Openhearted by Ann Ingle: A warm, witty voice and a sharp mind

Openhearted: Eighty years of love, loss, laughter and letting go

Author: Ann Ingle

ISBN-13: 9781844885718

Publisher: Sandycove

Guideline Price: €17.95

“He asked did I have children and I told him, ‘Yes, we had eight children.’

‘You dirty bitch,’ he said. And he laughed.

I am not a bitch, dirty or otherwise. I am a woman who enjoyed sex and wanted a large family... I couldn’t tell the taxi driver any of that.

I didn’t use my voice then. I’ll use it now.”

Ann Ingle is 81. A teacher in the Irish Writers’ Centre (Ivy Bannister, I believe) told her she had “a voice” and encouraged her to keep going. “Keeping going” is a leitmotif in the story of Ann Ingle’s life with her husband, Peter, who died more than 40 years ago, in 1980, and of her own life since then.

They met in Newquay, Cornwall, in 1960. She was working in Woolworths as she waited for her GCE results, planning to study at teacher training college. He was a builder’s labourer from Sandymount, handsome and charming, although never quite what he seemed. He introduced himself as Paddy Byrne, and she knew him as that until she discovered just before their marriage that his name was Peter Ingle. “What difference does it make? Everyone calls me Paddy over here,” was his reaction.

Many more shocks were in store for Ann over the next 20 years. I don’t want to report them here, because, unusually for a memoir, this particular book has dramatic plot twists more often found in a novel.

Openhearted takes the form of a suite of essays, each with a discrete theme – birthdays, mental illness, education, the pandemic, death. It moves easily between the past and the present, but there is a chronological progression, and thanks to the skilful arrangement of the biographical material, it’s an exciting read: a real page turner.

In spite of his many faults, Ann adored Peter, and he her. Love sustained them; there wasn’t much else. He worked as a taxi driver, but could spend his earnings in the pub or bookie’s. Ann came to the rescue, eight children or not. She was a superb typist (100 words a minute) and typed manuscripts for writers, solicitors, and various others, moving on to word processing when computers came on the scene (and before everyone did their own typing).

What emerges from the pages is a picture of a woman of exceptional ability and energy, a problem solver who made the most of what she had and never capitulated to misfortune.

One example of Ann’s ability to overcome adversity was her decision to resume her education, which was cut short when she became pregnant and married Peter. At the age of 51, she applied to Trinity and UCD and was rejected by both.

“Undaunted – well, not too daunted”, she did a pre-university course in Pearse College, got a place in Trinity, and took a degree in English and history, while simultaneously running a “mini word-processing bureau” in Sandymount. Not a woman to give up!

Her candid account of her college experience is among the few mildly barbed pieces in the book: “Brendan Kennelly, with his Kerry accent and stories which seemed to have nothing to do with the syllabus as far as I could make out, captivated the young women.”

There’s more!

The family prospered (the daughter Róisín she refers to is Róisín Ingle of The Irish Times). She acknowledges the help of neighbours on Sandymount Green, where she and Peter bought a house for £2,000 in 1963. Every Christmas Eve the local chip shop would deliver big parcels of fish and chips to the house. Other neighbours loaned money. So did Sister Agnes, who instructed Ann in the Catholic faith in the early days of her marriage.

Her attitude to Catholicism as much as anything else in this wonderful memoir earns the label “open-hearted”. She came to Ireland a (Protestant) atheist, and once again she is an atheist. Critical of the Catholic Church’s patriarchal stance on many issues, she is not blind to its good points. Balance and wisdom imbue her views on everything.

The teacher in the Irish Writers’ Centre was right: Ann Ingle has a voice. A warm witty voice, a sharp mind, an open heart. Reading the book, you feel you’d love to have a coffee with her, or a glass of wine. But reading the book you are with her. And she is very good company.

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s latest books are Look! It’s a Woman Writer (Arlen House 2021) and Little Red and Other Stories (Blacktaff Press, 2020)