by John Boyne
‘Hannah is seven months old,’ said Mam. ‘I’m not certain that my powers of persuasion will work on her. They haven’t so far anyway.’
‘Try, Mrs Yates,’ replied the doctor, opening his hands wide as if the mysteries of the universe could be contained between those palms. ‘Try. A good mother will keep trying until she succeeds.’
A comment which provoked a quiet fury on Mam’s part, but she was too intimidated by the three-piece suit, the house on Dartmouth Square, the brass plaque attached to the railings outside and the appointment fee of forty pence to challenge him any further. But perhaps, as with my eyes, Hannah’s problems simply corrected themselves in time, or perhaps she just grew too hungry to put up any more resistance to her food, for eventually she settled down into a regular pattern of eating and peace was restored.
I loved Hannah from the start, unaware of how much I wanted a younger sibling until one was thrust upon me. She would stop crying when I entered the room, staring up at me with her large wet blue eyes, and her head would turn slowly as I carried on about my business, taking note of my every move, convinced that if she looked away she would miss something important. She would cry out when I left her alone and clap her hands when I reappeared.
Mam didn’t have a job, of course; she wouldn’t have been allowed. Before marrying my father she had been a stewardess for Aer Lingus, a position that in those days was tantamount to being a film-star, and indeed in later life she loved to tell stories about the glamour she had witnessed as a young woman. Once, she had served lunch to Rita Hayworth on a flight from Brussels to Dublin; another time she had assisted David Niven with a faulty seatbelt as he came in from London to attend a film premiere.
‘Miss Hayworth was a beauty,’ she told me. ‘Such long, red hair. And very polite. She sat in her seat with a black cigarette holder between her fingers and was happy to sign autographs for anyone who approached her. She read the entire way, moving between a copy of Look magazine and a script for a feature film. There was a choice of beef or chicken and she took the chicken. Mr Niven was dressed better than any man I had ever laid eyes on, as dapper as could be, and he spoke Awfully Awfully, like they do. He was terrible fidgety though and couldn’t sit straight in his seat. And he drank like a fish.’
She had to give up the job once she got married, of course, because in those days Aer Lingus wouldn’t employ a married woman. Her own mother, who I never knew, said that she was mad to give up the high life for a semi-detached house in Churchtown, but she said that was what she wanted, and after all, that is what women did in those days: they went to school, they got a job, they found a husband, they left the job and retired to the home to look after the family.
‘The most exciting moment of all,’ she told me once, ‘was the day I was coming through Heathrow Airport and saw Princess Margaret. She was flapping her hands in front of her, as if she could make the crowds disperse simply by waving them away. I could tell just by looking at her that she was the rudest woman on the face of the planet, without an ounce of class. But it was Princess Margaret, all the same, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I only wished I had my Box Brownie.’
She met my father at a dancehall near Parnell Square. He was there with a couple of his pals, wearing his best suit, a black and white striped tweed, his thick dark hair Brylcreemed back with the comb trails still running through it like a freshly tilled field. A cigarette was hanging out of the side of his mouth, and when he spoke, it stayed attached to his lower lip, the ash growing longer and longer but never falling until he tipped it into the ashtray. He spotted her at the same moment that she spotted him and he walked straight over, ending the conversation with his friends in mid-sentence.
‘Are you dancing?’ he asked her.
‘Are you asking?’ she replied, the standard answer.
‘I am.’
‘Might as well so.’
He led her on to the floor and within half a minute she knew she’d hit the jackpot, for here was a man who had both a right foot and a left. No shuffling, no awkwardness, no embarrassment about where to place his arms or hands. He moved with confidence, and as she wasn’t a bad little mover herself they put on a good show and the rest of the gathering watched appreciatively. The men muttered that this was a fine little piece that Billy Yates had his arms around, and the women said you’d think he’d take the fag out of his mouth before dancing, sure did he have no manners at all?
‘Do you have a name?’
