Maeve Binchy (12 page)

Was the experience reason to relinquish her faith as suddenly and impressively as St Paul found his? One has to say, rationally, no. But reason has little to do with faith and Maeve did lose hers at that moment: ‘One minute I believed the lot, angels with wings and a special Irish God, and the next I didn’t believe a word of it,’ she said.
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When eventually Maeve told the story of her disillusionment with Catholicism, people in Ireland were stunned. Her
declaration
came as a shock to her parents’ generation and some of her own. Her father beseeched her not to tell her mother. Even a television documentary about Maeve fifty years later managed still to stir people.

Denying Christ was a significant step, certainly, but it did not mean that she no longer had an inner life. As Maeve’s brother William has said, her deepest reflection on the meaning of life should not be gauged by what she says about things on the surface.

Nevertheless, Maeve, at twenty-four, stood alone, an atheist for the next five years. All the things that she had been given to believe as a child had been shown to be untrue. Everyone had
lied to her. There was no friendly Irish God waiting for her at the gates of Heaven, no family of saints looking out for her, no guardian angels. They’d all gone, just like
that
! And they never came back.

Then, to cap it all, there was betrayal too by the man she loved. Once again it had turned out that Maeve had poor judgement where men were concerned. Her Israeli did not love her after all. She was not the love of his life, only a summer fling. Maeve took this very badly.

She had gone away a Catholic and returned disillusioned by the Promised Land. The Israeli experiment did, however, have one immediately good consequence. When she arrived home there was a cheque waiting for her for £16, which represented a week and a half’s salary as a teacher, though she hadn’t earned it by teaching.

Her father had been so impressed by her letters home that he’d had them typed up and sent to the newspapers. The
Irish Independent
gave Maeve her first by-line under the title ‘A Kibbutz Welcome’.

She had returned a published writer. Here was an opportunity which would ultimately confer lifelong meaning on her
existence
, and in the meantime it could be pursued alongside her teaching.

Then, of course, the next article she sent off wasn’t accepted. Now that she was writing for publication she’d become
self-conscious
and overcooked it. Rejection followed rejection. Every day she would run down the steps to the garden gate in front of Eastmount to meet the postman, hoping for a letter of
acceptance, but the postman – she said – developed curvature of the spine from the sheer weight of rejections.

Given that Maeve had not thought for a minute of having her letters published, it was clear that what had won the newspaper over was the
natural
style. She wrote them in her own voice. The letters were
real
Maeve, authentic Maeve, a chatty,
intimate
, enthusiastic
flow
of Maeve. There was nothing analytical involved – no objective intervention in what appeared on paper. It was
true
, and truth was what people were going to like about Maeve, because that is what she looked for in people.

But she still didn’t know what newspapers wanted articles about. One day she met someone from the
Irish Times
and asked him straight. He said, ‘What do you care most about, right now?’ Maeve gave him the current bee in her bonnet – that teachers understand children better than their parents do, a point of view partly informed by her experience of collectivist education in Israel and partly by her own experience teaching in Dublin. He liked it, said it was contentious and might get the parents to write in. What a paper likes is a dialogue with its readers. So, she wrote the article and it was accepted.

Maeve had discovered the two principles behind her writing success. First, ‘write about something you know and care about’; second, ‘write like you speak’.

One clear focus of her interest was, following the Israeli experiment, travelling abroad, and she returned to the kibbutz for the next two summers (1964 and 1965). She had planned to go to Turkey and South America, but she could never forget
that summer
, ‘that white hot sandy place’, as she called it. Then she
spread her wings. For two and a half months every year (during the school summer holiday) Maeve took off on her own. Cost? Not a problem.

She worked in children’s camps, did cheap bus tours and slept on the decks of ships for free, having made a spectacular
discovery
: a timetable of world shipping called
The ABC Shipping Guide: An Alphabetical Guide to Passenger Services; Sailing Dates, Fares, Index to Shipping Lines and Ports
.

She got hold of a copy and spent months studying it. Every port was listed, with the shipping lines that made use of the port, when they arrived and when they left. Very probably she became a world authority on where passenger boats were going and when.

The guide also had an index which told her where to find out everything about the ships themselves. Maeve used it to plot journeys across the world. The journalist Michael O’Toole once described her as ‘a great traveller, and the only person I know who can say things like “I remember one night in Bombay” without sounding affected’.

Many of the ships were not passenger boats at all. She would write letters to the shipping lines (addresses were available in the book) and ask whether she could be a guest on their boat going to … wherever. She would either sleep on the deck of the boat for nothing or, if a berth was available, she would try and get work that would pay for it. She called the guide her ‘
favourite
book’.

Travelling so much provided a good opportunity to write travel articles. From 1965 she started placing them quite
regularly with the
Irish Times
, where her sometime pupil at Miss Meredith’s, Renagh Holohan, now had a job and amused her colleagues in the office by insisting on calling the new
contributor
‘Miss Binchy’.

Maeve wrote more about the kibbutz, of course, and in 1965–6 about Tunisia, Sardinia, Crete, and the whole business of travelling alone, making a virtue of doing so and being in the unique position of being able to tell of its singular advantages, at a time when it was thought either racy or pathetic to go on holiday alone.

