An Only Child AND My Father's Son Read online

  I can only have been five or six when a house fell vacant next door to my grandparents’. Mother did not want to take it; it would detach her from the convent, which was one of the nearest things she knew to a home, and from the neighbours in Blarney Lane, whom she liked and who liked her. It was probably characteristic of the orphan, but I never met anyone so firmly rooted in places and people. When she began visiting me in Dublin, she was at first very lonely; then she noticed a house that reminded her of one in Cork, and then she saw a woman with a child who reminded her of a neighbour in Cork, and she even observed a piece of furniture in a shop-window that reminded her of something we had once possessed, till at last she built up a world of remote analogies with comfortable and friendly memories that protected her from the unknown. She disliked my father’s family even more than I did, and, besides, the rent – four and sixpence a week – was nearly twice what we paid for the little cottage in Blarney Lane. But Father was homesick for the delights of the Barrack Stream (as the old people called the locality), and he argued irritably that with a commodious house like that – four rooms instead of two – we could take in lodgers, and everyone knew the big money you could make out of lodgers. So one day we said goodbye sadly to the old neighbours, piled all our possessions on a little donkey cart, and set out after them down Blarney Lane toward the river. I carried the kitten in my arms.

  That night Mother sat in the dirty, dilapidated kitchen of the new house and wept, but Father’s family were happily reunited in a neighbourhood where they were well known and – according to themselves – highly respected. At least, in Barrack Stream, Father was sure of a good funeral. Grandfather and Grandmother lived next door, my Uncle Laurence and his family lived up the Old Youghal Road, near Mayfield Chapel, and for a time my deaf-and-dumb aunt and her deaf-and-dumb husband lodged with the old people in the house next door. The homesickness of my father’s family was really quite remarkable.

  Barrack Stream, though richer than Blarney Lane, was rougher, like all places attached to military barracks. There were women who went with soldiers, and girls who went with officers, and sinister houses where people drank after hours. Of course, it had its advantages for me, particularly when we weren’t plagued by lodgers. (Of these I remember two lots – a family so brutal and filthy that at last Father, who was out for most of the day and only pooh-poohed Mother’s complaints, practically ejected them himself, and an old lady so scared of draughts that she nailed up the window and padded the door till the front room stank.) A lot of the time I had an attic to myself, where I could keep my treasures, and there was an outdoor toilet, with a door suitable for climbing. From the roof of this I could get on to the high back wall and command a view of the neighbours’ back yards and of the hillside opposite as it sloped down into the valley of the city. I sometimes sat there for hours, till darkness crept up on me, and in order to enjoy the view a little longer I even climbed out of the attic window and up the roof to the ridge-pole. Besides, there was the Barrack, and the day was punctuated by bugle calls, and sometimes the soldiers went by on a route march, preceded by their band. When this happened in the evening and Father was at home, we both dashed for the front door. The regiments at the Barrack were always changing, and while the fast girls compared lovers – English, Scotch and Welsh – Father compared the height and smartness of the men, the quality of the band and, of course, the big drummers. If you went far enough afield, you could even see an occasional military funeral, with a gun-carriage draped in the Union Jack, and a band that played Chopin’s Funeral March. With the O’Donovan morbidity, I loved military funerals, and when Father was in good humour I got him to hum dead marches for me. Though he was usually ready to oblige with Chopin, Handel or Beethoven, he maintained that the greatest of dead marches was ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ as played by the pipe band of the Scots Guards. Naturally, he performed all these as though the principal instrument were the big drum, and I tested them out, pacing the kitchen with reversed sweeping brush, lost in ecstatic melancholy. Afterwards he would be bound to sing me ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’, one of his favourite songs and mine. So far as music went, he and I got on excellently.

  But the move to Barrackton brought to a head my sense of the conflict between the two families whose heredity I shared. The more I saw of my grandparents, the less I liked them. Children, who see only one side of any question and because of their powerlessness see this with hysterical clarity, are abominably cruel. And an only child is worse. There was no way in which I could have avoided seeing the contrast between my mother, on the one hand, and the women of my father’s family on the other, and it meant nothing to me that one was old, another ill, another deaf-and-dumb.

