As well as three names, Myles allegedly used two hats. One was said to hang permanently outside his office so that his superiors, on seeing it, might suppose him to be at work inside, when he was in fact drinking in some pub. Men, in those days, did not go out hatless, and open-plan offices had, presumably, not yet been invented.
I was one of Myles’s fans and regret never having met him.
I don’t know why he never came to our open Sunday nights. It can’t have been because he was obstreperous or a lush, for both Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh, who could be both, were habitués of Knockaderry.
Like other passengers on our morning bus, I read his column in the Irish Times over the shoulders of anyone who would let me. It was entitled An Cruisceen Lán which is Gaelic for ‘the full jug’ and, though no doubt a metaphor, must also have referred to drink, since Myles was known to like his drop.
*
I, meanwhile, had grown impatient to leave school. Life there was so coherent that its oddities had hardly bothered most of us until now. But when we got to be sixteen and one of our friends was caught with a letter from a boy, and expelled with unpleasant pomp from the Congregation of the Children of Mary, the rest of us took against the nuns’ rituals. The line in the letter thought to have given most offence was from a popular song: ‘I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China.’ Some of us wondered whether a more brutal quotation had touched off the furore. It was from a much older song which shows how backward we were. It ran:
Here’s to the girl who gets a kiss
And goes to tell her mother.
May she in a convent die (bis)
And never get another.
We understood nuns being upset by that and a variant which ran:
She should have her lips cut off …
I doubt if any of us knew enough anatomy to wonder ‘which lips’, but there was a sick chill to the words which made me lose interest in receiving the thick, silver child-of-Mary medal, which the nuns claimed would be a life-long passport to the society of former Sacred Heart girls. Wherever we went, they assured us, it would be a signal to people who shared our values and save us from taking up with the wrong sort.
‘What sort, Mother?’
‘Reds.’
Bad times, the nuns warned, were back.
This explained the great part played in our timetable by the invisible world. Not only was Religious Instruction the first lesson of the day, but polyglot pieties frittered away time needed, at least by me, to cram for outside exams. School was like an aquarium in which alien life was alarmingly close but, we hoped, safely glassed in. Was it though? Or were we at risk from a leakage of religious mania? An absurd notion, but one I must have entertained, for in my final year I told the new Mistress of Studies that I wanted no truck with ribbons or medals. ‘Blue ribbons’ were the insignia worn by girls who, in other schools would have been called prefects. I did not, I told her craftily, feel up to the responsibility. Chillily, she warned me against spiritual pride.
She had guessed that my energies were focused on winning a university scholarship, and that I didn’t want to waste good cramming time on supervising junior netball or the like, as blue-ribbon wearers could be asked to do. Poor school spirit? Yes. And there was worse. Religiosity had begun to embarrass me. If someone made a showy sign of the cross when passing a church, I felt uncomfortable. The Morandys had never done this. I hadn’t seen anyone do it in France, and suspected that we, in Ireland, had been landed with a ‘mission-country’ style of religion. Maybe Stephane gave me the idea? He, who had had to pretend to be a Catholic during the war, must have looked closely into our ways.
People who invoked God were more annoying still. ‘God bless you,’ they kept saying, as if they had pull with Him. Often they were old acquaintances of Seán’s or Eileen’s from Cork, a place whose yo-yoing accent was considered comical in Dublin. What if they did it when I was with Jasmine or Stephane? Or dredged up the old, prolix, greeting-dialogue: ‘God be with you!’ ‘God and Mary be with you!’ ‘God and Mary and Patrick and Joseph and …’ Who? They could string this out endlessly. How to stop them? Maybe I should pray against them? ‘Dear God,’ I might appeal, ‘can’t You, if You’re there at all, stop them making a holy show of us?’
A convent education aimed to help us make our way first in this world, then in the next. In my case, the nuns told my mother, I needed another year in school. Bookish girls, they warned, could be backward in unforeseen ways.
Another year? Wearing lumpy, black shoes, lumpy lisle stockings and my hair in plaits! I couldn’t bear the thought. After all I was sixteen!
