I remember when I was in UCD in the sixties going to buy an electric kettle for my bedsitter in a strange old-fashioned hardware shop in Grafton Street, now long defunct.
There was a rather large lady ahead of me at the counter (it was that sort of shop) who was buying an alarm clock, she was explaining , with great good humour, to the man in the brown coat (it was that sort of shop) how it needed to be a particularly LOUD alarm that was difficult to stop. “I have been late for work three times this week already and threatened with the sack if I don’t mend my ways “she told the man- and indeed the whole shop at this stage as we all hung on her words. Maeve Binchy, for this was of course she, had the most wonderful ability in scooping the whole world into her life I am firmly convinced that she was without guile or pretence she just presented herself as she came and her enormous personality carried her straight to our hearts.
That same personality was exactly what came across when she wrote her pieces of journalism, spoke of her experiences on radio and television and then later made gold of her novels.
In the early seventies my posh bed-sit days were over and I was sponging off my sister and brother-in-law in Rathfarnham when tragedy struck that family badly and my brother-in –law was killed in a car crash, leaving my sister with three and a half babies. My sister didn’t know Maeve but somehow she got to hear of this tragedy and, in typical Maeve fashion, she decided to do something positive.
She invited the family out to her house in Dalkey for an afternoon; there she entertained them royally with presents bought individually for the children. My sister was very touched by this and it makes one wonder how many similar acts of kindness Maeve quietly performed in the same way.
The playwright Frank Mc Guinness once stayed with us in Waterford and he told us how extraordinarily helpful she had been to him when he was taking the first steps in his career.
But it must be her extraordinarily funny radio pieces which I would want to remember her.
Somewhere in the RTE archives there must be the piece which left me weeping with laughter when I heard it for the first time several years ago.
It describes how, as women’s (and therefore by default, cookery) editor of the Irish Times she illustrated a piece about cooking beef with a picture she found on her desk which she thought would be appropriate. Back home in Dalkey, watching the news on TV she discovers that she has used a picture of a human heart just about to be transplanted by Dr, Christian Bernard. She runs out on the road in panic and madly hitches a ride into D’Oilier Street to stop the presses.She herself should certainly be allowed to tell the rest of the story, I imagine it will be aired by RTE before the end of the week; listen out.
Good bye Maeve, you will be missed.