  Mother was dainty in everything she did. Women can observe and describe that sort of fastidiousness better than men, and my cousin’s wife, whom Mother adored, gives a tart and amusing description of her at the age of eighty-five, flouncing about the kitchen of May’s little house, demanding to be inspected and assured that her hat was not crooked or her skirt too short. When she returned from town, she would immediately take off her wet shoes, stretch them with her hands, stuff them with newspapers (she had never been able to afford shoe-trees), and set them to dry before the fire. Only then would she produce the perfect pear or the perfect peach that she had coveted in some fruit-shop window, not for herself but May. This is the side of her I remember best, because one of my earliest recollections of her is the way she would choose a twopenny Christmas card, study it, price it, put it back, return and study it again with a frown as though she were wondering if it really was a Rembrandt etching, though all the time she was thinking not of what it was but of its appropriateness to the person she was buying it for.

  Besides, she was an excellent cook and a first-rate housekeeper, a woman to whom cleanliness and neatness came as natural as untidiness does to me. Though, apart from our beds, the only furniture we had was what went into the kitchen, she made even that room look beautiful. Over the mantelpiece hung a long mirror, and to the right of it the lamp. At either side of the window were pictures of the Battle of Bethlehem, a Boer War relic which I searched by the hour for a likeness of Father, and of Kathleen Mavourneen, with insets of the Lakes of Killarney. Facing the window was the little sideboard with one of our two clocks, and between that and the door was the bedroom wardrobe, which was too big to go up the stairs. Father used the top of it for his own treasures, his razors, clippers and pipes.

  One of those peculiar romances of Mother’s that I was always so curious about – not being very satisfied with the father she had supplied me with – had been with a French chef called Armady who had taught her to make superb coffee. I think he must also have taught her to hate fried food, that curse of Irish life, because the first thing she bought when I got a job and turned my wages over to her was a gas-stove on which she could grill. In the evenings, when I induced Father and herself to sing for me, his favourites were sentimental songs like ‘Eileen Alannah’ and ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’, and these he sang in the manner of a public-house singer, all sniffle and rallentando. When Mother was not singing Moore’s melodies – her favourites were ‘How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies’, ‘Farewell But Whenever You Welcome the Hour’, and ‘I Saw from the Beach’ – she sang charming little drawing-room songs of the Victorian period like ‘The Danube River’, ‘Alabama Moon’, ‘When the Old Man Died’, and ‘Three Students Went Merrily over the Rhine’, and she sang them in good time, in her sweet, clear, girlish voice. It was, I suppose, typical of me that when I sang the same songs I tried to invest them with Father’s trills, but I got ticked off for it. Even when I sang with her as a grown man I got a sharp ‘No!’ when I strayed from the correct time. Her harshest criticism was an impatient ‘Ah, you have it out loud and all wrong.’

  She was the sort of woman who is always called in when there is trouble in a house, and as she had to bring me with her in the years when I was still an infant, some of my earliest recollection
s of her are so extraordinary that to this day I cannot say if they weren’t hallucinations. Once, when we were living in Blarney Lane, she carried me to a neighbour’s house and put me sitting on a chair by the door. I could see into the little partitioned-off bedroom, and I watched her, in the candlelight, holding up the head of a young man who was coughing red stuff on to the bed. In a loud voice Mother said something that sounded like prayers, and he continued to cough till all the bedclothes were bright red, and then he seemed to fall asleep, and she laid him back on the pillow and knelt beside him, praying into his ear. Another time she took me with her and I saw a young man crouching under the bedroom window with his hands raised, screaming: ‘They’ll never get me alive!’ Mother went up to him, smiling, her two hands out in a gesture that was most characteristic of her, murmuring reproachfully: ‘Ah, Johnny, Johnny, don’t you know who it is? It’s only Mrs Donovan.’ The strange quality of these half-memories of her is best summed up in one incident. I remember the mother of a very sick little girl coming hysterically to the door and our running back with her to the cottage, where Mother forced back the child’s rectal passage, which had become extruded. The incident is perfectly clear in my mind, though I do not even know if what I think I saw is physically possible.

  She had always wanted to be a nurse and was an excellent one. When Grandfather was dying, it was she who looked after him, and I watched her scrubbing the floor, killing the lice that covered the bedroom wall, and changing the bedclothes, while downstairs Grandmother, huge, shiftless and dirty, drained her mug of porter over the fire and moaned. ‘I’m a bird alone, a bird alone!’ she whined, and Mother, sick with disgust, told her sharply that she could at least wash her face before the priest came.

