Trespassers (7 page)

Were these fantasies his or ours? His lean fanatic’s face and tight, drawstring mouth discouraged negotiation, and when my
generation began to think of leaving school we learned that he had forbidden us to attend Trinity, the older and more aesthetically pleasing of our two universities, on pain of excommunication. ‘A reserved sin!’ Why? Because Trinity was Protestant and he didn’t approve of Catholics fraternising with Protestants. By all reports, McQuaid was an odd fish.

In 1945 he bought a property at the foot of Killiney Hill, where he got an astronomer to rig up a telescope overlooking the beach. So, for all his inquisitorial ways, he had a soft spot for natural beauty. Human beauty? Perhaps. A biography by John Cooney,
John Charles McQuaid: Ruler of Catholic Ireland,
published first in Ireland, then in the US by Syracuse University Press, reports a rumour that he had been known to disguise himself and go cruising for boys. Another fantasy? Or another reserved sin? Gossip flourished. Nobody knew. The biography quotes Dubliners who, as boys, had been embarrassed by the prelate’s notorious interest in explicitly discussing sex and masturbation so as to encourage them to avoid both. And it records one lurid episode with a small boy which Irish reviewers tend to dismiss on grounds that its source was an enemy of McQuaid’s, and that there was no witness to it. But then attempted rape is rarely witnessed.

Interestingly, the outspoken biographer’s Irish critics argue that his ‘life’ of McQuaid judges the ‘Ruler of Catholic Ireland’ – his subtitle – between 1940 and 1973 by today’s standards. This, they imply, makes his assessments faulty and so does his ignorance of how Ireland was in those years. But, in the wake of the paedophile scandals now shaking the Irish Church, we must wonder whether these defenders themselves knew what, we now learn, was going on all over the country in those decades. If they did, they were guilty of connivance. If they did not, their criticisms are worthless. The Murphy report, whose findings are being discussed in the newspapers as I write, says that paedophilia was covered up for forty years in the Dublin diocese. In those years, covering up
scandals would have been easy – especially in the light of another item which appeared in the press not so very long ago to the effect that Pius XII apparently made it a reserved sin – yet another one! – for anyone to accuse a priest of paedophilia. True or untrue? How to know after so much duplicity?

I lived in Killiney myself until the early Fifties and thereafter regularly visited my parents there until twenty years later, when they left it for the urban comforts of nearby Dún Laoghaire.

Partly perched on its hilltop, partly tumbling down it, the town seemed so sedate, sexless and sleepy that my great anxiety was, when the war ended, travel revived and foreign exchanges were arranged for me, that the Italian or French girl whose lively hospitality I had enjoyed in the Savoy mountains or the seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi would die of boredom in Killiney.

Yet it was a pretty place, just a brisk, fifteen-minute walk from hilltop to beach, lush, woodsy, part of the old Pale, close enough to Dublin for people to have gone there in the days before motorcars to build roomy houses amidst what by now were mature,
semi-exotic
gardens, redolent of empire and Mediterranean trips. Several had dreamy names like Capri, Khyber Pass and Sorrento, though native Irish owners tended to choose ones like Carraig Donn, Grianán, Cois Ḟairrge and, in our own case, the semi-Anglicised Knockaderry, which, in the original Gaelic meant ‘the hill of the oakwood’, in memory of an earlier house where Seán had holidayed as a boy. Our field for now had only very young trees, but across the road from it rose a wooded park, and downhill to the right, between the Vico Road and the sea, a eucalyptus wood anchored the soil above a near-vertical slope which descended to White Rock Beach, where the cliffs gleamed with mica, and the sand was finer than caster sugar. In Killiney Park,
during the Thirties and Forties, children could be seen gathering sticks for firewood, then carrying them home in great bundles on their backs, which were often bent at right angles, like those of figures in a Bruegel painting. In winter, their fingers, like my own, were covered with chilblains. Fuel shortages were returning us to medieval conditions.

