Maeve Binchy (10 page)

We do not know the book of French essays she was reading, but the message is that of the existentialists. In the 1950s and 1960s much of the philosophy that was underwriting the great change in attitudes was coming out of France, and from one couple in particular.

Jean-Paul Sartre was the principal exponent of existentialism in France and exercised a considerable influence on the thinking
of students and the ‘beat’ movement after the Second World War, in particular on the student rebellions of the 1960s. In 1953, Sartre’s wife, Simone de Beauvoir, kick-started the feminist revolution with
The Second Sex
, the book in which the phrase ‘women’s liberation’ was used for the first time.

If Maeve was reading French at UCD in the late 1950s there is no doubt that she would have been studying existential
philosophy
. Existentialism was in any case in the ether at this time and Maeve’s ‘return to self’ was precisely what existentialism is all about. Later I would have it confirmed that Sartre was indeed Maeve’s mentor and life guide.
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His is a philosophy to which she would have taken naturally, for it holds that decisions important to the individual are not solved by painstaking intellectual exploration and dissection of the facts and the laws of thinking about them, but by
action
. It called upon Maeve’s passionate, intuitive side. Actions, not words. The motto of the Holy Child, no less!

To become liberated we have to be able to cut ourselves free from the systems that control our thinking, which in her case put Catholicism directly into the target area. There will
inevitably
be a chaotic period when everything is up in the air (which for Maeve and others of her generation delineated the 1960s), before the pieces of the jigsaw settle down into a true picture of who we are. No one can simply be told how to live; you have to discard what you are born to and find out for yourself; you have to recreate your own essence, and then invent projects to meet your purpose and thereby confer meaning on your existence. This is exactly what Maeve set out to do.

What she referred to as ‘my revelation on the park bench’ was far more than a moment of recognition that crippling
self-consciousness
was wasting her life away: it was a statement that she did not intend to be a victim of other people’s perceptions or live on the periphery of someone else’s idea of what was an acceptable style. The implication was that hers would truly be a meaningful existence, not wasted by being a follower of
fashion
, nor would she seek reassurance about life’s finite nature by worshipping idols such as humanity, science or some divinity. The Sermon on the Mount, which promised her and other woebegone people a great life in Heaven, was not going to be enough. Sartre was about
now
.

Maeve’s temple would become her self. Her revelation brought her to
self
-belief, put her on the track to authenticity, wary of affectation, hostile to pretension and fiercely loyal to those who were her friends because of who she was rather than how she measured up to fashionable criteria. The important thing immediately was that she now accepted the hand that Nature had dealt her. It was like she already knew who she was and had suddenly been given permission to
be
that person. Once the veil of self-consciousness fell away she let her real self express itself, intellectually, emotionally, even physically. ‘From then onwards I was never afraid. I wore miniskirts in the days when no fat girl should have, and with total delight…’
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Not being
self-conscious
opened a door to other things – such as travel and to other cultures and traditions outside the Catholic Church. She became ‘more interested in listening to other people talking, and hearing their stories’. Perhaps most important, it gave her 
the courage eventually not only to be herself but to write about these new principles for others.

Meanwhile, her decision to relinquish the idea of the duffel coat had a surprise piece of irony attached to it. A duffel coat was always reckoned to be highly appropriate attire for the budding 1950s existentialist. A few years later, Jack Kerouac revealed that the syllable ‘beat’, enshrined in ‘beatnik’, had in fact been chosen as a shortened form of the Catholic word ‘beatitude’ and was a hidden reference to the fact that he was a Catholic.

Maeve would have very much liked the image of the universe as a vast sea of compassion, but having laid aside the duffel coat she had unwittingly also laid down the apparel of Roman Catholicism, which was the principal institution that controlled her thinking. Eventually, although she didn’t realise it yet, her Catholicism would indeed have to go, if she was truly to stand alone.

