An Irish Country Cottage--An Irish Country Novel Read online

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  To Dorothy

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank a large number of people, some of whom have worked with me from the beginning and without whose unstinting help and encouragement, I could not have written this series. They are:

  In North America

  Simon Hally, Carolyn Bateman, Tom Doherty, Paul Stevens, Kristin Sevick, Irene Gallo, Gregory Manchess, Patty Garcia, Alexis Saarela, and Christina MacDonald, all of whom have contributed enormously to the literary and technical aspects of bringing the work from rough draft to bookshelf.

  Natalia Aponte and Victoria Lea, my literary agents.

  Don Kalancha, Joe Maier, and Michael Tadman, who keep me right in contractual matters.

  In the United Kingdom and Ireland

  Jessica and Rosie Buchman, my foreign rights agents.

  The librarians of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, the Rotunda Hospital and her staff.

  For this work only

  My friends and colleagues who contributed special expertise in the writing of this work are highlighted in the author’s note.

  To you all, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly MB, DSC, and I tender our most heartfelt gratitude and thanks.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  To old friends, welcome back. To new readers, céad míle fáilte, a hundred thousand welcomes. Doctors Taylor, O’Reilly, and Laverty, and the citizens of Ballybucklebo, want you all to enjoy this visit. This note is written to help.

  I find it hard to believe it is fifteen years since I drafted: “Barry Laverty, Doctor Barry Laverty, his houseman’s year just finished, ink barely dry on his degree…” Those were the opening words of a series of, with the publication of this, An Irish Country Cottage, thirteen books, containing about a million and a half more words. (Please don’t think me extravagant. I recycle many of them.) In those fifteen years, a great deal has changed for me. For my characters and indeed for Ulster between 1964, the setting of the first book, and 1969, when this one takes place, a great deal has also changed, and by so doing has affected how this story must be told. Some explanation will be given later, but first I want to thank everyone whose advice has been invaluable.

  In alphabetical order, Doctor Thomas Baskett, whom I met on day one of medical school in 1958 and who has been my best friend ever since. He and his wife, Yvette, kept me right on details of the Royal Victoria Hospital Belfast, where all three of us worked in the ’60s. The book’s discussions on the Catholic Church and its position on contraception in the late ’60s were based on Tom’s paper The Pill and the Pope. Carolyn Bateman is a remarkable woman. She has edited almost every word I have written since 1996. Without her help you would not be reading this. Mike Bradshaw, lately sergeant, Royal Ulster Constabulary, made sure I got all the details concerning the RUC in 1969 correct. My friend, the builder Chris Finn, solved for me (and for Donal Donnelly) the problem of making a cheap temporary roof for a cottage. Doctor John Morse, friend and gastroenterologist, advised me on certain conditions of the stomach. And as every chapter was drafted, my wife, Dorothy, as Ulster as I am, proofed with an eagle eye and commented on its accuracy.

  To you all, my most sincere thanks.

  Real places and actual people appear on these pages. The people were contemporaries of the action, some of whom were known to me. I wish to acknowledge them.

  Most of the action takes place in North County Down, my home for nearly thirty years, and in Belfast where, for want of a better word, I was educated. Ballybucklebo, of course, is a figment of my imagination, but Bangor, Cultra, Holywood, and Portaferry are real. (So is a gastro-pub in Holywood called the Dirty Duck, which opened after I had created the Mucky Duck.) And so is the Culloden Hotel, which was built as Culloden House in 1867. The executive chef, Paul McKnight, graciously provided two recipes for last year’s Irish Country Cookbook. Both the Duck and Culloden are well worth visiting if you are in North Down.

  Burntollet Bridge is also a real place, and this book contains a scene set there. I watched with horror the events I describe in this work being broadcast live on television in January 1969. Scenes set in Paris in and around the Hotel De Passy are as accurate as memory serves. The original hotel has been refurbished since I stayed there in 1985 while working with Doctor Jacques Hamou, who lived around the corner in Chaussée de la Muette. I first saw the Eiffel Tower in 1957 on a school trip and renewed old acquaintance with it and the carousel in 1985. In all those scenes, I have striven for accuracy. I well know the Campbell College and Queen’s University pipe bands. I played with both from 1955 to 1964.

  Nor can I write about a period without references to real people. They include Robert “Big Bob” Mitchell and David “Davy” Young. Both men taught me as a schoolboy and they coached the school’s senior rugby football team. Michael Gibson, Roger Young, and Willie John McBride were contemporaries who played rugby for Ireland.

  Some of these people were known to me through the media and in the political arena of Ulster in 1969. Captain Terence O’Neill, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, was prime minister of Northern Ireland from 1963 to 1969. Brian Faulkner was his deputy. This was the year that civil rights protests, which had been bubbling since 1968, boiled over into violence. Leading civil rights advocates of nonviolence included Eamon McCann, Michael Farrell, Kevin Boyle, and John Hume. Bernadette Devlin, a staunch Republican, went on to become the youngest MP elected to Westminster. On the Loyalist side, the instigators of the physical clashes were the Reverend Ian Paisley and Major Ronald Bunting.

