My father, who grew up in the Irish countryside, rarely said a bad word about anyone; gossip irritated him and though he sometimes listened, he always dismissed it after as being “made up”. The most withering insult I heard him deliver was about an academic known to my siblings for sexual misconduct with students, a rumour he found unsurprising. “You’d see him, sure, on the top deck of the bus, going home.” What this man did on the bus we can only imagine, but my father’s contempt was clear – the man was drunk and on show. Of the poet Patrick Kavanagh he simply said, “You’d see him about the place.”
Irish writers were often publicly sighted. The woman who came to “do” for my mother on a Friday walked up and down the hall with her hands behind her back in imitation of WB Yeats strolling along St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, and the tea towel twitched behind her as the poet counted the meter of lines he was writing in his head.
