In the Trades School I didn’t pick up anything at all, useful or otherwise, though I liked Murray, the tall, gloomy, sardonic monk who taught us in an atmosphere of complete hopelessness, as though he knew he had been given the job only because he could not teach and we had been sent to him only because we could not learn. I still read English school stories, and modelled myself entirely on the characters in them, and this continued to get me into trouble because neither Murray nor my classmates had read them, nor indeed anything else that I could ever discover, and continued to treat me as though I were slightly insane. It culminated in a scene when myself and another quiet boy were attacked on our way home from school by a real little fighter. Cowardice was no name for my normal attitude to violence; I slunk home through the streets like one of those poor mongrels that Minnie Connolly sympathized so much with, who flitted from pavement to pavement in an effort to avoid their tormentors, but when I was roused, I had my father’s murderous temper, and on this occasion at least, I managed to damage the other boy’s mouth and leave him weeping.
I can prove that I was alone in reading English school stories because next morning he complained to Murray – a thing nobody in an English school would do – and when Murray questioned me I told the truth and took the blame, which was an offence in itself, since Irish schoolteachers tend to regard truthfulness as Irish farmers regard the old-fashioned Quaker refusal to haggle – as something unneighbourly. Murray, with his morbid, dyspeptic humour, thought it a neat idea to give my opponent his strap and order him to punish us himself. He did this with my companion, and the class, which was almost as mature as Murray, thought it an excellent joke, but when it came to my turn I told Murray that if he came near me I would knock him down. Murray – not an unkind man – became a bright brick red and turned nasty, but I was fighting mad and stood my ground. Of course, I paid dear for the pleasure of spoiling his idea of a good joke, but it was one of the few occasions when I had no regrets for having made a fool of myself.
Then my grandmother died. In the early hours of the morning my uncle went for the priest and came in with him looking very pale. As they passed a forge, Father Tierney had said: ‘Get off the footpath and let the ghosts go by,’ which admittedly was enough to make any man go pale. In the manner of the old country people, my grandmother was well prepared for death. For as long as I remembered her, she had been giving instructions for her funeral, and Father, the tease of the family, had told her he couldn’t afford to take her back to her own people, at which Grandmother had told him she would haunt him. In a drawer she had the two bits of blessed candle that were to be lit over her when she died, and her shroud, which she took out regularly to air on the line. She was ill for a week or two and lay upstairs, saying her beads and reciting poetry in Irish. The day before she died she shouted for a mirror, and Mother told her she should be thinking of God, but the old woman only shouted louder. When Mother brought the mirror upstairs, Grandmother studied herself for a few moments in stupefaction and muttered: ‘Jesus Christ, there’s a face!’ before turning to the wall. She had not wanted to rejoin her dead husband, looking like that.
Afterwards we had perfect peace in the house till Father returned from the Army. Mother scrubbed out the bedroom and coloured it a warm pink; she sewed pretty curtains for the attic window and dolled up an old orange-box as a bookcase for me. My books didn’t amount to much, but I cheated quite a bit. There was, for instance, the sixpenny Shakespeare which I tore up and rebound as individual plays. There were also tracts you could buy for a penny in the church that made quite impressive titles. My files of boys’ weeklies and war papers were ranged along the floor under the attic window. Mother had taught me to make rough binding cases for them, and of course I had a neat catalogue, modelled on the catalogue of the public library, for I was nothing if not orderly, and I never admired anything without trying to imitate it. After some friends of Mother’s had taken us to a matinée of Carmen, I began another catalogue of operas I had heard, but this never amounted to much. The invaluable boys’ weeklies described how to do everything, and being in most ways a very ordinary boy, according to my lights and equipment I did it, from making a model aeroplane (that wouldn’t fly) to a telephone (that wouldn’t talk), though when I got down to making gunpowder I did blow the eyebrows and eyelashes off the unfortunate boy who was with me. I even made a model theatre out of an old boot-box with a proscenium arch and a selection of backdrops all painted by myself that represented backgrounds in Spain, Italy and other operatic countries; characters traced from illustrations in library books which I coloured and mounted on sticks; and an elaborate lighting system of Christmas-tree candles with coloured slides of greased paper that could be made to produce the effect of moonlight, dawn, storm and every other romantic aspect of nature. I played with this for hours in the dark hallway, singing arias, duets and trios that I made up as I went along.