  In medicine, my senior medical colleagues in Belfast, many of whom I knew personally, included surgeons at the Royal Victoria, namely Sir Ian Fraser, Mister Willoughby Wilson, Mister Sinclair Irwin, and Mister Ernie Morrison, as well as gynaecologists at Royal Maternity—Professor Jack Pinkerton, Mister Ian MacClure, and Doctor Graham Harley. All of these men taught Tom Baskett and me as students, and the gynaecologists were our mentors when we were young trainees. Edwin “Buster” Holland taught me and delivered my daughter. Graham Harley was our hero, a wonderful teacher, a fine clinician, and a man of deep compassion. Doctor George Irwin became the first professor of general practice (see An Irish Country Practice). Mister David Hanna Craig was an outstanding ENT surgeon. I knew neither, but Doctor Dennis Coppel was senior to me and joined the consulting staff of the Royal Victoria Hospital in the department of anaesthesia in 1970. The doyen of Ulster medicine was Sir John Henry Biggart, dean of the faculty of medicine, a towering figure in whose giant shadow mere medical students like me
scuttled like frightened mice.

  Internationally, I am proud to say I was privileged to know Doctor Celso Ramon Garcia. He was one of a team of three gynaecologists in the late 1950s, along with Gregory Pincus and John Rock, who introduced Enovid, the first effective oral contraceptive. Celso taught me microsurgery in the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in 1973.

  Professor Bruno Lunenfelt and his wife, Suzie, were visitors to my home in Calgary. His work on the use of gonadotrophin hormones is one of the milestones in reproductive medicine of the twentieth century. My greatest good fortune was being sent in 1969 to Oldham, England, to be taught laparoscopy by Mister Patrick Steptoe, who was already collaborating with Professor Robert Edwards (subsequent Nobel Laureate) on human in vitro fertilization. Patrick, who later became my friend and senior partner, introduced me to both Doctor Hans Frangenheim and Doctor Raoul Palmer, two of endoscopy’s pioneers. And please forgive my conceit, but I was performing laparoscopies in the Ulster Hospital, Dundonald, in 1969.

  Now, having made my thanks and acknowledged real places and people, it is time for some explanation of the changes that occurred in Northern Ireland in 1969 and how they influenced the development of this novel. Two apologies will follow.

  To show how a work of fiction can be influenced by real life, I must first describe one element of the craft. It is a given in fiction that if a character is to have credible substance, that character must grow. Growing presupposes the passage of time. While I can invent a whole village, and populate it with characters from my imagination, those characters are still bound by the reality of life in the real world that surrounds them.

  I decided that while a great deal of the novel would involve what happened to a family when their cottage was destroyed by fire, two other plots would contrast the parallel dilemmas of two women. One who is desperate to conceive, the other who is equally anxious to avoid conception.

  And this is where the passage of time necessary for character growth was influenced by biological reality. A couple who started trying to conceive in late 1967 would only begin to worry about nothing having happened by late 1968.

  I started the Irish Country Doctor series in 1964 when Northern Ireland, at least on the surface, was a quiet, neighbourly place, and I know my readers have written to say how much they appreciated being able to seek solace there from today’s hectic and violent world. But, and it’s a big but, sometimes fiction must run afoul of reality. I do not wish to give a history lesson. Simply put, since partition of Ireland in 1921 there have been injustices practised by the dominant community in Northern Ireland on the minority. The oversimplified badges of the sides were Protestants (also referred to as Loyalists), many of whom were members of the ruling Unionist Party, and Catholics, only some of whom were Republicans committed to achieving a united Ireland. The truth, as always, is much more complex. Religion was not the only dividing factor, and no attempt is made here to delve deeply into the question. I have in my three books about the Troubles avoided taking sides. I hope I have achieved the same in this work, but I can still offer some generalisations.

  Scared of being reunified with the Republic of Ireland where they in turn would become the minority, the Loyalists instituted discriminatory voting practices aimed at keeping themselves in the majority, in power, and part of the United Kingdom. There were also unfair methods of apportioning government-subsidised housing, and a biased auxiliary police force, the B-Specials.

  Inspired by the civil rights movement in America, civil rights organisations grew in Northern Ireland. It must be stressed that the original founders had only one goal: equal civil rights within the boundaries of Northern Ireland for all, regardless of creed. They were not bent on a reunified Ireland. Peaceful letter-writing campaigns grew to peaceful sit-ins and nonviolent protest marches. Tensions grew, until on January 4, 1969, the fourth day of what was supposed to have been the culmination of a march from Belfast to Londonderry, violence broke out. That was the spark that lit the fuse that fired an explosion of thirty years of internecine sectarian warfare in Ulster.

  My story starts in part with a couple worrying about their difficulties conceiving—worrying on December 27, 1968, one week before the first serious rioting. I have had no choice but to have the outbreak of the Troubles run throughout the work like the ghost at the feast.

