Maeve Binchy (11 page)

Maeve’s natural storytelling gifts brought the characters of history and Latin alive in memorable ways. Back in the 1960s Latin was essential for a number of degrees: law, medicine etc. Although it was one of her subjects at UCD, it was only a minor course and Maeve wasn’t much interested in teaching it until one day a very bright child, who’d been studying Latin for about three years, let slip that she hadn’t quite understood that people at one time actually
spoke
the language. On
investigation
it emerged that the whole class of thirty thought it was some kind of dead, out-of-date academic code which had been drawn on as a kind of source for modern European languages. From then on, Maeve made it her purpose to bring Latin to life for them, as Caroline Walsh, another alumna who worked for the
Irish Times
, variously as Features Editor and Literary Editor, remembered: ‘Maeve made the people in Latin so real we expected them to come alive any minute. It was this vigour with which she approached it that I’m sure was the reason I got top-notch honours.’

The writer Felicity Hayes-McCoy, who would later script some of Maeve’s stories for television, remembers being so
taken with her description of the death of Julius Caesar that after one class she began recreating the scene with a group of friends, perhaps a little overdramatically. Suddenly she became aware that Maeve was looming over her and she found herself ‘transfixed by a cold eye. My fellow assassins backed away
leaving
me frozen between the desks. Maeve gazed at me distantly for what felt like hours and then turned away with a weary sigh. That was it. Nothing more. But it was devastatingly effective.’
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Maeve could be an imposing presence. Indeed, for the first year the girls were more afraid of her than of the principal, particularly as she was not averse to giving the odd flick of a ruler as she passed by. Truth was that the new self-confident Maeve was not a woman to suffer fools gladly. But this, along with the theatre and eccentricity and storytelling magic, only served to bolster her reputation and gain her respect. What was especially attractive about her was that in private she didn’t suffer the fool in herself any more gladly than she did the fool in anyone else.

In teaching, Maeve had found a platform to assert and express her increasingly individual persona. She became something of a legend wherever she taught, but especially at Miss Meredith’s, many remembering especially the day she took the entire school to Wales, a trip she recorded in an article in the
Irish Times
.

The trip passed into the folklore of the school. Maeve said that it was the only thing she was
ever
remembered for – as an act of ‘unbelievable folly’ by the other teachers and as ‘the best day out they ever had in their lives’ by her pupils. That, surely, is a high point for any teacher to achieve.

Maeve related how forty girls under her sole care left Dún Laoghaire harbour for Holyhead one morning and by the evening, after a gorging of fish and chips in a Holyhead café, she realised she was six short. Fortunately five were found and returned before the ferry was due to sail, but the boat had to be held for the sixth while Maeve ‘prised her away from the arms of some latter-day Hiram John’.

On the ferry, Maeve repaired to the bar, only to be disturbed by a deputation of girls who claimed that she was wanted on deck. Expecting to be faced by the police, she was in fact needed ‘only to settle an argument about the Wicklow mountains, which had just come purplishly into view…’

Three days a week Maeve also taught conversational French to children in a Jewish primary school in Rathgar, the area of Dublin where James Joyce was born. Maeve had responded to an advertisement for a part-time French teacher and began work at Zion Schools soon afterwards. From the very first moment her interest was fired in all things Jewish – especially Israel.

It was to be another turning point.

At the start, things had not gone well. She made the mistake of telling the boys to take off their caps and refused to believe they were not defying her when they protested that wearing them was part of tradition, part of their religion. She
investigated
and apologised the next day, then switched tack, using Jewish customs – such as songs associated with the festival of Chanukkah
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– as subjects for translation, which would at the same time take them and her further inside their culture. Soon the children were following her to the bus stop in their eagerness
to learn, parents began inviting her into their homes and, seeing how completely enamoured of their traditions she became, they gave her a ticket to visit Israel.

