork had never really left me.’

The fierce local pride displayed by my grandmother, passed on to my mother and in turn to me, is at least partly the consequence of the city being constantly, and unfavourably, compared to Dublin. Corkonians have never really accepted a ‘second-city’ status. The city’s merchants boasted that Cork had the deepest natural harbour in Ireland. As trade flourished with Europe grand mansions sprang up along the valley of the River Lee; they were the homes of merchants who summered in southern Europe and came home to christen their new suburbs with Italian names like Montenotte and Tivoli.

My grandmother’s city was Cork but her country was the home, and when she married my grandfather Paddy Hassett in 1936 she settled into domestic life. Paddy built their house, St Declan’s, on one of Cork’s southern hills. It had ivy-covered walls and fine gardens at the front and back; there were four bedrooms, a kitchen that was almost entirely constructed of glass, so that even on the bleakest Irish days it threw light back into the dining room, and a genteel sitting room, usually kept locked until important visitors came. There was a lovely woman called Minnie, who first came in the 1930s as a housekeeper but who had become a member of the family. ‘Min’ was my grandmother’s rock and loved us as if we were her own children.

I lived with my grandmother for more than a year after my parents’ separation and spent each August with her in a cottage she rented at Ardmore, my grandfather’s birthplace, on the County Waterford coast. Those days roaming the rock pools of the foreshore were the happiest of my childhood; they left me with a lifelong addiction to pottering around at the edge of the sea, and a committed belief in the healing powers of the landscape of west Waterford. Always when I am troubled, or returning from some unpleasant place, I head for Ardmore.

It was May’s courage that left the deepest impression on me and encouraged me to get on with things whenever I was tempted to feel sorry for myself. By the time I went to live with her she had already experienced tragedy. Of her nine children, one died shortly before she was due to give birth, another when he was a baby of two months. Her sixth child, my Uncle Ben, was born with muscular dystrophy. My grandmother took him to Lourdes in the hope of a holy cure. She was a devout Catholic (though never a craw thumper), but there was no cure. Ben was fourteen years old when he died at home on a summer afternoon.

Ten months later her husband, Paddy Hassett, died. I believe his death was the direct result of stress. Paddy had got into financial difficulty in the early 1960s, essentially the victim of his own niceness. He owned a garage business in Cork but was undone by his willingness to give financial credit. When hard times came his debtors refused to pay up. Paddy’s nerves gave out. He had fought for his country in the War of Independence and worked hard to provide the best for his family. Yet now he felt that he had failed as a man. Paddy retreated into silence. My grandmother would ask him to talk but he could not. He was forced to sell the business and then the cottage he had built near Ardmore, the place where he was born. As his world collapsed Paddy suffered a stroke and was hospitalised. A few months later he had another stroke and died. For a while it looked as if my grandmother would lose St Declan’s, until an uncle stepped in and bought it from the bank.

It was the death of my uncle Michael, her fourth child, which fully revealed the extraordinary depths of my grandmother’s courage. Mike had emigrated to the United States in the late 1950s. He started out working with General Motors but his heart was set on becoming a theatre director. Mike worked until he’d saved enough money to go to college. After graduating he went on to teach drama at Columbia University, and was building a reputation as a promising director off-Broadway. Mike was drafted for Vietnam but got a deferment because of his studies. He’d protested against the war and had no intention of becoming cannon fodder for Richard Nixon. As the sixties came to an end he started to miss home. In a last letter he’d told my grandmother about a job that had come up at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.

I had met Michael only twice. One summer a few years before he’d come to visit us at a house my grandmother rented by the sea. It was his first visit home from the States in nearly a decade. I remember that Mike had dark hair and wore a plaid jacket and blue jeans, and looked like a character from a Simon and Garfunkel song. My grandmother laughed a lot around him. Mike was always up and moving about, he filled the little house with his gestures and voice; he told stories about America and sang ‘The Red River’ when he shaved in the morning, Come and sit by my side if you love me/Do not hasten to bid me adieu…

He threw me into the waves at Goat Island and when I bawled with fright he raced in and smothered me with apologies and carried me on his shoulders up and down the beach until I’d completely forgotten the anguish of a few minutes before. A few weeks later I saw him again as he was getting ready to leave Ireland. He was taking a train which would in turn take him to the plane. The carriages were crowded with football supporters. They were friendly but boisterous and Mike had to push to make his way to the window to wave goodbye. He smiled, he always smiled, then waved as the train pulled away taking him back to America.