by Eamon Kelly
Bryan and I enjoyed that trip to Newfoundland and rejoiced in the company of the other contributors and the many new friends we made there. We relaxed when our work was over. As we were talking quietly one night in a crowded room, and thinking back to the time when we first met playing in the local drama group twenty-five years before, Bryan said, with an air of pride, ‘Ned, we’ve come a long way.’ ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘only three thousand miles.’ He lowered his left eyelid and said, ‘amparan’, a Listowel word implying derision. Dineen defines ‘amparach’ as a helpless human condition of being bloated with swelling. The familiar expression in strange surroundings made us laugh heartily.
Talking about our own contributions to the seminar, Bryan said that during my show, In My Father’s Time, his attention was drawn to a group of Eskimos, young men and women who were students at the university, and he wondered how on earth would they respond to the indigenous humour of my stories. At first some were bewildered while others enjoyed the telling, but then some throwaway line or gesture must have reminded them of the idiosyncrasies of an old man in their own village, because they broke into almost uncontrollable laughter. They fell silent and their eyes glistened when death was mentioned, or the pain of parting during the emigration from Ireland in the 1920s.
Many of the Irish fishermen from the Cork and Waterford coasts who sailed, in the last century, to the rich fishing grounds of Talamh an Éisc settled in and around St John’s. In the streets and in the shops there is a noticeable Irish lilt to the people’s speech. At a television station I could have sworn I heard one crewman say to another, ‘Are ’ou all right there now, boy?’ The taxi drivers’ accents sounded Irish, slightly diluted, and Aidan O’Hara, who worked for a long time in Newfoundland, told me that Irish words linger on in everyday speech.
I was in a house one Sunday where worshippers had gathered after Mass. As at home, there was a cup of tea going, and one lady was asked to stay on for a mouthful. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I am in a hurry. There’s a slua at home waiting for me.’ She had a large family depending on her attention. Slua, of course, is the Irish word for a crowd.
Irish surnames like Tobin and Brennan gaze down from the fascia boards of shop fronts. The native sense of the ridiculous is akin to our own. A man in a car running eastwards to the sea stopped and asked a Newfoundlander working in a field, ‘Is this the road to Ireland?’ ‘’Tis,’ the farmer replied, ‘but you’d want to be careful. ’Tis flooded beyond the lighthouse!’
There was an arrangement with the university whereby we visitors stayed with Irish families. I was the guest of Dr Michael Mangan and his wife, who is also a doctor. Michael, who hails from Galway, owned racehorses in Ireland at that time, and there was one very famous animal of his called Monksfield, small and compact, which made a great name for himself. When I came home I saw him on TV win hands down at Cheltenham.
Michael had a bar down in the cellar. This speakeasy, as he called it, is a feature of many houses in the States too. There’s a counter complete with flap and a little door to get in. Shelves of bottles, many of them of Irish origin, line the back wall. There’s a fridge for the beer and the place is decorated with Guinness and whiskey signs brought over from Ireland. A few tables, easy chairs and a high stool or two. A cosy place for a quiet drink after a hard day. Many is the after dinner-hour I sat outside the bar, Michael inside, as we talked into the night, and the talk was always of home.
As part of an educational scheme St John’s University sent me out to speak to dramatic societies throughout the province of Newfoundland. I was to conduct a workshop one evening and put on my own storytelling show the next. My first stop was Labrador. The February weather was vile. Snowflakes flew thick and fast past the window of the plane. By air seems to be the only way of getting about, and the planes fly in the most atrocious weather. In the jolting and buffeting in the storm, passengers hold on desperately to their seats, grasping the armrests in such a tight grip that these journeys are known as ‘white-knuckle flights’.
My heart came up into my mouth one time as the plane seemed to stop. Outside the window was white with driving snow, and as there was little difference between the bumping in the sky and that experienced when landing, I thought we were still in the air. I held my breath, waiting for the plane to fall; but the French-English announcement of the bilingual Canadian steward proclaimed that we had landed.
Wahbush is the airport for Labrador. The two places, some miles apart, are known as the twin cities, but in actual fact they are no bigger than a small Munster town, and came into being because of the discovery of large deposits of iron ore. When the snowploughs clear the runways, the channel made looks as if a knife had cut through the icing of a cake with banks of snow at either side. The streets are the same, and so cold, thirty degrees below, that if taxis turn off their engines they can’t start them again. It is easy to find a taxi rank. There’s a cloud of exhaust smoke over it. Motorists have a heater inside the car and another in the engine.
When the vehicle is parked at home or at work there is a long flex to the heater which is plugged into the electricity. Otherwise the moisture would freeze in the door locks and the oil would solidify in the engine. The streets are always frozen, and a car couldn’t negotiate a sharp rise without chains wound round the tyres.
Wahbush and Labrador are three hundred miles inland and eighteen hundred feet over sea level. Because of the altitude, the air is thin and a newcomer falls asleep on his feet. A man brought me out to see the open mining and three times I fell asleep in the car. Trains, miles long, are travelling night and day, bringing iron ore to the coast for export. I was told that the trains were driverless, operated by electricity, but that could have been a Newfoundlander pulling my leg. What took my fancy, though, were the massive tractors with scoops in front for shifting the iron ore. To give an idea of their size, my picture was taken beside one and my head just came up to the axle of the wheel.
The space in which I did my storytelling show in Labrador was a games centre and far too large. It lacked the intimacy of a theatre. A sprinkling of Irish in the audience helped the reaction and forged a bond across the footlights. The workshop the evening before was full of interest for me as John B. Keane’s Sive was the next play the society was to perform. The Irish, some from home and some from St John’s, had plenty of work in the iron ore industry. There were Northern Irish there too, and the city of Wahbush boasted an Orange and a Hibernian hall. Protestants and Catholics tended to drift into separate communities when they settled in the Newfoundland countryside, and the weathercock or cross on the church spires revealed their identities.
In the twin cities only Wahbush had a hotel, where I stayed. My bedroom window overlooked what must have been a playing field in the summer, because the top of a soccer goal-post showed a few inches above the snow. Disposable paper slippers (mine fitted) were provided for one’s journeys to the bathroom, and the heat was blown in, which reminded me of a night spent years before in a motel in Wilmington, Delaware. Thank God there was a great log fire in the dining-room.
From Labrador I flew to Gander. As we came in to land, a large bird (in Gander of all places) crashed into the windscreen of the plane and cracked the glass. It could have been serious had the screen been breached. Those flying on to St John’s had to take another plane.
I enjoyed doing my own show in Gander, but the workshops, sometimes two a day, became slightly arduous, though the children in the schools were delightful and entered with gusto into my near insane projects. I told a story, which a volunteer among them retold, and then they acted it out on the floor. They improvised with imagination and assumed the characters of the little red hen, the cat and the mouse of the narrative.
The enchanted cake, when it was about to be eaten, ran away, followed by the cat and the mouse and the little red hen. In the chase they were joined by a crumply horned cow and a saddlebacked sow. They passed through a meadow full of mowers, by a barn full of threshers and a riversi
de full of washerwomen, all of whom joined in the chase. A sly old fox cornered the cake and they all sat around in a circle and had a feast.
They improvised the king’s orchard where his son guarded the apples from the great eagle with the feathers of gold, whose eyes were as big as the moon and as bright as the sun. They simulated an aeroplane, complete with pilots (‘This is your captain speaking’) and hostesses (‘Fasten your seat-belts, please’) and passengers holding on to their seats in a white-knuckle flight over Newfoundland. They impersonated the storm and the noise of the engines and regretted when I left and took my daftness with me.
My next stop was Cornerbrook where I met the son of novelist Maurice Walsh. He had chains around his tyres as he drove me over icy roads to a secondary school where they were preparing for a performance of Synge’s Riders to the Sea. In giving them the background to the play, I remembered my holiday in Inis Meáin and my visit to Ceata Bheag’s house, where Synge stayed when he came to live in the Aran Islands. Ceata Bheag was busy at her housework when a party of us arrived. She excused herself, went into the room, and came back with a stylish apron and a shoulder shawl. She greeted each person individually in Connacht Irish, which, because of the island’s proximity to Clare, had a little of the Munster music. We couldn’t have been received more graciously by the Queen of England. She sat on a fireside chair and, like a queen, held court.
