Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett

by James Knowlson

  Ann Beckett (cousin)* When Sam’s father, Willie, died in 1933, Aunt Molly [Samuel Beckett’s mother, May] rented a house in Greystones so that she could see Willie’s grave in the graveyard. As children we adored it because it was a favourite site for all the children of the neighbourhood. They used to beseech me to bring them to my Aunt Molly’s house, because she had two Kerry Blue dogs, who were rather scary and sort of slightly edgy. The other thing was that she always kept an enormous jar of bulls-eyes [sweets or candy]. She produced the bulls-eyes and all the kids around used to have some. One day, I remember, I swallowed one the wrong way and - being a nurse and knowing exactly what to do - she just caught me by the feet, upturned me and banged my back. The other kids were fierce impressed by this rapid treatment! I remember Aunt Molly being rather severe. I was slightly in awe of her. She was very tall and rather overbearing-looking and definite in the way she spoke. But at the same time she was rather exciting. There was a warmth from her as well. She was very kind to people. I had a raggle of kids with me, children in the neighbourhood whom I’m sure must have been very annoying to her, a noisy group of children. She never gave us the feeling that she didn’t want to see us or anything like that but simply went off and got those bulls-eyes …

  Beckett’s mother, May Beckett, with her brother, c. 1937.

  James Guilford (neighbour) Mrs. Beckett was thin and fairly tall and rather sharp-featured. She had tremendous charm and generosity. I’ll tell you one thing that she did. I was a young married man and I built a house nearby and she thought that buttermilk was good for us. So she used to bring us down a pint of buttermilk or a can of buttermilk or whatever every time she got it. From the milkman or wherever she got it. She thought it was good for us. It was sour to taste but I got a taste for it and it was very nice. There was nothing she wouldn’t do and she’d keep on doing it, you know. But at that time she was regarded as being something of an oddity. The fact of her wanting to have a donkey of course only added to this reputation. She also had dogs, Kerry Blues. They were big. I had trouble with them because I think Mrs. Beckett had two of them at first and they are very pugnacious dogs. I had a cocker spaniel, quiet-natured, and those dogs absolutely tore him to bits. It was an appalling thing to me and I had to try and get the vet to do the best he could. He was never the same again. And what could I say to Mrs. Beckett?

  Bill and May Beckett with their niece, Sheila Page (née Roe) and her children.

  Caroline Beckett Murphy (niece) I was in awe of my grandmother. But she was very kind. I can remember vividly - it couldn’t have been easy for her to entertain me - one of the things she used to do in the afternoon - she always had a donkey and she used to get her gardener-cum-handyman to harness up the donkey and off we used to go down Brighton Road to visit various of her old cronies … I can also remember going to church with her, to Tullow Parish Church. Church was an important part of her weekly schedule … I never remember her wearing any other colour than black. And she always wore a hat.

  Sheila Page I used to go for rides with her in the donkey and cart. I was terrified, since I was never quite sure whether the donkey would take off. But I was grown up then and probably married. We used to go for a little drive - it was very countrified, you know, in Foxrock. Down to Findlater’s Stores near the station. Then Sam’s father got a car. But first he got a motorbike and sidecar, to begin with. He used to put May in the sidecar and I’d sit on the saddle on the back. This was before people got cars. Then he got a Delage and I used to go down with him every morning when he was getting it out to go into the city.

  May Beckett, on the right, with (probably) her brother’s wife, c. 1937.

  Aunt May was unpredictable in a way. I remember we were playing hide-and-seek or something on the top floor and they had a wide curtain and I was hiding behind it. Sam pushed the curtain to see if I was there. And I broke the window. Poor old thing. She said, I won’t have you children staying here any more. All over in a minute. But it was very kind, having us. And I think the boys probably got bored having us around. Molly [Sheila’s sister] was very good with Aunt. She suffered awful fits of her being difficult and so on. But she loved her dearly and Molly was very patient with her. She was a difficult woman. But she must have had a wonderful strain of unselfishness, taking us on.

