Liffey Lane, by Maura Laverty

This 1947 novel, published in the UK as Lift Up Your Gates, is set in the slums of Dublin. Fourteen-year-old Chrissie Byrne lives in a one-room flat with her mother and her brother Lar. Her small cousin Kevin, the illegitimate child of her aunt Phil, used to live with them, but now he has a place at a nearby industrial school. When we meet Chrissie, she is sitting on a bench in St. Stephen's Green, waiting to collect the papers she delivers each evening to the small houses and cottages on the "good" side of Liffey Lane. They are across the lane from the tenement where the Byrnes live, which is due to be demolished in a few weeks.

Chrissie is in no hurry to collect the papers and head home, because she is in trouble. She has sold something that doesn't belong to her, to buy a treat for Kevin when she visits him at school. And even worse, what she has taken belongs to the convent that gives her family and many others a hot "Penny Dinner" every day, making sure they have enough to eat. Sister Martha, who oversees the kitchen where the food is cooked and distributed, lent Chrissie a nice little tin, to carry the daily stew home. But after her brother Lar, addicted to gambling, took the money she had saved, Chrissie is desperate to bring Kevin the cake roll she promised.

We follow Chrissie as she moves through her evening round, sick with the guilt and shame of her theft. We meet her customers and learn something of their lives, and we also learn more about Chrissie and her family, as well as their neighbors on the "wrong" side of the street. I was worried about where Chrissie's story might take her - not realizing that there are several different stories winding through hers. Her story comes to an end, one that I think is a happy one, but several of theirs are left open, unresolved, and I have been thinking about how they might turn out.

At first this story seemed very far from the small town of Ballyderrig, the setting of her best-known book Never No More (and a later book, Touched by the Thorn). Laverty puts her readers right in the middle of the poverty, the dirt, the smells of the Liffey Lane tenements. Food and decent clothing are scarce, and illness common particularly among the children. But there is also kindness and decency, neighbors looking out for each other, a community very different from that of the small Irish town, but still bound together. But this community is being scattered as the tenements are torn down, forcing the residents to find other homes. Chrissie moves through this world, and the more privileged one on the "right" side of the street, centered in her love for Kevin, whom she helped raise from a baby, and in her simple faith. She also has a true friend in Sister Martha, who makes time to listen and to help when she can.

I thought there was also a familiar Laverty touch in the chapter where one of Chrissie's customers makes an apple tart, with all of the loving attention to the details of Gran in Never No More. (I need to look for a copy of Laverty's iconic book on Irish cooking.) Another of Chrissie's customers is a writer, struggling with a story that compels him. I wondered if he was speaking for his author, when he thought about his work.

He continued to write, refusing to interrupt the rare lovely harmony which existed between his pen and his vision, fearing to move lest the harmony should shatter in discord. He was too appreciative of what had been given to him this evening to take any risk of spoiling it. Such harmony came so seldom. But when it came, how generously it made up for everything! One hour of it, and he forgot the torture of all those arid days when he sat dry-souled and futile and thwarted, deserted by the vision, sickened by the tastelessness of the words that came to him. One hour like this, and he recanted all the bitter protests his heart had ever uttered against the slavery into which a man delivered himself when he obeyed the urge to create.

This was Maura Laverty's last novel. I wonder if the vision deserted her. I hope not - I wish there were more of her books to discover. But I'm grateful for the four that she did write. I know I'll be reading and re-reading them many times in the years to come.

Touched by the Thorn, by Maura Laverty

The other day, while I was browsing on-line for copies of more of Kate O'Brien's books, I thought to check for Maura Laverty as well. And it was serendipitous, because that day there were two I didn't have: this one (published in the UK as Alone We Embark), and Liffey Lane (Lift Up Your Gates in the UK). I knew that Liffey Lane is set in Dublin (in the slums no less), so when I saw that Touched by the Thorn is set in the country-side, I decided to read it first.

