The great thing about autobiography as compared with biography, Cal McCrystal says, is that the possibilities are infinite. "You are on a search and you go down these little roads or boreens in the hope of finding some sort of context for a thought, or a conviction or a viewpoint. And it's on that journey that you turn aside and you see something else and you think, `I must bring that in because that's germane'. And all these things start coming in. You haven't thought of them before the task. It's in the middle of the task that they start appearing. Almost underfoot or through briar or whatever, and you go delving for them and once you get them then they will suggest something else."
In Reflections On A Quiet Rebel, we have the portrait of a father reflected in his son's eyes through the prism of a Northern Irish boyhood before the Troubles. Not that life was ever easy for peculiarities like the Catholic McCrystals, living in the heart of Protestant east Belfast. The father, Charles McCrystal, lived his life according to his belief "that our fellow-countrymen would, in the end, `bend to reason' and dump bigotry and the use of violence". It's an optimism his son did not share. Nor was he infected by his father's passion for political agitation but (largely out of an instinct for self-preservation, one suspects) confirmed his role as detached observer early on by turning down a place at university and becoming a journalist. For him, Northern Ireland remains a place where "nits are picked with pickaxes and pin-pricks bleed like the Ganges".
In And When Did You Last See Your Father, Blake Morrison took a similar, if more introspectively confessional path. Both writers camouflage their pain with poetry and humour, yet while Morrison uses the search for his father as a means of nailing his own identity, McCrystal sifts through the clues that remain of his early life to find his father "a brainy chap who identified with those chiefly reliant on brawn". A man who taught himself Esperanto, Russian and Irish, who began as a printer and ended up editing an Irish language news-sheet, a sometime member of the IRA ("the 'old' IRA") and the Communist Party. A life-long poet. A man Cal loved but never understood. The impetus for Reflections On A Quiet Rebel, says McCrystal, pre-dated Morrison's book. "There had been a dormant desire to write about him, but only towards the latter years when he became enfeebled," when father and son were at their closest, during the car journeys they would take together around Ireland in the last years of Charles McCrystal's life. A request from the family's parish church, Holy Trinity, to the now-celebrated journalist for a contribution to a magazine commemorating its centenary, developed into a long article, the first steps in the journey "from the fountain of discovery to the cistern of memory". It was the spur Cal needed to get started and a contract signed.
"When Blake's book came out I recall feeling let down, that someone had got there before me. I deliberately didn't read his book until I had finished mine."
The result is very different. Reflections is written with the ironic detachment that defines every aspect of his life, and in person Cal McCrystal is as hard to pin down as his enigmatic father. We sit in his garden, the eminent foreign correspondent sporting a panama ("my Irish skin") against the hot September sun. He may live in the rich north-London suburb which used to be home to Cliff Richard and Des O'Connor, now of oil sheiks ("millionaire's paradise. I'm at the humble end"), but he's not of it. The golf course at the back of his semi-detached house is unknown territory ("I have never played any sport, except water polo when I was a boy and which I gave up when I took up drinking"). He was born in Belfast, but not a trace of a Northern accent remains. His Catholicism has long since "wilted".
He considers himself Irish "but I don't have very passionate or very strong feelings of nationality which I can harness to any dogma or any political belief. I don't think since I was a young person have I felt any nationalistic burn in my belly and sometimes I wish others in Ireland would be similarly afflicted." He dreams of moving to the Burren, near his old friend John McNamara ("the wisest man I know") who runs a restaurant in Fanore. But Stella, his wife of 40 years, is more circumspect, he explains. " `That sounds fine,' she says, `but when you get to your romantic cottage overlooking the roaring Atlantic you'll say "Where are the people? Where is the town? I've eaten a bad oyster and I'm going to die, where is the doctor?" ' So she's kind of dampened my ardour for that idea."
As yet, writing the book is the closest he has got. "I wanted my sons and my grandchildren to know more about where they came from. All my sons were born in Belfast and left as kids. And with the exception of the years we lived in America, we took them over to Ireland for two weeks every summer and went right round the island of Ireland so they could absorb the beauty and the niceness of people and the totally different lifestyle, the storytelling, which they were being denied both in New York and in London." Reflections On A Quiet Rebel celebrates all these qualities. The North of McCrystal's memory unveils itself as a landscape rich in anecdote, humour and everyday kindness rather than everyday violence, although the horror is there too, like flashes of summer lightening, unexpected and unfathomable. The family lived a spartan life "with more hard surfaces than soft". Their mother died of cancer when Cal was four, leaving three small boys to be brought up by an eccentric, if resourceful, father. It was several years before a step-mother was introduced: she proved as eccentric and generous-spirited as the man she married. When he speaks of them, Cal's voice is filled with remembered pleasure.
"There were so many reference points that it was difficult to structure it. I knew I was writing about three things: one, my father; two, using my memoir of him to try to explain to those who still had an appetite for it - and from a very personal point of view - what had been happening in Northern Ireland before the Troubles broke out; and the third thing I was writing about was me, my absorption of what was happening in those early days, and my later physical presence as a visiting journalist in the province of my birth."
Yet, even within this framework of personal reminiscence the rigour of the journalist remains. "You are aware of distortions of memory and the very act of recollection is oddly selective, and when you find a memory, or a memory finds you, and you clutch at it, something strange happens which you must try to resist and that is to regard it as in a frame and to preserve it in a frame that is to be embellished. As if it doesn't relate to anything else. It does relate to lots of other things. It's just you can't remember what those other things are. The recollective process is a very dangerous thing in a way if you are trying to pass it off as recorded history."
Like his father before him, Cal McCrystal had to make his way in a Protestant society, which as a journalist meant working on Protestant newspapers, ending up on the Belfast Telegraph as labour correspondent. At the age of 28, he was head-hunted by the Sunday Times. He planned to stay away for three years: that was 35 years ago. "The trouble is that after a dose of foreign reporting, home affairs seems a bit dull." He is now a senior writer with the Observor.
And if he had returned to Ireland? "I would have tried very hard to get a job in Dublin. I would have loved to have worked on The Irish Times. I was becoming really sickened with the North where everything is circumscribed by elements which you won't find anywhere else in these islands. One is religion/politics and the other is sheer provinciality. And those two things together are quite an impediment to breaking through to one's life or career. I'm not saying that I have always been in love with Dublin, but it's always been more intellectually stimulating."
And if he had stayed in Belfast? He tips his hat, smiles and shakes his head. "I think the probability is that within a year I would have been carried away by the men in white coats."
Reflections On A Quiet Rebel by Cal McCrystal is published by Michael Joseph, price £15.99
