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The Leader Interview..with Grace Wynne-Jones
"WE are, I believe, human beings, not human doings," says Grace Wynne-Jones, the author, journalist and environmentalist whose family roots lie deep in Curraghchase.
She is, she says, a great believer in the simple pleasures that life can offer. "I think we need to reclaim the ability just to be," she says with great enthusiasm. "Sometimes, it's just all about sitting there, with a cup of tea and enjoying the cup of tea."
And she has hopes that, in an Ireland less caught up with conspicuous consumption, with accumulation and with busyness, we might all re-learn the knack of just being, and of being in the present.
"Simple pleasures," she says with feeling, "are all about trying to make the best of the situation. Maybe we can reconnect with some of the things that were valuable to us."
But she is also excited about the possibilities that could emerge from our current economic chaos. "I am very interested in the sustainable economy, the new economy, in encouraging community. It is the quality of life in the end that is important."
"People are getting quite inventive," she adds. In her own experience she has come across people starting up community gardens, setting up swapping networks, trying to develop more sustainable projects. "Really, it's all grist to the mill," she says with a smile in her voice.
In her own work and life, she has demonstrated her own ability to be inventive, to re-invent herself and to take on new challenges. At different times – and in places as far apart as California, South Africa, England as well as Ireland – she has temped, worked as a personal assistant and in administration, written and researched for Fortune magazine, worked on newspapers, worked in publishing and PR and for six years, in the musical department of RTE. Now, she mixes radio broadcasts with freelance journalism, gives writing courses and is interested in things of the spirit and in healing. And of course, she is the author of four novels – Ordinary Miracles, Wise Follies, Ready or Not? and The Truth Club – all written over a twelve-year period. And it is her interest in people that drives her books.
"As a writer, I make great friends with my characters. My novels are very much character-led, " she explains. In Ready or Not, for example, there is a character Eva, whom at first I regarded as a rather nice, elderly lady but who informed me she was a very much more complex person indeed."
And true to this more complex character, Eva, as the story unfolds, departs on a major adventure. Another unexpected development came when Eva's husband Jim took to living in a garden shed. And while that at first seemed implausible, Grace felt she had no option but to go with the evolution of her characters.
She does not, she admits, have set times for her writing. "I sort of fit it in when I can." But she is assiduous in making notes. "It is the little details that make a story true – the way a button on a particular cardigan will snag on a door, for example." If you note that, or can include a similar detail which people will recognise, it lifts the story, to Grace's way of thinking.
"I always say, your books need to grow with you," she continues. "My first book, Ordinary Miracles went to a bidding war. I was so thrilled that I had written a novel, but then after signing a contract, I found I had to write another novel," she says with a laugh.
"There was a big learning curve there. But I do really think writing is a great teacher. It's the actual writing that is going to teach you."
But she adds the caution: "You have to tell your inner critic to take a break when you are doing your first draft. Otherwise you will start saying to yourself… who would want to read this? You have to say to this inner critic - could you please just come back when I am doing the editing?"
"The wonderful thing about writing is you realise you are many people," Grace goes on.
As people we have huge access to knowledge about life, she elaborates but the trick is to get it down and to make it live. "And as Evelyn Waugh says -you sometimes have to modify the truth to make it plausible."
Grace likes humour, both in life and in her writing. "I love the humour that comes out of ordinary life," she says with conviction.
But for all that she stresses that she has had to hone her craft, writing has always seemed a most natural human function to Grace. (Her first book, "a self-published affair with a print run of one" was written at the age of eleven and was rather gloriously called "Tales for Everyone", which, she jokes now, it was anything but).
And of course, writing has a long tradition in her family – going back decades to the poet Aubrey de Vere who was in the same literary circle as Tennyson, Wordsworth, Carlyle and Cardinal.
"I was brought up in a house where writing was regarded as very normal. I got a lot of encouragement. I think the fact that Mum was a writer and Dad wrote educational books was a help. The typewriter in our house was kept very busy."
Her mother, Grace explains was Joan de Vere, the last child to be reared in Curraghchase – and she wrote articles on nature for the then Cork Examiner as well as writing two books, The Abiding Enchantment of Curraghchase and In Ruin Reconciled.
Earlier this month, Grace was invited, as a guest of Limerick City Library, to present a talk about her family and on her own life as a writer to mark Library Ireland Week – and she used the occasion to quote at length from her mother's books.
