I never knew Paddy. He died when I was a baby. I have only the things my mother has said to me over the years. They are impressions of character, and specific images: He was the kindest man. I never heard him raise his voice. He worked so hard. He only went out once a week to play cards at the Catholic Young Men’s Society, that was his entertainment. He loved the opera. When they came on tour he’d go and sing along because he knew all of the arias. You should have seen him there with the tears streaming down his face and the passion in his voice…
Both May and Paddy were passionate about their home city. Visitors call Cork people clannish, slow to welcome the outsider. ‘They’re only jealous because there’s none like us!’ May would say. The city is divided by the River Lee. In the middle there is an island connected by several bridges and on either side hills rise up, giving the whole place an atmosphere of closeness that locals find intimate and reassuring, and visitors often condemn as claustrophobic. More than any other place I have lived, it is Cork I regard as my home. It is my city and though I may never live there again, I have great sympathy with something my father told me the writer Frank O’Connor had once said: ‘I could never get over the feeling that although I had left Cork, Cork had never really left me.’
The fierce local pride displayed by my grandmother, passed on to my mother and in turn to me, is at least partly the consequence of the city being constantly, and unfavourably, compared to Dublin. Corkonians have never really accepted a ‘second-city’ status. The city’s merchants boasted that Cork had the deepest natural harbour in Ireland. As trade flourished with Europe grand mansions sprang up along the valley of the River Lee; they were the homes of merchants who summered in southern Europe and came home to christen their new suburbs with Italian names like Montenotte and Tivoli.
My grandmother’s city was Cork but her country was the home, and when she married my grandfather Paddy Hassett in 1936 she settled into domestic life. Paddy built their house, St Declan’s, on one of Cork’s southern hills. It had ivy-covered walls and fine gardens at the front and back; there were four bedrooms, a kitchen that was almost entirely constructed of glass, so that even on the bleakest Irish days it threw light back into the dining room, and a genteel sitting room, usually kept locked until important visitors came. There was a lovely woman called Minnie, who first came in the 1930s as a housekeeper but who had become a member of the family. ‘Min’ was my grandmother’s rock and loved us as if we were her own children.
I lived with my grandmother for more than a year after my parents’ separation and spent each August with her in a cottage she rented at Ardmore, my grandfather’s birthplace, on the County Waterford coast. Those days roaming the rock pools of the foreshore were the happiest of my childhood; they left me with a lifelong addiction to pottering around at the edge of the sea, and a committed belief in the healing powers of the landscape of west Waterford. Always when I am troubled, or returning from some unpleasant place, I head for Ardmore.
It was May’s courage that left the deepest impression on me and encouraged me to get on with things whenever I was tempted to feel sorry for myself. By the time I went to live with her she had already experienced tragedy. Of her nine children, one died shortly before she was due to give birth, another when he was a baby of two months. Her sixth child, my Uncle Ben, was born with muscular dystrophy. My grandmother took him to Lourdes in the hope of a holy cure. She was a devout Catholic (though never a craw thumper), but there was no cure. Ben was fourteen years old when he died at home on a summer afternoon.
Ten months later her husband, Paddy Hassett, died. I believe his death was the direct result of stress. Paddy had got into financial difficulty in the early 1960s, essentially the victim of his own niceness. He owned a garage business in Cork but was undone by his willingness to give financial credit. When hard times came his debtors refused to pay up. Paddy’s nerves gave out. He had fought for his country in the War of Independence and worked hard to provide the best for his family. Yet now he felt that he had failed as a man. Paddy retreated into silence. My grandmother would ask him to talk but he could not. He was forced to sell the business and then the cottage he had built near Ardmore, the place where he was born. As his world collapsed Paddy suffered a stroke and was hospitalised. A few months later he had another stroke and died. For a while it looked as if my grandmother would lose St Declan’s, until an uncle stepped in and bought it from the bank.
It was the death of my uncle Michael, her fourth child, which fully revealed the extraordinary depths of my grandmother’s courage. Mike had emigrated to the United States in the late 1950s. He started out working with General Motors but his heart was set on becoming a theatre director. Mike worked until he’d saved enough money to go to college. After graduating he went on to teach drama at Columbia University, and was building a reputation as a promising director off-Broadway. Mike was drafted for Vietnam but got a deferment because of his studies. He’d protested against the war and had no intention of becoming cannon fodder for Richard Nixon. As the sixties came to an end he started to miss home. In a last letter he’d told my grandmother about a job that had come up at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.
I had met Michael only twice. One summer a few years before he’d come to visit us at a house my grandmother rented by the sea. It was his first visit home from the States in nearly a decade. I remember that Mike had dark hair and wore a plaid jacket and blue jeans, and looked like a character from a Simon and Garfunkel song. My grandmother laughed a lot around him. Mike was always up and moving about, he filled the little house with his gestures and voice; he told stories about America and sang ‘The Red River’ when he shaved in the morning, Come and sit by my side if you love me/Do not hasten to bid me adieu…
He threw me into the waves at Goat Island and when I bawled with fright he raced in and smothered me with apologies and carried me on his shoulders up and down the beach until I’d completely forgotten the anguish of a few minutes before. A few weeks later I saw him again as he was getting ready to leave Ireland. He was taking a train which would in turn take him to the plane. The carriages were crowded with football supporters. They were friendly but boisterous and Mike had to push to make his way to the window to wave goodbye. He smiled, he always smiled, then waved as the train pulled away taking him back to America.
In those days when an Irish person was killed abroad it was usually a substantial item on the news. But Mike’s death was overshadowed by a national crisis. We were sitting by the fire in St Declan’s watching television when the main evening news came on. The headline said that thirteen people had been shot dead by the British army in Derry. There were black-and-white pictures on the screen of soldiers shooting and then a priest waving a white handkerchief leading some men down a laneway. The men were carrying a body. I’d never seen a real body before. There was a statement from the Irish government condemning what had happened.
I remember my grandmother saying ‘Mother of God, this is desperate.’ Even to a child living in the far south of Ireland, largely cut off from the politics of the day, I knew that these black-and-white images represented a moment of significance. If my gran was angry it meant something serious had happened. Then there was a knock on the front door. My mother went to answer. I heard my Uncle Barry’s voice. ‘Lads, I have some bad news for ye.’ And after that there were muffled sounds. Doors opened and closed. Then I heard a woman’s voice crying. My mother told me that Uncle Michael was dead. ‘Be good now because we have to mind Gran,’ she said. The rest of that night passed in a procession of grown-ups coming and going.
On the night of the fire Mike had been out with friends in Greenwich Village. He came home and fell asleep, possibly with a candle still lit. The firemen found him near the door where he’d crawled trying to escape. The New York Times carried a short paragraph:
Michael Hassett was killed in a fire in his apartment on Spring Street in Manhattan. Police are investigating the cause of the blaze.
There wasn’t really much to investigate. It was an accidental death a long way from home. The coffin came home a week or so after we got the news of his death. It was the first coffin I’d ever seen for real, a big steel coffin, and it scared me and made me sad, because until it arrived I thought that there might be a mistake