  Samuel Beckett Mother was always in the kitchen, helping and cooking. She was a very good cook and she used to do the shopping. She went to Findlater’s shop beside Foxrock Station. It’s gone though now. I often did shopping for them myself at Findlater’s Stores. She also looked after the flowers and helped in the garden. She looked after the house. The housework. It was a very big house and too much for one servant. [The earlier two servants were later reduced to one.] And in the kitchen, every year, she’d make the marmalade. Huge quantities of marmalade. She’d do that. And prepare it all. And we’d go blackberrying in the fields. My mother had some local friends. Local people. Mrs. Coote was one of them. She is mentioned in one of my stories. I used to go with Frank to work with Mr. Coote on his stamps. And Mrs. Coote used to come to tea with my mother - the ‘wafer-thin bread and butter’.*

  Beckett’s father, Bill Beckett, c. 1928.

  Sheila Page I don’t think Sam and his mother ever tuned in the way Bill [his father] and Sam did. She seemed overly anxious about him in some way. I don’t know whether it was that he had been a difficult child - I wasn’t conscious of it. She could be very stern with him. There was a very tense relationship between them when he was at Trinity [College, Dublin] and so on; that’s probably why he took to his heels. If only they could have lived to have seen the success that he’s been. But they used to think: ‘If only he’d write something we could understand.’ And my father said exactly the same … Uncle Bill and Sam were very close. They sort of understood each other. Bill was a man’s man. They played golf together and went for wonderful walks. They were absolutely tuned in.

  Samuel Beckett My father was a quantity surveyor. And he had this contract with Fred Hicks. And when my father and mother married, they lived for a time in Dalkey, I think it was, while the house was being built. Fred Hicks was the architect and I remember him coming to the tennis parties, sitting on the edge, not playing but watching.

  My father was a very kind man. Interested in my progress. I always felt guilty at letting him down. When I was working in Trinity College, teaching in TCD, that gave him a great deal of pleasure. He was absolutely non-intellectual. He left school at fifteen. He was taken away. He couldn’t stay and he was put to work. He had a big case of books, Dickens, encyclopedias that he never opened. He used to read Edgar Wallace. He was so pleased when I got this job at Trinity and when I got a good degree and then was appointed and had keys opening the gate [of Trinity College] on to the road, on to Nassau Street. We used to open the door and walk through. It was a privilege to have a key. Then when I resigned and gave the whole thing [teaching] up, he was very disappointed.

  He was a tremendous walker. He used to walk home from work sometimes. He used to take a train to the suburb of Rathfarnham. And from Rathfarnham he would walk over the mountain road through Dundrum, Sandyford and Stillorgan and home through the race-course premises where he had a friend, Fred Clarke, the Clerk of the Course. He walked all the way home, about an hour and a half it took him. He often did that. We often used to walk a lot together in the mountains. We used to walk to Three Rock Mountain on Sunday morning across the fields. We found a way of avoiding the roads, across the Ballyogan Road, across the highroad, all the time in the fields, then up to the heather and the Three Rock. There actually were three rocks. The further one beyond that is Two Rock. I remember father being very tired and remember leaving him and going on at my own speed as a young man, then waiting for him in the lee of the rock. He had got tired and had to slow down. You can see the sea from there.*

  I also remember we used to go once a week to a Turkish baths. I’d go with my father, who was trying to lose weight. And after all the sweating and the cool
ing off, we’d emerge from the Turkish baths and walk down the street to his club for a drink. I was given a beer, I think, and my father was given a whiskey, which he often used to pretend to drink because he wanted to wait for his own whiskey at home. So he would say goodbye to his friends with a glass in his hand and then give it to the man on the door to drink, as we left! And then drive us home. He left his car in the Automobile Club in Dawson Street. And then he walked to his office from there.

  Father gave up fishing. He used to go shooting too - he was a member of a shoot at one time - but he became disgusted with the cruelty of shooting and gave it up. But I remember going fishing with him in a little row boat, fishing for mackerel, with a spinner.

  James Guilford I knew Willie Beckett very well. You see, he was a quantity surveyor - Beckett and Medcalf was the name of the firm -in Dublin and I was in the builders’ providers business. So when he was doing quantities for a big contract, if there was any detail that he hadn’t got about materials, he’d get on the blower [the phone] and get through to me: ‘Jimmy, what’s so-and-so and so-and-so?’ and I’d have to say: ‘It’s so-and-so and so-and-so’, like that. He didn’t even say who he was. I knew his voice.

