Sunday Miscellany E-Book

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

 RTÉ Radio 1's Sunday Miscellany is an Irish institution, a programme that has provided comfort, joy and entertainment to hundreds of thousands of listeners for over half a century. Arranged in calendar months and spanning the seasons of the year, some of the best broadcasts from the last five years are collected here in one volume. This sparkling selection of writing by the best of new, established and household names is sure to amuse, move and delight readers of all ages.  Featuring: Colm Tóibín Niamh Campbell Joseph O'Connor Louise Kennedy John F. Deane Susan McKay Nicole Flattery Donal Ryan Manchán Magan Rosaleen McDonagh Lisa McInerney and many more...

Leseprobe

Sunday Miscellany

SUNDAY MISCELLANY

First published in 2023 by

New Island Books

Glenshesk House

10 Richview Office Park

Clonskeagh

Dublin D14 V8C4

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Individual contributions of essays and poetry © Respective Authors, 2023

Introduction © Sarah Binchy, 2023

The right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-904-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-84840-905-7

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by JVR Creative India

Copy-edited by Susan McKeever

Cover design by Niall McCormack

Printed by ScandBook, Sweden, scandbook.com

New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.

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Contents

Introduction

JANUARY

Moments of Being: Lani O’Hanlon

A Bit of Matter: Niamh Campbell

Into the Light: John MacKenna

The Smell of Snow: Tim Carey

Never Too Late: Gerry Stembridge

It Was All in the Stars: Bibi Baskin

The Younger Brother: Dermot Bolger

The Betrayal of Anne Frank: Judith Mok

A Young Irishman at Churchill’s Funeral: Charles Lysaght

Merlin Park Miracle: Liam Lally

El Greco, 1971: Michael O’Connor

FEBRUARY

The Morning Rush Hour: Katrina Bruna

Wild Words From the Dingle Peninsula: Manchán Magan

Eternity Along the Strand: Fionn Ó Marcaigh

Daniel O’Connell in Notre-Dame: Grace Neville

Familiar Stranger: Blanaid Behan

The Two Amys: Conor Horgan

Townie Farmer: Joe Whelan

Valentine: Rosaleen McDonagh

By Invitation Only: Jackie Lynam

The Ballad of Fred and Ginger: Paula Shields

On the Number 10 Bus: Frank Kavanagh

A Confession: Gerald Dawe

Uisce Coisricthe: Catherine Foley / Holy Water: translated from Irish by Catherine Foley