What I hadn't realized is that it is set in Ballyderring, the small town in County Kildare that is also the setting for Laverty's Never No More. This story takes place later, so to my disappointment we don't meet Delia Scully or her loving Gran again. But at the heart of the story is someone a bit like Gran. Julia Dempsey had gone away from Ballyderrig to become a cook in Dublin, but she came home to care for her parents, and to inherit their little shop. She sells home-baked treats as well as sweets and cigarettes, and she makes a bit of money keeping lodgers. She "was the only landlady in the place who would board Balties," traveling show people. It is the arrival of "The Bohemian Concert Party, fresh from their successes in all the principal towns in Ireland," which sets the story in motion. "Julia Dempsey said afterwards that it was an unlucky day for a great many people when the Balties came to Ballyderrig in 1928." The most unlucky is a young woman who falls in love with one of the performers and breaks her engagement to a local farmer. That step sets off a chain of misfortune and pain for three families that stretches over many years.

The second section of the book jumps forward almost a decade, into the early years of World War II (the book was published in 1943). I don't think that I have ever read an Irish novel set in this period. It was an interesting contrast with what I've read of Great Britain and the U.S. There are shortages, particularly of food, and what they have is of poor quality - a problem for Julia's baking. No one seems to be queuing for rations, however. There is an exodus of workers over to Britain, for jobs in the defense industries. The more nationalistic citizens of Ballyderrig strongly object to this. Unlike Never No More, there is a political element to this book. One character is an active member of the IRA, which at least in this area is busy drilling and recruiting rather than carrying out any kind of actions. However, the young man argues frequently with Julia about the group. He and Julia disagree about patriotism, and about Irish workers helping the British war effort. "Do you want Hitler to win then?" Julia asks him. "We mightn't be so much better off if we had him over here. I didn't hear that the people in the countries he took are delighted with him." A page later the authorial voice speaks of "two classes of Irish patriots."

In the first class are men who find it possible to love their own country without hating another. Their dreams are too full of gladness for what is good in Ireland and of sorrow for what is bad to have room for the ghosts of past wrongs. And their days are too busy with doing what they can to better their own small corner of the land to leave them time for gunning. In the other class are those whose love for Ireland is deep and sincere, and whose hatred for England is equally so. They are the fighters, and many men think that hatred is necessary to a soldier. . . A blow when he is sore, an injustice when his heart is raw, and the hatred comes suddenly to him, changing him from a mild, fairly contented being into a gunman.

Maura Laverty understood both groups, but she made it clear which she thought was right.

But the heart of her story is people, not politics. As with Delia's Gran, Julia Dempsey's neighbors come to her for her listening ear and her advice. Some of their stories are dark ones, full of pain and anger, and Julia does what she can to help. She is a lovely character. "Perhaps it was because Julia never married that she gathered loves and friendships as Johnny Dunne gathered pound notes." She is particularly concerned about Mary, her goddaughter, and Molly, her young shop-assistant. There is also Teedy, the daughter of her friend Nora in Dublin, who comes to live with Julia after her mother dies and her father remarries. In another echo of Never No More, Julia finds her way to the girl's heart through cooking. When Julia tells her about a "golden web" of spun sugar, to put over a "flummery when you want it to look extra fancy," which her mother used to make for birthdays and Christmas, Teedy begs her for one. Julia can't make it with the beet sugar that is then available, but fortunately someone shares some loaf sugar. The adventure that Maura Laverty spins out with Julia's sugar! Then too, Ballyderrig itself is at the heart of her story, and she writes movingly of its beauties in the different seasons.

Maeve Binchy wrote an introduction to the Virago edition of Never No More, which made it clear how much she admired Maura Laverty's work (including her iconic cookbooks). This book in turn reminded me of Binchy's novels, set in small Irish towns. I know that Liffey Lane, set in Dublin's slums, will be a very different book, but I know it will be written with the same clear-eyed affection and empathy for the people living there.

A country mouse in Spain

No More Than Human, Maura Laverty

When I re-discovered Maura Laverty last year, I was reminded that I had never read the sequel to Never No More. Set in Ireland, in the County Kildare town of Ballyderrig, it tells the story of Delia Scully, who goes to live with her beloved grandmother after her father's death. When the story ends, Delia is on her way to take up a post as governess in Spain. As I had already learned from Kate O'Brien's book Mary Lavelle, Spanish families preferred to employ Irish women who shared their Catholic faith as "misses," chaperones and governesses, rather than the English women often found in other countries.

