Maeve Binchy (8 page)

Maeve borrowed a dress from a cousin and had a big velvet band let into the front. Diamante earrings were found to complete the outfit, but with frequent practice earlier in the day they had bitten into her ears, so that by the time of the dance she’d had to put patches of plaster on her lobes. Maeve painted the plaster blue to match her dress, though wasn’t quite certain she had done the right thing.

But then, as she was leaving the house, Maureen yet again came to the rescue. She looked at her daughter proudly and said, ‘You look so beautiful you’ll take the sight out of their eyes.’

Alas, it was a cataclysmic failure of a night, one that would inspire what her editor years later described as ‘one of the most powerful scenes she ever wrote – the party scene in
Circle of Friends
’. Nobody – not one single person – danced with her, and this was a private party. She was there with her friends and she couldn’t hide her utter failure. Her parents waited up for her until she came home, wanting to know not only that she was safe, but about every heartbeat of every dance. Maeve told them that she had been danced off her feet all night long.

Long afterwards she admitted this was a very black time. If earlier she had not dared admit a discrepancy between what
Maureen was always telling her about her beauty and the reality, she surely did now and what did it say of her mother’s love that she had duped her all her young life? For days Maeve persecuted herself by imagining people were gossiping behind her back in the tight little Dalkey community. The memory of it still stung on the day her Leaving Certificate results came through. But it was only one of many feelings that were running through her core that day.

Today she would hear whether she had passed – and she was worried sick. The nuns had given their opinion that she was not, after all, of a scholarly frame of mind. If she tried, she could be top at anything, but she had continued to dream and when all was said and done she liked laughing better than working.

She no longer had a particular ambition. She was down to read Law at university, but had no desire to be a lawyer. She didn’t at this point want to be a writer nor was she thinking about becoming a teacher. She wanted to enjoy life and with the results hanging over her she had been uncharacteristically moody and difficult at home, flaring up on any subject. Maureen realised that she was worried about her results and wondered if, like herself, Maeve would be more successful in work where no great further study was required.

At the same time, Maeve had not forgotten what had been sacrificed to get her this far. She was aware of her father’s
expectations
of all the children to pass their exams, and remembered his warning that money might not always be there. As the eldest child she felt a duty to prove that they, the children of ‘these great people’, as she referred to her parents, were indeed swans and not ducks.

Dalkey was such a small town and however familiar and friendly on the surface, it was, like every other small town, full of small-town gossips. Everyone knew where everyone was and what you were doing all day and night. It was like being in a goldfish bowl. It was even suspected that telephone calls – all of which were routed through the local telephone exchange in those days – were listened into by the local postmistress. Imagine the buzz if she failed!

Well, whatever happened, there was at least change in the air. Whether or not she got the results she needed for university, nothing would be the same any more. She was about to make a break with the past, and about time!

Even at twelve, when she first came to live in Dalkey, she sensed she was in the wrong place. Everything seemed to point in the opposite direction, to the bright lights of Dún Laoghaire and the very bright lights of Dublin – the city in striking distance and yet off the map for her. She was never allowed to go there, except with her mother to shop.

Now that Maeve was seventeen, Dalkey seemed just about the dullest place on earth. Walking with Philippa past the pitch of Dalkey United they could appreciate the leggy fellows
playing
football, but they’d never get to know them. There was no cinema, no place for young people to dance, or even to meet. On Castle Street, the main street, there was the Queen’s bar, the St Laurence Club at No. 17 – neither of which they could
possibly
go into, or would want to. They went to McKenna’s or Hill Stores for sweets, and there were a couple of cafés, one called The Matassa, but that was it. Most of the shops would close for
lunch and everywhere was shut by 6 p.m. Apart from a sortie for fish and chips there was nothing for Maeve and her friends to do.

The feeling of being trapped here had been gradual, but Maeve had become acutely aware of it after an exchange trip to France. A letter from a family in Compiègne, in northern France, had been passed to the Binchys by a friend. They were looking, they said, for an Irish family of a certain social status to take their daughter, Odile, for a few weeks in exchange for a child from England. The Binchys assumed that the snobbish element of the letter had been down to the family’s poor
understanding
of the English language, but it transpired that this was not the case at all.

When Maeve arrived in Compiègne she was dreadfully
nervous
– she had never been out of Ireland before. She said
‘très bien’
to everything, committing herself to she knew not what. The mother turned out to be a religious maniac. An impossibly rich aunt stamped around prodding people with her walking stick. The father took delight in penalising Maeve for her poor pronunciation of French by refusing to allow her to eat anything until she had got it right. This was a master stroke – Maeve learned good French very quickly after that.

