Ysgol Jacob - First Welsh Talking Book

On Monday 28th March on the Glanfa Stage at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff the Welsh branch of the Royal National Institute for the Blind will launch the first ever Welsh language talking book. I'm happy to say that the title chosen is Ysgol Jacob, a translation of my novel Jacob’s Ladder.

I'm always pleased when a book of mine is translated into another language but I was delighted when Jacob's Ladder was rendered into Welsh because like the Welsh language movement itself, this is a book that concerns itself with identity and that's one of the main themes of my work.

As someone who grew up in London with Irish parents determined to maintain their ethnic identity and to pass on their pride in their heritage to their children I feel real solidarity with those people who are determined to see the Welsh language given the place in contemporary culture that it deserves.

Literature is something to which everyone should have access. That's why the cuts to library services that are taking place in parts of Britain at the moment make me feel so depressed. However, I'm cheered up greatly, and proud too, that through my book I am able to play a part in RNIB Cymru's initiative to increase access to those Welsh speakers who are visually impaired.

The Archbishop's Beard

Our Prime Minister, David Cameron, made a speech recently in which he suggested that multiculturalism has failed. He implied that this failure was responsible for the emergence of home-grown terrorism in the UK. He is not an unintelligent man but he comes from a very privileged background and his experience of the diversity of life is sadly limited.

Multiculturalism has been a great success in this country. Compare the relations between different ethnic groups in this country with that in the countries of mainland Europe, such as France where far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, who described the Nazi gas chambers as a ‘detail of history’, came second in the presidential election in 2002; or Italy where the grand-daughter of Mussolini, who has her own quasi-fascist party, declared in 2007 that all Romanians were criminals.

Of course, there are racial tensions in Britain, and there are people who make a living out of the culture of grievance. But you get people like that in every sphere. However, to make a link between these sorts of tensions and the growth of terrorism is quite unreasonable. Particularly when Mr Cameron makes absolutely no mention of our foreign policy, or the wars in which we have spent so much money and lost so many young men trying to arrange the political affairs of other countries to our liking.

The trouble is that David Cameron doesn’t have the kind of complex set of identities that many people experience in contemporary Britain. Consequently he feels threatened by them. Well I suggest there is nothing to be frightened about.

In my own way I am a product of multiculturalism. I was born in this country to fiercely republican Irish parents. I was brought up as a fervent Catholic who was taught by nuns that the best thing that could happen to England would be that it would be re-converted to Catholicism. In assembly we sang hymns like Faith Of Our Fathers, the final verse of which goes like this:

Our fathers, chained in prisons dark,
Were still in heart and conscience free
How sweet would be their children’s fate,
If we, like them, could die for thee

Now if that isn’t an incitement to martyrdom, what is?

Nowadays I see myself as more of a cultural Catholic. I like to think of it like this: if the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury were having a boxing match, I’d be shouting for the Pope. Admittedly, it wouldn’t be much of a fight. Unless the Pope started cheating and pulled the Archbishop’s beard. Now that I would pay to see.

In the same way, if Ireland were playing England at football I would be cheering for Ireland. Why? Because that’s my parents’ culture and I will never turn my back on it. Of course if England were playing France or Italy, it would be a different matter.

Identity is a complex and shifting arena. It is at the heart of so much of our art, literature, music, fashion and cuisine. For centuries this country has been fashioned from multiculturalism. That’s one of the reasons I love it and it’s why I would not want to live anywhere else.

Formation Boyishness

From time to time I’m invited into schools to talk to children about being a writer . Often I’m surprised by the perceptiveness of the questions that children ask. However, there is always some boy who wants to know what car I drive. It’s a question that invariably returns me to the contradictions of my childhood.

Women rightly complained about gender roles in the second half of the twentieth century but being a boy wasn’t all that great either. There was a very clear norm that you were meant to measure up to and I never seemed to get anywhere near it.

This norm was reinforced at Christmas and on birthdays by appropriate gifts. Well-meaning adults would often give you toy cars. I remember turning up at a cousin’s birthday party and being shown into a room where about a dozen little boys, in a display of formation boyishness, were eagerly ‘driving’ model cars around the walls of the room, making revving noises in their throats.

Seeing me standing there, my cousin, a kind-hearted soul, came over and held out his car to me. ‘Do you want to have a go with mine?’ he asked. He pointed out the make and model of the car which were obviously a matter of some prestige. But I shook my head. I was entirely indifferent to the hierarchy of automobiles.

Not that I was unmoved by the delights of motion and speed, however. I just didn't need a machine to achieve it. Regularly at night I dreamt that I could fly, soaring high above the rooftops and chimneypots of East London, gazing down on the streets below as though they were no more than a picture in a story book.

The sensation of flight seemed so real that when I woke I had difficulty believing that I couldn’t do it in real life. Indeed, I would often pass the time as I walked to school, frowning earnestly as I concentrated on trying to leave the ground.

The nearest I can get to flying nowadays is when a story has taken off and the writing is powering itself. My fingers race across the keyboard and there seems to be hardly any space between thought and the words that spring to life on the screen.

