Dear Maeve

by Maeve Binchy

  And it’s not Victorian, you know. It’s not as if they don’t mention her name, or refuse to acknowledge that she exists. They sent her a letter at Christmas and she sent them one. She also wrote in the New Year and said she was expecting a child in the summer. They haven’t replied to that letter yet.

  Now of course they’re not going to take it out on an innocent child. The danger of having any kind of standards is that people will paint you as unfeeling ogres. They don’t have stereotyped bigoted beliefs that the child will be illegitimate or anything. Such a word isn’t in their vocabulary any more than it is in the law.

  Yes, it would have been different if this man had his marriage annulled. Of course it would. Then it would be a question of no previous marriage having existed. Then he would have been free to marry in a church and everything would have been all right.

  But would they not agree that the man was being honourable in admitting that his first marriage of seven years had existed rather than finding a series of excuses and explanations to prove that it hadn’t?

  No, they could not agree with this, they would have to think that, since he knew his first marriage was a real one, he should also know that it was not capable of being dissolved.

  I think I am presenting their view fairly. But I have met their daughter in a far-off land. A girl living miles from home because she could not bear the tension and stress that living near her parents would involve.

  She lives in a big housing estate in a sprawling suburb of a city that she hasn’t really come to know and make her own. Her husband has a job with long hours, meaning he is away from home a good deal more than either of them would like.

  She has two jobs, one in a flower shop in the mornings, and in the afternoons she types theses and manuscripts on a word processor. Her mother does not know about either of these jobs – the letters she wrote home were deliberately short and spare on detail. Her parents had told her that they could not pretend to assume a delight and interest in her everyday life when she knew how grievously they disapproved of the whole situation.

  She is desperately lonely. She plays Irish music all the time. She made a journey of two buses and a train to attend an Irish book signing. Her neighbours who are having children have letters of encouragement from home. There are future grannies and grandfathers saving the fare to come out and see infants and toddlers. A group of her friends have bought a video camera to share so that they can send pictures home. She joins in because it would look so strange not to – but she will have no one to send the video cassette to. Yes, she does have friends back in Ireland; but it would seem somehow even sadder to send one to them and not to her home.

  You don’t have to be super-intelligent to know that it will all be made up some day. But when? When the parents are in their late 70s? 80s? When they are old and sad at the lost years, the lack of a daughter and grandchildren?

  One day the mother or father will meet a sympathetic prelate or friend who will say something simple: if there is a God then a God would not want a parent to cut off a child because of a principle.

  But it will be too late. A lifetime of memories and reunions and love will have been allowed to slip away. They will take their dog for a walk and wish they had grandchildren to push along the pier on a Sunday when they came home for a visit. She will play more and more Irish tunes and make her homeland into a fantasy island. He will work longer and harder hours to buy her the things he hopes will make her happy.

  And all the time a principle will have been honoured by two good people who truly believed that this was the time of their testing.

  Speedy Dispatch

  “That’s something we should remove from the national

  psyche . . . the notion that a letter might be an intrusion”

  A woman said to me the other day that she had voted Labour all her life until the last election, when she literally couldn’t give a vote to either candidate in Dublin because she was so utterly fed up with the campaign antics and the in-fighting. She also feared that Labour was sort of turning into Fianna Fáil. So she voted for the little Green girl, as she called her. But she didn’t feel good about it.

  Nobody would ever know what had changed a loyalty that she would have once thought of as unswerving. The party would see its vote down and not really know what had been in individual hearts and minds when it came to voting time. What a pity, she said, that we can’t put down our reasons for voting for or against a party, or candidate, on the back of the ballot paper.

  Well, for the price of a stamp, she could express her views. She hadn’t thought of writing letters to them, she said – politicians don’t want to hear long, hectoring tirades from people out there, especially people who didn’t vote for them?

  That may be true, but such a letter doesn’t have to be long or hectoring or even a tirade. Politicians, if they are in touch with reality, should want to hear a brief, reasoned explanation as to why they have lost your support. Even if they think you are barking. And suppose 10,000 people wrote to Dick Spring and said that these were their views? Then he would have to take it on board. And suppose 10,000 people who once had Fianna Fáil blood coursing through their veins wrote to Albert Reynolds and said that they really felt the business of granting passports didn’t have a kosher explanation and, even though he may well be as pure as the driven snow, it had produced an aura of Banana Republicanism about it that was unsuited to the Soldiers of Destiny – well, then Albert would know that a lot of people out there were uneasy and cynical.

  And suppose 10,000 people wrote to Mary Harney saying that they could no longer believe that the PDs had any new philosophy because all they seemed to do was shoot themselves, and each other, in the foot. And then 10,000 people could write to John Bruton saying that since the Tallaght Strategy had been let go, it was very hard to know what Fine Gael was for – only what it was against.

