She left me in a state of distraction, and God knows I was sorry for her – the saddest woman who had ever done her duty by attending a Redemptorist mission. But I saw it from outside – my material, as you might call it. It never occurred to me that anything of the sort could happen to myself.
6
Notwithstanding Russell’s forebodings, I accepted the job of librarian in Cork County with a salary of two hundred and fifty pounds a year.
It was great money; more than anyone in Harrington’s Square had ever earned, so far as I knew. Indeed, I suspect that Father’s imagination refused to grasp it at all, and that it only worried him. It even worried me at times, because I had more in common with Father than I liked to admit; but Mother, with her placid, sanguine temperament, knew it was the will of God and a proper reward for my years of hardship, so she rented a gas stove to cook properly and had gaslight installed in the kitchen and the front room so I could write without straining my eyes.
To furnish the front room she bought a second-hand carpet, a round table that was a little unsound on its one leg, two dining-room chairs and an armchair. I bought myself a Morris chair – a poor commercial substitute for the fine chair that Corkery had made for himself – a second-hand typewriter for seven pounds, a print of Degas dancers (as a student in the School of Art I had quarrelled with my teacher, who said that Degas could not paint, and later I quarrelled with Yeats about him), a gramophone and a few records of Mozart and Beethoven. I also got the local carpenter to make me a fitted bookcase that ran the length of one wall. As well as that I bought a black suit to go with the green shirts and the black bowtie. ‘We writers, ma’am’, as Disraeli said to Queen Victoria.
But beyond this my imagination, which was strictly conditioned to the interior life, did not function too well. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that it did not function at all. Anyone with a glimmer of worldly wisdom would have bought himself a comfortable modern house with a bathroom; and indeed some glimmerings of this I must have had because Father and I argued over it for years.
He was an emotionally generous man and did not hold it against me that – so far, at least – I had not turned into the liability he had prophesied. Among his old comrades of the Munster Fusiliers it flattered him to see my name in the papers and know I was in a public job – pensionable, of course; anything else would be valueless. He even came to see the advantages in the gas stove and the aluminium kettle. He liked to get up early and make the tea. ‘Star of Life’s Ocean!’ as Minnie Connolly said, ‘If a man brought me up tea at seven in the morning I’d plaster him with it.’
All the same I suspect that he was never without a secret feeling that there was something flighty and insecure about it all, even about the gas stove; something that lacked the Roman calm and permanence of his own two military pensions and the reliable old iron kettle. With these a man knew where he was, so he advised caution. If I had a little bit of money over and above (between grown men he realized that neither of us could afford to admit anything of the kind or people would start trying to borrow it from us) the thing to do was to put it in the bank. And seeing how difficult I found it to dispose of my money in any practical way, the bit of me that was Father inclined to the same view.
Besides, he would add with great resignation, one of these days I should be wanting a home of my own. This again was an appeal to my non-existent manliness and a gentlemanly assumption that I was not in love with my mother. What would he and she do then? The picture of my throwing out the pair of them for the sake of any woman struck me as merely laughable, but he nodded his head gravely and assured me that Life was like that.
And when this argument was not enough he had a real clincher. The son of an old friend had become a famous boxer and had immediately bought his parents a fine house in the suburbs. Father and the boxer’s father, who adored his son, met occasionally after Mass and went for long walks together, usually to some new building development on the outskirts of the city, but always ending up outside his friend’s old house in the poorer part of the city where the old friend had lived when he was poor and innocent and happy; and his friend would say, ‘God, Mick, I’d hate the Boy to know it, but I never had a day’s happiness in that other bloody misfortunate hole!’
Anyhow, Father’s reasons for not wanting to move went deeper than that – much deeper, and if I could plumb them I could reveal every detail of his character and much of my own. He didn’t own our house; he had to pay four and sixpence a week for it; but he identified himself completely with it and would have died for it if necessary. Children playing ball outside his gate plagued him – they might break a window – and he would stand in ambush behind the lace curtains in the front room, watching them, while Mother sat in the kitchen, sewing or reading.
‘Min!’ he would whisper in a tone of high tragedy.
‘Wisha, what is it now?’
‘It’s that little pup of the Horgans again!’
‘Ah, wouldn’t you forget them and read your paper?’ Mother would ask in a complaining tone.
‘How can I read my paper?’ Father would hiss back. ‘My goodness, what sort of parents do them children have?’
He was waiting for the supreme moment when one of them would jump over the wall from the next garden after his ball, or take a swing on the squeaky gate with the broken latch. Then he would rush to the front door, fling it open and glower and mutter at the children, who would run madly to the top or the bottom of the square and stand there, daring him. Father was too good a neighbour to make scenes that would involve him with the parents, and this left him in a permanent state of frustration, for after a couple of minutes of outraged dignity he would stamp back slowly to the kitchen, brooding on firing parties, the cat-o’-nine-tails and other neglected forms of military discipline.
