MAEVE BINCHY’S humour was irrepressible and was there, fully formed, in one of the very earliest pieces she wrote for The Irish Times in November 1964.
On the dos and don’ts of a winter holiday she advised: “DONT fall in love with the ski instructor. Everybody does. He will be quite tired of it by the time you do. Probably his wife and children will be equally tired of it.”
Humour was her preferred element but it would be a mistake to think journalism for Maeve was all about fun and games. Her reportage in the 1970s and 80s on tourism in Ireland, Anglo Irish relations, the Falklands war and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus was of the highest standard.
The eldest of four children she was born on May 28th, 1940, in Dalkey, Co Dublin, attended the Holy Faith Convent in Killiney and then UCD. She travelled widely and one of the first mentions of her in The Irish Times was a report of a talk she gave to the Dublin Rotary Club in March 1964 about her experiences at a kibbutz in Israel the previous summer.
She was then a teacher of history and French at the Zion Schools in Dublin’s Rathgar.
Writing in April 1970 about this, she said: “The first day I went to Zion Schools, I asked the little boys to remove their caps in class, and I asked everyone to write down their Christian names in the roll book. Considering that the boys are meant to wear caps, and that Jewish children do not have Christian names, but first names, it didn’t look as if I was going to last long there. But I lasted longer there than anywhere . . . ”
She taught in various other schools around Dublin, including Miss Meredith’s on Pembroke Road.
Letters home detailing her escapades on those travels abroad amused her family greatly. They typed them up and sent them to this newspaper, “and that’s how I became a writer”, she said. She freelanced for a number of years before being appointed Women’s Editor in 1968 and later Travel Correspondent.
In 1971 she met Gordon Snell who then worked for the BBC in London and she asked to be transferred to The Irish Times London office. They married in 1977.
It was while in London that she began to write short stories. This led to the collections Central Line and Victoria Line and her first highly successful novel Light a Penny Candle, published in 1982.
She and Snell returned to Dalkey and she continued to write her Maeve’s Week column and later a Saturday Column for The Irish Times into the late 1990s, thereafter writing occasionally.
Despite the furore in 1973 over her her Irish Times report on the wedding of Capt Mark Philips to Princess Anne, she didn’t have anything against Britain’s Royal family.
She wrote when Charles and Camilla married in February 2005 that a “large comfortable woman who sits like a wise old bird at the checkout is very pleased. ‘It’s one up for the cardigans,’ she says. ‘I knew the day would come when a woman as shabby as myself would marry a prince’.” It was “not a love story that immediately sets the bells ringing or promises to get to the heart of the nation,” Binchy felt. Yet, she went on to “genuinely wish these two confused middle-aged people a great wedding day and a good time together”.
She thought Camilla “basically a decent and horsey cardigan who loves Charles and is prepared to go through all this (like she has gone through so much already) from the sheer accident of falling in love with him”.
Yet, she reflected, “Queen Elizabeth II has four children. I was at three of their weddings and I didn’t bring any of them much luck. Only Prince Edward’s first marriage has survived, and Princess Annes second marriage.”
While the piece on Princess Anne’s wedding provoked hundreds of letters to The Irish Times in the early 1970s, by 2005 readers realised there was not an ounce of malice in Binchy. Mischief maybe.
In all she wrote 16 books, two of which, The Lilac Bus and Echoes, were made into TV films while Circle of Friends, Tara Road and How About You were made into feature films.
She wrote four collections of short stories altogether, a play for RTÉ Deeply Regretted By, which won a Jacob’s award in 1978, and the novella Star Sullivan.
It has been estimated that her books have sold 40 million copies in 37 languages.
In 1999 she received the British Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.
In 2000 it was a People of the Year Award in Ireland. In 2001 she won the WH Smith Book Award for Fiction. In 2007 she received the Irish PEN/AT Cross Award and in 2010 it was a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Book Awards.
Even after the novels and short stories which made her rich and famous, the humour continued unabated in her Maeve’s Week column. In March 1997, for instance, she recalled being prepared to go on the NBC Today Show in New York.
“The make-up girl asked had I any specific requirements? Youth and gauntness, I said, without hope. ‘Industrial strength cheekbones’, she pronounced, and painted two scarlet, tubercular spots on me, which actually looked terrific on screen.”
Later in Fitzpatrick’s Hotel she met many people from Dublin, including “a woman I knew years ago on the arm of a man who had a reputation for 30 years and is still at it”.
She once said she would like her motto to be: “We have to make our own happiness.” It was probably her greatest achievement that she did just that and despite illness in later years.
As she told this newspaper on July 3rd last: “I’ve been very lucky and I have a happy old age with good family and friends still around.” In Binchy’s case the description “a national treasure” is that rare snug fit.
She is survived by Gordon, her brother William and sister Joan.
Maeve Binchy born May 28th 1940, died July 29th 2012