  When my grandmother came to live with us after Grandfather’s death, I nearly lost my mind. Lodgers were awful, and the large fortunes to be made from them were clearly illusory, but at least they were not relations and I did not have to apologize for them to any other kid I brought to the house and wanted to impress. I was always trying to make an impression, particularly on one friend, Bob O’Connell, whose father was a colour sergeant and who spoke in a cultured English voice that I tried hard to imitate, but when I glanced into the kitchen and saw Grandmother at one of her modest repasts – a mess of hake and potatoes boiled in a big pot, with the unpeeled potatoes afterwards tossed on the table to be dipped in a mound of salt and eaten out of the fingers, and a jug of porter beside these – I fled for very shame. And once, when Mother was at work and Grandmother was supposed to give me my dinner, I hid under the kitchen table, yelling bloody murder and refusing to come out until Mother returned and fed me herself. Mother tried to induce her to keep herself clean, but Grandmother, deeply offended, shrugged herself in her dirty old clothes, blinked her eyes, and retorted sullenly: ‘Sure, what is it but clean dirt?’

  I had already become a classic example of the Mother’s Boy. Later, when as a public official I had to be careful not to involve my employers in my literary activities and had to change my name, I took her name in place of my own. At that time all I could do was beg her to leave my father and come away to live with me, and though in those days I was little tempted to criticize her, I did frequently blame her in my own thought for timidity. I felt that she, on the one hand, and Father’s family, on the other, were the two powers that were struggling for possession of my soul, and I hated every member of my father’s family – even cousins I later grew fond of. It was not the people themselves I hated, of course, but drunkenness, dirt and violence. I made an exception of my Uncle Laurence, because he was gentler than the others and had a sense of humour that partly qualified the O’Donovan gloom. When he was leaving for the front during the First World War, Grandmother, with her alcoholic emotionalism, began a beautiful scene that would have reduced poor Father to helpless sobs, but Laurence punctured it wickedly by pretending to sob even louder, and left Grandmother with the outraged expression that Shaw once versified as

  Respect a mother’s grief

  And give me time to finish my scene.

  Much as I pitied my aunt, I didn’t really like her either; her affliction was never anything but terrible; and her wordless rages and griefs were as horrifying as those of a chained animal. But, like Mother, I was very fond of her husband, Pat Hanlon, because he was a man of great expressiveness and gaiety, and made his affliction serve his purposes. He was a wraith of a man with small black eyes and a little black moustache, and he lurched about in a curiously disjointed way, his head rolling from side to side. I think he hated the O’Donovan atmosphere as much as Mother did. He never joined in the drinking and was very industrious. When things became too difficult, he got down off the table on which he sat cross-legged, and lurched into our house with a snort and a shrug. Then he threw himself into a chair with that loose-jointed air of his and began describing his day in the Jewish tailor’s in Patrick Street, his fingers flying, his small dark eyes flashing – really flashing – and queer animal noises that were intended to be laughter bubbling in his throat. He was a man who observed everything. I had never met the Jewish tailor, but he was as real to me as Charlie Chaplin, and just as funny. Hanlon was a superb mimic, and of everybody at once – the tailor, the customers and the work-girls. Having no sound track to bother with, he acted at the speed of the earliest films, breaking off a scene or a part in an instant, impatiently grabbing and growling at Mother, who would be in hysterics, to tell her something new, though his thin face never lost its air of faint anxiety. At the end of a story he would give another shrug as a final commentary on the futility of human existence.

  It was strange entertainment for a child, but I loved it – though, because I spoke slowly and only with my two hands, I often missed the point. Mother also used her two hands, but she spoke fast and clearly and could understand Hanlon when he grew so excited that he fell back on one hand, and between hysterical fits of laughter she carried on a sort of subdued commentary to herself that told the story to Father and me. Then Hanlon would return to that dirty, uncomfortable house, having enjoyed a couple of hours of intelligent conversation with people far better equipped by nature than himself, and knowing that he had given at least as good as he got. And how many of us, with all our faculties, can feel as much when we leave someone’s house? It was a real triumph of art over nature, and something it would take me twenty years to learn.

