Walter Macken

by Ultan Macken

  So I remember being in First Class in the Presentation Convent, terrified of the eagle eye of Sister Ursula, and being now a man, aged 7, and absolutely loathed being cooped up in a school with girls.

  Girls are hard on boys, particularly when there are a couple of hundred of them and only two of us, hair-pulling, pinching, jeering, so it is no wonder that we looked to our freedom and the day we would be going to the Bish as Xenophon’s men longed for a glimpse of the sea. I remember distinctly being told how Jack Deacy had been put into second class, and how Jo Jo and myself were simply dying to emulate him.

  So the longed for day came and we went to the Bish. It is un-fortunate that reality cannot live up to the dreams, but that is a lesson in life that you learn early on; that the attainment of dreams and ambitions are not everything. You get what you desire and all you can say is, ‘So what?’ until your final ambition which should be the most important one of all, and I imagine the only one where you will never say, ‘So what?’ when you attain it.

  In the Bish primary school, I remember playing crowded football in the concrete yard, lacerated knees and the seagulls over the river beyond the railings where we fed them with our bits of bread while they performed flying gymnastics as they screamed and called. It was hard leaving the seagulls for the classroom. I remember the class being dominated by the thought of Brother Joseph in Sixth Class. We could hear him in the room over our heads each year as we progressed. He believed in noisy punishment, the sounds of which haunted us, but as dreams cannot live up to reality, neither can nightmares. Things were not as bad as they sounded, when we got there. And now our aching ambition was to get into Secondary. You know why? Because they got longer holidays in the summer. What more would the heart desire?

  I remember in a higher class, asking to be excused, and Brother Leonard granting the request and asking: ‘Do you want a match, Macs?’

  I remember Brother Thompson, and Higher Maths. Himself and a couple of Maths geniuses chuckling away companionably over calculus and plane geometry and other monstrous equations just as if they were compiling a joke book. It was all a pure blank to me and a few other characters I won’t name in case, in the interim, they have turned into maths geniuses. People’s understanding of Higher Maths has always puzzled me, so that’s one place where the Patrician Brothers failed, but I find that they gave me many other things instead, like little prayers copied down in the middle of a Latin Grammar class; little prayers which one still says many years afterwards; a lot of advice which one thought unnecessary at the time but which turned out to be good, oh indeed lots of things which one can’t put a finger on, because they all go to the making of the man, but one thing I know for sure, that if I hadn’t spent twelve years of my life with the Patrician Brothers, I wouldn’t be as I am now. For better or worse the mould of a man is shaped and formed when he is a boy and I think that the Patrician Brother possess good mould-making hands.

  I remember my father telling me about those maths classes. Among the pupils in that class was a boy called Brod Newell. One day, when the maths teacher could not solve a particular problem, he sent Brod and a friend up to the university to bring the problem to a maths’ lecturer so that he would get a solution. Brod and his friend went out to the toilet and solved the problem themselves and when sufficient time had elapsed, they came back with the problem solved! Brod Newell went on to become a professional mathematician and eventually became the president of University College Galway.

  My father found school boring. In those years, the curriculum was not demanding, there was a lot of rote-learning and subjects were not taught in an interesting way. He sat the Intermediate Certificate in 1932 and obtained the following results:

  Irish

  168 (400)

  42%

  English

  276 (400)

  69%

  Latin

  160 (400)

  40%

  History

  140 (250)

  56%

  Geography

  70 (150)

  46%

  Mathematics:

  Arithmetic

  90 (200)

  45%

  Maths I

  94 (200)

  47%

  Maths II

  80 (200)

  40%

  It is interesting that the two subjects he did best in were English and History.

  When he was deciding where to send his children to school, my father told me he would not send any of his sons to school in the Bish. We went to school with the Jesuits, where we were beaten almost as much as we would have been in the Bish.

  Unlike his friends, my father did not have ambition to be a train driver, a bus conductor or a carpenter; even at this young age, he knew in his heart and soul that he wanted to write. Occasionally he displayed his ability in essays written for his English teacher, Brother Leonard. One of his schoolmates told me something that happened in class one day. Brother Leonard said he would read Wally Macken’s essay and read the opening line: ‘“Contact,” said the pilot to his co-pilot, and the engines roared to life.’ One of the pupils put up his hand to criticise this start, but Brother Leonard said no, it was a dramatic start and he liked it.

  At home, Walter had already started writing – he told my mother that he began to write at the age of eight. By twelve he had already written quite a lot and decided to submit a short story to The Daily Telegraph. He was disgusted when they returned his story to him, having rejected it.