  These are the kinds of things people say in conversation. They don’t meet the people who could do anything about them, all they can do is vote for them and the woman is absolutely right to feel frustrated. How will the politicians ever know the real reasons for discontent, disappointment and the eventual falling off of support unless we tell them?

  Of course they can read the papers and watch the television analysis and listen to the radio programmes. But these are the views of radio commentators, chat show hosts, newspaper columnists. On vox pop or access programmes, these are the voices of the committed, the politically active, the extroverted, and often the notice boxes who want to have their say and be heard saying it. The so-called Ordinary People, whose support politicians are trying to get, are often a mystery, since their considered view is not adequately expressed.

  They are wooed with promises of a better life, of lower taxes, of more jobs and ever-bigger hauls from the bottomless pits of Europe. There isn’t time in the sound-bite system to talk about idealism and hopes and dreams of what this country might be like. The speeches are a one-way business. They tell us what they think we want to hear. If we haven’t told them what we want them to do, then is it fair to expect them to know?

  Most of us have some sort of idea of how we would like the country to be run, and one of the parties must come nearest to that hope. So why don’t we write and tell that party truthfully what we think it could do?

  The woman who won’t write to Dick Spring dismissed this argument. He would just think it was from a crank, a nutter; he would move on through the letter wanting to know what particular favour she wanted. He would think she was a professional letter-writer, a person with time on her hands and an outsize ego. Why bother? It would be put in the wastepaper basket, or else answered courteously, in a meaningless, time-consuming way, by someone who dealt with these things.

  But my point is this. If he got thousands of these letters, they could not be ignored. By nature, we are not a shrugging, cynical race which has abandoned the running of things to the cowboys. We have always been able to express our views and this is what makes us
more interesting and volatile than many another race. But I think we have forgotten the art of the letter, as the old-fashioned manuals used to call it, and we have forgotten the power of many, many letters.

  We are bad at writing thank you notes, cards of congratulations and even fan letters. We think they won’t want to be bothered hearing all that. This is madness. People love to be praised, they love it to bits, we all love it to bits.

  So that’s something we should remove from the national psyche . . . the notion that a letter might be an intrusion.

  And, if something has gone disastrously wrong, if we have stopped voting for the party we always supported, I think it’s courteous, practical, reasonable and helpful to write a letter explaining why. That way they won’t have to interpret the polls, the pundits and the rumour factory. That way they will actually know, from people with the courage to include their name and address, and the restraint to keep their tone civilised and positive.

  The woman who wished she could express her views on her ballot paper was underselling herself. There wouldn’t be room. She would need at least one side of a sheet of paper and we should write the letters now.

  Naming the Criminal

  “Rape is a crime and must be considered one. To ignore it

  and just cross the street when she sees this man again is

  to diminish, even in his eyes, what he did”

  She is 20 and she doesn’t know me, but I know a great friend of her mother’s. She was at a party three weeks ago, and she went there with this fellow. He wasn’t her boyfriend, but he was a friend.

  There was a lot of messing about, quite a bit of drink, but she was definitely not drunk. People began to drift into different rooms. She was disappointed that the party seemed to be falling to pieces, but her friend seemed very pleased. He pulled her onto a sofa and raped her.

  Nobody heard her shouting for help because there was loud music. She had been dancing with him earlier but she swears she had not encouraged him in any way. They hadn’t even kissed each other, for God’s sake. He was much bigger and stronger than she was. He told her throughout that she was dying for it.

  She got away from the party and came home. She couldn’t sleep. She was frightened and hurt. And she also felt that it was her own fault.

  When her mother found her the next morning, still sitting beside her window and in great distress, she reluctantly told her what had happened.

  Her mother was hugely sympathetic and supportive. She gave all the hugging and moral encouragement she could. Not a word of blame, or regret that she had gone to such a party.

  And then when the girl said she was going to tell the guards, her mother’s face froze.

  “You can’t possibly do that,” she said in astonishment. “This has nothing to do with the guards, it wasn’t a stranger that came and raped you, it was a boy you went out with. You knew what you were doing when you went to the party with him. Nobody would call that rape, they’ll say it was a normal and even reasonable end to the evening.”

  Now the mother doesn’t think it was a normal, reasonable end to the evening, but she thinks that’s what the authorities will say. It’s like calling the guards to a fight between husband and wife . . . they’ll have to say, regretfully, that it’s a domestic matter. And if it gets to the courts? Well then, surely, there will be all kinds of questioning and investigating and does she really want to explain the night’s activities, in detail, in open court, to people who will all assume that it was a matter of consent anyway?

  “You mean he’s going to get away with it? Isn’t it a crime?” the girl asked.

  “You don’t have to see him again, and the trauma of the whole thing would be as bad as the rape,” said her mother, who was utterly sincere and had no hidden agenda about fear of publicity or scandal or anything like that.

  And this week, with all the publicity about the case in England where the King’s College student, Austin Donnellan, refused to submit to a college disciplinary punishment and insisted that, if he had to be charged with rape, then he should be tried in open court, has seemed very relevant to them.