At the same time though, like any true artist scornful of general criticism, he could admit to small weaknesses in his masterpiece and remedy them in his own way. When I pointed out that the wall and gate-pillars were disintegrating, he studied them at length with pursed lips, working out how they could be repaired at little or no expense. He had noticed a pile of quite good discarded bricks on some building site and brought brown-paper parcels of them home after dark. pleased as an old dog who has disinterred a juicy bone. Mother, accustomed to his treasure trove, gave them a curious eye and asked, ‘What are you going to do with them?’ ‘You’ll see,’ Father said complacently. We saw. He knew a builder’s labourer who could wangle him a bit of cement and some sand, and after evenings of labour during which trowel, cement and bricks had all turned and bitten him, he asked me to admire brand new gateposts, not perpendicular, of course, and very rough on the top, but still substantial, and now if God would only throw in his way a latch he could mortar into it and prevent those ill-mannered kids from using his gate as a swing, we should have a better house than any on the College Road and for a mere four and six a week. Father’s attitude to new building developments was mixed, to put it mildly. As a Corkman with a low opinion of all other nationalities, particularly Dubliners, he was fascinated by the expansion of the city, but as a potential victim he was highly critical of it.
So I could not have a house, and I was scared at the prospect of trying to keep a car in Harrington’s Square – ‘them kids’ would take it asunder – but I was determined that at least I should rent a cottage by the sea for a few weeks in summer as others did. Father humoured me and even agreed to come down and join Mother and myself for a couple of days himself. Anything longer would be impossible, and even the couple of days involved something like preparations for a siege of the home. It was not enough that neighbours guaranteed to watch it; bolts and window fastenings had to be renewed and strengthened, and when he left the house the gate was tied to the gate post with coils of barbed wire.
I enjoyed having him with us because he was an even better walker than myself, though a more perfunctory one. On a visit to the country his trained military eye sized up the number of
roads, and he liked to inspect each once, and when the inspection was complete to go home. The fact that a road was attractive did not mean it needed a second inspection.
One of these walks in Courtmacsherry is very vivid in my memory, and I wrote a story about it long after. We had climbed a hill overlooking the sea, and on the horizon, apparently moving across it in a series of jerks, like the swan in Lohengrin, was an American liner on its way into Cobh. A farmer working in a field by the road joined us; he too had been watching the liner and it had reminded him of his son who had emigrated to America when he was quite young. After a few years the boy had married an Irish-American girl whose family had come from Donegal, and soon after ceased to write home, though his wife continued to write. Then she fell ill and her doctor suggested a holiday in Ireland. She had arrived one day on a liner like the one we were watching, and her father-in-law had met her at the station with his horse and cart. She had stayed with them for weeks, regained her health and gradually won the affection of the family. After that she had set off to visit her parents’ family in Donegal, and it was only then that the old Cork couple had learned from a letter to a neighbour that their son was dead before ever she left America.
Up there on the hill in the evening with the little whitewashed farmhouse beside us and the liner disappearing in the distance, it was an extraordinarily moving story, all the more so because the farmer was obviously still bewildered and upset by it.
‘Why would she do a thing like that to us?’ he asked. ‘It wasn’t that we weren’t fond of her. We liked her, and we thought she liked us.’
Clearly he suspected that some motive of self-interest was involved, and I was afraid to tell him my own romantic notion that the girl might have liked them all too well and kept her husband alive in their minds as long as she could and – who knows? – perhaps kept him alive in her own.
I knew that some time I should have to write that story, but Father only listened with the polite and perfunctory smile that he gave to the scenery. Both, no doubt, were suitable for people living in backward places, but did not call for closer inspection, and next morning he was up at six to make sure of catching the noon bus for Cork.
He was the most complete townie I ever knew.
7
Once, summing up what she owed to Father, Mother said that since the day of their marriage he had never looked at the side of the road another woman walked on.
She was probably right. Father was a one-woman man, and in the same way he was a one-town man, and one might go even further and say he was a one-house man. In some extraordinary way she and Cork and the house in Harrington’s Square (not to mention the pensions) were all fused together into a vast complacency that hid whatever fundamental insecurity drove him to his terrible drinking bouts. Clearly I had something of his weakness to go back to Cork in defiance of Russell’s warnings. Mother worried and fretted even more than I did, but I feel that inside she was quite free of the tyranny of objects, and I sometimes wonder if she was not half-suffocated by the close texture of Father’s world – and my own.
It was pleasure enough for me to be back with money in my pocket among those, some of whom had regarded me as a half-wit and a ne’er-do-well and some who had wished me well and thought I had something in me if only I got a chance. Even Mother, ordinarily so humble, had her little moments of satisfaction, as when the ambitious woman who had refused to salute me when I was poor took her aside to ask if the books I was always reading when I was a boy were all about being a librarian. ‘I didn’t bother to enlighten her,’ Mother said stiffly, knowing that poor Mickie Joe, the ambitious woman’s son, would at once be sent to the library to borrow books on librarianship.
But I also had enough of Mother’s intellectual inquisitiveness in me to make me aware within a month that Russell had been right. I couldn’t stand the damn place. It was one thing to be in exile from it compelled to make friends of Phibbs and Russell and rely on brief visits to report on them to Jack Hendrick* and Corkery, and another thing entirely to be in Cork with Hendrick and Corkery, waiting for the post to bring me news of Phibbs and Russell. This was a reversal of parts which I hadn’t expected at all, because it had simply never occurred to me that I could feel as deeply about new friends as about old ones. One night when I met Corkery in King Street, I said it to him quite innocently, and afterwards felt that things were never quite the same between us.