‘I’ve had one for years. Gloria Cooper. What’s yours?’
‘William Yates.’
‘Like the poet?’
‘Different spelling.’
Mam told me afterwards that the first thought that came into her mind was this: Gloria Yates. She said it had a ring to it.
‘Have I seen you here before, Gloria Cooper?’
‘Do you mean to say that you’d have forgotten me if you had?’
‘That’s me told. What do you do then when you’re not out dancing?’
‘I’m a stewardess for Aer Lingus.’
He paused for a moment, then gave her a spin. ‘A stewardess, is it?’ he asked, impressed. Most of the girls he’d danced with before worked in cake shops or were in training to be teachers. One girl had said she was going to be a nun and the cigarette had fair fallen out of his mouth then. Another had said it was patriarchal to ask such a question and he’d said, ‘Ah, tonight,’ and walked away in the middle of Frankie Laine crooning his way through ‘Answer Me’. ‘How did you get a job like that anyway?’
‘I applied,’ said Mam.
‘Smart enough, I suppose.’
‘And you? What do you do?’
‘I’m an actor.’
‘Have I seen you in anything?’
‘Did you ever see From Here to Eternity?’
‘The film?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course I did. I saw it in the Adelphi.’
‘Well, I wasn’t in that.’
She laughed. ‘So what were you in then?’
‘Nothing yet. But I will be one day.’
‘And what are you doing in the meantime, Burt Lancaster?’
‘Stock man for John Player’s on Merchants Quay.’
‘Do you get the cigarettes for free then?’
‘I get them at a discount.’
‘You’re quick on your feet.’
‘You have to be these days.’
That is as much as Mam told me about their first encounter, other than to say that when he asked whether he might call on her the following Tuesday she felt a certain pride in replying that she wouldn’t be home until after seven for the flight from Ciampino only got in at five, a remark that made him smile, then laugh, then shake his head as if he wasn’t sure whether he knew what he was taking on at all.
They were engaged to be married within six months and soon after exchanged their vows in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel on Bachelor’s Walk, before making their way to the Central Hotel on Exchequer Street for a buffet dinner and afterwards taking a taxi to the airport for a flight to Paris. She knew two of the stewardesses on board, but the third was a new girl and seeing her being shown the ropes, she said, filled her with an overwhelming sadness, as if she realized that she might have made a terrible mistake.
‘Did you miss flying?’ I asked her once, for she only left Ireland on one occasion during the rest of her life, when she and Hannah came to visit me in Rome during 1978.
‘Of course I did,’ she said with a regretful shrug. ‘But then I didn’t know what I was giving up until it was already gone. No one ever does, do they?’
Little Cathal arrived only eighteen months after Hannah, when I was already four, and I know now from the way that Mam and Dad behaved at the time that he was a surprise to them and not an entirely welcome one. There was a mortgage to pay, and a cigarette factory was not the first choice for those who wished to become rich. And yet we carried on, the five of us, for a couple of years until Dad made the d
ecision to leave Player’s in order to pursue his acting ambitions.
Where these came from is anyone’s guess. I never knew my father’s parents any more than I knew my mother’s, for they were all dead before I turned five, but I have it on good authority that my paternal grandmother was a great woman for the Feis Ceoil and perhaps this is where he got his yearning for the spotlight. As a boy, he somehow found himself in the chorus lines of a couple of Christmas pantomimes at the Gaiety Theatre, and, older again, he joined an amateur dramatics society out in Rathmines, and the bug only got worse from there. Without telling my mother, he handed in his notice to Mr Benjamin at Player’s – ‘It gave me great pleasure,’ Dad said, ‘for I never liked working for a Jewman’ – and threw himself into going out on professional auditions, taking a part-time job in the meantime at a pub in Dundrum, which Mam saw as a terrible come-down. Packing small boxes of cigarettes into bigger boxes and then loading them on to pallets for distribution to the newsagents and tobacconists of Ireland was apparently a superior task to pulling pints of Harp and Guinness down at the Eagle House three nights a week.
