Girl in a hurry - but stuck

Past Drumcliffe churchyard where W.B. Yeats lies, past solemn Lissadell House with its brooding woods and into what seems a maze of tiny lanes and turnings with half-interested cattle glancing at a newcomer, writes Eileen Battersby.

It's a place where the Sligo landscape appears to be engaged in an elaborate game of musical chairs with a sea that materialises for a moment, then vanishes briefly before returning to view. You know you have followed the directions when the sloping road appears to slide into an abruptly rising sea and the scene consists of only water and sky, today both grey. Even in the rain, it is a dramatic setting. Writer Leland Bardwell has, after hectic years of raising children in basement poverty, found her place, a cottage on the edge of a tiny cove.

A confusing whirlwind of moves between Dublin and London, Paris and Scotland - all begun in rebellion from a cold family home in Leixlip, Co Kildare - provided her with more than enough material for her autobiographically based fiction. She makes no mystery of her work, or of her life. "It's been very hard, but I had a great time."

It's a story of several lives; that of a lonely young girl at war with her Hone family's Anglo-Irish world, a culture that made her an outcast, who would become an unlikely Earth mother of seven children, gradually a frantic member of a Bohemian arts scene, drawn to living dangerously and painfully, and finally an Irish writer. "I was a maverick," she says, "I often wonder how I got to this great age."

Few people appear to have mastered the art of survival quite as well. "I have a strong belief in the absurd. You have to have the ability to see the absurd comedy in things. My perception of life is as surreal."

All of the chaos and grief could easily be explained in a comment made by Cedric, the narrator of her best novel, The House (1984), when, in a moment of reflection on his return to his hated family home, he remarks: "It becomes clearer and clearer to me now, as I sit on this top stair that I am not telling a story about wars or family deaths but about love."

It is an excellent novel, with shades of Molly Keane and Jennifer Johnston, sustained by a tone of thoughtful regret. It is also her most technically ambitious. "The one I wrote most quickly. It's based on my uncle. I've always felt it a shame that it disappeared. It's the book I'd most like to be republished."

That London Winter, published in 1981, is, she says, "my end-of-the-affair novel. It's very sad". In it, she describes the closing stages of what was her great love, destroyed by her increasing fascination with Bohemian London literary life.

Interestingly, though, despite its intensely personal nature, it does not achieve the subtle emotional force of The House. Another subtle family study, the novel There We Have Been, was published in 1989.

Considering the pattern of abusive relationships and emotional trauma, there is nothing self-dramatising about Bardwell when she says: "It was all about love, my life, all those children. Hope and panic; just a search for love and a rebellion against that Protestant Anglo thing."

Her search began with a hopeless love for a cousin some 20 years her senior. She remains caught in a kind of endless middle-age; old enough to have given birth to a first son who is now approaching 60, while appearing not much older than that.

On emerging from her cottage at the sound of my arrival, she admires my unorthodox parking and says: "I've eaten your lunch." Robust and fit, she nods to the sea: "That's my pool, I go swimming there - just outside my door."

She makes no mention of her new novel and does not appear to be caught by pre-publication nerves. Although her life is the subject of her fiction, she does not appear intense or self-absorbed, nor does she live in the past. Her strong, humorous face is well-seamed and open. Conversation is dominated by her great loves: horses, dogs, books, painting and music. The anecdotes are black, as if shaped by her large hands, held steady before her. She is a colourful storyteller, capable of casually cryptic humour ("my grandchildren, I've hundreds, about 13").

Why Sligo, after all her travels? "Friends. One blustery November I stayed in Dermot Healy's house. It was hellish. No electricity. No toilet. No running water. Dark at four in the afternoon. November really is a terrible month. I fell in love with the place - so wild, so tortured, so awful; it sparked something in me."

That love was so complete it encouraged Bardwell, about 10 years ago, to do something she had never done: she bought property. Her life now is self-contained and she remains as resourceful as ever. She has a piano and some books. Art has always excited her and she has spent hours in galleries staring at pictures. But there are few paintings. Family photographs line the mantlepiece. Possessions have never interested her.

While she has often described the Anglo-Irish voice as "a kind of non-accent, neither Irish nor English, it's a kind of whine. Rather awful really", her turn of phrase retains that fluid grace of educated upper middle-class speech and her accent is well-spoken Anglo-Irish modified by Dublin commonsense.

She's an easy individual to engage with. A friend and neighbour, artist Sean McSweeney, says Bardwell possesses "a young mind". She is interested in everything, including the work of other writers. She is a good critic as well as a generous reader. Commenting on her difficulty keeping dogs alive in the countryside - where "once they go out of sight, they get shot" - she moves on to the genius of the South African writer, J. M. Coetzee: "I think he is the greatest."

For all her romanticism, Bardwell is also oddly practical and honest - but confusion has always been her master. She remains the young heroine of her hectic first novel, Girl on a Bicycle (1977), a story that could easily have been called "Girl in a Hurry". In fact, she was always a girl in a hurry and remains anxious to write as much as she can. "Yes. Girl in a hurry - but stuck."

Her new novel, Mother to a Stranger, examines the effect an approach made by a child, given up for adoption some 30 years earlier, has on the mother, a concert pianist, and her husband, who knew nothing of the story. The novel draws on Bardwell's most difficult heartbreak, the adoption of her first child. "It was a long time ago, but you never forget. I never tried to find him. He may well never have been told. He might have been lucky. I hope so. I always think about him; I imagine what he would be like. He's an old man now . . . his father was terribly handsome."

Being alone and pregnant in London at 19, having left Co Kildare to deal with her "problem", "was a terrible experience, you never forget. Having a baby at that age sliced everything in half. They're so important, those years, when you're in such a mess anyway".

As for the novel, she says, aside from the actual description of the secret pregnancy, the memories of it and the adoption, "everything else is all made up".

Sex seems to dominate her fiction and relationships are a central theme. Absurdity and offbeat physical imagery also prevail. But,looking deeper, Bardwell is primarily concerned with gender. "It's the politics of gender and the power games. Women were, still are, second-class citizens," she says.

Becoming pregnant outside marriage in Ireland has not changed. She lists the options open to women in this country, particularly in light of the recent referendum: "You're a killer, a thief or a liar. It's not great. Irish men have never really liked women".

Sheknew she would write about the adoption. Her life has always been the source of her novels. Her short stories are different; most of them seem to come from elsewhere.

Some, such as 'Night Rider' and 'The Hairdresser', are excellent. She places a small box on the table. It is a new French edition of classic Irish short stories and includes work by Mary Lavin, Frank O'Connor and William Trevor. "If I'm in an anthology, it's always 'The Hairdresser'. Here it is again."

Many have suggested she should write her memoir. She has. It is not yet published, but I have read a manuscript. The candid narrative follows the apparently indestructible Bardwell - "my constant running, my constant search" - from birth up until the 1970s. She sees that date as an important cut-off.

'It was the time of the women's movement in Ireland and, I have to say, it was largely dominated by women who were all so middle-class and well caught with no understanding of women's problems. I wondered 'what am I doing here?' Irish feminism was full of Dublin 4 types." Polite surprise rather than rancour shapes her opinion, yet Bardwell is also a shrewd commentator.

Asked about her writing, she says: "When did I begin? I was always writing, poems and stories. As a child I was terribly ambitious".

It was not about proving herself; she was mainly concerned with attracting her mother's attention. This was hopeless. As the neglected third of three children, she says: "I was always the runt, an ugly duckling. Mother was, well, she was a terrible snob, very cold. I didn't like her".

Judging by Bardwell's vividly candid portrait of her mother, Mrs Hone was a cruel, unloving character with many problems. "My father, whom I never really got to know, was terrifying, but he was quite an interesting man. I found a letter he wrote to my mother when he was a soldier . . . He was a bit frightened of 'writing' - he saw it as all bound up with drink and sex, though he wrote a book about cricket."

Bardwell seems to have run from exercising one horse to another, writing poetry and dreaming, all the while caught up in an endless guilt. "I had this enormous insecurity I felt as a Protestant. Catholics always look on Protestants like foreigners."

Her parents stalk the pages of the memoir. As have so many children from "big house" or quasi "big house" situations, Bardwell sought companionship from the maids. "We had so many of them. They were always good with sayings and stories." She refers to one talking about "a poor orphan".

"I'd love to have been an orphan. I'd have done anything to get away from my parents." In her autobiography, the novelist frequently overpowers the memoir writer. Did she feel her fictionalising tendencies intruding? "Yes, you begin to describe something and then the details just keep happening."

The earlier sequences, childhood and youth were easier to write: "Then my adult life took over". A great deal of the girl remains. She laughs: "That's what happens when you become an adult too soon; you never really grow up properly."

Born in India in 1922, she remembers "bits and pieces. The smells, the spices. I remember the boat going through the Suez Canal". On settling in Ireland she became an outsider in whatever setting she found herself. Always the odd one out.

Still writing, she has completed another novel: "It's called All Those Men, it's very violent. Everyone gets killed. And I've more poetry to write."

Has she regrets? "No, not really. Only that life was so hard when the children were small, I didn't give them the time I should have."

Leland Bardwell's new novel, Mother to a Stranger, is published by Blackstaff Press, €11.99