Maeve Binchy (5 page)

As for becoming a saint, this was no passing childhood ambition. She still planned to be one when she was twenty-three. It wasn’t a question of hoping; she was convinced that she would be.

At the Holy Child, recognition of a pupil treading the path of the saints was vested in an award known as ‘The Child of Mary’. The award was one all of the girls coveted, but to receive it one would have to partake in daily Mass and receive Communion. A combination of religious intensity and good character was also required and the award demonstrated that one was fit to be a leader as much as a saint. The climax of Maeve’s apprenticeship was a one-day retreat early one December, followed by a
candlelit
ceremony, for which she wore a white veil and, round her neck, the medal itself on a long blue ribbon, which she continued to wear with great respect and pride every day. Maeve developed her special relationship with God in pursuit of the medal. They spoke to one another like the Italian priest Don Camillo speaks
to Christ in Giovannino Guareschi’s popular series of books, which first appeared in print in English at this time. God was ‘a friend, and Irish, and somebody who knew me well’.

In spite of, or perhaps because of the highly disciplined
religious
life that the nuns had elected to pursue, tensions were released daily in an abundance of character and humour. Valerie remembers a typical incident.

Maeve’s readers may remember Mother Immaculata in her novel
Echoes
. But her fictional Immaculata is quite unlike the person Valerie describes – she has ‘a face like the nib of a pen’ and is a thoroughly difficult woman, concerned to impress on
plucky young Clare O’Brien the importance of everything she does for ‘the good name of the school’.

Maeve was always at pains to make clear that she never took a whole person from the real world into her fiction, only parts of them. But this story about Mother Immaculata reminds us how influential the convent became on her work. When the film of
Echoes
was shot at Dunmore East, an idyllic seaside resort in County Waterford, not far from where Maeve’s mother Maureen was born, Maeve saw to it that a lot of the nuns got parts as extras. It takes a nun to walk like a nun, apparently. Real nuns don’t so much walk as glide!

Mother Immaculata’s phrase, ‘the good name of the school’, was one used relentlessly to motivate the girls at Killiney,
notably
in sport, which also accorded great popularity if you were any good. Maeve said she was hopeless at games and even refused to vault the horse in the gym for fear of some injury. She also ducked out of hockey whenever she could, generally in the company of another girl. Together they used to hide in the toilets rather than go onto the hockey field, and then make a quick getaway. Otherwise, as Maeve wrote with winning caricature, it was a question of standing around on the pitch, looking like a sack of potatoes in her green uniform tied in the middle, legs blue with cold, hoping that the action would remain at the far end of the pitch.
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The games mistress was at a loss as to how to get her to
participate
in anything at all until she hit on the idea that her height could be put to use on the netball pitch. Maeve was unusually tall, six foot or more as a teenager. All she had to do was hang
around the net, wait for a pass and dunk the ball in – easier for her to do than not. She became a lethal striker and for two years actually made the school’s 1st VII netball team.

There were protests, however. Some schools refused to believe that so tall a girl was young enough to be playing for the team. They may have had a point: there is a discrepancy of one year between Maeve’s declared age and the one indicated on her birth certificate. No one will say for sure when the change was
implemented
, or why. Was it an attempt by Maureen to give Maeve the best chance of success in life following a long absence from school? Did she miss a year due to an extended bout of
glandular
fever, as one of her friends suggests? Whatever was the case, Maeve remained a year younger than her officially recorded age for the rest of her life.

More significant to Maeve than sporting success were
writing
competitions in magazines, which girls were encouraged to enter because here was another opportunity to show the school in a good light. Maeve remembered in particular one Christmas winning a prize in a magazine called
The Pylon
, subscribers to which (for a few pence a year) could proudly call themselves Electrons. To be an Electron and enter a writing competition was terribly important. Like being good at sport, it showed ‘school spirit, girls!’, while winning meant being fêted by staff and girls alike.

Maeve won this particular competition with a story about a girl called Jane, who wanted to be a missionary and teach the natives in Africa. Jane succeeded by beating the natives out of their own customs and forcing hers upon them. The win stuck
in Maeve’s mind because of a particularly prescient remark made by her father when he picked her up that day from school. ‘When you become a writer, you will always be able to say this was your first work.’
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When Maeve did become a writer she thanked God that the story had not survived!

Maeve had begun to subscribe to activities that promised a certain amount of status and popularity in the school, and to show less interest in those activities that didn’t – like academic work, for example. When she first arrived she had been expected to go the academic route and not, like some of the others, substitute domestic science for Latin and maths. She was a bright girl and found it relatively easy to come near the top of the class, but school reports described her as lazy. She grasped things well, but then became bored and soon lapsed into a daydream. In later life she gave the reason that being at the top of the class wasn’t a mark of status at school. It wasn’t nearly as important as being good at games, for example, or winning a writing competition.

