by Maeve Binchy
Then I cheered up again and was the life and soul of the car until I saw Dalkey, when I started to bawl again, and most people there must think I have a wretchedly unhappy home life.
And then I came back to London which is where I am meant to be living though as people often say to me you’d never know it. And I asked Aer Lingus would they mind me having a wheelchair because that’s a long haul on a weak leg uphill when you get off the lurching bus. They said there was no problem, and honestly, not that I’d wish a day’s illness or incapacity on anyone, a wheelchair is your only man at an airport.
First a car into the gate, not a lurching bus, and then a great fellow called Joe who was from Limerick and off we went. Joe said that he’d have to take a bit of a run at the ramp if I didn’t mind. Mind? I adored it. Imagine racing up past executives and eager, earnest walkers. I was crazed with power. I waved like the Queen Mother at everyone I knew and everyone I didn’t, the latter being much the larger percentage. In fact I would have happily done a tour of all the terminals but the luggage arrived and Joe wheeled me to a taxi and Gordon packed in all the unread books and the typewriter and the tomes of evergreens and The Art of Calligraphy and soon we were home.
You know when you listen to hospital requests the way all the messages seem to be a bit samey, the thanks is so fulsome and it’s always said in exactly the same words. Now I know why. There are no other words to express the relief and gratitude and amazement at the skill and kindness of people who were total strangers a couple of weeks ago, people who will hold your hand in the night and wash the back of your neck and root around for hours in a big silly knee full of Foreign Bodies. I hope they get satisfaction in their work. I really do. Because they give it. In spades.
Keeping Cruise off the Roads Is New Priority
16 November 1983
‘They would have been more interested in the arrival of the New Beaujolais than the cruise missiles if it hadn’t been for us,’ said Laura, who has been at Greenham Common for 13 months. She spoke with tears of frustration in her eyes. The peace women have been outsmarted by the US Starlifters, which touched down while the protesters were either asleep or at the other side of the airfield.
The first missiles had arrived just before nine a.m. on Monday when the women were leaving their little tents to organise breakfast. Yesterday had been widely rumoured as Arrival Day and the women had been planning a serious rehearsal of what form their protest would take. So it was with disbelief and horror that they realised about noon that the long crates which had been slid out of the back of the Starlifter had been taken under heavy guard straight to the nuclear shelters. In fact, Cruise had arrived while they slept.
Trying desperately to rally, the women insisted that the missiles might be in the base but they would never come out. Greenham is intended to be only a storage depot for cruise missiles and they could not be fired from there, claim the women. The plans to settle the missiles in various other parts of the British countryside will now be the main focus of their attention.
‘We could never have stopped planes and helicopters,’ said Lynn Jones, a long-time resident. ‘But we are not going to let them travel down our roads.’
Their candlelit vigil on Monday night was joined by many more supporters and when yesterday dawned cold and wet, the women were ready but on the wrong side of the airfield. This time the Galaxy aircraft and another Starlifter flew in accompanied by US military helicopters and guarded by British Army forces on the ground. Objects covered in tarpaulin and believed to be the actual warheads for the missiles were unloaded swiftly. Suddenly the singing and protesting women hundreds of yards away realised what was happening and ran for that corner of the fence, but too late to see the actual unloading of the weapons for which they have been waiting for over two years.
Two of the women who have been at Greenham since the beginning were sobbing openly. The two long winters, the lost springs and summers seemed to be in vain. They stood looking emptily from afar at the now unloaded planes. Their misery was like a long howl in the November afternoon.
But others reassured them and gradually got their spirits up again. So the missiles were in, but how could they get out? How could they get to their destinations if there was a massive campaign of civil disobedience? Suppose you had thousands of private cars blocking the cruise convoys? Suppose you had hundreds of pedestrians on the zebra crossings? Suppose even that you dug up the roads? It might be a crime of sorts digging up the roads with pneumatic drills, but it wasn’t killing people or blowing them to Kingdom Come.
Arms linked, tears dried, they rallied. They told the press that they were still winning because they had brought the matter to the front of people’s minds, and kept it there. The polls showed many more people objecting to the missiles now than there were in June during the election campaign. Even those who were for the missiles were jumpy about who had authority to fire them.
‘Ronald Reagan played into our hands by being such a silly twit about Grenada,’ said one tired, debby-looking girl, trying to wrest some good news from the crumbling day.
They barred the main gate again and lay down in front of it and cheered as young policemen first cautioned and then arrested over 120 of them. They don’t mind appearing in court over and over just so long as they keep it all at the front of people’s minds.
‘At least they didn’t come quietly,’ said the peace women proudly as they settled down to guard the few possessions of their colleagues, who had gone off in the dark under arrest but also under the camera lights of television crews from all over the world.