From this moment, ‘Maeve blossomed,’ remembers Geraldine MacCarthy. ‘She became the centre of a crowd.’ Now, lectures took second place and she would be seen more often than not in the Annexe, a smiling bubbly figure amidst her circle of friends, mostly giggling female students, hanging on her every word.
There developed what later came to be identified as Maeve’s unique style – a rapid-flow delivery of stories, anecdotes and observations on life. Said Patricia Hamilton, ‘She became larger than life, very good sense of humour, a good wit. She was
very
popular. Much more popular than she ever was at school.’ From being someone ‘not very obvious’, she was suddenly noticeable even to people who weren’t her friends.

Maeve no longer lived life on anybody else’s terms. In particular she stopped worrying about not having a boyfriend. ‘It was a freeing thing for her,’ Valerie said. ‘She could say, I’m not competing with you for men, so I’m free to be myself.’ Her crowd now, ‘the people who wanted to have coffee and cakes with me, or dance with me, did it because they liked
me
’.
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She didn’t care if a guy had spots, or lank hair falling into his eyes, if he was nice and interested in things.

Her crowning glory was being invited by Myles McSwiney, the President of the Literary and Historical Society (which had, by now, become the UCD student union), to serve on his committee. This was a massive endorsement and made a welcome impact on her social life. Maeve once said that it was the best day of her life until 1976, when her husband asked her to marry him, because L&H organised the dances every Saturday night. There was a huge frisson about who you were going to meet at the Saturday-night dance, even if the Cinderella hour for Maeve was the 11.07 bus to Dalkey.

Subsequently, Maeve did become close to a boy she referred to as the campus hero. She said she didn’t fall in love with him, but plenty of her girlfriends did. Perhaps he was the model for Jack
Foley, the UCD campus hero whom Benny falls in love with in
Circle of Friends
. If so, it is instructive to see what becomes of the relationship in the novel. After Foley has cheated on Benny with Nan, her friend, he begs her to come back to him, but Benny refuses because she has become her own woman, and no man has the power to dominate her life any longer.

No man would ever have the power to demean Maeve in this way either.

There was a part of her which actually preferred the company of women to men, and she was as intensely loyal to her women friends at UCD as she had been as a girl in school. Solidarity with women was about as political as Maeve got. And with her newfound self-confidence she could even allow herself a little grown-up viciousness too, as was demonstrated on one occasion with quite terrifying force.

Barbecues at White Rock in Killiney Bay, an open-sea bathing place accessed by a steep path from the Dalkey end of the Vico Road in the lea of Dalkey/Killiney Hill, were great summertime excitements when Maeve was an undergraduate. White Rock has been a popular resort for centuries, with bathhouses even in the eighteenth century, and there’s always the possibility that dolphins will be seen at play close to shore.

On this particular occasion – a barbecue to celebrate St Patrick’s Day – things began badly and didn’t get much better. As they were scrambling down to the beach Maeve, still a
non-drinker
, dropped her bottle of orange squash, smashing the bottle. ‘Thank God it’s not the wine!’ someone shouted. Maeve was furious as she knew it meant she’d be thirsty all evening.
This little accident turned out to be but a minor preliminary, however, for an act of almost Golding-esque barbarity.

As the wine flowed and inhibitions were relaxed, the sun went down and flames from the fire picked out a girl going off into the shadows with the long-haired boyfriend of Maeve’s best friend.

Maeve was incandescent. Her best friend’s tears were her business, as she saw it, and there in the dying embers of the evening she came up with the idea that punishment was in order. The boy had by this time fallen asleep, and Maeve’s plan was to creep round to him and cut off his long hair while he slept. And she did!

She described the act as ‘the most violent thing I did in my youth’ and excused it by saying that friends of hers had done far worse things (‘or said they did’). Maeve’s solidarity with her best friend shines through, but in the symbolism of the act, worthy of Delilah, so does a developing attitude towards the male of the species.

