Father, Dreamer, Spy...
Dedicated to my father Donal, on his 14th Anniversary. 30th January 1928-8 January 2009
Today’s blog is In the Name of the Father, as it were. His 14th anniversary is today. One bleak January, he slipped away in the middle of the night. Of his life and his work, you can read here. I’m more interested in my own memories of him, and how he seemed to almost manoevure his charismatic uncle-martyr, and my grandfather, into haunting our childhoods. My father loved talking. When he wasn’t talking, he was listening to the radio, usually RTE radio, which annoyed us all. It was all just too much talking. Pat Kenny and Mike Murphy were unbearable to me, pretty much always. Newstalk might have been the worst. But Scrap Saturday, I would sit down and join him in the sitting room, sharing a pot of black tea with Lapsang Souchang ‘twigs’ as he called them. His favourite, with a little plate of biscuits, the essential accompaniment to tea for the diabetic. Dermot Morgan was, to me, the best thing about RTE. Except that of course he wasn’t RTE at all, eventually. The priest lobby couldn’t take Father Ted, at all.
When I was young, my father told me all the dark Dublin jokes he could. As if nobody else in the family would listen.
“Mummy, Mummy, why do I keep going around in circles?”
“Shutup or I’ll nail your other foot to the floor.”
That kind of thing. Even at 8 years old I thought this was hilarious. I could sense that deep down, my father didn’t think much of himself despite being a journalist of many years, a writer of historical books, a spy for East Germany in the 1960’s, a thing he laughed off as a sort of drunken adventure as agent Paddy O’Brien, his alias who crossed checkpoint Charlie on freezing cold nights in Berlin. Great interview here. And last but very much least, PR manager of the Bank of Ireland, which he hated, apart from his successes in patronising the Arts using the Bank’s money and wangling a good pension out of them after ten years of misery on Baggot Street.
His mother Monty (Maureen Christina) had nurtured his drinking habit from nine years old after a peritonitis operation in Temple Street Hospital, by giving him a snipe of stout every night in the back room. She was his favourite, he told me. When he went to take the Pledge at his Confirmation, she pulled him back down by the shirt tails when he got up to take it and said: “Sit down Donal, you’ll break it in a week.” by 18 years old, he confessed, he was already a full blown alcoholic, all the way through apart from a brief respite in 1968, until 1977 when he finally collapsed and was carted off to Jonathan Swift’s psychiatric hospital to get off the tank, and into AA. It worked. My mother had followed him into St. Patrick’s with something akin to a manic episode. So I was left at Peggy’s down the road. And my brother went somewhere else, but I can hardly remember where. And my sister Kristin was old enough to think for herself, outside the family dysfunction. They were locked up for a few months but they survived, as did we all. Just about intact. After decades in AA, my father wrote a mocking version of the Serenity Prayer, which was read at his wake and went viral, subsequently, across the USA and is now on fridge magnets and tea towels all over the internet. One day, I might make a fortune claiming copyright over his hilarious poem, which he read out to us one day at the kitchen table:
SENILITY PRAYER
God grant me the senility
To forget the people I never liked anyway
The good fortune to run into the ones I do
And the eyesight to tell the difference
Donal O’Donovan, 2004
My father asked me at 11 years old what book he should write next. I said he should write a book about his uncle, Kevin Barry. The lad of eighteen summers hanged upon the gallows tree. Sung by Paul Robeson, Leonard Cohen and every traditional Irish band you can think of, the ballad became infamous and yet my grandmother Monty, Kevin Barry’s sister, would not allow the song to be sung in the house. It was maudlin, she said.
But Kevin wasn’t maudlin. An oval portrait of him hung in my father’s study – a copy of a painting by somebody in the H Company of the IRA. The face and shoulders of Kevin Barry had a slightly airbrushed look, set against a monochrome and patriotic green background. Kevin had a quiff of hair like Tintin and was wearing a trench coat with the collar upturned. He beamed eagerly around my father’s study, like a friendly family ghost. Beside this portrait was another one of my grandfather, Jim O’Donovan, in a rectangular frame, painted by Leo Whelan.
