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Out of The Mental
This time four years ago I was at the launch of a book of photographs in Downpatrick. Martin Meehan was there and David Trimble was there - and ignoring us. In a narrow corridor former RUC Chief Constable Jack Hermon squirmed as he had to squeeze past we untouchables. There were former loyalist prisoners, some minor royal figure, lots of local personalities, including musicians and artists also present. The man who had managed to bring us all under the one roof was a man like no other - Bobby Hanvey. Bobby is Downtown Radio’s Ramblin’ Man who has interviewed hundreds of people across the North. The book he was launching that night was ‘Merely Players – Portraits from Northern Ireland’.
Bobby is hard to designate. Born a Catholic in Fermanagh, he moved to Downpatrick in 1966 to work as a male nurse in Downshire Mental Hospital. He was involved in the early civil rights days but his politics are impossible to pigeonhole. Indeed, they are strange. He likes Ruairi O Bradaigh, dislikes the Irish Republic, counts Lady Sylvia Hermon among his friends, and wrote ‘On Boyne’s Red Shore’ (in the style of a traditional Orange tune) whilst the lead vocalist with Houl’ yer Whist. In the seventies he made some of the only recordings of many traditional singers, which he has preserved, including a rare one of the late Tony McAuley singing ‘Slieve Gallen Brae’. His last book of photographs was ‘Police Stations & People’ which documents the RUC exiting the public scene.
Okay, a certain tendency seems to be emerging, yet, Bobby Hanvey is owned by no one and is his own man.
Last week, again in Downpatrick, with some of the usual and even more unusual suspects present, J.P Donleavy relaunched Bobby’s novel ‘The Mental’, which was first published and sank in 1997. No mainstream publisher or distributor took on this bawdy, brave and touching book which he wrote as part therapy whilst going through a stormy period in his private life, including divorce. On both occasions it has been published by Wonderland Press, sponsored by the promoter Eamonn McCann.
In 1963 there was a young writer, John Kennedy Toole, who wrote a hilarious novel called ‘The Confederacy of Dunces’. Over many years he failed to get it published and in a fit of depressioin committed suicide in 1969. His mother believed in the book and persisted, looking for a publisher. When it came out in 1980 its brilliance was recognised and in 1981 John Kennedy Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
I mention that story because I have thought since first reading ‘The Mental’ six years ago that it was a good book, which deserved to be taken more seriously. I also believe it could be brilliantly adopted as a one-man stage play. Bobby Hanvey has now rewritten and expanded it. It is the story of young Hanvey from Brookeborough, his earliest fumblings and adolescent loves, and his work as a nurse in Downshire Mental Hospital until he left to become a photographer.
At school he recalls the teacher telling the class that, “Back in Russia, priests say Mass on the run.”
“‘Jesus, that’s some trick,’ I thought, ‘saying Mass and running at the same time.’”
After getting a dose of crabs at the age of fifteen he tells his local chemist that he got them off a toilet seat.
“‘Aye, that’s where they came from alright,’ he said.
“I said to myself, ‘He’s one stupid fucker.’”
He leaves home in search of work in 1966 and goes to Downpatrick where he becomes a student nurse. The descriptions of the patients and the several worlds, including hell, that they occupy, their needs and constant demand for attention, the sight of an old man eating his own faeces and maniacally laughing, are quite harrowing.
“Some were wearing those old Ebeneezer style nightshirts, which ended just below the knee, while others were stark naked. They were heading to the ‘churches and offices’, to the ‘farms and factories’ and to the ‘golf clubs and restaurants’. On their way, they would stop momentarily to gaze at their own reflection in countless windows. Then, as the outside darkness slowly gave way, the winter sun quickly wiped their images from each and every pane. All strands of society were here. There was no class distinction now.”
There is no doubt about it – nurses are close to angels. This could have been an occasion for talking about “how good I have been” but Hanvey confesses to his devilry and how it led him to infidelities and cuckoldings, and how a destructive passion led him to hurt a woman he particularly loved.
“I believed life was one long adventure and the energy I possessed at the time was something that God had given me forever. I had nursed the old and the infirm and sympathised with their condition, should they be bedridden, or just able to hobble about, and so you’d think having had such experience would have given me some insight into the future. But I still believed that infirmity, ill health and having to slow down, would never happen to me. These guys were just plain unlucky! At twenty-two I was bouncing without pain or ache and this was the way it was always going to be as far as I was concerned. No one had told me otherwise.”
Despite the book’s ribaldry there is a haunting melancholy to it. Close to the end he writes about going back to the old place and bumping into a nurse. She is uncannily like one of his former loves, and he realises that she is Sister O’Flynn’s daughter and that “the old magic had now filtered down into the new generation.”
She even recognises him and says that her mother often speaks about him.
He thinks: “Well what do you know, I mused. Imagine her calling me mister. I must be getting older by the minute…
“This old place, which once generated my energy, was now sapping it from me and taking it back again.
“Sadness, the emotion that sometimes keeps us alive, was coming at me like rain. It was like waiting for something that was never going to happen.”
This is a very honest, funny and sad book and I hope it results in ‘Mister’ Hanvey being recognised as not just a former nurse, a photographer, singer, but as an Irish writer of note and potential.
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© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison