Christine Dwyer Hickey – Tatty. By Patrick Brennan. (Originally published in The Irish Independent Weekend Magazine.)
Few books have captured the imagination and the emotions of the reading public in Ireland over the past 12 months more than Tatty by Dublin-born, mother of three grown up children, Christine Dwyer Hickey. Tatty’s recent nomination on the long list of 20 authors for the international female fiction award, The Orange Prize, confirms the success of the novel.
Tatty tells the story from the child’s perspective of a young girl between the ages of 4 to 14 years old as she copes with the horrors that stem from the fact that her parents are both raging alcoholics. The young girl in question gets her nickname Tatty from the tongue tripping rhyming idea of the ‘tell-tale-tattler‘. Dwyer Hickey describes, from the young girls viewpoint, the disintegration of her family.
In spite of the fact that Tatty is continually told to keep the secrets of the family to herself she has a habit of blurting out everything at the slightest hint of interrogation from her friends or the adult neighbours. The subject matter of a child of alcoholic parents has, however, struck a chord with people way beyond mere literary considerations.
“Tatty is my fourth novel,” begins Christine, “but in a way it’s the novel that was always demanding to be written. When I looked back on all the other work I realised that drink and as well as writing about the past ran through it all.
“It struck me, though, that most of us are very sympathetic towards the alcoholic who comes out and reforms him or herself, you know. They go to the AA meetings and reach that inner harmony or what ever they call it.
“But if you’re the adult child of the alcoholic you never really escape the shame, embarrassment, feelings of guilt and poor self-image that haunts you all your life. At this stage, I can usually spot if someone’s parents were alcoholics or not. It’s just an intuition. I can’t explain how I do it but normally even if I meet someone for the first time I can tell.”
Christine set about articulating just what it was like to be a child caught up in such traumatic circumstances. She has no qualms about admitting that Tatty is based upon her own life but she insists it’s not a memoir but a work of fiction. Tatty isn’t pretending to be full of facts. It’s a story, a tale of the imagination
“In the sense that Tatty talks about particular areas and a particular time in Ireland that’s all definitely straight out of my own experience,” says Christine. “With regard to other aspects of the book the stories are taken from my own experiences and those of people I knew. It’s a mish-mash of a lot of other lives.
“The one thing I would say is that the father in Tatty is my own father,” she continues. “He was an alcoholic. I did go from pub to pub with him and to the races from a very young age. I think the fact that I was the only girl and that my nearest sibling is mentally handicapped meant that I had a sort of solitary childhood.
“My father died ten years ago this year. He was a very open man, a wonderful man in so many ways. Thanks to him I wouldn’t have become a writer. He encouraged us all to use our imaginations. He was the sort of man who always wanted you to be talking to him. I think he was probably a frustrated writer, himself, but he was also the kind of person who had to have money in his pocket all the time so the life of the penniless artist didn‘t suit him.”
Christine admits that she always got on better with her father than her mother. Indeed, relations are so strained between the two these days that Christine declares she has no option but to refuse to say too much about her mother in interviews.
“I’m worse than an orphan,” takes up Christine, again. “My mother and I don’t talk at all so it’s as if she’s dead to me but because she’s not I can’t actually grieve for her. My parents separated when I was about 14 and we all stayed with our father, which was incredibly rare back in the late 1970s. It’s difficult to tell just when exactly my parents decided to call it a day because my mother left a number of times. I was in boarding school around this time and all I knew was when ever I came home things were really bad.”
Christine admits that not only is Tatty, the eponymous hero and young narrator, based upon her own life but Tatty’s older sister Jeanie also shows another side of Christine.
“The reason I split myself into two characters is because I was probably a little bit like that anyway,” elaborates Christine. “Tatty is always getting blamed for everything and not very good at anything. While Jeanie is like the hero, great at everything she turns her hand to. I thought it would be too much for the readers to swallow if I put that into just one character.”
Christine went to a numerous schools growing up but her favourite experience came from her two periods when she attended Mount Sackville in Chappleizoid in Dublin. The nuns of the order of Joseph of Clooney ran Mount Sackville. Christine was ten years old the first time she went there. At the time it was a boarding school that had the rich and the wealthy from all over the world. The emphasis in their education was on self-expression.
“When I went to Mount Sackville after two weeks there I progressed from being the girl who was quite thick in my previous school to a gold star student,” recounts Christine. “ I saw black , Chinese, French and Irish faces there. It was a great place because every day they had drama or painting or some other creative activity. Myself and a friend used to do an act where we played the women in Moore Street. We’d be cursing our heads off and these nuns would have tears running down their faces with the laughter.
“You also weren’t encouraged to talk about how rich your parents were, what kinds of cars your mother and father drove. That kind of thing. I remember when I went for weekends to the other girls houses and met with the long driveways up I used to think we were going to a hotel. We lived in a less than ordinary house in a lower middle class housing estate that, socially speaking, was a little above Walkinstown and below Terenure. We had nothing like the money the other families had.”
Christine remained in Mount Sackville for two years before she switched to Presentation Convent in Terenure, a school she declares she hated. It’s easy to see, though, how Christine can create both a Tatty and a Jeanie from her school experiences alone. While Jeanie begins the novel as a bright star it’s not too long before she ends up going to the bad. She gets into trouble and becomes a tearaway.
“At one point I was going to make Jeanie an entirely imaginary character who only Tatty spoke to and saw but I thought that might be too airy-fairy. For a good deal of the book Tatty is the only one who talks to Jeanie but then I have the parents ask Tatty why she can’t be good at everything like Jeanie. So that makes her a real figure in the book.”