However, just under the crest of Killiney Hill Road was a row of workmen’s cottages, one or two of which, thanks to the Mexican Gulf Stream, had palm trees in their small gardens. These, allegedly, had been built to house English servants brought over to work in the vanished great house belonging to ‘the Talbot Estate’. What had happened to that house? And where had it been located? Nobody seemed to know, but the names of the families now living in the cottages were indeed English – Hall, Mason, Tyndal and the like – and the big house belonging to Captain Disney, who had sold us our field, was said to have been the dower-house of the same estate. Down the hill to the left, just off the road leading towards what Protestants still called Kingstown and we called Dún Laoghaire, there was a tall, see-through, lacy, stone remnant of a house said to have belonged to the Parnell family which later disappeared. Had it been burned in the Troubles, as happened to so many such houses in fact and perhaps more in fiction? Surely not, if its owners were in any way connected to the great Charles Stewart Parnell? But perhaps they had had the roof removed themselves so as to avoid having to pay rates? Information was sparse, in part because so many Killiney residents were retired and had spent their active lives somewhere else. Many of those living – or having recently lived – in the roomy villas either on the hill top or down by the sea also had English names: Judd, Johnson, Robinson, Murray, Waterhouse, Hone, Starky, Fagan, Williams, Nutall-Smith, Boardman, Gibbon and even an ancient Mrs Parnell, who was thought to be eccentric because she wore nineteenth-century outfits featuring hats, buttoned boots, long
skirts and black lace such as I see girls selling and modelling nowadays in London’s Camden Market. She was often in our number 59 bus queue, but no one had the nerve to ask her if she was connected to the ruined house. Perhaps we half thought of her as a ghost.

Killiney Protestants varied. Some had represented the British Empire in India or Africa. Others, having inherited houses too expensive to keep up, lived frugally, while still others were feudal in their ways, like Captain Disney, who invited neighbourhood children to skate and slide on his pond when it froze, organised a fête every summer in his fields, and was generous with callers at Hallowe’en. Some occasionally invited Seán and Eileen, along with other neighbours, to drink sherry on Sunday mornings after church, and some were what Eileen called bohemian, by which she meant that the wives wore slacks (which was then thought daring if you weren’t actually riding an animal), drank openly in the local lounge bar (rather than discreetly in a cupboard-sized snug) and, once the war got going, were apt to get into conversation with the officers in civvies who came down from Northern Ireland to eat steak. According to Eileen, one of her friends, whom I shall call Lily, did more than talk. She picked men up and took them home. Eileen affected disapproval, but was soon wearing slacks herself – though never in town – and gave up letting herself be shut away in a snug. She and Lily befriended a German woman married to a Dutch journalist who lived in the village and felt isolated and lonely. After all, why not? We were neutral, weren’t we? They were careful, however, about introducing her to either Captain Disney or Colonel Williams, who lived on either side of us, or to Gracie O’Reilly’s son, Terry, who was in the RAF.

‘She’s not a great one for taking hints,’ Lily told Eileen. ‘So if we go into the pub with her, we’d better take her into the snug and keep her there. I’ll say you’re shy about drinking in public.
She’d never believe it of me, and if we tell her that the officer class would refuse to fraternise with her, she might blub. She’s prone to that.’

Lily, having lived in Africa, sometimes made remarks which would now be considered racist and which, even in the Forties, could make people blush. A swarthy friend might, to her mind, ‘have a touch of the tar brush’ or have a baby to whom Lily would refer as ‘her new coffee bean’.

I too had friends whom it seemed wise to keep apart. One was Lily’s daughter, Jasmine (another alias), who had spent her childhood in Africa and was imaginative, independent, astonishingly beautiful, permanently angry, resented her mother (whom she called ‘that sow’), adored her father (whom she felt that mother mistreated) and claimed to despise all humans and care only for animals. She had won prizes for painting lions and possessed a pony, a goat, two ducks and a dog, but seemed never to have any pocket money and apparently lived on boiled offal, which the butcher had probably been told was being bought for the dog. Like almost all local Protestants, except Miss Smythe, she and her parents lived in a high-ceilinged, formerly elegant, cold, unmodernised house equipped with a tennis court, vastly overgrown rhododendron bushes and a winding drive which established its claim to be a gentleman’s residence. Cash, however, was short, as was the case with many Anglo-Irish families, and often when I dropped by Jasmine would have a large potful of lights on the stove which creaked and croaked like something in a horror film. It made ghostlike noises as it simmered and looked, as it rose and sank, rather like a folded grey mackintosh. At other times she would be cooking sheep’s head, and would dare me to eat one of its eyes, mocking me when I refused the dare. Her
contemptus mundi
was extreme. ‘Look at those corpses,’ she would say, surveying a beachful of pallid sunbathers in early June. ‘Aren’t they horrible?’ She was frankly curious, though, about bodily functions and, as she was a year or so older than I, had no trouble persuading me to join in examining the parts of each other’s bodies that we ourselves couldn’t see. However, she refused to come trespassing with me, and so clearly disapproved of the practice that I felt that she and my new Catholic school friend, Marie, could not be introduced to each other unless I found some way of warning each in advance that flesh was sacred to one and property to the other. Marie, though less than totally averse to trespassing, would have greatly disapproved of being shown Jasmine’s private parts. And I, now that I had finally started going to school to local Loretto nuns, was being cautious about Catholic rules which, it seemed to me, my parents had either got wrong or had forgotten. Catholics at the Loretto convent seemed both mildly hostile and timorous.

