Every fortnight he would send magazines along with a postal order for pocket money. The magazines were Look and Learn and World of Wonder. They were packed with articles about history and adventure. I have them to this day. Once I showed them to my son Daniel. He read them with intense curiosity, seeing them as I had all those years before. ‘Gosh,’ he said.’He gave you a lot, didn’t he?’
Usually I would see him at Christmas, Easter, the summer holidays. I waited for him in hope. You didn’t always know if he would make the visit. He would want to, I know that now. But somewhere between his best intentions and the railway station, alcohol might intervene. I would watch the crowds coming off the train, and search for his face, heart beating with excitement. If the crowd passed by without any sign of my father it could mean he was still sitting on the train which in turn meant he was probably drunk. Or it could mean that he hadn’t made the journey.
If he was there, but drunk, I would panic. What if he met my school friends in town? They might see him stumble, or come over to say hello and hear him slur or smell the whiskey. I learned the power of shame. I knew people saw. I wanted to hide my father. I wanted to make him better. The last thing on earth I could do was accept him.
When he was sober we had happy times on his visits. They shone like the brightest diamonds. He would come to my grandmother’s house for tea, laden with presents and stories. Once in Killarney he bought me fishing gear and we wandered across the fields to a quiet spot and lay on the grass for hours under the hot sun. I cannot remember what we talked about, but I do know that I wished those hours would last forever and that when it came time to say goodbye I experienced the fiercest grief. That was how the world was after separation. I had my moments with him but we were far from each other, my father and I.
Through all of these times my Cork grandmother’s house was the port of shelter. I had been going there since I was a baby. Some of my earliest memories of smell and colour come from her garden. In autumn it smelt of blackcurrant and apple. I pressed my face to the bushes, sweet and musty, and saw the apples scattered on the grass. Never before had I seen so many. They were green but a lighter green than the grass. I picked one up and bit hard. My teeth stuck in the skin. Suddenly I was spitting, bits of peel spewed out. I yelped at the bitter taste. That would have been in the early 1960s when my grandmother, May Hassett – or May H as I called her – was still a young woman, in her early fifties, and only recently widowed.
All the other pictures of the garden are from a later time: the three apple trees, two on the left hand side, the other in the middle of the garden, and the ground always covered with fruit from the end of August until deep into October. Come on, lads, for the love of God, pick them up before they’re spoiled. I’ll make apple jelly. The high hedge between us and Freddie Cremin’s garden – busy Freddie who lived in fear of marauding children trampling his garden and who we swore cut his grass every day, rain or sun, and who was kind to my grandmother. Beyond Cremin’s was White’s where young Brid White lived, a year older than me with dark hair and wide excited eyes, and to whom I silently swore eternal love.
Behind the trees was the green shed where I smoked my first cigarette. My late grandfather had used it for keeping his tools. May H saw the smoke curling out of there, and said nothing. That was her style, by and large. Where her grandchildren were concerned my grandmother was mellow; not lax or careless but knowing when the blind eye was wisest. May was softhearted but never sentimental. I think suffering had made her a pragmatist; she lived for what happiness the present could bring. She was the family’s first real traveller, heading off to visit her relatives in America and travelling by Greyhound bus from New York City to the deserts of New Mexico, carried along by an unshakeable conviction that if she was nice to people they would be nice to her. She travelled several times to America and to her relative’s summer home in Barbados.
I longed to emulate her. On Sundays a group of us children from the road would cycle up the hill to Cork airport and hope a plane might take off or land while we there; I saw those departing planes of childhood as a promise. Some day, I told myself, I will climb on board. I will be going somewhere.
My parents gave me the passion of idealism. May H encouraged common sense and warned me against taking myself too seriously. ‘If you can’t have a laugh you’re finished,’ she would say. The greatest enemy, she said, were the ‘dreaded nadgers’. By this she meant ‘nerves’, as Irish people were apt to call any kind of emotional disturbance. If I worried too much, or failed to see the lighter side of a predicament, my grandmother would caution me against the nadgers.
‘Jesus Mercy, think of poor Auntie Katie above on the Lee Road with her wonderful education, one of the cleverest women in Cork, and where did it get her?’ My grand-aunt Katie was my grandmother’s sister-in-law and had been a progressive and highly admired national school teacher and one of the first women headmistresses in the city. But in her later years she was overtaken by mental illness, and ended her days in the city’s mental hospital, a place that would have sat well in Stalin’s Gulag.
My grandmother’s antidote to nadgers, and the inevitable incarceration that would follow, was to believe that no situation was so bad that it could not be remedied with the application of common sense, humour and a cup of Barry’s Gold Blend tea. Over the long term, that faith was challenged by the death of a beloved child, but even afterwards and up to the end of her life my grandmother retained a gift for laughter. Her voice is with me constantly, especially when I am agonising over some drama in my adult life. The only thing you can’t get over is death. All the rest you can manage.
She was born May Sexton in Cork city in 1910 when Ireland still dreamed of Home Rule and a future as loyal subjects within the Empire. May lived in a neat terraced house looking down on the city in the middle-class suburb of Ballinlough. Her father was an accountant with an old Cork firm; her mother was an orphan from a moderately well-to-do family, whose guardian before her marriage was a major in the Indian army.
My great-grandfather, John Sexton, was a quiet, gentle man, who went on the very occasional skite and once terrified his family by disappearing on the night the Black and Tans tried to burn Cork. He had been trapped, unable to get home from the pub because of the roadblocks. ‘I remember we watched the red glow of buildings burning that night. We were terrified. We were sure the Tans had got him. My poor mother was distracted with worry,’ May recalled.
May had one sister, Grand-aunt Kitty, who helped to radicalise my political consciousness. I spent an unhappy couple of weeks with her one summer and we spent hours arguing over politics and religion. Kitty was a generous person but well to the right on issues of faith and fatherland. She stoutly defended Mussolini and General Franco as ‘fine Catholics’ and regarded my political views as communist and blasphemous (by then I was a teenage socialist).
My grandmother and her parents were people of Cork’s genteel suburbs and, like the majority of their class, lived comfortably enough in the embrace of the Empire. Cork had been a British military and naval base for two centuries. There were several British military barracks in the city and nearby at Crosshaven and Cobh were the great naval bases of Haulbowline and Fort Camden. The harbour was also an important stopping point for transatlantic liners from the Cunard and White Star lines. It was here that the Titanic made her last stop before heading out to disaster in the North Atlantic.
My grandmother grew up in the world of dry sherry in crystal glasses, china cups for the visiting priest, the lace table cloth at Easter and Christmas, and the voice of Count McCormack on the gramophone. When you and I were seventeen and life and love was new./ That golden spring when love was King and I your wonderful Queen…
She saw McCormack once, on the day he sang at the Eucharistic Congress in 1932; it was the largest public demonstration in the history of twentieth-century Ireland, an assertion of papal power in the still young independent state. May travelled up by train with her husband-to-be, a young car mechanic and veteran of the War of Independence, Paddy Hassett. ‘You could hear a pin drop that day. I never heard a voice so sweet.’
McCormack sang the Panus Angelicus and a grateful, pious nation swooned. On the way back to Cork my grandparents had an argument. When she spoke about it later May