Maeve Binchy by Piers Dudgeon Read Free Book Online Page B

Knowing how irrepressible a personality she was as an adult, and how popular she became, and being aware of the support dispensed by her mother when she was a child, and of how, at home, she’d had a clear sense of herself at the centre of the world, one would expect Maeve to have been confident and popular and even a bit full of herself at school. But this was not the case at all. One fellow pupil recalls:
    Maeve wasn’t actually very
obvious
at school at all. I think shereally blossomed after she left. I would never think of her as a huge character. I’m not sure that Maeve was a very confident person when she was young. She changed a lot. I think for the better.
    It is noticeable that Maeve is almost always in the background in photographs taken of her class at this time, and she confessed to having been a nervous child – always worrying that something lay in wait for her around every corner, afraid of the dark, of going upstairs to the box room in case a monster lay in wait for her, of climbing trees in case she fell, of seeing a doctor in case he wanted to vaccinate her, of going to the dentist in case the drill slipped and went through her head, of passing buses and lorries in case they suddenly left the road and ploughed into her, of the sound of an ambulance or fire engine because she was sure they were bound for her house, of being cut, in case, like the royal haemophiliac, she would bleed to death. Any loud noise made her jump ‘four feet’, the sound of leaves in the wind was surely a burglar. She was always looking at the sky in case a comet was about to career into her, and she thought she saw the Devil on four separate occasions. 13
    It is tempting to put her nervousness down to Maureen’s excessive concern for her safety at every point, together with the child’s lively imagination, which had her lowering her eyes for fear of seeing a sacred vision. But this nervousness of hers was consistent with an emotional state which Maeve later admitted came to dominate her psychologically from this time – a crippling self-consciousness.
    ‘I think she was very conscious of her height because she used to slouch quite a bit. I do remember the nativity plays we had, because she was tall she invariably played St Joseph. I don’t think she had an awful lot of confidence then,’ said Susan McNally.
    But it wasn’t only her height. In later life Maeve put it plainly: ‘I was fat, and that was awful because when you’re young and sensitive, you think the world is over because you’re fat. I was also a bit lame.’ 14
    Another of Maeve’s friends, the journalist Mary Kenny, who met Maeve a decade later, remembered her saying that as a teenager she always weighed ‘around 15 stone’.
    Valerie recalled that she had to have her clothes specially made:
    She had great difficulty in getting them to fit. I remember there was a dressmaker called Miss Creegan, who lived in an old farmhouse, an ancient, falling-down place called Honeypark, with her sister. She was a very eccentric lady. I remember her wallpaper was upside down on the walls, flowers growing down rather than up. And Maeve used to get her clothes made by this woman, because she couldn’t get anything off the peg to fit her.
    At home the issue carried no stigma at all. Maureen did everything in her power not to make any concession to the idea that her daughter’s weight might be a problem.
    ‘My best friend at school was Jillyann Metcalfe,’ said Patricia Hamilton,

    and she was also a great friend of Maeve’s. She lived quite near her so they would play and go to each other’s houses – my house was in Carrickmines, considered the back of beyond in those days, so I didn’t go to Maeve’s house, but I remember Jilly saying to me, ‘Oh, you’d love to go to Maeve’s house because she has boxes of chocolates in every room and her mother puts them there just in case the children are hungry.’
    ‘At home,’ Maeve said, ‘I never felt fat. At