THE HANDSTAND | october 2004 |
This is the year of Paddy Kavanagh's
Centenary. How much I would like to hear his soft voice
again; Paddy and his wife were exceptionally good friends
to me, infact I can say that at that time I had no other
friends.I would like to set down a few lines in memory of
this kind strong friend, which hardly concern the
material of poets or literature, but days that crossed
our lives with a certain vigour and generous mental
nourishment. I met to talk to Paddy first in a pub in
Baggot Street, he was sitting with Brian O'Nolan and
others and thought he would have a little joke with his
friends. They had perhaps been wondering who was this
little mouse drinking in their watering holes with her
head always in a book - "Sit down here," he
said, designating a seat at a table opposite to his.
"I want you to do something for me," said he...
with trepidation I looked at him. Just as you see in the
photograph below he stared at me. "Look," said
he, "I came out without being able to fasten the top
button of my shirt, now you will do it for me." He
had such a big adam's apple! I leaned over the table, I
got to my feet and reached out, I tried to do the work
but I could not! I sank back but he had taken my hand and
tried to calm my deep embarrassment. Some years later I had crossed all the social mores of that little cell of Dublin's literary world of pubs by publishing UP Broadsheets (named in celebration of the grave ticket in James Joyce's Ulysses) poems and prose,some of the contributors were students from University College Dublin and that was forbidden; also I played with my children, (which Paddy maintained was unseen before in Dublin streetscapes); and betimes drank beer with those three good friends, Paddy himself, Professor David Franklin and Paddy Ryan. Paddy had brazenly and correctly tried to prevent me marrying a stupid fellow who fathered my two girls, but he stood by me when I lived alone with them. We would remember then the times he pumped up my bicycle wheels as I frantically bicycled around Dublin several years before from one of my three jobs a day to the other.We would meet on the canal bank as I pushed the old crank along to the corner where I was living on Leeson Street. When I came back from Italy in later years with my two daughters, when it was gossiped that I was "mad", he came to my gate and welcomed me home, and afterwards sent me a guardian, Peter Cohen, whose rule was : "So now, you make her laugh!". A rule he faithfully followed and which enabled me establish an even keel as a lone mother. It is my sadness that Paddy had died before I got into further publishing and street selling of the Treblin Times. A venture he would have welcomed. Later on, pregnant once more with a new lame-by-night-and-day fellow I ran away from everybody and took lodgings for us in London. I saw no-one. I waited for the birth of my child - I awoke one morning in the Medical Mission of Mary's to find Paddy's wife Kathryn at my bedside, poking my son with a smile on her face. "Here's someone who has been here before,"she said."Now, come back to Ireland." I did.Paddy represented for me the truth of living, I could say things to him I would never utter to others except possibly Patrick Magee,the actor, who gave me a literary education during my existence in London. I felt that none in Dublin paid any attention to the small particulars in life, that Paddy gave particular attention to. He was one whom, as a friend put it recently, thought "there was more to life than life".He turned me on to reading with joy several books he loved for their true gift to literature,Don Quixote and Gil Blas, books I often open and read today. He thought about my little family and he and Kathryn shared their humourous understanding of Dublin life with me. I would not like, now I am in this momentum of memory, to forget to mention James Dwyer who took delivery of all the poems sent in for a competition that Paddy was judging. A sea of papers and envelopes threatening to deluge their very lives i n Heytesbury Lane, where I spent a happy year.Dear Paddy, I did hear your voice once , years after you were dead. I was at a rather large dinner party silently listening to the guffaws of reminiscence about you, and someone then turned on a record of a reading you gave, that soft voice, that loving intonation of the text, the tears ran down my face. Everyone was embarrassed.Jocelyn Braddell, editor IN PRAISE OF WELLS Patrick Kavanagh Ireland of the Welcomes 1959 Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) Regarded himself primarily as a poet, but his prose works are far more numerous than poetry in his published oeuvre. Meegan's Well, Cassidy's Well, Feehan's Well - these were famous wells in my youth. They still survive in my imagination as well as in reality, though the well as we know it is giving way to the laid-on supply of water. It is a pity, ofcourse. It is not merely the clear spring water with a possible trout in it for decoration or the thorn-bush overhanging it, but something more. Perhaps the thing I most recall is the gossiping women at the well. I never liked the chore of walking a crooked path for 500 yards to Meegan's Well, which gave us our regular supply. and I often dreamed that it would be wonderful if there was a spring under our house and we could have a pump in there. Actually there was a powerful spring under the house and in front of it too, but Nicholas Kearney, the water-diviner, was unable to find water anywhere about our house but on the insanitary side of the dung-hill (nowadays known in deference to niceness but not to vividness, as the compost heap.) Not so long ago the present occupiers of that house got another diviner who found the spring mentioned, from which the water is now piped. Looking at this spring I thought of all the times I carried two tin cans of water from the distant well and I was reminded of a rhyme that was in an old school book: There was a man who had a
clock, his name was Mathew Mears, We owe a good deal to Philip
Dixon Hardy for his little book The Holy Wells of
Ireland, which is easy enough to come by. Hardy was a
stupid fellow, not given to analyzing his real motives,
who said that his object in writing was 'to hold up to
the eye of the public the superstitions and degrading
practices associated with them.' In the course of being
angry and self-righteous he gives us a good deal of
information..... He tells us of the pagan origin of well
worship and mentions the Pattern of St Michael's Well,
Ballinskelligs, on the 29th of September, the feast of St
Michael the Archangel, 'which concurs with the autumnal
Equinox and consequently with the Baal Times of the
Druids.' But I do not claim to be a scholar. I only say a
well is a thing of beauty and I am well aware of the high
justice of the fact that the most sacred place of
pilgrimage in Christendom is Lourdes, centered round a
well. |