  Billy was a terrific character, a charmer, a real charmer, tremendously energetic, large in figure, heavily built. All he knew about was to get on with things. Even his recreation was walking; he didn’t do much else, didn’t play games much I think [except for golf and bridge], but he used to walk for miles and miles; and he used to bring Sam particularly with him. And he’d walk over the mountains, my goodness, three or four times as far as we would even think of going. He was never desperately serious unless he was in some interesting topic. Inclined to be jovial, yes, but he was hot-tempered. He’d get angry very easily.

  Beckett’s brother, Frank.

  Samuel Beckett My brother, Frank, was at Engineering School [in Trinity College, Dublin]. Very good at it, he was an intelligent chap. But he wasn’t interested in art or anything like that. He played golf. I played with him. But he was very nervous; an uncertain temper.

  Sam and Frank playing cards, at ‘Shottery’, Killiney.

  After he graduated from Engineering School, my brother got a job on some railway in India. A two-year appointment, it was. When he came back in 1932, not knowing what to do, he had a pause before the next job. My father died in 1933. Frank put in the time. He would help my father during this period in the office. So when my father died, he had to take over the office. He had to pass his examination to become a quantity surveyor. I remember making him laugh by suggesting that he should put an advertisement in the paper saying: ‘Frank Beckett, the quality quantity surveyor’. But I think the move was a big mistake. I played the piano at home. I used to play classical music, but Frank played nothing but jazz. I used to play sometimes with Frank and duets with [my uncle] Gerald.

  Sheila Page I think Frank didn’t like losing at games. He had quite a temper. But he wasn’t the complicated make-up of Sam. I think that life wasn’t too easy for him because of the feeling between his mother and Sam. I think that bothered him. Then he went off to India. I think his life when he got married wasn’t easy, either. With his mother, I mean. Frank and Sam were very close. In his latter days, Frank relied on him a lot. And when Sam’s father, his mother and his brother died, he was always with them.* That was marvellous of him. I always found Sam so gentle and peaceful.

  Frank and May Beckett, c. 1948-9.

  Samuel Beckett Frank was always very involved with the church. I think he was a member of the Board of Trustees of the church. As children we used to go to church in the pew. We had a pew near the pulpit, shared by the market gardener, Mr. Tyler. He had a big market garden not far from the house. I used to go and buy apples. I used to go there when I was very young. He was ‘wall-eyed’. (My father used to have nicknames for people. And he called Tyler ‘walleyed Watt’.) But Father never came to that church. And later on, I used to be with him on Sundays in the mountains, in the fine weather. When I walked with my father, I wasn’t in church obviously. Otherwise I was in church with my mother, who was a very constant attender. She never missed it. Now in the evening my father would condescend to go to a church, but not to the Tullow Parish Church. He’d go to a church near Monkstown, down Blackrock: All Saints’ Church, where the parson was a man called Dobbs.† He was a friend of my father’s. The All Saints’ Church in Blackrock was fairly high. But our own church was fairly low.

  The Bible was an important influence on my work, yes. I’ve always felt it’s a wonderful transcript, inaccurate but wonderful. There are some wonderful hymns too. One was written by a man called Lyte. He was at Portora [Portora Royal School, Beckett’s old school]. ‘Lead kindly Light amid the encircling gloom’. It was either that or ‘Abide with Me’. Wonderful. (He sings.) ‘Abide with me/ Fast falls the eventide/The darkness deepens/Lord with me abide’.*

  Music and Tennis

  Samuel Beckett I remember my music lessons with Miss Ida Elsner. She had a sister called Pauline.† In the country that was [i.e. their house, ‘Taunus’], on the road to Stillorgan, not very far from home. I remember they had a very big garden. My father measured it out and got some plans prepared for a gymnasium in the garden. Ida Elsner taught me. I’ve seen it written that she taught me German, as they were German ‘émigrés’, but that isn’t true. I did do some French with her. And music. She used to teach the piano. Then I had some more music lessons at the Leinster School of Music, opposite Harcourt Street Station, at a later stage, from some woman whose name I can’t remember: Catherine something, I think. She was very unsympathetic. But I didn’t prepare, you know. I was a very bad pupil. Then, later on, I had to walk down to Blackrock to the Skipworths. There were three sisters living there. One of them was a very good musician. And Beatrice [Beckett’s music teacher] was the youngest. It wasn’t serious. I’d play something for her and she’d make some comment. And we’d have a drink of tea or something. And Father would call for me on his way home from the office and drive me home. Later on I had a piano teacher in Portora. I’ve remembered her name as well. It was Miss Hunt. I think her first name was Eliza. ‘Lizzie’ we used to call her, anyway.