For Maeve, it was ‘the obvious thing to do’, it being more likely that people would befriend a lone traveller, that being alone you could explore where
you
wanted to explore (rather than indulge someone else’s foibles), and of course it being more possible to engage in ‘romantic encounters’ without needing to worry about leaving a companion on their own. Her mother warned her that men could be intimidated by a well-travelled girl. Maeve laughed and so loved this anachronistic piece of mother-lore that thirty years later she put it in the mouth of Ria’s mother in
Tara Road
.

Of course, Maureen wanted Maeve to settle down, to marry a solicitor or doctor and start a family. But where was the
nine-to
-five professional man who could tame a woman as resourceful, energetic and hot blooded as she? Nothing was further from Maeve’s mind.

Realising that there was no Hell, she said, she no longer felt guilty drinking alcohol, and started to smoke, and also began to look on men ‘with a nice beady eye and much more enthusiasm’.

Looking back on her life she was grateful that she didn’t find fame and fortune when this period of her life began. ‘If I’d been twenty-four when fame found me, I’d have probably snorted everything up my nose, bought a yacht and fallen off of it and drowned.’

Laying her Christian values aside, she now joined the
generation
that wanted no commitments, no ties, no promises and no lies – there would be no need to lie. Unfortunately, underneath, she was still as vulnerable as she had ever been.

Molly Parkin remembers Maeve coming round to her house one morning following a party on one of her visits to Mary Holland’s house in London.

Jack MacGowran was Dublin born. He cut his teeth as a character actor at the Abbey Theatre and made his artistic reputation in Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
at the Royal
Court, in
Endgame
with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and on a record, a production he was working on when he met Maeve at the party –
MacGowran Speaking Beckett
was released to coincide with Beckett’s sixtieth birthday in 1966. Nothing could have been a richer mix for Maeve, but the liaison did not work out.

‘Well, it was terrible,’ said Molly. ‘Jack didn’t want to know and Maeve was bitterly upset. I did my best to console her. She was a warm, wonderful person. I loved her. I’m not sure that men were very good for her.’

Hiram John, Jack MacGowran and her Israeli certainly weren’t. Each of them had appealed to her for a serious reason that had little to do with the men themselves, more with what they represented to her – Hiram as an expression of the warm Welsh community culture; Jack as associated with the
existentialist
master, Beckett; and her Israeli for his political idealism.

Deep down there would always be the need for fulfilment at a level these fellows didn’t provide; otherwise, what was it all for? Meanwhile, as each new summer approached she began to ‘hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape’ that summer brought.

In 1966–7, while still a teacher, she wrote articles about Singapore, Cyprus, La Rochelle, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and about four days’ incapacity when over-enthusiasm doing ‘Le Madison’ on a slippery dance floor on a boat called
Vietnam
practically paralysed her from the waist down, and meant not setting foot in the Philippines.

Then came Russia, India, Greece, the Canary Islands, Austria,
Tangier, Spain, Scotland, Lourdes, Bulgaria, Agadir, and she returned time and again to the Holy Land. Soon it was easier to list where she hadn’t been.

Alongside the
Irish Times
, Maeve also submitted articles to
Punch
magazine; in October 1966 came ‘Playtime in Palestine’, which informed
Punch
readers that:

And so on. More and more people wanted Maeve to write for them because of her sense of humour, which now characterised her adventures – such as when she fell off a horse on the way to Petra.

People who knew Maeve recognised her immediately in stories
such as this. She had found her voice, which, as the months passed, more and more people got to know.

Then, tragedy. Maeve was in America when she received a phone call saying that her mother had been diagnosed with cancer. Apparently Maureen had been depressed for some months and had had tests, which showed that the cancer was far advanced and that she had little time to live. The approach in those days was really to deny that the patient was terminally ill and give them false hope. The last three months of Maureen’s life – she died in December 1967 – were therefore lived as a lie, rather than as a loving preparation for death and in expression of just how wonderful a mother she had been. The fact that Maeve and her brother William actually made public their regret that this was so is a measure of just how desperately sad all the
children
were at Maureen’s passing.

The pretence that the family kept up that she would get better was a terrible strain on everyone, including Maureen, who had been a nurse and was well aware of what was actually happening to her.

Maeve kept the pain of her mother’s passing bottled up for two years and perhaps she never truly vented it until fifteen years later, when she wrote so beautifully of the last two weeks of Eileen O’Connor’s life in
Light a Penny Candle
, the
matriarch
Eileen who towers above the lives of her children, just as Maureen did, until finally they too are shocked to learn that she has cancer. The prognosis is that she has two weeks to live. Like Maureen, she is a big woman who disappears physically before their eyes. Maeve paints the scene with loving detail, and there is time in her fictional world for proper goodbyes.

Eileen dies, but not before she settles a few important things to do with the girls’ relationships and Aisling’s future. Eileen knows things that Aisling can’t think that she knows. But that’s the point. Eileen knows, like Maureen always knew. As mothers do know.

Maureen and Eileen O’Connor were fashioned from the same archetype: the fictional Eileen is Maeve’s great tribute to Maureen – feminine, passionate and deeply intuitive. In the novel there is even a sense of the continuity of the mother’s spirit after death. When Aisling and Elizabeth return to Kilgarret to pay their respects to Eileen before she dies, they choose to sleep in the same beds in the room they shared as children when Eileen fulfilled the role of mother for both of them, and put Elizabeth’s baby, named Eileen, in her carry-cot on the floor between them, as if they are the child’s parents. It is a powerful, almost supernatural scene, confirmation of the continuity of the spirit of truth, which infuses the novel.