ONE of life's many levellers is the funny way in which the wild young rebels of yesterday tend to evolve into the middle aged conservatives of today. Disillusioning though it is, it appears to be a natural process. Changing one's mind is not an offence. Yet it can be difficult to forgive some people for exercising their right to metamorphose, particularly should it involve what appears to be a 360 degree turnabout.
Mary Kenny, an erstwhile mini skirted, pipe smoking Irish rebel who became flamboyantly famous both as a journalist and prim Catholic in England, seems destined to remain best known in Ireland for being expelled from school and for her role in the fledging women's movement of the 1960s, as well as for having held wild notions which she freely expressed.
It gave her an unpredictable, slightly terrifying aura which made her stand out in a muted society. "I was part of that wonderful, mad Sixties thing. It's like having been a member of a club. It probably means nothing to you. You would have to have lived it to understand," she says, waving her hands helplessly as if trying to explain a foreign culture to a person who had never visited the country she knew so well. "I drank a lot, I had affairs. There were always men about. I've always thought if you wanted a man you could pretty well have one, don't you think?" she says with the lilting voice of a society get straight out of Waugh.
Back to the present day. She continues with a flat, more matter of fact, almost Irish tone: "for my generation in the Sixties, it was wild and free and you've got to understand, Ireland then was still largely a Victorian society." Dressed in long flowing pastel garments, Mary Kenny soon removes the exotic turban she was wearing when shed answered the door - "I just haven't had the time to do my hair." With her English accent, aristocratic gestures, affectations, polite comments and old-world good manners, she could easily be a quaintly disarming Kensington eccentric of another era. A small, soft eyed and good natured woman, acting far older than she is, Mary Kenny moves slowly and invariably wears a concerned expression. Her attire makes one think of a mini Speranza Wilde or Lady Ottoline Morrell, or a member of a Bedouin tribe, while her conversation revolves around her interest in intellectual discourse. "I have always wanted to be an intellectual, I love the idea of the intellectual life" she announces.
WORDS such as "bohemian", "intellectual" and "philosophical" dominate her conversation. Mary Kenny's exceptionally mobile face changes, one moment looking quite worn, almost defeated, the next like a girl, particularly if she smiles.
While Catholicism is commonplace in Ireland, in England it appears to hold some social cachet. Is she aware of this? "Well, English Catholicism is held with some snobbery, but Irish Catholicism is a totally different thing." But then she sounds very English herself. Mary Kenny looks momentarily upset, almost wounded. "Do I? Well, I do, I've been living there so long. But I'm Irish and I have never lost touch with Ireland."
Many of her comments are prefaced by comments delivered in French - she is nearing the completion of a BA degree in French at Birbeck College and is delighted. "So good to have to read some French Renaissance poetry at night, it helps balance the journalism." It is difficult to ignore the sneaking sense of being in the company of a woman happily improvising a part in a play yet to be written. She could be hostessing a salon, except at present she is being interviewed.
Intent on feeding the photographer, she then begins to tend to the reporter. Sausages are offered and are soon cooking in the small kitchen. Traffic roars by on the narrow street below. It is a sound she likes. Mary Kenny, however, does not endorse the current journalistic habit of referring to women by their last names. Busily preparing to feed her guests, she expresses her pleasure in her newly acquired Dublin base, an as yet sparsely furnished apartment overlooking Kildare Street.
Currently painted a definite pink - "no, it's not the colour I had expected" - the sitting room appears to be braced for the onslaught, waiting for the Kenny clutter which is bound to accumulate. The books have already begun to fill the shelves. It seems as if a stately period clock should be ticking away on the marble mantlepiece as yet occupied only by family snapshots and a statue of the Infant of Prague. The Mendelssohn violin concerto is playing at a very low volume. Breakfast wafts across the room.
Tea appears in a china teapot dedicated to the life and work of Charles Dickens. The china teacups and saucers are genteel, as is Mary Kenny. Well used to public speaking and broadcasting, she speaks slowly and deliberately, her delivery has a modified theatricality, and for an opinionated character is surprisingly non combative. For a moment I have to remind myself she is not an actress about to discuss her career. The woman once described as "a fast talking babbler" with exhibitionist tendencies, has settled down, in every way - except, of course, for her clothes.
