The Suitable Man with the Monocle

Dad,

by Aubrey Malone

(Penniless Press Publications, £.7.99; a print-on-demand book from the publisher Ken Clay at pennilesspress.co.uk; for residents of Ireland, through aubreypmalone@hotmail.com; or locally at the Book Stand, Tone Street, Ballina, Co. Mayo, F26 VF30; tel.: (096) 60370.)

Aubrey Malone will be familiar to readers as the film critic of this paper, though he is also well known as a writer and biographer. He intended this new book to be a portrait of his father, but in the writing it has I think turned into something far more significant: an account of a class of people who are rarely written about, rarely even considered by many people: the professional middle class people of a provincial town, in this case Ballina in Mayo.

As a nation, we seem to be obsessed with biographies of our great patriots, notable rogues, and even our saints occasionally. The ordinary people of Ireland, of whom the middle classes are by far the greater number, when one comes to think about are rarely thought of. But as the social historian Tony Farmar pointed out years ago, it is these people who are the true spine of the nation, who provide for the most part our doctors, our dentists, and our solicitors.

Hugh Dillon-Malone was a solicitor, who had taken a decade to gain a law degree at Trinity College, established his personal practice in his native town back in the 1930s. He and his wife reared a gang of children, and lost others in infancy as well. Dad may have been an ordinary man in many ways, but he was also a man with a distinct character of his own. The photographs that fill this book, for instance, show him wearing a suit with a waistcoat to the beach at Enniscrone.

This was perhaps a little eccentric in the day – though in many photographs of the day in archives you will see people working on farms wearing part of suits: these were days before jeans and chinos, of course, so what else would a man wear.

But Hugh also sported a monocle, just like Bertie Wooster, Lord Peter Wimsey, or film actor Ralph Lynn. There was about his appearance a bit of the “silly ass”, but he was in fact no fool, but a man of quite genuine seriousness.

His son described for instance his appetite for the orange covered Penguins of the period, which filled a large part of one room in the family home. Though he also read other paperbacks as well, thrillers and adventure stories from Fontana and other firms.

But the “pictures” were his real passion. These days we tend to forget with all the talk of censorship and so on that Irish people were among the most frequent film goers from the 1930s to the advent of television.

From what we are told television, when it came, was less exciting, than those frequent evenings out. However, to the people of Ballina Hugh as a deeply conservative man – this too was in keeping with his class. He was deeply religious; priests were always coming to the house, and for them he would get out the decanter.  His boys had vocations too.

He did not care for Vatican II; or Pope John: his policies affected Irish priests; they didn’t know how to run parishes anymore, he would complain. “Religion is all ‘kindness to the cat’ since Vatican II came in … there was a time Rome spoke, now it only whispers”.

When the time came to retire, he closed his business – which he had in any case been running from the home, since his office burned down. He and his wife, now that their children were largely grown up and out in the world, retired to Dublin.

But after the small intimacies of Ballina he found the City of Dublin a disregarding place. His last years were fraught with illness and with a problem with drink. He found his beloved pictures were now “too smutty” – he no longer cared so much for them. Times were changing, but he could not change with them.

The last pages of the fade out into the experiences of the author. He was never a Dad himself, but he found himself deeply affected by the affairs of the family and the state of the nation; but cured it by writing.

This is undoubtedly a book worth reading, and worth pondering, as I say, for what it tells us about the Irish middle classes in the last century.