Develop Your Own Style
30 November 1983
The only useful advice I ever got about writing was to write as you talk. I talk a bit too quickly and certainly too much, so that’s the way I write as well. I don’t know how it works for silent, thoughtful people who only speak when they have something to say. I imagine it should work rather well. Whatever they write would be worth reading. This is not artistic or literary advice, it is practical and down-to-earth … and if you are having difficulty beginning something … an article, a short story, a novel or a play … ask yourself, ‘What am I trying to say?’ Then say it aloud and nine times out of 10 you’ll have your first sentence. And once your first sentence is written down in front of you it’s much, much easier to do the next one, and so on.
Unfortunately at school when we learn English we have to take on board a great number of words, expressions and forms of speech which are not used in everyday communication. This is necessary, I think, in order to fill up the gaps in vocabulary. It would be ridiculous to leave school with whole sections of the English language unknown to us just in order to clear the mind for easy communication. The language is rich so it’s important to know the huge range of words and their shades of meaning. But, and it’s a very large but, the trouble is that just because we do have to learn so many complicated and elaborate words we are inclined to overuse them. Not in speech, mind you, unless you happen to be a very pompous and mannered talker, but certainly in writing.
Time and again, I read short stories from young people – and oddly girls are the worst offenders – which are so choked up with words and phrases which they would never in a million years use in conversation that it makes the story itself unreadable.
An example: ‘Untimely fingers of frost in what should have been the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness nipped Ann O’Leary as with furrowed mien she proceeded from the domestic portals and directed her steps to the main thoroughfare.’
She was trying to say, ‘it was a cold autumn day when a worried-looking Ann O’Leary left her house ….’ or something like that.
Now I don’t know why we should think that the more disguises and padding we put on a thought the more respectable it becomes. It must be a throw-back to the days when we crammed as many words and allusions into a school essay in order to let the English teacher know that we were at least aware of them. Fine if that’s what you’re about, lettin
g an examiner know that you absorbed a barrel full of vocabulary. But if you are trying to tell a story simply … or get an idea or a picture out of your mind and into someone else’s then it needs to be a lot more simple, a lot less cluttered. In fact a lot more like the way you speak.
Last year in Waterford I was making this point and a girl in one of the groups asked me a question which I couldn’t answer. She said that if she was really to write as she spoke, it would be full of schoolgirl slang and local idiom and phrases that were currently fashionable but might be out of favour soon. Is that the way she should write, she wanted to know, because that was the way she talked? I’ve thought about it a lot since. She was right of course, her own school-speak was probably as unsuitable for getting her thoughts across to people outside her immediate circle as would be the awful essay-style crowded prose and jargon. Yet it would have more truth in it, and more honest attempt to say something simply. And as she grew to be aware what was in fact just the artificial group-talk that we all use at different times of our lives … she could discard it in favour of a direct and uncluttered style.
It’s not easy to do at once, not if you have been used to writing as a vehicle for other people’s thoughts and expressions. But once you start it becomes easier and easier and you will wonder how you could ever have begun a tale with some showy sentence full of words and hiding what you meant to say. It’s a bit easier also to hide the real you, and what you feel if you use the disguise of other people’s language. It’s somehow safer to say ‘within the hallowed walls of this esteemed place of learning’ instead of saying ‘here at school’ because the first one has a kind of sardonic ring to it … the second is more naked.
You could begin with a diary. Just telling it like it is. No high-sounding phrases, no wishing to impress, because in a diary you are writing to yourself. You could say what it’s like now in the winter of ’83, what you feel, what you think about. Nobody will read it but you. But when you’ve done a page or two go back over it with a red pen and hunt ruthlessly for phrases and words that are not your own, for things that would be foolish and fussy if said aloud.
I think that’s the best way to approach creative writing. To realise that it is creative, and you are the one creating it. Don’t be content with other people’s words, use your own. Don’t worry about style, if you speak like yourself for long enough the style will be there. It will be your style. You will be writing like yourself. You will have found your own voice.
One Eye on Bargains, One Eye on Alsatians
9 January 1984
A cold, bright morning, and a small crowd stands outside Harrods studying the free store map which the management wisely distributes at sales.
This saves endless hours of questioning, and helps the bargain hunters to work out a flight path from the main door to Fine China in the centre of the second floor, where a Wedgwood dinner service is reduced from £1,226 to £613.
Others were planning a quick gallop up the escalators to the Fur Rooms on the first floor, over on the corner where Brompton Road joins Hans Crescent – one floor above the spot where a bomb killed six people and wounded 90 last month.
There is nothing to show what happened here in December. No wreath, no flowers, no message scrawled in hurt or rage on any wall. Not even the broken windows. The whole menswear department has been fully repaired and was trading normally during the sale.
But there are no cars parked now in the side roads, and even a private car dropping somebody off at the door has barely time for the passenger to get out before it is waved on.
And all around stand policemen and policewomen, either speaking softly into the little radios which they wear fixed to their lapels, or just looking on with watchful eyes and a hand lightly laid on the collar of equally vigilant Alsatian dogs.