The boys’ weeklies were now the only form of education I had because I had given up school. There must have been some illness to account for this, but I am quite sure that if there was I extracted the last ounce of agony and weakness from it, because I loathed the Trades School and took advantage of every excuse to avoid attending it. Father’s absence at the War was a mixed blessing, because it left Mother unprotected against me, and I was every bit as ruthless as he was.
13
In April 1916 a handful of Irishmen took over the city of Dublin and were finally surrounded and overwhelmed by British troops with artillery. The daily papers showed Dublin as they showed Belgian cities destroyed by the Germans, as smoking ruins inhabited by men with rifles and machine guns. At first my only reaction was horror that Irishmen could commit such a crime against England. I was sure that phase had ended with the Boer War in which Father had fought, because one of his favourite songs said so:
You used to call us traitors because of agitators,
But you can’t call us traitors now.
But the English were calling us traitors again, and they seemed to be right. It was a difficult situation for a boy of twelve with no spiritual homeland but that of the English public schools, and no real friends but those imaginary friends he knew there. I had defended their code of honour with nothing to support me but faith, and now, even if the miracle happened and Big Tim Fahy returned from Chicago with bags of money and sent me to school in England, I should be looked on with distrust – almost, God help me, as if I were a German who said Donner und Blitzen, which was what all Germans said.
The English shot the first batch of Irish leaders, and this was a worse shock, for the newspapers said – the pro-British ones with a sneer – that several of them had been poets, and I was in favour of poets. One of them, Patrick Pearse, on the night before his execution had written some poems, one of them to his mother – which showed him a man of nice feeling – and another, which contained lines I still remember:
The beauty of this world hath made me sad –
This beauty that will pass.
Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy
To see a leaping squirrel in a tree,
Or a red ladybird upon a stalk…
What made it worse was that most of his poetry had been written in Irish, the language I had abandoned in favour of Flemish. And Corkery, who had introduced me to Irish, I had not seen for years. But I still had an old primer that had been thrown into a corner, and I started trying to re-learn all that I had forgotten. A revolution had begun in Ireland, but it was nothing to the revolution that had begun in me. It is only in the imagination that the great tragedies take place, and I had only my imagination to live in. I enjoyed English school stories as much as ever, but already I was developing a bad conscience about them. The heroes of those stories, the Invisible Presences, I knew, must look on me as a traitor. They reminded me of how they had taken me in and made me one of themselves, and I had to reply that if I was different, it was because of what they and theirs had done to make me so. For months I read almost nothin
g but Irish history and the result was horrifying. I wrote my first essay, which listed all the atrocities I could discover that had been committed by the English in the previous hundred years or so, but it had no more effect than the deceived husband’s listing of his wife’s infidelities has on his need for her. My heart still cried out for the Invisible Presences.
In the early mornings Mother and I went into town to the Franciscan or Augustinian church where Mass was said for the dead rebels, and on the way back we bought picture postcards of them. One afternoon when we were walking in the country we met Corkery, and I asked him how I could take up Irish again. After that I went on Saturday afternoons to the children’s class at the Gaelic League hall in Queen Street. The Irish we spoke was of less importance to me than the folk songs we learned, and these than the kilt that one of the boys wore. I felt my own position keenly. Not only was I suspect to the Invisible Presences; with a father and uncle in the British Army I was suspect to loyal children as well. But no one could suspect the loyalty of a boy who wore a kilt, and I persecuted my mother till she made one for me. She did not find it easy, as kilts were not worn in her young days.
