Faith, Hope and Charity? Maeve Binchy writes about Christ Deliver Us!
To be young is to be riddled with doubt; to be young in the 1950s was probably the worst and most drear time of all.
We had begun to hear there was a bright colourful all-singing and all-dancing world out there, a generation of bobby-soxers having a great time, but we saw little signs of it at home. The air was heavy with what people might think or say or what conclusions they could draw, none of them good. Too much exuberance was bad, too little was moody.
But the optimism of youth shone all around us – while everything joyful might seem unlikely, nothing was impossible. Confused and frustrated we may have been, with a feeling that there was something definitely missing from our lives, but we didn’t really know exactly what it was.
I spent a lot of the 1950s hoping that Marlon Brando would reply to one of the many letters I wrote to him beseeching him to come and live with me and explaining that I would look after him properly. Astonishingly, he resisted this tempting offer and sent series of broody postcards thanking me for being a member of his fan club. At the girls school we all talked with feverish excitement about the First Night of marriage, which in everyone’s mind would be the First Sexual Experience. We had practical concerns like: did you go down the corridor to the bathroom first or might that look too eager? The imagination of the decade did not stretch to pre marital sex or rooms with ensuite bathrooms.
I had a very happy if slightly bewildered childhood. I couldn’t quite understand why, if I was so good and well behaved, God made me fat. This was unfair of God. But then on the other hand I saw poor children sitting on Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge with thin shivery faces and a cardboard tray for pennies in front of them. Why didn’t God let them have a winter coat and a fireside like we had?
But it never crossed our minds that there might not be a God. That was like thinking that there was no sky or sea or sunshine. I only knew one person back then who didn’t believe in God. He was a grown up man and he was very kind. He gave us raspberries from his garden, and told us we could pick primroses and cowslips there. He was always happy and cheerful which was extraordinary since he was obviously on the road to Hell.
For years I would pray for him and hope that he would meet an angel or see a vision somewhere and would be back in the fold. I even told him once that I prayed for him and he took out a big blue handkerchief and had a bit of a cry so I never told him again. But these are sentimental and rose-tinted memories of a time long, long ago, from the point of view of someone lucky and privileged.
Mine was not the story of anguished and terrified children caught in a thick web of disapproval and violence. If there was violence and brutality in the homes near me it was discussed in such low tones that we never heard of it. We were not to be frightened by the world we were stepping into.
But many of the depressing and negative attitudes in this play are still in evidence in the world around us. Parents are still loath to let their children grow up, they fear to speak well of the children or to them in case they get spoiled. Preferable by far is the notion that they should have the sharp corners knocked off them.
Teachers may not feel free to belt children like they used to, and most of them would not want to, but there still exist those who think that this is the only way to get respect and hard work from a pupil. We only have to look back on the sad findings of Commissions and Reports last year to realise that hypocrisy was not confined to the 1950s and to realise the betrayal of trust went on to our own day.
When Wedekind wrote in his play, Spring Awakening, that the results of repression had to be an outbreak of violence, there was outrage and horror. No one should be allowed challenge the way things were, with this dangerous liberal view that freedom itself is far too precious to restrict.
The world has changed since Wedekind’s time and today’s audience has been exposed to so much harsh reality that nobody can shelter any more behind a comforting belief that this sort of thing doesn’t happen. I spent eight years teaching and saw plenty of hope and optimism as a new generation set out along the way. That’s what I remember most. They thought they could stop famines and wars and injustices. That was something to be treasured and encouraged, not ridiculed and dismissed.
If the parents had shown more love, if all the teachers in St Joseph’s had believed in the Faith and Hope they saw in front of them in classrooms and treated the children with much more Charity than severity, the sad events which make up Thomas Kilroy’s play could never have happened. And we would not be saddened by all the harm that has been done over the decades in the name of what is always described as a loving God.
