At the age of 82, Kildare Dobbs has published an account of an eventful life that has taken him from India to Africa and then to Canada. Mary Russell meets the 'artful codger' turned journalist and editor
Kildare Dobbs comes from another world, where women are "crones", "maiden ladies", or, if they're younger, "blondes" or "brunettes". His grandmother - the family was originally from Kilkenny - was a "dear old hag".
And because he really does come from another world - the British Raj - and because he's 82 and host to a pacemaker, you might just be tempted to make allowances, but that would be ageist, and in any case, here he is, warts and all, in a Dublin pub, chatting genially to me about his memoir, Running the Rapids.
He was born in India, where his father, whom he refers to in the book as Daddy, was an acting commissioner. Daddy comes over as a cantankerous old so-and-so, deprived of a job when the Indians gave it to one of their own; forced to return to Ireland to buy not a family home nor even a house, but a "seat", berating his son meanwhile for being "bolshie". The two were not close.
"A psychiatrist," Dobbs tells me, "said he had an obsessive-compulsive personality, which was why he was very controlling." He failed to control his son, for Kildare Dobbs went his own way, enlisting in the British navy. His encounters with wartime submarines and Atlantic hurricanes are enthrallingly and wittily described in the book. He then went to Cambridge, on a government grant, and in 1948 he set off for what was then Tanganyika (now Tanzania), initially to teach, but later to become a trainee district officer.
Life was marked by tracking man-eating lions, shooting hippos and explaining new local government policies to tribal chiefs. This is a historically fascinating section of the book, the details often drawn from the official notes he had to keep at the time. Though getting older, he tells me, means that his long term memory is good, the downside is that he can no longer drink as he used to. But then there was the nasty business of the elephant tusks. "You could get £400 for one," Dobbs explains, "a lot of money in those days. Of course, you couldn't exceed your licence." Though it all seemed to be a misunderstanding, he ended up in prison, and when he came out the only place to go was as far away as possible, which turned out to be Canada, where he reinvented himself as a journalist, an editor and whatever the occasion demanded. All of which took courage, plus a good dollop of nerve, and he had plenty of that.
Indeed, some of it came into play when, at the Dublin launch of his book, he read one of his poems in the presence of our Poet Laureate. "He was very kind and hospitable to Irish people visiting Toronto," Seamus Heaney told me, "and I was one of them." In fact, the book is peppered with literary luminaries, notable names and references of a raunchy nature. By all accounts, some of them his own, Kildare Dobbs had a way with the women, and at the launch, the poet Richard Murphy, an old friend, spoke admiringly of this aspect of Dobbs.
But here's the thing: as you read the book, a shadowy alter ego comes into focus, one who feels life has short-changed him. Despite his reputation for being a ladies' man, the fact is that he has two failed marriages and four children whom he doesn't see much of. His brother was sent to Shrewsbury, his father's old school, while he had to make do with "a public school of the British type in the Dublin mountains". No one cares what sort of degree he got more than 50 years ago - except himself. (It was a second.) He clearly failed to win his father's approval and didn't attend his funeral because it would have cost too much, even though this same father paid off all his debts for him and kept his letters from Africa on file.
The tusk business happened because the district commissioner had it in for him, Dobbs felt. One reason his first marriage ended, he writes, was because his wife was unsympathetic when he was ill. The second marriage broke up so acrimoniously that he was not allowed attend the wedding of one of his daughters.
But despite life's disappointments, he has survived. His third marriage - to a brunette, he writes, and much younger than himself - will see him out, he says, his characteristic optimism coming into play.
On his first night in Canada, at the age of 29, penniless and with a wife and two children to support, he fell asleep believing something wonderful was going to happen. As I watch him now, a bit of an artful codger, walking stiffly off, not into the sunset but over the canal bridge, a thought strikes me: maybe there's still time for it all to come good. u
Running the Rapids is published by Lilliput Press, €20