  A whole range of different factors in his background and his experiences growing up helped mould him into the writer he became. I remember my mother saying that when she first met him, there was a degree of violence coming out in his writing. It took her many years to help him to remove the violence that kept re-appearing in his writing. This violence may have been a reaction to events from his childhood. The community in which he lived was a small one and his friends would have spent a lot of their time in the streets playing football or taking part in gang fights. I remember my Auntie Birdie telling me how she often had to go out into the street and rescue him when he was being beaten by boys bigger than himself. He also witnessed very violent episodes in childhood. His autobiography has a vivid description of seeing two men fighting over a pitch and putt game – he heard the slap of a fist connecting with a man’s nose and the sound of the man’s nose breaking.

  Then there was a time when it was rumoured all over the street that one of their neighbours was lying dead in her back garden. The boys went over to the wall and found bricks on which they could stand so they could look over the wall to see the dead woman. He could see the red mark around her neck; she had hanged herself. An adult came along then and chased them away. This incident haunted my father and afterwards he had dreams every night filled with bloody images – terrible nightmares that took weeks to go away. His mother had to take him out of bed at night, hug him and hold him until the fear went away. Just down the road, a young couple, apparently happily married, had a row one night and the husband, who was a former British soldier, took out his knife and killed his wife. (I read a report of this in the Connacht Tribune). There is little doubt that this murder stayed in his mind and emerged in his first play, Mungo’s Mansion.

  Although school was not a happy experience for him, there were some things he did enjoy about those days. For many years, there was a school trip to Connemara on the Clifden train. He loved those trips, and enjoyed the sandwiches and the lemonade which always tasted better when you were drinking it in a field in Clifden. When CIE closed the Clifden Railway service, the boys’ day out became the sports day. (Although my father gave the impression that the Clifden Railway was closed down before he left school, this wasn’t true; it didn’t close down until 1935.) He also played hurling, Gaelic football and rugby, winning a Connacht Cup with the Bish rugby team.

  My grandmother had great difficulty managing on a British army pension. To overcome her dire economic circumstances she sent her younger daughter B
irdie (when she was ten) to live in England with her husband’s sister, Mary. Auntie Birdie told me she felt very hurt because she had to spend so much time in England as a child. Agnes sent the two other children to her brother Frank in Ballinasloe for the summers. The Ballinasloe experience was a good one for my father. Up to then his life had been primarily that of a ‘townie’ and the summers with his Uncle Frank gave him a solid knowledge of life on a farm. His Uncle Frank, who had a childless marriage, was a hard taskmaster. He was an angry man who seemed to suffer from frustration and bitterness, primarily caused, in my father’s mind, from being childless. My father found the work on the farm tedious and never forgot having to weed an acre of turnips by hand – he thought it would never end. Reading his novel based in Ballinasloe, The Bogman, the principal character’s grandfather seems to me to be a portrait of his Uncle Frank. The characters he created in this novel are true to life and are an accurate record of life in the midlands in the 1920s and 1930s. Although it was hard work, my father learned a lot from working on the farm: how to sow and how to reap, harvesting oats and corn and cutting and saving hay. He worked on the bog, cutting and saving the turf, something he made good use of when we moved to Oughterard. He also worked with animals, feeding them, taking care of them and even bringing the cow to the local farm to be serviced by the bull.

  At an early stage in his life he had a brief flirtation with the idea of being a priest. A Jesuit priest had told young Walter that he had to study both Latin and Greek to prepare himself for the priesthood. His mother went to a lot of trouble to arrange for him to attend St Mary’s diocesan college following this, as Greek was not taught at the Bish. St Mary’s college was a diocesan college specially set up to offer the subjects that were required for those going on to the priesthood. Within weeks of his starting to attend St Mary’s college and dreaming of what he would do as a young priest, his idea suffered a set-back. Out walking one night with one of his friends at Salthill, he realised his friend had arranged to meet a girl. The girl had a friend with her and of course she began to walk and talk with my father. So they arranged to go on a date the following Sunday and they kissed – my father realised that his dreams of becoming a priest were not going to come to fruition. Then he had a run-in with the priest who taught him Greek. The man was an exacting tyrant and demanded perfection from his students. If they made any mistake in pronunciation or immediate translation, they were in trouble. Any boy who made a mistake had to go to the priest’s room where the priest systematically beat him with his leather strap.

  One day, my father was tired, worried and conscience-stricken, as he knew now that he didn’t want to be a priest. He had not prepared that day’s reading material and was making mistakes. The teacher stopped him in mid-flow and told him he must come to see him after class. When the class ended my father followed the priest to his room, where he took out his leather strap and slapped my father eight times without saying a word. When he was finished my father walked out the door and, instead of going back to his classroom, he walked out of school. He took the road out to Silver Strand and sat there looking out at the sea.

  Although he was sorry to leave the school because his mother had gone to such trouble to have him enrolled and had bought him a set of books which he had left behind on his desk, he was generally happier. He returned to his home in Henry Street, where they had moved in 1927, walked into the kitchen and announced to his mother that he was not returning to St Mary’s college. He left his mother with the problem of getting him back into the Bish, where he started again in first year.

