Maeve Binchy (7 page)

The feelings Brando stirred were a new experience for Maeve and she didn’t know what to make of them. She responded by telling herself that he looked lonely and sad and needed someone to look after him. So she wrote to him, she said, and told him that his woman, Movita (the Mexican actress Maria Castaneda), was ‘doing him no good’. He should leave her and come to Ireland and marry Maeve instead. At one stage she wrote to him weekly, deeply concerned about the effect on him of some bad reviews and his marital problems, telling him not to worry too much about custody of his son, Christian, by his first wife Anna Kashfi. She was especially concerned that he was letting the role he played in
On the Waterfront
get ‘in on his mind too much’, which was quite an insight.

William can remember his sister’s room covered with hundreds of photographs of Brando. She had expected to hear back from Brando personally but, alas, every time Maeve wrote to him she received yet another photograph with a letter
written by some lackey thanking her for being part of Brando’s fan club. She was devastated that anyone should have thought her so crass as to want to join anybody’s fan club. Her feelings for Brando were true, her invitation to him genuine. Maeve even remembered ‘whinging and whining’ to Philippa that when Brando agreed to meet her she’d have to bring him to Dalkey, a place too sleepy for anyone their age to be. She recalled Philippa saying, ‘It’s a pity you don’t live somewhere nicer!’

There were, however, other opportunities to meet real boys. Every summer for twelve years, William and Maureen took the family back to where it all began: Ballybunion. The children would be hugely excited, for Ballybunion in the 1950s was a joyous place, full of friends who would meet up every year. Here at last they could run free without their mother worrying about where they were.

The Binchys would start preparing three weeks or more in advance, Maeve being sure to pack a bottle of St Blonde shampoo and another of peroxide, on the basis that blondes have all the fun. Having no car, they would travel down to Tralee by train, the first stage of the journey a taxi ride for Maureen, one child and the family’s luggage to what was then Kingsbridge station in Dublin (now Heuston). The rest of the family travelled by tram or rail, and every single year without fail, when everyone was gathered and settled in the
compartment
at Kingsbridge, Maureen would rise and announce that there were ten minutes to spare, time enough to go and get a magazine. They would moan and watch her browse the stall with ever heightened anxiety lest she would not get back on the
train in time for it to sound its steam whistle and draw out of the station.

Ballybunion is the inspiration for Castlebay in
Echoes
, so named because a ruined castle stands central to the cliff-top scene. When, in the novel, the Nolans arrive at Tralee on the train from Dublin, Castlebay’s Dr Power picks them up in his car and takes them the twenty miles into the town, while the young people of the party, Caroline Nolan and her school friend Hilary, are taken with the Nolans’ maid in a taxi under the
guidance
of Dr Power’s son, David.

The route they take is worth mentioning, because it is the same one that the Binchys took every year, even though it wasn’t the most direct route to their regular lodging house in the Sandhill Road. The Binchys would always make a detour so that they could take in the whole scene, the shops and the
holidaymakers
and the beach paraphernalia and all the sights, sounds and smells that they’d looked forward to so much all year.

In the novel, the girls are silenced by their first sight of the beach, the vast expanse of wet sand spreading ‘like a huge silver carpet’ between the two headlands. The waters of the Atlantic are warmed by the Gulf Stream, and the spirit of the place seems affected that way too.

As they come down Church Street – Church Road in
reality
– people are recognising one another from last season, waving and talking animatedly on their way down to the beach. Turning right into Main Street, the girls look excitedly at the big dance hall by the entrance of Dillon’s Hotel, which in
reality
, in Maeve’s time, was the Central Hotel. The taxi then turns
right again onto Cliff Road and they find themselves at the top of Church Street again, where the doctor’s house is situated and the Power family have tea prepared on the lawn. It is a lovely scene, and we get a real sense of Maeve’s anticipation as a child of a holiday about to begin.

Dr Power’s house, the big house on the cliff which Maeve describes, is in reality Ballybunion House. When Maeve
holidayed
there it was the residence of Dr Hannan, like his fictional counterpart the only doctor in the town. It is indeed still the home of Dr Hannan’s son Tim today.