MARCH

The Lads That Will Never Be Old: Conall Hamill

Telephone: Nicole Flattery

Lowering the Ladder: Quentin Fottrell

My Mother Was a Scrubber: Brian Farrell

Ada Sue: Clare Monnelly

Growing Up in Miltown: John Hurley

Granddaddy: Kathleen Murphy

The Day Luke Kelly Came Courtin’: Emer O’Kelly

My Father, Saint Patrick: Kate Carty

I Have Nothing to Wear: Barbara Scully

Happy Mother’s Day: Claire Garvey

APRIL

Ghosts in Green and White: John O’Donnell

Leland at Home: Brian Leyden

Mindfulness: Maurice Crowe

A Hard Time to Die: Mary Jane Boland

Easter 1916, Hedy Lamarr and Mobile Technology: John McDonald

A Certain Heroism: Neil Hegarty

Eggs and Fish: Alan Finnegan

Goodbye, Furball: Niall McArdle

Catharsis: Oliver Sears

Pauline, I Think You’re Still On Mute: Pauline Shanahan

The End of the Sarajevo Lockdown: Mark Brennock

Eroica: Eva Bourke

MAY

Dawn Chorus: Grace Wells

Granted, One Phone Call: Peter Trant

Tiede and Elisabeth: Frank Shouldice

From Inis Mór to Istanbul: Carrying the Songs: Alannah Robins

The Heysel Stadium Disaster: Michael Hamell

The Day My Sister Met the Queen: Roslyn Dee

Riverkeeper: Kerry Neville

My Mother Loved Me in Red: Rita Ann Higgins

Remembering Mary Maher: Séamus Dooley

Hiding in the Grain: Sharon Hogan

Wonderful Parties: John Banville

Keeping the Faith: Marina Carr

Wolf Song: Mary O’Malley

JUNE

Come Here You: Rachael Hegarty

The Longest Embrace: Antonia Gunko Karelina

How Duke the Dog Became an Italian Citizen: Tom Clonan

And I Nearly Said I Loved Him: Larry McCluskey

Adopted Moments: Zainab Boladale

Father’s Day: Chris McHallem

Crossing the Border: John Kelly

Father for a Day: Barry McCrea

Vino Rosso Pronto, Per Favore!: John Egan

The Hunting of the Octopus: William Wall

Why I Travel Alone: Rory Gleeson

Small Girl, Red Flowers: Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

JULY

My Voice: Mary Kate O Flanagan

Bob Sheppard: Voice of the Yankees: Jonathan White

Teddy’s Irish Bards: Daniel Mulhall

Game, Set and Match: Joe Ó Muircheartaigh

Marching: Anne Delaney

Confessor to the King: John Hedigan

No Regrets: Frank Keegan

Steamboat: Andrew Doherty

Bloody Friday: Olive Travers

A Dog Barking in the Darkness: JM Dolan

Shaking God’s Hand: Joe Kearney

Reek Sunday: Bernard Dunleavy

Island Devotions: Geraldine Mitchell

AUGUST

My Friend, the Duke: Paddy Murray

The Non-Wedding Photo: Farah Abushwesha

No One Writes Love Like Puccini: Muriel Bolger

Good Day Sunshine: Angela Keogh

Two Kilkenny Men: Olivia O’Leary

Mapmaking: Ian Sherry

Lessons from Leitrim’s Coastal Frontier: Colin Regan

Christy Ring, the First Superstar: Jim McKeon

Donnybrook Fair: Ann Marie Durkan

My Pre-University, University Challenge: Jennifer Carey

My Seamus Heaney Story: Denise Blake

SEPTEMBER

Zero Degrees: Donal Hayes

Young Ted: Fred Tuite

Ersatz Kerryman in Dublin: Mark O’Connell

Basil/βασιλεύς: Mary O’Donnell

Silver at the Ploughing: Fran O’Rourke

The Big Black Dog: Michael O’Loughlin

Teenager: Mia Döring

Dublin 9’s Dream Factory: Helen O’Rahilly

My Belfield: Daisy Onubogu

Magic Nights in the Lobby Bar: Aoife Barry

The Plans for UL: Mae Leonard

The Master: Nuala Hayes

Take Away: AM Cousins

OCTOBER

Rediscovering Carmen Bustamante: Colm Tóibín

Opening Nights: Dominic Dromgoole

’Twill Shorten the Winter: Margaret Galvin

Like a Bird on a Beam: Tom Mooney

Notes for the Fifth of October: Anne Devlin

Phenomenal Grace: Susan McKay

Teenage Kicks: Kate Kerrigan

Missing Brendan Kennelly: Gudrun Boch-Mullan

Her Smile: Cyril Kelly

Haybarn: Leo Cullen

A Tale of Two Stories: Kevin Marinan

A Principle of Freedom: Lourdes Mackey

The Hellfire Club, William Wordsworth and the Wrong Sort of Tourist: Kevin Mc Dermott

Pangur Bán and Audrey: Gordon Snell

NOVEMBER

November Dead List: Louise Kennedy

Northern Sky: Clare O’Dea

A Word With Gay: Patrick Griffin

Gaybo’s Piano Roll Blues, by Patrick Griffin

The Tenters, Where the Future is a Hundred Years Old: Henrietta McKervey

Kevin Barry in the Umbrella Stand: Síofra O’Donovan

Armistice Day in Donegal: Seán Beattie

The Poppy: Brian Patterson

The Sunday of Blood, November 1920: Chris Shouldice

The Bicycle and Us: Lelia Doolan

For Dervla: Raja Shehadeh

Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Man: Peter Cunningham

Blood in the Water: Bernadette Buda

Then and Now: John F. Deane

DECEMBER

At Ruadhán’s Well: Donal Ryan

Alternative Winter Solstice: Christina Park

John McCormack at Christmas: Tom McGurk

Christmas 1963: An Audience with Séamus Ennis: Jim Galvin

Courage in the Alleys: Hugh O’Flaherty: Joseph O’Connor

Christmas Cheese: Lisa McInerney

Tins: Paul Howard

Bringing in the Christmas: Kathleen MacMahon

Bulgarian Winter Wonderland: Wendy Erskine

A Child’s Christmas in Marino: Declan Kiberd

Piano Man: John Toal

Silent Night: Walking Through the Snow: Eileen Battersby

Christmas Concert: James Harpur

Nightwood Light: Vincent Woods

Contributors

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

It’s a great pleasure to share this selection of broadcast scripts from Sunday Miscellany with you, to capture something of this programme’s fleeting essence over the past few years, and to celebrate the sheer breadth of writing and storytelling talent we’re lucky enough to be able to feature on it.

Although we commission some scripts, the vast majority of what you hear on air – and, therefore, of what you’ll find in this book – has come in by open submission. This makes Miscellany a programme very much in dialogue with its listeners, and gives it a kind of power and intensity, fuelled as it is by stories that insist on being told, that don’t wait politely for an invitation. Memories, reflections, tributes, historical or cultural scripts, comic pieces – we seek to keep the bandwidth as wide as possible, the voices various, the perspectives multiple, not settling on a single way of seeing things.

The book is arranged around the months of the year, with the scripts ebbing and flowing between 2018 and 2023. The Covid experience, in all its strangeness, features directly or comes through often, like a watermark; the war in Ukraine is there too, and various anniversaries and momentous events. But much of what you’ll find here is drawn from the small moments of everyday life, captured in rich and precise detail. Our writers don’t shy away from the darkness and complexity of human existence, but they are also interested in lightness, laughter, tenderness, friendship and family, and the beauty of the world around us, which demands that we slow down and pay attention.

For fifty-five years, Miscellany has maintained its immense popularity and has provided companionship, solace and joy on a Sunday morning – heralded by those glorious trumpets, which transport so many listeners into their own memory zone before a word has been spoken. Long may it continue to do so.

Sarah Binchy

September 2023

January

Moments of Being

Lani O’Hanlon

It started when I was eight years old, then every Christmas or for my birthday in January, one of my relatives would give me a small, hard-backed diary – pink or blue – with a kitten or a puppy on the cover, a gold lock and two tiny keys.

‘I thought you might like to write down your secrets the way I used to,’ a favourite auntie whispered.

‘Anne Frank,’ another announced.

Intimidated, I’d put the diary in a drawer and forget about it until that lonely moment when I’d find it again, take the small key, insert it in the lock and pick up a pen. But what was I supposed to say? My name is … I live in … Today Jean and I slid on the ice.

I’d write dutifully for a few days and then lose the key, or else I’d find my little sister giggling at all the stupid things I’d written down. I didn’t understand that the feverish scribbling on the backs of old copybooks or on bits of paper, the doodled hearts with boys’ names in them, the notes I passed to Jean at the back of the class, the spat-out scrawls on my Latin for Today: I don’t give a toss about Caesar going into Gaul but I am interested in the Sabine Women – this was my secret self, and as Anne Frank once said, ‘People can tell you to keep your mouth shut but that doesn’t stop you from having your own opinion.’

Then, as an adult, I discovered other people’s diaries: Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, Anaïs Nin. I called into an antique bookshop looking for more of Nin’s.

The owner lowered his voice. ‘I have some in the back room.’

When he returned, he swiped the dust off an old hardback and then carefully wrapped it in brown paper, slipping it to me when other customers weren’t looking. Little Birds was the innocent title, and I discovered that Nin had been writing erotica to support herself and the writers around her; she said she suspected that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of a woman’s sensuality.

