Scottish Catholic Observer

‘Marie,” I shout. The trouble with being deaf is that you think other people can’t hear! Others just think you’re daft, because you don’t hear. You like to talk a lot then you don’t have to listen, which probably irritates others. “Marie [my all too patient wife] how do you spell seanachai?”

“What?”

“You know the Irish for storyteller!” The reason I need to know is because I must be a good storyteller. I tell unusual stories about the interesting people that I have been lucky enough to meet and frequently people have said ‘you must write about your memories.’ It is like a newspaper gossip column, alas, most about whom I tell stories are either dead or forgotten.

Communication is essential in life.  Today we are smothered with communications. There are limits to our mental filing cabinets, so as you get older you discard the short-term memories. So I indulged in the long-term variety and in September 2005 I started writing a book of ‘memories.’ No trouble at all, I am the best name-dropper in the world. By the end of the year I had written 20,000 words.

For a short time I resigned my title when Marie and I met the famous Irish/Scottish tenor Canon Sydney MacEwan, who had retired to Nazareth House nursing home in Glasgow. I realised then, that I only enjoyed amateur status in the art of name-dropping. Canon MacEwan wrote a fascinating book about his life as a priest in Scotland and as a world famous tenor On the High C’s—how the young Glasgow curate finally became the illustrious tenor. He was encouraged by no less than the even more famous Irish tenor John McCormack who told him to have his God-given voice trained. In all humility he told us how, late in life, he had been persuaded to abandon his vocal retirement for yet another tour of Australia, during which he apparently made enough money to help in the restoration of the fine Oban Cathedral in Scotland.

As for name dropping I could not match him: more than one Pope, JF Kennedy, Eamonn de Valera, prime ministers and a host of opera and theatre stars, whom he had met.

As we left, he reached into his umbrella stand at the door to show me a cane, the trademark of another great tenor, the Austrian Richard Tauber, who had given it to him.

God rest him, Sydney MacEwan is dead, so I have reclaimed the title of the best name-dropper.

When I get really geriatric Marie can play me some of our 78 gramophone records on our old wind up gramophone. There exist 185 of them with old labels of HMV, Columbia, Odeon etc. We even bought some replacement needles on a visit to Vienna. You have to change needles for each record and they are not readily obtainable! Sometimes a needle can get stuck in a grove of the record.

Repeat, repeat, something like this book, which is my excuse for it being untidy and informal and not chronological as it should be. It is purely personal memories, I do not aspire to write a history, it is more like the gossip column of a newspaper, or a peep through a          keyhole.

Sydney MacEwan brings to mind another brief Scottish reference. Helena Kennedy, a near neighbour of ours in London, once told us that when she was made a baroness and wrote to tell her mother she was going to the Lords, her mother read it as Lourdes and asked her to say prayers for her!

I visited Lourdes in 1964. Mary, my first wife, was on a visit to the USA, but Patrick aged eleven was with me. There was a lady in our Astoria Hotel, I can only remember her Christian name, Paddy. The life and soul of a party we had one evening in the hotel. I had hired a car and Patrick asked whether I would invite her two children to come out with us one day. I told him to ask Paddy, who said no.

She later explained to me that she could not tell Patrick, but her son was dying of leukaemia and was not to undergo any physical stress, but if I would see to it that he did not, she would be delighted. We then had a great day out. For me she was the miracle of Lourdes.

Hoping for a possible miracle, but not a trace of it in her behaviour. Shortly afterwards I had a letter from her brother Mgr Terence Stonehill, to say the boy had died.

The well-known Viennese Jewish author Franz Werfel, had fled to France, to escape Nazi persecution in his native Austria. Then in June 1940 France fell to the onslaught of Hitler and he fled to the South of France in search of refuge and in the hope of crossing the Spanish frontier. Thousands of others were in the same plight and shelter was difficult to find. He was told that he and his wife might find a roof in Lourdes. Werfel had only a superficial knowledge of its miraculous history. He hid there for several weeks during which time he became acquainted with the story of Bernadette Soubirous and the wondrous healings. One day in his great distress Werfel made a vow that if he escaped and managed to reach the shores of America, he would put off all other tasks and sing, as best he could, The Song of Bernadette.

I checked some of the contents of what I had originally written with my son, and my niece Bernadette Campion. Yes, they agreed, all very well if they knew the people I talked about. The sponsors of the idea of the book of memories included bishops, so I sent them relevant chapters. No reply, that tells a lot about the book or them.

The people I had written about were, or had been, newsworthy, some still are.

However the stories are about events, concerning them, that will hardly be known. So I have left them in. They are more like a peep through a keyhole.