In name of the father

Des Bishop’s new book celebrates his father’s role as a loving parent despite a troubled past, Richard Fitzpatrick reports.

LIKE many comics, Des Bishop has mined his life for stage material, most memorably perhaps in side-splitting descriptions of his battle with testicular cancer in 2000. With his family memoir he has taken revelation a step further.

Entitled My Dad Was Nearly James Bond, it tells the story of his father’s extraordinary life, Bishop’s troubled relationship with his parents, and ultimately how Bishop’s family, including his two brothers, came together in the last 15 months of his father’s life before he died from lung cancer in February 2011.

The bones of Bishop’s memoir are known to many, owing to his critically acclaimed stand-up show of the same title which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2010 and a subsequent documentary. The memoir, however, fleshes out the tale and in particular explores the shuddering saga of Des Bishop’s grandmother.

Mike Bishop, Des Bishop’s father, could have been a contender. He was a model and actor in the 1960s, a friend of Donal McCann, Richard Harris’s brother Dermot Harris and his wife Cassandra, who later married Pierce Brosnan, and others from the bohemian set of Swinging London. Indeed, he once cast for the part of James Bond, losing out to George Lazenby.

He turned his back on the vagaries of show business (and gave up alcohol) in the mid-1970s for family life, settling in Queens, New York where he raised three boys with his wife. He worked as a store manager at Burberrys. The compromise haunted him — the “could haves” and “should haves”, but it is his life as a father that Bishop seeks to celebrate. In this, he was a remarkable success given his early journey in life.

He was born in 1936 to an English father, a pleasant, agreeable man, but weak and alcoholic. (Alcoholism runs through Des Bishop’s family on both sides in every generation. He gave up drinkin’ and druggin’ as a 19-year-old in 1995.)

Mike Bishop’s mother, Hannah Ryan, was from Midleton, Co Cork, but immigrated to England. She was a tormented soul, brutalised by a wife-beating, alcoholic father who physically and sexually abused her. Later in life she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Mike Bishop, and to a lesser extent his sister, Joan, bore the brunt of her mental illness. She used to manically beat Mike with a solid brass stair rod for seeming indiscretions before banishing him to a coal shed. Most disorienting, writes Bishop, is that she smothered him in cuddles, or joked that he looked like a chimney sweep on release. He didn’t know whether he was coming or going. It led to a kind of dreaminess, an absence when he was with people for the rest of his days.

“At times,” says Bishop, “you could see my father would descend into that confusion in himself. He never fully recovered even though he lived a great life. I think there was just something in him until the day that he died that was just wounded by that experience.”

All through childhood, except for a few idyllic years during the Second World War which he spent on his uncles’ farm in Midleton, he navigated her moods like a sailor on windswept seas, until one afternoon.

When he came home from school, she started slashing him with a carving knife. He raised his arms to shield the blows. His body was covered in blood. He was 15 years old. Mercifully, two cruelty officers, a couple of policemen and a nurse, stormed into the house, having been tipped off by neighbours’ complaints. Her husband, reported the local East Sussex newspaper, “attributed the attacks to some kind of brainstorm”. She ended up in a mental asylum for two years where she was lobotomised. She returned to her family briefly afterwards. Sometimes she would be spotted walking around their sleepy, Victorian seaside village in her underwear. She died in a nursing home in 1997.

Des Bishop, who was studying at University College Cork at the time, represented his father at her funeral. His Midleton relatives bought him the ticket over to Britain. They resented his Aunt Joan for being “stern and unfriendly” to them over the years when they made attempts to visit Bishop’s grandmother and when they tried to bring her back to a nursing home in Ireland.

On the train from London’s Victoria Station to the funeral, Bishop, in command of the grisly details of her treatment of his father and aunt, railed against their bickering about his aunt. One of his cousins (since deceased) turned on him. “Children should be seen and not heard”, she said dismissively. He seethed at their denial and had to leave their train carriage.

“In my life that was an important moment because that was the moment I realised that not everybody gets liberated from the shame,” says Bishop. “I was in AA at that stage. My father was in AA. He had been honest with me, but not everybody involved in that story was willing to be honest.

“It was a horrible moment, but it was a great realisation later on in life about how lucky our family is. We were able to find a bit of honesty. In a lot of ways I would consider that moment to be a perfect example of why a lot of people suffer in this country. I don’t say that as an American criticising Irish society. I see examples of that type of way of dealing with things a lot in Irish society.”

There is, ostensibly, an unhappy ending to Bishop’s story. His father, of course, dies from cancer. On the contrary, the account of his father’s slow death, although it is full of heartbreaking moments, is uplifting, leavened in particular by his father’s gallows humour.

At one stage, after a torturous search amongst hospital staff to get permission for him to take a sleeping tablet ended in refusal, he dismissed the news as being “nothing to lose any sleep over”.

Bishop, like his brothers, became his father’s father. Simple, nurturing things became a delight. Bishop loved washing him, for example, as his father’s gratitude was so endearing.

The hardest part of the book for Bishop, oddly, he admits, was the passage which dealt with the eight years Bishop spent apart from his family, where they couldn’t put a face to a name in his life. As an errant teenager they had sent him away from their home in New York to boarding school at St Peter’s College, Wexford in 1990.

“The death of somebody as close as your father, or of somebody as close as your husband, is a shit or get off the pot time,” he says. “When a wife dies, a lot of men die within a year. That’s a fact. You drive on or you fade away.

“It’s been a very positive time in my relationship with my mother because there’s no more time to beat around the bush. If there was any residue left between myself and my mother, it was washed away. It has brought us a lot closer because I don’t think a lot of people ever get to that honesty as a result of this book and doing a show about my dad. It wipes the slate clean. It strengthens the team.”

* Des Bishop is signing copies of his book — My Dad Was Nearly James Bond: A Son’s Funny, Frank and Moving Story of the Lessons His Father Taught Him (Penguin) €16.99 — at Eason, Patrick St, Cork at 1pm and at Eason Mahon Point at 4pm tomorrow.