In what I hoped would be my last term, we had a retreat during which there were no lessons. Instead we were each assigned a quiet space where we could spend the day trying to meditate. We could walk in the convent woods, if we preferred, and meditate there. Images showing the stations of the cross hung on the inside of the perimeter wall, and when D, one of the most frivolous of my friends, was spotted genuflecting to them, it was clear that something was up.
My mind kept jumping. I had told the nuns that I couldn’t meditate and didn’t want to be hypocritical by pretending – only to be accused again of spiritual pride. Annoyed, I set off for a walk in the woods. There was D, wearing her broad, blue petersham silk ribbon across her proudly tumescent chest and, just above her, seated on the top of the outer wall, half hidden by thickets of ivy and valerian, was the faun-like face of her current boyfriend, who was playing hooky from his own school and relishing a glimpse of a breast which she had half bared by undoing three shirt buttons and loosening the blue ribbon. I warned them that they were dangerously visible from third-floor school windows, then went back to my desk, took out my Horace and worked at it for the rest of the day. Hypocrisy, I saw, was exactly what was expected of us. Good! OK. Now I knew.
I got my come-uppance though.
Candidates for the scholarship exam were required to present their three best subjects, and mine were English, French and Latin. But I learned at the last minute that the Church Latin pronunciation taught in girls’ schools was not accepted by the university or its oral exam. I was indignant, and wondered if the nuns had known this – and if not, why not. Perhaps God had answered my mocking prayer with some sly mockery of His own?
*
Meanwhile the state leaving-cert. exam was held in a nearby Dominican convent rather than in ours, where I was the only one sitting it. This exam, though of a lower standard than the university scholarship one, was nerve-racking for me because it included obligatory maths and Gaelic, at neither of which I was much good. Eileen, knowing how flustered I could get, now did something for which I would be grateful to her forever. If there had been a medal for heroic mothers, I would have nominated her. Knowing that I had acquired a taste for cognac while staying with the Morandys, and that Hennessy or Martell could settle my nerves, she called on her old trespassing skills, and arranged to meet me in the Dominican-convent shrubbery before each of the two dreaded exams to give me a few swigs from a pocket flask. This made me worry about the smell on my breath, displaced my anxiety and did the trick. I passed both exams.
I did less well in the one for the university scholarship, though; in fact, I failed to get it. A boy from a Benedictine school did. I thought of him as having snatched it from under my nose, because we had met as I came out of the oral and he was on his way in to display his superior pronunciation. As a consolation, I was given an ‘exhibition’ worth – I think – £25, while he got £125.
Abandoning the unequal rivalry with people like him, I left school, signed on at UCD, decided to drop Latin, took up Italian and won the £125 the following year. Not only that, I won summer scholarships to the University for Foreigners in Perugia for three years running. Walking down the Corso Vannucci during each of those summers with the local Perugian assigned to exchange Italian conversation with me for English, I was half tempted to start believing in God again, if only to thank Him for my lucky débâ
cle in the Latin oral.
Perugia is a hill town and charming, although living there all year round – I know from friends who did – would be deadly. But a summer visit, when the University for Foreigners is holding classes and arranging coach trips to look at art and architecture all over Umbria, provides a perfect way to get over those tonguetied first weeks when one is trying to break through into a new language. As had happened with the Morandys, I only discovered the drawbacks on my second trip. Local young men, it turned out, were predatory. Local girls went home at 9 p.m. and stayed there for the rest of the evening. The freedom enjoyed by foreign ones to linger in cafés, dance on sun-warmed terraces or walk out along the shady streets convinced Perugians that the girls were shady themselves. Fair game. Tarts. This distinction, we foreigners soon learned, was not peculiar to Perugia. Young men in other Italian towns we visited made it too. But the sheer numbers arriving in Perugia every summer had got local men used to exploiting us to the hilt. I was there in an innocent time compared to what seems to have happened later, when terrorists used the university as cover and druggies made the place dangerous. In the early Fifties it was no worse than unpleasant. Guessing that not even foreign girls would want to lose their virginity, the men merely hoped to be masturbated. As this requirement was hard to explain to girls who knew little Italian, action had to take the place of words and could provoke rage, slaps and tears. The families from whom we rented rooms advised us to beware of local men, but did so indulgently, using tolerant metaphors, such as ‘man is a hunter’. Clearly, we straniere told each other indignantly, the predators had been spoiled rotten by their own women.