Maeve chose to cut off the boy’s hair, not that of the girl, who was possibly guilty to a greater degree than the boy by virtue of her being a girl. Her betrayal of Maeve’s best friend flew in the face of the loyalty code of the sisterhood. Perhaps this passed through her mind, for when eventually the episode at White Rock made it into an article in her column in the
Irish Times
, Maeve made some amendments to the story. She didn’t admit to doing the hair cutting personally, it was described as a group activity. And it was the girl’s ponytail, not the boy’s, that was lopped.

W
ith all the emotional and psychological hiatus and socialising at UCD, Maeve’s finals did not go well. ‘To my mind,’ she said, ‘it was a miracle I got any exam at all.’

She will have been sad for her father, the First Class Honours graduate who had such high expectations of her. It was almost Clare O’Brien’s humiliation – Clare, the scholarship girl in
Echoes
, misses her finals because her illegitimate baby is born pre-term. There was no pregnancy in Maeve’s case but, as in the case of Clare, getting a degree had been the driving purpose of her life thus far.

The result was worse than Maeve was ever prepared to
admit
. She managed not a first, nor a second, nor yet a third, the so-called ‘gentleman’s degree’ for those who have a good time instead of working. She was awarded only a pass.

It didn’t bother her for long, and years later she wrote an
article
for the Irish
Times called
‘Remembering the Good Times’ that explains why. It is, as the title suggests, a joyful reminiscence of her time as an undergraduate, but in it she meets the girl
who used to serve her and her fellows coffee in the Annexe and Maeve develops an important point about social discrimination in education.
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She describes how the waitress had sometimes berated Maeve and her gang for not working harder, for not grasping the privileged opportunity they had been handed. If she had been a student, rather than just a waitress, she’d have forfeited the parties and the fellas, she said, and worked hard to get the best degree she could.

Maeve remembered how she and her friends had laughed at the girl and said that she’d feel differently if she was a student. But the girl had been right; she probably would have got a better degree than Maeve. However, UCD had been utterly significant in Maeve’s life for another reason. She had woken up to her potential. It had formed the essential part of her personality and that is ultimately what university should be about.

At UCD she’d found the self-belief that would carry her to the top in whatever she decided to do, the confidence to take control in any situation that presented itself. It was up to her now to find the projects to meet her purpose and confer
meaning
on her existence.

In her graduation year, 1959, she and her friends had taken jobs, on the grounds that if they got away from the distractions and the barbecues at White Rock there would be more chance of getting work done for their finals. Maeve had accepted an invitation from Mother St Dominic to help out at another Holy Child school, at St Leonards-on-Sea on the south coast of England.
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Having moved from Killiney, Mother St Dominic was now the school’s Mother Superior. The stint returned
Maeve to Mother at a time in her life when she could use her advice.

Geraldine, who followed Maeve as a teacher at the school, remembers, ‘Maeve left a huge mark at St Leonards. It gave her the inspiration to go back to UCD and do a Diploma of Education.’

It was the perfect interim solution. Her degree had been so bad that she couldn’t have used it for much. She had no money to travel, which she still really wanted to do, and she was expected to begin earning a living. The DipEd would ensure that at least she got a job teaching, and it was clear from her reception at St Leonards – years later, the girls would still remember many fun classes in the open air that summer – that the new Maeve had a talent for getting through to her pupils.

The summer of 1959 also found Maeve studying at a summer school in Wales, along with history students from all over Britain. At the start it had been disappointing; the lessons were all about mining rights and politics – good on facts, but hardly rousing. So instead she began making eyes at a fellow student called Hiram John, who had curly hair and a smile that engulfed his whole face. Hiram’s mother was a harpist, his father a preacher, both very Welsh. Hiram took Maeve for walks around Caernarvon, swims in Bangor, on a bus trip to Snowdon, to tea with his family, and she listened to his mother play the harp one night to twenty neighbours, who behaved as if they had known Maeve all her life. Here was the homespun honey of Welsh culture on which, before going to Wales, she had been led by her mother to believe Ireland had a monopoly.

On the last night Hiram had taken her in his arms, kissed her, and told her that she had been the nicest summer-school romance he had ever had (it transpired that she was his third) – and sadly that was that.