I read Little Birds then put it in the back of a cupboard. But what if I were to die suddenly? My family would think I was into some weird stuff and then what about my own Pandora’s box? Notebooks piled up beside and under the bed or stacked up higgledy-piggledy against walls in the study. But surely no one would be able to read those dense scrawls in blue, black, red, green, and – I am sorry to report – purple ink. Secret thoughts set down beside lists: send out those invoices, submit poems, buy milk and cat food. Badly worked out income and expenditure for the month, then quotes that interest me, for example W.H. Auden describing his journal as a discipline for his laziness and lack of observation. Arrows then, linking a sentence at the end of the page with one on the top, doodles, spirals, the intimacy of page and pen more truthful and powerful than any analysis. As Freud is reported to have said, everywhere he went in the psyche he found that a poet had been there before him.

The writer Melanie Rae calls her diary The Gospel of Grief and Grace and Gratitude, and in her memoir Are You Somebody?, Nuala O’Faolain writes that there had been no steady accumulation in her life, it was all lived in moments. In her essay ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Virginia Woolf writes that life cannot be written about by saying where a person came from nor what happened to them, but rather, that the truth of a person is revealed by the moments of being in that person’s life. Her novel The Waves is inspired by one of these moments of being: ‘… hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive’.

Ecstasy, then. Is that the reward for this compulsion to scribble? Sometimes, but mostly these are also records of loneliness, rage, pettiness, grief, gratefulness: all the unlocked moments of being in a life. Though when I read back through the years, I realise that everything changes, including ourselves, and that all of this scribbling bestows an undercurrent of steadiness that allows me to be present enough to notice, just now, the slant of gold light on coppered ferns, and the joy of opening a new notebook with the date and my name written inside the cover.

A Bit of Matter

Niamh Campbell

I travelled to France in summer with my boyfriend. We took a train into airless, verdant Limousin. The walls of our room were bare, no light fixtures, a deal table, a bed; all around us airless, verdant countryside. We ate pastries, had one public argument, and spent a lot of time in the bed.

Passing through Paris on the return, I visited the Gallery of Geology and Mineralogy, and there, met with the real-life version of an image I’ve seen many times: the Petit Fantôme, a slice of mineral matter that looks as though a smiling spectre is trapped in it. The pattern is incidental, but its cuteness seems to address you consciously. It was kept as part of a collection of ‘pictorial stones’ by the surrealist Roger Callois, and when I was a student I had a photograph of it on my desk. Encountering it in Paris felt like finding a forgotten friend.

I also caught Covid in France. This meant that, a mere week after the deal table, the shutters open on a creamy bank of the Vézère, I lay alone in bed in Dublin, hallucinating from fever. Its pitch was unprecedented. I tried talking to it – the fever I mean.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Burning off the bug,’ it replied, or so I fancied. In a hiss.

‘Okay, I can accept this,’ I told it, practising serenity. I closed my eyes, and in that moment – I do not exaggerate – I felt my temperature surge into the danger zone, then break immediately, and begin, right there, to heal.

One month later, I discovered I’d also gotten pregnant in Limousin: right there, somewhere between the table and the bed and the Vézère. The body in its fever, then, was hunting viruses and incubating the first spreading cells of life at the same time.

*

Every morning at four the baby begins kicking, inside me, in emphatic tattoo, like a tiny, reliable poltergeist. These slow thuds turn into bubbles. I think about the spasming glass of water on the dashboard in Jurassic Park because this is what it feels like – like a surface rippling.

I have become a universe.

At work, I spool and unspool nineties microfilm as the baby thumps around like a lottery drum. Scanned at a random angle is a note young Samuel Beckett seems to have left for someone. Sorry to miss you last night, and again today, no chance of further meeting, ’bye. This is funny to me, perhaps because it’s the only thing I can read: everything else on the microfilm is written in Beckett’s feathery cursive, mostly illegible. Beckett doodled ghouls and witches in his margins a lot.

I doodle cubes and cakes. The baby kicks.

Sorry to miss you

No chance of meeting

Goodbye!

*

Under the wand of the ultrasound machine, the baby shrinks away and hides her face, but suddenly her spine emerges, tensile as a quill, more like a fossil or a sigil than a person yet. One angry eye socket surges into view and makes me gasp.

Yes, they can be skeletal at this stage, says the nurse. Except she pronounces it skeleetal, with an extra e.

Beckett claimed to remember his time in the womb, to have what he called intrauterine memory, a sensation of entrapment and loneliness. In the archive I am chasing impressions, and most of these are repetitions or compulsions or habits of thought. An image of green larches recurs in his work, a rocking chair, familiar streets and rooms and orientations and idées fixes and calcifications: the ‘sucking stones’ of his novel Molloy, images of compression and blockage. Of things which will not dissolve.

I get bigger and I can’t lie on my back anymore. In the book I am reading, a woman has mastitis; her breast is hard and bulbous like a ball, her baby cannot latch, it’s as if she is ossifying.

*

Winter closes in. Rain flashes on the country roads that wind around the town. At night the baby wakes and so do I, and together we walk through the house. At four in the morning I am sitting in the cold darkness on a balance ball.

My pelvis, which I picture as a trencher of bone, is something I like to imagine gleaming underneath the archaeologist’s brush on a rainy excavation site a thousand years from now.

I pull up a months-old Instagram picture of the Petit Fantôme, smiling wanly in its little cell of compressed matter, winking whitely from the blackness like a foetal scan. I go back to bed and wait. The baby is due in spring: there are long weeks of velvet darkness to get through.

Into the Light

John MacKenna

It rises, even at this still murky time of year, out of the mist and fog and gloom. It rises on the other side of the river, miles and fields away. It rises into the clear sky and the darkened sky. It is there when I sit at my desk in the morning; it is there when I leave the work of the day behind. The mountain is a constant on the landscape, its sides catching the sweep of the wind, the shadows of the passing clouds running over its back, the sun glinting on its coats of snow and stone and heather.

Just after the Christmas of 2020, as the New Year was about to shoulder its way into the world, my constant companion and I climbed the mountain, as we’ve done every summer and every winter since we moved to south Carlow, ten years ago. We brought a picnic and we sat on a windswept rock and talked about the hopes and wishes and aspirations we had for the year ahead.

What the year brought was – as years are wont to do – a mixture of the good, the not so good and the bearable. But what it brought, too, at the height of last summer, was a Friday afternoon phone call telling me the clock was ticking, but not very steadily. Within a week, I was in hospital, preparing for open-heart surgery.