Somewhere or other I had picked up Eleanor Hull’s Cuchulain, a re-telling of the Ulster sagas for children, and that became a new ideal. Nobody in any English school story I had read had done things as remarkable as that child had done by the age of seven. But for me, even his deeds were small compared with what he said when he actually was seven and some druid prophesied a short life for him. ‘Little I care though I were to live but a day and a night if only my fame and adventures lived after me.’ No one had ever better expressed my own view of life.
Having exhausted most of the books in the children’s department of the library, I had discovered the adult one and, by using a ticket I had got for Mother, I could borrow a school story from upstairs and a book on history downstairs. It took real courage to face the adult library on those days. There was a card catalogue and a long counter surmounted by a primitive device known as an Indicator – a huge glass case where all the book numbers were shown in blue (which meant they were available) or red (which meant they were not). If you were a scholarly person and could deduce from the author and title whether a book was readable or not, it didn’t matter perhaps, but if, like me, you knew nothing about books, you might often walk back the two miles home in rage and disgust with something you couldn’t even read. Education was very hard.
One of the grown-up books I borrowed was O’Curry’s Manuscript Materials, which contained a lot about Cu Chulainn. No more than O’Curry himself was I put off by the fact that this was in a form of Irish I didn’t know, ranging from the eighth to the twelfth century (I never allowed myself to be deflected by details); and, casting myself in the part of a medieval scribe, I copied it out with coloured initials imitated from the Book of Kells.
But though I knew as little about the hero of a modern English public-school story as I did about the hero of a primitive saga, imitating the one turned out to be child’s play compared with imitating the other, and I nearly ruptured myself trying to perform the least of the feats Cu Chulainn had performed when he was barely half my age. It seemed I had wasted my time practising with a bow, for the Irish had no use for it, and I had to begin all over again with a slingshot; but though I practised hard, I never came within measurable distance of killing someone in a crowd half a mile away. It was difficult enough to hit a gate post at twenty yards, and even then my heart was in my mouth for fear I should break a window and have the police after me.
Most of my endeavours were wasted on a single episode in Cu Chulainn’s infancy. He left home when he was little more than a toddler, hurling his toy spear before him, pucking his hurling ball after that, throwing his hurling stick after the ball, and then catching all three before they alighted. No one who has not tried that simple feat can imagine how difficult it is. There was more sense in the story of how he killed the great watch-dog by throwing the hurling ball down its gullet and then beating it over the head with his hurley, and I practised that, too, beginning with very small dogs; but, knowing my character much better than I did, they decided I only wanted to play with them, and ran away with the ball. When they finally let me catch up on them and grinned at me with the ball between their teeth, I could no more hit them with the hurley than I could do anything else that Cu Chulainn had done. I was crazy about dogs and cats. I saw clearly that the Irish race had gone to hell since saga times, and that this was what had enabled the English to do what they liked with us.
Queer treasures I clutched to my chest, coming over Parnell Bridge in the evening on my way from the Public Library. Once it was a collection of Irish folk music, and I proudly copied the O’Donovan clan march in staff notation, hoping to find someone who would sing it to me. Father had earlier discovered the O’Donovan coat of arms, and I had discovered that there was a village called Castle Donovan in West Cork. The family was obviously something. Sometimes I took out in Mother’s name an art book or a novel by Canon Sheehan, who was parish priest of a County Cork town, and had a most unclerical passion for novel writing. He had been greatly praised by a Russian writer called Tolstoy, and later I learned that his clerical enemies had sent one of his novels to Rome in the hope of having it condemned for heresy, but the Papal authorities, mistaking the purpose of the submission, gave Sheehan a DD instead. He shared with the authors of the boys’ weeklies a weakness for foreign languages, and printed lengthy extracts from Goethe in the original, and ever since I have been torn between two attitudes to this practice. With one half of my mind I regard it as detestable snobbery, but with the other I think it the only sensible way of influencing young people like myself. If the original monkey had not despised monkeys he would never have invented clothes, and I should not have bothered to learn Goethe’s Symbolen by heart. Never having anyone to teach me, I learned only by pretending to know. I played at reading foreign languages and tenth-century Irish, at being a priest and saying Mass, at singing from staff notation and copying out pieces of music when I didn’t know one note from another, at being a painter and a theatrical producer. It is not a form of education I would recommend to anyone, nor should I ever get a degree in French, German, Latin, music or even Middle Irish, but I still catch myself out at it, playing at scholarship and correcting the experts, and sometimes a little streak of lunatic vanity that runs through it all suggests that I may be right and everybody else wrong.
