Maeve's Times (21 page)

And what will happen to them all? The mixed villages will have to go, for a start. When the whole truth of this week’s fighting comes out it will be shown that many of the killings were to settle old scores, feuds and hatreds growing and festering in tight communities where the fear of fear grew and grew. Partition has never worked well anywhere else, as we all know, but it might be the only solution.

On 6 March 1987, the
Herald of Free Enterprise
ferry on the Dover to Calais route capsized near the Belgian port of Zeebrugge in a disaster which killed 253 crew and passengers. When reporters were cordoned off from the site, Maeve quietly bought a ferry ticket so she could access the passenger terminal to talk to passengers and relatives. This is her report from Dover.

T
here was a fine coat of snow over the Cliffs of Dover making them whiter than ever at the weekend. The flag was at half-mast on Dover Castle … the town, which has always claimed to be the largest passenger port in the world, had a heavy feel about it as the reality seemed to sink in.

One of the FEs was not coming home. There are eight of the Townsend Thoresen ships called
Free Enterprise
, and, just as Sealink vessels are known by affectionate nicknames or initials, the Free Enterprises were always the FEs, and they were always considered unsinkable. All day long the local radio station broadcast the telephone numbers for enquiries, but stressed that there really wasn’t very much more information.

From Friday to Sunday, distraught relatives moved in a maddened circle from Dover to Maidstone where the police headquarters had been set up, on to Gatwick where some survivors had been flown in, then back to Dover where 30 surviving crew members had returned unexpectedly on another ferry.

The horror of the first published lists was that nobody was utterly certain whether this was a list of known dead or known living. So to hear a name read from a list could have meant the best or the worst.

In Enterprise House, the company’s Dover headquarters, the staff were red-eyed with lack of sleep and tears shed for friends and for the very fact of the catastrophes … families sat in little clusters on the benches of the big departure hall, they followed the staff with their eyes and whenever a telephone rang on a desk, a small crowd would gather immediately, just in case.

Wearily, the ferry staff faced television teams and made statements. ‘I have been asked to say that the Kent Police will answer any questions from now on.’

‘Well what have we all been doing here for God’s sake?’ asked a man, distraught for news of his son.

‘I don’t know, I’m terribly sorry, but we realise that the lists are incomplete …’

The man, whose face was so drawn it looked like a skull, clutched at her hand. ‘If you do know, I’d prefer to hear it now. I don’t want his mother to go on hoping.’

The tired girl from the ferries swore that she did not know. She pressed several ten-pence pieces into his hand so that he could ring the police in Maidstone. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.

‘I know you’re sorry. He was only 19,’ the man said ….

A woman, who was waiting for her sister-in-law to come back from this Continental shopping trip, said that they might all be better off at home, looking at their televisions. A Salvation Army woman gave her more tea and sat down beside her on the bench.

‘Tell me about your sister-in-law. What did she go to buy?’ she asked.

‘She might be drowned,’ the woman was frightened to talk about her in case it might bring bad luck.

‘But we don’t know that. Tell me what did she go to buy?’

‘Well she said there wasn’t all that much in Zeebrugge and she would go on to this place called Knokke-Heist that was nearby. What will happen to her children if she’s gone?’

‘Don’t think about that yet. The Lord will help, tell me about this place where she went shopping …’

Around the terminal building the crowds came and went as if by looking at that cold, grey sea they could somehow make it more likely that people had been taken from it the previous Friday night. And all around the Eastern Dock there were the distressingly inappropriate advertisements saying that the Continent is nearer than you think and perhaps the saddest of all, the big signs: ‘They’re here, the new big value luxury ferries.’

It was the endless waiting that was so hard to watch, even as an outsider. People passive in the never-never land of not being sure a full day and a half after the tragedy.

Gently, the police, the ferry officials and clergymen explained that there had been such a panic; nobody was too sure of what names were given and what names were taken. These English-sounding names would be unfamiliar to Flemish and French speakers ….

And in the town which has so strenuously opposed the building of a Channel tunnel, people said that it would be a crime if this disaster were to lead to the public believing that a tunnel was the only way to cross the sea.

Quietly, and without the usual excitement and fuss of people going on their holidays, the passengers filed on and off the rows of ferryboats in the harbour. And in a wet, cold, sad Dover, the ships sailed in and out under the white cliffs. The seagulls called as they always did but through the sleet and in the silence they seemed as sad as funeral bells.

M
y neighbour in London has lived for 81 years in her house. She came there when she was five. Before that she lived in a cobbled mews where her father was a coachman but he lost his position because the family he worked for decided to go over to the horseless carriage. The mews where she once lived changed hands for three quarters of a million pounds not long ago.

They liked the new house when they came there in 1909 and had five nice peaceful years before the First World War. She remembers when that war ended in 1918 and all the excitement and the men coming back. And she worked in a big firm which gave a celebration party where George Robey sang. Every lady who worked in the firm was allowed to invite a gentleman and every gentleman a lady – the night is as clear to her as if it had been last week.

Much clearer, actually. Last week wasn’t all clear.

Her sight is so bad these days that she dare not even boil a kettle in case she burns herself, so another neighbour, a woman from further up the road, comes in and makes her breakfast, her lunch and her tea. The State, through the welfare services, gives an allowance for this, called an Attendance Allowance, of £27 a week.

This is a fairly regular procedure now in London, where there is a real need for it. A lot of elderly people have no relations nearby, the very nature of big city living means they have few close friends.

Britain is a very ageing society, the contrast between there and here is extraordinary. Here the parks are filled with children, in London they are filled with the old. In Dublin you hold a supermarket door open for a mother with a pram, in London for an elderly couple with a basket on wheels.

