In his own words: Brian Friel’s ‘Irish Times’ columns

Gunning for Sheriff
May 21st, 1957

When the new TV transmitter goes up on Sheriffs Mountain, I can foresee that we will be the only family in Derry who won’t have a TV set. Even now, nearly every house in our street is sporting an aerial. When I was asked why we hadn’t one, I used to reply that we were waiting for the opening of the new station. Now I’m lost.

Apart altogether from the money, I have another genuine excuse: my poor eyesight. (One explanation for this is that when I was young, I spent most of my nights in a cinema where my mother played the piano for the silent movies.) Even when reception is perfect, I still see snow. But no one believes me. They tell me that I don’t concentrate hard enough. Then I concentrate very hard and I see nothing. My only chance is to sit sideways and peer furtively at the screen. I get it that way, sometimes.

Occasionally, friends of ours who have television ask us up to see some particular programme – and I find that my wife and I become unusually garrulous. Even though we may be barely on speaking terms when we leave home, five minutes’ viewing sets us going immediately.

We discover all sorts of unlikely facial resemblances between our neighbours and the actors on the screen. And when I miss a resemblance, as I frequently do since I don’t face the screen and I can’t allow myself to concentrate, my wife points it out and we get wonderful fun out of it all.

The last programme we saw was a very interesting documentary on South Africa. That was the funniest night I’ve had in years; you would be surprised at the number of people in Derry who look like South Africans. I noticed, though, that our hosts never broke silence. Maybe they don’t find resemblance funny – or maybe their eyesight is even worse than mine. Anyway, they never laughed.

The name is Friel
December 16th, 1957

When the door opened, I could see the waiting room was already overcrowded and about a dozen people stood silently along both sides of the hall. A crisp receptionist looked at me.

“Friel,” I said pleasantly. “I have an appointment with the doctor at half-past.”

A dozen pairs of interested eyes roved over me. Any diversion was welcome to them; last year’s magazines were in the waiting room.

“Friel? Friel?” said the receptionist, consulting her book. “James Friel?”

"No. Brian Friel. "

“B P Friel?”

“Yes. Yes. BP. Brian Patrick.”

She frowned at her book. She looked up at me. “What was the appointment for?”

I hesitated. One does not like shouting one’s ailments over the housetops. “As a matter of fact,” I began.

“Oh, I remember now. You want to have your ear syringed. Isn’t that it? You are deaf in the left ear. How stupid of me to have forgotten!”

Twenty-four eyes were glued to my left ear. It whistled and buzzed furiously.

She stood aside and I reeled into the hall and flattened myself against the wall between a corpulent man and a woman who clutched a child with a snotty nose. I patted the child on the head with the tips of my fingers. “A bad cold, eh, eh?”

The mother drew the child to her protectively. “Nothing wrong with the wain. It’s me. I’ve got asthma.” And she wheezed in demonstration and patted her chest and nodded at me to see did I understand her sign language.

The woman turned to the sallow girl next to her. “Terrible affliction is deafness, dear. Specially when they’re not so young. Like him there. Makes life so lonely for them. And then it’s pride that keeps them from using a hearing aid.”

The receptionist came out of her office and walked over to me. She caught me by the arm as if to lead me to the surgery. Some demon seized me then, some unaccountable frenzy over which I had no control. For I wrinkled up my face like a gnome and wriggled my fingers at the ceiling and did a little skip into the air.

“Tra-la-la, tra-la-la. Hi-bongo boo-boo-boo. The cat and the cosy cot. Choo-choo-choo.”

That shook them.

Friel and Boswell
August 6th, 1958

I have lost a very dear friend; a man who for years back has followed my career with friendly interest. He had in his time a fuller knowledge of me than many of my closest friends (he knew that the P in my name stands for Patrick

– but, cute and all as he was, he never discovered that the C was for Casimir); and the strange thing is that we never met. More, I never knew his name. And now he is gone. I have lost my first and only publicity agent.

This unusual friendship had its beginnings many years ago, when my wife and I first went to a certain holiday resort in Donegal. We had not been there a week when there appeared in the local notes of a popular paper: "Mr B Friel, MA, and his wife are at present holidaying in B–."

What matter if we were wedged between a dog who had made a 20-mile journey back to its first owner, and a potato which weighed 2lb? It was a good start. I had a feeling that that reporter, whoever he was, would go far.

He did, in fact, go much further. The following year he heralded our arrival with: “Once again Mr B Friel, PhD, accompanied by his wife and their daughter Paddy . . .”

I graduated from philosophy to law, from law to science, science to dentistry, dentistry to music. I was in turn “a popular figure”, “prominent in Derry business circles”, “an ardent sailor” and once, in some frenzy of inventiveness, “fresh from his London success”.

It was its vagueness that tickled me most. Had my two-year-old dog, A Lad of the O'Friels, romped home an easy winner in the White City? Was my musical, The Swim Suit, breaking all records in Drury Lane? Had my recital in the Wigmore caused Casals, in the far-off Pyrenees, to break his cello over his head with sheer envy? I remember swaggering round B– that summer, my shoulders back, my keen grey eyes languid but penetrating, pushing the pram in front of me as lightly as if it were a caddy car.

Then I suddenly lost my chronicler. He either died or lost his job. I like to think that he is still with us; in America, perhaps, a big man in advertising, as the women’s magazines say.

But he is lost to me, and I am not the same man since. His successor, clearly a dull, factual fellow, feels that he does justice to the holiday season in B– when he writes: “Many Scottish visitors are at present in B–. There are also families from the Six Counties.” I think I will change my resort.