When Odile’s letters started arriving from Ireland, however, things changed for the better. Odile was able to report that although the Binchys didn’t appear to be very wealthy they actually had two homes, one in the town close to Dublin and another on the far west coast by the sea at a place called Ballybunion. She had mistaken the house on Sandhill Road for
a second home! More important, Odile let slip that the Binchys had paid for everything, even her ice creams.

This had an immediate effect on the French household. A quick calculation showed that they owed Maeve more than £30 in hospitality and suddenly she was being taken to Chartres, to châteaux in the Loire, even to Brussels. The trip was completely transformed. They taught her to ride a horse and to hunt and insisted that she kept a diary of everything they had paid for her to do.

Maeve had got the travel bug; she enjoyed observing the doings and habits of people outside her little bubble of Dalkey.

Before Compiègne she had had no inkling that anyone thought at all differently to the way she had been brought up to think. She was so completely
of
Dalkey, and had so little
experience
beyond
Dalkey, that she had no reason to think that her home
in
Dalkey was singular in any way at all. It was while she was in France that she became determined to see more of the wider world.

And now that was once more at the forefront of her mind. What did it matter that no boy wanted to dance with her? She had decided that she was going to see the world before she’d let herself fall for any of them.

But first things first, she did not want to suffer the indignity of failing to matriculate. Today she had decided not to go to school with everyone else to get their results, but to cycle down to the Church of the Assumption – her church – and envelop herself in its comforting silence instead.

Maeve fell to her knees, praying that she would get the exam,
telling God that she would be good for the rest of her life if she passed.
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Like Niamh in
Light a Penny Candle
– the first of the O’Connor siblings to go to university – if she had prayed any harder she would have ‘prayed herself into a near coma’.

Fortunately, rescue was at hand.

When Maeve’s sister heard the news for which Maeve was waiting, she mounted her bicycle and flew through the town to tell her. When she appeared through the doors at the west end of the church and shouted the good news, there was great satisfaction, not just that Maeve had got the ‘Matric’, but that all four children were now on their way. For being the eldest of four it was Maeve who was setting the pace.

The two girls got back on their bikes and headed for home, acknowledging Maeve’s triumph to everyone on the street as they passed, and then to the shopkeepers who came to their doors to see what all the fuss was about.

It was the end of an era, and no one could begin to imagine just what a new era was about to begin.

N
o more travelling to and from the convent on the little train around the bay. It was life in the big city – Dublin – a city like no other, as James Joyce has his
alter ego
Stephen Dedalus exclaim to his friend Frank Budgen: ‘What a town Dublin is! … I wonder if there is another like it. Everybody has time to hail a friend and start a conversation…’
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In 1956, University College Dublin was located in a huge, classically designed building (now the National Concert Hall) situated in Earlsfort Terrace on the southern edge of St Stephen’s Green in the heart of the city, only a short way from the maternity unit where Maeve was born.

Initially she had signed up for BA Law and for King’s Inns with the intention of becoming a barrister, but soon realised that the law wasn’t for her and transferred to English, French
and History, with Latin her fourth subject. A year later she sat what they call First Arts in these subjects and then concentrated on French and History for her honours degree, which she took in 1959.

The novelty of university was immediately upon her. New sensations bombarded her on all sides. The noise and bustle were a hundred times bigger than at the Holy Child. Everyone seemed so much more grown up than her, with a confidence and spirit of independence unlike anything she’d encountered before.

Student social life, like that for millions of other young people in the 1950s whether or not they were at university, began in the coffee bar. The burgeoning coffee bar scene was the
defining
mark of the decade. From Dublin to Liverpool to London’s Soho, coffee bars were the new gathering places for the young, and youth was what the late ’50s and ’60s were all about.

At UCD the student coffee bar was known as the Annexe, as Maeve recalls faithfully in her novel
Circle of Friends
– the novel that owes so much to her experience at UCD in the pre-pill, pre-sexual revolution era, ‘when a Catholic culture’s threat of damnation was making its last stand against the forces of temptation’.
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The Annexe was located in Newman House, the student centre named after the Catholic theologian and scholar Dr John Henry Newman, first rector of the university. The building had been St Patrick’s House of the original Catholic University, founded a century earlier.

Located on St Stephen’s Green South, it was readily
accessible
via Earlsfort Terrace or through Iveagh Gardens at the rear
of the main university building. St Stephen’s Green itself and Iveagh Gardens are public parks, but were always reckoned by everyone in those days to be campus territory. Together with Newman University church, a stunning little building in
blue-grey
and red brick, next door to Newman House, the area made an impressive inner-city university site.

