He tugged hard and brought it in. It was a brown trout, small, the brackish colour of the river. When it was directly beneath us, twisting at the end of the line, my father said, ‘Watch this’ and put his finger under the white stomach of the fish. I swear that after a few moments of him stroking it stopped its frantic movement, and sat suspended between his hand and the surface of the water. I remember feeling so proud of him then, my father, the least practical of men, metamorphosed into a skilled hunter on the river. We cooked it later in my grandmother’s kitchen, sizzling in butter, tiny now that the head and tail had been removed.
Before a trip to Kerry he was excited, like a child. Coming into town he would point out the Carnegie Library, where he dreamed over books, and St Michael’s College, where his genius for language won him first prize in Greek in the national examinations; the cemetery where our people were buried, and the police barracks where the Royal Irish Constabulary mutinied against the British in 1921.
My grandmother’s people farmed at a place called Lisselton, a few miles away in the green valley between Listowel and the Atlantic Ocean. To get there you drove down a small brambly lane and into a wide whitewashed farmyard. This was in the time before Irish farms were mechanised, and I milked cows by hand and saw the curd churned into butter. My instructor was one of the gentlest men you could hope to meet, an old IRA man, my grand-uncle, Eddie Purtill.
After the day’s work had been done cards would be played in the kitchen, and then stories would be told. There was no television; the magic box hadn’t yet colonised the homes of much of rural Ireland. It was a large and airy room and life congregated around the big hearth where food was cooked and clothes dried. My father told stories too. I asked him to tell me those I had heard a thousand times before. ‘Tell me about the Knight of Kerry’s castle, Da.’ And he would. They were true stories and made-up stories; stories he had heard from his own father or the men and women who’d told their legends of ghosts and old battles around the firesides of his youth. He could keep an audience spellbound, whether they were farm labourers or the Dublin intelligentsia.
Kerry was my father’s inspiration, a country of magic. But I could tell he was haunted by it too. It was the place where he had known uncomplicated happiness but it was also the source of much of his pain.
Éamonn was born there in 1925; his parents, Bill Keane and Hanna Purtill, had married in 1923, the same year the Irish Civil War reached its terrible apogee. The country of his birth was devastated by war. His mother had fought with the IRA against the British and been a marked woman. She smuggled guns and communications. Her brother Mick led the IRA Flying Column in North Kerry. A Black and Tan named Darcy called the beautiful farmer’s daughter ‘the maid of the mountains’. When she refused to go walking with him he gave her twenty-four hours to leave town. Hanna laid low but refused to leave Listowel.
In the civil war that followed the British withdrawal, my father’s people took Michael Collins’s side. They were tired of war and believed the Treaty he signed with the British was the stepping stone to freedom that Collins promised. Hanna worshipped Collins. When he was shot by his former IRA comrades she wept inconsolably. Years after, when the IRA began attacking meetings of Collins’s supporters, she joined an outfit called the Army Comrades Association, better known as the Blueshirts.
Depending on who you talk to the Blueshirts were a legitimate self-defence organisation forced into being by IRA intimidation, or a quasi-fascist legion imitating the Blackshirts of Italy and the Brownshirts of Germany. I believe the truth is somewhere in between. The movement disintegrated after their leader, a pompous buffoon called General Eoin O’Duffy, led a brigade off to Spain to fight for Franco in the Civil War.
In Kerry a general warning was sent out that anybody seen in the Blueshirt uniform would be attacked. Hanna was told the IRA would rip the shirt off her back. So she put on her blue shirt and walked up Church Street staring into the faces of the IRA supporters. Nobody dared attack her.
I called my father’s mother Granny Kerry. She would meet us at the door like a proud queen, with her neighbours looking on. She had one son a famous playwright, another a famous actor, another studying to be a teacher in Dublin, a daughter a nun in Cahirciveen, and other sons and daughters all taken care of, married or working. There were no idle Keanes, which in that time and place was something to be said.
Hello, Granny Kerry, it’s lovely to see you. She would embrace me at the door to the house on Church Street. Wisha, child, ‘tis lovely to see yourself. She was still a handsome woman. Her hair was dark and her skin sallow. Like a Spaniard. Her family name was Purtill. It used to be Purtillo, my father said – his Spanish connection. In her youth she had been an aspiring actress, before becoming a guerrilla fighter, and then mother of the Keanes.
Her house smelled different to a city house. You could start at the door where Joan Carroll – modest, quiet Joan who gave me money for sweets – rented a room from my grandmother. Joan ran a hairdressing salon from the room and the scent of her shampoos and lotions overflowed into the hall, sweeter than I’d ever smelled in my life. There was a door with a glass window through which you could see the matrons of Listowel being primped and clipped. On the wall were photographs of beehive hairdos and perms.
The heart of the house was the parlour, a small room with a large open fireplace at its centre. Dominating the fireplace was a big steel range into which turf was poured at frequent intervals. My grandmother cooked on this range and dried clothes beside it. It filled the room with the musk of the peatlands. When the window was open to the back yard, other smells blew in and mingled: the smell of meadow and river, of hedgerows and brackish water, of donkey droppings in the lane between the house and the Major’s Field.
It was a country house. The long narrow stairs, three storeys high, creaked and sagged as you climbed up to bed, the voices of the adults growing fainter as you turned one corner, and then another, until you were left with the sound of your own footsteps and the groan of the floorboards.
Across the landing from where I slept was a locked door. It was shut tight with a length of wire from a coat hanger. Behind it lay the stairs to the attic, where Uncle Dan used to live. Dan was a bachelor, my grandfather’s brother. My father said: ‘Your uncle Dan used to talk to the crows. They could understand him, I swear. They would come in through the eaves into the attic and sit on the edge of the bed and Dan would be talking away to them.’
In Dan’s attic there were wisps of cobweb hanging from the rafters and the only light was that from a paraffin lamp, throwing shadows around the shoulders of my father and his brothers as they listened to Dan’s stories. He sat on the bed, an uncle remembered, ‘with his cap askew and his collar undone and his lips ringed with the brown stain of porter’.
My father and his brothers would sit in the attic and listen to his stories for hours. But Dan could not easily communicate with adults, except at the cattle fairs where he made a few pounds acting as middle man between the sellers and buyers. It was said that Dan was a good man to make a deal. But he never owned a cow himself. Apart from fair days his one excursion was to Mass. Dan didn’t care too much for appearances. On Sundays he would march to the top of the church and find the seat where the most pious matrons of the town were ensconced. Dan would force them to squeeze in and accommodate him. There would be furious muttering. But Dan ignored it all. If the sermon displeased him he would chatter away to himself, conducting a personal dialogue on the finer points of theology. Eventually the parish priest could stand no more and rounded on him, screaming:
‘Dan Keane if you don’t shut up I’ll turn you into a goat and put two horns on you.’
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