  In another article, Remembrance of Things Past, about his experiences in the Bish, he wrote:

  It is an infallible sign of middle age when one starts by saying: I remember. At that point young people run for cover or groan and remain patiently bored. But I suppose it will be grown-ups who will be reading this, past pupils, and I know they will grunt a little approval, or hum and haw in disagreement, knock the dottle from their pipes, or flick their cigarette butts or kick the coals of the fire or say: He hasn’t changed a bit; he’s still talking – have another one Mart.

  There is one consolation. This is a Centenary Edition. I wasn’t there when the Bish was founded. I was on the team that won the Connacht Junior Rugby Cup many years ago and there’s a picture in the school to prove it with the year written on the ball.

  So what on earth can you say but: I remember? I could pay great tribute to the Brothers and the Bish, but we didn’t think like that in those days, and the lives of their past pupils and how they live now; how they benefited from the education they received in the school will have to be the living tribute of their dedication.

  In fact – let’s face it – we looked on the Brothers with an eye to their health. It is a fact that if a Brother dies you get three days off from school. Not that we wished them any harm. After all they were religious and when they died where could they go but to Heaven? So it was really no harm to wish for a sudden death – say one every term. The trouble was that all the Brothers I knew were very healthy men.

  They never seemed to get sick so you would get few exercises off. The Brothers tend to be disgustingly healthy, in fact, and completely impervious to the death-wish. I often think of this when it has been my duty to chide children who say: I wish Sister this or Father that of Brother Such would pass out. Nothing changes.

  Different people remember different things. What matters to one is completely forgotten by others.

  I remember the railings by the river in the old school and the way we fed the seagulls with the remains of our lunch. These seagulls were very adept.

  I remember the terrible scrums on the hard concrete of the old school yard with fifty boys aside or more. Some boys I will not name played at these scrummages with unnecessary vigour. I feel aching ribs, hot ears.

  I remember a newspaper in Second Inter, produced on a home printing set, called Sheriff’s Weekly. It was a rather libellous rag.

  I remember an excursion to Clifden on the train. Even as un-feeling schoolboys, we were awed by the beauty of that trip on the railway. Whenever I see the pitiful remains of the Clifden Railway now I think of that trip, and am glad we rode that train before they tore it up. I remember the field in Clifden and eating the ham sandwiches and drinking the lemonade. It is a strange thing that never since have I tasted sandwiches that were a patch on those and always feel that the lemonade nowadays is not nearly as nice or gassy as that lemonade.

  Really we were sad when we started to have sports every year instead of an excursion, but I suppose we did so much damage to the trains and the railways generally that they never recovered and have been in financial difficulties ever since.

  I remember the new school. Nice classrooms, central heating, tennis court in the yard, all grand, but there was something about that old school, even if the floors were a bit dangerous … (I must stop using dots. I remember Brother Leonard telling me about dots one time I wrote an exciting composition for his English class. I have never used them since, until now.)

  I remember when we were bigger (how we despised the small fry!) sitting on the bridge. That became an occupation before school and at lunch-time and after school. We polished a lot of limestone up there with our trousers. We discussed many things; how the school should be run; what was wrong with the Government and the United States of America; and I’m afraid we wolf-whistled after girls. If any of the girls had paid attention to us I don’t know what we would have done. I always thought we were sort of sheep in wolf’s clothing; ready to take off the disguise and bolt.

  The trouble about [what] I remember is that you could go on forever, one thought leading to another. You would even forget that you had remembered one thing already and repeat it and you’d end up boring your grandmother.

  So I will stop. I know that my few will set a chain reaction going with other past pupils, so perhaps it will have served some purpose.

  It is the home and the schools that mould you. Now after all t
hose years I have come to a favourable conclusion about my school. I am what I am on account of my home and the Brothers and the Bish and if I had my time over again, taking everything into account, I wouldn’t really wish to change. May the Bish and the Patrician Brothers flourish forever.

  It’s hard to know what direction his life would have taken if it was not for an experience he had one day, as he was sitting on what was called the lazy wall with his school friends, on their lunch break. A tall elegant lady passed by. She was from the Taibhdhearc, the Irish language theatre in Galway.

  ‘Somebody [we don’t know who] told me you were a good singer and a good actor,’ she said to him.

  He was astonished that anyone like this would be talking to him at all.

  ‘Well,’ she told him, ‘the Taibhdhearc is looking for people like you. I would like you to go down there and speak to the producer, Frank Dermody. They need talented young men like you.’

  So my father met Frank Dermody. Michael MacLiammóir and his partner Hilton Edwards had brought Frank Dermody into the Taibhdhearc when they helped establish the Taibhdhearc in 1928. Dermody had been a lieutenant in the Irish army at Renmore Barracks and the two theatre men gave him a grounding in the skills of producing and directing in the theatre. Dermody saw potential in my father as an actor, but he realised that his Irish was weak, so he proposed that my father come with him to the Aran Islands for a weekend so that he could improve his Irish. The Taibhdhearc would pay for the trip and for the accommodation.