I hoped that the actress playing the part of Maurya in Riders to the Sea might take her as a model. I told the students about life on the island and about the sea on which the people depended for a living. The ocean was their orchard, their meadow and their garden.
The students read their parts and, in spite of their Canadian-American accents, the magic of the words came through. They laughed at me at first when I tried to teach them the lament – the caoineadh – of the women as Bartley’s drowned body is brought back on a door from the sea. Finally they got the lilt of it. It sounded great, and the sorrowing mother’s closing speech would soften the heart in a stone:
It isn’t that I haven’t prayed for you, Bartley, to the Almighty God. It isn’t that I haven’t said prayers in the dark night till you wouldn’t know what I’d be saying; but it’s a great rest I’ll have now, and it’s time surely.
When I came back to St John’s I wrote a report on my activities – the limbers, the improvisations, the rehearsals, all the phases of the work I had done – and gave it to Mr D. Ferry of the Arts and Culture Centre. He was so pleased with the account that the ghost walked immediately and I got the bread, always a fitting culmination to a bout of hard work. My next stop would be New York. Ted Auletta had arranged with me to take part in a concert presented by Carmel Quinn in Carnegie hall on 6 March.
The morning came for me to leave Newfoundland. It had snowed so heavily the night before that Michael Mangan had to give me his wellingtons to walk from the house to the taxi. I have them still. Many people from the province go down to New York on day trips, and Dr and Mrs Mangan told me that when a man comes to immigration he holds up his passport and says, ‘I’m only down for de day.’ I did just that and it worked. No delay, I was waved through.
Waiting in my dressing-room in Carnegie hall on the night of the show, I was surprised to hear over the tannoy an artist on stage telling one of my stories. I had many imitators at home but I didn’t think the malady had spread across the Atlantic. Imitation, it is said, is a form of flattery. Flattery I could have done without that night, because the story he was telling was on my list for the concert and I had to rack my brains for another and rehearse it in the little time I had left. I went on and couldn’t have wished for a better reception.
After the show I met Billy Nolan, a son of Liselton, and a diplomat attached to the Irish Consulate in New York. I shall not forget his kindness to me. For safety’s sake I had mailed home most of the fee I had earned in Newfoundland, leaving myself with the plane fare and spending money in New York. By a miscalculation I had left myself short and was unable to afford my next meal. Billy must have sensed my predicament. He stood me a dinner in a Russian restaurant nearby. The waiter, when I told him I was a vegetarian, prepared a gorgeous meal for me, so unlike another American waiter who, when I said I didn’t eat meat, wanted to know if I was some kind of nut.
I had to go back to Carnegie hall a few times before I got my fee from Ted Auletta. Some Americans hate parting with money. When I got the dollars I had enough to tide me over to my next engagement, which was with the Irish American Cultural Institute. This was Eoin McKiernan’s Irish Fortnight, a tour of United States universities in the days around St Patrick’s Day.
Eoin had sent me the schedule and a hundred dollars. I’d have no expenses on the road, he assured me. I had my air tickets, which he enclosed, and I would be met at the airport at each venue and put up in an Irish American homestead. The majority of the houses I visited were quite palatial, with swimming pools and as many bathrooms as we had bedrooms at home. The owners were the successful Irish, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of penniless emigrants. They were rich, friendly, hospitable to a fault, and every mother’s son and daughter of them as handsome as the famous Kennedy family.
I criss-crossed America, starting in Pittsburgh, where I stayed with Arthur Fedel, a scion of France whose Irish connection was that he had been to Trinity College – on a postwar GI scholarship. In after years he researched the work of writer Francis MacManus for his PhD. Arthur walked with me to the university, where I gave my first show on the night of 10 March. He had a sheaf of fliers advertising the events of the coming fortnight. He handed them out to passers-by, good-humouredly extolling the virtues of what was on offer. To a rather reluctant young lady he said, ‘You must be Irish. You have red hair. Take one!’ She did.
