All of These People: A Memoir. Fergal Keane

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Название All of These People: A Memoir
Автор произведения Fergal Keane
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Серия
Издательство Биографии и Мемуары
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007347612



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       All of these people

      A Memoir

      Fergal Keane

      

       For My Parents

      Table of Contents

       Cover Page

       Title Page

       Dedication

       CHAPTER SEVEN The junior

       CHAPTER EIGHT Local Lessons

       CHAPTER NINE Short Takes

       CHAPTER TEN Into Africa

       CHAPTER ELEVEN The Land That Happened Inside Us

       CHAPTER TWELVE Cute Hoors

       CHAPTER THIRTEEN North

       CHAPTER FOURTEEN Marching Seasons

       CHAPTER FIFTEEN Visitor

       CHAPTER SIXTEEN A Journey Back

       CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Beloved Country

       CHAPTER EIGHTEEN People Are People

       CHAPTER NINETEEN Limits

       CHAPTER TWENTY Valentina

       CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Witness

       CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Consequences

       P.S.

       About the author

       From Our Own Correspondent

       LIFE at a Glance

       Top Ten Favourite Books

       A Writer’s Life

       About the book

       In the Bone Shop of the Heart: Writing All of These People

       Read on

       Have You Read?

       If You Loved This, You Might Like…

       EPILOGUE A Last Battle

       INDEX

       ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

       About the Author

       Praise

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       PROLOGUE

      Early in the new year, 2004, I was due to meet a friend for coffee in Chelsea. As I waited an elderly man entered and went to the front of the line. I felt a flash of annoyance and tried to attract the attention of the staff. ‘He’s jumping the queue,’ I said. But nobody heard me. The manager came and showed the man to a table. He turned, slowly, and I looked into the face of my father.

      In the fourteen years since his death he had not changed.

      My father did not recognise me but I knew him: those poetic lips, the melancholy vagueness of the old king fighting his last battle, the same shock of greying black hair, the thick-rimmed glasses, the tweed hat and scarf I gave him once for Christmas, the aquiline nose – the Keane nose! Crossing O’Connell Bridge in Dublin one day Paddy Kavanagh had turned to my father, his friend, and remarked: ‘Keane, you have a nose like the Romans but no empire to bring down with you!’

      The man in the coffee shop was not, of course, really my father, but it was his face I saw. After being seated at a table near the window he had begun to talk to himself. I heard him. An English accent – upper class, not at all like my father’s. ‘I want to admire the magic,’ he said, and made a grand, kingly gesture, waving his hand. The manager laughed.

      They both laughed. It was the kind of language Éamonn, my father, would have used. Expansive. I want to admire the magic…

      This book began as an attempt to describe my journalistic life and the people and events which have shaped my consciousness. I had come through several traumatic personal experiences and arrived at middle age – a time when men often collide with their limitations and feel the first chill of mortality. I needed to take stock of where I had come from, examine the influences which had formed me, and to look at where I might be going. There were also certain resolutions to be made in the