Lots of other men seem to be on the lookout too. These are plain-clothes Special Branch officers and members of the Anti-Terrorist Squad. They say that some of the people inside the store who might look like assistant manager or floor supervisor are in fact Special Branch as well.
The sale began officially on Friday morning, with the usual overnight campers pitching their tents early on Thursday evening. Some are paid to go and queue for bargains. One boy was paid £100, to get a television and video set which had been reduced from £1,000 to £500. He said that the fellow who paid him would still be able to sell the goods at a profit after that, so it was worth it to everyone. Including Harrods, presumably, who have the reputation of offering really gigantic bargains.
The store’s managing director and chairman, Mr Aleck Craddock, said that the people who normally shopped in Harrods had no intention of staying away because of the bomb. In fact, he thought it had made them more determined than ever to come and buy. He announced that since the bombs, trading had not decreased at all, in fact it was 14 per cent up on the same period last year.
On the same factual note, Mr Craddock continued to express his belief that the store would be able to announce record takings of £25 million over the three-week sales period. More than 250,000 people attended the opening day. But not everyone is able to show such a calm and unruffled front.
Some of the 5,000-plus staff are very unhappy and distressed and don’t mind admitting it. A woman in the china department said that on Friday there had been a great deal of noise and crashing about while people literally struggled over bargains, breaking crockery and china. She said her nerves got very bad and she had to sit down for a long time. She kept thinking that the bombers had come back to finish them off.
A young woman told me that if I went past the Staff Only door, I would see that the corridors were lined with messages of sympathy to the staff from the public – people had written from everywhere to say how terrible it was. A lot of people had wanted to send sympathy to the families of those people who had been killed or injured, but they didn’t know where to write so they just wrote to Harrods. There were some letters from Ireland also, people writing to say that the Irish were upset too.
Some of the staff thought that these should be put up on a wall where the public could see them and realise the support that people gave the store, but the powers that be said no, that would be a bad idea. It would keep reminding people of the terrible thing that had happened, and really, it was best for people to forget and get on with living.
The crowds on Saturday morning seemed less than usual for the first Saturday of the sale, which is after all the first day that ordinary people who work Monday to Friday can get to it. There wasn’t the stampede and throng that has been known and some of the staff were relieved to be able to breathe a little more easily than they expected. The tight security was adding to what was the normal tension of the country’s biggest sale. But the big, silent police presence was obviously a great comfort to the shoppers, some of whom approached a little uneasily, one eye on the bargains and one eye on the big Alsatian dogs straining at their leads.
A Tipperary Robin Hood
7 December 1985
Twelve Christmases ago, when I had just come to live in Hammersmith, I was shocked at a notice which went in everyone’s door telling them to look out for signs of old people who might be dead in bedsitters upstairs. They gave handy hints such as not having heard them move around, or milk bottles piling up outside the door. Then you were to say to yourself: aha, there must be a dead person in there. The notion that in bedsitter-land you wouldn’t know who lived in the same house, or how frail they might be, was very hard to accept.
I think things have got much better. Social workers, who have got such a bad time over the deaths of children released from care back to families who were violent, also have the care of the elderly and it’s not always easy.
There’s a very cheerful social worker who has her hands full with the area round where I live. I’m not sure what her title or job strictly is, because they call her the Welfare, the Town Hall, the woman from the madhouse, Old Nosey Parker, the Labour, the Social Services, the Warder, the Warden an
d the Minder.
They are half-afraid of her in case she will change their lives in some unacceptable way, like giving them a Home Help or putting them into sheltered accommodation. They are half-afraid that she isn’t doing enough for them and that there might be free coal or another £2 a week if they play their cards right.
She is a marvellous woman, from Tipperary, and she is probably a saint. In her car she always has a dozen hand-knitted shawls. She gets the people in a local home to knit them; she pretends she has knitted them herself, so the old women with thin, shivering shoulders will take them because they think they’re a genuine gift. She tells me she has hours of paperwork getting the money for the bloody wool and knitting needles, and she has to disguise it very deeply because they won’t pass anything irregular or allow any hint of charity to come from public funds.
She has boxes of packet soup – she says she thinks she’s turning into an oxtail by now, she has so much of it. She tells them it was a free sample and why don’t they try it; she gets in, puts on the kettle and they all sip a mug of it and nod and say possibly, but she knows they will never stir themselves to buy it, so next week or next visit she will have another so-called free offer.
She picks up a lot of odd newspapers, anywhere – in restaurants, bus shelters. Sometimes she just swipes them from her own office. In some of the houses she visits, she thinks they would like a daily paper but it’s a bit of an extravagance, so she casually says, ‘I’ve finished with this’ and sees it pounced on eagerly. They read out bits about the royals and Joan Collins to her, and she knows it was right to give them a few stories to think about.