by Maeve Binchy
Emigrant’s Return
“One of our own gone for three or four years was the
one who had least permission to criticise”
He is 26 now, and he came home for Christmas and New Year. Not an entirely successful visit. He doesn’t quite know why. He sat at the airport puzzling about it. It wasn’t the usual thing you hear about, like his parents treating him like a kid or anything. No, they didn’t cross-question him about where he had been or what time he came home or anything. They didn’t smother him, make him feel claustrophobic, beg him to go for interviews here to get a job, any job in Ireland, like other people’s parents did.
But it wasn’t satisfactory.
Everyone has got very blinkered here, he thinks, smug, self-satisfied. You can’t say a thing against Ireland but they’re all bristling like a herd of hedgehogs. They all react on cue if you say anything at all that is less than a hymn of praise to the whole nation.
Take the streets. He made a comment, an ordinary comment, about the litter and the way people throw wrapping papers on the ground. He saw someone emptying an ashtray out of a window and he just mentioned it, drew attention to it just as you would to such a happening. But it was taken as criticism.
And the beggars. He said it was terrible to see children begging on the streets with little cardboard boxes. Well! You should have heard the response. It was as if he had called down the wrath of nations on the country.
He was told that there were many, many homeless sleeping in the streets of the particular part of the New World where he had gone to seek his fortune. He was reminded sharply by his sister that this was not a new phenomenon and they had always been there, so it did not do him any credit to notice it only since he had been away.
It was the same if he spoke with anything except awe about the meals when they dined out. He said that the service was indifferent in one place, the waiter shruggy, the wine waiter supercilious, that those people wouldn’t last two minutes where he lived. The night was ruined for everyone. They said this was one of the best places in Dublin, that Irish people didn’t make waiting at tables into an art form, moaning out a litany of char-grilled vegetables, dawn-picked mushrooms and stir-fried delicacies while the guests sat and listened. This was Dublin, where people liked to talk to each other. They hadn’t lost the art of conversation so much that they expected to be entertained, instead, by a theatrical performance of the menu.
The thing was that he is proud of Ireland, and he talks about it all the time when he is not here. And people are great fun, quick on the uptake and seem to be having a good life for themselves. But they have this giant-sized chip on their shoulders which means that not a word can be said which is other than fulsome praise.
They cast you in a role: returned emigrant . . . back for the Christmas . . . you’re meant to be gaping with awe about how marvellous everything is, faint at the size and scope of the new Financial Services Centre and not ask how much wealth it has generated for the country.
They want you to marvel over the Irish film industry and say that everywhere else the industry is finished. No films coming out of the States, Australia or France anymore. Ireland’s your only man. He says just mildly that this is overstating the case a bit, and they all raise their eyes to heaven about him.
His mother gets upset and tries to take him aside. “Look at The Sound of Music. We loved that and that wasn’t Irish,” she says, and he wants to cry.
He has friends who have all taken up set dancing. He just remarked that when they were all at school and college they’d have died laughing at anyone doing Irish dancing – remember how they used to corpse themselves over a friend who put on a yellow or saffron skirt and long white socks. Remember?
It had fallen on deaf ears and lapsed memories. They didn’t care to remember.
They were allowed to complain about things Irish, like the opening hours of the National Library, or the time of the last DART or the price of the pint or the freelance parking adviser who led you into spaces from which it would be impossible to emerge ever again. But he couldn’t add his voice.
It pisses him off hugely to see people being so self-deluding and defensive. It’s not as if he’s saying there’s anything really wrong with the place, but what kind of life is it if you’ve got to walk on eggshells for fear of offending people? What kind of homecoming is it if you can’t be honest about your own home?
He was very disconsolate at the end of the holiday he had looked forward to for so long.
Had it ended well I wondered?
Not really. In fact, not well at all. You see the thing is, he was not playing the part of the successful guy coming back and telling people how things should be done. He had been four years over there, working very hard. Too hard in fact. There were many ways in which he would like to get a job back in Ireland, but not in an Ireland where you had to pretend it was the greatest country in the universe and you couldn’t see its faults unless you wanted to be some kind of traitor in the camp.
There were ways in which he was softer and more sentimental than the rest of them. Take today, none of them came out to the airport to see him off. Now, when anyone came to his neck of the woods, they would drive miles, literally 100 miles to see someone off at the airport or to meet them.
But none of them stirred their stumps. And had he mentioned this? Well of course he had. He had said that for a country which prided itself so much on its so-called warmth and friendliness, it was unusual that they should ask him what time he wanted the taxi called. They had said that it was hard to park and there would be a lot of waiting around and surely it was better to say goodbye at home. And it was the last day before they went back to work so it didn’t make sense . . .
He thought he was going to get some sympathy from me, but I told him how much we hated to hear anyone say our land wasn’t all we hoped it to be. One of our own, gone for three or four years, was the one who had least permission to criticise. The hedgehog syndrome hides a fear that this might not be the best place on earth, and we don’t want to be told about it in that destructive, chipping-away manner.
