‘With you it’s not a question of politics,’ he said, referring delicately to the fact that I was still wearing Father’s old trousers. ‘It’s a question of how much a man can take, and you’ve taken enough. You can’t afford to take any more.’
One of the pleasantest revelations that life has offered was that on his retirement that stout anti-clerical rushed himself into Holy Orders and worked gallantly as a missioner in the East End of London through the blitz. All Irish anti-clericals are spoiled priests, and you must never trust any of them.
Late in 1923 my old teacher Daniel Corkery told me that Lennox Robinson, the dramatist, who was now Secretary of the Irish Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, was organizing rural libraries and looking for young men and women to train as librarians. The moment he said it I knew that this was the very job for me and that I was the very type of person Robinson was looking for. It was not so much that I wanted to be a librarian, or even knew what being a librarian meant; it was just that never in my life had I had enough books to read and this was my opportunity.
I met Robinson in the restaurant of the Cork railway station at Glanmire, where he was waiting for a train to Dublin and drinking double brandies. He always looked like someone’s caricature of him, long and mournful and disjointed, as though at some time he had suffered on the rack, and he had a high-pitched, disjointed voice that sounded like someone’s reading of an old maid’s letter from Regency times, with every third word isolated and emphasized.
The only sort of job he could offer me sounded hopeless. I should have to spend a year or two studying librarianship somewhere in the north of Ireland, and the salary would be thirty shillings a week, though at the end of my training I should qualify for a librarian’s post at two hundred and fifty pounds a year. The latter figure, of course, was fantastic; I couldn’t imagine what anyone would do with five pounds a week, but even in the twenties I knew that nobody could live away from home on thirty shillings a week. I could manage it at home, but not in lodgings.
I have met some tough bargainers in my life, but none quite so ruthless as Robinson. He merely looked ineffectual and sad, and God did not choose to reveal to me that within a few years he would be begging for a job from me and I would not have the sense to look ineffectual and sad, so I went home in great distress to my mother.
She, poor woman, did not have much sense either, but she saw clearly that a job in a library was about the only job I was qualified for, and she timidly offered to add half a crown, or even – if she was lucky – five shillings to the salary till something better turned up. I hated to accept her offer because I knew how she would have to earn it.
But, shortly after, she got a loan to buy me a decent little cardboard suitcase and packed it with my spare shirt and underpants and a few pairs of stockings she had knitted herself. I have a strong recollection that she packed a holy picture as well, for fear I might not find one in an out-of-the-way place like Sligo, and I set out for Dublin on my way to the west, like Cu Chulainn setting out for Armagh at the age of seven, though I was fourteen years older and had nothing of the heroic spirit.
2
I found lodgings near Sligo Cathedral at twenty-seven and sixpence a week and had a whole half-crown for laundry, cigarettes and drink. Mother had it worked out that it would be cheaper to post my laundry home than to get it done locally, and every week I posted home my shirt, my underpants, a pair of stockings and some handkerchiefs.
My room was in the house of an ex-officer in the Free State Army who had been a private soldier in Churchill’s campaign against Russia and taught me my first words of Russian. When he was on the drink he was very like Father, and I slept with his rifle under my mattress because his wife was afraid he might use it. One night when he took it out and loaded it, she begged me to stay up and watch with him. It seemed that somebody had been sleeping at the bottom of his garden. Early next morning we stole out of the house and crept down the garden in approved army style to surround and overwhelm the trespasser. She turned out to be a poor country girl from near Collooney who had been thrown out by her parents and had nowhere in the world to go, so my landlord let her off with a caution.
There were other troubles as well. Across the road lived a loyal Protestant, and occasionally in the evening the passions would rise in him at the thought of all the dirty disloyal Catholics about him, and then he would throw open the window and play ‘God save the King’ on the gramophone. At the first notes of the insulting melody my landlord, an equally staunch supporter of the other side, would drop whatever he was doing and race for my room with a portable gramophone, rest it in the windowsill and play ‘The Soldier’s Song’. His wife, a decent Cork woman, said that the Sligo people had ‘no nature’, but I wouldn’t have gone as far as that. They struck me as very patriotic.