A true die- hard, my grandfather’s convictions had him locked up long after the War of Independence. His face, in the portrait and in real life, was sterner and more chiseled. When I was brought to see him in his nursing home, he never looked at me. I used to stare at his missing fingers – blown off when he was demonstrating a hand grenade he’d just invented. I found the stubs fascinating. Pieces of schrapnel had fallen out of them over the decades. We called him ‘Beep-beep’, because he used to say this in his wheelchair, to get people out of the way. He occasionally demanded bottles of whiskey from my alcoholic father and other visitors. I suppose he needed an anesthetic for the past and for the tragedy of his wife Monty, who then lay prostrate on her bed down the corridor in the same nursing home, riddled into paralysis by several strokes. A woman with a razor sharp wit was living her final years in a terrible limbo.
My grandmother Monty was the first dead person I ever saw. I stole a glimpse of her in the open casket at her funeral in the nursing home chapel. I never forgot her still, waxy face and the smell of candles and incense hovering around her. My father quickly took me out to the cold corridor with my cousins where we were told to wait until the funeral service was over. I heard the drone of praying, and the priest muttering gloomily from the altar. She, Kevin Barry’s second-youngest sister, was gone. My grandfather was gone by 1979. They were all slipping away, leaving my father angry and intolerant of our inability to grasp who these people were. He wanted me to carry the chattels of our family history, but I did not want to do it. He would sit in his green armchair and tell me stories of how Kevin Barry cycled over the Wicklow hills to drink in the hotels in Glendalough and Aughrim, how my grandfather locked himself in a room at night in the family home in Shankill, County Dublin, speaking German to his secret friends in Nazi Germany. How my great aunt Kitby, Kevin Barry’s older sister, sailed to America with Countess Markiewicz, on De Valera’s orders, to fundraise for the Republic. But my father always came back to Kevin. Kevin spinning around on his bike in his Belvedere cap, drinking, dancing, pulling Belgian girls, out on the streets in ambushes, down alleyways carrying arms. And in the end, hanging on the gallows, just like in the song.
Kevin
Are you the nephew of?
Who tried to inveigle the elegant tart
In the train from Rathvilly
Who murdered a gallon of Smithwick’s
Lying on a bed with a Belgian bird
In the Glendalough Inn by the lake beyond Laragh.
Are you the nephew of?
Robbed a Lewis gun laughing
From the King’s Inns showing
Dinny Holmes his new toy
Are you the nephew of?
Was caught under a soldier’s lorry
Was tortured, tried and fed apples and grapes
Till he hang-dangled dead from an alien rope.
Donal O’Donovan, 2001
When my father was twelve years old the German Abwehr spy, Herman Goertz was put up in my father’s room in the family home, at the invitation of my Grandfather Jim. As far as my father was concerned, he was a hero, dropped from a Heinkel 111 bomber near Ballivor, County Meath. An amused farmer asked him, ‘Do you not know Ballivor?’, when the spy inquired as to where on earth he was. Two parachutes were dropped from the aeroplane, a German Heinkel, one containing a radio transmitter and the other, Hermann Goertz wearing a German officer’s uniform and a coat stuffed with 20,000 US dollars. Goertz swam across the river Boyne by night and marched up to Laragh in the morning, in the Wicklow mountains to Iseult Stuart, his contact.
He was then collected by my Grandfather and brought to Shankill, Co. Dublin. Goertz moved into the garage or the orchard by day, hiding behind the eucalyptus tree. My father, in this visiting spy, found another father – one who had heroically parachuted out of the sky, who hid his codes under the eaves of the stable and was fed dinners by my grandmother Monty.
