"I think being a woman is like being Irish . . . Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same."– Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green (1965)
The story of my family is the story of most Irish families, I think, in that it’s built on secrets and silences.
I’m from Cork, but I live in London now. English people, I find, have a fairly fixed idea of what it is to be Irish: I’m often told, for example, that the Irish are marvellous storytellers. So many great Irish writers, they say to me, with something like wonderment, and I nearly answer, well, we kind of had to learn to be good at it, the storytelling. Maybe, I want to say, the reality of things in Ireland was so bad for so long that people turned to making things up for relief. In a story, you have control over what happens. You can manage things. In real life, our history was being rewritten for us, all the time. We were told to speak in a different language, to abandon our old one, and eventually we became skilled at taking the language forced on us and bending it to our needs and making up new stories in a practically new language. We got so much practice at the storytelling that we became, in the end, famously good at it; too good, perhaps.
My mother’s family was from County Limerick. They were respectable, established people: my great-grandfather, Maurice O’Sullivan, and his wife, Ellen, owned a successful business in the city centre; they had solicitors, priests, farmers in their number. By the turn of the 20th century they were prosperous - thriving, even. Then came the War of Independence.
My grandmother’s relatives became involved in some capacity in the war; no one knows to what extent. One of them owned a hotel in the countryside. Like all his family, he was sympathetic to the rebel side, and he began to hide rebel soldiers in the attic. The hotel became known as a safe house. Eventually his involvement was uncovered and the Black and Tans came to the hotel, one afternoon, and took his children outside and lined them up against the wall of the hotel and then had their parents stand in front of them. In the retelling of the story, they were given to understand that the children would be shot. The Black and Tans then turned and shot the children’s father instead.
My father’s family was from west Cork, and the story here is almost too similar to that of my mother’s family in its narrative of things lost. They were a family of doctors (Alfonso O’Sullivan, for example, left the family farm to study medicine at Trinity and later at university in Paris), of business owners, wine merchants. But things went wrong for them, too, during the War of Independence and my great-grandfather had to sell the farm that had been in the family for generations. We went to see the farmhouse once, when I was a child: it stands outside Skibbereen, on a small, slate-grey lake. We couldn’t go inside the house because it belongs to other people, another family, now. We stayed in the car and looked up at it from the bottom of the narrow driveway.
A cohesive note
When I started to write my book, I took those two images, the image of the old house on the lake and the image of the children standing against the wall facing the Black and Tans and wrote a story around them. There’s no one alive now who was alive then, during the War of Independence, and what happened in my family was never written down or officially recorded. It doesn’t even exist in anyone’s memory anymore. The story of it was handed down in only the oral telling of it, but parts - important parts - must have been left out, left untold. We don’t know what part of the story is real and what’s made up and that’s true of most of history. All histories are half-told, half-hidden, but maybe particularly so in Ireland, where the truth often had to be concealed, or forgotten.
My book is a fiction. I made it up. But in it are things that that happened. The emotions in it are true. There was no point in writing it, I realised, very early on, if I wasn’t going to be as truthful as it’s possible to be in fiction. All these stories we tell ourselves to try to make sense of things and the stories we keep hidden, and what it does to a person to have to keep secrets: these were the things that preoccupied me as I wrote.
I don’t know what became of those children, my distant cousins, who were lined up by the Black and Tans and made to watch their father die. Did they tell the story of that day to their children? Did they keep it a secret out of shame or fear? And the Black and Tans: did they go home to England after the war and tell the story of the day as it happened, or did they change it in the retelling, or did they stay silent? If a story ceases to be told and if no one is alive to bear it witness, if we have no reliable narrator, how can we know, really, what happened, even if it happened at all? Who says that what we take to be fact is not fiction, or vice versa?
A book, for me, is a feeling, a colour, a tone, like a note in music. That’s what I was looking for as I wrote the book: a cohesive note. The two protagonists in the book are women, and they’re bound to each other by a secret. That’s the note running through the book. The secrets and stories we tell each other, and ourselves, to bring us into being: that’s perhaps a classically Irish story, in the end.
A River in the Trees by Jacqueline O’Mahony is published by Riverrun on January 10th, 2019, at €16.99