  Mary Manning as a child, 1914.

  Mary Manning (friend) At the Skipworths’ in Blackrock I used to come on in an afternoon before Sam and when I came down, there was Sam lumped up over a book down in the hall waiting to go up for his music lesson. I used to laugh over those lessons with Sam afterwards. He was terrible then. He banged, just banged away remorselessly, not caring a damn. He didn’t practise. But the family was very much into music.

  Sheila Page They had a piano at home in the drawing room. And we used to queue up for this. Sam loved the Doyle Carte [sic] operas, you know. We all used to sing that stuff and Sam used to tinkle it on the piano and sing it madly with a quavering voice. And we’d all be roaring with laughter out in the hall. He was very musical. And Frank used to play jazz. But Sam was all Schubert and so on. I remember them playing duets.

  Geoffrey Perrin (neigbbour) I really became friendly with Sam and the Beckett family due to our enjoyment of playing tennis. When the weather intervened, we retired to the house, where Sam strummed Sullivan’s music on the piano and sang irreverent, ribald Beckett libretti in substitution for Gilbert’s words. Both the Becketts and the Delaps [another family of neighbours in Foxrock] had complete sets of gramophone records of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas and we became very familiar with them, as, in between bouts of outdoor activity, playing the operas was our recreation.

  Mary Manning Then there were the tennis parties, those historic tennis parties, we used to go to them constantly. Oh, those awful tennis parties. There would be about six boys and six girls. None of us spoke to each other. Sam and Frank never uttered a word to any girl. They were both totally bound up, shy. Nobody - it was awful. We were in our teens. Earlier there were all the children’s parties: just a mob of silent creatures. Nothing good - occasionally if they sang t
ogether -but they all stayed waiting eagerly for food. That was it. It was just the food. And May knew that, of course. She toiled over the food.

  Sheila Page We usually played tennis on the Beckett’s court. But I did play in one tournament. I won the girls’ junior at Carrickmines and Sam won the boys’. He reminded me of this not so long ago. The under-twelves or under-fourteens. And he and I, Sam told me, had to play an exhibition game. He was very athletic.

  Geoffrey Perrin My principal memories of Sam were on the tennis court. We played at both our houses and at Carrickmines Tennis Club. We partnered each other in the handicap doubles in both the Co. Dublin and Co. Wicklow championship tournaments for two years. We were about the youngest pairing and must have been reasonably competent as we were never given a fancy handicap, + or - 0.2 was usually our level.

  School

  Prep school: Earlsfort House

  Samuel Beckett Earlsfort House school was over seven miles from home. We walked to Foxrock Station and then took the train to Harcourt Street. I can still remember every one of the stations from Harcourt Street to Bray on that line: the Dublin Slow and Easy.

  Jobn O. Wisdom (fellow pupil; later the autbor of several books on psychoanalysis) Earlsfort House was a very small school, only 100 or so pupils, and we had some Roman Catholic boys. That’s where I got my first lesson that there were other people around, because we are a Protestant family, though we may not practise, in fact we don’t. We all knew who everybody was. You can’t be in Ireland and not know. But there was never any offence taken at the other party, and the number of Roman Catholics was a fairly small proportion. I got one of my first lessons [in tolerance]. We were summoned one day by the Headmaster, Le Peton (Lep as he was known)*, and he said: ‘We’re having a new boy coming to the school on Monday. Now, you have to treat him like anybody else. He may be a little different, but God help you, you’ll be flayed alive if you don’t.’ This was [Edward] Solomons, the first Jew. It was a very good thing for me because I’ve been mixed up with Jews for so long both in psychoanalysis and at the LSE [London School of Economics] and so I understood then that they were just people … and he was the most popular boy in the school.