William Trevor
The Times, April 1992
During the 1930s and '40s, William Trevor's family occupied a succession of homes across provincial Ireland - in his birthplace of Mitchelstown, in Youghal and Skibbereen, in Tipperary Town, Enniscorthy and Maryborough (now called Portlaoise). And in each, he recalls, there lurked that terrible, disquieting sense that an argument was about to happen.
"One of the legacies I have from the parents' bad marriage is a great fear of quarrelling," he says. "I hated the sound of it, because it was always there above your head some place. Perhaps I'm over-sensitive to it now, which is silly - obviously it's better for children to see that side of things than for it all to be suppressed. But to see quite as much as I did was too much. Growing up, the duller it is the better in many ways."
There was little opportunity for dullness to take root, though, as James William Trevor, the writer's father, led his household in an itinerant dance across the map, one inspired by his upward progress at the Bank of Ireland. The third son of farmers in County Roscommon - Catholics until late in the 18th Century, when they became "lace curtain Protestants" to avoid forfeiting land and stock under the Penal Laws - his father had seen the family's meagre estate disappear through an older brother's mismanagement and its tiny house, built without foundations, collapse to the ground.
"I think when you come from that rather poverty-stricken background, your reaction is to want to get on, and the sense of living in a society which is withering away compounds that," Trevor says. "Also, as Protestants, we were a small community within the bigger community. I don't know what the exact percentage was in those early days of Eammon de Valera's New Ireland, but it was very, very small. As a result, I think there was a feeling not just of wanting to survive, but of wanting to survive as well as you possibly could."
In pursuit of betterment, James Trevor studied accountancy at a commercial college and took up a junior post in the frontier town of Dundalk. There he met Gertie Davison who, although she came from County Armagh, had a similar background to his own and was working as one of the first female clerks for the Ulster Bank. They married (though were soon to prove temperamentally ill-suited) and, with Trevor's father accepting the first in the series of promotions that would inspire the family's nomadic progress, moved to Mount Bellew, Count Galway. By 1928, the year of Trevor's birth, they were living in Mitchelstown.
"My father was very jolly, one of those men who love talking to people and telling stories, and whom you couldn't not like," Trevor says. "My mother was an extremely charming person also, but very different. She was a capricious, fickle and almost eccentric woman, tiny but also very beautiful. As a pair they were quite elegant people, in an Irish provincial way rather than the Scott Fitzgerald one."
It's possible to imagine such a couple, given social status via the husband's position, making something of an impression as newcomers to Ireland's tight-knit rural communities. "That might be so if they'd ever done anything together," Trevor allows.
"For all that charm and elegance, they didn't mesh. They passed each other by. And in a rather crude way, you'd put that down to the fact that one was a southerner and the other a northener. They were not really a couple and were strange when together. The image I have of them is one of separation. They existed in two different worlds."
One rare mutual interest was that of film, a medium which transformed provincial life in those pre-television days. "Cinema was like a big wedding cake that was given to you every so often and you were invited to eat into it. Before the war came and petrol shortages further curtailed my mother's lifestyle, she and my father would drive up from Skibbereen to Cork where they'd see a film at the Savoy, the Palace or the Paviliion, then have some supper and come back again, probably without speaking to each other the whole time.
"He liked Edward G. Robinson, while she was a great follower of William Powell, Myrna Loy and, particularly, Fred Astaire. My father, although a bigger man, actually looked like Astaire and so must have been her type. And in a way there's a marvellous irony, albeit a purely personal one, in their going to see Top Hat and those other jolly, jazzy films which are so full of fun, so happy, and sitting there as this grimly unhappy couple."
For Trevor, his older sister June and younger brother Alan, one consequence of their live as middle-class gypsies was the difficulty they experienced in making and keeping friends and the constant interruption of their studies. Taken out of school for one move or other, it was sometimes as long as six months before they found themselves back in a classroom. A failed Christian Brother was engaged as a temporary tutor during one such hiatus, but he left after a week in a dispute over wages. Miss Mary Quirk, armed with her Intermediate Certificate Examination qualification but otherwise little more than a child herself, was a more long-lasting substitute.
"She came in every day on her bike, red-cheeked and bearing briars and grasses picked on the way for us to draw. She was a wonderful, lovable person and very good with what were two rather naughty boys. But I have great gaps in my education to this day, which I always think is a rather good thing for a fiction writer. There remains a lingering curiosity about things I feel I should know but don't."
The Trevor household was not a bookish one, but Trevor's mother learnt to submerge her frustration at the slow pace of small-town life in historical romances from the Argosy Library, a book-lending service available at most sweet shops at the time. And eventually an orange-jacketed edition of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, found on a shelf in Hogan's Newsagency, Tipperary, helped her adolescent elder son overcome his resistance to what he viewed as the staid, adult occupation of reading. Further Christies were then feverishly consumed, followed by Sapper and Edgar Wallace. "For years I read nothing else, and am a considerable expert on the detective fiction of that period, even to this day."
At 14, Trevor began a two-year spell as one of only 12 boarders at Dublin's 120-pupil Sandford Park, then a boys-only school with a reputation for liberalism and to which the sons of many locals intellectuals, Conor Cruise O'Brien among them, were sent. "It was a very homesick time,' he says. "You couldn't pick friends out of just a dozen people, and there was a feeling of great Dickensian grimness as this other galaxy of different types cycled off each day, most particularly at weekends."
He was then transferred to the fee-paying St. Columba's in the hills beyond the city of Dublin, although his father was to protest until his dying day that financial strain of this almost broke him. Here, sophisticated classmates laughed at a provincial accent which, Trevor admits, was hurriedly modified.
Other memories of its spartan regime include those of regulation nude bathing outdoors for boys and masters alike, and a contact with women limited to the vicarious appreciation of a classmate's formidable crush on Ingrid Bergman.
At St. Columba's he settled into a group which regularly cycled down into the city in the early hours to eat vast fry-ups at the Green Rooster cafe. "From there we'd go to the Shelbourne Hotel to try to persuade the hall porter to give us a drink. He never would. There was a boy called Popeye Jameson - one of the whisky people - who'd say, 'I think my father is staying here at the moment,' to which the reply would be, 'I don't think he is, sir.' That would be the end of that and we'd have to cycle back."
Word of these nocturnal sorties reached the headmaster on the day war ended and two of the group, who were prefects, were expelled, partly because of the rumour that the Green Rooster also functioned as a brothel. "I think that hint came from the headmaster's wife. He wouldn't have dared even to think of that eventuality."
Steeped as he was in the rhythms of a less cosmopolitan life, Trevor found Dublin a daunting place and, despite having gone on to take his degree at Trinity, he still retains the sense of being a stranger there. Nor has the subsequent experience of living in England since the '50s or of spending time abroad diminished his bond with towns like those through which his family once made its unhappy way.
"I'm very aware of belonging to the Irish provinces, even though it's not to one particular place," he says. "I have the feeling of being at home there even in towns I've never lived in."
Copyright © 2020 Alan Jackson