When Goertz was leaving my father’s orchard to find another safe house, he gave my father his Third Reich knife and revolver which he kept until they were stolen from our home during a burglary in the 1980s. My father had no understanding of Goertz’s political ideology nor that his father had invited the spy to Ireland to work with the IRA, although he had some suspicions. “I might have thought you’d guess.” said Monty to my father when he asked her were the men who drove up the drive in the night IRA men. What he did understand, I think, was that he had found a surrogate father in the orchard. Herman Goertz took his own life in 1947 when he was instructed to leave Ireland and return to Germany. My grandfather had kept his cyanide capsule safely all those years. He popped it down in front of the authorities, and dropped dead.
It was Kevin Barry who made the greatest impact on me, of all the ghosts my father chose to summon into our family home. The rest of it was just too frightening and strange, such as the thought of my grandfather Jim drinking tea with Hitler (which he didn’t, of course), or speaking to him on his radio from the family home (which he didn’t do either). I took refuge in the boy who beamed at me from the oval portrait in my father’s study. I could see his face as he was driven with the British soldiers to Bridewell prison. Irate, but amused. I wrote about the arrest on 20th September 1920 and about the short time he spent in Mountjoy prison before his execution on 1 November. He was hanged the day before my birthday and, although we lived decades apart, his death was a shadow that followed me everywhere.
Anyway the point is that my father was my hero, despite all of his failings. He could be cruelly acerbic at times ( a family tradition), he was a raving alcoholic for the first 6 years of my life (and decades preceding that) he was impatient, controlling and had many of the qualities you often find in those who have turned away from the bottle. Another one being a shamelss addiction to cakes and biscuits. But it was he who nurtured my writing from nine years old. I wrote a short story about a Russian girl called Anna in the snow, and her cat. My father edited this, and went on to edit everything I wrote in my school years. There was something about stories, both made up and true, that fascinated me. There were endless stories in our house. Bookshelves stacked with stories of other people’s lives. Short stories, novels, poetry, monographs. He’d survey them all from his green velvet armchair, while making sure he kept a close eye on the thermometer on the wall- at had to be a consistent 70 degrees, or he’d get uneasy. When he died in 2009, I vowed to have his book, Kevin Barry and his Time, republished. But I ended up writing a new book called Yours Til Hell Freezes, which was published in time for the 100 year centenery in 2020.
It was a long road with many obstacles. It’s behind me now, but there is still the revised paperback edition to come. Hopefully, before hell freezes over.
When he ‘got’ cancer in 2008, he was gone in two months. He’d had enough, at 80 years old. He made a quick exit from St. Vincent’s Hospital. I was with my Aunt Aedine from Amsterdam, the night he passed away. She tapped my shoulder in a brief slumber I’d snatched, and she told me that he had just slipped away. I was emerging from a dream about a little Indian boy running down the street, and a Golden Buddha. It inspired the poem I wrote about him the next day:
DEAR FATHER
The long day stretched out blue and
Clear for the larks to sing into,
As you pass by
I dream of a golden Buddha.
The lids fold over your eyes
The breath rushes out
With no suitcase
No tank to fill
No ticking watch
This time, you leave for some other world,
For some other place,
Your spectacles perched on the bridge of your nose
Your pen scratching across the dry page
Whispering:
“Listen to my poem”.
But I cannot hear it.
Dear father, until we meet again,
I will sit under the birch tree,
I will wait for the door of your wooden shed
To open again.
Dear father, my Mahātma, until we meet again.
Siofra O’Donovan
January 9 2009
When I was driving home from St. Vincent’s hospital in the middle of the
night after my father had died, I passed the blue Christmas tree in
Kilmacanogue and asked my father for a sign that he was still here– there were
hardly any cars on the road, but there was one in front of me. Its hazard
lights blinked. If it’s you, do it again Dad. They blinked again. If it’s
you, do it again Dad. They blinked again. All the way down the N11. They never really leave you.
Such an interesting family, Siofra. And your intimate storytelling style wonderfully brings your relatives to life in this blog.
One of the most beautiful pieces I have ever read. Many, many thanks!