Gypsy and The Poet by Dave Kenny

Memories merge when I dream about my father. They wheel and clash like magician’s rings, intersecting, passing through each other, becoming linked together. Remote moments of our lives join up. Old age and youth, fights and truces, all loop and link where they should not. Places, times and faces are confused.

Sometimes when I dream of Ted, I see us sitting in Connolly’s barbers in Glasthule. It’s the mid-70s, I am 10 and he is old and near death. His hair and fingernails are long. He is wearing pyjamas. We don’t speak. Men never speak to each other in a barber’s queue. It’s one of The Rules. The barber’s voice is the only one allowed to play at full volume. The sheepish client waiting to be shorn answers questions at half volume. Irish men don’t like to be overheard. They don’t want to make gobshites of themselves.

Old man Connolly nods at me. I sit on a board on his chair. He chats and chops, winks and gives me two pence ‘hidden’ in a hanky. Dad watches me in the mirror. His dying eyes are wild, terrified.

Memories merge again. I am in my 30s. It’s February 1999. A dying decade is wheezing through its penultimate winter. My father too is breathing uneasily. He holds an oxygen mask to his face. He is in a nursing home, but he is the Ted Kenny of my childhood. He is wearing the face he should have worn in the barbers. He is young again and trying to tell me a story he has repeated many times before. How his mother met her lover. I listen, but only half-listen. Recently, I pieced the story together, gluing shards of memory and hard evidence:

James Crawford Neil slipped into the drawing room of No 3, Wharton Terrace, Rathmines. He was young, handsome in a Protestant sort of way, and always immaculately dressed. Almost always. Today, 20 August 1911, the elbows of his tweed jacket and his shirt-cuffs were soiled. He mumbled a few ‘hellos’ and tried to pick his way lightly through the earnest young artists – in that self-conscious way drunk people do. You know how it goes: the more you try to hide your drunkenness, the more pissed you look to others.

He stumbled past Countess Marcievicz, who was bayoneting the air with a Sweet Afton, recounting her protest at the Lord Lieutenant’s Ball: “Then I leaned down and scooped up a handful of ashes from the grate, and …” (she paused for dramatic effect), “...smeared it all down the front of my ball gown.” Applause.

Crawford Neil spotted a gap by the open window and lurched towards it, hoping the draught would dilute his whiskey-soured breath. His shoulder glanced off a figure standing by the curtain.

“Oh for God’s sake. Look what you’ve done to my dress.” The figure emerged from the curtain folds. She was holding an empty coffee cup. A beige stain spread across her gown. Crawford Neil rooted for a handkerchief, stumbling back into the curtain, as he turned his pockets inside out. Abbey actress, Patricia Walker waved him away and stamped out of the room.

The story should have ended there. Crawford Neil should have continued to drink himself to death and Patricia to build a career on the stage. However, Fate – like Patricia – had stepped out from behind the curtain. Crawford Neil was in love. He had toppled into the famous, deep- dark eyes that had earned Patricia the pet name ‘Gypsy’.

Gypsy, on the other hand, was most definitely not in love. She knew Crawford Neil to see. He worked at the National Library and attended the same literary evenings as her and her sisters. Neil was as famous for being a drunk as he was for his potential to be a great poet. She despised the pathetic sot that had spilt her coffee and ruined her evening.

It had taken her four days to make that dress. She never wanted to see him again. Fate took note of her wish and filed it away under ‘Revisit in Five Years’ Time’.

**************************

Gypsy and Crawford Neil’s first meeting may not have happened exactly like that. Marcievicz may not have been there, but the story about her protest is true. Gypsy often told my father about how she was present when the countess rubbed ashes into her dress. I found a postcard, dated Christmas 1915, among dad’s papers. It was from Marcievicz to my grandmother. They were good friends, it seems.

All the other elements about that disastrous meeting are accurate: the coffee, the drunkenness, Gypsy’s anger.

Ted told me the story so often that I absorbed it by aural osmosis. I wasn’t aware that I was absorbing it. I spent most of our life only half-listening to him. That’s the tragedy of most Irish father/son relationships: we speak to each other but we never talk. My father died in 1999, on March 10 – Gypsy’s birthday. Since his death, I’ve tried to flesh out the skeletal memories he left me of his family.

