Now that Dan was dead and gone the door to his attic room was locked.
What’s up there now, Granny Kerry?
Yerrah, only old stuff, boy. And dust. A power of dust.
But I did not believe it. My child’s imagination told me that Dan was still there, surrounded by his crows, a muttering old storyteller whose feet I could hear creaking across the floorboards at midnight. I wanted so badly to open that door. It would not have taken much. A few twists on the wire and I’d be through. But my courage failed me every time. Suppose Dan really was there? Hidden away by the family because he had gone mad. Suppose the crows were there protecting his lair, waiting to peck the eyes out of any intruder. There were safer places to go adventuring.
Out the back was a big turf shed. My grandmother would ask: ‘Will you go out and bring in a bucket of turf, boy?’ Granny Kerry knew I loved the big shed. The dried turf smelled of dead forests, of Ireland before history. My father said the Tuath de Dannan, the mythical people said to have been supplanted by the Celts, had buried great treasures in the bog, and that ‘You never know what you might find in the turf.’ I looked for jewels or a golden crown in the dried-out turf. I pulled away the sods and smashed them open. I never found anything there though, except once a sixpenny bit on the floor. I suspect my father put it there. Down below the turf was a cobbled floor that must have been centuries old. Under that, my father swore, lay a great fortune.
Our holidays in Kerry always seemed to begin with laughter. But as I got older I sensed the tension between my father and grandmother. Mostly the conversation between them seemed to revolve around horse racing.
‘What do you think of Glencaraig Lady at Cheltenham?’
‘Yerrah? I’m not so sure about that one.’
They would sit at the table next to the range, the newspapers spread out around them. It was the time they seemed most at ease with each other. But he could not stay long with her before something she said, some change of tone or inference would set his nerves twitching. And then he would be gone. Out the door and up the road to Gurtenard Wood or down to the fields by the river, walking his anger away.
Hanna would look up from her paper and shake her head: ‘What did I say wrong?’ Usually it had something to do with her praising another member of the family, or some words my father would interpret as criticism. And after that there would be no more ease in the kitchen, no swapping of tips for the horses, only waiting for the next offending word.
I believe the source of the friction between them was love. She loved him. But in his eyes it could never be enough. He craved her approval, and anything less than total and constant affirmation sent him into despair.
As a child my father had been bright and precocious. But somewhere in childhood there was a sundering between him and his mother. I think it happened slowly. As more children arrived Hanna was forced to divide her attention. My father responded by throwing tantrums. He became the troublesome one; he gave cheek and stayed out late, but ended up alienating his mother.
Enter the figure of Juleanne Keane, the spinster sister of my grandfather. She lived with the family and acted as my father’s champion. When he was chastised by his mother, Juleanne would step in to shield him. In her eyes Éamonn was faultless. The violent scenes he staged to attract the attention of his mother were rewarded by Juleanne with smothering kisses, trips to the sweet shop, the protecting embrace of her shawl.
But though she tried, I do not believe Juleanne could replace my grandmother. By the time he left home my father was already an angry young man. He was angry with the Church, with the bitter politics of the time, and angry with his mother. He had also started to drink. He found that it gave him courage and took away his anguish.
Hanna Purtill had sad eyes. Even at six or seven I could see that. Her smile was like my father’s smile: generous, warm, but always flushed through with something melancholy.
On her bad days my grandmother would stay in bed, and we would be warned to leave her in peace. She gets the bad nerves sometime.. That was how some uncle or cousin explained it. In Ireland people who got bad nerves often took to the bed. Trays of food would come and go, be picked at and sent back downstairs. Often the nerves would be explained as an illness. A trapped nerve. A bad stomach. A stiff knee. A bad back. But everybody knew what it really was: something that descended on the mind. Like coastal fog it could sit for days.
Granny Kerry was silent when she took to the bed. But light or dark she was always kind to me. I went into the room once to give her the paper and she motioned to me to come closer. She put her two arms out to hold me. Close to her, tighter than she’d ever held me. When I stood back up I saw she was crying. I went out of the room and found my mother.
‘What’s wrong with Granny Kerry?’
‘She feels sad. It’s not her fault.’
‘Oh.’
When the nerves struck an Irish house people talked in low voices. Children were told to go out and play and stay out. A doctor might come and sit with the patient, prescribe some tablets and shrug his shoulders or nod his head, sympathetically, as a family member showed him out of the house: Time is the best cure, you know. Just give it time and she’ll be grand again.
And after a few days she would be up. I would come downstairs and Hanna would be in the small kitchen peeling spuds or marking the racing pages in the parlour. She would smile and put her hand on my head and tell me to sit down and eat my breakfast. And that would be the end of the nerves. I never knew what brought on the sad hours. I simply came to accept it as part of our family inheritance.
Now there are things I know that explain part of the sadness. Some of it, at least, had to do with the hard circumstances of life. My grandmother reared nine children on a country schoolteacher’s paltry pay. For much of the time she lived under the same roof as her parents- and brother- and sister-in-law. It was a house without retreat or space for the young mother in a country where women were told that suffering was their noble duty.
I did not know my grandfather, Bill Keane. He died when I was a baby. My mother remembers: ‘He used to sit you on his knee when you were a baby and tell stories to you. By that time he was sick with throat cancer. Very sick. And he could only really swallow things that were very soft. He used to drink ice cream that had melted but it was still agony for him. He was a lovely man.’
Everybody I ask says the same thing. A lovely man. Bill taught at Clounmacon school, seven miles outside Listowel. He walked there and back every day of his teaching life. A few years ago I met two elderly nuns who remembered him. One of them said: ‘He was a gentle teacher. You know, in those days some of them could be wicked blackguards. They beat the children something terrible. But your grandfather wasn’t like that. He loved teaching and he loved words. The way he could get across those words of great writers to you was something magical. He had a great way of talking.’
I formed a picture in my mind of Bill Keane in that country classroom, before him the children of the surrounding farms, many of them boys who would soon leave to plant their father’s fields or to work as labourers on other farms, barefoot children of a pre-industrial Ireland held in thrall by the teacher’s stories.
Next to the kitchen in Church Street he kept a small library. My father and Uncle John B were introduced to the great writers like Hardy and Dickens through that little cupboard. The Keane house also had a name as a place where visiting actors were sure of a welcome. At that time theatrical companies still toured Ireland bringing the works of Shakespeare to the small towns and villages. The great Anew McMaster came and recited verse in the small parlour and inspired my father to become an actor. Words filled that house.
But my grandfather Bill was not what you would call a practical man. The best description I have of him comes from a poem written by my uncle, John B.
When he spoke gustily and sincerely Spittle fastened Not merely upon close lapel But nearly blinded Those who had not hastened To remove pell-mell. He was inviolate. Clung to old stoic principle, And