Maeve's Times

by Maeve Binchy

  And as usual, Gordon is calm and has his own clipboard to humour me and tries to head off too many ‘senior moments’ by reminding me to take my laptop computer, which I nearly forgot.

  I read once in an etiquette book that if you are about to travel, you should take out an advertisement in a quality paper and tell society of your plans. So in a way, that’s what I am doing.

  2000s

  Mr Gageby …

  3 July 2004

  There is a dangerous tendency of thinking your own time was the best, and there were no days like your days. Journalists fall into this trap more easily than anyone else.

  It’s as if we want people to know what stirring times we lived through, what dramas our newsroom saw and what near-misses we had, and what amazing never-to-be-equalled camaraderie we all shared.

  All over Ireland this week there will be people telling such tales of Douglas Gageby’s time.

  And even as I write his name I feel forward.

  I never called him anything except Mr Gageby.

  I met him when I was a 27-year-old schoolteacher in Dublin, sharing a dream with half the country that maybe I could write if someone would let me.

  Even when I nearly caught up with him in age and we were friends, when he asked me to call him Douglas I could never do it. He was too important.

  At the job interview where he asked what I would do if I were to run the Woman’s Page I suggested that we relegate Fashion to one day, Cookery to another, and then get on with what people would be interested in on the other four days.

  He asked mildly what I thought people might be interested in, and I blinded him with my views.

  ‘Of course, she’s never worked a day in her life in a newspaper,’ he said to Donal Foley, the news editor.

  ‘She has to learn somewhere,’ Donal said, and Mr Gageby nodded and said that was fair enough.

  So who wouldn’t love someone who took such a mad risk?

  My memory of those days was that he seemed to be forever in his office.

  Day and night.

  That wasn’t possible because we knew he had a great family life, he often talked about his children, and he always talked about his wife, Dorothy.

  He was invited everywhere, but he was never a great one for going to receptions or dinners, except the Military History Society of Ireland which he was very keen on.

  He was handsome, he was confident at work, he was happy in his home life, he was courageous and he was dragging the paper into modern times.

  No wonder so many of us were mad about him.

  He had, of course, a short fuse.

  There is nobody who doesn’t have a Mr Gageby experience of some kind. Like when he would bellow his annoyance at something that appeared in Yesterday’s paper.

  There was never such a thing as Today’s paper, there was the one we had written Yesterday which, according to him, was full of faults and mistakes and unbelievable oversights, or Tomorrow’s, which was going to be spectacular and we would stick everyone else to the ground with our stories, insights and backgrounds.

  I have seen Mr Gageby incandescent with rage about a sports writer who said that a match was a nip-and-tuck affair and gave no further detail, and a financial journalist who said the AGM of some company was predictable, but hadn’t explained what had been predicted.

  He has been white-faced over someone who missed the one big row that week in the Senate, or called the ceremony that happens in England the Trooping OF the Colour when there should be no OF in it, apparently. And somebody invariably got it wrong, and somebody else invariably let it past.

  I have been at the receiving end when the Woman’s Page had a series of apologies in it.

  We regret that when we said 11½ pounds of split peas, we actually meant 1 to 1½ pounds of split peas.

  We regret that when we said this dress in Richard Alan’s cost £20 we actually meant it cost £200.

  We regret we have given the wrong number of the Gay Switchboard, the wrong score in the All-Ireland.

  His eyes were narrow. I wondered how I had ever thought he was handsome.

  ‘Your page is a laughing stock,’ he said. ‘With the possible exception of the Straits Times in Malaysia I have never seen a worse Features page.’

  My face was scarlet for 48 hours. I contemplated emigrating.

  Next week it was forgotten and we could breathe again.

  But, by God, how he stood up for us, all of us.

  He never gossiped about one to another, and he fought our enemies and people who said we were less than great.

  He said that we reported what we saw.

  Even when his back was against the wall over what we had reported or misreported.

  We knew we would not be sold down the river.

  And I know he had hard times in Stephen’s Green clubs when some of us were a bit light-hearted about the British royal family.

  And though I lived my whole life slightly in awe of him, it was not of his doing. He was warm and friendly and interested in the lives of all his workforce.

  When I took all my courage in hand and invited him to lunch with us, he said he would come if we had one course, and that he really liked sardines with lemon juice. He may, of course, have been protecting himself and Dorothy against botulism, since they knew only too well some of my limitations through the cookery page and my misunderstandings of presenting food.

  If you were going to lunch with someone who had used a picture of open-heart surgery to illustrate veal casseroles, perhaps you, too, might have asked for sardines.

  But we lunched happily summer after summer, alternately in their house and ours.

  And it was wonderful to be in the presence of a couple who loved each other and never felt they had to hide this from anyone else.

  I would have liked them to live forever as part of all of our lives.

  But they didn’t, and I hope their family will always know how many of us got a great and exciting start in our writing lives under his editorship.

  And how proud we were to be part of the time when he took our newspaper out of the shadows and into the light.