Yet it was with Marie, a quiet classmate of whom the nuns thought highly, that I managed to indulge the addiction to fear which I had contracted while trespassing with my mother. One day I persuaded her to try skipping school with me (this was called ‘mitching’), but I forget how we spent the stolen time. Perhaps I took her to visit some of my old acquaintances, like Mrs O’Reilly, several of whose doddery charges, I now realised, were amiably off their heads. Or perhaps our truancy was on one of the days when we walked down the coast to a stretch of rusted railway tracks which had been abandoned when the cliffs along which they ran became eroded. There were places where access roads to the beach ran under, and at right angles to, the tracks. They must once have been supported by some sort of girder but were now as airborne as telephone cables. Stepping out along yards of slim, unpropped and possibly crumbling track was pleasurably frightening, especially when Marie, standing some way off on
terra firma, kept calling to me to come back, be careful, watch out, and remember that the road below me was paved with stones.

‘You’ll be killed,’ she moaned satisfyingly.

Eileen would have been no good as a companion here, where the risk was real, since she wouldn’t have let me run it. Besides, she was always busy now with her fairy tales (which I had outgrown), her garden and my small, but demanding, brother. Amazingly though, Marie let me persuade her to come with me on a more dangerous venture. There was a large cave at one end of the White Rock beach, used as a lavatory by swimmers. Its smell protected it, since nobody, other than myself and the anxious Marie, was prepared to walk through to the back, where the smell stopped and a number of underground passages fanned out into the dark. At least one was so narrow that we had to crawl through it on hands and knees and to come out backwards, since we couldn’t turn around. Another still narrower passage with a high roof led along a slippery clay shelf running halfway up an underground cliff, past the side of a possibly deep pool. The whole area was sculpted from compacted reddish mud, and we learned later that it had been a copper mine, though it had looked to us like blood on our first visits. Following the advice provided by adventure stories read in schoolgirl magazines, we brought along bicycle lamps, matches and candles, by which we would know, if they flickered out, that the air was no longer healthy. They never did, but the place was eerie, litter-free and, as far as we could tell, known to no one but us. Exploring it was an end in itself. We hadn’t expected to find bones or treasure, and had no practical purpose except to test our nerve and defy the adult world’s advice about being cautious and avoiding ‘useless, commercial trash’, which was how my parents described the school stories which, on the contrary and to our delight, had turned out to be so helpful. They didn’t supervise my reading at all closely, so I had often been enthralled by books found on their shelves which were clearly too
grown-up
for me, since their more exotic meanings remained opaque. Among these were
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Mr Norris Changes Trains, No Orchids for Miss Blandish
and a novel by someone called Rayner Heppenstall, whom Seán must have known, for his novel was in galley sheets in our attic. Not quite understanding proved tantalising, and perplexity drew me on. It was a little like the excitement I felt when venturing into the copper mine, and reminded me too of the games I played with Jasmine. The books could have been written by near-aliens, or by the kindly, harmless, semi-human animals which she had invented for us to imitate so as to escape our banal selves. I don’t know whether my parents would have minded the odd selection I had made among their books if they had noticed it. Probably not, since most of my favourites were perfectly orthodox – I revelled in the adventure stories of G. A Henty, Baroness Orczy, Dickens, Hugo and Dumas Père, as well as in the polite world of Jane Austen and the entertainingly ordinary one of Richmal Crompton. The failure to warn me against less suitable books may have hinged partly on Seán’s dislike of the Censorship Board and partly on a Rousseauistic assumption that, just as falling into a fire was the best way of learning not to play with it, reading incomprehensible books would encourage better choices. At any rate, my parents’ only prohibition targeted ‘English trash’, by which they meant a paper called
The Girls’ Crystal.
They had not read it, but as it was for English children they suspected it of peddling alien values.

