All of These People: A Memoir. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ believe the truth is somewhere in between. The movement disintegrated after their leader, a pompous buffoon called General Eoin O’Duffy, led a brigade off to Spain to fight for Franco in the Civil War.

      In Kerry a general warning was sent out that anybody seen in the Blueshirt uniform would be attacked. Hanna was told the IRA would rip the shirt off her back. So she put on her blue shirt and walked up Church Street staring into the faces of the IRA supporters. Nobody dared attack her.

      I called my father’s mother Granny Kerry. She would meet us at the door like a proud queen, with her neighbours looking on. She had one son a famous playwright, another a famous actor, another studying to be a teacher in Dublin, a daughter a nun in Cahirciveen, and other sons and daughters all taken care of, married or working. There were no idle Keanes, which in that time and place was something to be said.

      Hello, Granny Kerry, it’s lovely to see you. She would embrace me at the door to the house on Church Street. Wisha, child, ‘tis lovely to see yourself. She was still a handsome woman. Her hair was dark and her skin sallow. Like a Spaniard. Her family name was Purtill. It used to be Purtillo, my father said – his Spanish connection. In her youth she had been an aspiring actress, before becoming a guerrilla fighter, and then mother of the Keanes.

      Her house smelled different to a city house. You could start at the door where Joan Carroll – modest, quiet Joan who gave me money for sweets – rented a room from my grandmother. Joan ran a hairdressing salon from the room and the scent of her shampoos and lotions overflowed into the hall, sweeter than I’d ever smelled in my life. There was a door with a glass window through which you could see the matrons of Listowel being primped and clipped. On the wall were photographs of beehive hairdos and perms.

      The heart of the house was the parlour, a small room with a large open fireplace at its centre. Dominating the fireplace was a big steel range into which turf was poured at frequent intervals. My grandmother cooked on this range and dried clothes beside it. It filled the room with the musk of the peatlands. When the window was open to the back yard, other smells blew in and mingled: the smell of meadow and river, of hedgerows and brackish water, of donkey droppings in the lane between the house and the Major’s Field.

      It was a country house. The long narrow stairs, three storeys high, creaked and sagged as you climbed up to bed, the voices of the adults growing fainter as you turned one corner, and then another, until you were left with the sound of your own footsteps and the groan of the floorboards.

      Across the landing from where I slept was a locked door. It was shut tight with a length of wire from a coat hanger. Behind it lay the stairs to the attic, where Uncle Dan used to live. Dan was a bachelor, my grandfather’s brother. My father said: ‘Your uncle Dan used to talk to the crows. They could understand him, I swear. They would come in through the eaves into the attic and sit on the edge of the bed and Dan would be talking away to them.’

      In Dan’s attic there were wisps of cobweb hanging from the rafters and the only light was that from a paraffin lamp, throwing shadows around the shoulders of my father and his brothers as they listened to Dan’s stories. He sat on the bed, an uncle remembered, ‘with his cap askew and his collar undone and his lips ringed with the brown stain of porter’.

      My father and his brothers would sit in the attic and listen to his stories for hours. But Dan could not easily communicate with adults, except at the cattle fairs where he made a few pounds acting as middle man between the sellers and buyers. It was said that Dan was a good man to make a deal. But he never owned a cow himself. Apart from fair days his one excursion was to Mass. Dan didn’t care too much for appearances. On Sundays he would march to the top of the church and find the seat where the most pious matrons of the town were ensconced. Dan would force them to squeeze in and accommodate him. There would be furious muttering. But Dan ignored it all. If the sermon displeased him he would chatter away to himself, conducting a personal dialogue on the finer points of theology. Eventually the parish priest could stand no more and rounded on him, screaming:

      ‘Dan Keane if you don’t shut up I’ll turn you into a goat and put two horns on you.’

      To which Dan replied: ‘And by God if you do I’ll fuckin’ puck you.’

      Now that Dan was dead and gone the door to his attic room was locked.

       What’s up there now, Granny Kerry?

       Yerrah, only old stuff, boy. And dust. A power of dust.

      But I did not believe it. My child’s imagination told me that Dan was still there, surrounded by his crows, a muttering old storyteller whose feet I could hear creaking across the floorboards at midnight. I wanted so badly to open that door. It would not have taken much. A few twists on the wire and I’d be through. But my courage failed me every time. Suppose Dan really was there? Hidden away by the family because he had gone mad. Suppose the crows were there protecting his lair, waiting to peck the eyes out of any intruder. There were safer places to go adventuring.

      Out the back was a big turf shed. My grandmother would ask: ‘Will you go out and bring in a bucket of turf, boy?’ Granny Kerry knew I loved the big shed. The dried turf smelled of dead forests, of Ireland before history. My father said the Tuath de Dannan, the mythical people said to have been supplanted by the Celts, had buried great treasures in the bog, and that ‘You never know what you might find in the turf.’ I looked for jewels or a golden crown in the dried-out turf. I pulled away the sods and smashed them open. I never found anything there though, except once a sixpenny bit on the floor. I suspect my father put it there. Down below the turf was a cobbled floor that must have been centuries old. Under that, my father swore, lay a great fortune.

      Our holidays in Kerry always seemed to begin with laughter. But as I got older I sensed the tension between my father and grandmother. Mostly the conversation between them seemed to revolve around horse racing.

      ‘What do you think of Glencaraig Lady at Cheltenham?’

      ‘Yerrah? I’m not so sure about that one.’

      They would sit at the table next to the range, the newspapers spread out around them. It was the time they seemed most at ease with each other. But he could not stay long with her before something she said, some change of tone or inference would set his nerves twitching. And then he would be gone. Out the door and up the road to Gurtenard Wood or down to the fields by the river, walking his anger away.

      Hanna would look up from her paper and shake her head: ‘What did I say wrong?’ Usually it had something to do with her praising another member of the family, or some words my father would interpret as criticism. And after that there would be no more ease in the kitchen, no swapping of tips for the horses, only waiting for the next offending word.

      I believe the source of the friction between them was love. She loved him. But in his eyes it could never be enough. He craved her approval, and anything less than total and constant affirmation sent him into despair.

      As a child my father had been bright and precocious. But somewhere in childhood there was a sundering between him and his mother. I think it happened slowly. As more children arrived Hanna was forced to divide her attention. My father responded by throwing tantrums. He became the troublesome one; he gave cheek and stayed out late, but ended up alienating his mother.

      Enter the figure of Juleanne Keane, the spinster sister of my grandfather. She lived with the family and acted as my father’s champion. When he was chastised by his mother, Juleanne would step in to shield him. In her eyes Éamonn was faultless. The violent scenes he staged to attract the attention of his mother were rewarded by Juleanne with smothering kisses, trips to the sweet shop, the protecting embrace of her shawl.

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