In those ironically dark midsummer days, I thought about a lot of things – mortality, the past, the present, the mistakes, the things I wished I had and hadn’t said to people over the years, the cul-de-sacs I’d gone down and the open roads I’d never taken. Most of my thoughts were negative and a dark stranger seemed to loiter on every stairs I climbed.

But I survived the surgery and, as the days darkened and autumn blew into winter, my spirits rose, and Christmas and the New Year became beacons of light and optimism and anticipation. I realised I’m one of the lucky ones, and I realised, too, that I’ve been blessed in my life with two GPs whose care has spanned almost fifty years of living.

The first is a man called John MacDougald. He became my go-to for the minor ailments of my twenties; he was the man who stood in the kitchen at three o’clock in the morning getting the children through croup; the man who sat with me when silence was needed, and talked when words were required; the man who walked with me through the dark days before and after my brother’s death. He was the true family doctor – his approach was holistic and his care and friendship and support were – and are, though he has now retired from practice – above and beyond what might rightly be expected of one man.

The second is a woman called Helen Delaney and, without her astute observation, I might not be here to write these words. The warmth of her personality, coupled with her medical skill, ensured that something that might otherwise have gone unnoticed was spotted and dealt with. At different times and in different ways these two medics have saved my life and kept me afloat.

So, this spring, as we climb the mountain and try to find a sheltered spot in which to hunker down and share our coffee, we will raise a cup to those two people and think of them with gratitude and a deep appreciation. And I will look to the brighter days ahead.

My hope for the year is that they, that we, that all of us find peace, good health and joy, after the bleak, hard times we’ve all been through.

The mountain is there to climb. It casts its shadow, it shelters the valley, it hides the sun and then reveals it. It lifts its head to the light of the stars and towers above the jigsaw of fields below.

The mountain offers darkness and light; challenge and recompense; indecision and optimism. But who would not want to go on climbing? Who would not want to stand on the summit and watch the sun set and the moon rise? Who would not want to remember the friends who save our lives in a multitude of ways?

The Smell of Snow

Tim Carey

I can smell snow. In fact, the smell of snow is one of my first memories. I’m three years old and our family is living in the tree avenue suburb of Shorewood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. I wake to see the world blanketed in snow. In the back yard a huge drift covers one half. As my mother puts me into a one-piece snow suit, zips me up and helps me put on my snow boots, I cannot wait to get out into this landscape.

My father and brother are in the backyard. My brother brings me over to what appears to my three-year-old eyes to be a mountain of snow. At the top there is an entrance. My brother sits on the edge of the hole and puts his feet into it. Then he pushes himself off and disappears. A few seconds later, he appears at the bottom of the drift. Then I’m on the edge and, without fear, push myself off and slide on my back down a steep incline into a snow cave. The walls of snow crystals emit a blue light. The only sounds are of my suit’s synthetic material scratching the iced floor and my breathing. The only smell is the smell of snow.

I’m sure I am not the only person who can smell snow. I’ve met many who do not think snow has a smell. But I trust my nose as much as the weather forecasters when it comes to one of the most difficult of weather conditions to predict. If a chance of snow is mentioned by Met Éireann, I will go outside and sniff the air and make my own decision on the matter.

My greatest proof that I can smell snow came on a college night out. As we rolled out of the Lincoln Inn, I detected the unmistakable scent of snow in the air. I stopped and shouted, ‘I smell snow!’ – only to be largely ignored. But then, before we even reached the next pub, flakes began to fall from the night sky.

Growing up in the Midwest, deep snow was a fact of winter life, much in the same way that thunderstorms were in the summer. When I moved to Ireland at the age of twelve, among the many things I left behind was snow. I would have to become used to the Irish climate’s lack of extreme cold or heat.

Snow did make an appearance sometimes, brief and tantalising. The occasional flurry, even if it brought the city’s traffic to a standstill, didn’t really meet my snow longing. But the big snow of 1982 brought me back to my old element, like the return of an old friend from my past.

And then snow became a distinct rarity. The years passed, and it began to feel as if it would never happen again. As climate change became an acknowledged fact, I began to believe that our two children would grow up in a world without snow.

Then came the big snow of 2010. To be followed by the big freeze of 2011. I don’t know of any adult that got as much enjoyment out of playing in the snow with their children as I did. I was at least as much a child as Jen and Aaron were. We played American football with spectacular catches and dives, we built the biggest snowmen in the estate, we built an igloo. And we went to Killiney Hill with sacks, tea trays and anything else we could use to slalom the 300 metres down the hill’s main avenue. We would stay until we were just too tired to walk back up the hill to race down again. They were some of the most memorable times I have had with my children and they’ve been immortalised in our YouTube video, ‘Tea Tray Slide Killiney Hill’.

Snow returned briefly a few years later. But it wasn’t the same. The children were no longer the eight- and ten-year-olds who’d play with me for hours. They had become teenagers and playing with their father in the snow didn’t have the same allure it once had. And while we did go to Killiney Hill it wasn’t as magical. Part of me knew Jen and Aaron would probably prefer to be with their friends. And I was selfish, because part of me just wanted them to always look at me in the way they had done. It was one of the saddest days. I figured that the next time it snowed, I probably wouldn’t be out with them at all.

But still, throughout each winter, I get excited if I see the forecast predicting a cold front to move in from the east, to bring Arctic air and moisture from the Irish Sea. And each time I will go out, turn upwind and sniff the air, to try and get an early scent of ice crystals joining together to form snow, somewhere high up in the atmosphere.

Never Too Late

Gerry Stembridge

It was early March 1979, and I left the UCD campus mid-afternoon and went to my bedsit, a little back room over a shop in Windy Arbour, £5 a week.

Now, normally I haunted Belfield morning, noon and night. The Arts block was my stately pleasure-dome, my wonderful everyday and my Sunday best. My bedsit was for sleeping in and writing last-minute essays in. Being there in the afternoon was just weird.

Even stranger, I fell asleep. When I woke it was dark and, not having turned on the two-bar electric fire, very, very cold. Through the grogginess something dawned on me, and I checked the time. Oh God! It was … well, it was sometime after 8 p.m. And you see, I was acting in a play in Dramsoc that had started at eight.