Birth of a Salesman
October 15th, 1959

Many, many years ago I made a brief and regrettable excursion into the world of selling. I have never known what prompted me to do this. Perhaps it was the suggestion of Mafia mystery of the last line of the advertisement: “Ring . . . and ask for Mr Pirelli.” I rang the number at the appointed hour and asked for Mr Pirelli. “Speaking,” said a vibrant bass voice.

There was a pause. I do not know what I expected to happen, but I knew that I had repeated the magic words accurately and something must happen. I remember that, for some confused reason, I had put on my good suit to make the call: the trousers were too long and I had them hitched up to an uncomfortable height. Now I began to sweat. The windows of the kiosk became misted.

He named a hotel in the town. “You come straight up here now, old man, and we’ll give you the old one-two-three.”

Pirelli was a tiny man who might have been a jockey if the world of commerce had not got him first. “I’ll come straight to the point, chaps. Foundation garments is our racket – ladies’ foundation garments. No need to spell it, is there? Well, stays.”

I had a moment of truth, a half-second when I saw myself pleading with aunts and female cousins around the town to take an order from me, for God’s sake; and somewhere at the back of that image, I could see my decent Irish mother wringing her hands in a contortion of grief.

I was still trembling when I arrived home an hour later.

Memories and Vagaries
March 29th, 1960

I’m strongly suspicious of those autobiographers who claim to remember their early childhood as if it were yesterday.

Perhaps my suspicion is caused by jealousy, because I remember nothing at all. Not absolutely nothing, but certainly nothing that seems to be the real stuff of autobiography. I have my memories, of course: of greyhounds we owned that slept under the range; of killing rats on threshing day; of blowing up a pig’s bladder and using it for a football. But no one could make anything of memories like that.

My parents provided none of the right copy, either. My earliest recollection of my father is very vivid, but all wrong. He is sitting in the kitchen with his feet in a bucket of warm water. He is washing his feet because he is going to hospital. (He had ulcers, and he always seemed to be washing his feet in preparation for hospital. We had a bath, but he never used it. I used to think his ulcers were on his heels.)

Mother is sitting on the other side of the fire, holding his pyjamas to the heat to air them. (He did not use pyjamas, either. But he could nip very smartly and very modestly into bed in his drawers and vest.)

Who could make anything of that childhood ? No, there is nothing for it but invention, and when it comes to concocting I am as good as the next. “Until I was eight,” I will begin, “father and mother were merely names to me. But their places were well filled by Nanny, a dour but kindly Scottish woman who used summon me to lunch by playing an arpeggio on the oboe . . .”

La Dolce Vita in Derry
January 23rd, 1961

Some months ago our public representatives in the corporation here in Derry (unionists and nationalists, Gestapo and gunmen, Dicks and Micks, gerrymanderers and gerrymandered) expressed their concern at the number of unhealthy films being shown in the town and decided to ask the film exhibitors to submit to them for approval any film which, they felt, might disturb the civic conscience.

The exhibitors promptly made arrangements for late-night showings of the most doubtful features. To these they invited our representatives, who have been subjected to at least two obscene films per month since.

The future holds two possibilities. Our public representatives could become so corrupted that Derry may well turn into the Sodom of the Six. (It has already been hinted that our famous walls will be the setting for an annual open-air pageant that would make the Folies look like a parochial garden fete.)

On the other hand, if the corporators continue to copy American standard – we already have the biggest hospital, swimming pool and fire station in the country – the town faces financial ruin. Either way, disaster seems inevitable.

Labours of Love
May 12th, 1962

I have distinct memories of two thoroughly exhausting affairs before I was 10. One was with my teacher, Miss Crossley, and the other was with a young married woman whose husband was in the British army.

Both romances coincided with the acquisition of new and spectacular skills. When I fell for Miss Crossley, I had just learned to cycle backways, and for at least a fortnight her evenings were disturbed by the sight of a lad careering madly up and down in front of her house, his rear resting precariously on the handle bars of a bicycle that had neither brakes, tubes nor tyres.

Eventually, of course, I got a bad fall and was in hospital for a month. Now my only mementoes of that affair are two scars on my arm and two overdeveloped muscles on the backs of my thin legs. She never even visited me all the time I was laid up.

My castanet-dance routine with the married woman took the form of handstands. Every time she opened her door, I was upside down on the street before her. If she went to the well for water, I was stationed beside the pool like an inverted genie. Had her husband been absent for more than a month, I might have burst a blood vessel. As it was, I suffered from severe headaches and my eyes were constantly watering.

A third romance occurred when I was 11 and fell for a huge, lumpy, red-headed girl called Annie Gormley, who was in my own class and shared with me the distinction of being the best of the slow group. The slow group, not having the same aptitude for higher things as the bright group, amused itself by doing lines, and by a process of elimination Annie and myself were left for one another.

“Annie,” I said one evening after class, “will you go with me?”

“Why should I?” said Annie archly.

“Annie,” I said again, more loudly this time, “will you go with me?”

“Parrot!” she jeered.

I grabbed her and kissed her on the ear before she could run away.

I will never know how I survived the three weeks of that romance. In return for the purely technical title of going with her, Annie insisted that I fight all the new suitors who suddenly found her irresistible.

I was always a light child, but by some means or other I lasted a dozen fights. I had teeth loosened and eyes blackened and ribs bruised, but an obscure sense of gallantry kept me going. When a contest was over Annie would hand me back my coat and say in her broadest Tyrone accent, “You’re a right cub!”

I lost her to the 13th challenger – one of the McGuire twins. She accused me afterwards of throwing the fight but that was ungenerous of her. He was the better man, and anyhow I was disillusioned with love. I let him take me in the second round.

Years afterwards, I heard that they married and that she beats the tar out of him every Saturday night. I was not surprised.