For Maeve the Annexe was a huge challenge. There were boys everywhere. Suddenly, from a small single-sex school and a single life, she found herself in an almost all-male environment. In the 1950s the vast majority of students at UCD were male, a species she knew nothing about even if she had discussed them with her friends in minute detail.

She had had so little contact with boys before and no boyfriends at all, other than Matt in Ballybunion, who hadn’t even been hooked, let alone landed. In the last year at school there’d been a lot of talk of her friends being taken by boys in cars up into the Dublin mountains, but she was never invited. She had met fellows at parties, but that was all. Boys were, as far as she was concerned, a species apart. And she was innocent not only of sex but of talking to boys in the first place.

In the Annexe it was inevitable that something would happen. In
Circle of Friends
Maeve is Benny in this very situation, sitting at a table with her friend, the shapely Nan. A small group of boys come over and their leader asks whether the girls would like to come down Grafton Street for some real coffee. He has eyes only for Nan, who puts him off lightly and with practised ease. But then to Benny’s alarm Nan offers her instead. To cover her blushes, Benny surprises herself by issuing an invitation of
her own: ‘Why don’t you bring a chair over and have a coffee here with us?’

And so it began, in reality for Maeve as in the fiction for Benny. Communication was easier than she had anticipated. The boys seemed almost normal – human beings with names and faculties. She managed the initial conversation with a lively charm and wit. There never was even a moment of silence (much dreaded), and soon she had quite forgotten her anxieties.

In the novel the boys accept Benny at once. One of them says that he’s heard that the Debating Society on a Saturday night is a lot of fun. We know that Maeve did become a force in the UCD Debating Society and it is easy to believe that her interest did start like this.

The society had a fine reputation for getting in
prominent
speakers, ‘like Seán Lemass
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and James Dillon.
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And it was a most enjoyable night, well attended,’ Tim Hannan, also a UCD student at this time, told me. ‘There’d always be a few hecklers in the audience.’ But it was also very much the preliminary to socialising. ‘Afterwards everyone went to the dance at the Gresham Hotel, next door to the Savoy cinema in O’Connell Street.’

In the novel, attending the dance is suggested but Benny cannot go because she is living at home and cannot be in Dublin at weekends. Poor Benny, what a dampener that must have been, and poor Maeve, for that was her situation too. At first, her parents insisted she spend the weekend at home in Dalkey, and every night during the week she would have to make her dark and lonely way home by bus or train – dark because after
the bus passed Booterstown Bird Sanctuary there was no street lighting at all.

Maeve used to long to have a room a few minutes’ walk from the university in Baggot Street, for many years home to the world’s most famous pub crawl, although pubs were not an attraction to her. In the 1950s few girls went into them, and Maeve didn’t drink alcohol at all until she was twenty-two. She had never been tempted to drink. Toothache as a child had always been treated by Maureen with a piece of cotton wool soaked in whiskey and Maeve hadn’t liked the taste. On another occasion she had added gin to the trifle at home when they’d run out of sherry and it hadn’t worked at all.

Maeve’s ideal in those days was to have a boyfriend who wore an Arran sweater, to dance to Dave Brubeck and to sip small cups of black coffee with him. That was the scene in the late 1950s.

William and Maureen were obviously concerned about how Maeve would handle her newfound independence. They must have been aware of just how vulnerable she was. In the fiction, Benny’s family want to give her the opportunity of a higher education but are determined not to let her grow out of the middle-class Catholic culture in which she has been brought up. Benny accuses her father of taking her to the top of the mountain, showing her what’s available and then refusing her a part of it.

For Maeve, the weekend ban lasted only the first term, but she returned home every night throughout her time at UCD. In reality the two sacred institutions around which life had turned
when she was a schoolgirl – family and religion – still
dominated
her life at university.

The start of the year left new students in no doubt of the heavy Catholic ethos at UCD. There was an opening Mass at which all students had to dress up and troop around in procession, and the front row of the lecture hall was always packed with novice nuns and black-suited students from religious seminaries bound for the pious life, looking notably neater than the main student body. Geraldine, who did History and French with Maeve, remembers, ‘It was still all very Catholic, the ’50s and the ’60s.’

Maeve recalled how she would think nothing of it when, at Friday-night dances at the Gresham Hotel, with the dance band in full swing, there’d be an announcement that a special
dispensation
had been arranged to allow the party-goers to eat meat, normally banned to Catholics on Fridays.

She and her friends still lived under the shadow of the Church and were full of the notion of sin. But Catholicism at UCD was in one way different to what they were used to. There was a serious political edge to it.