Eoin McKiernan always had at least fourteen contributors in the air in the daytime, so that there was an event taking place simultaneously in that number of universities that night. Sometimes, arriving at a venue in the early morning, I would meet another contributor setting out. Men half my age were complaining that the gruelling schedule was getting them down.
We had on our list Ruaidhrí de Valera, Desmond Guinness, Diarmuid Ó Muirithe, Michael Hartnett, Aidan O’Hara, Nicholas Furlong, Margaret MacCurtain and many more. I did my show at twelve centres in fourteen days, from Omaha, Nebraska, to Holyoke, Mass., from Albany to San Antonio in Texas, and places in between. Inside two weeks I had experienced the icy cold of Labrador and the heat of old king sol splitting the stones in Texas.
Monsignor Michael McManus was my host in San Antonio. The hundred dollars Eoin McKiernan had given me at the outset was gone and I was on my uppers again. The good monsignor must have seen this in my eyes because, on shaking hands with me as I was going, he left a fifty-dollar bill in my palm.
Dr Rona Fields introduced me to the audience when I spoke at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. Jewish, with red hair and blue eyes, she gloried in that part of her heritage that was Irish. Rochester, Minnesota, brought me to the house of my brother-in-law, Dr Michael O’Sullivan, and his wife Margaret. Familiar faces and talk of home helped me to relax, and after a few beers Michael and I went native and sang ‘The Valley of Knockanure’. The lecture room in Rochester stands out in my mind because of the fact that nearly everyone in the audience had a camera or a tape recorder. I was no more than settled in when the lights began to flash and microphones like snakes’ heads rose out of the dark and crept towards the platform.
My last engagement was at Fordham University, Lincoln Centre, New York. I stayed with my dear friends Jack and Jeanie Cronin in Yonkers. Next morning I had my last letter from Eoin McKiernan, in English this time. He generally wrote in Irish. He thanked me for my contribution to the Irish American Cultural Institute’s Fortnight. ‘You have done beautifully,’ he rounded off. ‘You have demonstrated a great art, and charmed great audiences. You have been a wonderful ambassador for Ireland.’
He enclosed my fee. Jack, Jeanie and I went out for a me
al and a few drinks that evening. Tomorrow I would board the Aer Lingus skyship – St Brendan or St Bridget – and hyse home to Ireland.
STORY THEATRE
Lelia Doolan was artistic director at the Abbey after Alan Simpson but her term of office ended abruptly. I thought she was treated harshly. At actors’ meetings a number of the male members – the old stagers, some of them in the Abbey for twenty-five years – were less than gentlemanly to her. During her stay Tomás MacAnna came up with an idea for story theatre in Irish at the Peacock, with which she readily agreed. It was to be called Scéal Scéalaí – Story Storyteller. Tomás asked me to join him in dramatising some of my stories for the stage, and together we put on paper an evening’s entertainment, not unlike the Hail Mary, the first part of which was made by the Angel Gabriel and the Church made the last.
Tomás assembled a cast and we went into rehearsal. As well as the dramatised folktales, we had music, mime, song and dance. The setting was of batik hangings by Bernadette Madden, and the basic costumes were of the same material. In one of my stories about the fairy host – ‘The Changeling’, it was called – infrared light was used, and on the darkened stage white and light colours showed up dazzlingly bright and gave an otherworldly atmosphere to the scene.
Tomás organised a small orchestra which included Seosamh MacCionnaith, Seán Ó Duibhir, Mary Bergin and Mary’s sister Antoinette. Fr Pat Ahern of Siamsa Tíre in Tralee directed the music and song and taught the actors to dance to an Irish tune. Tomás MacAnna was the overall director and, because of his long association with pantomimes in Irish at the Abbey, he had a distinct flair for this type of theatre. His was a rare talent for positioning, grouping and moving actors on stage.