Maeve Binchy (3 page)

Maeve heard of these exciting antics from her father, who then read her the opening scenes of
Ulysses
, which are set the morning after this incident. Gogarty is immortalised as ‘stately, plump Buck Mulligan’ (the opening words of the novel) and Trench is Haines. Maeve imagined the events of the book happening on her very doorstep.

Maureen’s natural way of life was clearly in tune with that of Joyce – both of them eschewed any form of pretension and both celebrated reality as what went on every day between the ordinary people of Dublin. The ability to see the marvellous in the everyday was Maureen’s way and Ireland’s natural way, and would become Maeve’s way too, as a person and a writer.

Meanwhile, radio also played a big part in the growing child’s imagination. People born much less than sixty years ago will find it difficult to appreciate how captivating radio was before the more immediate, effort-free, visual stimulus of television. The pictures one conjured while listening to radio plays were somehow so much more fulfilling than the easy option of television. Maeve loved radio and it became a significant part of her development.
Saturday Night Theatre
on the BBC Home Service was her favourite. In the 1940s and 1950s the programme followed shortly after the nine o’clock news and lasted around ninety minutes. Listening to it was an activity she alone could undertake with her parents. Only she, being the eldest child, was allowed to stay up to listen to it. These were entertaining plays, but well written; indeed, writers featured included (among
many others) Dorothy Sayers, Edgar Wallace, Peter Cheyney, Somerset Maugham, J. M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens, Eugene O’Neill, Lewis Carroll, J. B. Priestley, Dodie Smith, Agatha Christie, Freddie Lonsdale, A. A. Milne, John Galsworthy and Noël Coward. The programme was successful because of its simple formula: ‘good popular
entertainment
value associated in the minds of Mr & Mrs Everyman with the general idea of Saturday night’, as BBC Director of Drama Val Gielgud put it. More than twelve million people listened in each night, though figures declined with the
increasing
popularity of television in the late 1950s.

Another interest of Maeve’s was her father’s library of law books, which he kept in his study. This was his territory. William liked nothing better than to deliberate over the rule of law with whoever was to hand, and he would occasionally discuss his case histories with Maeve, always with the enticing proviso that she must keep the details a secret. Maeve loved to be a part of her father’s serious other world and became convinced that she wanted to follow in his footsteps, but not just as a lawyer – she wanted to be a judge, because William held judges in awe and they didn’t seem to do half as much work as he did.

The idea persisted but was dented by a professor of law who asked her why she thought that a solicitor would choose to give a brief to a young woman when he could give it to an experienced man like her father. At the time Maeve could find no answer to that.

The professor, a man of course, was not alone in his
thinking
at the time. There was still a culture that women were
going to marry and become housewives. In the 1940s and 1950s it wasn’t done for a wife to work and in some industries you weren’t allowed to work if you were a married woman, because it was taking a job away from a man during a period of serious economic depression. Maureen knew well enough that in her home county of Tipperary thousands were leaving in search of employment abroad, often to England, where they could be held in derision as Paddies and Biddies and where the jokes made about them were humiliating in the extreme. ‘Born for Export’ was a catchphrase among mothers of the day. During the period 1946 to 1956 alone the number of Irish emigrating from just one county in Ireland (Cavan) exceeded 11,000, as against registered births of 12,481.

What could an Irish girl expect by way of work in Ireland after the Second World War? If you were bright with a few years in secondary education behind you, and your parents had a few pounds set aside, you might be able to buy six months’ unpaid work in a clothes shop or hairdresser as an apprentice learning the trade. Or you might train to be a nurse, even chance your arm as a trainee nurse in England, where you could expect to earn your keep initially by scrubbing floors. With women closed out of almost all professions it is not difficult to see why being a housewife seemed the better option.

Such would never be an option for Maeve. As Maureen kept telling her, she could be whatever she wanted to be. But first she would need a higher education.

‘To go to university,’ said Geraldine MacCarthy, a
contemporary
of Maeve at school, ‘you had to have your Leaving
Certificate, and you had to get Irish and maths, and you had to have Latin, but then of course you had to be able to pay.’ And even if you could pay and you did all this you would have to cope with the prejudice shown by that professor of law.