But let’s rewind a bit. Two years before, in Freshers Week, Dramsoc was one of the ten or so college societies I’d joined, once I got over the shock that the University Drama Society did not operate from an ancient ornate hall with a raised stage, my seventeen-year-old’s notion of theatre.

Dramsoc HQ was a cold, black box space in the basement of the Arts building, called, with little regard for the romance of it all, LG1. Folding doors gave access to the equally glamorous LG2. Nonetheless, production photos on display of the previous year’s triumph, Shakespeare’s Richard II, suggested that some kind of magic could be created. I parted with my precious 50p and joined.

Some of my new college friends were convinced I was wasting my money. Dramsoc was a clique, full of weird types, a nest of homosexuals – an appalling stereotype which I am very glad to say I discovered to be largely true. But the notion that this coven was unfriendly was not. The very first time I summoned up the courage to audition for a play, The Bedsitting Room by my comic hero Spike Milligan, I was welcomed and cast in a leading role. So here I was, starting my college life, acting in a play called The Bedsitting Room and renting my own bedsitting room. I was free as a bird.

I became, I admit, an inordinately selfish member of Dramsoc. Not for me the tiresome business of hunting down props, sticking up posters or manning the box office. I acted. I soaked up applause and laughter. Even learning lines was a tedious necessity, though I usually got there by opening night, while testing the nervous systems of my more studious fellow performers.

But I had never, ever missed a performance. So waking up in my bedsit when the show I was in had already started was a new and scary experience.

The play, by the way, was Brand by Ibsen, directed by Dr Joseph Long, a lecturer in the French Department. Remember the Richard II production photographs that had impressed me in Freshers Week two years before? He directed that. Something of a Dramsoc legend, everyone wanted to be in a Joe Long production, including myself although – dark secret – I’d read Ibsen’s Brand and thought it was spectacularly boring.

When Joe offered me the minor role of the Provost, I found myself experiencing a very peculiar form of envy. I really disliked the play, but was furious not to have been offered the lead role. Perhaps waking after curtain time was some unconsciously psychotic howl of rage against Ibsen, Brand, Dr Joseph Long and the whole wretched production?

Well, I had no time to consider this fascinating psychological question, because I was grabbing a coat in the dark and cantering from my bedsit, out under the shadow of Dundrum Mental Hospital, along Bird Avenue, spinning left and then right at the Clonskeagh entrance to Belfield, and sprinting down the ridiculously long avenue past dark playing fields and the looming water tower, to the Science block and the lake, into the maw of the Arts building and down, down to the basement and LG1.

It was almost nine o’clock. Through the buzzing interval crowd, I spotted three faces huddled together in tense conversation: the auditor of Dramsoc, the stage manager, and Dr Joseph Long.

And now a reveal. An anti-climax perhaps. I had reluctantly accepted a smaller role in Brand. I did not mention that the character of the Provost did not appear until the second half – when, as it happens, he had quite a big scene, but that’s by the way. So, though I had been AWOL for the entire first half, and created serious trauma for the production team, I had not actually missed my bit.

Joe Long glared at my sweating, panting self and was brief: ‘Get changed, please.’ In the gloom of LG2, he who had been about to read in my part clambered out of the soutane and amusing hat that was my costume. And, without a whiff of warm-up, on I went. My scene … well, I remember nothing about it. It was fine, I think. Everything had worked out fine, really.

Afterwards, as I was getting out of my costume, I saw Joe coming towards me. I sighed and thought, here we go. Remember, this director was not a fellow student, he was Dr Joseph Long of the French department. I was resigned to a terrible tirade, a monumental dressing-down.

Joe spoke in a cold but very even voice.

‘You may have no respect for your own work, Gerry, but please have some respect for mine.’

And he walked away.

That I can remember his words precisely, forty-two years later, indicates the intensity of their effect. No lengthy harangue could have humbled me more than that crisp sentence. Not only did I appreciate and regret the stress I had caused my fellow students, I realised something else for the first time: ‘You may have no respect for your own work,’ he had said, and my pain at this judgement told me that my involvement in Dramsoc was no passing college fling, but a serious affair. I had never given it a second’s thought, but now felt at least a flicker of understanding that this theatre thing involved giving as much respect and applause as I received. If, that is, I wanted to do it right at all.

It is generally understood that going to college may change someone’s life. What is not always appreciated is that the life-changing bit can happen, not in moments of achievement, but of shame. However, in a story about new insights, I should emphasise that one important detail remains unchanged since that time. Trust me, Ibsen’s Brand really is boring.

It Was All in the Stars

Bibi Baskin

I didn’t know anything much about astrology before I went to India. At that stage, like most people, I might browse through the star signs in a doctor’s waiting room, select my star and then, while not really believing any of it, idly pick out the information that rang true to me, discarding the rest.

My first trip to India was for a holiday. And I did all the touristy things. I took a boat down the serene waterways of Kerala in south India, I saw traditional dance, called Kathakali, and I ate lots and lots of tasty curries. But I also included in my itinerary a visit to a Vedic astrologer. Now, the Vedas are the holy books of Hinduism, and Hindus take astrology very seriously indeed. It is used as a reliable decision-making tool for significant aspects of life such as picking a life partner, choosing a career, moving house and so on. In fact, today, you can study astrology in Indian universities, an idea which would probably bring out the raging sceptic in most of us in the Western world.

At that time, I was at a juncture in my life professionally. I had quit my television career in both Dublin and London. So what was going to be next? I was, at the very least, open to ideas. And so, when I heard that we, as tourists, could have a session with a genuine Vedic astrologer, I thought, why not?

Though I must admit that, as I entered his rooms, I was prepared to take it no more seriously than I did the star signs in the doctor’s waiting room in Ireland.

He asked my name, and the time and date of my birth. The time was a bit of a guess. I was born in May so I figured around an early dawn might be reasonable, but I did caution him that I was uncertain.

He proceeded to look at various astrological maps, and over the next half hour or so, he a told me a few minor but accurate things about my life. So minor and incidental, I don’t remember them now, but I do remember thinking, well, so far he hasn’t been wrong.