‘It’s only until I get a decent part,’ said Dad, who brushed off all her complaints about the lack of housekeeping money with a dismissive wave worthy of Princess Margaret herself. ‘Once I do, we’ll all be set for life.’
And then something remarkable happened. He was put up for the part of the Young Covey in a production of The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey Theatre, which, at the time, had been relocated to the Queen’s on Pearse Street after a fire destroyed the original building. He auditioned in front of Proinnsias Mac Diarmada and Seán O’Casey himself and must have given a decent performance for he was asked if he would understudy for Uinsionn O’Dubhláinn, who was a great favourite with the public at the time. My father suffered mixed emotions at this offer; he was proud to have his talents recognized but saw himself as second fiddle to no man. But then as luck would have it, didn’t O’Dubhláinn get offered Laertes at the Old Vic in London and skip off across the water without so much as a backwards glance, and MacDiarmada had no choice but to promote my father from understudy to cast member. O’Casey had his reservations, apparently, but there was no one else who could take on the role at such short notice.
‘This is it now,’ he said when he told us the news, rubbing his hands together in glee. ‘This is only the start of it. The Young Covey is a great part, it’s one that gets you noticed. Sure I might end up on the West End yet. Or even Broadway.’
‘Listen to Laurence Olivier,’ said Mam, putting plates of fish and potatoes in front of us, for now that there was less money coming in, meat was becoming a rare treat.
‘Ah, would you go ’way,’ said Dad, whose enthusiasm was not to be diminished. ‘You won’t be making jokes when you’re the wife of the most famous actor in Ireland.’
Eoin O’Súilleabháin and Caitlín Ní Bhearáin were playing the lead parts of Jack and Nora Clitheroe, and for weeks all we heard was Eoin-this and Caitlín-that as he came home stinking of drink and telling stories of what was going on backstage to an audience that was growing less appreciative by the day.
‘What has drink to do with learning your part?’ Mam asked.
‘You wouldn’t understand, Gloria,’ he told her. ‘We have to go to the pub after rehearsals to release some of the pent-up energy that comes from being on stage. It’s what actors do.’
‘It’s what drunks do,’ she countered. ‘And you with a family.’
‘Ah, would you whisht, woman.’
‘I will not whisht. Do I have to go back to Aer Lingus, is it?’
‘Sure they wouldn’t have you,’ he laughed.
‘They would if I told them I was a single woman. I could say that you left me.’
Which put the frighteners on him, sure enough, and he threatened to phone the parish priest, and when she called his bluff he called hers directly back and before the night was out there was Father Haughton, an awful stern man with a face like one of those Easter Island statues, sitting in our front room while Hannah, Cathal and I listened at the door and imagined Mam and Dad sitting side by side, each more embarrassed than the other by this turn of events.
‘Gloria, do you not recognize your husband’s needs?’ asked Father Haughton in a silky tone. ‘This is a big change for him. Sure how many of us even get the chance to visit the National Theatre, let alone perform on its stage?’
‘It’s not the acting I mind so much as the drinking, Father,’ said Mam. ‘We have precious little money coming in as it is, and to spend it on pints when I have five bellies to fill in this house—’
‘Lower your voice, please, Gloria,’ said Father Haughton. ‘I’m a patient man, but I have a low tolerance for screeching women.’
My mother did not speak for several minutes afterwards and when she did it was in chastised tones.
‘William, you’ll try to get home to your family a little earlier in the evening, won’t you?’ asked the priest.
‘I will, Father. I’ll do my best. I can promise nothing, but I’ll do my best.’
‘And I wouldn’t ask you to, but as long as you’re willing to make an effort, that’s what counts. And you, Gloria, you’ll be less insistent with your husband, yes?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Promise me you will, Gloria.’
‘I will, Father.’
