My father fought to become well. At some point towards the end of the 1960s my father was admitted to hospital in Dublin for treatment for his alcoholism. He went to the main treatment centre for men with the ‘good man’s fault’. In his poem ‘Dawn at St Patrick’s’ Derek Mahon, a former patient there, conveys the atmosphere:
One by one
The first lights come on,
Those that haven’t been on all night.
Christmas, the harshly festive, has come and gone.
No snow, but the rain pours down
In the first hour before dawn,
Before daylight…
Television, Russian fiction, snooker with the staff,
A snifter of Lucozade, a paragraph
Of Newsweek or the Daily Mail
Are my daily routine
During the festive season.
They don’t lock the razors here
As in Bowditch Hall. We have remained upright –
Though, to be frank, the Christmas dinner scene,
With grown men in their festive gear,
Was a sobering sight.
I went to visit him. It was the first of many visits to many hospitals. They would go on for thirty more years, in one part of the country or another. The hospital was halfway between the Guinness brewery and Heuston railway station where we used to catch the train to visit my maternal grandmother in Cork. Éamonn didn’t look sick. In fact he looked better than I remembered him being for a long time. In hospital he couldn’t drink. He was sharing a big room with some other men and seemed to be popular with them.
My father could have charmed the Devil himself. His way was to start out very quiet and humble, and then dazzle people with a few stories or recitations. Before long the whole place would be talking about what a great character he was. In Ireland people love a good storyteller. Éamonn was a gifted mimic and would mock the more pompous consultants (the power of the Irish consultant class was matched only by its self-regard). But what I could not see then, and did not understand for decades, was that my father was trying to fight back; his hospitalisation was not a weakness, nor should it have been something to be ashamed of; it was a brave attempt to change.
In those days our national attitude to alcohol was extraordinarily perverse. There was hardly a family in the country that did not count an alcoholic somewhere among its members. The hospitals were crammed full of men, and women, suffering from alcohol-related illnesses. Recognising the crisis as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, the Catholic Church campaigned for the cause of temperance. Regular appeals were made for men to join the Pioneer Movement, a church group which promoted total abstinence from alcohol, and children in secondary school were urged to take the pledge not to drink.
Yet awareness of the problem did not extend to honest public discussion, or any campaign by the state to provide treatment for the alcoholics who were victims of our most pernicious national disease. Nor was there any state support for women who were the victims of physical or emotional violence. ‘You made your bed now lie on it,’ a priest told my mother once. Alcoholism belonged in the land of silence. If there was a drunk in the family they were all urged to shut up and get on with the suffering. Most families did. It was a nowhere land where nothing could be confronted, where a woman dare not leave because of social pressure, or the simple fact that she had no job and depended on the man for economic survival.
My mother was lucky in that she had a profession. And when she could take no more, when it seemed as if my father could not succeed in giving up alcohol, she decided to leave.
We left at the beginning of January 1972. We were moving south to the home of my maternal grandmother in Cork. The last Christmas was harrowing. My father drank heavily. I see a toppled Christmas tree, a broken chair, fish and chips scattered on the ground; I hear his voice raging downstairs alone, mad at everything. There were bitter, painful scenes. And afterwards there was regret and apologies and the promise of better times. But I no longer believed. I feared him then. I was angry with him. I wanted to run away. I did not want to say goodbye. I was so lost, so screwed up and scared, that more than anything else in the world I wanted peace.
How long does it take for a heart to break? Mine did not break instantly. It broke every day. Year after year. So that by the time I was old enough to understand that word – ALCOHOLIC – I took it as the definition of everything broken and hopeless. My hope departed incrementally. Year after year, slowly, surely, definitely, a little more went.
And how long does it take for the habits of a lifetime to form? My own: lurking anger, the habit of sadness, and that fear which goes on even now. All of my life I have been quietly afraid. I can still lie in bed, after my wife and children are asleep, and feel full of anxiety; this in a house full of ease and warmth. To this day the sound of a key turning in a door at night, feet shuffling on the street outside my window, can set my heart racing.
Now, I would give anything to know, to be able to talk with him about what he felt when he looked into my eyes then. What did he see looking back at him? Did he see the twitching eyes, the strange, strange child I had become? So many times I wanted to shout: ‘In Jesus name why can’t you stop?’ But I was never bold enough for that.
For me the story of my father and I doesn’t have ‘sides’. There isn’t his side of it or my side of it; a wrong or a right side; a good or a bad side. There is what I lived through and what I remember of him. I loved him every day. I was proud of him. But I was also scared of him. Can you understand that? To be all those things at once, the negative not cancelling the positive, but all of it so muddled up that I couldn’t tell light from dark. I had no lamps, no compass, no maps, and there were no explanations. In those days I practised survival not analysis.
Da. That’s what I called him. Da. It’s a softer word than ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy’ or ‘Father’. Da lingers, a solitary syllable at the end of the world, a word to convey everything I felt about him in those days, a word full of tenderness and loss. I can’t describe the impossible loneliness I felt at the moment of goodbye. Lucky for me he was asleep when I looked in and saw him. I mouthed the word ‘Goodbye’.
…You had a lovely hand,
Cursive, flourishing, exuberan,, gratefu,, actual, generous.
‘Daddy Daddy’, PAUL DURCAN
My father used to write to me regularly. He had beautiful handwriting. His script was neat and flowing. He wrote about the plays he was performing or the film parts that might be coming up, he asked about how I was getting on at school. The letters d.v. appeared a lot.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked