Long before he wrote the haunted short story Maurice Kennedy hated Christmas, and he was at pains to make this clear to his long-suffering family. In a good year the announcements started with Advent. In a bad year soon after Halloween he would remind us that he was having nothing to do with Christmas this time, wanted no presents, and would be giving none.
Each successive stage of Christmas preparations was greeted with groans and head clutching. We could enjoy Christmas however we liked, he would remind us – as he stitched up the stuffed turkey with carpet needle and button thread – but he was having nothing to do with it this year.
His three urban children were entertained with tales of his own country childhood in a small village, and the long seaside summers in Youghal, but strikingly there were never Christmas tales – and maybe there never were any for his splintered family.
My grandparents were living in lodgings when their first child was born. The baby was sent temporarily to Limerick, to two spinster great-aunts living with their mother: the opinion of the two young women, one the soul of kindness, one very much not, is not recorded and was probably not asked. When my grandmother got a village school to run and a cottage with it, she looked forward to the infant’s return. The aunts said the old woman was very fond of the baby, he would not be coming back, and he never did.
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Maurice and his sister Angela, born a few years apart but close as twins, were too clever for their own good: both won scholarships and were exiled from the village, Angela to Youghal, Maurice a second burden on the aunts in Limerick. Both were broken a bit at being separated.
Summer brought them all together in the big shabby Youghal house, but they never really lived again as a family. Since the village was far from a train station, the weather vile, and their mother had only a few days’ break from the school, it strikes me as probable that they never again met up at Christmas. Whether or not that caused Maurice’s seasonal wretchedness, it was real: he looked physically ill as the first cotton wool snow fell in Pym’s shop windows.
Money was always short: his civil service job paid the mortgage for the big cold house in Rathgar, bought for a song when nobody wanted second-hand houses, but keeping it going swallowed every spare penny. We grew up hoping that cheques from The Irish Times, for his and our mother Val Mulkerns’s book reviews, would arrive in time to pay for holidays and birthday presents.
Literature – their short stories and Val’s novels – was a much less reliable paymaster. Nevertheless one year Maurice forced himself to write that guaranteed money spinner, a charming Christmas short story with a happy ending – but not for anyone who considered printing it. Two small publishing houses went bankrupt before it was published, one with it actually in type. A publisher died, a magazine foundered. The civil service review lost the typescript, despite his distinctive yellow flimsy paper. When the German translator, who found absurdly well-paid commissions for Irish writers, fell in the snow and broke her leg weeks after placing the haunted story, my father announced he was destroying every copy of it.
When Christmas morning actually arrived, Maurice would shuffle into breakfast in his slippers, carrying a bin bag of presents from whichever shop he could still bear to enter. Lenehan’s Hardware in Rathmines often supplied excellent flash lamps and watches, radios and fancy pens.
Once it landed there was no point in his dreading Christmas, and since there were cocktail sausages for breakfast, turkey and plum pudding to come, the living room fire lit by mid morning and a cat on the hearth rug, the films he could no longer face in a cinema on the telly, and his family circling around him, he was grumpily delighted with himself all day. Most years he produced indoor fireworks coughing out evil-smelling clouds of green smoke, from the joke shop beside the Gaiety, as a grand finale.
Long after he died – six weeks before Christmas – I did eventually find and read the haunted story, which appeared just once in that German magazine. It was indeed charming, it was about ... but no, for the sake of all your Christmases, really better not.
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