REMEMBERED by an earlier generation of Irish people as the condom waving member of an otherwise sombre, if defiant, group of pioneering feminists who boarded a train to Belfast in order to bring a bulk load of the then illegal condoms to the Republic, she publishes a new book next week. If it were a memoir, her contemporaries would be rushing out to buy it, if only to relive a common past.
Goodbye To Catholic Ireland is a general social history, intended, she says, not so much as a defence of the Catholic church in the face of the many scandals which have threatened its status in an increasingly secularised Ireland, but more as a reminder of the vital role the church played when the people were faced with nothing aside from the traditional enemy, England. No, not the type of book one might expect a Daily Express columnist to write.
"I think it is wrong the way commentators describe Catholicism as anti intellectual. It is simply not true. I want my book to be there so if the French cultural minister arrives in Dublin and asks what kind of a place is this he can take up my book and find out. Also as one gets older there is this need to leave behind something that you knew all about. Catholicism was narrow minded, but it was never insular."
Aware that some observers have tagged her as a turncoat, Mary Kenny accepts the criticism in a thoughtful, unoffended way. "Motherhood makes you change. It makes you softer. I was very hard in my twenties. The things I rebelled against begin to be very attractive when you have a child and you want to protect this tiny creature from everything. When I became a mother in my thirties, I suddenly felt like calling for the return of censorship." She does not like being described as a born again Catholic. "As the French say, I am Catholic, but I am not a fanatic, I go to Mass most Sundays, but I certainly don't go every day.
Far from fanatically trying to convert her listener to Catholicism, she seems to have a more relaxed attitude than she is given credit for. She is determined however to win new readers for the Catholic Central Library in Merrion Square. "You have to join - if they don't get new members, they will close." One of the best sources for her book was the Irish Messenger Of The Sacred Heart magazine and she speaks at length of, the role that magazine played in the lives of many Irish people, "even the soldiers when they were away".
NOW 53, she has been a born again conservative for more than two decades and repeatedly refers to herself as an older woman. "I constantly find myself nowadays in the role of the older person advising the young. I suppose they see me as a bit of an old hippy who's also an old traditionalist. Once you are no longer active in the sexual marketplace you have a far greater freedom for developing different kinds of intimacies with men," she says. Sitting on the floor, she leans back on her heel and decides: "Yes, I like men. It may be because I have two sons, but I find I have a tender feeling for men. Yes. I'm sure it's the mother in me. She has been married to Richard West for 23 years and the eldest of their two sons appears set to become a good historian.
"I'm so glad. He is fulfilling all my intellectual ambitions."
For all her Catholicism, she agrees she is much more Jewish in her manner, particularly in her determination to dispatch food to visitors. "I'm a real Jewish mother. I tend to want to take over. My sons won't tell me about their private lives, I think they are scared of me knowing too much." Irish men, are, she says "frightened of women. They are surrounded by mothers. Mother Ireland, Mother Church, their own mother. No wonder they all want to run away.
Aside from career stresses born of her ambitions and which she seems to have brought on herself, even to the point of trying to work at home with a toddler playing under the table she was writing on, Mary Kenny has had problems. Years of heavy drinking eventually led her to seek help. "I stopped drinking six years ago, I also used to smoke 60 cigarettes a day. I've stopped that as well. I think my mother's prayers helped me stop drinking. She knew all about it." Her mother, who came from Co Galway, died at 87, in 1989. "We became much closer in later years." She says she has often experienced unhappiness in her life.
As for marriage, she believes: "it is good for the character." Of her husband, she says: "he is an eccentric, an English eccentric." Mary Kenny is more practical than she would care to admit. She merely looks eccentric.