  Every time I think of Mr Gageby I straighten myself up a little and hope to try and do him some kind of credit somewhere along the line.

  Another World for the Price of a Cup of Coffee

  30 October 2004

  You would get the smell half a street away, coffee like it never smelled at home. And the fresh-from-the-oven cakes and buns, six of them on a plate ready and waiting for you on the table.

  Long before the days of self-service, the waitresses would come and serve you, always with a few words about the world we lived in. Like the rain maybe, or the sales, or Peggy Dell playing the piano in a furniture shop across the road, or the marriage of Princess Grace, or the hardy souls who swam all the year round in our cold seas.

  And then they would leave you to your own chat, going off to talk on other topics at other tables.

  Bewley’s was filled with characters and we would talk about them for a bit before settling down to our own chat. There used to be a woman with a handsome, ravaged face and wild and curly hair, wearing a matted fur coat with not much underneath it. There was a rumour that she was a wealthy person and that someone had left Bewley’s a sum of money to make sure she was fed every day, which she always was, with great kindness and charm.

  There was an old man whose coat was tied with a rope, who always complained that the tea was cold. The thin, slightly stooped waitress would feel the side of the teapot and assure him that it would roast the hand off you, so then he would grudgingly drink it.

  There were men with sheaves of papers covered in figures, adding and subtracting; there were well-known poets and writers and actors. Real celebrities were there, such as Maureen Potter at one table or Eamonn Andrews at another, and everyone would just nod at them, delighted to be sharing the same aromatic air – but we would never go up and disturb them.

  When I was a student we could make
one cup of coffee last an hour and a half and, like everyone else, we felt a slight guilt in case this sowed the seeds of the eventual decline of Bewley’s fortunes. But we had to make it last because nobody wanted to leave the warm, happy coffee and sugar-flavoured fug and go out into the cold, rain-filled streets. And nobody had the price of another cup of coffee.

  I look back on hours and hours of conversation then, about communism, about how to starch petticoats, about who would be on the committee of the L & H debating society. And about how, when we were old and rich, we would come back from overseas and buy a whole plate of cakes and have three coffees each. It was the 1950s then, and we all assumed we would have to go away to get a job, and a lot of us did.

  Then, when I was a young teacher, I would bring the pupils’ exercise books and correct them in Bewley’s. History essay after history essay, more coffee, more cigarettes to keep me going, and the waitresses would be most sympathetic.

  ‘You lot earn your money,’ one of them said to me. I thought she earned hers much harder, clearing up marble table after marble table of slopped coffee and crumbs, but there was never a complaint.

  Sometimes, when I didn’t even have time to go in, I would stand and watch the windows and wallow in the smell. The amazing sight of beans jumping, being ground just for our pleasure – it was very heady. And then we all bought our first coffee-makers there and were surprised that it didn’t taste quite as good at home.

  When I joined The Irish Times there was Bewley’s right opposite us at a time when it was slightly easier to cross the road than it is now. And there were many long discussions there too. Things that were too private to be discussed in the Pearl bar or in Bowes but which needed the solidarity of the marble table and the almond bun.

  Like what? I don’t know. Love, hope, disappointment, press freedom, whether we had better coverage of something than the other papers, elections, sports, and what readers really wanted and whether or not we should try to give it to them.

  In those days the budget extended to more than one promised cup of coffee. But when the bill was being totted up the waitress would ask, ‘How many almond buns?’

  The number would be admitted.

  ‘And did you have butter with them?’ she would inquire, in the kindly but firm way that a priest might have asked you, ‘did you take pleasure in it?’ a long time ago.

  Oh yes, we always had butter with the almond buns. Like we always loved going in to sink down and forget the outside world in Bewley’s, and like we sang carols outside it for many Christmases, and like we always felt safe there and at home.

  It was all things to all people and we are allowed to be sentimental and sad that a little bit of everybody’s past has gone and that we can’t conjure it up any more just for the price of a cup of coffee.

  ‘One Up for the Cardigans’

  12 February 2005

  The news programme announces the engagement in the little minimarket where people are doing their morning shopping. The younger people ignore it, as they continue to root around looking for extra complimentary CDs among the magazines or to lick bits of frozen yoghurt from the outside of the cartons ….

  The older people are more interested.

  ‘That will be a relief to Her Majesty,’ says the woman with a basket full of lentils for herself and choice cuts for her cat. ‘Her poor Majesty was exhausted trying to turn the other way; now it will all be above board.’

  ‘A lot of bloody nonsense,’ says the man in the cloth cap with the north of England accent, who buys tins of pilchards and oven chips and nothing else. ‘Pair of them were perfectly all right living over the brush like half the country; he’s only marrying her because they’re asking questions about how much of our money he spends on her anyway.’

  And the large, comfortable woman who sits like a wise old bird at the checkout is very pleased.

  ‘It’s one up for the cardigans,’ she says. ‘I knew the day would come when a woman as shabby as myself would marry a prince.’