Gypsy’s actor/rebel family were Ascendancy Protestants who went native in the 19^th century, eventually Gaelicising their name to ‘Nic Shiubhlaigh’. Her older sister, Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh, was the Abbey’s first leading lady. The seeds of the Abbey Theatre were sown in the Nic Shiubhlaigh kitchen on High Street. On its opening night, there were five members of the family working on-stage and behind it.

Maire also led Cumann na mBan in Jacob’s in 1916. In 1956, Ted wrote up her memories of the Literary Revival and the Rising in a book called The Splendid Years. I read it for the first time after he died. It made me think of all the stories I had missed while only half-listening when he was alive.

There were tales of how my great grandfather, Matthew, was a close friend of Parnell and how he had lost all his money defending him in his newspaper, The Carlow Vindicator. There was the story of how Matthew (then 69) walked into the GPO in 1916 and printed The Irish War News – under fire – for Padraig Pearse. Matthew, who knew the Pearse family well, was also entrusted with his farewell letter to his mother.

There were other tales of 1916 and the War of Independence. Ted’s uncle, Bob Price, was great friends with Collins (I later discovered he was his Director of Organisation). Collins, like Pearse, McDonagh and Ceannt, were family friends and co-conspirators of the Walkers.

Of all the stories, the one that intrigued me the most was the impossibly romantic love story I half-heard over and over again. The story of Crawford Neil and Gypsy. I wanted to know how much of it was embellishment. The Kenny/Walkers were preternaturally modest people, but they were still actors. Actors like to embellish things.

In 2010, the National Archives put Census 1901 online. With its help, I began to uncover the foundation of Ted’s tales. I typed in ‘Matthew Walker’. Within minutes I was looking at my Great Grandfather’s handwriting on a census form.

My father said Matthew’s Fenian family lived in the house that Wolfe Tone had been waked in on – No 65 High Street/Merchant’s Quay. In Census 1901, Matthew has written either No 66 or 56. It’s close enough to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The form also says Matthew was born in Carlow and was a master printer. I have since found copies of his Parnellite paper. He definitely was a friend of The Chief’s.

The more morsels I uncovered, the hungrier I became for more information about Gypsy. I went to Census 1911. The family had moved to Rathgar, but Gyp was missing. I vaguely recalled talk of a shop in Dun Laoghaire. A few more clicks and Gyp popped up living in 111 Lower George’s Street – beside Michael’s Hospital. She was listed as a shop assistant. I had finally pinpointed Gyp to somewhere I have passed thousands of times. I could almost feel her physical presence.

I went looking for Crawford Neil and found him in Census 1901, living with his Presbyterian family on Merchant’s Quay – near the Walkers. Ten years later, according to Census 1911, he had moved to Drumcondra with his now-widowed mother. Crawford Neil was living on the northside while Gypsy was on the southside. This scrap of information is critical to their story. If only the Liffey hadn’t come between them…

I went to the attic and searched through my father’s papers, finding a bundle of long-forgotten letters. They were addressed to Gypsy from James. I opened one. It pulsed with longing. In it, my grandmother, the sad old woman I never knew, is a beautiful, yet “fickle and faithless” girl of 20. She is the dusky “dear soul” who haunts his verse.

The curtain slowly rose to reveal the young actress and the poet standing centre-stage once again after 96 years.

In 1911, the day after he spilled coffee over Gypsy, Crawford Neil woke “as usual, half dead with a horrible taste” in his mouth. Slowly, as his hangover cleared, he realised that something momentous had happened the previous evening. As he shaved in the wash stand beside his bed, he saw himself for the first time in years. The mirror reflected a man of 40, not 29. His eyes were sunken, black-ringed and haunted-looking. Like the fool in Pearse’s poem, he had “squandered the splendid years of his youth.” Today, Crawford Neil – poet, librarian and pacifist Republican – would quit drinking for good, convert to Catholicism and wage a war of attrition on Gypsy’s heart. They would become engaged. To achieve one of these ambitions would have been a laudable feat. Remarkably, James achieved all three.

