Maeve Binchy (2 page)

Light a Penny Candle
, set in Ireland and England during and after the Second World War, is a tale of friendship between Aisling O’Connor (generally pronounced Ash-leen) and an English evacuee to Ireland, Elizabeth White, who arrives in Kilgarret at the start of the Second World War. Elizabeth’s mother Violet knows Aisling’s mother Eileen because they went to school together at a convent in England. At the beginning of the novel both girls are just ten, but their friendship continues to survive against all odds, long into the future.

There are many reasons to return to this novel, one being the affecting picture Maeve draws of life at home in the O’Connor household, a wonderful testimony to the happy and supportive childhood William and Maureen gave its author.

In the beginning the White family is the yardstick against which the O’Connors’ happy family scene is measured. Elizabeth, her mother Violet and father George live a drab, grey life in suburban London. George has a dreary job in a bank and has been rejected as unsuitable for war. His rejection seems less to do with his deafness, varicose veins, flat feet and whistling chest than with his utter dullness and inadequacy. George seems to invite rejection from every quarter.

Elizabeth’s mother, Violet, has been ground down by marriage to George. Her features are flat; all sparkle has disappeared.
Elizabeth longs for her parents to be happy, and escapes upstairs pretending to do her homework when in fact she is sitting on her bed crying and unpicking the stitching of a favourite doll.

This is in vivid contrast to the tumbling humanity of the O’Connor family in Kilgarret – Sean O’Connor, his wife Eileen, young Sean, Maureen, ten-year-old Aisling, truculent Eamonn, consumptive Donal and baby Niamh.

The O’Connors are passionate, fun, lively creatures. On arrival, the evacuee Elizabeth is overcome by the sheer boisterousness and confusion and extravagant emotion of this, a traditional Irish family.

It is then that Aisling, with her wild red hair and intuitive ways – the person Maeve said she would most like to have been of all her fictional characters (and in many ways actually was) – takes control, initiating and encoding the friendship she will have with Elizabeth in a sign that she draws up for the door of the bedroom they will share. It reads, ‘Aisling and Elizabeth. Please Knock. No Admittance.’

Elizabeth’s integration is just one of the many joys of this novel. We know it is complete when the English girl catches the rhythms of the language of the O’Connor family, adopting the music of their speech patterns, learning the emotional
resonances
, and discovering their potential to heal. Leaning over to the distressed Mrs Moriarty one day, Elizabeth engages her with a sure and motherly warmth, of which only a few months earlier she would have been incapable. It is a wonderful and significant moment. When it happens, everything stops and everyone looks at her. You feel she has apprehended something unique at the
very heart of the family, which cannot be put into words but is signalled by the rhythms of the Irish language. ‘You talk like us now,’ says Aisling, laughing. ‘God help us, we’ll have to get that out of you fast before the war is over,’ says Eileen.

When, five years later, Elizabeth returns to cold,
suburban
Clarence Gardens in London and her parents’ ailing marriage, we know that a part of her will always remain in the lap of Ireland. Their parting and coming together again, and Elizabeth’s final return when Aisling’s mother Eileen is dying, are emotional high points that go unchallenged elsewhere in Maeve’s stories.

Eileen O’Connor is the mother in the novel, the homemaker. Everything about her is spontaneous and natural. She is a passionate wife even after giving birth to six children,
responding
wholeheartedly to her husband Sean as he turns to her in bed. Eileen has a heart big enough to include far more children than those she has already. She is the mother-of-all-things, intuitive, always capable of saying the right thing.

So it was with Maeve’s real mother. The whole novel has its roots in Maureen’s non-intellectual, emotional, intuitive and loving nature. One not insignificant difference between Maureen Binchy and Eileen O’Connor, however, is that Maureen was almost obsessively protective of her children. She was so fussy and protective of Maeve that her husband was driven almost to distraction over it. There was a running joke that when Maeve was made by her school to swim in the sea on cold days it wasn’t beyond possibility that her mother would pack her off with an electric fire to make sure she got properly dry afterwards,
because it would be terrible if she put on damp clothes and caught rheumatic fever. Maureen’s protective instinct, Maeve said, even lay behind the ‘open house’ policy at home. Behind her insistence that she should have all her friends come to the house lay the thought that Maureen would then know where her own child was, and that she was safe.