Robert Wilson, the librarian, was a small nervous man with an irregular face, flushed with whiskey, thick sensuous lips and delightful brown rogue’s eyes set a little to the side of his head. By the time I got there Lennox Robinson was on the point of being compelled to resign from his position as Secretary. He had written what had been denounced as a ‘blasphemous’ story in a little paper called To-Morrow, and what Lady Gregory tardy called ‘a storm in a chalice’ followed. The story concerned a simple country girl who believed she had been visited in the same way as Christ’s mother and, as if to ram the point home, Yeats contributed his sonnet on Leda. When we heard of Robinson’s resignation, Wilson buried his head in his hands and moaned, ‘O Ireland, how thou stonest thy prophets!’, which struck me as excessive.
Wilson was neat and dexterous, and though after a week or two of my clumsiness he gave me up as a bad job and began to introduce me as his ‘untrainable assistant’ he was extraordinarily kind, drove me to every spot Yeats had written about, and stopped the car while he chanted poems with tears in those gentle, beseeching rogue’s eyes; took me home to dinner in his flat and played me Vaughan Williams, and lamented the ugliness of Irish Catholicism (to which he was a convert) and the beastliness of the cathedral music. I liked him and I liked his poems, but I wished he wouldn’t bring me home, because at the age of twenty I had never dined out anywhere, and his English society wife could make me mix the cutlery and gag over my dinner like no hostess I ever met after. Years later, it was of her I was thinking when I made a young policeman say of his sergeant’s wife that God Almighty had put her in the world with the one main object of persecuting him.
Long after, Wilson and I met when she was dead and he had left the library to return to schoolmastering. Over a drink he told me shyly that he had changed his name to ‘Robin’, and then produced photographs of the beautiful schoolboy with whom he had just spent a Continental holiday. I understood then, too late, the brave face he had been putting on things in those Sligo years and the thick crust of innocence and ignorance that had made it impossible for me to return his kindness.
I wasn’t really ‘untrainable’, as he jokingly complained, but I was not very happy either. Partly I missed Cork, but partly there was a certain air of futility about the work of the library that reminded me a little of the railway.* We had village and small-town branches throughout the country, and every three months we sent them each a box or two of books by rail. We had a printed catalogue of the ‘Three Thousand Best Books’, and the local secretary made his choice from this, though as we had only one copy of each book, he rarely got what he asked for. The catalogue of the ‘Three Thousand Best Books’ had been compiled by an unbookish Belfastman, who was rarely sober and, like the ‘Hundred Best After-Dinner Stories’, his choice plunged whole provinces in gloom.
The Belfastman’s notion of rural libraries was based on city libraries of the Victorian era, and these in their turn had been based on university libraries. Hence the importance of having only one copy of a book instead of the twenty or thirty copies that were really needed – this would decrease one’s ‘basic stock’. A library with forty thousand titles was more useful to an imaginary research
student, and nobody explained to us that we were not dealing with research students.
All the same, I wasn’t entirely unhappy. For the first time in my life I had books at my disposal. Whenever a box was returned from some country centre I fell on it, hoping for treasure – a book of poems or a Russian novel I had not read. I took away the library’s Collected Poems of Yeats and practically learned it by heart. The local assistant, Bob Lambert, who was almost as hard-up as I was, came on long lonesome walks with me, out to Strandhill or Rosses Point, and we carefully spaced the poems and the cigarettes, Long as the walks were, I do not remember that either of us ever had enough to pay for two bottles of beer. And besides, after I had been in Sligo only for a month or two, the Carnegie Trust summoned Wilson and myself to a conference in London, with all expenses paid, and I dreamed of it for weeks. It was to be my first trip out of Ireland.
