SHE MANAGES to burn down the tiny Derry schoolhouse where she is a trainee teacher, get slung out of the Big Band scene in Dublin in the 1950s, set up one of London's first floating restaurants (The Barque & Bite) only to lose it a year later, and in her late fifties, when she goes to busk in Sydney, meets by chance the son she gave up for adoption 40 years before.
Does this incredible storyline sound like the kind of thing you would not believe in a million years if you read it in a novel? It only goes to show that truth is stranger than fiction, because all these events and more have occurred in the life of one redoubtable Derry woman, Maryanne Kerr, who is in the process of writing her memoirs.
The first volume, Over the Mountain, comes out next month but she has finished volume two and is already working on volume three. In the meantime, she is still living life in her own inimitable style "I'm 62 now, and I feel fantastic. I intend to go on living for a very long time."
Maryanne regrets that, although she has always loved writing, she couldn't write fiction "I haven't got the imagination." Instead her imagination goes into fuelling a life which has been full of "tragedy and joy" the stuff of the fiction of Edna O'Brien and Maeve Binchy, two writers whom she greatly admires, and whose work her own writing resembles. The difference is that while the events they relate are invention, her stories have been lived on the pulse.
"I bore easily. Things changed all the time in my life. I made them change. I hate traps, like the time when I was living in a caravan in the south of France with my husband and daughter. It was no accident I got cancer then."
Talk to Maryanne for a few minutes and you delve into a life which is so chock full of adventure and anecdote that you are taken on a roller coaster journey which doesn't allow you a second to even suspend your disbelief.
She reckons the factors that made her such a defiant spirit (apart from being born a Sagittarian woman, of course) include her family and the Catholic church. Her father, a staunch Catholic, was a schoolmaster in rural Derry, and the parish priest "who governed everything" used to visit their house every day. Maryanne grew up the only girl in a house full of boys "It isn't true that only girls area spoilt. I had to do all the housework, and my brothers did nothing. They played football. It's the Irish mother thing, I'm sure it hasn't changed, where the boys are allowed to slag all over the place and the girl has to do everything.
I have horrible memories of having to wash their dirty football togs in water from the rain barrel. We had no running water. And I'll never forget the polishing. My mother was a fanatically shiny person in every way."
A horrific dressing down from her mother after being found, aged six, examining a boy's "thing" behind a bush did not discourage Maryanne from being fascinated with the male sex for the rest of her life.
Unlike many women however, Maryanne never lets herself get downhearted over bad treatment from men. In Over the Mountain she is philosophical about losing her virginity to a fellow touring actor, "stone drunk", who abandoned her soon after, and unsurprised when she finds herself pregnant after an encounter with "a handsome Casanova studying at Trinity".
She gives a frank though never cloyingly self pitying account of how she coped with the pregnancy. She went to a back street abortionist, who, after taking her money, tried to rape her, so she ran away, the problem still unsolved. Her biggest fear that her parents would discover that she was older a successful singer in Dublin had pawned all her belongings, and was five months pregnant was realised when they arrived on her doorstep and took her home to Derry.
A doctor who examined her and confirmed the pregnancy told her "If you were mine, I'd thrash the living daylights out of you." But Maryanne even then was not to be cowed, exhibiting an astonishing amount of insight given the prudery and double standards of the time "I had a sudden desire to hit him. How dare he? How feckin' dare he speak to me like that? Especially when I knew of some of the things he got up to, or would have liked to get up to, if snippets of those backroom conversations I'd overheard were anything to go by."
Meanwhile she was screamed at be her mother for disgracing the family, kept shut up in the house (her brothers were told she had TB) and sent off to spend the end of her confinement in "a special home, a house where girls could stay, girls like me". She and her parents brought her son, Peter, to an orphanage. Leaving him there was torture "My fingers started to claw at the window. Suddenly I heard screaming, inside the car. It went on and on. I couldn't stop it. It filled my ears and my head and tried to burst into my brain and destroy me.
NOT LONG after this trauma, however, we find Maryanne having high old time as a receptionist in a hotel in Donegal, where she is not averse to the allure of Dutch sailors or other interesting male guests including a couple of MPs "who shall of course remain nameless" who chance her way, and the inevitable happens she gets pregnant again.
She admits that this was difficult to include in the book "I knew I was in danger of losing the reader's sympathy after going through all that, giving up my baby, and then getting pregnant again. But every woman knows that this is life, this is what happens. It was a combination of drink and no birth control, a combination which is still prevalent among young people in Ireland on a Friday or a Saturday night."
She writes in Over the Mountain "In Donegal in the late 1950s, and indeed for years to come, there was not the slightest hope of finding anything pertaining to birth control, and my life style included getting paralytic every weekend and sometimes, too, during the week. I was looking for love and if someone wanted to make love to me, then I was sure it meant he loved me. I was under pressure, too, from the parents to get married. At 26 I was considered to be very much on the shelf."
With the second pregnancy (detected early on), she bamboozles a doctor into getting her into hospital for a D&C operation, which she hopes will solve the problem. But as she is recovering from the anaesthetic, the surgeon tells her to get out. He is horrified at having been tricked into performing what has turned out to be an abortion.
TO BE honest, I'd never or a moment considered the possibility that he would detect the presence of a six to eight week old foetus. What size was it, for God's sake? Nebulous. A tiny squiggle, minuscule, completely obscured by the rest of the murky stuff that was in there. But obviously he had noticed and by the time he'd seen it, it was to late. He was a Catholic a staunch, upright who had this day, however inadvertently, performed an abortion. That, for him, constituted murder."
She says now "Even though I have let the past go, without trying to analyse or dissect it, I still have the Catholic guilt. I loved my parents they are both dead now and I felt very guilty for hurting them." Although her parents did not know about the second pregnancy, Maryanne was bleeding heavily when she went to stay with them following the "D&C" and in the end she had to be taken to a hospital in Derry for another operation, so her mother was naturally suspicious, with the result that "any maternal tenderness that still lingered was gone. Dead ... as the foetus that had resided for such a short space of time within the comfort of my womb. She was never to look on me with love again."
Maryanne has always had to survive on her wits, and it is a challenge she clearly relishes, one that has led her from modelling to designing knit wear in The Avengers "I'm a super she says. "I have a lot of in their twenties and me that I am their inspiration that when I turned 60 and a pensioner, I lost that down, repressed Irish thing had since I was a child. I felt I could be myself at last. It was a great freedom."
Another source of satisfaction for her was the amazing experience of meeting the man whom she believes to be her long lost son Peter in a cafe in Sydney "He was also called Peter, he was 39 the right age and had the same birthday he even had the same birthmark on his foot. We spent our time together laughing our heads off. We sang to each other. It was as though we were the same person." Peter's adoptive aunt was able to relate to Maryanne how she and his adoptive parents watched Maryanne and her parents arrive at the orphanage to give Peter up "Everything she said she had seen was true, down to remembering my hands clawing at the window, and my scream.
Maryanne went to Sydney originally to husk, an activity she still enjoys "When I'm husking, I go to holiday places in the sun. I go to the restaurants. I play my piano harp and I sing love songs. People invite me to come to their tables they are fascinated by a woman of my age busking, all dressed up in a long dress, a hat, my toenails painted. But I've always loved singing and performing. It's show business."
