All of These People: A Memoir

by FATHER J. ANTHONY GAUGHAN

My father’s country begins on the shores of the River Shannon. The river is wide here where it meets the Atlantic and the currents twist and race as fresh water, from the distant mountains, washes into the ocean. On one shore there are the hills of Clare, on the other the flatlands of North Kerry. Kerry and Clare are separated only by a few miles of water. But they are immeasurably different. The Clare people – my wife’s people – are quiet, modest and watchful, they wait before sharing their opinions. To me there is something stolid, almost puritan about them, born of generations of tough living on small, flinty farms.

On the other side of the river, my father’s side, are people who call their county ‘The Kingdom’ and regard it as just that: not a collection of townlands and villages, mountains and rivers, but a place set apart from the rest of Ireland, by virtue of its beauty and its characters – writers, politicians, footballers and dreamers. Football and politics are the twin religions here. In his youth my father was a good footballer. He played for Listowel in fierce matches against teams from neighbouring villages.

There is a photograph of my father, taken when he would have been around seventeen, playing for Listowel. He is standing in the middle of the group, but I recognise the expression in his eyes. He is with them, but he is far away, already thinking of elsewhere. Soon after the photograph was taken he left Listowel to find his dream in Dublin. ‘He just upped and went,’ an aunt remembered.

But the villages of childhood rang in his memory. Names shaped by Irish words, names such as Moyvane, Duagh, Lisselton, Knocknagoshel, Asdee, Finuge, Ballylongford, Cnoc an Oir, the mountain of gold where Finn McCool fought the King of the World. The Norsemen ravaged here, and the Normans after them, followed in time by the armies of Elizabeth and Cromwell, and later still the Black and Tans. A country of ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, all the history of conquest and dispossession poking out from beneath thickets of brambles.

When my father spoke of Kerry there was always a tenderness in his voice, a caressing of the names which took him back to a world before the city. The city was the only place to be if you wanted to be an actor. But my father was always a countryman, never truly at ease with the noise and pace of Dublin.

As a child I would sense the beginning of that magical country through the sweet smell of burning turf, watching from the car window the smoke curling from the chimneys of isolated cottages; the ricks of freshly dug peat stacked near the roadside, or standing like the cairns of some lost civilisation across the acres of bogland; the black surface of the bog, crisscrossed with pathways made by generations of turf diggers, interspersed with clumps of snipe grass, and sometimes, in the right season, white wisps of bog cotton.

For several miles after Tarbert it was a country of small horizons; I remember the distant shimmer of the Atlantic against low clouds and then the road pushing inland, the bog giving way to small farms as we climbed into the hills above the River Feale, travelling back to my father’s beginnings. Coming down into the valley, I would see the river, and badger my father to take me fishing there. There were deep pools upriver, he said, where if you fell in you would never be seen again. But in those pools were the biggest salmon. Once I followed him with siblings and cousins up the path by the river, across the ditches, and along the edge of Gurtenard Wood. This landscape had been a place of escape for him as a child. He had wandered there alone, reciting aloud the poems of Wordsworth and Shelley, already planning a life on the stage, burning with belief.

There was a place where the trees leaned over the water and a small, sandy beach extended almost to the middle of the river. This was one of the salmon pools, he said, and my heart thrilled. We fished with a line, a tiny hook and a worm I’d rooted out from the bottom of a ditch. How long passed without a bite that afternoon? It might have been one hour, two hours, more. I didn’t mind at all. I loved the sight of him there, happy in a place he loved, with the river dreaming its way past us. And then there was a bite. A flicker on the line and my father became alert, slowly moving to the edge of the water. ‘Sssh,’ he said. Then whispering, ‘We have one.’

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.’

To which Dan replied: ‘And by God if you do I’ll fuckin’ puck you.’

Now that Dan was dead and gone the door to his attic room was locked.

What’s up there now, Granny Kerry?

Yerrah, only old stuff, boy. And dust. A power of dust.

But I did not believe it. My child’s imagination told me that Dan was still there, surrounded by his crows, a muttering old storyteller whose feet I could hear creaking across the floorboards at midnight. I wanted so badly to open that door. It would not have taken much. A few twists on the wire and I’d be through. But my courage failed me every time. Suppose Dan really was there? Hidden away by the family because he had gone mad. Suppose the crows were there protecting his lair, waiting to peck the eyes out of any intruder. There were safer places to go adventuring.

