Maeve Binchy, page 4
Maeve liked to say that the nuns, who had only just arrived in Ireland, were utterly unaware of what they had got themselves into. Unable to understand the Irish accent, they were putty in the girls’ hands; the girls could tell them anything and they’d believe it.
For her part, the shrewd Mother St Dominic used to play along with this and respond that given the choice between teaching natives on the Gold Coast of Africa (another mission of the Society of the Holy Child) and fulfilling her missionary duty among middle-class Irish girls in County Dublin, the Gold Coast presented itself as distinctly preferable!
There was a happy atmosphere at Killiney and a compassionate one, with attention to the individual a priority. Mother’s great strength was to instil self-esteem in her girls by finding something in each one of them to admire. ‘She had the most wonderful insight into each of us,’ said Susan McNally. ‘It had an incredible binding effect on all of us.’ It worked like this: ‘She had a room downstairs where she would have little chats with you. She always used to say, “Come in Susan, close the door, sit down, now what’s on your mind?” You could pour your heart out to her.’ Every girl availed herself of these ‘chats with Mother’.
As the fathers of Maeve and Geraldine hoped, Mother’s regime also prepared the girls for a fast-changing world in which women were already gaining ground. One of Maeve’s early articles for the Irish Times praises nuns for being at the forefront of career guidance, which at the time barely existed in Ireland. ‘They no longer look out on the wicked world from behind cloistered walls and urge their girls to seek similar shelter,’ she wrote. ‘People would say there was something about the Holy Child girls,’ agrees Valerie. ‘They would stand up. They were able to express themselves. They were able to have an opinion about things.’
Independent thinking did not extend to religion, however, which was dispensed with Jesuit intensity. From the moment Maeve arrived in 1950 she entered what she later referred to as her ‘religious maniac’ phase.
At school ‘our Catholic faith permeated everything’, says Valerie.
Everything we thought about, said or did during the school day. The first class of the day was Christian doctrine. We said a prayer before each lesson and we said grace before meals. The boarders attended daily Mass and evening prayer in the school chapel. We had a yearly retreat and at the end we exchanged holy pictures with something personal inscribed on the back.
In Light a Penny Candle, Elizabeth’s friend Monica cannot believe that at the convent they pray before every class, even before maths and history. The novel captures beautifully the innocence and unquestioning beliefs of Maeve’s younger self and her friends during their time at the Holy Child. As Elizabeth White is a Protestant evacuee from England she knows nothing of Irish or Catholic ways. All must be explained to her, like the concept of ‘limbo’, for example, which Catholics believe to be a place where dead babies are held; not having been baptised they are in a state of original sin and cannot be admitted to Heaven. The idea of masses of innocent dead babies hanging in some remote space, in endless twilight, would be macabre in any other context, but in the convent with Sister Mary and Sister Bonaventure, Elizabeth is soon prepared to accept it as perfectly natural.
Then, of course, dear sweet innocent Elizabeth is herself perceived to be in danger of everlasting damnation, because she has not been baptised into the Catholic Church. The girls realise that it is up to them to set matters straight. Outside classes it becomes their purpose to save her soul. Elizabeth submits to four baptismal rituals and there is some concern whether any of them has worked. Were the words said at exactly the same moment as the water flowed? Should the service have been conducted in Latin rather than English? Later the class ponder on how they can arrange for her First Communion, because sooner or later she is going to have to make her confession to cast out the sins with which, as a Protestant, they believe she is riddled.
As a child Maeve never had a Protestant friend like Elizabeth. It was a mortal sin at the time for a Catholic even to enter a Protestant church or attend a wedding that was not a Catholic one. A mortal sin meant that you would be consigned to Hell for eternity. As a Catholic child one knew that there was no way back from everlasting Hell. Children sensed the divisiveness of so exclusive a regime.
Though there was a Protestant presence in 1950s Dalkey, and friendships and marriages across denominations did exist, generally there was minimal integration and sometimes a degree of unpleasantness about it when it did occur. ‘When my father married my mother, who was a Protestant,’ one woman explained, ‘there was a huge rift in the family. Honestly, they wouldn’t speak to her. When she had her first child, who died, one of her sisters said, “Well that’s one Catholic out of the way.”’
Utterly convinced of everything she was told, and being a caring person inside, Maeve began to worry about the father of a friend of hers, who was a Protestant while the rest of his family attended the Catholic church. Every Sunday he would drive his family to church but instead of joining them at Mass he would go for a walk on the pier at Dún Laoghaire.
She spent hours with her friend discussing the situation, fearful that he would suffer ‘the Devil and the pain that goes on forever’ and actually teamed up with her friend, faced her father with the situation and urged him to reconsider!
The compassionate ethos of the Holy Child Killiney was clearly at odds with the Church’s wider determination to marginalise and alienate anyone outside the Catholic community, but this only fell clear to Maeve in her late teens when she went to university. And even then, so completely had she lived within an opaque Catholic bubble that when she travelled abroad in her twenties she found it difficult to believe that there were countries where the Angelus bell did not ring at midday.