  I lived here in these London streets in 1981 when Charles was getting married for the first time, and the atmosphere was electric. The playboy prince was going to settle down, and he had found a nice virgin girl to marry. Yet, at his engagement press conference, when asked was he in love, he had said rather ominously, ‘Yes, whatever that means.’

  But the country had gone mad with an innocent pleasure. It was July 1981, and there was a huge fireworks display in Hyde Park the night before the wedding. There were street parties, and I was almost afraid to tell people I was talking to on the tube to St Paul’s that I had an invitation to the do in my handbag. They might have killed for it. And I say ‘the people that I talked to’ because for a day or two London forgot its introversion and everyone spoke to everyone else. It was like the day the Pope had come to Dublin two years previously.

  It was something that was of its time and will never happen in the same way again. There’s no excitement about Charles and Camilla in the streets of west London this time around. No spontaneous flags and bunting, no lump in the throat empathising with the happy event.

  The past 24 years have seen too much murky water flow under too many bridges. The little virgin bride shed all her shyness and puppy fat and became one of the world’s most beautiful women, and Charles, who had never loved her remotely, behaved as badly as any pantomime villain. The disastrous royal marriage was lived out in public, with other parties briefing the media about the rights and wrongs of the situation. The couple’s two little boys struggled on, surrounded by butlers, nannies and nonspeaking relatives.

  Princess Diana, who at one stage held all the cards because she was nice to people and full of charm, lost out in the end in every possible way. Charles, who became more arrogant and mutinous with every passing year, made little attempt to hide his relationship and now seems, oddly, to have won. It looks now as if he is being rewarded: he is getting the marriage he should have had 35 years ago when Camilla was certainly up for it but when he dithered and couldn’t make a decision.

  It’s not a love story that immediately sets the bells ringing or promises to get to the heart of the nation. But never underestimate the power of the media. About 20 minutes after the usual messed-up announcement from Clarence House, a statement that left so many questions unanswered and showed a complete lack of planning and preparation, all the television channels had wheeled in the ageing royal-watchers. They were brought out of mothballs and dusted down and wound up to go. I know what I’m talking about; I was one of them.

  Queen Elizabeth II has four children. I was at three of their weddings and I didn’t bring any of them much luck. Only Prince Edward’s first marriage has survived, and Princess Anne’s second marriage.

  I am sure Charles and Camilla, who have had each other out on approval for some time, will make a go of it. And truly, most people of goodwill will wish them happiness, as you would to anyone who has had a troubled journey in romance.

  But it’s such a different scene this time around. I wonder whether Charles, in his very narrow world, knows this. It’s hard for any of us to know what other people think and how they live and what their values are. But it must be harder for the Prince of Wales, surrounded as he is by sycophants and by people who grew up in the same strange enclosed world as himself, where journalists are called ‘reptiles’ and where there are the People Who Matter and then the rest of the world, which doesn’t matter a bit. He must think he is a scream, because I have seen the awful, fawning, servile press, really worse than reptiles, laughing hysterically if he makes a stupid joke. Why would he not think that his forthcoming wedding should be on the same scale as the last one? He has no loving family to lean on.

  His parents never went to visit him when he was at that terrible school, Gordonstoun. Do you know anyone who was never visited at boarding school by their parents? He was completely out of touch with the life his first bride wanted to live, and there was nobody to advise him, except in the ways of protocol, history and tr
adition, which could be summed up as ‘wives must learn’. He was singularly unlucky in that his wife never did.

  His polo-playing friends told him that Diana was a loony tune and that his best bet was to invite Camilla to their house parties. Then, somewhere along the line, somebody taped his intimate conversation with Camilla years ago and broadcast it to the world. That was the only day I felt really sorry for Charles. I could have wept for his sheer embarrassment as I saw him on television straightening his cuffs and going to see his mother, who was after all the queen of the country that was rocking to his bizarre sexual fantasies. Strange as they were, they were his and Camilla’s own business.

  So the man who will presumably one day be king may not have a clue how his future subjects think of him and his wedding.

  For a start, most of the broadcasts and breaking news and interviews focused on the issue of what poor Camilla would be called. She would not dare to call herself Princess of Wales, would she? She couldn’t ever be queen, could she? And eventually, two hours later, Charles’s expensive spin doctors and PR people issued a statement defining what the woman would or would not be called.

  Then there were hours of debate about whether a civil ceremony would be a proper marriage for a head of the Church, or whether a church wedding would be worse. Then they debated whether Charles was only marrying Camilla now because the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee might uncover something too damaging about what he had spent on the lady. Or because the results of the second inquest into Princess Diana’s death were to be published, possibly throwing up even more bad publicity about the royal family. Or because the Archbishop of Canterbury said that they should regularise their situation.

  And as if all this wasn’t bad enough for a couple planning their wedding, it was said that the Labour party was incandescent with rage because Charles and Camilla’s plans were messing up the timing of the next election.