Maeve Binchy (15 page)

From time to time a little bohemian anarchy did show itself, however. Mary Maher recalled a court case that hinged on the archaic notion that a married woman was still regarded as the ‘chattel’ of her husband, a key word in the Irish Women’s Liberation manifesto – ‘Chains or Change’.

Maeve was so annoyed about the case that throughout one issue she substituted ‘Chattel First’ for the running title of the women’s page, ‘Women First’, wherever it occurred in the paper. She told no one she planned to do it, just slipped it in at the last minute.

Humour was of course fundamental to her journalism. ‘She saw the funny side of everything,’ said Maher. Time and again she made trenchant points about serious or sensitive issues by taking a light-hearted approach. On the sensitive issue of contraception, over which there were rallies, pickets, marches and demonstrations, with Women’s Lib members walking out of Mass in protest over Archbishop McQuaid’s letter on the
subject and making public displays of illegally imported
contraceptives
at Connolly station in the centre of Dublin, Maeve took a characteristically witty line.

The pill was unavailable in Ireland unless prescribed for menstrual irregularity, so she ran a piece observing that the number of women in Ireland with menstrual irregularity was so staggering that perhaps the World Health Organization should look into it.

Of course contraception was a religious issue. It was actually important to Maeve not to force people out of their religious faith. She may have lost hers, but she let people make their own minds up. This was what she liked about the
Irish Times
, which was after all a traditionally Protestant paper: ‘Nobody was
forcing
everybody out into the world,’ as she put it. But those who didn’t want to be confined by the Papal edicts and the laws of the Catholic state could find inclusion too. It was a mature but difficult line to tread, which she did with consummate ease.

Later, in another article, she has an argument with a woman she meets at a bus stop, who comments on the bad weather and observes that the gloom has spread to politics with the
introduction
in Ireland of doctor’s prescriptions for contraceptives. Maeve misunderstands and thinks the woman is in favour of contraceptives being freely available. She goes on the attack against all those feeble politicians who are ‘passing the buck to doctors’.

The woman falls silent. Maeve thinks she hasn’t heard her, so she ups both volume and tempo, recommending that condoms and pills be stocked on chemists’ shelves (a radical proposition
in Ireland at the time), until finally the woman, appalled, asks in steely tones whether that is indeed her view, that she would like contraceptives in public places, there for all to see.

For a second Maeve considers that she may have misjudged the situation and backtracks – the condoms wouldn’t need to be on show exactly, they’d be in packets… The woman remarks that Maeve seems very well informed. Maeve laughs and admits that she has seen a lot of condoms in her time, in fact she’d bought a number for friends just recently when she was in London.

The woman is now boiling with rage. Two red marks have appeared on her cheeks, her eyes are bulging out of their
sockets
. But mercifully the double-decker bus arrives and she waits to see whether Maeve will sit downstairs or look for a seat up top…

It is a masterful article, one of a series she wrote starting with the words ‘Today I…’ The journalist was becoming more than just that; the author was beginning to emerge. In the case of abortion, change has been the slowest of all. Mary Maher wrote a letter to the
Irish Times
as late as June 2012, only months before Savita Halappanavar died in a Galway hospital because she was not allowed an abortion, struggling with the feeling of horror at the shocking reality of what an unwanted pregnancy could mean.

Maher reminded readers that all of twenty years earlier, a fourteen-year-old rape victim had been forbidden by a High Court order to travel to England for an abortion. Thousands had marched through the streets and forced the Supreme Court to overturn the order. Finally a referendum decided in favour of allowing pregnant women information and abortion abroad.

Maeve did not attempt to treat abortion as lightly as she did contraception on the paper. Like Dickens before her, who had his own journalistic and fictional outlet in the magazine
Household Words
, Maeve saw that issues which polarise society as divisively as abortion does in Ireland are better handled in fiction, which has a way of dispelling prejudice and
transforming
at a level deeper than the argument of journalism.