The health cuts have meant that a serious attempt is being made to keep old people out of residential care. On a purely factual and financial level it has been worked out that it is much dearer to put a person in a home permanently than it is to provide what are called back-up services. Attendance allowances are a part of the back-up. The State also provides a Home Help twice a week for two hours on each occasion, and a bath attendant once a week to assist in washing. The Home Helps often say that they are more needed to assist as company than as cleaners, and that sometimes they are followed around by the people whose houses they are trying to clean. The need for conversation is greater than for vacuuming.

The bath attendants say that very often they are told that the old person ‘doesn’t feel like a bath today’. It’s too cold or they’re too tired or whatever. It’s not a police state, they say, they can’t drag the person upstairs and insist on cleaning them.

So back-up services and a fair amount of people calling in and taking an interest have meant that this neighbour has been able to live in her home reasonably well for the past few years, since her sight and hearing and mobility have all so disimproved. She has resisted sheltered accommodation, rightly saying that where could be more sheltered than where she is? A house whose every floorboard and stair step has been familiar for eight decades. And people will find her, she says, if she has a fall. She has given the keys to people who will come and look for her if she doesn’t answer the phone.

She didn’t answer the phone last week. Her bed was empty when I went in. She was lying underneath it, unable to get up. There were no bones broken, so she couldn’t be taken to hospital. The police, who now work the ambulances because of the strike, helped to carry her downstairs and settle her in a chair.

Snow white and shocked from who knows how many hours like that, she was determined to be cheerful. Part of the generation that doesn’t like to worry the doctor, she agreed under duress to let him call. He is a determined man, he said she must go into hospital to be looked at, and because casualty departments will admit an ambulance with an old person if it comes with a doctor’s referral, she was taken to Charing Cross Hospital in Fulham.

And that’s where she is today, while they try to decide whether she will be able to manage at home any more. The last time she had a fall they built an extra rail on the stairs; the time before that they arranged a commode.

People have shaken their heads darkly and said, ‘Thatcher’s Britain!’ They say the old lady is not able to look after herself and there shouldn’t be all this cheeseparing and pussyfooting about, people like that should be given good residential care in their last years, they worked hard enough for it during their time.

But I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I can see that, alarming as it might be to neighbours who are at the moment relatively mobile, an old woman might like to live and die in a house where she has been since the year Lloyd George tried and failed to bring in the People’s Budget and Bleriot tried and achieved the first flight from Calais to Dover.

Yet, when I see her all clean and pink in a hospital bed with nurses around and company and no fear of falling and lying through the long hours of the night alone on a floor, then I think she must stay in care. She doesn’t get frightened of burglars when she’s in hospital.

She doesn’t find her heart thumping in fright when someone knocks on a door after seven in the evening, thinking that it’s muggers like she reads about in the local papers. And there is an argument that says since she can’t really enjoy her own home maybe she should go into something more organised.

But there’s another argument which says we only have one crack at life and if you protest so strongly that you want to be in your own place, regardless of falls and knocked-over tables and things not being as clean as they used to be, then that’s where you should be.

And that is actually what Thatcher’s Britain is trying to do for old people … keep them in their homes.

It doesn’t, of course, give nearly enough in resources. You get the feeling that the Prime Minister wants a return to old-fashioned values of neighbourliness and concern, because the government doesn’t have to pay for such things. And yet to my intense annoyance I can’t disagree with her. I only wish I had her sense of certainty about everything. It would be great to know which bed my neighbour should sleep in tonight, and know it was the right place for her.

B
eckett looks 54, not 74; he looks like a Frenchman, not an Irishman, and he certainly looks more like a man about to go off and do a day’s hard manual work rather than direct one of his own plays for a cast which looks on him as a messiah come to rehearsal.

He has spikey hair which looks as if he had just washed it or had made an unsuccessful attempt to do a Brylcreem job on it and given up halfway through. He has long narrow fingers, and the lines around his eyes go out in a fan, from years of smiling rather than years of intense brooding.

He is in London to direct the San Quentin Workshop production of
Endgame
and
Krapp’s Last Tape
for Dublin’s Peacock Theatre. It will open in Dublin on May 26th. Beckett has become very involved with this San Quentin group since the early sixties when he heard what was happening in the big American Jail.

One of the convicts, Rick Cluchey, who was serving what might have been a life sentence for a kidnap and robbery but which turned out to be only 11 years, persuaded the authorities to let the prisoners do Beckett plays and they performed them in a studio theatre in what used to be the prison’s gallows room.

The plays made such an impact on the prisoners, who immediately saw similarities between the imprisonment felt by Beckett’s characters and themselves, that they were repeated over and over. The word got out and it even got as far as Beckett in Europe.

Nowadays, Cluchey and Beckett are friends, something that the convict in San Quentin would have thought impossible. Cluchey and his wife, Teresita Garcia-Suro, have called their two young children after Beckett and his wife, Suzanne.

Rick Cluchey knows nearly every word that Beckett has written but when he is in a position of actor with Beckett as director, he says he tries to forget everything he ever thought himself, tries to strip his mind and memory of actors’ tricks and his own interpretations, and just wait like a blank sheet of paper for Beckett to tell him what to do.

This is what was happening down at the Riverside Studios in London where they were getting the rather minimal set ready for a rehearsal of
Endgame
. They needed a chair for Hamm to sit in, a ladder for Clov to run up and down, and a dustbin for Nagg. Nell, the other dustbin inhabitant, hadn’t arrived yet (she is Teresita and was coming over from America the next day), so this day Beckett played Nell.