And a terrible trip it was. We took ship in Belfast; I was seasick the whole time and thought I was going to drown, so I comforted myself by reciting ‘Lycidas’ the whole night through. When Wilson came into my cabin next morning I smiled bravely at him and said, ‘For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead.’
Encouraged, no doubt, by this, he insisted on taking me to Matins in Liverpool Cathedral, having first explained to me in his kindly way that the Irish bishops’ ban on attending Protestant services did not apply in England – as though that worried me. Poor Wilson! In his genuine desire to make an educated man of me he was always going out of his own way to put things in mine – Yeats, Vaughan Williams, English villages and now Matins.
On the boat we had been joined by Maclntyre, the Donegal librarian, an untidy, harassed little man in glasses, who had been a village postman. Wilson had told me about Maclntyre’s visit to Sligo, when he had hung over the bridge, looking at the foaming waters beneath and said solemnly, ‘ “I would that we were, my beloved, white swans on the foam of the sea!” – God, there’s enough water here to wash all the watter-closets in Sligo.’
Mac, who was a native Irish speaker, did not like the idea of travelling alone in a foreign country, so he attached himself to us, more particularly to me because I spoke Irish almost as well as he did, though he would not have admitted this. Neither, of course, did he like the idea of attending a heretical service, and the moment a prayer began he ran quivering to the west door and stood there till the organ began again.
‘Och, such a nice cathedral!’ he clucked at me. ‘Such a pity it isn’t our own!’
At the other side Wilson turned beseeching brown eyes on me whenever he particularly wanted me to admire the service; and at last he could stand it no longer and joined in himself. As a Catholic he should not have done this, but as a parson’s son he simply could not resist. Between the two guilty creatures I felt like Goethe’s description of himself – Propheten rechts, Propheten links, das Weltkind in her Mitte. I was inconceivably worldly.
Maclntyre attached himself to me all the time in London and insisted not only on staying in the same hotel, but on sleeping in the same bedroom. He also refused to speak anything but Irish, which was a sore trial to me as I spoke Munster Irish, which has been infected by the accentuation of Norman French, and he spoke Ulster Irish, which has been affected by Scottish Gaelic. It was only a question of the tonic accent, of whether you said ‘P’cheen’ or ‘Potin’, but oh, dear God, the trial that tonic accent could become when Maclntyre became glued with fright in the middle of Piccadilly Circus and would neither come on nor go back.
He had tried to buy for Donegal Country Library a book which he thought was very devotional – it was Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – and had actually bought an anthology of contemporary French poetry. One night at bedtime he begged me to read to him from this. From listening to Wilson’s French I knew how deplorable my own French accent was, but he was so much in earnest that I read him Jammes’ ‘Prayer to Go to Heaven With the Donkeys’. It put Maclntyre into a state of ecstasy.
‘Och, man dear,’ he said at last, ‘isn’t it a terrible pity you can’t speak Irish as well as you speak French!’
Ulstermen are the nicest people in the world except in the matter of religion and dialect.
I am sure he saw little of London because my London was not one that anyone else would recognize. We must have seen Westminster Bridge because it would have been an excuse for my reciting ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’ to him, but I doubt if we ever saw Westminster Abbey. On the other hand I rapidly made myself an authority on London bookshops, and knew the shortest possible route from anywhere through Charing Cross Road to Mudie’s or the Times Book Club, and I moved in a lover’s trance through the wet twilight, clutching under my arm some treasure I had gone without lunch to buy.
And under the lust for books and pictures was another lust – the provincial’s for the strange book or print or packet of cigarettes or bottle of wine that may bring back into the gloom of some provincial town a flash of glory from the world outside. He imagines he can open the book, and there will be Charing Cross Road, or light a Gauloise and back will come the Boulevard St-Michel, but the glory fades; the book becomes like any other book, the print like those he bought in Patrick Street; the cigarettes and wine lose their flavour, which was never theirs to begin with.