He then asked me about my job, and I could feel a sense of something significant brewing. Well, I didn’t think it would help my cause much if I told him I was between jobs. More than that, possibly between careers, and definitely between countries. Even continents.

So I told him a half-truth. I said I was a writer. Well, I’d had several articles published when I was a journalist, and at the back of my mind I had already decided that I would stay a bit longer in India and that I would use the time to write a book, in that vainglorious way that half the population say we’ll write a book and we never do.

But his reaction was noticeable.

‘No, Madam,’ he said. ‘In two years’ time, you will have a different career entirely.’ I protested. I said, ‘That’s out of the question.’ He was having none of it. But he didn’t indicate what that career would be.

It was only a couple of years later, when I came across the scribbles I’d made in his rooms, that it dawned on me. Two years had indeed passed, and during that time I had bought an old landmark residence with outhouses in Kerala, which I gradually converted into a heritage hotel. I had become, in effect, a hotelier. ‘A different career entirely,’ the astrologer had said. Well, from television presenter to hotel owner and manager. He had a point.

I also found, among my scribbles of his prophecy, something else intriguing. He had told me that I must do something substantial about Ayurveda, the Indian system of wellness, which I had been unofficially studying for decades.

‘Madam, if you don’t,’ he had warned, ‘the gods will be very angry with you when you die.’ Well, I’d quite forgotten that caution, but as it happened, I had installed an Ayurvedic centre in my Indian hotel and since then have done quite a bit of Ayurveda work in Ireland. I hope I have paid my death duties.

Finally, though, and perhaps most significantly of all, he had said, ‘Madam, you will never have much money but you’ll always have enough money to do.’

Of all his pronouncements, that seemed the most likely. It’s nearly twenty years later now, and my bank account proves that gentleman right. I have never been attracted by money, I don’t know much about how to make it, and for sure I do not find it to be a hugely helpful factor in the pursuit of happiness, which is, after all, what everyone’s life’s goal should be, in my opinion.

Mr Astrologer, you were spot on, Sir. Namaste.

The Younger Brother

Dermot Bolger

It’s hard being a kid brother. I speak from experience. Old neighbours often call me by the name of my big brother, whose footballing exploits I never matched.

But I’ve had it easier than Jack Butler Yeats. My big brother didn’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature, wasn’t considered the greatest poet of his era and didn’t possess a self-important public aura.

Not that the Yeatses were rivals. W.B. was a supportive older brother, unthreatened by his sibling’s talent. But when a big brother spends his life weaving a personalised mythology, and a kid brother declines to mythologise himself, it’s hard to escape that big brother’s shadow.

Nothing better sums up their difference than their epitaphs. W.B.’s epitaph was austere: ‘Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by.’ As noted by Hilary Pyle in her monumental biography of the painter, Jack’s epitaph was whimsical when told to a friend before his death: ‘I have travelled all my life without a ticket: and, therefore, I was never to be seen when inspectors came around because then I was under the seat …’ [but] ‘… in the end, we who travel without tickets, we can say with that vanity which takes the place of self-confidence, even though we went without tickets, we were never commuters.’

They chose their wives differently too. When W.B. finally married, his bride was half his age and, humiliatingly, knew that she was his third choice, his other two other proposals having been recently rejected.

Jack was twenty when he became engaged to a fellow art school student, affectionately nicknamed Cottie. He spent three years working in a fireless room, producing comic magazine sketches until he earned enough to give his bride a home. Jack and Cottie were childless but shared a compatible happiness for fifty-three years until she died in 1947.

Jack never lost his childlike sense of wonder. While his elder brother dabbled in the occult and astrology, Jack enjoyed creating puppet shows for children and making model boats with the poet John Masefield. His early illustrations were simple depictions of West of Ireland life, but also captured the circuses he enjoyed with boyish enthusiasm.

These early drawings don’t only convey sweetness: he illustrated the dreadful poverty that J.M. Synge chronicled in newspaper articles when they travelled through Connacht. But while capturing that poverty, he also caught the people’s defiant spark.

What he witnessed never left him. But what makes him remarkable is that he described everything twice. He did so straightforwardly as a young man. But, working in oils when older, he revisited those memories in a way that made him a great artist.

His starting points in the later paintings didn’t change: Irish landscapes, ponies, travelling shows. What changed was his depiction. He painted the layers of emotion within his memories, so that his canvases became not external landscapes but internal ones, infused with grief and passion.

He ceased being a factual illustrator, but rather, chronicled the human heart, even if this initially baffled his small audience. His monumental works were painted in a state he described as ‘half memory’: the original landscapes distorted with vibrant, emotional colour, flowing so quickly that brushstrokes weren’t enough: daubs of paint were squeezed onto the canvas and moulded by his fingers.

In conservative Dublin, he was mocked, but a new generation of writers were mesmerised by the audacious, free-floating freedom of these paintings, by extraneous forces crowding onto canvases to give the logic of dreams. Young Samuel Beckett was in awe of him; James Joyce treasured a Yeats painting.

It took Ireland a long time to realise how the young sibling was as great an artistic force as his famous brother. But Jack B. Yeats was too engaged with life to worry about fame. Not that he was reclusive. Callers at his city-centre studio were served Madeira with twists of lemon peel. If persuaded to stroll along Fitzwilliam Street, he bought his visitors flowers from street sellers, regaling them with stories of beggars he had befriended.

After his wife’s death he entered an old folk’s home at Portobello Bridge. The modernist poet Thomas McGreevy visited every night, no matter how late the hour. Overhearing McGreevy’s chatter, residents complained that Yeats ‘has the BBC radio on every night after midnight’.

Jack Yeats chose to travel without a ticket and to hide from inspectors. But the kid brother has emerged from his big brother’s shadow to become recognised as Ireland’s greatest twentieth-century painter, his textured masterpieces displayed in the National Gallery.

I think of him whenever I walk the canal bank near Portobello Bridge, knowing how he loved to leave his nursing home and walk there, immersed in life. Two days before he died, aged eighty-six, he made his final drawing: two swirling ponies on a funfair roundabout. That captures him: joyous to the last, wrapped in wonder and unpreoccupied by any thoughts of genius.

