Maeve Binchy (18 page)

This is but one three-year window, a tiny sample of the endless actions by covert forces of the IRA against civilians who may or may not have been British and who couldn’t fight back. The bombings continued through the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, dealing out death and horrific injuries by the score.

In the
Irish Times
office, Maeve found herself drawn into political and social reporting. ‘It extended me very much as a journalist,’ she said. But first, on 14 November 1973, she announced her presence on Fleet Street with a scorcher of an article about Princess Anne’s wedding to Captain Mark Phillips.

Maeve, who had been brought up to dislike pretension of any kind and had a sense of humour that liked to puncture it,
delivered
a series of satirical hits on the royal family which were very funny but ruffled some feathers.

She referred to the princess as looking ‘as edgy as if it were the Badminton Horse Trials and she was waiting for the bell to gallop off’, and the royal entourage as ‘actors who were getting paid over the equity rate’. It caused a minor storm. Maeve was in Brussels when the article came out and returned to a mound of telegrams.

Recently, in a RTÉ documentary on Maeve’s life, a fellow journalist made light of it, saying that it just wasn’t ‘
reverential
like the Brits are used to’. The line was that criticism had come from the English side and any from the Irish side always carried the codicil, ‘We love you anyway.’ This was not at all the case. Very few people in Britain even read the article, but many
Irish Times
readers across the sea were aghast. In letters to the Editor, Maeve’s article was described as ‘bitchy’, the choice of her as worthy of the commission ‘a serious indiscretion’. ‘I am as Irish as the rest of us,’ said one, but the article was ‘something of which we all should be heartily ashamed’. That was from a resident of Killiney, Maeve’s home patch: ‘Lord preserve us from the “Binchys” of this world,’ it ended. While Evelyn Scales satisfied herself with, ‘pshwshwshwsh! – Yours, etc.’

The last article Maeve ever wrote in her life was for the professional magazine
The Journalist
, in which she confessed that the royal wedding piece was her worst journalistic
experience
ever, because she got such a torrent of hate mail. Maeve, a highly sensitive woman underneath it all, wasn’t good at taking criticism, as she had shown in front of Douglas Gageby in 1969, and she confessed that the aftermath of the royal wedding had taken much more of a toll on her than she imagined it could.

Wisely, she turned her attention away from British royalty and back to the Irish.

One has a sharper awareness of one’s identity when abroad anyway, but in London Maeve found herself alone among the English, living there as an émigré with an English lover, while the IRA was planting bombs in pubs, in litter bins and under
people’s cars, and causing mayhem on the street. It was not a good time to be Irish in London. When something went off the Irish were the first to be stopped on suspicion by the Metropolitan Police.

Donal Foley, who was himself at one time London Editor of the paper, was Maeve’s great ally and support. He knew what it had been like to be an Irishman in London during the Second World War, long before the Troubles began.

Foley and his wife Pat Dowling had sought out the Irish enclaves in the metropolis, going to ceilidhs in Clapham Common and discovering that Irish émigré songs ‘like “Galway Bay”, “Moonlight on Mayo” or “An Carraig Doun” sung in the atmosphere of a quiet back room in a Camden Town pub by someone like Margaret Barry, could be just as haunting and authentic as Nicolas Toibin from Ring singing “Na Connerys”’.
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Foley was himself born in the Ring Gaeltacht in County Waterford, the beautiful peninsula west of Dungarvan, where Gaelic was the principal language. He lived and breathed Irish tradition, but Maeve wrote that one of his great strengths was that he never allowed himself to become a prisoner of it. He noted, for example, an affinity between the Irish and working-class people from London’s East End, who urged them ‘to sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” in the middle of “Knees Up Mother Brown” and “The Old Kent Road”’.
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But, at the same time, he told her that the recitation of the Irish during the London Blitz, when those self-same East Enders were being massacred by the score, was, ‘May God’s curse be on you England…’ It was this terrifying antipathy that raged now in London, forty years on.