His letters show his struggle with alcoholism. “Dearest soul … some days I don’t feel it is worth getting out of bed… Unhappiness is the price I pay for being good.”

They describe Gyp as the “perfect singer of his songs”. A rummage through my father’s papers turned up a book of music notation. Untrained James would play notes on the piano and Gyp would write his music down. It was the perfect excuse to be alone together.

They fought like wildcats too. James constantly reprimands himself for being jealous. “Some voice – is it God’s? – has called upon me to give my life and all its strength to make Gyp happy …”

There was physical passion. Gyp would “crush yourself into me” when they embraced. When she fed him rabbit stew, he playfully asked: “rabbits have the largest families in the beast world – and they have the smallest brains. What are you trying to tell me?”

In one letter, the following line stands out. “Give my affectionate regard to all for a happy, unshadowed Easter and remember that I am always, only yours, James”.

Easter 1916 was not ‘unshadowed’. Two days later, Matthew Walker walked into town to publish Pearse’s War News and Maire entered Jacobs. Gyp followed them but couldn’t get into a garrison. Instead she carried despatches for her friend “Charlie Burgess” – Cathal Brugha.

Crawford Neil was a pacifist and didn’t take part in the fighting. On Tuesday morning, April 25, he walked out to Glasthule where Gyp was resting up. That evening, she begged him not to cross the city. He refused, saying he was concerned about his mother. Gypsy fetched her bicycle and walked with him to Blackrock. They embraced and she “crushed herself into him” again. She didn’t sleep that night.

James wanted to avoid the violence on Sackville Street and crossed west along the quays to Liffey Street, near where Matthew and his sons were printing Pearse’s propaganda. Across the Liffey, Maire was taking food to the sniper on the roof of Jacob’s. My granduncle Frank was on the Green.

Crawford Neil was halfway down Liffey Street when he saw a group of children looting a sporting goods shop. He loved children. His first book, Happy Island Child Poems, was due to be published that year. I have a rare copy of that book here beside me.

He stopped to warn them of the danger they were in. One of the children was holding a new air rifle. It went off and a pellet stuck in James’ spine.

Word that he was missing reached Gyp the following day. She searched the city centre, fearing the worst. To her relief, she found him in good spirits in Jervis Street Hospital. She didn’t realise that the good humour was just to keep her spirits up. James was dying.

On May 9, the young poet. summoned the hospital chaplain and asked him to marry them. The priest refused. He said he would not perform a wedding where the bride would soon be a widow. Gyp never forgot those words. On May 10, James Crawford Neil died in the arms of his “dear soul”.

His contemporaries spoke of a sweet-natured man with the potential to be a great poet. History has forgotten him now. Gypsy never forgot. She hoarded his words. After she was gone, my father hoarded them.

In 1925, Gypsy married my granddad, another sweet-natured man called Eddie Kenny. They moved, with the rest of the Walkers, to Co Louth. She was never destined to have a happy ending, though. Nine years later, Eddie died of TB. Heartbroken Gypsy never loved again. My father, her only child, became her life and she faded into him.

I’m the last of our branch of the Kenny/Walkers. If I hadn’t searched Census 1901, Gypsy and James might have stayed lost in an attic. I would never have found them – or another letter that brought me back to my youth. It was from James to Gypsy and was addressed to 70 Glasthule Road. I’ve lived in Dun Laoghaire for 40 years and until I found this letter I had never known the exact location of the Walkers’ home during the Rising. Here was the address from which they set out do their duty for Ireland in 1916. Here was the last warm hearth James sat beside before meeting his fate.

It’s now a barber’s shop. The barber shop where dad and I used to get our hair cut. Where old man Connolly used to slip me two pence in a hanky. It’s across the road from where I went to school and next to the church where I was confirmed. I never knew I was so close to my father’s people.

I don’t know if dad knew either. I’m fairly sure he didn’t. He never mentioned it. If he did, I was only half-listening at the time.

I’ll never know.

(c) Dave Kenny 2012

Below a picture of the Walker family - Gypsy, I believe on her mother's knee.