‘There’s a good girl. No man wants to come home to a nagging wife. Keep your disposition cheerful and the dinner warm and there’ll be no more problems in this house, may God bless all who live here.’
And that was that for the time being. Dad was given leave to do exactly as he pleased and Mam had no choice but to put up with it. In fairness to my father, he made more of an effort for a while to help out when he was at home, but the pints still flowed a few nights a week and the name-dropping became shameless.
I was probably too young to appreciate the play – I was only nine years old at the time – but Mam took me with her to see The Plough and the Stars on opening night, leaving Hannah and Cathal in the care of Mrs Rathley next door, and despite my youth I could tell without fear of contradiction that my father was the worst actor on the stage. He shouted when he should have spoken, came upstage when he clearly should have been down, facing the person he was addressing. He grew confused over his lines at the beginning of the third act when he and Uncle Peter bring news of the Rising to Bessie Burgess and she predicts the defeat of the rebels at the GPO. And I remain convinced that in the middle of his argument with Fluther, he caught sight of me in the fourth row and threw me a wink, an unexpected turn that caused Philib O’Floinn to repeat a line and flounder through the rest of the scene.
When the play was finally over and the cast appeared on stage one by one to take their curtain calls, the applause he received was muted, to say the least, and one group to the rear of the auditorium even let out a hiss. O’Casey shunned him at the cast party afterwards, apparently, leaving my father to say that the playwright had no more manners than a pig in a field. The following morning, however, the critic from the Evening Press made mincemeat of him in his review, saying that he’d set fire to the Queen’s too if he ever saw such a performance on the stage of the National Theatre again. A few days later, MacDiarmada had my father replaced, and if things were bad then, they were about to get much worse, for my father spent the first half of the next night’s performance in exile in The Stag’s Head, alternating between pints of Guinness and glasses of whiskey, before making his way back to Pearse Street and in through the stage entrance before marching out, drunk and in his street clothes, on to the stage in the middle of the third act, where he threw a punch at the understudy who had replaced him, leading to the farcical situation of a pair of Young Coveys tussling onstage and having to be pulled apart by Mrs Gogan and Mollser, while the audience scratched their heads and wondered whether this was some new scene that had been added to the play for comic effect.
What was it Yeats said at the riots that g
reeted the first production of that play more than thirty years before? You have disgraced yourselves again! Something along those lines. Spoken to the audience, though, not the cast. Sure he never would have imagined that he would have to speak that way to the actors. I have no idea what O’Casey was thinking, but I imagine it wasn’t pretty.
My father never set foot on a stage again after that. Sober, he tried to apologize to MacDiarmada, who refused to see him. He showed up at O’Casey’s house on the North Circular Road and was given short shrift. He wrote a mea culpa to the Evening Press, who said he was nothing more than a figure of fun and they wouldn’t drag their pages into the debacle by publishing it. A week later, he received a letter informing him that he was banned for life from the Abbey Theatre, and when he tried to put the whole business behind him and started attending open auditions for other plays in Dublin he was met at the door by producers who said it would be a cold day in hell before they risked their investment on a man with his reputation.
‘It’s not that you made a holy show of yourself, brawling on stage when you were in your cups,’ one pointed out to him in the killer blow. ‘That I could live with. It’s the fact that you’re the worst actor who ever had the unlikely opportunity to set foot in a theatre. You’ve no talent, do you not recognize that?’
‘Would you not go back to Player’s?’ Mam asked him eventually, for we were running out of money fast. ‘We have First Communion clothes for Odran to buy, Hannah needs new shoes and Cathal is growing out of everything I try to put on him.’
‘This is all your fault,’ he grunted, sitting in his chair, drinking, and this was a new thing, for he had always kept his drinking to the pubs before.
‘How is it my fault, William Yates?’ she asked, her nerves pushed to the brink now.
‘You never gave me a bit of support.’
‘Sure that’s all I’ve done.’
‘What kind of a wife are you anyway? I made a bad choice.’