Piers Dudgeon - Maeve Binchy: The Biography

T he morning of Wednesday 15 August 1956 saw the sun rise full and bright over Killiney Bay, creating a perfect backdrop to the image of a tall teenage girl hurtling down the Knocknacree Road in a blur of bicycle wheels towards the little town of Dalkey.

On a day as glorious as this the deep blue sky and sea, sunsoaked white buildings, occasional palm trees and distant shadowy aspect of the Wicklow mountains to the south beg comparison with the fabulous view over the Bay of Naples, to which the roads surrounding Vico, Sorrento, Monte Alverno, San Elmo and Capri seem also to bear testimony.

But you wont find a road in the whole of Italy called Knocknacree. And the town of Dalkey, inscribed more or less on three sides by the sea, is inescapably Ireland. Old Dubliners used to say of it, For Gods sake, sure thats the end of the line; sure, it must have been the last place God made and left His tools behind Him. Up to 1876 there was no road beyond it along the coast, and it was literally the end of the line for the Dublin tram. Stables for the old horse-drawn version were constructed here in the 1880s, before it gave way to the motorised vehicle, but that disappeared in 1949. Its strange, said Patricia Hamilton, who lives there now, but Dalkey is still a little like a cul-de -sac. Youre not going through it to anywhere. Why would you? As Flann OBrien described it in his novel The Dalkey Archive (1964), its the perfect antidote to Irelands capital city.

Dalkey is a little town maybe twelve miles south of Dublin, on the shore. It is an unlikely town, huddled, quiet, pretending to be asleep. Its streets are narrow, not quite self-evident as streets and with meetings which seem accidental. Small shops look closed but are open. Dalkey looks like an humble settlement which must, a traveller feels, be next door to some place of the first importance and distinction

In 1956, untroubled by traffic, this southern outpost of Irelands capital city was not among the towns and villages of the Gaeltacht (traditional, Gaelic-speaking Ireland), but its closed-in nature fostered just as strong a sense of belonging among its people. The family values which lie at the heart of Irish tradition imbued life here: the girl on a bicycle had spent her first seventeen years surrounded by more love than anyone could hope for.

As she careered, less perilously now, down Railway Road into Castle Street in the centre of town, Findlaters, the grocery and provision merchant at No. 37, with its sacks of dried peas and porridge oats on the old wooden floor, was opening its doors. Searsons Wines & Spirits, Dartry Dye Works and Felton the Draper at No. 47 lined the way as she glided into the old Dalkey lands the seventh-century ruins of St Begnet, the original parish church, the two medieval castles standing sentry on either side of the road, and the nineteenth-century Church of the Assumption, where she brought her bicycle to a halt.

Leaning it against the wall of the church she glanced respectfully at the figure of Our Lady in the churchyard, for it was indeed Her day, 15 August, Feast Day of the Assumption, the day reserved by Catholics to celebrate the Virgin Marys ascension into heaven.

Making her way inside, she saw with relief that she was alone and walked silently down the nave towards the east end of the church where stood a rack of candles and a collection box covered in hard white wax.

Put a penny in the box and you could light a candle for someone ailing, or for their soul if they were dead. She and her friends generally did it to make a wish come true, and today the girl would need all the help she could get. She was expecting the results of her Certificate of Matriculation, which would decide whether she could go to university. It was a day that could change her life forever.

With the candle lit she knelt in one of the long pews in the main body of the church. The carving of the Last Supper on the face of the High Altar and the white plaster sculptures depicting the Stations of the Cross on the walls above her were scenes she knew intimately, quite as well as the furniture in any of the rooms at home.

Raising her head she looked up at the three magnificent stained glass panels of the east window, framed like a triptych over the High Altar. The one in the centre commanded her attention in particular. It showed the very moment the Mother of God was taken into Heaven, her earthly life over.

She held the vision in her mind as she covered her eyes with her hands and told God exactly why it was that she was there, that she was sure He would understand that it was time now for her to leave Dalkey and put all the tortures He had seen fit to heap upon her to good use.

She had a very special relationship with God, frank and open. She regarded him as a friend, an Irish friend of course. He knew her innermost thoughts, both good and sinful. He also knew her innermost problems, or tortures as she referred to them. He knew them because it was He who had given them to her, to challenge her and make a saint of her, which she fully intended to be. In later years she would be reticent about her spiritual beliefs. But now, though seventeen years of age, she was still an innocent child and was clearer, freer and more content with her inner life than she ever would be again.

Hers had been the best start any girl could want. She was born Anne Maeve Binchy, in a maternity unit at 26 Upper Pembroke Road in Dublin, on 29 May 1939, the eldest daughter of a young barrister, William Francis Binchy, and his wife, Maureen.

Her father was a studious, intellectual and gentle man. As a barrister he wasnt especially high-achieving, but he had a deep and serious interest in the law and was clearly something of a workaholic. Whether at home in his study, or sitting in the garden in the summer, or on holiday with his wife and children, William always had a bundle of solicitors briefs with him.

Maeves upbringing might have been a thoroughly ordinary middle-class Catholic one had it not been for her mother. Maureen Blackmore was completely different to William. She was an extrovert, with an irrepressible personality grounded in an unquenchable interest in people, whoever they might be and wherever she might find them. If she and Maeve were on the bus together Maureen would not only talk to the person next to her but to the whole bus, making her daughter more self-conscious with every passing moment. Often Maureen could be found down in the open-air market in Dublins Moore Street, sitting in a fur coat on an upturned box, furiously smoking her Gold Flake cigarettes and engaging with the traders, famous for their banter and thick Dublin accent. What was important to Maureen was what went on between people her world was made up not so much of things as of people, and in particular of the resonances between them.

Very much an authentic free spirit, caring, socially conscious but unaffected, a natural socialist, she brought compassion to peoples lives and had an intuitive way of always saying what turned out to be right. This wasnt a learned skill nor did she have to try to find the words. They were just there, as Maeve put it. It seems that Maureen was something of a seer, and Maeve felt that her mothers marriage to her father was definitely touched by fate.

Maureen and William were both working in Dublin around the time that they met, William as a lawyer, Maureen as a nurse at St Vincents, a major academic teaching hospital in Irelands capital city. But they actually came together for the first time elsewhere, under extraordinary circumstances.