At last I was beginning to get a picture of Ireland, the real Ireland, lonely and dotty. This was no longer the romantic Ireland of the little cottages and the hunted men, but an Ireland where everyone was searching frantically for a pension or a job. I also found that my ability to handle a priest in County Wicklow was no qualification for handling the Cork County Council.
On my first morning at work I came to interview the Secretary of the County Council. I had a cheque in my pocket for what was to me a vast sum from the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and I needed instructions as to where I should lodge it. I had also to select premises for my library and insure them. Under such circumstances it was the business of the senior County Council official to advise, and it was our business to regard the advice as instructions. The final decision rested with the Library Committee of the County Council when it was formed, but it was also common form that the Committee should not interfere with the Council on whom they would eventually have to rely for funds.
But, of course, nothing like this happened to me. I knew my Turgenev and Tolstoy, but they were useless when applied to local authorities. What I needed was a strong dose of Gogol, an author whom I had never studied.
I arrived at the Secretary’s office at ten o’clock in the morning and was told he was at Mass. This sort of message is one that every Irishman automatically accepts. The Secretary may even have been at Mass. About eleven-thirty he came strolling in, a tall, gangling man with long white hair and a white moustache and a wonderful air of inconsequent buccaneering. A number of people seemed to be waiting on him, and he shouted at one, became involved with another, and whatever the subject was he seemed to change it.
He did precisely the same thing with me. For the best part of half an hour I tried to get from him the instructions I would have got from the Secretary of the Wicklow County Council in five minutes, but every time he evaded me. Finally the Angelus bell rang from the Franciscan church behind the court-house, and he slowly clambered on to his desk – a tall, old-fashioned desk like a lectern – joined his hands and closed his eyes. When I interrupted him again, he snapped at me angrily.
‘Ah, let me say my prayers!’ he said. And that was all the advice I ever got from the Secretary of the Cork County Council. I doubt if even Gogol would have been enough.
I went from him straight to the manager of the County Council bank and modestly asked to be allowed to open an account with the large cheque in my pocket.
‘When you produce a resolution signed by the chairman of your committee, Mr O’Donovan,’ the manager said coldly, practically implying I had stolen it.
I was distracted. Never in my life had I had a bank account or more money on a cheque than would pay my own small salary, but I did know that people deposited such cheques in a personal account, collected the interest and then later wrote a cheque for the original amount, and I was sure that sooner or later someone would accuse me of having stolen it. I knew one member of the County Council who had voted for my appointment, so I went to see him in his office in Patrick Street. He was a big fat man who had told me the story of his life – the publishable portions at least – when I went to solicit his vote, and I had liked him for it. As a boy his dream had been of becoming a great violinist, and he had practised in his room till he was found out and beaten by his mother.
Normally he moved slowly and apparently with great difficulty, but he moved like a bird when I told him my sad story.
‘Leave it to me, boy!’ he said in a sad, booming voice. ‘Leave it to me!’
He took me straight to his own bank and repeate
d the story to the manager. The manager, who obviously admired Mr Buckley, as I may call him, received me with Christian understanding and said there would be no difficulty; he would take it on himself; and when I left an account had been opened on behalf of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. I was very relieved and thanked my friend Mr Buckley. He told me that whenever I was in difficulty again I had only to call on him.
I suspect now that Mr Buckley knew very well the difficulty I was in and intended that I should remain in it. Before a week was over I had visits from a score of councillors who complained of my opening an account for a sub-committee of the County Council in an unauthorized bank. Obviously they did not believe my version of the incident.
By the time the County Council Secretary had done with organizing my sub-committee it consisted of a hundred and ten members, and anyone who has ever had to deal with a public body will realize the chaos this involved. Finally I managed to get my committee together in one of the large council rooms, and by a majority it approved my choice of bankers. There was, I admit, a great deal of heat. Some of the councillors felt I had acted in a very highhanded way, and one protested against my appearing in a green shirt – a thing which, he said, he would tolerate from nobody.
A general meeting of the County Council was being held at the same time in another part of the building. During the discussions I was exasperated by people banging on the doors at one side of the chamber we occupied.
Later I learned that (through an oversight no doubt) all the doors leading into the committee room from the Council Chamber had been locked, so that councillors who wished to oppose my choice of banker had been locked out and only those who knew the architecture of the building were in their seats on time.
By the time the next meeting was held the supporters of the County Council bank were staging a revolution. They accused me publicly of having had the doors of the committee room locked so that they could not arrive at the meeting on time. I was out of my wits, trying to understand. Several councillors tried to explain to me, but I didn’t understand their explanations. ‘You see,’ one would say in a whisper, ‘poor Murphy has an overdraft in the Banba Bank’, but I did not see why that should make him so angry with me. Another said that ‘Buckley is under the thumb of the Eire Bank’, but that did not make any sense to me either. It was all very confusing.
An Only Child AND My Father's Son Page 28