Growing up in London in the 1960s didn't give you an automatic licence to have fun. There was John Walsh, stranded in Battersea, just a bridge away from swinging Chelsea, but living in quite another world. His parents ran a very Irish household where friends sang ballads and told stories late into the night and priests called around for endless cups of tea and cake. First-generation emigrants, the Walshes were determined to bring their two children up to be good Irish Catholics who would one day Go Home. Irishness, he remembers, hung around the household like "a great green fug", but Walsh wanted to be English. Years later, stranded in a Galway hospital, watching his mother die a slow, mundane death, Walsh begins to tell the family story.
His father, a doctor, hailed from Co Galway but settled in London and became the local GP in Battersea, though he always had a hankering to go home. His wife, a nurse, older than him by several years, couldn't get out of Tubbercurry fast enough back in the 1930s. The couple married relatively late and had two children: Madelyn, now living in Athenry and married to a vet, and John, a literary critic, broadcaster and now author.
The romance could be that between his parents, an odd and entrancing couple about whom we don't really hear enough. Or it could be Walsh's love affair with Ireland, which has not gone smoothly. A big, tousled man given to wild physical and literary gesticulations, he looks like an Irishman, talks like an Englishman and is not entirely at home in either country, which is the crux of the story.
Walsh explores the "see-saw of his dual heritage", from the early days in Battersea through family holidays in Ireland, a long and glorious hippy summer in Killaloe where he and a gang of friends came to stay at a house his father had bought and hoped to live in, through student days in Oxford and Dublin, and through his desperate journeys across Ireland, when first his father died, and later his mother grew seriously ill. Later he made a sentimental journey to Sligo, to his mother's country, and understood why she had had to get out of it. By the end of the book he thinks he has found a compromise - the Aran Islands, where English and Irish blood is mixed. In a fit of optimism and ignorance about planning laws, she suggests that he and his sister might build a house there, and that's the end of the story.
But the heart of this book is not in John Walsh's voyage of discovery around his English Irishness, but in the household in Battersea. Walsh presents a slice of Irish life that's not much documented, maybe because of its decent middle-class ordinariness. No grinding poverty here, and no Bohemian adventures, either. Pillars of the London-Irish community, the Walshes held terrific parties that went on until breakfast and went to dress dances at the Irish Club. Walsh's description of the preparations for one of these St Patrick's Day dinner dances is so clear that you could almost be there with him and Madelyn, sitting on the stairs watching his mother in a gold ballgown, petticoats making a noise "like swept leaves", his father "resplendently monochrome", giving himself a last-minute shave using the razor plugged into a lamp socket in the livingroom.
Walsh never felt quite at home with those who filled his parents' home, London-Irish professional people and priests. His attempts to chat about match fixtures sounded false and Little Lord Fauntelroyish to his own ears, while his pronouncements on the Catholic Church shocked his parents' friends. At home he was the "small Englishman, regarded by the Irish hordes with curiosity and some alarm". At school, though, he was the Irish Mick. Much later, when he is living in Dublin in a garret in North Great George's Street, he yearns to be back in London watching cricket at the Oval. Once he's back there, he finds himself a staunch defender of all things Irish. And so it goes on. There are some marvellous scenes throughout the book - his father's yearning to be asked to play hurling with a team he spots in the park, his mother telling stories about the good old days nursing in great aristocratic houses with Lady Violet this and Lady Honor that. Later his parents return to Ireland but his father dies before he can settle back into the life he missed so much. His wife survives him by many years in a house where the London furniture is packed away in a room that's never visited. She dies lengthily and in detail. There's nothing mawkish or sentimental in his description of her dying "aghast with worry about what is going to happen to her". He holds her hand, looks into her eyes and sings to her, catalogues her last pathetic belongings in her bedside locker and wishes himself back home in London in a world of sun-dried tomatoes, his children's conversation and expensive bottles of burgundy in Dulwich wine bars.
Orna Mulcahy is an Irish Times journalist