"The book In Ruin Reconciled was an early memoir, about her early childhood," Grace explains. "She was only a tiny child when she went there - she was actually adopted into that family by Stephen de Vere and his wife Isabel who was the daughter of Bishop Moule of Durham"
Stephen de Vere was a judge, and the family spent periods of time abroad, in Kenya, the Seychelles and elsewhere but "Curragh" as the house was called then was home, the place to which they returned as if to a cocoon. The child Joan was not always taken on these postings and spent quite a lot of her childhood with her grandmother at Curragh and it is this childhood which is recalled in "In Ruin Reconciled". In the book, recalled and written in old age, she recreates the rooms of Curragh, describing furniture, paintings and ornaments, and in particular describing her nursery and the dolls she played with in every detail. But she adds other telling details too.
"In the Big House, when I knew it, cold was ever-present in the winter and it is one of the most vivid memories of my childhood," she writes. "Chilblains also were a torment, even when rubbed with a cut onion which was guaranteed as a cure."
One particular bedroom, the Green Room, in which she slept as a child is remembered thus: "It was well know that this room was haunted but it was felt that a child sleeping there would have a calming effect. Almost every night I would be kept awake by continual and peremptory knowck at the door which ceased only when I sat up in bed saying "come in". Nobody ever did. Sometimes there were mournful groans and sighs coming from behind a cupboard."
But as her daughter Grace explained to her Limerick audience, the accidental fire of 1941 abruptly ended domestic life at Curragh – and it is now only through Joan de Vere's books that we know anything of it. "She did give a real sense of how it had been," Grace says.
"I wasn't born when the fire took place but we used to go there on visits and Mum would tell us all sorts of tales. One was about two servants she met but discovered later they must have been ghosts. She used to hear noises… but always felt it was a very benign house. She felt there was an enchantment about the place. It was very special."
"Mum adored the grounds. We would go to the pets graveyard, to the wishing seat . And then there were lots of pictures of her and of Dad taken there. She was very involved in helping Curragh through the years, and was thrilled when it was taken over, and then developed into a forest park, as was the whole family."
Grace, who also felt the place as somewhere "mysterious and intriguing" now has a dream of reproducing some of her mother's memories of Curragh in a booklet form. "I was amazed so many people knew so much about Curragh," she says of her visit back to Limerick. But because so many people now visit Curragh in its latter-day transformation as Curraghchase Forest Park, Grace feels many of them would like to know more about the house which now stands, roofless but still imposing. "The house is gone but from a distance you almost feel you can enter there," Grace says. A booklet, which would be affordable, would give added pleasure, she feels, but could only be done if some kind of sponsorship was available.
Grace herself grew up in the shadow of the Ballyhouras and the Galtees, first in Ballyorgan and later in Knockainey where her father, Martin Wynne-Jones, was the Church of Ireland rector. "Since there weren't many Protestants in the area, he sometimes played LPs featuring hymns sung by the choir of St. Martin in the Fields in the local church. Passers by who did not know about the recordings must have been amazed by the choral grandeur…given that there were usually just a few cars and the odd bicycle outside the church during the services," Grace recalls. The only daughter in a family of five, her love of the countryside and of ponies stems from those early years and from visits to Curragh.
But she remembers laughingly and with affection her first brush with a somewhat more glamorous side of rural. On a visit to family friends, the Griffins in Newbridge, she went dancing in Rathkeale and found herself nominated in the Princess of Desmond contest – and indeed, walked away with the title that year. It was, she says almost with a giggle, something to really boast about when she returned to boarding school in Villiers.
Home today is in Bray, Co Wicklow, in her little house which she loves. "But I am someone who likes going away every so often," she adds.
She has, she says, "notes for my next book but no title yet". But she is not rushing the creative process. The book will come in its own time. And besides, there is so much to be getting on with in the meantime. Including that cup of tea in the garden that is begging to be enjoyed.
(Grace Wynne-Jones' four novels are published by Accent and her website is www.gracewynnejones.ie)
Fact-file
Family: Daughter of Martin Wynne-Jones and Joan de Vere, Grace has four brothers, David, Patrick, Aubrey and the late Vere.
Education: Kilmallock, St Michael's, Limerick and Villiers, Limerick, Trinity College.
Favourite Book: From among a great many favourites, Howard's End by EM Forster
Favourite Film: How to make an American Quilt, if I have to choose only one.
Favourite Food: Chocolate but only because I eat more of it than of my other favourite, Vietnamese spring rolls.
Favourite Holiday Destination: The Red Rock Country of New Mexico.
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