The new friends Maeve made in London loved her instantly, her generous Irish warmth, her accent, character and humour. She was a new woman, liberated, enlightened, apparently
unburdened
by religious or political affiliation and yet Irish through and through, traditional Irish in the Cumann Merriman sense – the festival to which she still returned for one week each summer for spiritual renewal.

Nevertheless, there were difficulties for the Irish in London during the Troubles. ‘There are five and a half million people in Britain who can claim to be Irish,’ she wrote in the Melbourne newspaper
The Age
. ‘These days their claim is muted if heard at all. After almost every violent incident we hear on the radio or read in the papers that the police “want to interview someone with an Irish accent”.’

She wrote little about the Troubles for the
Irish Times
, concentrating on the risks that ordinary folk were being put to and the damage being done to London businesses, particularly to restaurants. First, people were asking for tables away from windows, for fear of the glass killing them in the event of an explosion. Next they were asking for a table in the basement and before long it was more likely that they would stay at home. In the West End, theatres were soon closing because of the bombing and Maeve became nervous travelling on the London Underground, particularly when walking the long corridors. Parking a car had become impossible, because car bombs were now a real threat to ordinary people.

She gave no inkling in her articles about how she personally felt about the politics of the Troubles, however, saying later that
she hadn’t known enough about them and she only wrote about what she knew.

But later she did say that if she’d been writing a book at the time of the car bombing in Omagh, which killed twenty-nine, and injured around 220 people,

Her thinking on nationalist politics in the equally traditional country of Wales was, significantly, to keep the political and religious institutions out of the picture.

She had many heated arguments about this in 1974, when she followed the Welsh Nationalist candidate Gwynfor Evans for the
Irish Times
during his campaign to get back into Westminster. Her position was that Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, was simply
unnecessary
, because Wales had retained its traditional culture, its language, music, songs and poetry already. Why did they need a political party to fight for it? Israel and Ireland are, like Wales, both traditional cultures and she had seen what happened when religious or political institutions took control of them. Sunrise ‘came up unnoticed while they told me why’, she said, and she loved every minute of it.

What inspired Maeve the writer were the values of these
traditions
, many of them endemic to cultures she had experienced
all over the world, the implication being that all cultures belong to Tradition – with a capital ‘T’ – which is bigger than any one religion or political party can account for.

When James Joyce and his university friend Gogarty
considered
ways to ‘Hellenise’ Ireland in Dalkey in 1904 they were suggesting something similar – that in the centuries since the Romano-British missionary St Patrick had converted Ireland to Catholicism, the Church had lost sight of the ‘theoria’ of the Greeks – the Platonic ideas or forms out of which the Church had arisen, and that these ideals – beauty, love, truth – were intrinsic not only to ancient Irish culture but to Tradition itself, which is in no way restricted to a nation or to a religion, or indeed to a period in chronological time.

When Maeve spoke for Ireland, and when she wrote for Ireland, which she did with renewed vigour once she had found her feet as an Irish woman in London, Tradition is what she spoke for.

There is an interesting codicil to this. Maeve was not alone among the Binchys in championing native Irish culture at this time. So inspired was her uncle, Professor Daniel Binchy, by his undergraduate years, when he had been caught up in the martyrdom of those UCD boys back in 1920 – boys who were themselves fighting for the nation’s identity – he began to write what became his life’s work. The six-volume
Corpus Iuris Hibernici
, in its reinstatement of ancient Irish law [Brehon Law], speaks elegantly of the customs and values of Irish tradition and the identity of the Irish people within the pre-Christian
kingdoms
– Leinster, Ulster, Munster, Connacht and Meath.
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Daniel Binchy’s work resulted in six volumes, 2,343 pages and 1.5 million words.
Corpus Iuris Hibernici
confirmed that Ireland, for all the horrors it had suffered, had a cultural identity which neither Britain nor the Catholic Church in Rome could, after all, redefine.

There was significant alignment between Daniel and his equally patriotic niece, in that the final volume of his master work came off the press in 1978, the very year that Maeve’s first book of fiction –
Central Line
– was published.