The Catholic family to which Maeve belonged at Killiney enveloped her completely – not only Mother St Dominic, but other less corporeal figures, like St Patrick, who was always looking out for her, St Anthony, whom she relied on to find things for her, St Peter, who was always dependable, and St Francis, her father’s namesake, who was the saint of the poor and of course friend of all the animals and birds.
So closely did she come to belong that Maeve would sometimes rather be at school than at home. Once, for example, she opted to celebrate St Patrick’s Day by swelling the ranks of boarders at the school, attending Mass with them in Killiney rather than with her parents and siblings at the Church of the Assumption in Dalkey. She remembered persuading a nun to let her decorate the statues of all the saints, so that St Patrick ‘up there’ would have a good day and not feel over-adorned in the otherwise stony naked company of St Peter, St Francis and ‘the other lads’.
During this time she was determined to become a saint. When this was mentioned by a priest during her funeral Mass sixty years later the congregation actually laughed out loud, but the ambition really wasn’t so unusual in the 1950s. Life for everyone in the Catholic community had a spiritual dimension which was wholly real. Even if you were a poor boy living in a village in a rural area, there’d likely be a day or two a week when you’d rise early to serve the priest at Mass before school. And the possibility of seeing a sacred vision, meeting ‘in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld’, as James Joyce described the metaphysical dimension of Catholicism so well, seemed high.
Maeve herself developed a terror of emulating the shepherd children at Fatima and apprehending a vision of Our Lady in a tree – there was a period when to avoid a repetition of the famous visionary experience she kept her eyes firmly on the ground whenever she went outside.
As for becoming a saint, this was no passing childhood ambition. She still planned to be one when she was twenty-three. It wasn’t a question of hoping; she was convinced that she would be.
At the Holy Child, recognition of a pupil treading the path of the saints was vested in an award known as ‘The Child of Mary’. The award was one all of the girls coveted, but to receive it one would have to partake in daily Mass and receive Communion. A combination of religious intensity and good character was also required and the award demonstrated that one was fit to be a leader as much as a saint. The climax of Maeve’s apprenticeship was a one-day retreat early one December, followed by a candlelit ceremony, for which she wore a white veil and, round her neck, the medal itself on a long blue ribbon, which she continued to wear with great respect and pride every day. Maeve developed her special relationship with God in pursuit of the medal. They spoke to one another like the Italian priest Don Camillo speaks to Christ in Giovannino Guareschi’s popular series of books, which first appeared in print in English at this time. God was ‘a friend, and Irish, and somebody who knew me well’.
In spite of, or perhaps because of the highly disciplined religious life that the nuns had elected to pursue, tensions were released daily in an abundance of character and humour. Valerie remembers a typical incident.
We lived up the road here and my dad had his office in St Stephen’s Green in Dublin and in those days there was so little traffic that he would come home for lunch, it would take twenty minutes or so. Now, if one of the nuns wanted to go to the dentist or something they would ring my mother and ask for a lift into town after lunch. One day this nun, Mother Immaculata, who was quite elderly and a very tiny person, asked if my father could give her a lift into town. He called for her in his very smart car – some sort of sporty Jaguar – and she got in beside him – she could barely see over the dashboard. And she asked him, ‘May I ask, would you do something for me?’ He said, ‘Yes, what is it?’ She said, ‘Would you take me down to the Big Tree – (which was the only bit of motorway; well, there were two lanes rather than one) – and will you drive me at 100 miles an hour?’
Maeve’s readers may remember Mother Immaculata in her novel Echoes. But her fictional Immaculata is quite unlike the person Valerie describes – she has ‘a face like the nib of a pen’ and is a thoroughly difficult woman, concerned to impress on plucky young Clare O’Brien the importance of everything she does for ‘the good name of the school’.
Maeve was always at pains to make clear that she never took a whole person from the real world into her fiction, only parts of them. But this story about Mother Immaculata reminds us how influential the convent became on her work. When the film of Echoes was shot at Dunmore East, an idyllic seaside resort in County Waterford, not far from where Maeve’s mother Maureen was born, Maeve saw to it that a lot of the nuns got parts as extras. It takes a nun to walk like a nun, apparently. Real nuns don’t so much walk as glide!
Mother Immaculata’s phrase, ‘the good name of the school’, was one used relentlessly to motivate the girls at Killiney, notably in sport, which also accorded great popularity if you were any good. Maeve said she was hopeless at games and even refused to vault the horse in the gym for fear of some injury. She also ducked out of hockey whenever she could, generally in the company of another girl. Together they used to hide in the toilets rather than go onto the hockey field, and then make a quick getaway. Otherwise, as Maeve wrote with winning caricature, it was a question of standing around on the pitch, looking like a sack of potatoes in her green uniform tied in the middle, legs blue with cold, hoping that the action would remain at the far end of the pitch.11
The games mistress was at a loss as to how to get her to participate in anything at all until she hit on the idea that her height could be put to use on the netball pitch. Maeve was unusually tall, six foot or more as a teenager. All she had to do was hang around the net, wait for a pass and dunk the ball in – easier for her to do than not. She became a lethal striker and for two years actually made the school’s 1st VII netball team.