Christine felt that deep down that she was always going to write. She is reminded that one day when she was very young she told her mother that she thought she would become a writer because she was very good at making up stories. Her mother’s cryptic reply was, ‘You’re that all right!’
Christine’s first writing success came when she was in school at the age of nine. One girl was being particularly bitchy towards her so Christine wrote her a vicious poem. The girl’s mother complained to the head nun. She dragged Christine up before her but instead of punishing her asked her if she could write a nice poem instead about the head mother of their order who was coming to visit them from France next week.
“I still remember the opening lines of the poem,” says Christine, laughing at their recollection. “ ‘ Hello General Mother Pia/Welcome to the school/It’s very nice to cya1’ The teachers didn’t know what to make of me and one kept asking me who wrote it. She couldn’t believe it came from me. I had shown no inclination of anything like it up to that point. After that I realised that there was a certain comfort in being able to make up stories and write things down.”
More school changes followed and Christine returned to Mount Sackville to do her Intermediate Certificate (these days the Junior Cert). However, more bad experiences in school, the worsening situation at home along with Christine falling in with a wild bunch of friends who came from more or less similar shattered home lives meant that Christine decided to drop out of school.
“I remember going to my father and telling him that I didn’t want to go to school anymore,” takes up Christine. “He took it very well and said I could please myself but that I wasn’t going to sit on my backside all day. I could come out and work with him instead. So, I became a labourer. I remember painting the railings in the Curragh racecourse and hanging from my feet as we painted the grandstand at the Phoenix Park racecourse.”
Christine’s father, Denis ‘Dinnie’ Dwyer, had a very eccentric bunch working for him. For a start, he refused to ever employ anyone who didn’t drink on the grounds that they would probably eventually want to take over all his contracts. Christine spent two years working for her father, learning, as she puts it, “the language and the ways of men in a man’s world.”
When she was 17 Christine wanted to return to school. She attended Sandymount High School but after three months was struck down by viral pneumonia that laid her up in bed in hospital for six months and almost killer her.
“My father came in one time and started roaring at everyone in the hospital that they were to give me triple shots of some sort of medicine they were using to treat TB otherwise I was going to die,” says Christine. “At first, they refused because it was too dangerous but they eventually gave in because everything else they tried hadn’t worked. My father was right. The stuff he suggested cured me.”
Denis Dwyer was no ordinary father in many other respects, too. He was one of poet Patrick Kavanagh’s best friends and was part of the literary set in Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s that included other Irish writers such as Liam O’ Flaherty, Brendan Behan and Anthony Cronin.
Kavanagh was a constant presence in Christine’s home as she was growing up. Christine likens him to your boldest favourite cousin. Kavanagh never behaved himself. He sat on the floor rather than on a chair. He ate his meals sitting on the floor as well and he swore like a trooper. Christine remembers one priceless story about the cantankerous poet.
“There was a very stuck up and snooty elderly couple living next door to us at the time,” she recalls. “They were very proud of their garden. One day a delicate cousin of mine went in over the fence to fetch a ball. The old man came out and hit her. My mother was telling Kavanagh this one Sunday morning on the way back from the pub.
“He just listened and didn’t say much. She told him how the old lady had told her how she would never have moved into the estate if she had known there were going to be working class families living here as well and all of that. Well, my mother stopped the car outside our house. Kavanagh got out, pulled down his fly and peed onto the roses of the snooty old couple. Then he climbed back into the car and said, ‘That’ll give her something to occupy her mind with now! All us young children worshipped him for that!”
As a consequence of the subject matter of Tatty, Christine has been inundated with letters from people telling their own stories of being children of alcoholics. Sometimes they simply just thank her. On other occasions Christine feels that some are looking for too much from her. She suggests she has moved on from that part of her life. Besides, she doesn’t feel qualified to deal adequately with other people’s traumas.
“A lady came up to me recently and with tears in her eyes and told me that reading Tatty had made her think again about what was going on in her own life,” recalls Christine. “She told me that her mother was an alcoholic and that now she and her husband were, too. Tatty made her think of her children for the first time. She realised that her husband wasn’t going to give up the drink so she would have to if all their lives weren’t going to end up ruined.”
Christine admits that such moments are incredibly touching but there are others who have contacted her for whom she feels there is no help. Some people also begin their letters to her ‘Dear Tatty’, which she admits she finds weird as well.
Encountering other people’s sad state depresses her terribly so in a self-confessed show of self-preservation and selfishness she wants to just get on with her one life and not have to be faced with all those other tales of suffering in silence and loneliness.
“One person wrote to me and told me that all the roles the various characters take up in the book within the family were exactly the same as her own family,” adds Christine. “She was the child of alcoholic parents as well. All dysfunctional families I think will seek out a scapegoat in order to pin all the blame on him or her. Tatty is the scapegoat in my book. The child with the poorest self-image.”
Christine abandoned writing Tatty several times because the recollections from her own childhood were just too painful. Then one day, on old school friend from India, told her she felt that the little girl, Tatty, needed to have her story told.
“As time has gone by I’ve grown to like Tatty, the character, more and more,” declares Christine, finally. “A funny thing has happened to me as well. Where as before the last person I would stand up for was myself since Tatty was published I’m much less likely to allow people to get away with saying unjust or hurtful things about me.
“I just think we all should just be allowed to say what we want, to stick our heads out the window and scream everything out so that all the neighbours can hear you! I also never really trusted adults until Tatty. The reaction of people has been so good and kind it’s changed my mind on all of that.”
Tatty by Christine Dwyer Hickey is published by New Island Books. The winner of the Orange Prize will be announced in June 2005.
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