  2

  Father was a really fine-looking man. He was a six-footer and built to match, and years of work as a navvy had not affected the soldierly erectness of bearing he had picked up as a young man in the Army. He had a long Scandinavian head, but because of the slightly Mongolian cast of feature he had inherited from Grandmother, the lines of his face were horizontal instead of vertical. At the same time the bulge of the brows and the height of the cheekbones, instead of making his eyes seem weak, made them look as though they were twinkling. He was extraordinarily like certain photographs of the young Maxim Gorky. He dressed carefully, in the manner of an old-fashioned tradesman, in a blue serge suit with the cuffs of the trousers turned down over the heels, a bowler hat cocked a little to one side, and a starched shirt-front. Dressing him for Mass on Sunday was a serious task for any woman, for his fingers were all thumbs. He could rarely fasten his own studs, and it sometimes ended with his stamping and cursing before the big mirror, and Mother’s grabbing at a stool to stand on, so that she could reach up to him, and begging him for the Lord’s sake to keep quiet and let her do it for him. Then he put an open white handkerchief, casually disposed, in his breast pocket, and went down the road, graciously bowing and raising his hat to any woman he met, a fine figure of a man, and as vain as a child in his first sailor suit. In the ‘tall tales’ he loved to tell of his soldiering days there was a great favourite of his about a review held by Queen Victoria during which she said: ‘And tell me, General, who is that distinguished-looking man in the second rank?’ to which the general replied: ‘That, Your Majesty, is Michael O’Donovan, one of the
best-looking men in your whole army.’

  Nothing could ever persuade Father that he was anything but a naturally home-loving body – which, indeed, for a great part of the time, he was. Nobody but himself could lock up the house for the night, and he had a big bolt for the back door and two bolts for the front, and only he could properly check the catch on the window, wind the alarm on the clock, and see that the lamp was out before we retired. Often he would be up first in the morning, give Mother a cup of tea in bed, and have a tremendous wash-up under the tap in the yard, winter and summer. Indeed, if there was snow he rubbed himself all over with it because it prevented chilblains. It was a bitter disappointment to him that I was a sissy, and he made angry comments when I drew a basin of water and then poured hot water from the kettle into it. When he got in from work in the evening, he usually had a more leisurely, noisy wash, changed into old trousers and ‘slippers’ that were old boots cut down and hacked in all directions so that the leather did not press on his corns, and, with a cap on to protect his head from draughts, sat at the head of the table by the window to read the evening Echo aloud to Mother, with comments that went on longer than the news. He began with the Police Court news to put him into good humour, and reserved for the last the political meetings, which made him scowl and mutter ‘Oh, that unspeakable scut, George Crosbie!’ I liked that till I began to read myself, but even then it did not disturb me much, for I was always too involved in what I read even to notice when neighbours dropped in.

  This was just as well, because any project of Father’s, from cutting his corns to writing to Whitehall about his pension, involved preparation on a major scale and something like general mobilization, and in any detail of this he could become entirely lost. For instance, when he wrote to Whitehall – this usually meant no more than filling out some form to show he was still alive – he had first of all to get the penny bottle of ink, and a new nib for the pen, and a bit of blotting-paper, and lay them all out on the table before him; then he had to get his papers, which were in a locked tin trunk in the bedroom, and he could never take one of these out without rereading the lot: and on going through his discharge papers and discovering again what a model soldier he had been, he would be moved like an old novelist re-reading a review of his first talented book, and would have to bring them down and read them all over again to Mother, who knew them by heart. Every question on a questionnaire he read over several times before replying to it, because he knew it had been drafted by an old and cunning hand with the deliberate intention of catching him out. When he spotted the trap – and there nearly always was a trap – his whole face lit up with approval and he explained the problem carefully to Mother while he considered how best to handle it. He liked a subtle enemy because it enabled him to show how subtle he could be himself. He was a born hob-lawyer, always laying down the law about regulations, and greatly looked up to by other old soldiers, like Bill Heffernan, who were too humble even to pretend that they knew what the War Office wanted of them. When the form was filled out and in its envelope on the mantelpiece, and Mother had been warned that she must post it with her own hand and not entrust it to me, he would become emotional again about the goodness of the British Government and its consideration for its old servants – unlike the gnats of employers he worked for in Cork, who would see an old workman dying in the streets and not lift a hand to help him. The pension meant much more to him than the trifle of money it represented. It gave him a personal interest in the British Government. A Liberal Government might be good for the Irish cause, but a Conservative one would be better for the pension. It gave him wild dreams, because no quarter passed without his toying with the idea of compounding it for a capital sum, the size of which staggered imagination. It gave him the prospect of a happy old age, for when Mother died he could hand it in in return for provision in one of the military hospitals like Chelsea or Kilmainham where every day for the rest of his life he would get his pint of beer for nothing.