  In the Old Bailey in London, Austin Donnellan was entirely cleared of rape because it was decided that the girl was drunk and willing. Hate mail has gathered in sackfuls against the girl who had wrongly accused the male student who was brave enough to give his name, even though hers has been kept a secret. It seemed to prove what a lot of people suspected, that women were quite enthusiastic and then regretted it and then cried rape.

  The mother and daughter read the reports and were glad they had not filed a complaint on the friend who had taken her to the party – even though he had proved to be such a false friend.

  If it had been a stranger . . . now, that would have been totally different, they told each other. Then she would have been blameless. No one could have said it was all her fault.

  If it were defined as rape at all, it would be called “date rape”, with all the complicity that that term implies.

  That is not a phrase that should be used.

  We don’t talk about dating as part of our normal conversation in this country. You say someone is going out with someone on Friday, not dating them, or that people are seeing each other, not dating each other. Why choose this phrase to cover such a hugely controversial and important aspect of rape? The expression “date rape” minimises rape. It is also misleading – 80 per cent of the rapes committed in Ireland are by people known to the victim.

  In cases of “stranger rape” – to use another made-up expression – women are much more likely to report it. It’s not as hard to describe violation by a totally unknown person, and there isn’t the lurking fear that it might be seen to have been condoned or encouraged.

  Of those who consult the Rape Crisis Centre in Dublin, only 30 per cent will go to the guards and, of that number, only 10 per cent will go to court. The centre agrees with this mother and daughter’s view, that rape by a stranger is somehow more socially acceptable, if you could use such a phrase in this context.

  Some of the girl’s friends are encouraging her to bring charges against him. If he had assaulted her in some other way, she would; if he had robbed her, she would have no hesitation. She was hesitating because she feared that the intimacy he forced upon her would be regarded as part of something agreed between them.

  Some of her friends have said that statistics have shown that someone who rapes is likely to rape again. All right, so she might not see him again, but what about all the other women he is likely to meet in his life? Does she not owe them any responsibility?

  Her mother has heard that going to court is a nightmare. The victim is not legally represented, she appears only as witness for the State. There are proposals to change that, but this is the way it stands at the moment. The girl can look at a group of wigs and not know which one is for her and which one is against.

  If she doesn’t accuse him of rape, she may forget it more easily.

  Or, if she does accuse him, perhaps she will have somehow exorcised it and played a part in establishing that rape is a crime and must be considered one. To ignore it and just cross the street when she sees this man again is to diminish, even in his eyes, what he did.

  She doesn’t hate men, nor does she want them branded as beasts. She is torn between the beliefs that it is best forgotten or best tackled.

  I’d advise her to tell.

  Too many people have not told things over the years because it was going to cause more trouble, or get too involved, or cause more heartbreak, than it was worth. Often they think that to report a crime such as rape would be a sort of act of revenge, and therefore almost as tainted as the original offence.

  Always, in the case of reporting someone you know, there is a huge conflict of interests. But if she were to ask the people who know, the people who work for the Rape Crisis Centre, she would hear words and statistics that would give her courage. The courage to know that sleeping dogs – if they are rapists – should not
be allowed to lie.

  Young Nicks

  “If parents gloat over not paying VAT on something, shouldn’t a child try to escape the fare on the DART?”

  They were in the carpark, unpacking the trolley from the supermarket. Her nine-year-old son was being very helpful as usual and, as he went to return the trolley to the queue, she saw him pausing to open a Kit Kat.

  “Hey, where did you get that?” she asked.

  He reddened and said nothing.

  “Did you steal it?” she asked. There was no reply.

  “You can’t take things without paying for them.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, with his head down.

  The mother said it was a very long moment. She didn’t want to force him to go back with it and say he had stolen it. She didn’t want to say anything about how shaming it would be if he had been caught, because that made the being caught bit worse than the actual act of taking it.

  But she thought, come on, he’s only a kid. Kids like Kit Kats. Supermarkets leave them where kids can see them, to drive them mad with desire for them. Supermarkets build in the cost of kids nicking things. It’s not a federal crime. She should lighten up and let it go. Otherwise, when it comes to really heavy things where she wants to lay down the law – like about drugs and motor-bikes – she won’t have any authority. He’ll always think of her as a nit-picking mother, who thinks that the most minimal things are major deals.

  So after what seemed like a lot of thought, she said: “All right this time, but don’t do it again, you get pocket money and that’s what it’s for”. And he cheered up, finished the bar, and got into the car companionably beside her.

  For him, the incident was over. For his mother, it was not. “Did I do the right thing?” she asked. A lot of people said yes.

  They said that supermarkets were almost open season. They said that big companies like that expected to lose the odd bar here and there and wouldn’t even know how to ring through an empty wrapper paper if it were returned by a humiliated nine-year-old and his gaoler mother.