But I still haven’t managed to summon up any real interest in cars. When I reply to the enquiry about which car I drive, it’s always a disappointment. The boy with the question had clearly expected something altogether more flashy from a writer, who is surely supposed to be some kind of celebrity. Invariably, he loses interest in me at this point and his eyes glaze over. No doubt, he is driving a vastly superior model round and round the walls of his mind.

My Parents Were Immigrants

There is a lot of fuss in the UK about immigrants at the moment. This is because (a) we are in a recession and people are looking for a handy scapegoat and (b) there is a general election coming up and it’s a useful lever for manipulating public opinion.

The general feeling seems to be that there are too many immigrants in Britain and the government needs to place more restrictions on them. In this one-sided debate very little mention is made of the fact that our public services are being held together by immigrants, or that immigrants are doing many of the jobs that indigenous British people don’t want to do, like working in the food-processing industry.

My parents were immigrants. They came to Britain because there was no work in their own country. They were not warmly received. My mother told me that when she went looking for accommodation she repeatedly came across signs that read, ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.’

As the child of immigrants I was always conscious of how my parents saw a different reality to other people. The world around them was less real than it was for me. Beneath the thin and shabby world in which they earned their money, glittered the more substantial geography of Home, just out of reach.

I grew up listening to sentimental songs about people leaving home, dreaming of home, returning home. But for me there was no such thing as home. My parents’ country wasn’t home but neither was England. Home was something I had to carve for myself out of my imagination. It’s a project I’m still working on.

Whenever the voices of those who feel with complete certainty that this is their country begin to be raised in righteous indignation, I always think of my parents, keeping their heads down, working hard. My father, whose name was Jack, putting up with being called Paddy by everyone he worked with. My mother cleaning the altar in her local church, taking her troubles to God.

What no shamrock, Brian?

St Patrick’s day is a festival that has lost its way. When I was a child it did not mean, as it seems to do now, even for those who have no connection with Ireland, going to a bar and getting hammered. Instead it was about asserting our Irish identity. All day long we wore the shamrock which had been sent over to us, packaged in damp cotton wool, by our relatives in Ireland.

We did so with defiance because it inevitably meant running the gauntlet of insults at school since being Irish was not cool then, as it seems to have become now. IRA bombs were going off at regular intervals. Irish people, far from being lovable comedy rogues with sexy accents, were, at best, the butt of jokes about the famous stupidity of the Celt, at worst the hate-filled Muslims of the nineteen seventies.

All that has changed. March the seventeenth has become a festival of drink, a part of the marketing strategy of Guinness. It has been annexed by politically correct councils who feel it is appropriate to spend council tax payers' money promoting Irish cultural events but who would never dream of using the same funds to promote events on St George’s day. It does not belong to the Irish any more. It is simply another stop on the global cultural bus route.

Where Do You Belong?

Linda Grant was on the radio the other day discussing her novel, When I Lived In Modern Times. It’s a terrific book in my opinion. Set during the early days of the state of Israel, it describes the way that identities shift and re-form as people from the most diverse backgrounds are melded together by history.

When asked about her own identity, Ms Grant said, ‘I never really feel at home wherever I am’. Later in the interview she said that American Jews don’t really consider English Jews to be properly Jewish because they speak with ‘a la-di-da accent’. I don’t know whether this is true or just Ms Grant’s paranoia but it made me smile.

When I was at school in East London we would have football matches with the Irish against the English and, of course, I was in the Irish team. At secondary school I was once publicly rebuked by a teacher for pronouncing the word this as dis, ‘like an Irish tinker’.

However, when we went to Ireland each Summer for our holidays, I was always described as the English cousin. Indeed, in the village where my father lived I was once spat at in the street and called ‘Dirty English’ by a complete stranger. So, like Linda Grant, I felt at home nowhere.

I still feel like that to a great extent but a couple of things have happened in the last few years to make me feel that perhaps I belong somewhere after all.

The first was that someone who was visiting me from the north west of England wanted to know whether his car would be safe parked outside my house. I thought at first that he was joking but I soon saw from his manner that he was genuinely very nervous about leaving it there.

Then a writer who lives in the north east of England was coming to London to talk to me. I suggested meeting at the British Library near Kings Cross station. She sent me an email saying that she had heard bad things about Kings Cross and wondered whether it would be a safe place to meet.

I was describing these reactions to a friend, who said, ‘Yes but they only seem silly to you because you’re such a Londoner.’ And I suppose she was right. I’m not scared because this is my territory.

At the end of the interview Linda Grant admitted, a little sadly, that one of the few languages her work had not been translated into was Hebrew. I immediately thought of the same friend who had confidently assured me that I was a Londoner. Though English-born, her mother had been Irish and she had spent long periods in Ireland as a child but had been living in London for many years. Recently she sent me an email in which she just had to tell me that she had been described by a newspaper as an ‘Irish writer’. I think that if she had sold the film rights to her novel she could not have been more pleased.