We turned for company to foreign young men, but were still exposed to misunderstandings. A French Communist, called Jean, with whom I had chatted a few times over milkshakes or coffee, told me not to go to a drinks party planned by the English contingent which, he had heard, could turn into an orgy. I laughed and told him that drink was all Anglo-Saxons and indeed the Irish did. They didn’t have orgies – well, the ones here weren’t likely to. He wouldn’t believe me and warned that if I went to the party, all was over between us. All what? No more milkshake-drinking? When I laughed at him, he left in a huff. So I went to the party, where, just as I had expected, people ate pasta, drank cheap wine and sang Gaudeamus Igitur and The Foggy, Foggy Dew. Jean must have had a spy among us, for the next day he approached me gravely, bowed and apologised for his suspicions. He was the first Communist I had met and reminded me disappointingly of the kind of Catholic who, in Ireland is, or was, called a Holy Joe. His spy must have left the party early, for Bill, an older man than the rest, had given me a lift home on his motorbike and made a pass when we got there. He was easily rebuffed. But Jean, if informed, might not have believed this.
*
My friends in UCD were not Holy Joes, but, apart from the handsome eighteenth-century Newman House at 86 Stephen’s Green, the place was drab. Notoriously, there would be no contraceptives available for years to come. Men and women were careful with each other, and the Fifties were impoverished years. Meanwhile, our summer jaunts abroad only served to show Modern Language students how much livelier things were in places other than Ireland, where a post-Famine fear of the woman who ‘gets herself pregnant’, so that the man is forced to marry her and divide the wretched bit of family land, survived subliminally into my time and made it a grim place for both sexes. Men drank.
Trained in this nursery, those of us who got abroad scrutinised foreign men for similar doubts regarding us, were circumspect in our dealings with them and, being recognised as wife-material – des filles bien or ragazze per bene – attracted quite a few offers of marriage. One or two girls I knew accepted, and I later wrote a novella, Man in the Cellar, about the imagined experience of marrying an Italian. Later still, an Irish woman who had fled from such a marriage told me I’d got it more or less right. I was pleased but deserved less credit than she thought, for in my winter in Rome I had had a fidanzato – a less serious connection than a fiancé – on whose more furtive doings I received reports from two Irishmen, whose solidarity with me trumped their male connivance.
*
My Roman year (1952–3) was funded by an Italian government scholarship and I spent it working for a two-year National University of Ireland travelling studentship which was due to come up the next year. Before leaving Dublin I introduced my friend, Grace, to Stephane, and not long after that heard that she had joined him in Paris and that they were in love. However, I then learned that when he told her he could only marry a Jewish girl, love had petered out. Years later, when married to someone else, she confided that, on her return from France, she had grown friendly with Stephane’s uncle Serge, who told her something Stephane could not have wanted us to know. Although his father had indeed died in the camps, his mother had not. She was alive, remarried and had never been Jewish. ‘Stephane couldn’t forgive her,’ Grace explained, ‘for remarrying. He told Serge that that was why he could never trust or marry a Catholic.’
I was fascinated. So this was why he had chosen me as his confidante when I was fifteen. It had been because I was someone – perhaps the only one? – to whom, after sustained brainwashing, he could talk freely and at length about a faithful – though imaginary – dead, Jewish mother. Anyone who knew his uncle’s friends would have known this to be untrue. But with me he had been able to comfort himself with a consoling fantasy.
‘Do you realise,’ Grace was following her own train of thought, ‘that this means Stephane himself isn’t Jewish either? For Jews it’s the mother who matters. The heredity comes through her.’
That made me think of my own mother. ‘So,’ I saw, ‘it really was because we were pariahs! He needed a pariah! I bet Eileen had told him that that was what we were and so gave him the idea. I can just imagine her saying it! She could be quite obsessive about it.’
‘Who are you talking about?’
‘My family. It would take too long to explain. Tell me, though: did he make up for his mother’s not being Jewish? Did he marry someone who was?’
Grace’s laugh was sour. ‘Can you believe that in the end he married a Catholic?’