What she was really good at was reaching out to her
readers
of the paper. On one occasion a ferry company was giving away a holiday as a prize and Maeve decided that the winner would be the person who wrote the best letter describing why they wanted to go with their best friend, not their husband. The response was enormous: women poured out their hearts about their female best friends, ‘telling things about their lives’, as Mary Maher recalled, ‘that took your breath away’. In the office Maeve couldn’t believe how truthful the correspondents had been, knowing that they might be published and named. It was a subject close to her heart, of course, and in the end she wrote three articles called ‘Women Are Fools’, fictionalising what the correspondents had told her. Once again, the response was amazing.

Another ‘bridge’ to writing fiction was being built in an ever more consistent movement towards writing in a ‘case history’ format. It began with an article about the Council of the Single Woman and her Dependants, an organisation started by Mary Webster in 1963 after she was forced to give up work at just thirty-one years of age to care for her parents. This was
obviously
a cause close to Maeve’s heart but on the face of it, in
journalistic terms, a dullish subject if sourced from statistics. So, she started writing little short stories of the people who had found themselves in this situation, bringing the carers one by one alive as real characters with beating hearts in their own stories, which carried all the points Maeve as a journalist wanted to make. It was a sympathetic emotional approach and people were very moved by it. In hindsight Maeve’s readers will
recognise
it as the seedbed of the one she used later in fictional books like
The Lilac Bus
and
A Week in Winter
, which her long-term British editor would refer to as ‘novels in episodes’ – individual stories of characters who coalesce in the story in the end.

Meanwhile, so strong a following was she creating on the
Irish Times
that, just three years after beginning work as Women’s Editor, she published her first non-fiction book, a book of her articles; the title –
My First Book
– a signal to her intentions for the future. Within a week it stood at No. 3 on the Irish bestseller list. Her wit and wisdom were exactly what readers of the paper wanted. So much so, in fact, that she attracted a stalker.

The
Irish Times
in those days had an ‘open door’ policy and readers would come in off the street, have a cup of coffee and tell them their stories. One day a woman came in claiming to be Maeve’s muse. Maeve tried everything to avoid her and on one occasion had to dive under a desk while Mary Maher informed the woman that she wasn’t in that day.

Joining the
Irish Times
brought a new circle of friends. Journalists, irrespective of which paper they worked for, like Mary Kenny on the
Press
, Mary Anne McCutcheon and Mary Anderson on the
Independent
– ‘rivals but friends’ – belonged to
a fun-loving sisterhood with Maeve which also included roving reporters from around the world. They were women who worked hard and played hard, worked out their ideas and schemes, and compared notes on life, living in the fast lane as they had chosen to do.

They’d drink together at the famous Pearl Bar in Dublin’s Fleet Street. ‘We became friends and some of us were feminists together,’ said Maeve. ‘We had a wonderful platform for airing our views and by God we didn’t hide our views.’
50

Marianne Heron remembers the first time she saw Maeve: ‘She held half the editors in Dublin spellbound in a snug.’ Maeve had been telling them about the time she’d woken up in the middle of the night and found a man in her room. She had engaged him in lively conversation and ended up getting him to fix her vacuum cleaner!

These were the days of long, boozy lunches, whether you were a journalist in Dublin or in London, and Maeve loved it. Fleet Street, which runs west off the bottom end of D’Olier Street, at one time formed the southern boundary of the Liffey, the great river that flows through Dublin. It was home to both the Palace Bar (still at No. 21) and the Pearl Bar (now, alas, no more). The Palace dates from 1880 and has all the dark wood and massive mirrors and tiled floors one would expect. Famed for making its own whiskey, it became the bar of choice of the legendary
Irish Times
Editor, Bertie Smyllie, who was at the helm from 1934 until he died twenty years later.

The story goes that he transferred his custom to the Pearl after he discovered that the Palace was stamping the back of his
cash cheques with ‘The Palace Bar’ and he didn’t like his bank manager knowing how much he spent there.