UCD was itself a Catholic institution. If you were a Catholic going to university in Ireland there was no option
but
to go to UCD. It was the university for Catholics, and founded as such. Trinity College on the far side of the green was for Protestants and even after they let Catholics into Trinity, the Catholic Archbishop regarded it as a sin to go there, as Eve Malone tells us in
Circle of Friends
, where the sense is also that Trinity undergraduates were intellectual snobs. With great irony, given the intellectual track record of the Catholic Binchys, Maeve
has students at a rugby match against Trinity at Lansdowne Road chant, ‘Come on Collidge – C-O-L-L-I-D-G-E’, as if Catholics are so thick they can’t even spell.

Beneath the Trinity–UCD rivalry lay a thick layer of serious history. During the Second World War, Catholic Ireland elected not to fight alongside Britain (not surprisingly, given the history between the two countries), even though many individuals did fight of their own volition, as Aisling’s older brother Sean does in the fiction. To mark the politics, on VE Day the pro-British, Protestant Trinity (whose students obviously did fight for Britain) raised the flags of some of the victorious nations, and lowered the Irish tricolour. Famously, Charles Haughey, who later served three terms as Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Eire, was among a group of UCD students who burned a Union Jack outside Trinity in protest at their action.

The religious–political edge at UCD was far keener even than that, however. Earlier in the century, when Maeve’s uncle Daniel Binchy was a student there, two students actually became martyrs to the Catholic cause.

On Easter Monday 1916, the Irish Volunteers, from which the IRA (the Irish Republican Army) descended, with various other revolutionary republican bodies
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seized certain locations in Dublin, and at a key moment the Catholic Patrick Pearse read the famous ‘Proclamation of the Republic’ outside the Post Office on Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street), boldly proclaiming Ireland’s independence of Britain.
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It was an impressive manifesto, more enlightened than that of any other country in Europe at that time. ‘Civil liberty,
equal rights and equal opportunities’ – women were to have equal rights with men and everyone was going to be able to vote. Pearse and the other leaders of the Easter Rising were
summarily
arrested and executed by the British. But their work had been done. In the 1918 general election the Republicans won 73 out of 105 seats, and declared independence from Britain the following January.

When Britain did not accept the vote, guerrilla warfare broke out on the streets of Dublin, just as Daniel Binchy took up his place at the university. Earlsfort Terrace became a fortress. It is hard to convey the intensity of feeling on campus at this time. Some students were actually founder members of the Irish Volunteers – passionate, idealistic boys like Frank Flood, who had won a scholarship to read Engineering at UCD, and his school friend Kevin Barry, who was studying Medicine there.

Flood was active in the Literary and Historical Society, which had begun as the Historical, Literary and Aesthetical Society, functioned as a debating society and later became the student union at UCD.
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Daniel Binchy would shortly become Auditor or President of the L&H, as it was known. He knew Flood and his friends, among them Tom Kissane and Mick Robinson, were all impassioned Republicans. Todd Andrews, another Republican student, noted in his memoirs, ‘There were a number of students who were known to be IRA, but unless they were in the same Company or Battalion they never spoke or associated with one another on the basis of their common allegiance.’

No one publicised their involvement with the IRA for
obvious
reasons, but a cryptic note in the Binchy Archive at UCD
observes that Daniel Binchy arrived in 1918, ‘when political commitments were hard to avoid’.

The scale of the madness that was to follow was as yet
unimagined
. With justification people can still talk about heroic ideals and courageous boys believing they were righting the wrongs of 800 years of history, during which successive British forces had robbed them of the traditions and customs that went to make up what being Irish means.

Flood, who was nineteen, was arrested while attacking the Dublin Metropolitan Police at Drumcondra. No police were killed, but he was charged with high treason and executed by hanging at Mountjoy Prison.

He requested to be buried next to his friend and comrade, Kevin Barry, also nineteen, who’d been captured while taking part in a raid on a military lorry collecting bread in Church Street, during which a young British soldier was shot dead. Barry was court-martialled and executed, again by hanging, the expectation of a common criminal – not honourably despatched by firing squad.

The hanging of Kevin Barry outraged public opinion not only in Ireland but throughout the world, particularly because of his youth. ‘The Ballad of Kevin Barry’ appeared soon afterwards. No one knows who wrote it, but it remains a part of Irish folk tradition and has been covered by Leonard Cohen and by Paul Robeson in his
Songs of Struggle
.
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In the wake of these terrible events the Irish Free State was established, and in December of that same year talks began which led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which ended British rule
in Ireland, except in six northern counties of Northern Ireland. The North–South divide, soon marked by civil war and leading eventually to the Troubles which spilled over onto the streets of London from the 1970s, had begun.
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