EARLIER this year the septuagenarians Colm and Charlie Herron gathered with other members of their large extended family at a Co Donegal graveside for the funeral of their brother, Mickey.
This band of brothers composed an interesting triumvirate. Colm and Charlie are two late-flowering writers, while Mickey, who dabbled in poetry in his day, ran a bookshop in Carndonagh, Co Donegal, now operated by his daughter Christine and her husband Peter.
Mickey was a retired teacher – as are Colm and Charlie – and his bookshop sells new and rare books with a considerable focus on literary works.
Friel, Heaney and the late James Plunkett and John B Keane have been patrons, according to Colm.
Mickey, regardless of his successful business, drove what is still a fairly common mechanically propelled vehicle in Donegal, a Ford “Heap” – a model that can be purchased in various other makes, the stipulation that it be at least 10 years old, and in rusted, virtually wrecked condition. Americans call them jalopies.
"I used to say to him, 'why the hell don't you buy a decent car – you can well afford it?'," says Colm. "And Mickey'd respond, 'Imagine me going around Inishowen trying to buy second hand books. Sure if people saw me in a Mercedes I'd never get a bargain'." Mickey encouraged his two brothers to write. Charlie recently published a novel, McCauley's War,a work of fiction, humorous but with a dark tinge and set in Derry in 1941 and told through the eyes of nine-year-old Dickie McCauley, a very streetwise child.
It started off as a short story which he had abandoned to "gather dust", but his three daughters cajoled him into expanding on the work, finally resulting in his debut novel aged 74. Some critics have described it as " Angela's Ashesfor Derry". Certainly, you get a sense of Derry during the years of the second World War, of the already well-developed sectarian fault lines, of a great convulsion to come a generation later.
Telling tales is definitely part of Charlie’s lifeblood as he is a four-time winner of the annual Baron Von Munchausen competition in Derry, dedicated to the 18th-century German spinner of wild yarns.
Charlie, writing in longhand, is now starting on a sequel to McAuley's War.
Colm insists that there is nothing of the Baron in his claim to be the first person to print the work of Seamus Heaney. In his student teacher period he was a year behind Heaney. At the time, says Colm, there was a male student teachers’ college in Belfast, St Joseph’s and a female college, St Mary’s and that they combined to publish an annual magazine in 1962.
Colm was one of the editors. “I asked Seamus had he any poems, and he said ‘I will get you something’. He produced two handwritten poems which were published in the magazine.” He thinks that one of the poems was about a céilí and concluded with some onomatopoeic language to capture the thrill and movement of the dance. He has lost his copy but reckons somebody out there still has copies of this publication featuring Heaney juvenilia.
Both Colm and Seamus Heaney came under the tutelage of the teacher and writer Michael McLaverty, whom the Nobel Laureate has frequently acknowledged as a guide and inspiration. It seems McLaverty hadn’t quite figured that Herron was as ready as Heaney for a literary career. “I hope you get a nice girl, Colm,” was McLaverty’s parting advice to him.
Which he did in Fidelis – they’ve been married now for over 40 years.
Colm, now 70, has recently published his second novel, Further Adventures of James Joyce. Rather hard to categorise, it is something of a post-modern gritty romp telling of the exploits and travails of some testosterone-fuelled teachers in which the Joyces, James and William (Lord Haw Haw) somehow feature. Flann O'Brien is definitely an influence.
It follows from Colm's first book, For I Have Sinnedpublished seven years ago, told in the Derry argot about a boy growing through adolescence to early adulthood in the city in the 1950s, caught in the shackles of a tough Catholic education. Derry plays a large part in the book. It's a raw and humorous work, with a strong autobiographical framework, one suspects.
It seems rather late for the Herron brothers to be concentrating on their literary careers, but, according to Colm, it makes perfect sense, and anyway Mickey and other members of their family both encouraged and bullied them to press on when they were dispirited.
He recalls that when he was 14 he had a play on BBC Children’s Hour and that when he was 22 he showed some short stories to Brian Friel, who unlike McLaverty advised him to stick to the task.
He didn't. "I decided to give up writing and live instead." But now he's back at the coalface. This past Bloomsday he travelled to Joyce's Martello tower in Sandycove in Dublin at the invitation of curator Robert Nicholson to read from the Further Adventures of James Joyce, jumping in when actor Barry McGovern was taking breaks from reading Ulysses. His sold more than any other book at the tower that day, he says proudly, even more than Joyce's.