Maeve Binchy (4 page)

I
n the early 1950s one or two secondary schools in Dublin seemed to be gearing up to meet the growing demand among girls for a university education and a career. Pembroke School, a lay Catholic school for girls in an elegant Georgian house in Pembroke Road, Dublin 4, was better known as Miss Meredith’s after its founder, Kathleen Meredith. It had a first-class
reputation
for academic achievement, combined with a friendly, liberal atmosphere and small classes, where dedicated teachers gave personal attention to each pupil.

Maeve’s contemporary Geraldine MacCarthy was doing well there when suddenly her parents decided to move her. People had begun talking about a new school for girls called the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, which had started up in Killiney, the next little town along the coast from Dalkey.

Geraldine’s father told her that the school, which offered places to both boarding and day girls, would get her to university and help her make her way in life – and that soon became William Binchy’s view, too. But the point the O’Donnells made was that while it offered a brilliant education, it also provided more than that. And there were plenty of girls at the Holy Child whose parents wanted that special something for their children who were not cut out for academia. It was perfectly possible to take domestic science instead of maths and Latin, and feel no humiliation in doing so. ‘The view at the time was that we who took this route had a lot more fun,’ as Adrienne Lavelle, another contemporary of Maeve, recalls. ‘We used to go twice a week to the technical college in Dún Laoghaire and come back with all these food dishes. Others used to envy us for that.’

The Society of the Holy Child was founded in 1846 by Philadelphia-born Cornelia Connelly and approved in 1887 by Pope Leo XIII. Its rules and constitutions were confirmed and ratified in 1893 and based on those of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, although it was not a Jesuit order.

The Society had initially been turned down by the dioceses in Ireland to which they applied because there were already many religious orders running convent schools there,
including
the Sacred Heart, the Dominicans, the Mercy Sisters,
the Presentations and the Loretos. Only when the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John McQuaid, became concerned that too many Irish girls were going to England for their education and marrying Protestants, did he invite the Society of the Holy Child to open up in his diocese.

On 15 September 1947, a century after the founding of the Society, the school at Killiney settled into an old hotel
overlooking
Killiney Bay, a short walk from the railway station and close to the Archbishop’s own house.

McQuaid already knew the Binchys, having attended Clongowes Wood in the early twentieth century alongside Michael, James, Joseph, Owen and Daniel. Maeve became a day girl at the Holy Child Killiney in 1950, travelling the few miles from Dalkey on the little train which even to this day takes the girls to and fro around the bay.

The school was ordered along lines set out by the then
headmistress
, a one-off who had a huge effect on Maeve, such that she kept in touch with Mother St Dominic, as she was known, until she died in her nineties among the Holy Child community in Harrogate, North Yorkshire.

Mother St Dominic was the hidden factor of excellence at Killiney. As soon as anyone met her they were won over, and the girls trailed after her as if she were the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Past pupils remember a very tall, bespectacled woman with a wonderful smile and great presence, a sense of proportion and above all a sense of humour. Said Susan McNally, ‘She
was
Killiney. We all loved her.’

Instead of the Jesuit model of discipline, Mother St Dominic
exercised Cornelia Connolly’s conviction that girls will never learn unless they are happy, and put the onus of discipline onto the pupils themselves. As Valerie, also a contemporary of Maeve, remembers:

In the 1950s this was indeed new. If a major infraction occurred then it would be pursued. ‘Not to steal was a huge thing at school,’ remembers Maeve’s friend Patricia Hamilton. ‘I
remember
once someone was discovered to have been stealing and the whole school was summoned and the nuns were there. We were kept in there for ages, and people had to go through other people’s lockers to see if they were the culprit.’

But day to day, rather than chastisements, Mother St Dominic brought her personal charisma and – most especially – her
character
and sense of humour to bear. Said Susan,

Teresa Mee, a nun seconded to Killiney for six months, once saw a young Holy Child girl running furiously down the
corridor
(not allowed) and as she turned the corner she ploughed into Mother St Dominic. The girl was horrified at what she had done. Mother St Dominic, seeing the extent of the child’s mortification, drew herself up to her full height, let loose a great smile across her face and commanded, ‘Do it again!’

Maeve liked to say that the nuns, who had only just arrived in Ireland, were utterly unaware of what they had got themselves into. Unable to understand the Irish accent, they were putty in the girls’ hands; the girls could tell them anything and they’d believe it.

For her part, the shrewd Mother St Dominic used to play along with this and respond that given the choice between teaching natives on the Gold Coast of Africa (another mission of the Society of the Holy Child) and fulfilling her
missionary
duty among middle-class Irish girls in County Dublin, the Gold Coast presented itself as distinctly preferable!

There was a happy atmosphere at Killiney and a
compassionate
one, with attention to the individual a priority. Mother’s great strength was to instil self-esteem in her girls by finding something in each one of them to admire. ‘She had the most wonderful insight into each of us,’ said Susan McNally. ‘It had an incredible binding effect on all of us.’ It worked like this: ‘She
had a room downstairs where she would have little chats with you. She always used to say, “Come in Susan, close the door, sit down, now what’s on your mind?” You could pour your heart out to her.’ Every girl availed herself of these ‘chats with Mother’.