Maeve decided to make it no ordinary holiday. With her companion Philippa O’Keefe, now a radiographer at a Dublin hospital, she made arrangements through the Zionist Federation to take a working holiday for two and a half months at Zikim, a kibbutz in southern Israel in the Negev Desert, about three miles west of the main road from Tel Aviv to the Gaza Strip.

The Federation Secretary looked the two young women up and down rather dubiously and said, ‘You won’t find an Ari Ben Canaan in every orange grove.’ It was a reference to the hero of
Exodus
, the novel by Leon Uris about the founding of the state of Israel. The film had done plenty for the film star Paul Newman’s reputation with the ladies.

Maeve said she realised that working on a kibbutz would be no picnic and agreed with the secretary that she and Philippa were totally ignorant and unfit, but they had made up their minds that that was what they wanted to do. They paid £48 for the fare and spent around £20 subsistence when there – a small price for what then transpired.

On arrival they were put to work in the kitchen peeling
potatoes
, in the chicken shed plucking chickens and in the garden weeding. Then, as the long hot summer wore on, Maeve was shifted from chicken duty to making yogurt from 6 a.m. until 2 p.m. Along the way she fell in love with the ideals of this desert kibbutz, writing home almost daily about the communal farms and the way of living and the separation of the children
from their parents – how, as she put it, ‘they had to learn to be grown-up and independent from their parents’,
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which wouldn’t have been lost on William and Maureen, given that Maeve, at twenty-four, was still living at home.

She reckoned that, as a result of the separation, the
children
were more loving than ever when they did come into contact with their parents. However, at this stage she had had no personal contact with the kibbutz children. Only when she returned the following summer would she be allowed to supervise their swimming and only after she could prove that she could shout Hebrew phrases such as ‘Come in at once’ and ‘Nobody out further than their waists’!

Such was the scene. There was nothing sentimental or
idealistic
about the people who ran the kibbutz. In many ways Maeve and Philippa were at the front line of a conflict between one cultural tradition and another, which was no less serious or potentially dangerous than what had been happening between Ireland and the UK, as it turned out.

The Jewish settlement in the Negev was at that time very sparse, and tensions between Arabs and Israelis were building towards the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which came into being the following year. Maeve mentioned in letters home that there were air raids, and Zikim did later become a target. The people she and Philippa were working with in the kitchen – girls of their own age – had already spent two years in the army and knew that a war could start at any moment.

Maeve wrote that these girls were hard and cynical in some
ways and simple and innocent in others. They certainly weren’t slow to question the Christian faith of two Catholic girls
working
in a kibbutz, and Maeve took their point: it would be a few years yet before the Vatican Council Fathers would vote to absolve the Jewish race for Christ’s death.

However, the new Maeve didn’t care what people thought, or that she and Philippa were the only gentiles there, or how she looked in shorts as she picked oranges from the trees. She was much more interested in talking to the Israeli girls and hearing their stories.

The kibbutz had been established in 1947 by a group of young Romanian Jews who belonged to a Zionist group called Hashomer Hatzair, which is the oldest Zionist youth movement still in existence. It grew out of two other groups, one a scouting movement (with roots in the ideas of Baden-Powell, who started the scout movement in Britain), the other more hard edged and political, its aim to integrate Marxism with psychoanalysis and shape Israeli children from birth to maturity through the commune regime, a process known as ‘collectivist education’.

In effect, Zikim was run by a youth movement preparing for war to reinforce the state of Israel. The intensity of being in the front line was heightened by Maeve rising to the political idealism of the kibbutz – and then falling in love with one of its proponents.

This boy, like other members of Hashomer Hatzair, earnestly believed that the commune ideology would take over and the world would be perfect, with everyone equal. Communism and the commune ideals of collectivist education were at the root
of the thinking of Kibbutz Zikim. To a young observer today, the fact that a member of the Jewish race should be communist (a political ideology in which private ownership is abolished in favour of communal production and subsistence, not profit) is difficult to comprehend. But in the 1950s and ’60s communism had a utopian ring about it, and many Jews were communists, even in Britain.