As soon as I opened this book, I realized that Delia's adventures would make a very different sort of book from Mary Lavelle's. She is much younger, not just in age but in experience. Mary is engaged, taking a temporary post in part to fill in the time before her wedding. With seven siblings at home, Delia has her way to make in the world. (It's an amusing coincidence that the nuns who find these two their jobs are both named Sister Liguori; apparently the sisters ran unofficial employment bureaus for their students.) While Mary is from the town of Mellick, Delia is a true country mouse. She arrives in the train station in Madrid on a November morning in 1924, wearing a coat that is too small and a light blue satin dress, which her Gran had bought for her first dance. "Well, it was my nicest dress. Of course, I can see now that it was really not suitable for travelling on the Continent in the winter." Her new employer, herself an Irish former governess who married into a Spanish family, "gave a quick sigh then, as if to say, 'Well, now that you're here I suppose I'll have to make the best of you.'"

Delia's education is rapid but not smooth. She learns how she is expected to dress and to behave (extremely quietly, in both cases). She meets not only the family who employs her and their servants, but also the community of her fellow governesses. Like Mary, she discovers a great warmth and friendliness among the Spaniards she meets, and she is drawn to the servants and to the kitchen. There she takes lessons in Spanish cooking. Food is a major theme for Laverty, who went on to write best-selling cookbooks that include the culinary history of Ireland, which are considered classics today. Maeve Binchy calls her a "food pornographer," and here she describes the rich cuisine of Spain in mouth-watering terms. I'm sure somewhere in Houston's United Nations of restaurants and groceries I can find the "gleaming amber cones of nun's cheese, a Catalonian specialty made with ground almonds, lemon, spice, egg-yolks and syrup."

Like Mary, Delia finds the other Irish governesses difficult to like. Many openly express their contempt for Spain and the Spanish, embittered by the poverty that keeps them tied to jobs and people they dislike. She does make one good friend, an older and more experienced governess, Miss Carmody, who gives her much-needed advice and support. Delia herself is often homesick for Ireland, and for her Gran, and her memories link this book back to the earlier one, as does her habit of comparing the people she meets in Spain with her neighbors in Ballyderrig.

Delia's naivité, friendly spirit, and youthful exuberance soon get her into trouble. Despite Miss Carmody's best efforts, she simply cannot confine herself to the narrow existence required of the "misses." In one grand misadventure, she spends an afternoon splashing around the beach with a young male friend, wearing a forbidden red bathing suit, only to discover her horrified employers sitting on the piazza of a near-by restaurant. Her job ends that afternoon. She begins to get the reputation of being "fast," particularly after she is seen with a young Spanish man, which means no reputable family will hire her. Her only recourse is to become a "professora," a free-lance tutor and sometime chaperone. This is much more to Delia's taste, giving her freedom and independence, but she finds it very difficult to establish herself, particularly at her young age. And even here, her madcap reputation causes her problems. She sets her sights on a goal that no Irish "miss" in Spain has ever achieved: to become an office worker, in jobs that are reserved for English women. Undaunted, Delia sets herself to studying shorthand and typing. Maura Laverty was writing from her own experience here. Like Kate O'Brien, she went out herself as a "miss" but later moved into secretarial work (including a stint with a princess) and then journalism before returning to Ireland, where she became one of the first prominent women journalists.

I loved this book, just as much as Never No More. I loved the connections back to Ballyderrig and the first book, and the contrast to Madrid. Mary Lavelle is set primarily in a small town on Spain's northern coast, also an interesting contrast to the Madrid setting here. I could not wait to see where Delia's adventures took her next. As you might expect of someone raised by the Gran of Never No More, Delia is a caring, compassionate person who wants to do the right thing, whose warm heart makes friends easily and remains loyal to them. Like Mary Lavelle she finds love in Spain, and if her first love proves unworthy, the love of friends is always there to support her. It is her innocence and her good heart that draw people to help her, and if they sometimes seem a bit like fairy godmothers and godfathers, I didn't mind a bit, any more than I minded that in this sequel Laverty has pushed the story back four years (Never No More ended in 1928, and this opens in 1924).