As the fathers of Maeve and Geraldine hoped, Mother’s regime also prepared the girls for a fast-changing world in which women were already gaining ground. One of Maeve’s early articles for the
Irish Times
praises nuns for being at the forefront of career
guidance
, which at the time barely existed in Ireland. ‘They no longer look out on the wicked world from behind cloistered walls and urge their girls to seek similar shelter,’ she wrote. ‘People would say there was something about the Holy Child girls,’ agrees Valerie. ‘They would stand up. They were able to express themselves. They were able to have an opinion about things.’

Independent thinking did not extend to religion, however, which was dispensed with Jesuit intensity. From the moment Maeve arrived in 1950 she entered what she later referred to as her ‘religious maniac’ phase.

At school ‘our Catholic faith permeated everything’, says Valerie.

In
Light a Penny Candle
, Elizabeth’s friend Monica cannot believe that at the convent they pray before every class, even before maths and history. The novel captures beautifully the innocence and unquestioning beliefs of Maeve’s younger self and her friends during their time at the Holy Child. As Elizabeth White is a Protestant evacuee from England she knows nothing of Irish or Catholic ways. All must be explained to her, like the concept of ‘limbo’, for example, which Catholics believe to be a place where dead babies are held; not having been baptised they are in a state of original sin and cannot be admitted to Heaven. The idea of masses of innocent dead babies hanging in some remote space, in endless twilight, would be macabre in any other context, but in the convent with Sister Mary and Sister Bonaventure, Elizabeth is soon prepared to accept it as perfectly natural.

Then, of course, dear sweet innocent Elizabeth is herself perceived to be in danger of everlasting damnation, because she has not been baptised into the Catholic Church. The girls realise that it is up to them to set matters straight. Outside classes it becomes their purpose to save her soul. Elizabeth submits to four baptismal rituals and there is some concern whether any of them has worked. Were the words said at exactly the same moment as the water flowed? Should the service have been conducted in Latin rather than English? Later the class ponder on how they can arrange for her First Communion, because sooner or later she is going to have to make her confession to cast out the sins with which, as a Protestant, they believe she is riddled.

As a child Maeve never had a Protestant friend like Elizabeth. It was a mortal sin at the time for a Catholic even to enter a Protestant church or attend a wedding that was not a Catholic one. A mortal sin meant that you would be consigned to Hell for eternity. As a Catholic child one knew that there was no way back from everlasting Hell. Children sensed the divisiveness of so exclusive a regime.

Though there was a Protestant presence in 1950s Dalkey, and friendships and marriages across denominations did exist, generally there was minimal integration and sometimes a degree of unpleasantness about it when it did occur. ‘When my father married my mother, who was a Protestant,’ one woman explained, ‘there was a huge rift in the family. Honestly, they wouldn’t speak to her. When she had her first child, who died, one of her sisters said, “Well that’s one Catholic out of the way.”’

Utterly convinced of everything she was told, and being a caring person inside, Maeve began to worry about the father of a friend of hers, who was a Protestant while the rest of his family attended the Catholic church. Every Sunday he would drive his family to church but instead of joining them at Mass he would go for a walk on the pier at Dún Laoghaire.

She spent hours with her friend discussing the situation,
fearful
that he would suffer ‘the Devil and the pain that goes on forever’ and actually teamed up with her friend, faced her father with the situation and urged him to reconsider!

The compassionate ethos of the Holy Child Killiney was clearly at odds with the Church’s wider determination to
marginalise
and alienate anyone outside the Catholic community,
but this only fell clear to Maeve in her late teens when she went to university. And even then, so completely had she lived within an opaque Catholic bubble that when she travelled abroad in her twenties she found it difficult to believe that there were countries where the Angelus bell did not ring at midday.

The Catholic family to which Maeve belonged at Killiney enveloped her completely – not only Mother St Dominic, but other less corporeal figures, like St Patrick, who was always
looking
out for her, St Anthony, whom she relied on to find things for her, St Peter, who was always dependable, and St Francis, her father’s namesake, who was the saint of the poor and of course friend of all the animals and birds.

So closely did she come to belong that Maeve would
sometimes
rather be at school than at home. Once, for example, she opted to celebrate St Patrick’s Day by swelling the ranks of boarders at the school, attending Mass with them in Killiney rather than with her parents and siblings at the Church of the Assumption in Dalkey. She remembered persuading a nun to let her decorate the statues of all the saints, so that St Patrick ‘up there’ would have a good day and not feel over-adorned in the otherwise stony naked company of St Peter, St Francis and ‘the other lads’.

During this time she was determined to become a saint. When this was mentioned by a priest during her funeral Mass sixty years later the congregation actually laughed out loud, but the ambition really wasn’t so unusual in the 1950s. Life for everyone in the Catholic community had a spiritual dimension which was wholly real. Even if you were a poor boy living in
a village in a rural area, there’d likely be a day or two a week when you’d rise early to serve the priest at Mass before school. And the possibility of seeing a sacred vision, meeting ‘in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld’, as James Joyce described the metaphysical dimension of Catholicism so well, seemed high.

Maeve herself developed a terror of emulating the shepherd children at Fatima and apprehending a vision of Our Lady in a tree – there was a period when to avoid a repetition of the famous visionary experience she kept her eyes firmly on the ground whenever she went outside.