There were protests, however. Some schools refused to believe that so tall a girl was young enough to be playing for the team. They may have had a point: there is a discrepancy of one year between Maeve’s declared age and the one indicated on her birth certificate. No one will say for sure when the change was implemented, or why. Was it an attempt by Maureen to give Maeve the best chance of success in life following a long absence from school? Did she miss a year due to an extended bout of glandular fever, as one of her friends suggests? Whatever was the case, Maeve remained a year younger than her officially recorded age for the rest of her life.
More significant to Maeve than sporting success were writing competitions in magazines, which girls were encouraged to enter because here was another opportunity to show the school in a good light. Maeve remembered in particular one Christmas winning a prize in a magazine called The Pylon, subscribers to which (for a few pence a year) could proudly call themselves Electrons. To be an Electron and enter a writing competition was terribly important. Like being good at sport, it showed ‘school spirit, girls!’, while winning meant being fêted by staff and girls alike.
Maeve won this particular competition with a story about a girl called Jane, who wanted to be a missionary and teach the natives in Africa. Jane succeeded by beating the natives out of their own customs and forcing hers upon them. The win stuck in Maeve’s mind because of a particularly prescient remark made by her father when he picked her up that day from school. ‘When you become a writer, you will always be able to say this was your first work.’12 When Maeve did become a writer she thanked God that the story had not survived!
Maeve had begun to subscribe to activities that promised a certain amount of status and popularity in the school, and to show less interest in those activities that didn’t – like academic work, for example. When she first arrived she had been expected to go the academic route and not, like some of the others, substitute domestic science for Latin and maths. She was a bright girl and found it relatively easy to come near the top of the class, but school reports described her as lazy. She grasped things well, but then became bored and soon lapsed into a daydream. In later life she gave the reason that being at the top of the class wasn’t a mark of status at school. It wasn’t nearly as important as being good at games, for example, or winning a writing competition.
Seeking status is perfectly normal behaviour among children but here it looks like becoming a definitive motivation, and one wonders why. Knowing how irrepressible a personality she was as an adult, and how popular she became, and being aware of the support dispensed by her mother when she was a child, and of how, at home, she’d had a clear sense of herself at the centre of the world, one would expect Maeve to have been confident and popular and even a bit full of herself at school. But this was not the case at all. One fellow pupil recalls:
Maeve wasn’t actually very obvious at school at all. I think she really blossomed after she left. I would never think of her as a huge character. I’m not sure that Maeve was a very confident person when she was young. She changed a lot. I think for the better.
It is noticeable that Maeve is almost always in the background in photographs taken of her class at this time, and she confessed to having been a nervous child – always worrying that something lay in wait for her around every corner, afraid of the dark, of going upstairs to the box room in case a monster lay in wait for her, of climbing trees in case she fell, of seeing a doctor in case he wanted to vaccinate her, of going to the dentist in case the drill slipped and went through her head, of passing buses and lorries in case they suddenly left the road and ploughed into her, of the sound of an ambulance or fire engine because she was sure they were bound for her house, of being cut, in case, like the royal haemophiliac, she would bleed to death. Any loud noise made her jump ‘four feet’, the sound of leaves in the wind was surely a burglar. She was always looking at the sky in case a comet was about to career into her, and she thought she saw the Devil on four separate occasions.13
It is tempting to put her nervousness down to Maureen’s excessive concern for her safety at every point, together with the child’s lively imagination, which had her lowering her eyes for fear of seeing a sacred vision. But this nervousness of hers was consistent with an emotional state which Maeve later admitted came to dominate her psychologically from this time – a crippling self-consciousness.
‘I think she was very conscious of her height because she used to slouch quite a bit. I do remember the nativity plays we had, because she was tall she invariably played St Joseph. I don’t think she had an awful lot of confidence then,’ said Susan McNally.
But it wasn’t only her height. In later life Maeve put it plainly: ‘I was fat, and that was awful because when you’re young and sensitive, you think the world is over because you’re fat. I was also a bit lame.’14
Another of Maeve’s friends, the journalist Mary Kenny, who met Maeve a decade later, remembered her saying that as a teenager she always weighed ‘around 15 stone’.
Valerie recalled that she had to have her clothes specially made:
She had great difficulty in getting them to fit. I remember there was a dressmaker called Miss Creegan, who lived in an old farmhouse, an ancient, falling-down place called Honeypark, with her sister. She was a very eccentric lady. I remember her wallpaper was upside down on the walls, flowers growing down rather than up. And Maeve used to get her clothes made by this woman, because she couldn’t get anything off the peg to fit her.
At home the issue carried no stigma at all. Maureen did everything in her power not to make any concession to the idea that her daughter’s weight might be a problem.
‘My best friend at school was Jillyann Metcalfe,’ said Patricia Hamilton,
and she was also a great friend of Maeve’s. She lived quite near her so they would play and go to each other’s houses – my house was in Carrickmines, considered the back of beyond in those days, so I didn’t go to Maeve’s house, but I remember Jilly saying to me, ‘Oh, you’d love to go to Maeve’s house because she has boxes of chocolates in every room and her mother puts them there just in case the children are hungry.’
