Maeve Binchy by Piers Dudgeon Read Free Book Online

actually laughed out loud, but the ambition really wasn’t so unusual in the 1950s. Life for everyone in the Catholic community had a spiritual dimension which was wholly real. Even if you were a poor boy living ina village in a rural area, there’d likely be a day or two a week when you’d rise early to serve the priest at Mass before school. And the possibility of seeing a sacred vision, meeting ‘in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld’, as James Joyce described the metaphysical dimension of Catholicism so well, seemed high.
    Maeve herself developed a terror of emulating the shepherd children at Fatima and apprehending a vision of Our Lady in a tree – there was a period when to avoid a repetition of the famous visionary experience she kept her eyes firmly on the ground whenever she went outside.
    As for becoming a saint, this was no passing childhood ambition. She still planned to be one when she was twenty-three. It wasn’t a question of hoping; she was convinced that she would be.
    At the Holy Child, recognition of a pupil treading the path of the saints was vested in an award known as ‘The Child of Mary’. The award was one all of the girls coveted, but to receive it one would have to partake in daily Mass and receive Communion. A combination of religious intensity and good character was also required and the award demonstrated that one was fit to be a leader as much as a saint. The climax of Maeve’s apprenticeship was a one-day retreat early one December, followed by a candlelit ceremony, for which she wore a white veil and, round her neck, the medal itself on a long blue ribbon, which she continued to wear with great respect and pride every day. Maeve developed her special relationship with God in pursuit of the medal. They spoke to one another like the Italian priest Don Camillo speaksto Christ in Giovannino Guareschi’s popular series of books, which first appeared in print in English at this time. God was ‘a friend, and Irish, and somebody who knew me well’.
    In spite of, or perhaps because of the highly disciplined religious life that the nuns had elected to pursue, tensions were released daily in an abundance of character and humour. Valerie remembers a typical incident.
    We lived up the road here and my dad had his office in St Stephen’s Green in Dublin and in those days there was so little traffic that he would come home for lunch, it would take twenty minutes or so. Now, if one of the nuns wanted to go to the dentist or something they would ring my mother and ask for a lift into town after lunch. One day this nun, Mother Immaculata, who was quite elderly and a very tiny person, asked if my father could give her a lift into town. He called for her in his very smart car – some sort of sporty Jaguar – and she got in beside him – she could barely see over the dashboard. And she asked him, ‘May I ask, would you do something for me?’ He said, ‘Yes, what is it?’ She said, ‘Would you take me down to the Big Tree – (which was the only bit of motorway; well, there were two lanes rather than one) – and will you drive me at 100 miles an hour?’
    Maeve’s readers may remember Mother Immaculata in her novel
Echoes
. But her fictional Immaculata is quite unlike the person Valerie describes – she has ‘a face like the nib of a pen’ and is a thoroughly difficult woman, concerned to impress onplucky young Clare O’Brien the importance of everything she does for ‘the good name of the school’.
    Maeve was always at pains to make clear that she never took a whole person from the real world into her fiction, only parts of them. But this story about Mother Immaculata reminds us how influential the convent became on her work. When the film of
Echoes
was shot at Dunmore East, an idyllic seaside resort in County Waterford, not far from where Maeve’s mother Maureen was born, Maeve saw to it that a lot of the nuns got parts as extras. It takes a