My mother is pretty. She smells of Imperial Leather. Her hair is brown – long, and she asks me to comb it. Six pence for ten minutes. Half a crown for twenty. My father is darker and in the sun his skin tans quickly. Like a Spaniard. He says the Keanes are descended from Spanish sailors who were wrecked off the west coast of Ireland during the Spanish Armada. Such pictures he paints of our imagined beginnings along the rocky coast of Galicia, the great crossing of Biscay, the galleons smashed on the black rocks of Clare, the soldiers weighed down by their armour, sucked down into the cold. ‘Only the toughest survived,’he says.
His eyes are green like mine: ‘Like the heather,’ he says. When he poses for a publicity photograph for one of his productions my father looks like a romantic poet, a man who would sacrifice everything for his art. He wore a green tweed jacket; I remember the scratch of it when he embraced me. And the smell of John Players cigarettes, the ones in the little green boxes with the sailor’s head on the front, and I remember how the smoke would curl above his head. Sometimes in the mornings I would see him stooped over the bathroom sink in his vest, peering into a small mirror as he shaved. Afterwards he would have little strips of paper garlanded across his face to cover the tiny razor cuts. He used to tell a joke about that:
A rural parish priest goes into the barber’s and asks for a shave. The barber is fond of the drink and crippled with a hangover. His hands are shaking. Soon the priest’s face is covered in tiny little cuts.
Exasperated, he says to the barber: ‘The drink is an awful thing, Michael!’
The barber takes a second before replying.
‘You’re right about that, Father. ‘Tis awful. Sure the drink, Father…it makes the skin awful soft.’
I have a cottage by the sea on the south-east coast of Ireland. Every year I go there in August, the same month that I have been going there for over forty years. I am well aware that my addiction to this place is a form of shadow chasing. It was here, on the most restful of Irish coasts, that I enjoyed my happiest hours of childhood. What else are you doing, going back again and again, but foraging for the ghosts of lost summers?
Last August I went to a party at the house of a friend overlooking Ardmore Bay. We had sun that day and the horizon was clear for miles. In Ireland when I meet older people, they will frequently ask one of two questions: ‘Are you anything to John B. Keane?’ or ‘Are you Éamonn Keane’s son?’ Yes, a nephew. Yes, a son. My father and his brother were famous and well-loved figures in Ireland. Éamonn, the actor, and John B, the playwright. Although they are both dead, they are still revered. In Cork city people will usually ask if I am Maura Hassett’s boy: ‘Yes I am, her eldest.’ They will say they remember her, perhaps at university or acting in a play at one of the local theatres. ‘She was marvellous in that play about Rimbaud and Verlaine.’
At the party in Ardmore I was introduced to an elderly man, an artist, who had known my parents when they first met. In those days he was a set designer in the theatre. My parents were acting in the premiere of one of my uncle’s plays, Sharon’s Grave, about a tormented man hungry for land and love: ‘I have no legs to be travelling the country with. I must have my own place. I do be crying and cursing myself at night in bed because no woman will talk to me,’ he says. He is physically and emotionally crippled, a metaphor for the Ireland of the 1950s.
Stunted and isolated, Ireland sat on the western edge of Europe, blighted by poverty, still in thrall to the memory of its founding martyrs, a country of marginal farms, depressed cities and frustrated longings, with the great brooding presence of the Catholic Church lecturing and chiding its flock. My parents were children of this country, but they chafed against it remorselessly. The artist told me that he’d sketched them both during the rehearsals for the play.
‘What were they like?’ I asked him.
“The drawings? They were very ordinary,’ he replied.
I said I hadn’t meant the drawings. What had my parents been like?
‘Well, you could tell from early on they were an item,’ he said.
We chatted about his memories of them both. He praised them as actors, and talked about the excitement their romance had caused in Cork. The love affair between the two young actors became the talk of Cork city. The newspapers called it, predictably, a ‘whirlwind romance’. The news was leaked to the papers by the theatre company. Éamonn and Maura married after the briefest courtship. The love affair caught the imagination of literary Ireland. For their wedding the poet Brendan Kennelly gave them a present of a china plate decorated with images of Napoleon on his retreat from Moscow, and there were messages of congratulation from the likes of Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh, both friends of my father. When the happy couple emerged smiling from Ballyphehane church, members of the theatre company lined up to cheer them, along with a guard of honour made up of girls from the school where my mother taught.
Once married they took to the road with the theatre company with Sharon’s Grave playing to enthusiastic houses across the country. In a boarding house somewhere in Ireland, a few hours after the last curtain call, I was conceived.
Several weeks after I met the artist who sketched my parents a brown parcel arrived at my home in London. Inside were two small photographs of his drawings. They looked so beautiful, my parents. My father handsome, a poet’s face; my mother, with flowing brown hair and melancholy eyes. Looking at those pictures I remembered a line I’d read somewhere about Modigliani and Akhmatova meeting in Paris: Both of them as yet untouched by their futures. The artist had caught them at a moment in their lives when they believed anything was possible. There is a poem by Raymond Carver where he remembers his own wedding. This remembrance comes after years of desolation, amid the collapse of his marriage.
And if anybody had come then with tidings of the future they would have been scourged from the gate nobody would have believed.
That was my parents in the year they met, 1960. I was the eldest of their three children, born less than twelve months after they were married and we would live together as a family for another eleven years.
I showed the sketched images of my parents to my eight-year-old son. He looked at them briefly and then wandered off to play some electronic game. I felt the urge to call him back, to demand that he sit down and contemplate the faces of his grandparents. But then, I thought, why would he want to at eight years of age? To him the past has not yet flowered into mystery. Anyway, he knows his grandmother well. Maura is a big figure in his life. He never met his grandfather whose gift for mischief he shares, and whose acting talent has already come down along the magic ladder of the genes.
He is occasionally curious though. ‘What was your dad like?’ he asks. ‘My dad and your granddad,’ I always say. Usually a few general words suffice, before his mind has hopped to something else. But I am sure the question will return when he is older. Just as I ask my mother about her parents, and wish I could have asked my father about his, my son will want to put pieces together, to find out what made me and, in turn, what shaped him.
My parents were temporary exiles from Ireland when I was born. After the successful run of Sharon’s Grave,