As far as the Binchys were concerned, university was very much on the cards for all the children. Maeve said that her father sacrificed everything for their education. All schools in Ireland charged fees of some sort. It wasn’t until 1968 that the free state school system, heralded in England by the Education Act of 1944 and implemented in the six counties of Northern Ireland in 1947, was introduced to Eire.

But some schools cost more than others and Maeve’s father was stretched to pay for the ones he chose for the children. His philosophy nevertheless was that, if necessary, all their savings should be spent on education. They splashed out on Eastmount, it is true, the first and only house William and Maureen ever purchased (it cost them £3,000, a great deal of money in Ireland in 1952 and double the average house price in Britain at the time). But the family never had a car or went to restaurants, which Maeve understood to be so that the three children could go to university. She grew up with the sense that money might not always be there; it was one reason her father gave her to study hard and pass all her exams.

Today it sounds like the typical middle-class thing to do: stretch yourself financially for the sake of the next
generation
. But in the case of the Binchy family, the importance of education was hot-wired into their thinking by their own paternal history.

L
ong before the Norman Conquest of Britain in the
eleventh
century, the Binchys were to be found with their own heraldic coat of arms in Middlesex, an ancient territory and county of England which originally incorporated London but which was abolished in 1965, fragmenting into parts of Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Surrey and a new administrative area known as Greater London.

The Irish branch of the family descended from Cromwellian settlers in County Cork, in the province of the south-west of Ireland known as Munster.
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The line began with two Binchy brothers who found their way to Charleville, a market town on the original mail coach road between Cork and Limerick, beside a headwater of the river Maigue.

The two young men arrived in the wake of the Ascendancy – the political, economic and social domination of Ireland by the Protestant English/English-Irish – following Oliver Cromwell’s merciless brand of mayhem, brought to bear from 1649.

After the execution of King Charles I in that year, Cromwell
had turned his attention to Catholic Ireland with relentless savagery, his campaign lasting six years and costing 600,000 lives. By the time he left, only 8 per cent of the country remained in the hands of the indigenous Catholic Irish. His ‘final solution’ required men, women and children, the sick and the infirm, all classes of people, to be herded into Connacht, the province of the north-west of Ireland, in a small reservation between the river Shannon and the sea, a place where ‘there was not wood enough to burn, water enough to drown, nor earth enough to bury a man’, as one of the commissioners responsible described it. Anyone found east of the line after 1 May 1654 could expect to be executed and, when there were too many flouting the rule to make this practical, they were sold into slavery to Jamaica in the West Indies, so that even today Jamaican English retains many aspects of Irish intonation.

In order to fill the vacuum left by this unbridled genocide and ethnic cleansing, large-scale plantations of settlers came over from Britain and Europe, creating new communities of Protestants which replaced the older indigenous Catholic ruling class and secured the authority of British Crown government in Ireland.

All this had its seat in the Reformation, the Protestantisation of England by Henry VIII a century earlier, and followed Elizabeth I’s ‘Act of Uniformity’, which made the Protestant liturgy
compulsory
in Ireland and led to similar atrocities and ethnic cleansing, with large-scale plantations, or settlements, of new Protestant population-stock. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked a devastating period for Ireland, when the country’s very identity was threatened with extinction by the English.

The founding of Charleville as a Protestant stronghold by an Englishman called Roger Boyle, from Marston in Somerset, was part of this disastrous development. Boyle, a seasoned and ruthless campaigner, as well as a man who changed his loyalties to suit his ends, was directly responsible for Cromwell’s success in overcoming the south of Ireland.

On Cromwell’s death in 1658, and now known as Lord Orrery, Boyle returned, resumed his command in Munster and secured Ireland for Charles II by inviting him to land at Cork,
confirming
his loyalty to the new king by asking his permission to name Charleville after him.

When the Binchy brothers arrived in the late 1700s,
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Ireland was still subordinate to Britain. The great majority of the population were Roman Catholic, but had no power or say in the governing of the country. Charleville remained very much under the yoke of the Protestant Ascendancy. Boyle’s immigration policy was designed to ensure that Catholics never had a
look-in
. ‘I admit,’ he said, ‘neither presbyter, papist, independent, nor as our proclamation says, any sort of fanatic to plant here, but all good protestants.’