The Betrayal of Anne Frank

Judith Mok

I first heard the name Anne Frank when I was five or six years old, in my parents’ house in the dunes of Bergen aan Zee, a small, isolated village on Holland’s windswept North Sea coast. We were sitting in the living room on a quiet afternoon, and for some reason I remember that my mother was talking about varnishing the floorboards in a deep purple colour, when the doorbell rang. My father answered the door and brought in a tall and somewhat sombre-looking stranger. I had no idea who he was, but later I was told that it was a man called Otto Frank, who had come all the way from Switzerland to visit us. He went with my father to his study.

Some time later they emerged, and my father was crying. I had never seen him cry before, so it made a strong and confusing impression on me. Mr Frank had come to visit my father to give him some letters and papers. They related to my father’s sister, my aunt Saar. I knew that she had been murdered in a German concentration camp, but my parents rarely talked about these matters, or her, as they thought my sister and I were too young to fully understand the tragedies that had taken place in our family. From the adults’ conversation I learned that my aunt Saar had known Mr Frank’s daughter Anne in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, where they had both died within days of each other.

That’s how Anne Frank came into my life. It was years later that I read her diary, written in my native language, Dutch. But I knew she had been born in Germany, and had come to Holland with her family, fleeing the Nazi regime. Like many of the Dutch writers and intellectuals of his generation, my father, the poet Maurits Mok, spoke fluent and correct German. Whenever I ventured a sloppy sentence or made a grammatical mistake in the language he worshipped, a tortured frown would appear on his large brow.

How painful it must have been that the clipped language of his family’s murderers was the same as the one he had learned to admire and love as an innocent Dutch teenager. We never spoke about it. I read the beautiful leather-bound German books by Heine, Goethe, Schiller and many others in our little black-and-gold painted library. I loved those books with their Gothic script, and I loved the smile on my father’s face when he discovered our shared joy in the German language.

When I came to read Anne Frank’s diary, I already understood why she had decided to write in Dutch, the language of the country where she was given refuge and grew up, and where eventually, as the world knows, she would go into hiding in an annexe with seven others, behind a house on the Prinsengracht. Then they were betrayed and taken off to the transit camp of Westerbork, like my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, my cousins – all the members of my family, ranging from toddlers to pensioners. After spending a short period there, they were loaded onto the trains heading east to the extermination camps. None of them ever came back.

After the war, everyone, including my parents, struggled to get back to life as normal, as if that was possible. Only in his very old age did my father open up about those closest to him, who had been betrayed by their fellow citizens and then murdered in the camps – just like the people who betrayed Anne Frank’s place of hiding. A new book has appeared recently which seems to shed new light, after all this time, on the identity of her betrayer. But in Amsterdam there are few secrets. There was so much unspoken, but everyone knew what had happened. Everyone knew who had betrayed whom. Already as children, we understood that there were shops you didn’t set foot in, restaurants you didn’t eat in, families you avoided, people you didn’t speak to. It was rarely talked about directly, but somehow we knew.

Only once, as a child, did I see my father’s anger. We were driving past a busy restaurant, one of the best known in Amsterdam, with the owner’s name in fat gold letters on the window. And time stood still. I knew that these were the people who had told the police about my aunt Saar’s hiding place. These people were, it seemed, still doing well.

In Amsterdam the traffic is dense, and we sit in the car looking at that restaurant. We see eager people in front of their big plates of food. We’re all quiet, waiting for the traffic lights to change, the rain to stop, the car to move on, when my father’s rage comes out of nowhere. He shakes a white-knuckled fist at the over-lit restaurant and shouts through the opened car window: ‘Informers!’

A Young Irishman at Churchill’s Funeral

Charles Lysaght

Unlike many Irish children of my generation I was brought up to admire Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime leader. My father, although nationalist enough, always uttered his name with reverence, believing he had saved us as well as the British from the evil Hitler. Churchill’s defiant orations, received at home in those perilous years on our crackling Telefunken wireless, had made a deep impression.

All that might not have impinged on my childhood mind had I not had an unfortunate speech defect. This exposed me to teasing at school. ‘Lysaght, you speak like a baby,’ some boys told me hurtfully. ‘Don’t mind them,’ my father reassured me, ‘Winston Churchill also has a lisp and, apart from James Dillon, he is the greatest orator in the world.’

To encourage me, my father got me recordings of Churchill’s speeches. I listened to them over and over again, absorbing their rolling rhythm. I learned passages by heart and used phrases from them at school debates. Churchill became my unlikely hero.

I was up at Cambridge when he died in January 1965, aged ninety. All England stood still in the week between his death and funeral. Memories of his heroic life and British triumphs under his leadership were recited endlessly, making it a time of celebration rather than of sorrow. The fulsome enthusiasm of it all was a welcome relief from the mocking mood of self-denigration that had gripped England in that dreary decade of decline.

On the night of Churchill’s death, that consummate old stylist Harold Macmillan, the former prime minister, wound up the tributes on television. He looked even more doleful than usual as he peered out from the screen. ‘None of us,’ he concluded, ‘can be without a sense of personal loss that the greatest heart in England beats no more.’

Almost the only discordant voice came from Ireland. President de Valera said that Churchill might have been a great Englishman but he had been a dangerous enemy of the Irish people. Twelve years previously, in 1953, the two men had met for the first time. Their lunch, held in Downing Street, went well. Afterwards, Churchill told friends how much he liked the man. Dev was less forgiving and his words on the morrow of Churchill’s death sounded ungenerous. First reports, happily not fulfilled, were that our government would not even send a minister to the funeral. I decided that I, at least, would keep faith and be there.

I was up at six in the morning to be given a lift to London and join the throngs lining the route of the State funeral. In a biting east wind beneath a steel-grey sky, we waited for hours on Ludgate Hill, just below St Paul’s Cathedral. We saw the leaders of one hundred nations mounting the steps to Wren’s magnificent building. Most striking was the tall, erect, solemn figure of Charles de Gaulle, President of France. For all their wartime rows, he was the Frenchman whom Churchill esteemed above all others.