Socialism and communism, only a little further towards the extreme end of the socialist spectrum, were viewed by many cultures as an evolutionary way forward. In Britain,
communism
had taken a hold in areas like Glasgow, where in 1918 Lenin appointed the first Bolshevik Consul for Scotland to Russia, and in Parliament, to which Communists were elected in the early 1920s, Cecil L’Estrange Malone, Shapurji Saklatvala and Walton Newbold among them. Indeed, the whole rise of left-wing politics in Britain, which gave vent to the feelings of the working classes for the first time, rode in on this revolutionary tide, and in the 1950s and ’60s was widely viewed in America as a drift towards communist revolution. America was so concerned to prevent the spread of the ideology in Europe that it poured in billions of dollars, giving Britain the Macmillan years, when capitalism rooted down and the British ‘never had it so good’. Meanwhile, from the late 1930s right through to the end of the 1960s, the police were ranged against far-left political protesters in cities all over the Western world.

There were people then who were political ‘out of a kind of religious reason … God-seekers, looking for the kingdom
of God on earth,’ as the writer and Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing remembers. She was herself a communist with ‘an
inclination
towards mysticism’ (rather than religion).

At the kibbutz, political idealism and romance were in the air. Cool evenings under the stars were spent listening to music on a record player Maeve had borrowed from an old Hungarian. The songs and the clicking of the crickets mingled with the laughter of a group of army boys and girls who had been billeted on the kibbutz for a month. Maeve was knocked out by it all.

She was sure that her man loved her. She was so sure that she was wondering how she could explain to her parents that she was going to convert to the Jewish faith and that there would be a desert wedding. Everything combined to have an almost metaphysical effect upon her, which made such an extraordinary idea seem a real possibility.

Maeve had read Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook
, published a year earlier, and would now play ‘The Game’. Think about the smallest objects in a room, then let the mind spread to absorb the house, the city, the country, the continent, while still holding the small original details in place until, as Lessing’s character Anna Wulf thinks, ‘the point was reached where I moved out into space, and watched the world, a sunlit ball in the sky, turning and rolling beneath me’.

What Anna wanted was ‘a simultaneous knowledge of
vastness
and of smallness’. It was a game played by Lessing as a child in the vast open spaces of Africa. And now Maeve played it with her man under the stars over the Negev Desert and gained a new perspective on life.

In the context of infinity, not only did the goldfish bowl in which she lived in Dalkey seem less important somehow, but the need for a new, more meaningful philosophy of life became paramount and no doubt prepared her for what then happened.

Each week she and Philippa had a couple of days off and on this occasion Maeve decided to go to Jerusalem and see the Upper Room, where the Last Supper had taken place just before Christ’s crucifixion. What she found was a cave. She couldn’t say what exactly she had been expecting to find, but of course in her mind will have been the depiction of the Last Supper on the front of the High Altar of the Church of the Assumption at home in Dalkey, modelled on Leonardo da Vinci’s.

What she found, she said, was a cave and a gun-toting Israeli soldier with a Brooklyn accent who, when she exclaimed that this couldn’t possibly be the site of the Last Supper, said, barely looking up at her, ‘What were you expecting, lady, a Renaissance table set for thirteen?’

Immediately white was black and black was white. Everything she had been taught with such certainty, everything she had taken on board with such trust and faith since she was a tiny child meant nothing. It all went – like that! – ‘and never came back’, she said.

Christian tradition has it that the Upper Room where the Last Supper was held is a second-storey room located directly above the Tomb of David and near the Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion, just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. It is not a cave; it has a low, vaulted ceiling, certainly, but it looks more like a crypt than a cave.

Of course, the room that stands today is not what it would have been at the time of Christ, and perhaps Maeve was told that the site had long ago been a cave. All that is known is that the room has been visited since at least the fourth century by pilgrims, who believe it to be the Upper Room. But there is no verification that it
was
the room where the Last Supper took place. Or indeed that there ever was a Last Supper (the words ‘Last Supper’ are not mentioned in the New Testament).