Nevertheless, the experience left her with a deep affection for the country and she returned on a notable trip in the mid-1960s with an entire school of girls, and again in 1972 to report on striking miners in a village close to Pontypridd. Such was the warmth of the community that people would call out of their windows, ‘Maeve, bach, you look cold and damp, come in to the fire and have a cup of tea.’ She loved it so much that she spun her reporting job out far longer than was intended, going down the mine in the day and talking the night away with the miners in the Working Men’s Club. She would return a third time in 1974 to follow the Welsh Nationalist Gwynfor Evans during his campaign to get back into Westminster.

Back at UCD, she sat her Higher Diploma of Education, believing that she had learned little of great use. She and her fellow students had been taught the psychology of teaching but nothing about
actual
teaching, which Maeve realised can only be learned when you do it, hands on.

For the next eight years she did just that – first in Cork, her ‘year of misery’, as she called it. ‘We teachers used to huddle together in a tiny room so small that one person had to breathe in if the other breathed out – united in our loathing of the frightful headmistress!’
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She was so lonely that it seemed to her that she watched the same film –
Carthage in Flames
– week after week at the
local cinema. She was so cold and so broke that she would carry pieces of coal back to burn at night and eventually, when it was all over, she boarded the 3.20 Friday train for Dublin with six sacks of the stuff – there was no other way to get rid of it!

Her time in Cork was not fun, but it did confirm that she liked teaching. On the train home she discovered something that would change her life. In the buffet car she met a handsome man who claimed also to have had a miserable time in Cork and suggested they drown their sorrows together.

‘What do you like in your gin?’ he asked her. Maeve replied, ‘It!’ at once, not having drunk alcohol before and not knowing what ‘gin and it’ was, but associating it with romantic
situations
in detective novels she’d read. It scarcely mattered: Italian vermouth was not a viable option on the train from Cork, and the barman suggested tonic instead.

It is fair to say that alcohol became an agreeable element in Maeve’s life henceforth. ‘So began a lifelong friendship which must have gladdened distilleries the world over,’ as she herself put it.

There was no Jekyll and Hyde situation when Maeve had a drink. She admitted that occasionally she might stay on too long at a party, perhaps forget a few things and suffer the odd hangover, like everyone else, but she rarely lost control and, best of all, ‘my liver held out!’

With a gin and tonic or a nip of whiskey her rapid-flow
delivery
of stories, anecdotes and observations on life was given a million-miles-an-hour enhancement. So it was that the Cork project, for all its shortcomings, did give her a new weapon in
her arsenal, which would serve her well in the coming years. What Sartre had started, Gordon’s completed!

Maeve’s first teaching job in Dublin was to twelve- to
eighteen-year
-olds at Pembroke School in a Georgian mansion at No. 1 Pembroke Road, Dublin, close to UCD. History, Latin and religion were her subjects. Pembroke School was a girls-only, lay Catholic school which taught the middle-class daughters of liberal Catholics and was known as Miss Meredith’s after its founder, who started the school in 1929 and had a reputation of being something of an eccentric. While academically strong, and superb at getting girls into top women’s jobs, Miss Meredith’s concentrated on letting pupils be what they wanted to be and do what they wanted to do. Miss Meredith herself still turned up with some ceremony mid-morning to call the roll. It was, altogether, a rather unusual establishment, both for its pupils and for its teachers. Maeve fitted in very well, for there was a great deal of the theatrical about her during this particularly liberal stage of her life in the early 1960s.

Maeve had embarked on her existential process with some verve and occasionally she would take flight to London, centring operations on Mary Holland’s house in Palace Garden Terrace, behind Kensington Church Street, close to Kensington Palace. The house became a magnet for visiting Dubliners and there was quite a party scene.

Later, Mary would write for
The Observer
and for the
Irish Times
and forge a reputation for writing about Irish affairs, the Troubles in particular. Controversially, in Catholic Ireland, she also came to write about abortion, admitting that she herself
had had one. But Maeve first entered her orbit at the start of Mary’s career, which began after she won a competition and was taken on by
Vogue
.