There was also a culture of praise which Maeve discovered later, much to her confusion, went beyond the bounds of
reality
. As far as Maureen was concerned Maeve was the brightest, most beautiful and best, and she never stopped telling her so.

By the time she commented on her childhood Maeve had already made the discovery that rather than confinement, real love offers freedom. But she understood why it was ever thus with her mother, because of the deep sorrow Maureen felt at the loss of her own parents, whose premature death had taken the beauty of her own childhood away.

Maeve wrote that Maureen compensated for her lost
childhood
by making her own family such a definite and important entity. Though Maeve and her siblings looked back at their childhood with ‘laughter and affection’ as well as a sense of how lucky they were, Maeve was shielded from life – not only as a child but also as a young adult – and she would feel the need for release eventually.

The first outside influence to impinge on Maeve’s life came in the shape of nursery school at the age of five. She was sent to St Anne’s, an imposing three-storey terraced building at No. 36 Clarinda Park East, a short walk from Beechgrove, off the northern end of Lower Glenageary Road.

St Anne’s was founded by Gertrude Russell in 1912, who, when Maeve arrived, was assisted by Gertrude’s two nieces, Peggy and Eileen Bath, known to the children as ‘Hot Bath’ and ‘Cold Bath’. There was no school uniform, but there seems to have been a practice of tying ribbons in big bows on the top of the girls’ heads, or at least on Maeve’s. The bow was ironed for Maeve every morning by her mother and she went off proudly to school with a little bottle of milk with a cork in it and two Marietta biscuits, looking like a cockatoo.

While Maureen, the farm girl from Tipperary with no higher education at all, thought that Maeve was the best girl in the world and took every opportunity to tell her that she would be able to do whatever she wanted in life, her father, aware that academic success is not a matter of wish fulfilment, took her education seriously.

He was a scholar of literature and graduated in 1928 not in Law, but with First Class Honours from University College Dublin in English Language and Literature. The following year he was awarded a Master’s, again in English Language and Literature, and again with First Class Honours.

During the course of her childhood William read his
daughter
everything he could, from
Winnie the Pooh
to bits of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
. Before he had gone farther than the first few lines of the former she would demand to know her place in it: ‘Where am I?’ He told her that of course she was there, sitting in a tree or perched on a gate. Once Maeve knew that she was there she was happy and would submit to his telling of the story completely. Journalist Donal Lynch sees this as significant: ‘A
writer has to believe in themselves as a protagonist of sorts. Maeve must have had that instinctively from the start.’
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Certainly it shows a lively imagination and Maeve did have a clear sense of herself at the centre of the world, because for her first three years she was an only child and the focus of her parents’ attention. Later, Maeve would ‘shiver with
embarrassment
’ when friends of the family related how her parents would get her down from her room and parade her in front of them. Indeed, given Maureen’s culture of approbation it is a wonder that Maeve wasn’t insufferably self-centred even at this stage. The signs were certainly there. When her sister Joan was born Maeve asked if she could swap her for a rabbit, so put out was she at the diversion of interest in her.

Maureen, though not a great reader herself, did also play an important role in ensuring that there were books in the house. She liked to go to furniture auctions, which in those days often included cheap deals on boxes of second-hand books. William also loved nothing better than combing the second-hand
bookstalls
which lined Dublin Quays on the river Liffey, and came home laden with the spoils.

Before long the walls of Maeve’s bedroom, her private world, were covered with shelves and she had a desire bordering on the obsessive to organise her ever-growing library, which she did by colour rather than author. It was as if they were valuable
property
to be organised and stored, Crusoe-like, in the lumber room of her head for the purpose of survival on the little island where her childhood was playing out.

In time all the spare wall space throughout the house was
covered with bookshelves and reading was part of a family routine after supper when the homework was done. It wasn’t all plain sailing. Later, like any young teenager, Maeve did tend to resist her father’s recommendations of some of the classics (notably Carlyle, Trollope and Thackeray). But because reading was never a pressurised activity at home she eventually came around to them.