The Binchys came to know the Hannans, and for her novel Maeve drew on the interior of the house and the garden as it was in the 1950s. Perhaps she first came upon it like Clare O’Brien, who cuts her leg on a piece of machinery and goes to Dr Power’s surgery for stitches.

The Pavilion, where Maeve’s parents had danced in the 1930s, closed in the early 1950s. The opening of the Central Ballroom in the Central Hotel, which replaced it, was quite an affair. There were over 3,000 people there the night it opened. The line-up featured Josef Locke, a tenor in the mould of Mario Lanza, a real pro hardened by working men’s clubs in the north of England and by nineteen seasons in Blackpool, Lancashire. Locke’s greatest hit was ‘Hear My Song, Violetta’, but mostly he performed Irish songs like ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’, ‘Dear Old Donegal’, ‘Galway Bay’ and ‘The Isle of Innisfree’.

As well as the Central there was another hotel in Maeve’s day, the Castle, both establishments owned by the McCarthy
brothers, William and Paddy, whose father had managed the Lartigue Railway in the town – a little eccentricity in this far outpost of Eire, which somehow doesn’t surprise. The Lartigue Railway, named after the French engineer Charles Lartigue, who invented it, was a monorail system that ran to and from Listowel, little more than ten miles to the east. There were only two ever made, one in Africa and the other in Ballybunion.

The house on the Sandhill Road which the Binchys used to rent from a dentist in Listowel is located on the bend in the road as it leads out of town towards the town’s famous ‘pro’ golf club. Maeve used to say that it was so close to the sea it was like having your own private bathing place. As soon as they arrived, the children would leave everything and rush down to the beach to see who else had arrived. It was at that point that summer officially started.

There are two main beaches in Ballybunion, the Men’s Strand and the Ladies’ Strand, to the north of which the large cliff is scarred with caves reminiscent of Brigid’s Cave, the ‘echo cave’ of Maeve’s novel, where if you wanted to know whether you’d get a fella, you’d call out and wait for the reply. The castle ruin stands on the cliff between them.

Back in the late 1930s, Ballybunion had a parish priest called Father Behan who on a Sunday, when there were a lot of
visitors
about, used to stand by the castle ruin and insist upon the segregation of the women on the one strand and the men on the other. Few took much notice and he would retire in the end to his own section of the men’s beach where the rocks are known as the Priest’s Rocks. In the evening, after Father Behan’s party
had left, children would scamper down and look for any coins that might have fallen out of their pockets.

Times were hard in the ’30s, but there seem to have been quite a few children with their eyes glued to the ground looking for a few bob even twenty years later. Aged twelve Maeve had thoughts only for rides on the bumper cars – there was a
travelling
fairground in summer as well as fixed rides. She was forever scanning the pavement just in case someone had dropped a coin that would pay for the next ‘go’.

Gangs of girls and boys hunted in packs at Ballybunion. To Maeve and thousands of others, here was unbridled excitement and anticipation and freedom, unlike anything they’d
experienced
all year.

At fourteen or fifteen, as her thoughts turned to boys, she would go to her first dance here, and anticipate her first kiss and perhaps have a taste of alcohol at a picnic party down among the sand hills, as she described in
Echoes
.

As she reached adolescence, the big-city teenage rock ’n’ roll revolution was just beginning to happen. Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’ was released in 1955. Little Richard charted seven No. 1 hits in less than three years around this time. Theirs was the sound that gave way to white rock ’n’ roll – Bill Haley in 1955, Elvis in 1956 with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes’.

At the Central Ballroom, Maurice Mulcahy was the resident orchestra. The band had a line-up of five saxophonists, two trumpets, a guitar, a squeezebox, double bass and drums and was one of the famous Irish show bands of the time. It provided a
kind of transition between the big-band sound of the ’40s and early ’50s and the dawning era of rock ’n’ roll. Mulcahy’s playlist was pretty conservative but it was quite possible to dance the waltz to ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’ one minute and jive to ‘See You Later, Alligator’ the next.