HAVING been a late youngest child, arriving as the unexpected last baby of four after a gap of almost 11 years, she says: my mother was not delighted. No. In fact she was horrified. She was 42 and had gone through most of her thirties without having another baby. It was very hard for her. My father on the other hand was 67, he was delighted. Enchanted." He died when Mary Kenny was five, leaving her mother to raise her alone. "I was a little show off, it was only when I was about five or maybe seven that my mother began to like me. But it was very hard for her coping with a small child."
There are two large photographs in oval frames resting against the wall: a youngish woman and a middle aged man in Edwardian dress stare out of them. The couple look as if they are from another time. "They are my parents. They were sweet, so kind, too kind, rather absent minded. They were really very good to us." After one of her many thoughtful pauses, she adds: "I'm not sure they were cut out to be parents." Her father had been born in 1877, five years before James Joyce. He was an interesting character, a Hispanic scholar and lecturer in Romance languages at the University of Santiago. "I would have loved to have known him. At one time he was training to be a Jesuit. He benefited greatly from the education."
As a child she was "indulged, spoilt, allowed to run wild". The family home was in Ballsbridge, Herbert Road. "Here, I have a picture of the house. Lovely isn't it? It is a bit like the house we live in London. Actually, it's a flat. Our home in London looks very pretty from the outside. Inside it is rather falling down. But my family home is part of the Mount Herbert Hotel now. Rather sad." What of the girl who was expelled from Loreto Convent in St Stephen's Green? She laughs and says she was very wild. "I had to go - leave school I mean. I was out of control." She does not complain about the school, where she says her English teacher might have told her her essays read more like "cheap journalism, not English prose" and is probably rather taken with being able to say she was expelled and remarks with the slightly distracted air which at times interrupts her habitual concerned expression. "I hear from my nieces it is a very fine place. What did I do when I left school? I mean, when I was asked to leave? I learnt shorthand and typing."
BY 18 she was on the way to France, to work as an au pair. "The family was Catholic, but they spoke so openly about things not spoken about here. I remember at a meal, the writer Francoise Sagan was mentioned. The father then remarked who is she living with?' I was shocked." Her career as an au pair did not last. "God no, I wasn't much good and they, the family, kept reminding me of this wonderful German girl they had had, who did everything and was very good at cleaning." She stops for a moment as if to reconsider her former employers. "That family, yes, it was quite a shock for me. They were rather aggressively atheistic." Was she?
"No, I was never an atheist. Catholicism may have gone quiet in me - and it did. I had no interest in it for a long time. But, you know, it didn't let go of me. Are you a spiritual person?" It is a habit she has. Mary Kenny sees an interview as a trade off. Once she answers a question, she feels obliged to ask one, and her concerned expression intensifies.
By the time she arrived in London she seemed to know she wanted to be a journalist and how to become one, claiming to have "talked my way into it". Her secretarial skills must have helped. By 1966 she was writing for the London Evening Standard. Her return to Ireland in the late 1960s saw her working for the Evening Press, where she became woman's page editor.
During that time she also became a founding member of the Irish feminist movement. Her wild behaviour was in marked contrast to the more deliberate approach of her fellow feminists, many of whom were worried that Mary Kenny's antics might undermine the dignity of their cause.
"I left Dublin in 1971 because I was offered a good job in London. I know the women in the movement thought I had let them down. I know they thought I was selfish and ambitious. I can't deny it. I was always driven, I wanted to do well. I would have done anything to further my career. I went. They probably saw it as an act of betrayal." Looking back on that younger self, she says: "I was pretty terrifying and I was rather sexually aggressive." Her career included spending 19 years as a columnist on the Sunday Telegraph. "But I wasn't staff, I was always freelance. I left last year because of this offer from the Daily Express. Finally I have a staff job. Well, I am rather a senior citizen now. Part of what I have to do is represent the paper at functions and the like. The paper itself is changing." She also writes for the Tablet.
Asked for her thoughts about spending a life in journalism, she says: "it's a bit like Moliere said about being a harlot. First you do it for love. Then for friends and finally for the money." Evaluating herself as a journalist, she says: "I have made a modest talent go rather a long way. But if there is one quality I have which I think is essential for a columnist, it is my world view. I have always had an ability to see beyond the narrow. I think that is very important, don't you?"
