Maeve's Times (42 page)

Tomorrow night I will be unpacking them in a hotel that looks out on the Pacific Ocean.

In the old days I used to pack in 10 minutes. The old days are gone. I’m ashamed to say it has taken a week to pack.

I got a clipboard – not just a piece of paper but a serious clipboard – and I listed all the items. I felt somehow powerful and in control as I wrote down things such as: Sellotape; torch; Velcro rollers; corkscrew; good black dress.

There was a time when I used to think only the insane would make lists like this, but alas I have travelled to too many places and found myself disappointed with the contents of the two glaring cases when I arrived. Like the time I took six pairs of shoes, six T-shirts and no skirts whatsoever to South Africa.

So I realised it was time for the clipboard. It’s not that anyone is getting old or forgetful or anything. Lord, no. What people like myself have nowadays is what the Americans call a ‘senior moment’. It’s a wonderful phrase and one I have taken up enthusiastically. It takes the whole harm out of being bewildered.

Tomorrow night, when I am unpacking the glaring suitcases in a faraway place, I don’t want any surprises. But if it were only a matter of what you took with you for six weeks it would be reasonable enough; sadly, it’s also a matter of what you leave behind you.

There will be other people staying in the house here while we are gone, so it’s not a matter of ramming awful things into a cupboard and saying that it can all be dealt with in December. It means a visit to the dump, which always frightens me because I assume everyone there is getting rid of dismembered bodies and that they think I am doing the same. And a visit in what might, hopefully, be off-peak hour to the bottle bank and the paper bank – rain forests of newspapers and magazines unread going back to be pulped somewhere. And taking out all the things from the press where the table napkins are, in case I might have hidden some cheese there to stop me eating it.

And one of the things I love to do, in what a psychiatrist friend calls my pathetically over-documented life, is stick my snaps in an album. I don’t feel right until I’m up to date with this. So it involves getting out all the pictures since summer, and oohing and aahing over a trip to the Isle of Man, and to Schull, and to the Merriman Summer School, and to get an honorary degree in Queen’s, and to visit Dickson’s Nurseries in Newtownards, and a party in London, and a magical day at the National Ploughing Championships which I think I enjoyed more than anything else this year.

Sorting out all that takes time.

And there are the letters to write which I will not take with me and carry around the world as I have done so often: instead, I will stay up late and write them before I go.

And I won’t worry that the cats will miss us because cats have their own agenda and they will think whoever is here is us really, just as long as the bowl of food is put out and someone tells them they are wonderful.

And it doesn’t really matter that we will be in some places where it is snowing and others where the sun will be splitting the stones.

And as usual, Gordon is calm and has his own clipboard to humour me and tries to head off too many ‘senior moments’ by reminding me to take my laptop computer, which I nearly forgot.

I read once in an etiquette book that if you are about to travel, you should take out an advertisement in a quality paper and tell society of your plans. So in a way, that’s what I am doing.

T
here is a dangerous tendency of thinking your own time was the best, and there were no days like your days. Journalists fall into this trap more easily than anyone else.

It’s as if we want people to know what stirring times we lived through, what dramas our newsroom saw and what near-misses we had, and what amazing never-to-be-equalled camaraderie we all shared.

All over Ireland this week there will be people telling such tales of Douglas Gageby’s time.

And even as I write his name I feel forward.

I never called him anything except Mr Gageby.

I met him when I was a 27-year-old schoolteacher in Dublin, sharing a dream with half the country that maybe I could write if someone would let me.

Even when I nearly caught up with him in age and we were friends, when he asked me to call him Douglas I could never do it. He was too important.

At the job interview where he asked what I would do if I were to run the Woman’s Page I suggested that we relegate Fashion to one day, Cookery to another, and then get on with what people would be interested in on the other four days.

He asked mildly what I thought people might be interested in, and I blinded him with my views.

‘Of course, she’s never worked a day in her life in a newspaper,’ he said to Donal Foley, the news editor.

‘She has to learn somewhere,’ Donal said, and Mr Gageby nodded and said that was fair enough.

So who wouldn’t love someone who took such a mad risk?

My memory of those days was that he seemed to be forever in his office.

Day and night.

That wasn’t possible because we knew he had a great family life, he often talked about his children, and he always talked about his wife, Dorothy.

He was invited everywhere, but he was never a great one for going to receptions or dinners, except the Military History Society of Ireland which he was very keen on.

He was handsome, he was confident at work, he was happy in his home life, he was courageous and he was dragging the paper into modern times.

No wonder so many of us were mad about him.

He had, of course, a short fuse.

There is nobody who doesn’t have a Mr Gageby experience of some kind. Like when he would bellow his annoyance at something that appeared in Yesterday’s paper.

There was never such a thing as Today’s paper, there was the one we had written Yesterday which, according to him, was full of faults and mistakes and unbelievable oversights, or Tomorrow’s, which was going to be spectacular and we would stick everyone else to the ground with our stories, insights and backgrounds.

I have seen Mr Gageby incandescent with rage about a sports writer who said that a match was a nip-and-tuck affair and gave no further detail, and a financial journalist who said the AGM of some company was predictable, but hadn’t explained what had been predicted.

He has been white-faced over someone who missed the one big row that week in the Senate, or called the ceremony that happens in England the Trooping OF the Colour when there should be no OF in it, apparently. And somebody invariably got it wrong, and somebody else invariably let it past.

I have been at the receiving end when the Woman’s Page had a series of apologies in it.

We regret that when we said 11½ pounds of split peas, we actually meant 1 to 1½ pounds of split peas.

We regret that when we said this dress in Richard Alan’s cost £20 we actually meant it cost £200.