Except that jiving did have its own set of obstacles at the Central. If you were caught doing it, you were out on your ear. The only chance you had was down on the right-hand corner of the ballroom. The ballroom then had a balcony apparently, and if you met a young lady you had to go up to the balcony for an orange or lemonade and then you took your chances after that.

Maeve remembered that Mulcahy himself used to like to gee up his audience with clichéd innuendo that would set the dance floor alight in a riot of laughter and whistling. He would come to the microphone and ask for silence and make a serious ‘lost or found’ announcement that a certain girl had gone down to the sand hills last night and lost her … And then he would pause suggestively, and the audience would corpse themselves laughing. Boys’ minds were centred on lost virginity from about 8 p.m. on, when they were getting well oiled in the pubs.

There were no great decisions to be made about what to wear. ‘For girls it was summer frocks, somewhere down to between the knee and the ankle and maybe a couple of layers of
petticoats
. A lot of the boys would have worn suits to the dances,’ Tim Hannan says. The great thing was not to look as if you were trying too hard. ‘They had a resident photographer in the old days and there was always a rush in the morning to see who you were taken with last night.’

For Maeve’s first dance she wore a sixteen-shilling dress in turquoise and white from Clerys, the Dublin department store. She chose the colour, she said, because while red was reckoned by most people to attract more attention, girls prone to red face would be advised against it.

In search of a tan she made up a mixture of Nivea and Brown Nugget boot polish (the cheapest you could get, so cheap, she said, that most people thought twice about putting it on their shoes). She applied this concoction to her face, which set off her white cardigan nicely but made her, as she put it, ‘very
dangerous
to dance with’.

Generally, her apprehension added considerably to her
problems
. Expectations were high. Her younger sisters, Joan and Renie, would crane their necks around the main door to see how she was getting on, expecting her to emerge later that night at the very least engaged to a future husband.

Inevitably, the reality turned out to be quite different. The dances started about 8 p.m. and the pubs didn’t close till ten, which meant that to begin with there were many more girls than boys in attendance. So crowded was the cloakroom that Maeve couldn’t even get a sixpenny spray of Evening in Paris which was available there. The few young fellas who didn’t drink and were out for a dance appeared to have been snapped up by girls a good deal older and more experienced than her.

No one asked her to dance, and when she saw the eager faces of her sisters and their friends she was so desperate not to show how completely unsuccessful she was that she made a few passes, twirling by the half-open door in front of them as
if her partner was just out of view. This was undertaken, Maeve recalled, during a rendition by Mulcahy of a jive number, which at least would have accounted for the absence of a partner in her arms.

Maeve was actually a very good dancer. The girls at the Holy Child were taught dancing at school by a fine teacher, and before long she would have a whale of a time dancing the night away in Ballybunion. ‘If you could manage to get someone to dance with you,’ she once admitted, ‘then you were there for the night.’

A school friend remembers Maeve coming back from Ballybunion one year saying that she had fallen in love with a fellow called Matt. Maeve showed her a photo of a big hulk of a guy six or seven years older than her and said that she spent the whole summer hovering around and standing at corners hoping to bump into him. ‘He featured for many years and it was always her hope that he would fall in love with her.’ That was Ballybunion, a harmless ’50s fantasy land in which everyone had fun at no one else’s expense. It seems likely that Maeve’s crush was none other than Dr Hannan’s oldest son by the same name, who sadly died in early middle age.

Life may have been simpler back in the ’50s, but for Maeve occasionally it was so hurtful that even her sense of humour was not enough to protect her sensitive soul.

In 1956, the year of her Leaving Certificate, she turned
seventeen
. She was approaching the end of her time at the convent and was nervously awaiting the results on which her passage into university depended when she was invited to a dance at the
Royal Marine Hotel. It was to be a big ‘do’, a dance given by the parents of two of her school friends.

The Royal Marine has been an elegant fixture in Dún Laoghaire since 1865, with its bandstand out front and stories abounding of guests as various as Queen Victoria, Frank Sinatra and Michael Collins, the Irish freedom fighter who took Room 210 with Kitty Kiernan in November 1920.