If he comes home next year, he should say that the place is fantastic and he doesn’t know why he ever left. He should hint at a huge groundswell of emigrant envy for the way we all pulled the country together. All right, so it’s not totally pure and honest . . . but then is every aspect of the 14-hour day he works over there as up front and sincere as he would like it to be?
At the End
“It has taken me a year to get the courage to write down
his advice to those who want to do their best for friends who
are about to die”
Years ago, there was a different code. You went to see a friend who was terminally ill and you looked into the eyes which would not see for much longer and you swore that the person had never looked better. You could see a terrific improvement since the last visit, and it would be no time at all before your friend was as right as rain again.
The more hearty and jovial the protestation, the better you thought the whole thing had gone. At least you felt you had handled the performance as it should have been done, and you were hugely relieved that nobody’s guard had broken down and there had been no danger of anyone saying anything important about life and the leaving of it.
We don’t know what they felt about it . . . the people who were at the receiving end of this histrionic pretence that everything was normal. It might have been some consolation to them, but surely they saw through it. In the dark hours of the night, they must have wondered why there was no communication left between friends who had once talked about everything.
Just when they needed real conversation most, they got reassurance, platitudes and, in fact, lies . . . and this from friends who used to sit up until dawn to discuss the meaning of the Universe, the future of Art, and the likelihood of getting someone you fancied to fancy you.
Why should it turn to “Ho, ho, ho and aren’t you looking well today”? It w
as because the well could not bear to admit the thought that the rest of the world was not well.
So what do you do if a friend is terminally ill? You do not want to go in with a face like the tombstone they know is not far away. You might not wish to bring up unaccustomed spiritual reading, likely aphorisms or new thinking on reincarnation.
Last year I had a friend who was given three months to live, and I asked him to tell me what were the best things people could do and what were the worst. He said that the very worst thing to do was to send a Get Well card, one with bunny rabbits crying into spotted handkerchiefs and saying “Sorry to hear you are not so well”. He used to look at these cards blankly and knew that they were the conditioned response and automatic reflex of people who meant desperately well, but who had to hide behind totally inappropriate greeting cards.
He wanted to reply on another card, saying, “I‘m trying, God damn it”. But he didn’t. And he didn’t because he knew that the idiotic bits of card with hospital beds and sexy nurses and thermometers and bad puns hid the real message of sympathy and huge distress.
He said that he really didn’t like people urging him to get another opinion and saying that it couldn’t do any harm. It would do harm, he thought, because it would waste time, the one thing there wasn’t much of left.
He preferred people to call it cancer if they spoke of it at all, rather than use some euphemism, and he also wished that he didn’t have to spend so much time thanking people politely for their suggestions of healing crystals, prayers Never Known to Fail, or the laying-on of hands by someone who lived half a continent away.
Those of us who knew him well and asked him how he wanted to do it were told. He wanted to remember the good, laugh at the funny, hear all the gossip and try to be as normal as possible.
Even though he could no longer eat, he wanted to come to restaurants with us and didn’t want to see anyone wince when he told the waiter he was on a diet.
He said that three months was a terrific bit of notice to get. You could make all kinds of arrangements, ask people to take a book from your collection, burn incriminating letters, heal old enmities, and send postcards to people you admired.
Once upon a time he had thought it would be good to die in his sleep or in a car crash. Something instantaneous. But there was a sense of time borrowed about this three-month sentence. Without being in the slightest maudlin, he said it was something we should all be lucky to get.
He said that he didn’t really like bunches of flowers, there was too much of the sick room, and even the funeral parlour, about them arriving in great quantities. But what he really liked was a rake of stamped postcards or a couple of colourful tracksuits which he could wear around the house and a few videos to watch at night.
He didn’t like letters telling him that lots of people had conquered this and surely he would too. But neither did he like the letters saying that he had a good innings and that, at 60, he had done everything. He wanted to be the judge of that.
But he did love to hear from the many people he had known during his life, saying briefly that they had heard about his diagnosis and that they were sorry. Letters that then went on to say things he could hold on to, things about time well spent, marvellous places seen, and memories that would live forever. All this brought a smile to his face and made the tapestry richer and less laced with regret.
He said that, if at all possible, he would like there to be no tears, but he knew this was hard, and he didn’t mind unnaturally bright eyes, because he knew this was a sign of grief felt but bravely fought back. He could understand why some people hadn’t the guts to come and see him, but he wished they had.
It has taken me a year to get the courage to write down his advice to those who want to do their best for friends who are about to die. A year in which I have never ceased to admire his bravery and honesty and to believe that there may be a lot of it around if we could recognise it.
We planted a rose tree, a Super Star, in his memory, and at last I feel the strength to pass on his advice to those who might learn from it.
