The Grene grass of home

MEMOIR: PATRICIA CRAIGreviews Nothing Quite Like It: An American-Irish ChildhoodBy Nicholas Grene Somerville Press, 173pp. €14.99

IT WASN’T USUAL to grow up on a Co Wicklow farm in the mid 1950s and have parents who were both professors as well as farmers, let alone be able to claim Protestant-Anglo-Irish-American-Polish-Jewish ancestry. But this was the situation of the young Nicholas Grene (now a professor himself, in the English department of Trinity College Dublin). And in this lucid memoir he evokes the ingredients of his singular childhood with a kind of dispassionate relish, and painstaking attention to detail.

The subtitle is a bit of a misnomer, though. Nicholas was five when he left Illinois with his parents and older sister, and the earliest, pre-Wicklow part of his life is something of a closed book to him. Ireland is the norm, even though he began in the United States, and even though the US was the place to which his father, David, returned for six months of every year, in his capacity of professor of classics at the University of Chicago. The rest of the year, the spring and summer months, saw Grene snr occupied as a farmer at Ballinaclash – here abbreviated to Clash, and meaning, I think, the townland of the trenches, or ditches, from the Irish word clais.

The farmhouse at Clash was as eccentric as its inhabitants – mostly 19th-century, but with bits added on – and, with its odd corners, narrow wooden staircase rising steeply from the entrance hall and innumerable animals – horses and cows and ducks and rabbits and dogs – about the place, made an interesting spot for a properly attentive and adventurous boy to grow up. (Nicholas Grene still lives in the house, and, like his father, carries on a farming enterprise for part of the year.)

The five-year-old was enrolled at the local Protestant national school, bringing the number of its pupils up to 13; and later he joined his sister, Rufus, as a boarder at Drogheda Grammar School. He then continued his education in Belfast – adding a further layer of complexity to an already tangled heritage – at Belfast Royal Academy, after his parents had divorced and his mother had obtained a post as senior lecturer in philosophy at Queen’s.

Saying goodbye to compulsory Irish at Drogheda, Grene tells us, involved a spot of book-burning by the side of the Boyne, and the satisfaction of seeing his Irish textbooks go up in smoke. Never guilty of ill treating the printed word before or since, he’d allowed a mildly destructive impulse to get the better of him on this occasion. But he shouldn’t be blamed too much, perhaps, for giving way to a schoolboy’s natural resentment of ideological rigidity and coercion.

The fact that no Irish was taught at (Protestant) BRA might have sent him off in a different direction and turned him into an enthusiast for the language, but it didn’t. The school suited him, in many ways (“I have always felt grateful to Belfast and Belfast people ever since”), and from it he gained a scholarship to Trinity College Dublin in 1965.

In the meantime, he'd asserted the Jewish part of his identity by buying Teach Yourself Hebrewfrom Mullan's Bookshop on Donegall Place, and by spending a summer on an Israeli kibbutz, a place in which he found himself as refreshingly alien as his family had in Clash. Blow-ins, they were called, but it was a tonic breeze that brought them.

Nicholas Grene’s book can stand as a tribute to his parents, to the farm at Ballinaclash, to local traditions, to farm workers such as the independent-minded Tom Cullen (of “extraordinary character and charm”), to the whole of his rural/urban, outdoor/academic, insider/outsider upbringing. It is all recounted with great good humour, self-deprecation, zest and alertness, and makes invigorating reading.

Patricia Craig's most recent book is a memoir, Asking for Trouble