  And this is the reason for my first apology to those readers who are disappointed that violence has appeared in my Irish Country Doctor books, and I fear some will be. As I write, one has posted on Facebook, “Please don’t take them too far into the future.” I can only say I am truly sorry, but I have to write what I feel deeply. I can only hope you will understand, forgive, and possibly enjoy a somewhat more complex work, but one I believe preserves the simple, human, benevolent values of the first twelve books in the series.

  A second element of fiction is the need for a protagonist in conflict with an antagonist. The white hat and the black hat. But I do not know any rule that says these players must be human. Captain Ahab was obsessed with killing a white whale called Moby Dick.

  There are no individual humans in serious conflict in Country Cottage. I have chosen to contrast the gradual disintegration in Ulster life with the ecumenical spirit of neighbourliness in Ballybucklebo, where the entire village rallies to help a friend fallen on bad times.

  For that I make no apology, but my second apology and my promise do come next. Once again real-life timing has interfered. Two plotlines, one major, one lesser (except of course for the characters involved), cannot be resolved within this book’s time frame. I am sorry. I know many of you hate loose ends. So, I solemnly promise that after a short break to recharge my creative batteries I will begin work on book fourteen for 2019, and as O’Reilly might say, “To quote Saint Luke, the good physician, ‘… nothing is hidden that will not be revealed.’” Please be patient.

  I hope all of this will add to your understanding of the process by which this novel came to be created, and the constraints under which a writer of historic fiction must work. Thank you for staying with me on this.

  PATRICK TAYLOR

  Saltspring Island

  British Columbia

  July 2017

  1

  Blazes and Expires

  Barry Laverty, Doctor Barry Laverty, took his time driving their almost-new 1968 Hillman Imp. His ancient Volkswagen Beetle, Brunhilde, had started to cost too much in repairs, and as a full partner in the general practice of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly and with Sue, his wife, still teaching at MacNeill Memorial Primary in Ballybucklebo, they could afford a better car.

  He made his way carefully from the top of Bangor’s Main Street, past the old abbey founded by Saint Comgall in 558 A.D., and onto the Belfast Road, heading for home in Ballybucklebo.

  He was feeling a distinct surfeit of “’Tis the season to be jolly,” and a combination of irritation and sadness at something Barry’s mother had said shortly before Barry and Sue had said their goodnights.

  Two days ago it had been the 1968 Christmas Eve hooley at Number One Main Street, Ballybucklebo, presided over by Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly and his wife, Kitty. Archie and “Kinky” Auchinleck had catered the event and Donal Donnelly had served behind the bar.

  Christmas dinner had been at Sue’s family’s farm in Broughshane.

  Now, Barry had finished his second Christmas dinner in three days with his parents in their home in Ballyholme, and not only was he feeling full of food, there was a distinct atmosphere between him and Sue. If only his mother hadn’t asked over coffee, “So, you two, you’ve been married for eighteen months. When are you going to make Dad and me grandparents?”

  He accelerated slightly. A steady January drizzle was falling, reflecting his own feelings of sadness. He glanced over at Sue in the dim illumination of the dash lights and saw the single schoolmistress with the copper-coloured mane who had attracted him at the school Christmas pageant four years ago. How he hated to see her hurt. “Sue,” he
said, struggling to offer comfort, “Mum didn’t mean it unkindly, you know.”

  Sue made a noncommittal noise and moved her thick plait of hair from one shoulder to the other. She generally kept a firm control over her feelings. She sniffed before saying, “Please. I don’t want to talk about it just now, Barry, thank you. None of it,” and turning to stare out the side window. She had been silent since they had left his folks’ house. In Ulster, the sun sets before four thirty in early January, and although the town’s streetlights had made driving easier, once out in the country the night was pitch black and had been until he’d passed through the lights of the petrol station, the Presbyterian church, the manse, and the Orange Hall at Ballyrobert, halfway to home.

  Barry dipped his headlights to accommodate an oncoming vehicle. He just wanted to get back to the secluded bungalow he and Sue had bought from the widowed Gracie Miller in 1967. Old Gracie was still living happily in Portrush with her family, and Barry and Sue had settled into their nest on its little peninsula in Belfast Lough on the Bangor side of Ballybucklebo.

  “Be there in about fifteen minutes, love,” he said. “I’ll get a fire lit and we can talk about things if you’d like.”

  Sue moved and he sensed she was looking at him. “Yes. I’d like that, Barry. I’m sorry I—”

  The clanging of an insistent bell split the night and drew nearer. Its steady tinging was given counterpoint by the rising and falling of a police siren and the flashing of that car’s blue dome light. Barry realised they were approaching from behind. He squeezed over to the left-hand side of the road, as did the rear lights of the car in front. Both cars stopped.

  The emergency vehicles roared past, heading in the direction of Ballybucklebo or— Barry swallowed. He could now make out that up ahead the undersides of the low clouds were bathed in flickering red shot through with yellow.