John Creedon carries his earned authority, and his persona, lightly. Genial, relaxed, friendly and without side, he has found an assured place in the hearts of radio listeners and television viewers all over Ireland.
The temptation, surely, when he embarked on this memoir of his childhood, must have been to play on and reinforce the unthreatening and unforced warmth of this public persona. To a degree, of course, This Boy’s Heart does just that, but Creedon is too intelligent, and scrupulous, to leave it there.
His memories of a particular Cork boyhood are shaped in large part by his wish to give life to his loving parents, to his siblings and to the place that reared and nurtured him. His memoir is a record of growing up and being parented in a time and in a place where children were allowed, even encouraged, to identify themselves by what they thought and felt and did as themselves already, distinct people with distinct personalities.
This gives to the book a texture and context that lifts it well above the ego-driven and often self-exculpatory norm of what we are all too often given in the memoirs of those who live in the public eye.
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His father drove buses, and kept a shop. His mother kept the shop too, and between them they reared 12 children. To say this, while it’s true, is to say the least possible about two remarkable, intelligent, shrewd and far-sighted people. Their roots were deep in west Cork, their instincts were hospitable, they were kind, shrewd, beloved of their neighbours and always capable of surprise.
This Boy’s Heart gives colour and depth to the remarkable characters of his parents, and not the least virtue of this engaging memoir is Creedon’s layered and nuanced portraits of them: Connie Pa “was ... a hurler, a hunter and a champion angler ... As well as English and Irish he spoke Classical Greek, Latin and Hainakatina, a language he invented himself”; Siobhán was a great beauty, “ ... softly spoken and subtle in her ways ... She brought her considerable energies to healthcare, nutrition, education, art and antiques”.
If I am dwelling a little here on his parents, it is because Creedon gives great care and a novelist’s eye to bringing them to the fore in his young life. His own unique personality, after all, marked as it already is from the age of three or four, is shaped and allowed to disclose itself gradually in the light of their relaxed attention.
As all good parents must, or at least should, they knew when to turn a blind eye to the commandeering of parked lorries as pirate ships, the mostly harmless street fights of rival gangs, the rambles and adventures on the streets and through the warehouses of the city-centre neighbourhood – and what a neighbourhood it was: “Most of the buildings were hundreds of years old and included all manner of shops, pubs, family homes, flats, a bank, a hotel and an undertakers.”
Through it all, up on roofs and down alleyways, rambled a carefree, insouciant, fearless boy, one of whose favourite pastimes was to climb on to a high stool in “any one of a dozen pubs”, smoke a cigarette with his lemonade and listen with great care to the wandering conversation of old men nursing their pints and grievances – and this at the age of eight or nine.
Creedon looks back at this boy with great good humour, tolerance and restrained fascination. It’s very engaging, but he has an eye too for the quirks, gifts and loneliness of others who circled around his life, most especially for the kindness of Johnny, to whose farm in Lackenroe young John was sent often, to help work the farm and to work himself out for himself. If there are echoes of An Only Child in the urban world depicted here, and echoes of The Tailor and Ansty in the country sports and stories, Creedon holds his own in that company.
In a book crammed full of memorable scenes, two in particular stand out: his forensic and chilling descriptions of the cruelty he sometimes experienced at the hands of Christian Brothers will live long in the memory, the more so for being recounted without a shred of self-pity; the second episode, a hilarious counterpoint to the bleakness of the first, deals with the fun and games invented between them by himself and his younger brother Cónal, now a lauded writer of considerable distinction.
This Boy’s Heart is a rich and sophisticated evocation of a remarkable boyhood, skilfully handled, touching and thought-provoking but steely when it needs to be. It is also, and not incidentally, one of the best evocations of Cork I have read for a very long time.
Three cheers for John Creedon. Doubtya boy!
Theo Dorgan’s latest work is Once Was a Boy
