Kevin OSullivan - A Good Boy

You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment

Annie Dillard, A Writer in the World

M y clansman, Muiris OSilleabhin, wrote a gem of a book in 1933 called Fiche Blian ag Fs or Twenty Years a Growing in its English translation. In it he tells many stories within the arc of two narratives. One narrative describes the latter days of the Irish-speaking islanders on Great Blasket Island as the population diminished, as families moved to the mainland, and sons and daughters went to America. The last OSullivan family left the island in January 1954, when I was not quite eighteen months old and living two hundred miles up the road, in Dublin. The other strand of the book is a personal tale of Maurices own growing up, the first stage of his life according to a saying of his father about the shape of a life. We spend, said his father, Twenty years a growing, twenty years in bloom, twenty years a stooping, and twenty years in decline. As I wrote the present memoir, I realised that I was writing an account of my own years a growing, in my case not twenty, but twenty-five. This was not the original purpose of the book, which was to write an account of the life of my mother, to whom I was very attached, not by way of affection, but rather as a dutiful son. Along the way I realised that I could only tell my story and so it became the story of the dutiful son.

My mother impressed upon us that we were in exile, a little clan led by her, as she tried to be a mother and father to us all since my father had died. Our exile was from the rolling green downs of Wiltshire in the West Country of England to a sprawling concrete estate of pebble-dashed houses south of the city of Dublin. I was to reciprocate her care by being a good boy, studying hard or working hard, and by not telling other people Our business. What our business was that was so important to conceal from others was never very clear to me. There didnt seem to be much going on in our house that others couldnt see or guess at. What were the secrets that we should conceal? What were the consequences if they were revealed? These questions were never answered satisfactorily and arguments for openness never prevailed; we maintained our privacy by not dawdling to chat with neighbours after Mass, and by making sure the net curtains were closed.

It wasnt clear that the exile was permanent. Mum always talked about having come to live in Ireland for the duration, a phrase that English people used in both the First and Second World Wars to mean the duration of the war. It was a hopeful phrase and it spoke of an end, even if no one knew when that end would come; it meant that one day we could all go back to normal. Because we were in exile, Ireland didnt feel like a permanent home to me. I didnt know anything about the Irish side of the family, my fathers side, other than being acquainted with his father and sister, my grandpa and auntie, whom I saw once a year, and whom I didnt really like. Although the English side, my mums side, were across the water in England, they seemed much more alive to me. I knew stories of my English uncles, like the fact that my Uncle John had tried to climb the smokestack at the Avon India Rubber works when he was three years old, or that Uncle Charles had designed and made my mums evening wear, or that Uncle Richard had played the organ in Wells Cathedral. I even knew that Uncle Alan, a mysterious figure who was an uncle but wasnt my mothers brother, had been in the Royal Engineers and had emigrated to Canada.

As a kid I wasnt entirely sure whether I was English or Irish. I went through phases of trying out accents, I barracked for the English rugby team at Lansdowne Road, I attended the Remembrance Day memorial service in Phoenix Park and, much to the indignation of a Catholic nun who knew me, I sold poppies for the British Legion. At home we stood up if God Save the Queen was played on the radio and we listened to the Queens Speech on Christmas afternoon. I was my English mothers son.

As my brothers and sisters grew up, one by one they went to England, or Australia, or Scotland. The exception was Bid, my oldest sister, who never managed to get away. On the one occasion that she was ready to leave for London, my mums chronic illness took an unaccountable and sudden turn for the worse. I am happy that I became close to Bid in the last years of her life and grew to love her. But the others all left, and with their leaving the family shrank and changed. Bid once remarked to me how different we kids had all become, despite the fact that we grew up in the same family. It struck me then that although in one way we are all in the same family, the families we grew up in are quite different. The first three children, Bid and Eileen and Dermot (Derry), were born in England before the war, in a prosperous family with a thriving business, a market town pub dating from the twelfth century, that provided a charming home and even maids to do the housework. Margaret and Gerard were born in Ireland after mums migration during the war, each birth following a period of navy shore leave for my father. Their various rented homes in Ireland initially had some pretension to refinement until the money ran out and the budget shrank as the family grew. Then there were Heidi (Mary), Nora, and me, post war kids, baby boomers, born well below the poverty line, except that there wasnt a poverty line back then, or certainly not one that we knew about. No carpets? Who had carpet? No television? Who had television? Bread and jam for tea? Sure. My mother was an ingenious cook (I have many of her handwritten recipes) and a knitter and seamstress. We got by. In time the UK Ministry of Pensions came to the party and mum could even pay for us younger kids to go to the better schools, Monkstown Park College for me and Dominican Convent in Dun Laoghaire for Heidi and Nora.

Sandy Toksvig, host of the BBCs QI program, once described herself as being afflicted by the unfortunate condition known as posh voice, no money. I related to this at school, having an accent different from my classmates, especially if I was going through one of my being English phases. Irish people would tilt their heads to look at me quizzically and say: