Sunday,
September 23rd.
Hello again. Long time no blog.
Actually, I have been very busy since last we virtually met. I had
my gig at the Edinburgh Book Festival, reading from, and discussing ‘The Locked
Ward’. That was an enjoyable experience. My wife and daughter, some old
friends, from hospital and school days, were there; and a sizeable number of
people I’d never met. There were one or two probing questions too, but I think
I managed to answer most of them to the questioner’s satisfaction. I have a similar
gig a week on Tuesday at the Wigtown Book Festival. I’ve never been there, so
I’m looking forward to it. I also met my agent at the publishers’ do on the
last evening, and he made a suggestion for my next project (of which more in
later blogs) which has kept me writing at a furious pace for days now – an
average of four and a half thousand words a day. I think it’s shaping up
nicely, though I do say it myself. Got the title and the main thrust of the narrative
a week or so ago. And the one missing aspect, the twist in the plot, came to me
this morning when Herself and I were shopping in Marks & Sparks. It’s true
what they say – you can get everything there.
I
also had my old Mammy staying for a week, in between times, and had the
pleasure of running her all over the county to meet various old (and I mean old) friends. Mum is 87. During her
stay, my own 61st birthday happened. Then we had our granddaughters
for the day yesterday. And the cycle of life was brought home sharply to me.
We walked down to the shops with the girls, the younger (4-year-old)
holding my hand. And it reminded me not only of the obvious comparable
occasions: holding her older sister’s hand at that age, or even her mother’s;
but also of how, 56 years ago, my own grandfather, Willie O’Donnell, used to
meet me as a child off the school bus. Mum put me on it at Ramsay Crescent and
Grandad used to meet me off it at the stop in Bathgate near the Co-op Drapery,
where he was manager. He’d take my hand and walk me across the street and down
to the primary school in Livery Street. He was 61.
He survived the
First World War, and returned to Norwich, where he had been billeted before
active service, to meet the girl he had fallen in love with, the young, pretty
and resonantly named Ivy Bunn. They married in 1924. I have a few photographs
of the occasion, one of the newly weds, Ivy standing one step lower than Willie
to address the fact that she was almost a foot smaller than him.They had ten
children, one of whom, Laurence, died as an 11 year old. Nine sons and one
daughter, Evelyn. Lucky Evelyn, eh? Nine brothers and no sister.
The old man lived until he was a week short of his 92nd
birthday. My grandmother died at 86. I have written a biographical monograph,
‘The Lives of the Saints’, that records what I know of their early lives, and
of my father’s childhood. I may post extracts – maybe on Armistice Day. I still
miss them, the love and the encouragement they gave me, their eldest
grandchild. I can only hope that, when I go (probably a lot earlier than 86,
far less 92), my own grandchildren will look back on our time together with as
much affection.
And I am reminded of a poem I wrote for the one O’Donnell uncle I
never knew: Laurence. It was published in my second collection of poetry, ‘Smoke
& Mirrors’. I’ll finish off today by posting it.
OTHER ECHOES
Down
the passage which we did not take
Towards
the door we never opened
Into
the rose-garden. TS Eliot
My father’s brother, Laurence, died,
11, in 1946.
I pore over his school photograph,
and, like clever cinematography,
or a mirror that lets no reflection fix,
his features become, one after another,
the eyes and smile of all his brothers,
forming and dissolving in the mind.
Who knows what would have been his life,
if things had been different, fate more kind?
What woman might have been his wife?
That sober virgin these long years
that daily haunts the half-dim pews
and lives on candle-light and prayers,
a gleg wee lassie till she heard the news?
Or one who married someone else,
widowed, re-married, dead herself?
And the cousins that I might have had –
they flick through the mind as half-formed questions –
negatives, outlines, the merest suggestions
of the kids who might have called Laurence ‘Dad’.
Freakish, both of us older, so young –
a middle-aged nephew; a child-uncle, dead.
He was alive in a different time
and no reflection entered his head
that I’d be alive in years to come,
a nephew he would never know,
staring into living eyes that died so long ago.
