Bill would stop for a drink on his way home from school in the houses of people who knew and loved him (Yerrah, Bill, come in for the one). He stopped at crossroads where he met the local characters (J can only stop a few minutes.. At Alla Sheehy’s pub next door (J must be off now in the name of God. Well, just the last one so).
My grandfather worked through to his retirement. He cared for his family and every one of them remembered him with love. He was a thinker but also a dreamer. Sometimes he could spend money on drink that Hanna depended on to pay bills and provide for the children. It was not a permanent crisis but it added to the pressure on my grandmother.
He clashed with the Catholic priest who was the ultimate manager of Clounmacon school. Part of my Uncle John’s later aversion to organised religion sprang from what he felt was the unforgiving attitude of the Church towards his father. He told me once of how the priest had arrived at the house and gone upstairs to where my grandfather was lying sick in bed and harangued him to get up and go back to work.
Bill Keane did get revenge of sorts, or at least he proved he was not cowed by the Church imperial. Once when seeing a particularly unpleasant priest – a man with a reputation for brutality in the classroom – on the main street, Bill walked past without doffing his cap, the customary greeting. As John B’s biographer describes it:
‘The priest rounded on him. “Don’t you know to salute a priest when you see one?"’
To which my grandfather replied: ‘When I see one.’
My uncle wrote a play about his father. It may have been the bravest thing he ever wrote. In those days autobiographical drama was rare in Ireland, the fear of bringing shame on a family in such a small community was too great. In The Crazy Wall John B describes a man attempting to build a wall in his garden. But the builder, clearly modelled on his father, is not a practical man. The wall twists and turns. It is badly made and eventually crumbles. John B later told an interviewer: ‘When things were not going his way, my father built a symbolic wall around himself, to shut out the harsh realities of the world; he once dreamed he was going to take off around Ireland, but it came to nothing. He wanted to write the great book, and that, too, became a futile exercise.’
The relationship between my grandparents went through difficult times. Hanna must have suffered when her husband retreated into himself and when the bills came and there was no money to pay them. But when they walked out together, well into old age, those who saw them remember a couple in love, strolling arm in arm along Church Street and out towards the country lanes. They were alert to the higher values – love, compassion, the beauty of words – but hemmed in by the Free State and its poverty, the puritanical hectoring of the Church, the leeching bitterness of the Civil War and the exceptional demands of rearing many children in a small place. When I visualise my paternal grandparents I imagine two sensitive people, people of restrained nobility. But somewhere in that large family with its many pressures I believe my father became lost.
I cannot understand my grandparents, or my father, without looking at the country in which they lived. My father grew up in a state ruled over by former guerrilla fighters, men who had fought the British and then fought each other. In war photographs they are dressed in peak caps and trench coats, country boys with expressions that are half eager, half desperate, men with a price on their heads, who would be shot out of hand if captured, wild rebels in the mountains. But in my father’s country they were transformed. Éamonn de Valera had helped spark the Civil War by rejecting the Treaty with the British and providing political leadership for the IRA; his successor, Seán Lemass, was a man who had shot dead an unarmed British agent at point-blank range. But now they wore grey suits and dark hats; their rebel years behind them, they said their prayers and listened carefully to the raging whispers of the bishops.
When I was younger I judged them harshly, our spent revolutionaries. But after seeing war myself, especially the self-murdering insanity of civil war, I see them in a different light. I think they were tired men, trying as best they could to create a country after nearly a decade of conflict, battered by the economic depression that followed the Wall Street Crash, and then allowing themselves to be dragged into an economic war with Britain which they could not win. In the original shooting war against the British they had been hunted like wild animals; they had killed and been killed; in the Civil War men who had fought together, in some cases members of the same family, turned their guns on each other. The Civil War overshadowed everything in my father’s country. How could it not: that memory of ambush, executions, torture? It may be fanciful to believe, but I think some of them were more than tired; they were in a state of lingering shock, frightened by what they had discovered in themselves during those terrible years of war.
My father said: ‘We hated each other more than we ever hated the British.’ I don’t know how true that was. But he did grow up listening to stories of atrocity: men shot dead as they surrendered, others tied to landmines and blown to pieces. By the time my father was politically aware, he would have known that two parties dominated the landscape: there was Cumann na nGaedheal, the party of Collins’s people, and Fianna Fáil, the party of de Valera. They barracked each other with bitter words. ‘Murderers’. ‘Free State traitors’. ‘IRA assassins’. The toxic rasp of hatred went on and on in the lives of the people. They fought about it at political meetings, football matches, anywhere crowds gathered.
Yet both parties were profoundly similar. They were deeply conservative, both bended the knee to the Catholic Church and both would, in time, use fierce repression to protect the new Irish state from would-be revolutionaries. More than anything our new state suffered from a chronic failure of imagination. Having achieved freedom, our leaders were too tired or too blinkered – or a combination of both – to do much more than manage the shop. Innovation and inspiration were decades away.
Though they were devout supporters of Collins, the Keanes were independent-minded enough to recognise the absurdity of the political situation. During one particularly bitter election campaign my Uncle John B and his friends decided to put up a mock candidate who went by the name of Tom Doodle. The idea was to inject laughter and reduce the bitterness of the hustings. Doodle was the pseudonym given to a local labourer. His slogan, depicted on posters all over the town, was: ‘Vote the Noodle and Give the Whole Caboodle To Doodle.’
John B had organised a brass brand and a large crowd to accompany the candidate to his election meeting. He travelled to the square standing on the back of a donkey-drawn cart. It was a tumultuous affair. In a speech that satirised the clientelist, promise-all politics of the time, Doodle declared his fundamental principle: ‘Every man should have more than the next.’
Some time in the 1940s, not long before he left the town, my father was wandering around Listowel square, thinking and dreaming. It happened that there was a mission under way in the Catholic Church. The visiting Redemptorists were well known peddlers of hellfire and damnation and would send scouts into the square to round up any locals who malingered outside the church. When one of the priests approached my father, warning him to get into the church fast or face an eternity roaring in the flames, Éamonn responded with a remark that would earn him the status of local legend.
‘My good man,’ he said to the raging priest ‘your fulminations have the same effect on me as does the fart of a blackbird on the water levels of the Grand Coulee dam.’
With that he said goodnight and walked away. It was typically opaque, a very ‘Éamonn’ response.
My father’s country was a place of paradox. It was full of poetry and music, there was laughter and satire, but also repression and darkness. For every story told there were a hundred suppressed. There was magic there, but madness too.
Éamonn nurtured a dislike of the clergy all of his life. There were individual priests and nuns whom he liked but he loathed the organised Church. These gentlemen lived in fine palaces and generally behaved with all the humility and decorum you would expect of imperial pro-consuls. In 1937 de Valera framed and succeeded in having adopted a new Irish constitution. For the first time in Irish history the pre-eminent position of the Catholic Church ‘as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens’ was guaranteed by law. This meant the