All of These People: A Memoir. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ though she tried, I do not believe Juleanne could replace my grandmother. By the time he left home my father was already an angry young man. He was angry with the Church, with the bitter politics of the time, and angry with his mother. He had also started to drink. He found that it gave him courage and took away his anguish.

      Hanna Purtill had sad eyes. Even at six or seven I could see that. Her smile was like my father’s smile: generous, warm, but always flushed through with something melancholy.

      On her bad days my grandmother would stay in bed, and we would be warned to leave her in peace. She gets the bad nerves sometime.. That was how some uncle or cousin explained it. In Ireland people who got bad nerves often took to the bed. Trays of food would come and go, be picked at and sent back downstairs. Often the nerves would be explained as an illness. A trapped nerve. A bad stomach. A stiff knee. A bad back. But everybody knew what it really was: something that descended on the mind. Like coastal fog it could sit for days.

      Granny Kerry was silent when she took to the bed. But light or dark she was always kind to me. I went into the room once to give her the paper and she motioned to me to come closer. She put her two arms out to hold me. Close to her, tighter than she’d ever held me. When I stood back up I saw she was crying. I went out of the room and found my mother.

      ‘What’s wrong with Granny Kerry?’

      ‘She feels sad. It’s not her fault.’

      ‘Oh.’

      When the nerves struck an Irish house people talked in low voices. Children were told to go out and play and stay out. A doctor might come and sit with the patient, prescribe some tablets and shrug his shoulders or nod his head, sympathetically, as a family member showed him out of the house: Time is the best cure, you know. Just give it time and she’ll be grand again.

      And after a few days she would be up. I would come downstairs and Hanna would be in the small kitchen peeling spuds or marking the racing pages in the parlour. She would smile and put her hand on my head and tell me to sit down and eat my breakfast. And that would be the end of the nerves. I never knew what brought on the sad hours. I simply came to accept it as part of our family inheritance.

      Now there are things I know that explain part of the sadness. Some of it, at least, had to do with the hard circumstances of life. My grandmother reared nine children on a country schoolteacher’s paltry pay. For much of the time she lived under the same roof as her parents- and brother- and sister-in-law. It was a house without retreat or space for the young mother in a country where women were told that suffering was their noble duty.

      I did not know my grandfather, Bill Keane. He died when I was a baby. My mother remembers: ‘He used to sit you on his knee when you were a baby and tell stories to you. By that time he was sick with throat cancer. Very sick. And he could only really swallow things that were very soft. He used to drink ice cream that had melted but it was still agony for him. He was a lovely man.’

      Everybody I ask says the same thing. A lovely man. Bill taught at Clounmacon school, seven miles outside Listowel. He walked there and back every day of his teaching life. A few years ago I met two elderly nuns who remembered him. One of them said: ‘He was a gentle teacher. You know, in those days some of them could be wicked blackguards. They beat the children something terrible. But your grandfather wasn’t like that. He loved teaching and he loved words. The way he could get across those words of great writers to you was something magical. He had a great way of talking.’

      I formed a picture in my mind of Bill Keane in that country classroom, before him the children of the surrounding farms, many of them boys who would soon leave to plant their father’s fields or to work as labourers on other farms, barefoot children of a pre-industrial Ireland held in thrall by the teacher’s stories.

      Next to the kitchen in Church Street he kept a small library. My father and Uncle John B were introduced to the great writers like Hardy and Dickens through that little cupboard. The Keane house also had a name as a place where visiting actors were sure of a welcome. At that time theatrical companies still toured Ireland bringing the works of Shakespeare to the small towns and villages. The great Anew McMaster came and recited verse in the small parlour and inspired my father to become an actor. Words filled that house.

      But my grandfather Bill was not what you would call a practical man. The best description I have of him comes from a poem written by my uncle, John B.

       When he spoke gustily and sincerely Spittle fastened Not merely upon close lapel But nearly blinded Those who had not hastened To remove pell-mell. He was inviolate. Clung to old stoic principle, And he dismissed his weaknesses As folly. His sinning was inchoate; Drank ill-advisedly.

      Bill would stop for a drink on his way home from school in the houses of people who knew and loved him (Yerrah, Bill, come in for the one). He stopped at crossroads where he met the local characters (J can only stop a few minutes.. At Alla Sheehy’s pub next door (J must be off now in the name of God. Well, just the last one so).

      My grandfather worked through to his retirement. He cared for his family and every one of them remembered him with love. He was a thinker but also a dreamer. Sometimes he could spend money on drink that Hanna depended on to pay bills and provide for the children. It was not a permanent crisis but it added to the pressure on my grandmother.

      He clashed with the Catholic priest who was the ultimate manager of Clounmacon school. Part of my Uncle John’s later aversion to organised religion sprang from what he felt was the unforgiving attitude of the Church towards his father. He told me once of how the priest had arrived at the house and gone upstairs to where my grandfather was lying sick in bed and harangued him to get up and go back to work.

      Bill Keane did get revenge of sorts, or at least he proved he was not cowed by the Church imperial. Once when seeing a particularly unpleasant priest – a man with a reputation for brutality in the classroom – on the main street, Bill walked past without doffing his cap, the customary greeting. As John B’s biographer describes it:

      ‘The priest rounded on him. “Don’t you know to salute a priest when you see one?"’

      To which my grandfather replied: ‘When I see one.’

      My uncle wrote a play about his father. It may have been the bravest thing he ever wrote. In those days autobiographical drama was rare in Ireland, the fear of bringing shame on a family in such a small community was too great. In The Crazy Wall John B describes a man attempting to build a wall in his garden. But the builder, clearly modelled on his father, is not a practical man. The wall twists and turns. It is badly made and eventually crumbles. John B later told an interviewer: ‘When things were not going his way, my father built a symbolic wall around himself, to shut out the harsh realities of the world; he once dreamed he was going to take off around Ireland, but it came to nothing. He wanted to write the great book, and that, too, became a futile exercise.’

      The relationship between my grandparents went through difficult times. Hanna must have suffered when her husband retreated into himself and when the bills came and there was no money to pay them. But when they walked out together, well into old age, those who saw them remember a couple in love, strolling arm in arm along Church Street and out towards the country lanes. They were alert to the higher values – love, compassion, the beauty of words – but hemmed in by the Free State and its poverty, the puritanical hectoring of the Church, the leeching bitterness of the Civil War and the exceptional demands of rearing many children in a small place. When I visualise my paternal grandparents I imagine two sensitive people, people of restrained nobility. But somewhere in that large family with its many pressures I believe my father became lost.

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