Roughly half an hour after the appointed time, I met, under the blue ceilings and plastic chandeliers of the New Arts Theatre Club (where her first play, A Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers, opens tonight), a country girl, born and brought up in Clare, with a scrubbed face, shiny nose, and longish brown hair. We settled down to tea and madeira cake, and Miss O’Brien, sloughing the man’s sheepskin overcoat that she had been clutching about her, spoke to me in a soft Irish voice more or less as follows:
I often wonder why, when Cromwell said “To hell or to Connaught” he didn’t include Clare. I left it and went to Dublin to study pharmacy and became a qualified pharmacist after four years. Here they’d call it a chemist. I had no interest in it at all and I married a novelist called Ernest Gébler who lived just outside Dublin. We have two sons, not really small any longer, one nine and one seven, and we lived in Dublin until we came here to live four years ago. I had written bits and pieces for Irish newspapers and Iain Hamilton advised me to write a novel and I actually began it during the first month after our arrival in London. That was The Country Girls. London was strange to me. I hate strangeness. It sort of frightens me. That’s why I don’t want to travel. Scenery bores me. Even furniture is only important to me for its associations. I didn’t realise I would miss Ireland so much, and in a way the book was a private recreation of my early life. Both my novels are about things I’ve done myself, or wish I’d done myself, or imagine I’ve done myself. When I’m actually writing, if I was consciously aware that anyone was ever going to read what I was writing I could never write a line. Most people I know who write have certain fixed ambitions that they’ve always had and this astonishes me: I’ve never set out and never do set out to do anything.