*
When I knew it first, Rome’s centro storico had traces of a rural languor which might almost have dated back to the era before 1870, when the pope was king. Vespas and Lambrettas buzzed about, but there was otherwise often so little traffic that, if I crossed the piazza di Spagna early in the day, Edward McGuire’s archaic and shaky vintage car might be the only vehicle parked there. He and I had been introduced before we left Dublin and encouraged to meet in Rome, where we were both headed. Edward’s father may have regretted filling his house with a seductive display of expensive French paintings when Edward announced that he meant to paint professionally rather than go into the family business. The father was said to be a talented amateur painter himself, but had devoted his life to making money. Edward despised him for this. ‘He’s a bloody businessman,’ he sometimes murmured, ‘so the least he can do is give me enough money to make me free to paint.’ To buttress this decision, he dressed the part. The vintage car was a prop, and so were his unfashionable stove-pipe trousers cut from a tweed which matched his tawny curls. He had a life-size painting of a dead bird in his room, which reminded me of Patrick Swift’s work, which in turn recalled that of Lucian Freud. In time Edward would paint some rather lovely paintings of owls and a number of portraits of poets, including one of Seamus Heaney, and a Stubbs-like one of Charlie Haughey on a horse with a gentrified house behind him. I’m not sure, though, whether he painted much while in Rome, apart from the dead bird. He claimed to want to paint me, but our sittings produced nothing. He kept his canvas turned away from me while he worked and, in the end, declared the portrait a failure. When asked if I could have a look anyway, he loaded his brush with green pigment and, quickly sloshing it on, turned whatever had been on the canvas into a cabbage. Like myself, he was an Irish – i.e. immature – twenty-year-old.
*
Why Edward wanted to paint me at all may have been because he had seen my portrait by Swift, whom he admired, in a one-man show which the Waddington Gallery put on just before Swift took off for Portugal with one of Dublin’s more impressive beauties. Oonagh Ryan was one of several glamorous sisters, the best known of whom, Kathleen, had starred in John Ford’s Oscar-winning film The Informer and Carl Reed’s Odd Man Out.
Swift, who already knew the art worlds of London and Paris, was more alert than my UCD contemporaries and, in contrast with my parents’ friends, was animated by a tigerish juvenescence. Sitting for him had been like watching a window swing open onto a previously unimaginable landscape. He talked while working about painters whose work he loved, launching their names with such verve that I remember them still. They were Francis Bacon, Johnny Minton, Alberto Giacometti, Frank Auerbach, Derek Hill and Lucian Freud, with whom Swift shared a studio on Freud’s frequent trips to Dublin. He spoke with enthusiasm about Bacon, whom he portrayed as caring so little for success that he hid his best paintings from prospective buyers and destroyed quantities of his work. This may have been a legend or – more probably? – a validation of an attitude by which Swift himself would live more boldly than even Bacon did. It would be said later of Swift that he disliked the commercial side of his profession, and a close friend of his would claim to have found him too hiding paintings on a day when he was expecting a visit from a rich collector.
This backfired. Despite being praised in 1994 by Derek Hill as ‘probably the most formidable Irish artist of this century’, Swift, who had died eleven years before, is now often described as the most underrated Irish painter, even though that 1952 exhibition had been hailed as a triumph in an article in Time Magazine. ‘Irish critics’, wrote the Time reporter, ‘got a look at the work of a tousled young man named Paddy Swift and tossed their caps in the air. Paddy’s thirty canvases are as grey and gloomy as Dublin itself – harshly realistic paintings of dead birds and rabbits, frightened-looking girls and twisted … plants. Their fascination is in the merciless, sharply etched details, as oppressive and inquiring as a back-room third degree.’ Remembering myself as one of those frightened-looking girls, I can report that the effect was carefully contrived. In Swift’s portrait my flesh is indeed grey, and I appear to have nothing on, though I was in fact wearing a very proper jumper rolled down to create a décolletage calculated to cover both my embarrassment and breasts. If I look alarmed, it is either because of this or of his saying that before Cézanne felt able to paint an apple, he had to want to eat it – or words to that effect. Fascinated, I both did and didn’t want to be eaten.
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