Out the back was a big turf shed. My grandmother would ask: ‘Will you go out and bring in a bucket of turf, boy?’ Granny Kerry knew I loved the big shed. The dried turf smelled of dead forests, of Ireland before history. My father said the Tuath de Dannan, the mythical people said to have been supplanted by the Celts, had buried great treasures in the bog, and that ‘You never know what you might find in the turf.’ I looked for jewels or a golden crown in the dried-out turf. I pulled away the sods and smashed them open. I never found anything there though, except once a sixpenny bit on the floor. I suspect my father put it there. Down below the turf was a cobbled floor that must have been centuries old. Under that, my father swore, lay a great fortune.

Our holidays in Kerry always seemed to begin with laughter. But as I got older I sensed the tension between my father and grandmother. Mostly the conversation between them seemed to revolve around horse racing.

‘What do you think of Glencaraig Lady at Cheltenham?’

‘Yerrah? I’m not so sure about that one.’

They would sit at the table next to the range, the newspapers spread out around them. It was the time they seemed most at ease with each other. But he could not stay long with her before something she said, some change of tone or inference would set his nerves twitching. And then he would be gone. Out the door and up the road to Gurtenard Wood or down to the fields by the river, walking his anger away.

Hanna would look up from her paper and shake her head: ‘What did I say wrong?’ Usually it had something to do with her praising another member of the family, or some words my father would interpret as criticism. And after that there would be no more ease in the kitchen, no swapping of tips for the horses, only waiting for the next offending word.

I believe the source of the friction between them was love. She loved him. But in his eyes it could never be enough. He craved her approval, and anything less than total and constant affirmation sent him into despair.

As a child my father had been bright and precocious. But somewhere in childhood there was a sundering between him and his mother. I think it happened slowly. As more children arrived Hanna was forced to divide her attention. My father responded by throwing tantrums. He became the troublesome one; he gave cheek and stayed out late, but ended up alienating his mother.

Enter the figure of Juleanne Keane, the spinster sister of my grandfather. She lived with the family and acted as my father’s champion. When he was chastised by his mother, Juleanne would step in to shield him. In her eyes Éamonn was faultless. The violent scenes he staged to attract the attention of his mother were rewarded by Juleanne with smothering kisses, trips to the sweet shop, the protecting embrace of her shawl.

But though she tried, I do not believe Juleanne could replace my grandmother. By the time he left home my father was already an angry young man. He was angry with the Church, with the bitter politics of the time, and angry with his mother. He had also started to drink. He found that it gave him courage and took away his anguish.

Hanna Purtill had sad eyes. Even at six or seven I could see that. Her smile was like my father’s smile: generous, warm, but always flushed through with something melancholy.

On her bad days my grandmother would stay in bed, and we would be warned to leave her in peace. She gets the bad nerves sometime.. That was how some uncle or cousin explained it. In Ireland people who got bad nerves often took to the bed. Trays of food would come and go, be picked at and sent back downstairs. Often the nerves would be explained as an illness. A trapped nerve. A bad stomach. A stiff knee. A bad back. But everybody knew what it really was: something that descended on the mind. Like coastal fog it could sit for days.

Granny Kerry was silent when she took to the bed. But light or dark she was always kind to me. I went into the room once to give her the paper and she motioned to me to come closer. She put her two arms out to hold me. Close to her, tighter than she’d ever held me. When I stood back up I saw she was crying. I went out of the room and found my mother.

‘What’s wrong with Granny Kerry?’

‘She feels sad. It’s not her fault.’

‘Oh.’

When the nerves struck an Irish house people talked in low voices. Children were told to go out and play and stay out. A doctor might come and sit with the patient, prescribe some tablets and shrug his shoulders or nod his head, sympathetically, as a family member showed him out of the house: Time is the best cure, you know. Just give it time and she’ll be grand again.

And after a few days she would be up. I would come downstairs and Hanna would be in the small kitchen peeling spuds or marking the racing pages in the parlour. She would smile and put her hand on my head and tell me to sit down and eat my breakfast. And that would be the end of the nerves. I never knew what brought on the sad hours. I simply came to accept it as part of our family inheritance.