My third friend was Diana. A Protestant of a different sort from Jasmine, Diana was prim, slightly younger than myself, totally without a sense of humour and apt to deliver little speeches about manners, hygiene and the most appropriate way to blow one’s nose. It amused me to tease her by pretending to be a wild creature who
had never even seen a handkerchief, but her readiness to believe this spoilt my fun. Which of us, I had to pause and wonder, was mocking the other? Surely she couldn’t be as prim as she seemed. Could she? She could. And yet it was she who got me into trouble with my school nuns. She lent me a book which was a source of unexpected scandal. The surprise was that this hadn’t happened until now, since some of my parents’ thinking would undoubtedly have upset the nuns. What I had not foreseen was that her book about someone called Darwin would do so even more. It was the first time I had come across his theory, so I elected to give my geography class the benefit of my discovery. The geography nun, who was older than the others, had decided, possibly with an eye to arranging short rests for herself, that in the course of the term, each girl in our class should prepare a brief talk on any topic she liked, so long as it had a connection with geography. I submitted the title ‘The Galapagos Islands’, which did not alert her to what was coming, so it was only after I had laboriously anatomised the unfamiliar heresy known as evolution that she began to worry. Perhaps she hadn’t been listening at first, for she let me talk on for quite a while before asking if what I was telling the class was supposed to be fact or fiction. Perhaps she had just remembered that my mother wrote fairy tales.

‘It’s science, Mother.’ You had to keep saying the word ‘Mother’ when you addressed a nun.

‘What sort of science? Let me see that book. Where did you get it?’

‘From a friend, Mother.’

‘A friend? What school does she go to?’

‘Glengara Park.’

‘That’s a Protestant school. Did you know that?’

‘Yes, Mother, but her parents are friends of my parents.’

That gave the nun pause. ‘Well,’ she decided, ‘I’ll have to get advice about this. Let me keep it for a few days.’

It turned out that evolution was erroneous and forbidden, and that the chaplain wanted a word with me. This news, I suspected, would not please the nun, who disliked priests or government inspectors or indeed anyone looking over her shoulder. Intrusiveness, even by other nuns, upset her, but her resentment applied most specifically to men.

‘Men,’ I remembered her exclaiming on an earlier occasion, while drawing a large, free-hand map of Ireland on the blackboard, ‘never give up a privilege. They hate letting women near the altar.’ Her hand wobbled with feeling as she said this, and I noticed that her Ireland was looking more and more like a cross between our rather chubby chaplain and a teddy bear. I was puzzled at priests – who else could she mean? – wanting to keep her away from the altar. ‘They don’t think,’ she warned, turning to address us, ‘that
we
can think for ourselves.’

I understood this bit, for my mother too liked to think for herself and, if advised to do something one way, would often do it in another. Sending me to school three years late was an example of this, and so was her failure to kit me out in the right uniform. Sometimes I wished she would do things like other people.

‘Who’s the little girl wearing England’s cruel red?’ a nun named Mother Fidelia had called out at assembly on my first day, ensuring that every head turned to stare at my scarlet hair ribbon.

‘You knew,’ I reproached Eileen when I got home. ‘You
must
have known it was the wrong colour.’

She was unabashed. ‘Ask that nun,’ she challenged, ‘where was she when your mother was fighting for independence.’

She was torn, though, for, while there was romance in despising the new ‘bourgeois’ Ireland, she wanted me to do well in it, so was unsure whether to scorn or join the new order. Ambition, for me, won, though there would be U-turns, like the times when she sent me out on to the road to collect droppings for her
rose-beds
. Due to the petrol shortage, horses, carts and old, mildewed
cabs had by then been brought out of retirement, so my bucket was soon heavy with steaming, yellow horse dung, some of it still sweetly grassy and fresh. When I told her how worried I had been, lest someone from school see me scraping it off the tarmac, her response was always, ‘You should get rid of human respect.’ To help me do this, she might then sing
The Red Flag,
which had been written, she reminded me, by a County Meath man. I wasn’t sure whether she was indulging in self-parody, or if the parody was an excuse for savouring the corny but rousing words:

‘Join in,’ she sometimes invited, forgetting or choosing to forget that I had no ear.

During the Civil War, she and fellow members of
Cumann na mBann
– the IRA women’s auxiliary force – had sung that regularly while slow-stepping behind coffins at Republican funerals. Didn’t that prove that the English had no monopoly of the colour? Nor of aggression. Nuns, after all, could be very aggressive. Perhaps this came from living in a pack. Like wolves?