Meanwhile, the funeral procession wended its way along the ancient road to St Paul’s from Westminster Abbey, where the body had lain in state for three days and four nights. The route was lined with young soldiers, their heads bowed over their rifles in respect. The bands played old military tunes. Each minute we heard the distant echo of the ninety gun salute – one for each year of Churchill’s long life. The sailors, soldiers and airmen in all their panoply advanced past us, marching in measured rhythm. Then came the oak coffin borne on an open gun carriage pulled along by a phalanx of naval cadets. The chief male mourners and pall-bearers attired in top hats followed, led by Churchill’s ailing son Randolph, struggling uphill on foot. So quiet was the crowd about us at that moment that one heard only the crunching footsteps of the naval escort on the sanded road as they marched in step beside the gun carriage. In the awe and emotion it expressed, the hushed silence was more eloquent than any words, and certainly more moving than the applause which has become commonplace at modern funerals. I shall never forget it.

The tension subsided as Churchill’s widow, his beloved Clemmie, and other female mourners followed in horse-drawn carriages. The silence was broken in our party when one of the girls turned to me excitedly and said, ‘It makes you proud to be English, doesn’t it?’ As an Irishman, I could not be quite that, but I was and remain to this day mighty proud to have been there.

Merlin Park Miracle

Liam Lally

I turned seventy a while ago. For most people nowadays, reaching seventy is not that significant, but for me, having spent a lot of my childhood in hospital, it was akin to a minor miracle.

From about the age of four, I could not digest solid food, and frequently woke up at night with a pain in my belly, calling to my mother for a hot drink. Only when I became a parent myself did I realise and appreciate the effort it took for her to meet my impatient demands – getting out of bed, warming milk on a dormant turf fire, adding a pinch of soda. This frothy mixture eased my pain, but the underlying condition persisted.

Travellers from Belmullet to Castlebar know only too well that the R312 was – and is still – a mere tarmacked, meandering sheep track. I first experienced this road in the back of an ambulance in the early 1950s, bouncing up and down from pothole to pothole, lurching from side to side like a drunken giraffe.

Going from farm and turf fire smells to the chloroform-laden air of the County Hospital was a sickening shock to my system. Worse still was the fear generated by the rattle of the medicine trolley, which the nurses wheeled round the ward every morning and evening. My fists would unclench and my heart would stop racing only when that noisy horse passed my bed without stopping. In those days, an injection needle was a fearsome object, more suitable for equine use than inserting into the thin thigh of an emaciated six-year-old boy.

Merlin Park hospital in Galway was my home for much of the next six years. The combined efforts of our gifted GP, Dr Tom Kelly, and his friend, the skilled surgeon Mr Kneafsey, correctly diagnosed my problem: a collapsing oesophagus. Their solution was innovative – replace the faulty section of my oesophagus with a piece of my colon. Great in theory, but such an operation had never been done before in Ireland. And I was too small and weak for such major surgery.

Undeterred, Mr Kneafsey came up with an ingenious interim plan. He would insert a solid tube down my oesophagus every morning to open it and allow food travel down into my stomach. He did this while placing me under mild sedation for a couple of weeks. Then he moved to the next stage – do it without sedation.

Surgical notes made at the time describe ‘the patient’ – that’s me – as being ‘uncooperative’ during this procedure! Coincidentally, my father came to visit me after the first attempt, and he was informed by a junior doctor that I had bitten his finger that morning.

Mr Kneafsey and his junior doctor persisted, and after some weeks I was allowed home with this wonder-weapon – a solid, flexible tube about 30 inches long which, by now, I had learned to push down my throat every morning. I became so proficient at this manoeuvre that it could have become my circus act.

I spent some Christmases in hospital. Missing my family was eased considerably by visits from the hospital Santa, who seemed to have access to a wider range of gifts than the Belmullet version.

And there were fun times too. At supper time, the nurses allowed me to ‘drive’ the snack trolley from ward to ward at a speed that nearly turned the milk into butter.

Beside each bed was a four-wheeled trolley. One ward had a large open space in the middle, ideal for trolley races. New patients didn’t stand a chance against me, the veteran Formula 1 trolley driver. Some minor injuries were added to our underlying conditions.

There were no children’s wards in Merlin Park. Sometimes I was on the orthopaedic corridor where, in those days, patients were often confined to bed for long periods. I became their messenger boy, fetching drinks and sharing newspapers and cigarettes – yes, cigarettes! My reward for this service was to help them reduce the hill of grapes on their bedside lockers.

In those years, parents seldom visitedchildren in hospital. It was believed that such visits could be too upsetting for both parents and children. Furthermore, bad roads meant that travelling from Belmullet to Galway was as daunting for the older generation as a round-the-world trip might be today. Thus, I became the happily adopted child of patients, nurses, and ancillary staff.

After about a year at home, performing my ‘circus act’ with the magic tube every morning and gaining weight and strength, I was recalled to Merlin Park, where Mr Kneafsey successfully performed his ground-breaking operation.

Now, more than sixty years later, I begin each meal with a silent ‘thank you’ to Dr Kelly, Mr Kneafsey, and all the unsung heroes of the medical professions, both then and now.

El Greco, 1971

Michael O’Connor

At the end of the night when all bills had been paid,

Frixos, the owner, would come from the tiny bar

and play the bouzouki for the diners who lingered

over their Cona coffee and brandy. Sometimes

he opened a bottle of Commandaria

dessert wine and treated whoever was there. He

gave me a bottle that Christmas, which we liked, but

nobody at home liked the Retsina which he

also gave me. He sang too, and his voice was mellow.

On nights when there was no band, we put a record

player on the stage and played the soundtrack of Zorba

the Greek. It was scratchy and made Anthony Quinn’s

voice even rougher than it was in reality.

But what’s reality, when this all happened long

ago, and only a few remember it?

Well, Frixos was real, and Vassos was real,

and the bowl of water with cubes of butter that

I rolled into intricately carved spheres for every

table in the restaurant: that bowl was real;

and the night I spilled peas over Mr Apple

while easing the meat off the skewer of his kebab:

that was real. There is so much more, of course:

the smoke of our cigarettes behind the curtain

that hid us from the diners; the long drags we took

before emerging to clear a plate, reset a

table or answer a polite request: they were

real. And the foundation stones on the ground floor

– black marble – each with the name of a Burton’s partner,

they were real too, but far below El Greco,