Less is More
“I advise a lot of people to do less, not more, next year”
All right, so Margaret Thatcher got up at five o’clock in the morning but did it do her all that much good? Joan Collins has slaved to look young, but must she not get tired of people looking at her ears for signs of scars from a face-lift, rather than into her eyes, when she’s talking to them? Does Rupert Murdoch wake each day and say “Oh goody I’m delighted that I made a resolution to buy up every newspaper I saw”?
Do the men and women in the money houses see the New Year as a spreadsheet of some sort, where numbers and figures dance ahead of them like some kind of Pied Piper? Do the dieters see the year ahead as a hand-to-hand struggle against the demon god Excess? Do the excessively house-proud see it as a year when every centimetre of wood that can be seen, should be stripped down and begun all over again?
I have heard the resolutions all around me. They all involve doing more, working harder, putting in longer hours, concentrating fully, being stern with themselves.
It doesn’t matter that it won’t happen, that it’s all a dream really . . . this is not the point. The point is that it just seems too much, too puritan, too pessimistic. Too much belief that we are, in fact, all rats and that the race has begun. To stand still or to pause for a moment would mean being trampled on by the other rats, the eager, winning rats. To say that things aren’t too bad as they are, and let’s enjoy them, is to lose ground. On, on, more, more . . .
I advise a lot of people to do less, not more, next year. It’s not a sign of inertia, smugness, complacency and the imminent end of civilisation if we are just happy with what we have, rather than forever seeking to increase it.
Why should my American friend resolve to do yet another night course in business administration so that she’ll make senior vice-president of the company before she’s 50? Why should she do this? Why deny herself a life, friends, love, time just sitting at home, resting?
Yes, I know it’s great to get somewhere, to be recognised, but in her case, what will it mean? Most of her colleagues will hate her; some will be pleased, but jealous; her family will be proud, but know that now they’ll never see her; people like myself will be bewildered and won’t know what kind of an honour it is and why it was worth it, but will be sorry that it means she will never take a vacation again.
Why should this man I know make a resolution that he’ll get a proper loan and expand his small business which is doing perfectly well? None of his children wants to go into it with him. He employs four people. If things work out the way he hopes, he’ll have a staff of 14 . . . and a bank loan like a thundercloud for the foreseeable future. He’s 54; he doesn’t want to be a Michael Smurfit. Does he want to be listening to the market reports from Hong Kong and Tokyo at the crack of dawn? Does he want to be angst-ridden about budgets instead of just complaining about drink and cigarettes? Does he think he’ll be a better person?
When will he spend the money he earns? There won’t be time to go abroad on a holiday, or peace and ease to sit and enjoy a nicer house and garden. Will his wife be glad to have a designer outfit, but no nice, easy-going man around the place of an evening, who might go and walk the dog with her, or take a drive out to look at the sea?
Tell me about this girl who is 20 and doesn’t have a boyfriend. Now I’m not on some kind of crusade to keep the world fat or anything, but honestly, she’s nine stone, she’s lovely, but she thinks if she were seven stone it would all happen for her. So the plan is that, tomorrow, she will go on an 800 calorie a day diet.
It’s a pity it’s a Saturday, she says, but, then if you leave it till Monday, it’s a show of weakness, isn’t it? And it’s even more of a pity because there are two parties on this weekend and she won’t be able to eat any sausages or anything. She often feels a bit self-conscious. People will look at her and say to themselves “Look at that big fat girl there on a die
t; not doing her much good from the signs of it”.
Wouldn’t it be great if someone could tell her that maybe if she lost just a few pounds, for the pride of it, and put a smile on her face, she might enjoy the year, and even enjoy it in company?
Surely after Christmas, when so many plans were thought of and abandoned, so many resolutions made and broken about having everything ready in time, about not getting red-faced and fussed, about not snapping the heads off immediate family while smiling graciously at strangers . . . surely we noticed that the skies don’t fall on us if we don’t keep to a plan? And that Christmas was fine really when we were the way we were?
I don’t think that it would be holding back the march of a nation, or the interests of progress, to say that too many of us grit our teeth and try to work out a totally different Spartan, energetic, workaholic regime for ourselves, instead of facing another year with gratitude and relief.
Those of us who have a house to live in, a job to earn a living from, our health to be able to enjoy pain-free days and night, should not be attacked if we say “isn’t this fine? Aren’t we grand as we are?”
The point might be – like the world-class golfer who said that he would never forget to enjoy the game, smell the grass and see the flowers – that maybe we should resolve to be happy rather than perfect, peaceful rather than stretching to achieve. We should begin another year with hope and confidence, rather than the self-imposed gloom of so many would-be superpeople.
This time next year we might be saying that it was the best year of all, the year of living uncompetitively . . . the year we counted the blessings we had rather than chased after dreams.
Part 4 In the Public Domain