As with Mary Lavelle, there are political rumblings in this book, hints of the coming Civil War that would devastate Spain. Even in the sunshine and the warmth, Delia sees the problems in Spain, and as in Ballyderrig she sees the dark side of humanity. She sees them, she recognizes them, but she does not allow them to overshadow the good that is also there.

I just loved this book (I know I said that already), and I'm kicking myself for waiting so long to read it. I was lucky enough to find a 1944 first edition, with its "war-time economy" format. I've been trying to imagine what it must have been like, to read this warm, funny, loving book, in the dark days of 1944. It could only have been torture to read the luscious descriptions of food, but I hope it brought comfort in other ways.

My brother and sister-in-law are traveling to Spain in a couple of weeks. They had invited me to join them, but I couldn't manage it this year. If I'd read this book sooner, I'd have been sorely tempted to rig a ponzi scheme or buy lottery tickets or hold a bake sale or something, anything, to get myself over to Spain.

An Irish Eden

Never No More, Maura Laverty

I discovered Maura Laverty around the same time as Kate O'Brien, a fellow Irish writer.  But the only book of Laverty's that I ever read was Never No More.  That was back in the infancy of the internet, before I could browse bookstore inventories around the world, and also before interlibrary loan was available to regular library users as it is today.  It's hard to remember when I had to wait patiently for books to come to me, rather than going out to find them.  (On the other hand, in those days I had a minuscule TBR pile.)

As it happens, I also re-discovered Maura Laverty as I did Kate O'Brien, though Verity's Virago Venture.  That's where I was reminded that there is a sequel to Never No More, in which Delia, the narrator, goes off to Spain as a "miss," a chaperone/governess, just as Mary Lavelle does in Kate O'Brien's book of that name, which I read last month.  Laverty's sequel, No More Than Human, immediately went on my TBR pile.  But since it has been so long since I've read Never No More, I wanted to read it again first, to get re-acquainted with Delia before following her off on further adventures.

Never No More opens in October of 1920, as Delia and her family return from her father's funeral, in the small town of Ballyderrig in County Kildare.  Delia's mother has decided to move the family to the near-by town of Kilkenny, where she will open a dressmaking business.  Delia's distress over leaving Ballyderrig turns to joy when her beloved grandmother offers to give her a home and even fund her education to become a teacher. While Delia and her mother have a difficult relationship, her grandmother provides the love and security she needs.  Her mother is more than happy to leave her behind, and Delia moves that night to her grandmother's farm, Derrymore House.

There Delia settles into an idyllic life, one of hard work but also of home comforts described in loving detail, especially Gran's cooking.  In the introduction to my Virago edition, Maeve Binchy writes that

"Maura Laverty was a food pornographer, her pages are full of spicy vapours which would cajole a dying man to eat, luscious pools of butter on speckled surfaces of seed cake, potato apple cakes oozing with sugar and butter.  She is sensual and specific and utterly convincing, and she is not even writing a cookery book."

Binchy points out later that Laverty did write two very successful cookbooks, "which are still a legend in Ireland."  And oh this book is full of food - definitely not a book to read on an empty stomach.  It is country cooking with farm ingredients, and it would probably horrify a vegetarian.  But as much as food, this book is full of love.  Delia says of her Gran,

"You were the purple bog and ripe wheat-field and a crab tree in May. You were good food, and songs in the firelight and the rosary at night.  You were a welcome for my coming and a prayer for my going out.  You were Gran." 

Her Gran is a wonderful character, a perfect surrogate mother, a woman of great faith, wisdom and charity, always willing to lend a hand to those in need.  Living at Derrymore House, Delia also remains part of the close-knit community of Ballyderrig, and she weaves in stories from the town and outlying farms, many of which deal with the dark side of life, with illness, violence, and death.  Yet under Gran's influence Derrymore House remains an Eden.  When Delia reluctantly leaves it for a convent boarding school, she proves to be an unsuccessful student and returns with relief to Gran.  In the end, however, she must leave Ballyderrig forever, for this new post in Spain.

Never No More is a lovely book, and I can see its influences in Maeve Binchy's books.  I am looking forward to Delia's adventures in Spain, though like her I was sad to leave Ballyderrig, and Gran.