The famous five-cornered snug, which can be booked and shut off from the rest of the pub, survives and the atmosphere is still amazing today. Flann O’Brien, who died in Dublin aged fifty-four, in 1966, drank here and there are countless stories about his larks, most famously that he parked a car without an engine outside and pretended to be drunk in charge of it, was arrested and had to be released when it appeared that someone had taken its engine.

The ‘cultured’ Pearl Bar was evidently just as popular with the following generation. The craic has particular significance, of course, in Ireland – the urbanity, wit, laughter, conversation and spontaneous levity, generally laced with alcohol, can be had any night in any number of bars in Dublin.

This was a scene Maeve took to and contributed to and in some ways never really left. ‘“Moderation” is not a word I ever cleaved to in any way,’ she once said. In the novels, parties are the great
test
of something essential about being Irish. You should be able to tell a good story and sing a good song and laugh and weep if you were partying with Maeve. In
Light a Penny Candle
, Elizabeth White’s ineffectual father and Aisling O’Connor’s impotent husband are hopeless when it comes to enjoying themselves. Aisling’s husband Tony can’t hold his liquor and looks down after every second sentence to his written notes when he’s giving a speech – a sure sign that he has failed the test. When Elizabeth suggests to her father that perhaps he could make life more fun for her mother, she is mortified at
how sad her intervention makes him and promises to God she’ll never bring the subject up again. At her father’s birthday party he does eventually pass the test, but it’s like drawing blood out of a stone, because of course Mr White is English.

The English come in for a pasting on this score. Maeve once found an elderly Irishman to interview who lived in England and would go home to Tipperary every Christmas. He told her that he’d been going home for Christmas every year for
thirty-eight
years and each time he’d look forward to leaving so dreary a place and rediscovering the place where he experienced all the first happiness and warmth that he longs now to recapture, when all of a sudden, the very moment he’d be leaving, ‘wouldn’t they turn into cheerful, happy human beings and have a chat and a song…!’

For Maeve and the sisterhood, meeting at the Pearl would often start at lunchtime and go on until late in the evening, and sometimes there was no great distinction between the character, fun and humour of bar and office, as one of her most famous stories shows.

Two days a week, ‘Women First’ was all about food and fashion, and the rest of the time it was for women’s issues. Theodora was the name of a journalist Maeve regularly commissioned to write foodie articles for the page. Theodora was every editor’s dream: she required no editing at all. Moreover, Theodora’s husband, George, was a film-maker and took pictures which would often appear in the paper illustrating her articles. On one occasion George hadn’t sent a picture in to accompany an article by Theodora about making veal casserole. Maeve became
unreasonably annoyed with George, who she doubted ever charged for his services to the paper, but soon realised that it was her own fault that she hadn’t ensured that George would come up with a picture. She began to rush about looking for an alternative.

It was late. She was due to be home with her father for supper. He would be expecting her. She had to find an alternative fast. She went to her file of emergency pictures and found one that was the right shape for the space left on the page. It seemed to Maeve a good photo too, absolutely on theme, a colourful
casserole
with lots of knives and forks sticking out of it. She typed out a caption – something about a veal casserole being perfect for a winter evening – and went home to prepare a meal for her father. Afterwards, as they were settling down to watch the nine o’clock news on television, the second story made Maeve freeze.

There was her picture! It appeared after a shot of Dr Christiaan Barnard, the man who performed the world’s first heart transplant operation, coming out of the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. What she had seen as knives and forks were clamps and other utensils for the surgeon’s second heart transplant operation. A picture of open-heart surgery illustrating an article about cooking veal casserole was being printed for the morning edition of the
Irish Times
.

She rang the Editor, Douglas Gageby, and told him that a photo had gone in that had been thought to be of a veal
casserole
and was in fact of a heart operation. She then ran down Knocknacree Road with Gageby’s less than appreciative words still ringing in her ear, convinced that her job was in jeopardy.