Maeve Binchy, Light a Penny Candle (1982).

clearclassicsblogpost 52.

Maeve Binchy was first a teacher and then a journalist, and for a while she was both. I first came across her in a mission magazine – was it The Far East or The Africa or The Cross? The article was a teacher’s view of young people and her words – I’m paraphrasing from memory – have stayed with me all these years – something like, we love them when they are puppies and kittens but when they’re not cute any more we punish them for not having the experience and maturity we have. She continued to be a wise, perceptive and witty journalist until her death in 2012; her novels felt like a pure indulgence for herself as well as the reader, although of course it takes grafting and crafting to bring off that sense of ease which suffuses her writing. I first read Light A Penny Candle not long after it came out; I remember reading it on the Dublin-Galway train and hiding my face with it so that people wouldn’t see me crying at the sad bits. But it’s also very funny and quite original in its characters and plot.

The story is a simple one; Eileen O’Connor, an Irish woman who was sent to a posh English convent boarding-school as a girl in the ‘Teens of the last century, made a friend there, Violet, and they kept up a correspondence after their respective marriages. Now, in 1940, in a Wicklow town, Eileen is the wife of shopkeeper Sean and mother of 6, and Violet is married to a bank official, George, in London. Violet asks Eileen to take her only child, her 12-year-old girl, Elizabeth, to get her away from the war, so Elizabeth journeys to Ireland and stays until the war is over and grows to love the O’Connors as her own family. She and Aisling, her contemporary, forge a bond of friendship that is unbreakable. Elizabeth goes back to England to find her rather selfish parents are splitting up, although the man her mother leaves her father for, Harry, is worth ten of either parent. (The novel is full of unexpected little twists like that.) Elizabeth stays with her father, becomes capable beyond her years and learns how to make a living. She also falls hopelessly in love with the aptly-named Johnny Stone. Meanwhile back in Ireland a lazy Aisling finishes school with no particular plan, does a secretarial course, starts to work in the office of her father’s shop, and is courted by Tony Murray, the Town Catch, son of a prominent business family.

The genius of the book is the way it overturns stereotypes and defies expectations. The O’Connors love Elizabeth (and she, them) and absorb her easily into their big and mainly loving family, a family which nonetheless has its own problems. The eldest boy, Sean Óg, dies fighting for the British without ever being reconciled with his father. The second son Eamon is a bit of a thug who goes out ‘lamping’ at night and hangs around with corner-boys. Maureen, the eldest girl, is perpetually cross at having been strung along by her boyfriend until she finally caught him, only to become a drudge. Niamh and Donal are the youngest; Donal, who had a worryingly weak chest as a child and poor prospects of reaching adulthood, grows into a rather smug young man. Niamh is just a pain. Aisling, despite being one of six, is wilful and somewhat spoilt, as well as being loyal and deeply lovable. Elizabeth, an only child, used to effacing herself, asks for nothing from life, and gets very little.

This bald summary does not do the story justice. There are funny and sad descriptions of Christmases, birthday parties, schooldays, weddings, and one very sad funeral. Eileen, a good mother according to her lights, is not very understanding about Aisling’s unhappy marriage, but a rock of strength for Elizabeth. (It’s always easier with someone else’s child.) Tony’s mother is not a monster either, just an unhappy, neglected widow. The O’Connors are great fun, always jumping up to sing songs at the slightest opportunity, unlike Elizabeth’s relatives in England, and Aisling at George’s 50th birthday leads them in ‘Take A Pair Of Sparkling Eyes’ and other songs. The dark side of this Irish confidence is a drunken Tony, some years later, insisting on singing every verse of ‘Kevin Barry’ at another English gathering,while everyone applauds politely. We’ve all been there, haven’t we, at both kinds of gatherings.

There is an abortion in the book, portrayed as a very risky business (as indeed it would have been in the early 1950s, as well as being illegal), but dealt with sympathetically and somewhat briskly, too. It happens for all the ‘wrong’ reasons, because the monstrously selfish father of the unborn child cannot be told, and – no spoilers – it is experienced as very sad by the potential mother. It was brave of an Irish writer to write about an abortion in 1982.

Is the novel realistic about the 1940s and ’50s, though? The all-pervasive religious (Catholic) culture of Ireland in that era is portrayed very accurately and matter-of-factly, not particularly negatively. Standards of living in both Ireland and England are well-described – when Aisling visits Elizabeth in a still-rationed Britain around 1949 or 50 she brings lots of food from Ireland, including butter and a ham. That was what people did. Aisling is the envy of all when she starts married life in a modern bungalow, and her having a motor car is portrayed as a big deal – as indeed it would have been. Sometimes the language used by characters and the frankness with which they discuss things can feel more like the ’60s and ’70s. Reading the book I had to keep putting it down to imagine Aisling and Elizabeth dressed and hair-styled like my mother and my aunts, and I didn’t always succeed. On the other hand I, and my sisters and cousins and friends in the 1980s, all talked like (and thought like) the characters in this novel set several decades earlier. We had the same fears, hopes, expectations and humour. We all encountered a Johnny Stone and a Tony Murray, and our mothers were more or less like Eileen. Re-reading it I feel nostalgic for us, not for my mother’s generation. But Maeve was older than me and closer to my mother’s generation than mine; she might have known whereof she spoke.

Back in the ’80s and ’90s some people derided Maeve Binchy as a ‘romantic novelist’ (though why this should be grounds for derision puzzles me.) When I’d quiz her critics (many of them my female friends) about which of her novels fitted this description it would usually turn out that they hadn’t read any of them. They were going on ignorant hearsay. Maeve was an anti-romantic novelist and she started, in Light A Penny Candle, as she intended to go on. The ending is brutal and the ending of her second novel, Echoes, is something similar. She was a bleak realist, but one with a very light touch. The only aspect of life she is romantic about is work and business; characters in her novels contrive the most ingenious ways of making a living from their passions and pastimes. Economic independence and vocational satisfaction – which are achieved by some characters in both of these books and many of her other ones – are her happy endings, much more so than the romantic clinch.

Maeve Binchy, Light A Penny Candle (London: Century 1982). I have the Coronet paperback published in 1983 which depicts Elizabeth and Aisling on the cover with 1970s hairstyles against the backdrop of a mountain on the inlet of the sea. The book’s title is taken from Arthur Colohan’s song ‘Galway Bay’; ‘Sure you might as well go chasing after rainbows/Or light a penny candle from a star’ [as change Irish people, that is.]

________, Echoes (London: Century 1985). I have a signed first edition of this with a note from Maeve to my parents: 1st of May 1985: To Paddy and Kathleen Clear: Sile came in to me to have this signed for you. I hope you like this story. Maeve Binchy. There was a big long queue in O’Mahonys in Limerick and she took the same trouble with everybody. She was a lady.