Between reading
Pooh
and
Pendennis
, she devoured Enid Blyton and afterwards became heavily involved with Peter Cheyney, Agatha Christie and Graham Greene, his
Stamboul Train
occasioning a rare moment of parental censorship after she enquired as to the night-time berthing arrangements of Myatt and Coral Musker on the
Orient Express
.

Books took Maeve out of herself. She remembered at eleven or twelve becoming completely carried away by
Gone with the Wind
, so much so that the day she read it she didn’t come down to lunch, which was something that had never happened before.

The experience got her thinking about its author, Margaret Mitchell, and how clever she must have been to write it and the amount of research it must have taken and how interesting it was that she had only written the one book. Maeve concluded that Mitchell was born to it.

Being a writer was an idea that Dalkey itself recommended. Telling his daughter about her home town’s high-powered
literary
history was an inevitable and important part of William’s education of her. Samuel Beckett, who, later, Maeve would meet and interview for the
Irish Times
, was born and brought up in nearby Foxrock. Leopardstown racecourse, the Foxrock railway
station and Harcourt Street station, the Dublin terminus of the Dalkey line, all feature in his prose and plays.

The playwright, poet, prose writer, travel writer and
collector
of folklore John Millington Synge was born in nearby Churchtown and later lived at Glendalough House, Adelaide Road, Glenageary, close to where Maeve first lived. Synge was one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, along with W. B. Yeats and the dramatist Augusta, Lady Gregory. A key figure in the Irish Literary Revival, he is best known for his play
The Playboy of the Western World
, which caused riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey, led by Irish
nationalists
who saw the play as an offence to public morals and an insult against Ireland.

Another local was George Bernard Shaw, who had lived in Torca Cottage on Dalkey Hill, very close to Eastmount. And Maeve knew exactly where James Joyce had lived, just a walk away from her.

William introduced her to Joyce’s personal history as well as to parts of his landmark novel,
Ulysses
, and she realised from a young age what a touchstone Joyce was to the spirit of Ireland and to that of Dublin and Dalkey in particular. There were a number of points on which, even as a child, she could identify with him. Joyce was born to a Catholic middle-class family like hers. He had been schooled by Jesuits and University College Dublin, where many members of the Binchy family had studied. In 1892 Joyce’s family had taken a large semi-detached house at No. 23 Carysfort Avenue in Blackrock, just the other side of Dún Laoghaire from Dalkey. And in 1904 he had actually
taught at a school in Dalkey,
6
in that same year staying for the best part of a week with his friends Oliver St John Gogarty and Samuel Chenevix Trench at the Martello tower in Sandycove,
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a popular bathing place a short walk from the centre of Dalkey.

Martello towers were built to withstand invasion during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) and there are two in close proximity here. The story of Joyce’s time at the Sandycove tower, rentable then for eight pounds a year payable to Dublin Castle, is
riveting
and will have appealed strongly to Maeve’s young mind. From the top of the tower, accessible by means of a tight
internal
spiral stone staircase, one can look out across the bay to the Muglins, a group of rocks with a distinctive lighthouse, which get a small mention in
Ulysses
. When the weather was warm the three young men sunbathed up there, moving around the raised sentry platform of the tower to get the best of the sun and to avoid the wind, discussing plans to ‘Hellenise’ Ireland – to dismantle the Catholic theocracy and return it to the traditions and Platonic values of ancient Greece, birthplace of Western culture.

The principal living area of the tower, where Joyce slept with the other two, occupies the first floor. It was in this room, on the night of 14 September 1904, that the three occupants were asleep when Trench had a nightmare about a black panther, reached for his revolver and fired at the fireplace where he imagined the beast to be crouching. As the others woke in alarm, Trench fell back to sleep and Gogarty took the gun. When Trench stirred again, Gogarty said, ‘Leave him to me’ and fired a few shots at the saucepans on the shelf over Joyce’s bed, bringing them down
on the terrified poet. Joyce dressed and left immediately, walking through the night into Dublin, never to return.