Postcards from the Edge

Gay hero of the SAS

Paddy Mayne, a tormented warrior, drowned his sorrows with Mary Kenny’s brother

My elder brother Carlos was a pal of Paddy (real name Robert) Blair Mayne (1915-55) – one of the prominent SAS men in the BBC TV series Rogue Heroes. Back in the 1950s, they went carousing together around the many Dublin pubs.

PBM was from a strict Presbyterian background, for which reason he would travel south at weekends to escape the austere Ulster Sabbath.

He was a boozer, a killer warrior (he told my brother he had dispatched Germans in the desert with his bare hands) and a tormented homosexual, at a time when such relationships were criminal. But Dublin tended to be more easy-going, and had a gay subculture, centred in the Catacombs, and a famous gay pub, Bartley Dunne’s.

After a rambunctious evening, the SAS commando, sitting in his sports car, made to kiss my late brother (who preferred girls). Carlos slugged him in the face, which reduced this rogue hero to mortifying apologies. ‘Christ almighty! I decked Paddy Blair Mayne!’ recalled my sibling, in hungover horror the morning after. PBM could have garrotted him with a flick of his wrist. But the Ulsterman took the rebuff ‘like a gentleman’.

Carlos always affectionately remembered PBM, whose sexual orientation was never accepted by his family, especially his ‘formidable’ mother. He died in a car crash in 1955 in his native Newtonards, aged only 40, after a night’s heavy drinking at a Masonic dinner – a warrior who never settled into peacetime.

‘There’s one obvious way to halt illegal migration across the Channel,’ said Chris White, as we sipped coffee at The Sicilian in Deal. ‘Introduce identity cards. Simple.’

Chris is a Brussels reporting veteran – covering the EU for many years – and sees the absence of ID in Britain as one of the main reasons nearly 50,000 migrants landed on Kent’s shores, near my home in Deal, in 2022.

I’ve always been against ID cards – ever since a Parisian flic pulled me up, at age 19, with the contemptuous demand ‘Tes papiers!’ I was walking innocently along the Boulevard Montparnasse; how dare an agent of the state demand my ‘papers’ – and address me in the familiar tu form! I had done nothing wrong. From that moment, I preferred the British tradition that every citizen is entitled to travel the King’s highway without let or hindrance.

But a moment comes when we must realise circumstances have changed. I dislike the idea of the state – any state – having access to my private data; but the powers that be know everything about us anyway. All our data can be found in some algorithm somewhere.

There was a time, in living memory, when ladies could conceal their age. My mother contrived to knock a few years off her date of birth on a passport, which is probably now a felony. We seldom knew what age our elders were and, if we asked, were told, ‘I’m as old as my tongue and older than my teeth.’ Now date of birth is public knowledge: when I arrive at a local clinic for an eye treatment, it’s announced to one and all – 4.4.44.

If they know your date of birth and your postcode, I’ve been told, they know everything about you.

All the old suppositions have altered. The police may well check you out on suspicion (they may even arrest you for, effectively, a thought crime). Privacy is an archaic concept, and confidential information is now called ‘covering up’.

John Maynard Keynes advised that when the facts change, it’s rational to change your mind. If ID cards help to halt the cruel trafficking across the Channel, then yes, introduce them.

It came as a surprise that so many – some 40 per cent – of Channel migrants hailed from Albania, and were frequently described as ‘criminals’.

When I visited Albania under strict Communist rule, I was informed there was no crime at all. It was like visiting the 19th century, with Hardyesque peasants reaping in the fields with scythes.

Our official guides spoke excellent English, much of it learned from reading PG Wodehouse. Every Albanian I encountered expressed admiration for Edith Durham, the celebrated Victorian Englishwoman who explored Albania with just a native guide and a donkey, and wrote a renowned book comparing the Albanian clans to the Scots.

I’m afraid I thought it all rather charming, leading my late husband to call me ‘the Beatrice Webb of the Balkans’, for insufficiently grasping the tyranny, repression, brutality and general odiousness of Enver Hoxha’s rule.

Still, I thought the people nice and the Adriatic scenery very pretty indeed.

This was the year we should have been reading Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. The first volume of the English translation by CK Scott Moncrieff was published (like Joyce’s Ulysses) a century ago, in 1922 – also the year Proust died, aged 51. Groundbreaking stuff. The images are cinematic.

It has also been published in accessible cartoon form, adapted and drawn by Stéphane Heuet. Great classics should always have a bande dessinée version.