"Did You Once See Shelley Plain?" Dublin, The Bell, the Fifties

Toward the end of the school year I went over to Dublin to see my father, and one. hot, humid day at the end of June I suddenly remembered the exact location of The Bell office as I stood on O'Connell bridge to catch a breeze coming up river from the docks. The Liffey at low tide was sluggish, and smelled no sweeter than usual, but the breeze was invigorating and after a few breaths of it I decided to take a chance on finding Peadar O'Donnell in the office.

I well remembered that stuffy little place at the top of the narrow staircase of No. 14, Upper O'Connell Street. I remembered my first introduction to "close editing" by Harry Craig, when he reduced an early story of mine to half its length and greatly improved it, though I certainly didn't think so at the time.

When I knocked, Peadar said "Come in" with an abstracted air, and when I did he was standing still scratching his gray head in the middle of the chaotic office and, as though four hours instead of four years had elapsed since we met, he said, "Take a perch, child, and tell me what to do with all this."

"All this" was the tumbled papers, the dusty galleys hung layer over layer on the walls, and even hanging down from the heaps of back numbers on the window ledge. There was a general air of laissez-faire which, from the direction of Peadar's hopeless gesture, seemed to be concentrated on several heaps of (probably) unsolicited manuscripts from ever-hopefuls like me not so long ago. I gingerly edged away a pile of letterheads on the smaller of two tables to make a place for myself—presumably the perch to which he referred. Peadar paced the very small square of floor and ran his fingers across the white tufted eyebrows.

"What I'm in need of is a bit of help," he said. "The help I had has taken itself off to London."

I saw no point in beating about the bush. "Coincidentally, Peadar, what I need is a job. I'm thinking of coming home again from London, as it happens."

"Are you now?" said Peadar, raking me suddenly with the extraordinarily youthful-looking bright blue eyes. "Frank O'Connor said you wrote a good book." Question and statement were fused together in the guttural Donegal growl. He suddenly looked crafty. "How much could you live on in Dublin?"

"By that I take it you mean how little?"

"You're quick on the uptake, I'll say that for you." Peadar grinned suddenly, showing some of the tumbled hound's teeth, white still because he never smoked. "What's more important is, can you start at once? We can discuss minor matters later on. Come over to Bewley's for a coffee."

"Thanks, I will. If we do come to an agreement I could probably start the week after next."

"If the bailiffs haven't got here by then," said Peadar.

Peader was exceptionally generous in some ways, and country-cute in others. Instead of asking how much I could live on, an offer to match the salary of the last associate editor might have been more fair; but then this was a decade before "Women's Lib," and it was generally accepted that women cost less to hire than men. In fact, when it came, Peadar's offer suited me very well. I told him that one of the reasons I wanted to leave London was that, by the time I got home from work by the Underground in the evening, I was tired and disinclined to work hard enough on my new novel. If I could work at home on it in the mornings, when I came back to Dublin, and be in to The Bell office not later than two o'clock every afternoon, I'd stay on and work for as long as it took especially coming up to publication day. If I could do that I'd be...