Nevertheless the trip had its compensations. A few weeks later I returned to Cork for the Christmas holidays and a little crowd gathered in Corkery’s front room on a Sunday night. He was discussing modern architecture and sculpture and spoke severely of Liverpool Cathedral. I protested, and said it wasn’t as bad as all that, and Corkery turned on me with unusual severity. I think by this time he felt I was getting notions. ‘What do you know about it?’ he asked. ‘The photographs are there. The detail is very bad.’ I was embarrassed, because though I might high-hat the neighbours, it would never have occurred to me to be anything but deferential to him, so I said feebly. ‘Oh, nothing, but I was there at Matins a few weeks ago, and I thought it very impressive.’ It was only in the silence that followed that I realized that, quite without intending to do so, I had left my old master with nothing at all to say.
3
After six months in Sligo I was sent as assistant to Wicklow, where a new library was to be opened. With me went a second assistant called Brennan, an ex-seminarist who later in life abandoned his literary career and went back to the priesthood.
I lodged in a little huxter shop kept by a widow named Soames on the main street. The house itself seemed to be slipping gently away down from the street into the river. When you opened the unlocked half of the glass front door, there were steps down into the shop, which never seemed to have anything but a few packets on its quite substantial shelving. Then a bell rang and Mrs Soames, with an old coat thrown round her shoulders, came grousing and moaning up another step from the kitchen, which was on the right. She had a long, bloodless white face and the air of an old witch. Behind the shop was the sitting-room, also down a step, but this did little to reduce the house’s urge to subside, for the floor sloped alarmingly towards the little window, and the midday soup usually overflowed on to the tablecloth.
I had the room to myself, except for one night in the week when a travelling teacher came. He was small and neat and fussy, with a rosy face and bright blue eyes. He had a poor opinion of Ireland, and when this made him too depressed, he took a couple of drinks. They only made the depression worse, and he kicked his schoolbooks round the room and broke into a nasal wail.
‘I’m a child of the sun, and what am I doing with my life? Teaching Eskimos up at the bloody North Pole. This is an awful country!’
Then he took up a Greek play and started to read it to me. When I said I didn’t understand it, he became impatient.
‘But can’t you feel it, man? Can’t you feel the Greek sunlight?’
Bill Soames, the only son, was about thirty-five. He was an agricultural labourer, and every morning, wet and fine, cycled miles out into the country to earn his miserable wages. For
close on fifteen years he had been keeping company with a servant girl, and each week on her free night they went for a walk or to the cinema. In due course – maybe, if God was good, within the next ten years – his mother would die and leave him the little shop and Bridie could make a few shillings selling cigarettes and keeping a lodger as his mother did.
It was a house of character, and very pleasant on those winter evenings when the rain lashed the window and you heard the roar of shingle from beyond the Murrough, the curious bar of land that divided river from sea.
Geoffrey Phibbs, my boss, was tall and thin and dark, with a long lock of black hair that fell over one eye, a stiff, abrupt manner, a curt, high-pitched voice and a rather insolent air. There was something about him that was vaguely satanic, and he flew into hysterical rages about trifles. Within the first few minutes of our meeting he made it clear that he despised Brennan and myself and proposed to have as little as possible to do with us. He was the eldest son of a Sligo landowner, and had the natural contempt of the educated man for the self-educated. He under-valued his own education; I over-valued mine, and the laboriously acquired bits and scraps of Goethe, Heine, Musset and the Gaelic poets which with me passed for culture seemed to him mere country pedantry.
Our very first attempts to organize a library in Wicklow ran into bad trouble. Before the library committee had met at all, the priest who represented the Catholic Church on it told us that he intended to propose at our first meeting that the committee adjourn sine die. There would be no library at all if he could stop it, and he would. The reason for his opposition was still the fuss over Lennox Robinson’s ‘blasphemous story’. Although Robinson had been forced to resign and Tom McGreevy* had resigned with him, the entire library foundation came under suspicion. Clearly, the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust was involved in a vast conspiracy to deprive the poor Irishman of his faith.
An Only Child AND My Father's Son Page 25