Seeking status is perfectly normal behaviour among children but here it looks like becoming a definitive motivation, and one wonders why. Knowing how irrepressible a personality she was as an adult, and how popular she became, and being aware of the support dispensed by her mother when she was a child, and of how, at home, she’d had a clear sense of herself at the centre of the world, one would expect Maeve to have been confident and popular and even a bit full of herself at school. But this was not the case at all. One fellow pupil recalls:

It is noticeable that Maeve is almost always in the background in photographs taken of her class at this time, and she confessed to having been a nervous child – always worrying that
something
lay in wait for her around every corner, afraid of the dark, of going upstairs to the box room in case a monster lay in wait for her, of climbing trees in case she fell, of seeing a doctor in case he wanted to vaccinate her, of going to the dentist in case the drill slipped and went through her head, of passing buses and lorries in case they suddenly left the road and ploughed into her, of the sound of an ambulance or fire engine because she was sure they were bound for her house, of being cut, in case, like the royal haemophiliac, she would bleed to death. Any loud noise made her jump ‘four feet’, the sound of leaves in the wind was surely a burglar. She was always looking at the sky in case a comet was about to career into her, and she thought she saw the Devil on four separate occasions.
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It is tempting to put her nervousness down to Maureen’s excessive concern for her safety at every point, together with the child’s lively imagination, which had her lowering her eyes for fear of seeing a sacred vision. But this nervousness of hers was consistent with an emotional state which Maeve later admitted came to dominate her psychologically from this time – a
crippling
self-consciousness.

‘I think she was very conscious of her height because she used to slouch quite a bit. I do remember the nativity plays we had, because she was tall she invariably played St Joseph. I don’t think she had an awful lot of confidence then,’ said Susan McNally.

But it wasn’t only her height. In later life Maeve put it plainly: ‘I was fat, and that was awful because when you’re young and sensitive, you think the world is over because you’re fat. I was also a bit lame.’
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Another of Maeve’s friends, the journalist Mary Kenny, who met Maeve a decade later, remembered her saying that as a teenager she always weighed ‘around 15 stone’.

Valerie recalled that she had to have her clothes specially made:

At home the issue carried no stigma at all. Maureen did
everything
in her power not to make any concession to the idea that her daughter’s weight might be a problem.

‘My best friend at school was Jillyann Metcalfe,’ said Patricia Hamilton,

‘At home,’ Maeve said, ‘I never felt fat. At home I felt very loved and very special.’
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But outside the house she became so
self-conscious
about her size that in adolescence she felt lonely and already ‘out of the race’, convinced that fat people didn’t get on.
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She was also tortured by the idea that everybody was looking at her, and so she stooped or slouched to appear smaller than in fact she was.

Outside the house there was a gradual dawning that people did find fatness an issue, if only because slimness was the prescribed ideal. And less than a leap away from knowing that was the realisation that she was not the centre of attention at school, as she was at home, because she fell short of the prescribed ideal. She was not one of the gang because she was fat, and so gaining status and popularity at school by other means became her principal motivation.

In her conversations with God it fell clear that He had sent these tortures, among which Maeve listed ‘not being good at games (until the marvellous netball “discovery”) and being fat at school’, to try and test her. From this it followed that ‘it was
bad, very bad, to be fat’. So she began to construct a defence mechanism to deal with it.

Valerie remembered ‘a religious studies class when we were all asked what did we most appreciate that didn’t cost us money. I said, “Looking into the flames of a fire.” Someone else said, “Sunset.” And when it came to Maeve, do you know what she said? “Chocolate biscuits!”’

Maeve’s comment raised a laugh from her classmates, and it was intended to. Just as Mother St Dominic played up to the girls at Killiney, who responded with laughter and adoration, so Maeve played to the crowd, learning to cover up her
anxieties
with a self-deprecating brand of humour. She’d forever be telling stories at her own expense. As an adult it became her trademark. There was always irony behind it, and wit, but sadness too, because it was often designed to disengage her from some pain.

Maeve used her fiction sometimes to dispense her hard-won philosophy through characters whose problems were hers in real life. In
Echoes
we meet Josie Dillon, the ‘big white slug … so fat she’s disgusting’, as Chrissie O’Brien puts it cruelly. Josie is lonely and doesn’t seem to get enthusiastic about anything.

Later comes Benny in
Circle of Friends
(1990), real name Mary Bernadette. If you watched Minnie Driver play Benny in the movie but have not read the novel, you’d fail to
appreciate
just how unfashionably fat Benny was in the mind of her original creator.

In
Echoes
, Josie is supported by Clare O’Brien, and makes strides on her own account, taking hold of her life and discovering
the power within herself to do so. In
Circle of Friends
we always know that Benny is beautiful inside and we suffer with her when her friends betray her, and cheer with her at the end when she realises she is over Jack Foley, the boy who cheats on her with her friend, the shapely Nan Mahon.

As a mature adult, who had put her adolescent tortures behind her and become a confident writer of world renown, the issue of Maeve’s weight emerged as the scratching mat against which she developed so much of the great wisdom delivered in her stories. Both Josie and Benny win out in the end
not
by conceding to the fashionable stereotype,
not
by slimming,
not
by moping, nor yet by being transformed into princesses by their creator, but by taking control of their lives and becoming
confident
in who they are.