MEMOIR: I'll Tell Me Ma: A Belfast Memoir, By Brian Keenan, Jonathan Cape, 308pp. £16.99
DESPITE ITS TITLE, this is not a misery memoir. The dreadful proliferation of these lurid and sentimental abuse-and-recovery tales continues to infest the market, and some of them go in in a big way for the colloquialism “ma”. The “ma” of Brian Keenan’s title, on the other hand, appears in a jaunty skipping song: “I’ll tell me ma, when I go home,/ The boys won’t leave the girls alone,/ They tossed my hair, they stole my comb,/ Well, that’s all right, till I go home.”
But if you didn’t know this, you might easily gain a wrong impression. You might think the author had something untoward to confide to his mother, when in fact his early years were unexceptionable, secure and upbeat for the most part, though not without the normal aggravations you’d expect to encounter in a tough part of east Belfast.
Of course, most readers will already be familiar with the central drama of Brian Keenan's story. He came to prominence in the most unenviable way imaginable, as a hostage taken from his teaching post at the University of Beirut and held in captivity by Shia militants for more than four years. His account of this unspeakable ordeal, An Evil Cradling(1992), is an exemplary and inspiriting work. He came through the terrible years with his integrity, his sanity and his confidence in the world intact. How did he do it? Is there something in his background to explain in some way the ferocious strength of character and power of endurance that made him a survivor? Perhaps – but you have to read between the lines of his memoir to uncover it.
“No one can pull miracles out of the air,” his mother tells him when he is very young. “You have to make your own.” In the opening pages, he worries that the whole of his past may have been “extinguished in a big black abyss” – but gradually, as he revisits it in his head, aspects of his childhood are brought up into the clear light of day (or at least, into the murk and grime of rainy old 1950s Belfast).
Brian Keenan was born in the Duncairn Gardens area in the north of the city and lived there during his earliest years, before his family’s sudden, disconcerting removal to east Belfast, which he neither understood nor relished. Did it stem from a quarrel with his grandfather, Harold McLean, who may have owned the house his parents rented? That, with its bay window and proper hallway, was exchanged for an inferior, two-up-two-down row house – and never mind that the latter was owned, not rented, bought from a butcher and paid for in instalments.
Young Brian was taken away from his friends, from his school, from his early-morning visits with his father to nearby Alexandra Park, from Clifton House (the old poorhouse with its fascinating graveyard and tales of long-ago body-snatchers), from Saturday afternoons among a crowd of juvenile cinema-goers, cheering and booing at appropriate moments in the Duncairn Picture House (irreverently contracted to “the Donkey” in local parlance). From all this to the industrial east was something of a comedown, but it didn’t dampen the Keenan spirits for long.
In a curious way, Brian Keenan fits into the noisy street life round him, in both the north and the east of the city, but he's also detached from it – as an observer, a historian, a recorder of local foibles and goings-on. His memoir is filled with immemorial figures going about their antiquated pursuits (it's only the 1950s, but it could be a lot more remote). Here are coalmen shouldering sacks of coal from the front of the house to the back, bleachmen, skinmen, ragmen, each with his raucous cry, ("Oi-raw!", "Blee-each!"). Here is Heron Maggie, like something out of the pages of Herbert Moore Pim, who, in his Unknown Immortalsof 1917, evoked an earlier, more peculiar Belfast with its "company of venerable women who are older than Smithfield". Here is Smithfield itself in all its ramshackle glory, "like a corner of Casablanca", before terrorists burned it to the ground in 1974, with its abundance of offbeat treasures ("You could buy anything in Smithfield").
BUT THIS BOOK ISN'T FUELLEDby nostalgia or a backward-looking impulse. As an account of a Belfast upbringing, it works in contradictory ways: it's spirited and thoughtful, sensitive and robust. The young Brian Keenan is self-possessed and resourceful and not averse to going against the back-street grain. He is entirely unabashed by the jeers of his "gang", who call him "sissy knickers" when he joins in the girls' skipping games. Going his own way, asserting his independence, is something he's good at.
Just before the move to east Belfast, he embarks, on his own, on a marathon walk through unknown parts of the city, taking in social distinctions and new intriguing areas along the way, and gets safely back home without anyone having been alerted to his absence. (His older sister is too many years his senior to be a companion.) This piece of solitary exploration is a prelude to the later bus journeys further afield, undertaken in a spirit of escapism and curiosity about different places. No one knew about these expeditions either.
There was secrecy, then, but also great attachment to his parents, to whom this book is in many ways a tribute. Brian Keenan’s father was an ex-wartime pilot and later an employee of GPO Telephones, and a strong trade union man. One of Keenan senior’s pleasant habits is to bring home wounded birds and animals and nurse them back to health, sometimes provoking an outcry from his wife: “Get that thing out of here!” His son admires him unequivocally, at least until adolescence kicks in with its cargo of moods and mutinies (a temporary slough).
For his energetic mother, a one-time mill-worker and great supporter of local women, Brian Keenan has a different, more complicated kind of affection. The last few chapters of his book take us forward to Minnie Keenan’s decline and death (in 2004), as her son contemplates her mysterious, troubled past (like her husband, she grew up in east Belfast, so the return to that part of the city was for her a kind of homecoming, if a bitter one). “I’ll tell me ma” at this point takes on a different implication, as there are things – too late – her son would like to tell her (and hear from her).
No one can write about Belfast without bringing in the sectarian carry-on that scarifies the city, but Brian Keenan manages to hold the terrible topic at bay for 196 pages. He also succeeds – succeeded all along – in dissociating himself from it, partly due to the sensible, liberal attitude of his parents. He has a lot to be thankful for, as he freely acknowledges.
This book is written with great discernment and aplomb – and in its pages, obliterated streets, houses, shops, churches, cinemas, glory holes, skipping ropes take shape in all their shabby authenticity as the author gets to grips with a Belfast boyhood as distant, and as pungent and enticing, as the bygone fish man’s cry: “Fresh her’n, fresh her’n, fresh her’n. All alive!”
Patricia Craig is a critic and author. Her memoir, Asking for Trouble, was published in 2007