Before his coming it had been a Catholic village with, so he put it, ‘the heathenish name of Rathgoggan’. He raised it from ‘village insignificance and obscurity’ to the position of Borough, and with the king’s blessing made it the seat of his court as Lord President of Munster, building in it a church, an endowed school and, on an 800-acre plot, a grandiose mansion with landscaped gardens, fish ponds and pleasure grounds, giving it a reputation for ‘much revelling and wine-drinking’, but also
attracting manufacturers in linen and woollens, and tradesmen to the town. In 1670, Charleville petitioned successfully for a Royal Charter, which gave it the privilege of appointing two Members of Parliament.

But Boyle’s uncompromising stance on Catholicism was eventually his family’s undoing. In 1690, when no member of the family was present, the Catholic Duke of Berwick, illegitimate son of James II, happened by on his way back from the Siege of Limerick, where his forces had resisted the Protestant William of Orange. He feasted at the family’s expense and then razed their mansion to the ground.

It was into this turbulent scene of bigotry and sectarianism that the Binchys sowed their seed. The two brothers, one a grocer, the other a lawyer, at first found no Catholic place of worship in the town. The Constitution of 1782, however, which gave Ireland legislative independence of Britain, began to ease the situation for Catholics generally, and when the Acts of Union were passed in 1800, promising Catholic representation in Parliament (delivered in 1829), the yoke was finally lifted.

For the Binchys, the first outward sign of change in Charleville had been the building of a Mass-house, a sort of hut, with two side walls, a gable and a thatched roof under which the faithful gathered. Then, in 1812, the foundation of a Catholic church was laid in Chapel Street; its construction began the following year. And by the time we find useful records of the family in the first decade of the twentieth century they are living in a completely integrated Irish Catholic township, with names such as Holy Cross Place, The Presbytery and the Convent of
Mercy, and with one of their number, Margaret Binchy, a Sister of Mercy.

Maeve’s paternal grandfather, William Patrick Binchy, was born in 1858 and became a successful retail merchant in the town, the family store servicing a large local farming
community
, many of whom descended on the town on market day.

His immediate family consisted of his wife Annie, a woman seven years his junior (they married in 1896) and five children (a sixth died). In 1911 they lived with Mary, William Patrick’s mother, born in 1831, at No. 42 Main Street along with two female servants and a male apprentice.

Charleville is built on a crossroads. Main Street, with Chapel Street and Smith’s Street running across it, is as wide and straight a street now as it was then, with substantial three-storey buildings, many of them two-storey residential quarters over a street-level store.

One can easily imagine the noise on market day of the wagons, cattle and horses piling through, and the farmers with their lists, ‘busy men who hated having to take any time at all away from their deals and discussions on beasts’, clearly drawn upon by Maeve in her wonderful depiction of Sean O’Connor’s store near the beginning of
Light a Penny Candle
.

Another branch of the family lived at nearby Gortskagh, still within the official vicinity of Charleville. Head of the family was James Binchy, a solicitor also based on Main Street, born four years before William Patrick. The family firm of James Binchy & Son is today in its fourth generation. In the 1920s, James’s son Owen became the first Binchy to own an estate, Knight’s Lodge,
one of the choice houses of the area, now known as Binchy Park and still owned by the family.

Over the years the Binchy family’s commercial interests were quartered in various stores in the town. In 1914 they had a china and glass dealership, a hardware store in Smith’s Lane, and at some stage also a timber yard. Then, in or around 1920, they acquired Synan’s bread shop and set up Binchy’s Bakery at the corner of Smith’s Street, which Maeve’s favourite cousin, Daniel W. J. Binchy, born in 1940, managed from 1957 right up until it closed in 1982, after which he became a novelist.

Two more Binchys, both farmers, both called James and born within ten years of each other, lived in Ballynoran and in Churchtown respectively, again close to Charleville.

The family was prospering and extensive in the area. Since the two boys’ arrival towards the end of the eighteenth century, they had been instrumental in the reversion to power of the
indigenous
culture, with which they were now integrated.

The pattern is not an unusual one. Time and again, since the very first conquest of Ireland by Henry II in the twelfth century, English settlers were embraced by the indigenous Irish culture, instead of the Irish being converted to English ways, as had been intended.

