spoke unemotionally, as if the subject were a distant country of moderate interest she had once visited. But then came a thaw, and a runnel of information began to flow my way. This may have been due to a sense that if her father’s life was to be reduced to ink and paper, it was as well she had her say; but I think her openness really stemmed from an impulse to commemorate her recently deceased mother, with whom she had enjoyed very happy relations and whose finished life was inextricable from that of her husband and grand amour.
My mother disclosed small, pleasant things. For example: that Joseph would proudly instruct her – his eleven-year-old daughter finally returned from four years’ schooling in France – ‘Récite!’ and she would speak verses by Alphonse Daudet to gathered adults; that in the evenings he would take his daughters out on a rowboat in the sea (a boatman, and not Joseph himself, would man the oars); that he would take my mother for a spin in the car through the citrus groves or to the patisserie in Tarsus to buy baklava; that he bathed three times a day; that he read newspapers fanatically (often, wearing crisp pyjamas, in his bed: for an enterprising man, he was curiously idle), consuming six a day, morning and evening editions; and that Papa, whose suits were beautifully cut, always wore a clean white handkerchief in his breast pocket.
Amy also remembered little moments. When she was fifteen years old, her father saw her wearing a touch of mascara. He explained to her: ‘Let me tell you something. Girls who wear makeup do so because they need to. You have big brown eyes, so you have no need to wear make-up.’ Amy was very interested in my investigations into her father’s life, and she sent me documents and photos and suggested lines of inquiry. It seemed that for her, too, Joseph – who died, after all, when she was only twenty-one, and whom for years she’d only seen during school holidays – was obscured in a dimness out of which she wished to haul him. There was, naturally enough, an iconolatrous element to this desire, but there was also plain curiosity. My mother became curious, too – she was only twenty-three when Joseph died and, like her sister, had been away from home for much of her life’s short overlap with her father’s – and after a time her long reticence about her father largely disappeared. That reticence, my siblings and I had always vaguely sensed, had been expressive of a some kind of injury. The only paternal tort we could think of – apart from the unknown matter of our grandfather’s wartime activities – was Joseph’s refusal to permit my mother to pursue a university career. Equipped with a French baccalaureate, she desperately wanted to study medicine or law at a French university, but her father would not contemplate the expense: a young woman had no real business acquiring professional qualifications of that kind. Crushingly, the matter was not even debated. Although no Mersin women attended university at that time, it was probably not until my mother had graduated doctorandus in French from Leiden University in her thirties that she began to forgive her father his act of chauvinism.
In the event, Joseph did authorize Lina (Caroline) to go to London and take a bilingual secretarial course at a college in Dunraven Street, in Mayfair. My mother lived in The Boltons, a splendid address in South Kensington, in a hostel overshadowed by the mansion of Douglas Fairbanks Junior. In the mornings she would walk across Hyde Park to her college. She found London, with its stupendous fogs and polite, pin-striped pedestrians, strange and wonderful. She made friends, among them the about-to-be-famous model Jean Shrimpton, ate lunch at Selfridges, improved her English. She was not homesick. To keep in touch with home, she corresponded with her mother. ‘Did your father write to you?’ I asked her. ‘No,’ she said, ‘just my mother. Maman cared for the children – visited us at school, looked after our day-to-day needs. We were part of her domestic domain. My father’s domain was outside the house, at work, at the hotel. I had a very quiet childhood,’ my mother said. ‘I never recall my parents raising their voices at each other.’
My mother’s spell in England – which also included some months spent teaching conversational French at Tolmer’s, an obscure boarding school for girls near St Albans – was the finishing touch on an international upbringing. She attended Turkish primary school, and then, aged seven, went to boarding school in Lyon, where she did not see her parents for the best part of four years. For her secondary education, Lina was transferred to the Ecole Franciscaine in Aleppo, a convent school for girls. Schooling in Aleppo or Beirut was customary for the well-to-do Christian girls of Mersin. Its objective was to produce nice, comme il faut young women who would return home to excite the attentions of the resident young men – the Alberts and the Andrés and the Michels and the Henris – and fall sufficiently in love as to get married. They would speak French (with a distinctive Levantine accent) as their first language and Turkish (also with a distinctive Levantine accent) as their second. Their speech in both tongues would be unidiomatic and relatively unsupple, limitations reinforced by the spectrum of activities awaiting them: cooking expertly; supporting their husbands’ business exploits; bearing and raising children; throwing and going to tea parties and cocktail parties; putting up with the heat in the summer and the boredom in the winter; periodically voyaging to Europe and, once there, shopping – for shoes in Italy, silk scarves in France, chocolates in Switzerland, raincoats in England. My mother was not enthusiastic, when the time came, about leaving London.
However, when she returned in 1960, Mersin, its population grown to sixty-something thousand, was livening up. A new port had been built and all kinds of projects were in progress at the new industrial complex, Ataş. It was at Ataş that my mother found work as a secretary with the American construction company, Foster Wheeler. She made a good living and, most importantly, she met her husband.
The improbability of my parents’ union is of the kind usually associated with being whacked by a rock fallen from outer space. Even leaving geography out of it, Cork boys would appear to have little in common with Mersin girls; and Kevin O’Neill – monolingual, freckled from head to toe, teeth ravaged by blows received from hurling sticks and the negligent interventions of Cork dentists – was, on the surface, pure Cork. He had been sent to Turkey to lay the ground for a project which Chicago Bridge had undertaken, the building of a small oil refinery for Mobil Oil. It was a big job for a young man, particularly one whose only experience abroad was a short time spent in Germany. But my father was energetic and undaunted, and, sustained by the O’Neill trait of easiness and unfathomable confidence, he took to the task and to the town. For the first few months, he stayed at the best hotel in Mersin, the Toros, whose top floor was still under construction and whose owner, Monsieur Dakad, would pass days judicially supervising the works in a chair across the road, his casque coloniale firmly placed on his head. When the time came to adjudicate in the matter of the windows my father had smashed, Monsieur Dakad, although displeased, did not overreact. He heard out my father and then calmly, without reprimand, leaned across his desk and handed over an estimate for the repairs. He never spoke of the incident again – not even a year or so later, when my father again requested a private interview, this time to ask for permission to marry his eldest daughter, Lina.
Over the years there has been a seepage of stories about my parents’ courting days. My father would borrow a car and pick up my mother from her home in Camlibel. Oncle Pierre, still a teenager, would come along to chaperone his older sister. As soon as the car had turned around the corner, Pierre would jump out of the car and my parents would be free to drive where they pleased – along the coast, or up to the blissfully cool yayla (mountain retreat) of Gözne. Overlooked by a ruined castle and laced with streams, Gözne was a gorge dotted with rickety wooden houses that were barely visible in the thick greenery of oak, hawthorn, honeysuckle, myrtle, arbutus, jujube and Judas trees. Other times, Kevin would take Lina for a walk to the beach or along Atatürk Çaddesi, where the pavement was shaded by awnings of vine leaves and bougainvillaea. They were in love. In November 1961, they got engaged.
Joseph Dakad was unhappy about the match. He did not like the idea of his daughter marrying a foreigner and going away overseas. ‘She has only just returned from England,’ he complained to my father. ‘And besides, how do you propose to support her?’ ‘The same way that you’ve done,’ my father said. ‘By working.’ Joseph Dakad was not satisfied. He knew for a fact that his daughter had good values; but how could he be sure this Irishman shared them? What sort of family