Among the centres in London identified as Irish in Maeve’s time were Camden Town, Kilburn, Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith. She herself lived with Gordon in Hofland Road, West Kensington, just behind Olympia, on the borders of Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush. The Royal Oak in Glenthorne Road was her local (now closed). She was much put out by the diminished opening hours on a Sunday at the Oak (and all pubs across Britain), as keen readers of the
Irish Times
may recall.

Ending her misadventure with royalty slightly wounded, Maeve mined a rich seam of articles about the Irish immigrant community in London. The history of Irish immigration goes back centuries, and is an unhappy one of exploitation, hunger (even starvation) and poverty, right into the time that Maeve was there in the 1970s.

February 1974 found her at the old Marmite factory in Kennington, which had closed its doors seven years earlier but was then reopening as the modern equivalent of a union workhouse (without the work). Here Maeve mingled with 300
down-and-outs seeking shelter – ‘in by 11 p.m., out by 7’. Her mother would have been proud of her.

The aroma of Marmite had given way to the pong of dossers’ feet, with Maeve in among it and the Irish to the fore. The ‘case history’ format – little cameos of people that make her points – was once again her chosen vehicle.
Irish Times
readers were introduced to, for example, John Anderson, the third of nine children who came to London from a farm in County Mayo in 1944, when things had looked poor in Ireland for a young man of twenty-four. For years, like so many Irish émigrés, he went home to his family at Christmas, but no longer. Returning costs too much in drink for his mates, because everyone assumes that having transferred to London he must be a secret millionaire.

A picture began to emerge of the Irish émigré which was less than stereotypical. In her stories she gave a glimpse of a multi-layered population which remained true to its roots and often worked a little harder to compete with the locals. A series called ‘The Way We Live Now’ again carried interviews with émigré Irish, though it was not all destitution. The first featured a doctor in Hampstead, with Joycean memories of the Jesuits at Stoneyhurst, the famous Roman Catholic school in the Ribble Valley in Lancashire. After years of travel through Burma, Malaya and Africa, Gerry Slattery had made his home in London and yielded his soul to Britishness, even if he still made the biennial trip to Twickenham to cheer for the Irish Fifteen. In contrast Paddy O’Connor, who left Wicklow for London penniless as a lad, experienced emigration at a
different
level, remembering ‘raw Irish kids coming off the train at
Euston and punch-ups between the pimps and the people from the Irish Centre to see who could get to them first’. By the time Maeve met him in 1974, Paddy was Deputy Chief Whip of the Greater London Council at County Hall. Taking over the Marmite factory for the homeless had been his idea, and he was about to take over the Charing Cross Hospital on the Strand as a second site, after the hospital’s relocation to Fulham in 1973.

Her readers then meet a girl from Limerick, who came to London in 1967 and worked hard. In four years she’d saved £400 in a Post Office account. Enter a man who asks her to marry him. He’s always wanted to live in Ireland so why not get a house there; her £400 would earn better interest in his building society account, which itself would look better for buying their own house together if it had £400 more in it. The girl begins making plans to go home to Ireland and hands her notice in at work. Suddenly her fiancé isn’t to be found at his address.

Maeve was herself not only an émigré to London, but an émigré for love, and there is great precedent for that. Certainly the main drift across the water was of the legendary Irish ‘spailpins’ or trampsmen, of men to the factories of the old enemy, of ‘McAlpine’s fusiliers’ to the building sites, as the famous Irish ballad of the early 1960s calls them (an allusion to Sir Robert McAlpine, a major employer of Irish workmen), and of the thousands who found work in the docks since the early nineteenth century. But it is a common misconception that only men emigrated from Ireland. There are countless examples in the twentieth century of Irish girls emigrating to England in search of love. The first thing an émigré girl would do was to go
to the local Catholic church, of which there were many in Irish immigrant areas. The priest would find her a place to stay where she’d be safe, which would in turn give her the greater chance of securing employment. The Church had a hugely important role to play in safeguarding the immigrant community.