‘Mary hated working for
Vogue
,’ says the sometime fashion journalist and writer Molly Parkin. ‘We were neighbours in Palace Garden Terrace when I was married to [the art dealer] Michael Parkin and we had our first daughter, Sarah. I was painting professionally then. It was very arty up there at that time and we were all party people.’

London was now all about youth, all about fashion. The photographer David Bailey was working for
Vogue
. The clothes designer Mary Quant had set up in the King’s Road in the mid-1950s in the vanguard of the style revolution, and was just then opening up in Knightsbridge, with Terence Conran designing the second of her shops. Conran himself was about to launch Habitat. The future was all about offering the masses a style to buy into. This was anathema to Maeve, whose whole thrust was for authenticity. Right up to her last novel,
A Week in Winter
(2012), she was exasperated by women being so weak as to allow themselves to be ‘sucked into a world of labels and trends and the artificial demands of style’. Even so, Maeve clearly made an impression, as Molly Parkin remembers:

So this was Maeve at the time she started teaching at Miss Meredith’s. She dressed ‘in her own way’, individual, effective, looking after the edges, her hair, her hands, her feet and so on, letting her increasingly individual personality do the talking. And Molly took her for an actress. The girls at Miss Meredith’s discovered the same persona, for her classes became something of a theatrical experience – even history, which was the first of the day.

Maeve’s rule was that if a girl turned up late she would be locked out. One day,
she
was late and the girls locked
her
out and then watched, outraged, as she crossed the road to Searson’s pub opposite and did not return until it was time for the next class. She never gave the girls the satisfaction of mentioning it.

For inspiration Maeve drew on the message of Cornelia Connelly: girls will not learn unless they are happy. And as with Mother St Dominic, presence, charisma, humour and attention to the individual were to the fore. Maeve followed Mother’s example too (and her own experience) in making it her aim to raise the levels of self-confidence among her pupils, if not so wildly as her mother had done: ‘Good teachers believe that their pupils can do anything,’ she once said. ‘When I was at school we had a teacher like that.’ Such teachers – all women – turn up in her novels all the time.

In
Evening Class
(1996) that teacher is the Signora, Nora O’Donoghue. Maeve describes her as ‘a wonderfully mad inspired teacher’.
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Strong, eccentric, warm and wise, ‘Signora burned with love. I think there’s a message in that. Signora stands for the kind of people who do things from passion and fire and courage. We all love them.’
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Maeve’s passion for teaching came, she said, from knowing that when she left the classroom after forty-five minutes her girls had something, however small, that they didn’t have before. In
The Copper Beech
, a novel named after the great tree which spreads itself over the schoolhouse at Shancarrig where conscious life for the village children begins, Maddy Ross expresses her joy in seeing a child work out how to read a sentence for herself, or suddenly ‘get’ how a sum in maths works. Maeve once said that Maddy was one of the two characters in her fiction that she would most have liked to be (the other, Aisling O’Connor in
Light a Penny Candle
).

The girls at Miss Meredith’s were all mad about Maeve, as they are mad about the gutsy Angela O’Hara in
Echoes
, and Miss Daly, the teacher in
A Week in Winter
. She became a role model to them, as Mother St Dominic had been for her, and would never be forgotten by them, as the tributes of many after she died showed.

Always she played the eccentric. Renagh Holohan, who would later hold positions at the
Irish Times
as London Editor and Features Editor, remembered that Maeve was so uncertain of Latin that she kept translations of the Virgil and Horace texts that the class would go through every day, under her desk,
as cribs. There was no secret that she had them there, so that really it was all part of the theatre of Maeve’s class, a ploy to keep the lessons lively. Some of her pupils may have been alert to the fact that exactly the same scene occurs at the beginning of Joyce’s
Ulysses
, when Joyce’s
alter ego
, Stephen Dedalus, is
teaching
at the school in Dalkey. He looks at the crib under the table ‘and the boys are not quite in synchrony so they actually have to coach him what to do’.