Читать книгу All of These People: A Memoir - Fergal Keane - Страница 10

…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.

In those days when an Irish person was killed abroad it was usually a substantial item on the news. But Mike’s death was overshadowed by a national crisis. We were sitting by the fire in St Declan’s watching television when the main evening news came on. The headline said that thirteen people had been shot dead by the British army in Derry. There were black-and-white pictures on the screen of soldiers shooting and then a priest waving a white handkerchief leading some men down a laneway. The men were carrying a body. I’d never seen a real body before. There was a statement from the Irish government condemning what had happened.

I remember my grandmother saying ‘Mother of God, this is desperate.’ Even to a child living in the far south of Ireland, largely cut off from the politics of the day, I knew that these black-and-white images represented a moment of significance. If my gran was angry it meant something serious had happened. Then there was a knock on the front door. My mother went to answer. I heard my Uncle Barry’s voice. ‘Lads, I have some bad news for ye.’ And after that there were muffled sounds. Doors opened and closed. Then I heard a woman’s voice crying. My mother told me that Uncle Michael was dead. ‘Be good now because we have to mind Gran,’ she said. The rest of that night passed in a procession of grown-ups coming and going.

On the night of the fire Mike had been out with friends in Greenwich Village. He came home and fell asleep, possibly with a candle still lit. The firemen found him near the door where he’d crawled trying to escape. The New York Times carried a short paragraph:

Michael Hassett was killed in a fire in his apartment on Spring Street in Manhattan. Police are investigating the cause of the blaze.

There wasn’t really much to investigate. It was an accidental death a long way from home. The coffin came home a week or so after we got the news of his death. It was the first coffin I’d ever seen for real, a big steel coffin, and it scared me and made me sad, because until it arrived I thought that there might be a mistake and Mike might still walk through the door.

The day of the funeral the wind and rain belted in from the coast. I went with an uncle and stayed at the back of the church. Then we followed in the procession to Ballyphehane graveyard where Michael was buried next to his father and his younger brother Ben. I have no memories of my grandmother on that day. She was surrounded by people and I could not catch a glimpse of her. I remember my mother dressed in the black of mourning with a veil covering her face. Underneath she glistened with tears.

May Hassett’s house had been a place of ease and security. I was afraid now that grief would take her away from me. It was an inchoate fear, spurred by the utter change I was witnessing in somebody I had always known to be strong. She retreated, slept during the daytime, and wept when she did not think I could see her. But I was by then attuned to the secret strategies of adults. I could always tell.

Then, after several weeks my grandmother emerged from mourning. She struggled to take her place again at the centre of the family. It wasn’t a swift transformation. But May knew we were all watching her, and slowly she found a way to laugh again. It was only years later that I understood how much she fought to prevent grief from overwhelming her. By then I’d started work on a newspaper and bought my first car. I was taking my grandmother on a long drive through the countryside on a Sunday afternoon when she began to talk about Michael.

She talked about what he had been like as a child, mischiefloving and easygoing, how heartsick she’d been when he took the ship to America, and how the break-up of his marriage had been a relief to her: ‘They weren’t suited to each other at all, you know.’ May talked about the letters he’d sent describing his successes at Columbia and then off-Broadway. He’d sent her a book on the American theatre in which his production of a Strindberg play had been analysed and praised. Then my grandmother began to sob. I hadn’t seen her cry in years. ‘He was so young,’ she said. And she repeated this several times. We drove on in silence for several miles. Then she asked me if I believed in heaven.

‘What makes you ask that?’ I asked.

‘Because I wonder if I’ll see him again,’ she replied. ‘I would give anything to see him just once more.’

In those days I did not know what I believed in, if anything, but I told her I was sure there was a heaven. Then this devout woman told me that when Michael had been killed she wondered if there was any God. She said she’d kept on going to Mass but she struggled with faith, asking how her child could have been taken in such a way. When I asked her why she didn’t crack up, go under, become a heart-broken recluse, her explanation was that she hadn’t any choice but to keep going. ‘What else was I going to do?’

Love carried her through. The love for her children, the love she gave in taking care of myself and my siblings. The light of my grandmother’s life was my younger sister, Niamh. Barely two years my junior she was born with coeliac disease and was seriously ill as a baby. Given the troubled state of things in our home May H offered to look after Niamh in Cork. Niamh was effectively reared by my grandmother and her presence helped May H greatly as she fought to emerge from her grief over Michael.

Though she would have abjured such a notion herself, I believe my grandmother was the first heroic person I knew.