Mother must have been astonished at becoming a borrower of art books containing pictures of naked gods and goddesses in queer positions, and I had great difficulty in persuading the stupid girls in the Carnegie Library who tried to stop me taking them out that they were Mother’s favourite reading, but I knew I should never become a great painter unless I could copy Bronzino and Tintoretto and learn all about the rules of perspective and chiaroscuro, and there is a sort of irresistible force behind a small spectacled boy with an aim in life. At the same time I was astonished at the modesty of the Renaissance artists who painted women different from men, and I still remember the stunned look on Mother’s face when I commented on it to her. ‘Difference of sex I never knew more than the guardian angels do,’ but I was broadminded, and I realized that, for the common run of people, such frankness might not do.
I had my greatest shock in that same year, 1916, when, passing by O’Keeffe’s bookshop in Great George’s Street one evening, I saw a book called A Munster Twilight of which the author was someone named Daniel Corkery. It seemed altogether too much of a coincidence to presume that the author could be my old teacher, and even if I had had a shilling (the price of the book) I dared not have risked it on such a slender possibility. But it stuck in my mind, and when next I waylaid Corkery, he admitted that he was the author. I was instantly struck with awe – not only at the man’s ability, but at my own shrewdness in having discovered him before anyone else had done so. Cu Chulainn might have been able to smash bronze chariots with his bare fists and capture whole flocks
of birds alive with a single throw of his slingshot – a most difficult feat, as I had discovered by experiment – but there was no evidence of his ever having had an eye for talent.
I borrowed the book from the Public Library and one day when Mother was at work I sat on a warm rock at the foot of the square and read steadily through it without understanding a word. It was not as good as the Gem or the Magnet, but Corkery certainly had talent. I was interested principally in what it said about me, but, beyond referring to some ancient West Cork poet called Owen More O’Donovan, Corkery seemed to be keeping our acquaintance dark.
And that settled the hash of the English boys’ weeklies. I did not know their authors as I knew Corkery, and henceforth their creations would be less real to me than his, little as I might understand them. And one day I woke to find the Invisible Presences of my childhood departing with a wave of the hand as they passed for ever from sight. Not angrily, nor even reproachfully, but sadly, as good friends part, and even when I grew up and had other presences to think of, I continued to remember them for what they had been – a child’s vision of a world complete and glorified.
14
By the time I was fourteen it was clear that education was something I would never be able to afford. Not that I had any intention of giving it up even then. I was just looking for a job that would enable me to buy the books from which I could pick up the education myself. So, with the rest of the unemployed, I went to the newsroom of the Carnegie Library where on wet days the steam heating warmed the perished bodies in the broken boots and made the dirty rags steam and smell. I read carefully through the advertisements and applied for every job that demanded ‘a smart boy’, but what I really hoped for was to find a new issue of The Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator, the New Statesman or the Studio free, so that I could read articles about books and pictures I would never see, but as often as not some hungry old man would have toppled asleep over it, and I was cheated. The real out-of-works always favoured the high-class magazines at which they were unlikely to be disturbed, though occasionally some cranky ratepayer would rouse the Lancashire librarian in his rubber-soled shoes, and the out-of-work would be shaken awake and sent to take his rest elsewhere. Then, divided between the claims of pity and justice, I went out myself and wandered aimlessly round town till hunger or darkness or rain sent me home.
An Only Child AND My Father's Son Page 14