But that is not to underestimate the effort and application it took for the Binchys to rise in their newfound society, or the character which was formed during this time and which then flowed down the line into the modern generations of the family, all of whom have their roots not only in the indigenous culture
of Ireland but also in the energy and frontiersman spirit of the two original brothers.

But the key to their rising beyond Charleville to high
political
, academic and literary positions in Europe and elsewhere in the world lies in their resolve, incubated in the culture of the Catholic Church. The Irish, fighting for their very identity in those days, lived in a theocracy. The Church brought you into its sphere of operations through baptism, educated you, policed you spiritually and morally, possibly employed you as priest or nun, and sent you out of the world at the end. Critical to the process was the Jesuits’ Society of Jesus, and Ireland was top of the list for ‘enlightenment’ from the moment it was formed. The first Jesuit school was established at Kilmallock in County Limerick in 1565.

In Maeve’s second novel
Echoes
(1985), we detect irony in her approbation of Jesuit teachers. The teacher in
small-town
Castlebay, Angela O’Hara, is said not to compare with Jesuit teachers, who are ‘on a different level entirely’. If only Miss O’Hara had been a man then she could have been a priest and taught the children properly, as doctor’s son David Power suggests. In fact, Angela O’Hara is the best kind of teacher imaginable.

The ‘level’ on which Jesuit teachers operated was emotional and psychological as well as academic and spiritual. The writer Catherine Cookson, for whom Maeve reserved no small amount of respect, a Catholic Irish girl who grew up on Tyneside in the north-east of England at the same time as Maeve’s father and
uncles were growing up in Charleville, was terrified of the Jesuit missioners because they filled her little head with fears of hell and purgatory. The primitive sense of the supernatural which they appealed to, and the punitive schedule of abuse, shame and guilt which they apparently imposed on their charges, put pain and fear on the religious agenda. In the mouths of Jesuit priests the flames of Hell were a reality, everlasting fire a destiny which could be met surprisingly easily.

Certainly a Jesuit education was rigorous and uncompromising, but it was also thorough, and it had need to be if Catholics were to counter the effects of the Protestant Ascendancy and be returned to the position they had once occupied in the land of which so many had been dispossessed.

The Binchys were ambitious: education was therefore a priority and they did what hard-working rising middle-class Catholic families did with their boys. They sent them to a Jesuit boarding school.

In 1911 five Binchy boys between the ages of eleven and
seventeen
– Michael, James, Joseph, Owen S. and Daniel A. Binchy – were being educated at the Jesuit college, Clongowes Wood, in Balraheen, County Kildare.

Academically brilliant, Clongowes has prepared Catholic pupils to play important roles in the political, economic, social and literary life of Ireland and beyond since its inception in 1814. But like many other Jesuit schools, it was once infamous for its uncompromising approach and tough discipline, as Joyce recalled from personal experience in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1915).

We know that Maeve’s uncle, Daniel Anthony Binchy,
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was there at eleven. Before being sent there he was educated by French nuns, and left a wryly understated note about the difference between the two experiences: his memories of the Jesuit education were not as warm as his recollections of the French nuns.

Daniel was bright and made very good use of the college. He matriculated in 1918, well disciplined, primed for eternity and very well educated for this world, too, to take up a place at University College Dublin, which had been founded as the Catholic University in 1854, and where at the very early age of twenty-four he was appointed Professor of Legal History and Jurisprudence. At twenty-nine he was appointed, ‘at British insistence’, Irish Minister to Germany. Hitherto Ireland had been represented in Europe only by British ambassadors.

Daniel was the model for the Binchy future and his was the route written in stone for Maeve, even as she prepared to leave St Anne’s in 1950. She had been born to a family that had risen against all odds. Its history and the value it attached to a good education lay behind the pressure on her to study hard and pass her exams and, as the eldest, to set the pace for her three siblings. Likewise, the difficulties and uncertainties inherent in such a rise in the world lay behind her father William’s
anxiety
and his warning to her that the money might not always be there. The world had taught the Binchys that nothing should be taken for granted.

In turn, an awareness of the pressure all this heaped on Maeve was almost certainly behind her mother Maureen’s constant,
anxious reassurance that she was the brightest and the best and would be bound to succeed.

Expectations for Maeve were from the start very high. What was new was that the Binchys were for the first time thinking of educating a
daughter
for professional and possibly international service.