MEMOIR: Cissie's AbattoirBy Éibhear Walshe, Collins Press, 160pp. €9.99
IN ÉIBHEAR WALSHE’S vividly engaging memoir of growing up in Waterford city of the 1960s and 1970s, he identifies his maternal grandmother, Cissie Hamm, as the anchor-point person who “gave me my first lesson in survival through style” – the inner and outer style of a small, astute, chain-smoking, poker-playing, gossip-loving, fashion-conscious businesswoman of practical piety “who encountered her life rather than endured it”.
This is also the story of Éibhear Walshe’s coming to terms with his own emerging sexuality as a middle-class “nancy boy” (his own unabashed description), whose father worked in “the Mental” – but that confessional aspect is done with good humour and a refreshing lack of narcissism or overblown portrayal of self in terms of heroic victimhood. The particular social loneliness often attendant on homosexuality is a vital part of this memoir, however, and must evoke the sympathy of every reader.
Walshe does not try to flatter the place in which he grew up, but he sketches it with affection, even as he waits to escape. Happily, there are no self-righteous tirades about a Dark Ages past. The story he has to tell is far too various and incorrigibly human for such sweepingly monochromatic brush strokes. He describes a middle-class and provincial world, still almost Joycean in some of its aspects. The middle class generally has a bad press from writers and artists, though they themselves are often of the same caste and need reminding that there are middle-class virtues, such as a degree of stability that every society needs. The real story of Ireland since the Famine is one of struggle towards various degrees of middle-class “respectability” and security.
I can recall the Waterford city of more than a decade before the period of which Éibhear Walshe writes colourfully and affectionately, if questioningly. My maternal grandparents – he a photographer and she a church organist and piano teacher – lived in a big rambling gaslit house on O’Connell Street, and I would spend holidays there as a child temporarily transferred from my small upriver hometown of Carrick-on-Suir. It was an exotic remove to what was still a quasi-Edwardian world. To the end of her life, a tune from Wallace or Balfe could bring my Waterford-born mother to tears, exiled as she was through marriage in Carrick. An inward-looking world? Yes and no. As well as old crones in shawls there were ships on the big river and sailors in the streets.
Éibhear Walshe’s Waterford of the 1960s and 1970s was changing, but not all that rapidly or radically. Though he begins by describing the place rather unpromisingly as a “puddle-grey” (?) town and “a tough port in the southeast of Ireland, a place best known for pig-killing, jute-making and glass-blowing and for the vinegary defensiveness of its inhabitants”, the wit, colour and affection soon break through – and why wouldn’t they, with a fun-loving grandmother like Cissie, along with her mother, his great- grandmother, who rejoiced in the wonderful sobriquet “Mammy Gracedieu”, from the outskirts of Waterford, west of the famed Ballybricken of pig fairs and passionate Redmondite politics.
Feisty women these, and matriarchs who exercised great power in their domain, though they never were to know the real on-coming social liberation for women of acquiring control over their own fertility, a factor that was to change things utterly in Irish society. Cissie had nine children; her mother, Mammy Gracedieu, had borne 16. The author here allows his parents a comparative privacy, and concentrates on Cissie and the kind of world she both shaped and responded to. The abattoir of the title was her family business (her husband Francie Hamm, whose origins were German, was incapacitated for much of his life). The abattoir sounds like a charnel-house from Dickens. Walshe worked there as a youth. He must be unique among Irish academics and authors in having the processing and curing of animal intestine-casings as part of what Americans would term his “resumé”.
Cissie’s business enterprises didn’t always make money. A guest house in Dunmore East was one failed venture most evocatively recalled. But she hated penny-pinching, and loved nothing more than taking on accountants, officials or solicitors. This little woman, who loved glamour, gossip, poker games, sing-songs, race meetings and the odd pilgrimage, contradicts most standard stereotypes of oppressed Irish womanhood. Her deep understanding and love for her “girly” grandson emboldened him to envision the world as a place to be encountered and enjoyed.
Walshe strikes an all-too-rare tone in writing of all this with affection, wit and occasional poetry. Cissie lit up his world, as she lights up this book. You couldn't but warm to a woman who once tartly characterised a rather over-mature actress playing the part of Dorothy in a staging of The Wizard of Ozas "Judy Garland's grandmother".
Michael Coady is a poet and writer and a member of Aosdána. Going by Water,his forthcoming book of poetry, prose and photographs, is due from Gallery Press next month