We regret we have given the wrong number of the Gay Switchboard, the wrong score in the All-Ireland.

His eyes were narrow. I wondered how I had ever thought he was handsome.

‘Your page is a laughing stock,’ he said. ‘With the possible exception of the
Straits Times
in Malaysia I have never seen a worse Features page.’

My face was scarlet for 48 hours. I contemplated emigrating.

Next week it was forgotten and we could breathe again.

But, by God, how he stood up for us, all of us.

He never gossiped about one to another, and he fought our enemies and people who said we were less than great.

He said that we reported what we saw.

Even when his back was against the wall over what we had reported or misreported.

We knew we would not be sold down the river.

And I know he had hard times in Stephen’s Green clubs when some of us were a bit light-hearted about the British royal family.

And though I lived my whole life slightly in awe of him, it was not of his doing. He was warm and friendly and interested in the lives of all his workforce.

When I took all my courage in hand and invited him to lunch with us, he said he would come if we had one course, and that he really liked sardines with lemon juice. He may, of course, have been protecting himself and Dorothy against botulism, since they knew only too well some of my limitations through the cookery page and my misunderstandings of presenting food.

If you were going to lunch with someone who had used a picture of open-heart surgery to illustrate veal casseroles, perhaps you, too, might have asked for sardines.

But we lunched happily summer after summer, alternately in their house and ours.

And it was wonderful to be in the presence of a couple who loved each other and never felt they had to hide this from anyone else.

I would have liked them to live forever as part of all of our lives.

But they didn’t, and I hope their family will always know how many of us got a great and exciting start in our writing lives under his editorship.

And how proud we were to be part of the time when he took our newspaper out of the shadows and into the light.

Every time I think of Mr Gageby I straighten myself up a little and hope to try and do him some kind of credit somewhere along the line.

Y
ou would get the smell half a street away, coffee like it never smelled at home. And the fresh-from-the-oven cakes and buns, six of them on a plate ready and waiting for you on the table.

Long before the days of self-service, the waitresses would come and serve you, always with a few words about the world we lived in. Like the rain maybe, or the sales, or Peggy Dell playing the piano in a furniture shop across the road, or the marriage of Princess Grace, or the hardy souls who swam all the year round in our cold seas.

And then they would leave you to your own chat, going off to talk on other topics at other tables.

Bewley’s was filled with characters and we would talk about them for a bit before settling down to our own chat. There used to be a woman with a handsome, ravaged face and wild and curly hair, wearing a matted fur coat with not much underneath it. There was a rumour that she was a wealthy person and that someone had left Bewley’s a sum of money to make sure she was fed every day, which she always was, with great kindness and charm.

There was an old man whose coat was tied with a rope, who always complained that the tea was cold. The thin, slightly stooped waitress would feel the side of the teapot and assure him that it would roast the hand off you, so then he would grudgingly drink it.

There were men with sheaves of papers covered in figures, adding and subtracting; there were well-known poets and writers and actors. Real celebrities were there, such as Maureen Potter at one table or Eamonn Andrews at another, and everyone would just nod at them, delighted to be sharing the same aromatic air – but we would never go up and disturb them.

When I was a student we could make one cup of coffee last an hour and a half and, like everyone else, we felt a slight guilt in case this sowed the seeds of the eventual decline of Bewley’s fortunes. But we had to make it last because nobody wanted to leave the warm, happy coffee and sugar-flavoured fug and go out into the cold, rain-filled streets. And nobody had the price of another cup of coffee.

I look back on hours and hours of conversation then, about communism, about how to starch petticoats, about who would be on the committee of the L & H debating society. And about how, when we were old and rich, we would come back from overseas and buy a whole plate of cakes and have three coffees each. It was the 1950s then, and we all assumed we would have to go away to get a job, and a lot of us did.

Then, when I was a young teacher, I would bring the pupils’ exercise books and correct them in Bewley’s. History essay after history essay, more coffee, more cigarettes to keep me going, and the waitresses would be most sympathetic.

‘You lot earn your money,’ one of them said to me. I thought she earned hers much harder, clearing up marble table after marble table of slopped coffee and crumbs, but there was never a complaint.

Sometimes, when I didn’t even have time to go in, I would stand and watch the windows and wallow in the smell. The amazing sight of beans jumping, being ground just for our pleasure – it was very heady. And then we all bought our first coffee-makers there and were surprised that it didn’t taste quite as good at home.

When I joined
The Irish Times
there was Bewley’s right opposite us at a time when it was slightly easier to cross the road than it is now. And there were many long discussions there too. Things that were too private to be discussed in the Pearl bar or in Bowes but which needed the solidarity of the marble table and the almond bun.

Like what? I don’t know. Love, hope, disappointment, press freedom, whether we had better coverage of something than the other papers, elections, sports, and what readers really wanted and whether or not we should try to give it to them.

In those days the budget extended to more than one promised cup of coffee. But when the bill was being totted up the waitress would ask, ‘How many almond buns?’

The number would be admitted.

‘And did you have butter with them?’ she would inquire, in the kindly but firm way that a priest might have asked you, ‘did you take pleasure in it?’ a long time ago.

Oh yes, we always had butter with the almond buns. Like we always loved going in to sink down and forget the outside world in Bewley’s, and like we sang carols outside it for many Christmases, and like we always felt safe there and at home.

It was all things to all people and we are allowed to be sentimental and sad that a little bit of everybody’s past has gone and that we can’t conjure it up any more just for the price of a cup of coffee.

T
he news programme announces the engagement in the little minimarket where people are doing their morning shopping. The younger people ignore it, as they continue to root around looking for extra complimentary CDs among the magazines or to lick bits of frozen yoghurt from the outside of the cartons ….