Some years ago I did a day’s teaching at Fighting Words, the creative writing centre established by Roddy Doyle and Sean Love. The afternoon was for adults, and Hilary Fannin, who was there, gave an account of the memoir she wanted to write. It had the following elements:
The time: the late 1960s. The place: a semi-D in a north Dublin suburb. The characters: her artist father, talented, unhappy, unworldly, ironic, hobbled by domesticity; her actress mother, baffled, stylish, thwarted, miserable, hobbled by domesticity; and her older siblings, two sisters and a brother, exotic but largely distant figures. The story’s elements: booze, penury, infidelity (her father’s) and, ultimately, eviction, when the family’s home was seized to pay debts.
The book Fannin described has now arrived. Hopscotch has all the elements she itemised, plus it's written in a lucid, crystalline and intoxicating style.
Hopscotch takes place when Fannin was four to 10 years old. The narrator, however, is not Hilary, the adult, but Billy (as she was known in the family) speaking as she then spoke and understanding as she then understood. In other words, the conceit is to present a complex adult world filtered through a child's consciousness.
Fannin restricts herself to Billy's vocabulary, as we'd expect. But a measure of her considerable technique is that she allows Billy to know that her language is inadequate and to express this, though in a childlike way.
For example, after speaking of her mother securing “a leading role in a musical comedy that was on in a famous theatre in the city”, Billy says in parenthesis, as is her wont, “(That kind of ‘role’, by the way, is different to the ‘rolls’ that we get with butter and soup in the convent lunch room. It is also a different kind of roll to the roll that you do downhill when the grass isn’t wet.)”
These droll riffs regularly punctuate the text. In addition to nailing the inadequacy of language, they bring us to the heart of Billy’s problem: it’s not only that the words don’t work, but that she doesn’t have the life experience commensurate to the cataclysm unfolding around her.
Biblical meaning
Another of the author’s strategies for drawing us into Billy’s world view is to show how she misunderstands (though she thinks she hasn’t) the meanings of the Biblical and mythical materials to which she scurries for guidance.
For instance, a girl from Billy’s school, Mary, has a nanny, Majella, who has had a baby, improbably named Ringo. Ringo was taken away “as soon as he came out of her bottom”. The only way Billy can make sense of this incomprehensible detail is to elide Majella with Mary, mother of Christ: “The fruit in her womb, had to go to an orphanage because there was no Joseph around, and no archangel either,” she reasons.
Dozens of explanations drawn from the myth kitty are scattered through Hopscotch and, like, Janus they face two ways. On the one hand, they are funny; on the other, they are deeply troubling because of what they imply. In the absence of adult counsel stories are Billy's principle explanation of the calamities around her – and the very fact they are so significant speaks eloquently of her terrible isolation.
When there aren’t myths available, Billy’s other support is magical thinking. Thus, after seeing her brother John expelled from the family home, Billy looks at her father’s breakfast plate:
“The rashers are worriers; they huddle together on my father’s plate. The sausages, who can be awful bullies, snigger up their sleeves. The mushrooms, always first with the news, wake up the grilled tomato, who is a bit slow on the uptake, a bit slovenly, and the egg, sunbathing in a shaft of dusty light from the stormy morning window.”
The evocation, here and elsewhere, of Billy’s projection of her woes on to impersonal objects, which allows her to safely feel, is brilliantly done.
Another marvel of Hopscotch is the rigour with which Fannin replicates Billy's narrative competence. Traditionally, even when writing in the voice of a child, memoirists are chronological: Angela's Ashes, for example, harnesses a child's voice to conventional chronology. Fannin, though she has the big events such as First Holy Communion and Confirmation in the right order, opts instead for a non-chronological narrative organised by association.
So, en route to buy her first communion coat, by way of Uncle George’s pet shop in Middle Abbey Street (where she and her mother alight from the bus), Billy takes us back to the family home and the mouse her sister found in the kitchen. then it’s on to Lucky, the family’s budgerigar, next to her mother’s baking and high feminine style (“beauty spots and pillar-box-red fingernails”), before returning to the communion coat expedition.
This is high risk, but the author manages these the endless ox-bows off her narrative river with such aplomb that one doesn’t bridle.
The penultimate part of Hopscotch summarises the Fannin story post-eviction: amazingly, the marriage survived, Billy's father made a life as a cartoonist, and her mother became a drama teacher. Her father died in 2000. Her mother still lives and her three siblings, we learn, have all forged enduring marriages.
Hopscotch ends with a memory, of the author and her brother drinking and competing to see who does the best take-off of their father. Oh, they can channel Dad all right, which is no surprise: he was quite a figure. Certainly, yes, a tad delinquent by contemporary standards, for example bringing Billy on a visit to his mistress and leaving her playing in one room while he and the woman "work" in another, and then making Billy promise not to tell. But her father was also the exemplar who helped his daughter become a writer. He is this book's only begetter, really.
Hopscotch tells a private story with candour and exactitude, love and understanding, artfulness and wit. It allows you to understand what it was like to live like Billy. The experience, though troubling and disquieting, is one I highly recommend.
Carlo Gébler teaches creative writing at the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin. His memoir The Projectionist, the story of Ernest Gébler, was recently published by New Island
