Blood-Dark Track: A Family History. Joseph O’Neill
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into this position, now get yourself out of it!”’ ‘He loved me,’ my grandmother once said, ‘but he paid attention to other women.’
As often happens with the heartbreakers of yesteryear, my grandfather’s dreamboat charms are not revealed by the photographs of him, which show a bespectacled fellow with smallish eyes and a dark concentration of hair beneath the nose. However, his famous spruceness does come through, not least in a picture that turned up in early 1995 in my grandmother’s papers. The photo was copied and sent to various family members, almost as if it were an official portrait. Its seductive, iconic value was obvious. Joseph, thirty-something, sat atop a horse. (The animal’s name was Tayara, Arabic for flier. It lived in a makeshift stable in the hotel, where a full-time groom fed it and polished it up every day like a shoe. Occasionally, Tayara ran unsuccessfully at the Adana hippodrome.) He sported a smart wide-brimmed hat and round glasses, a sleeveless sweater, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up into neat scrolls above the elbows, breeches, and superb riding boots. He carried a whip and he wore white gloves. It was hard for me, a non-equestrian, to say whether a certain horsemanship was captured by the photograph, but to my inexpert eyes he looked the part. The horse was prancing, and its heraldic posture lent the rider – straight-backed, impassive, assured – a chivalric air. Le chevalier Dakad: this was what the ensemble was calculated to impress upon the world.
What particularly interested me about this image was that Joseph lived in a dusty Turkish port populated by the families of shipping agents, cotton traders, commercial landlords, shopkeepers, stallholders, tradesmen, importers, exporters. These people were not cavaliers, and to the best of my knowledge there hadn’t been a local class of chevaliers to which Joseph might have belonged since Crusader times.
Of course, displays of class are, to an important degree, self-fulfilling and artificial, but it seemed that the aspirant and romantic elements in Joseph’s brand of stylishness did not pass unnoticed. Into his thirties, he would be teased by girls chanting the rhyme
O Dakak-e Tu nous fais tourner La tête.
(Oh Dakak, you turn our heads.) The chant illustrated something else: contrary to the local custom of calling people by their first name (Monsieur Jean, Monsieur Theodore, etc.), for some reason Joseph’s peers generally referred to him by his surname, Dakak.
But if Mersin was a one-horse town, and my grandfather owned that horse, it was to be noted that when Mersin was a one-fridge town, Joseph owned that fridge – a tall Frigidaire, expensive as a motorcar, bought in around 1950. He also owned the first car with automatic transmission in Mersin, a blue Pontiac bought in around 1956, and in the new hotel he installed Mersin’s first central heating system and first elevator. When Mersin was a one-pedigree-dog town, Joseph owned the dog: Tarzan, a Great Dane acquired in Lyon in 1947, whose gargantuan appearance would send the people of Mersin diving for cover. (In those days there was so little traffic that Tarzan was allowed out on solo tours. His master rarely took him out for walks.) Back in 1939, Joseph employed a European architect to build the town’s first decent cinema, the Günes Cinema, which was equipped with plush seats and loges. And, of course, Joseph at all times owned and ran the premier hotel in Mersin.
It was clear that these material firsts – many of which, in a backwater like Mersin, could only be achieved with a great deal of effort and expense – were more than social affectations. My grandfather’s imagination was grabbed by technological progress. New things, modern things, brought into view cultural horizons which profoundly excited him. That said – and here was a rare trait in Mersin – he also was interested in ancient forms of civilization. He had an antiquary’s curiosity about relics and would ask local villagers whether they had come across any objects of interest. He wrote to Ankara to protest at the local habit of incorporating ancient blocks of limestone into the villagers’ houses. He was proud of his friendship with Professor John Garstang, the English archaeologist, and also made friends, in the ’forties, with another English archaeologist, Michael Gough, whose wife Mary subsequently wrote of ‘the good M. Dakad’. When the English travel-writer Freya Stark checked in at the Toros Hotel in April 1954, she wrote, ‘Such a kind welcome because all here are friends of John Garstang’s. They gave me one look and asked me what period I was studying – and are full of interest in Alexander the Great.’ In Alexander’s Path (1958), she described Joseph Dakad as ‘overflow[ing] with kindness and a passion for cleanliness unique in my experience of Turkish inns’.
Joseph Dakad enjoyed reading history books and subscribed to the French journal Historia. He liked non-fiction. Novels did not interest him; neither, despite his interest in the Günes Cinema, did movies. Aided by his voracious newspaper reading habits, he was knowledgeable about a wide range of matters. When Julian Huxley came to the hotel, Joseph knew who he was. He took an interest in domestic and international affairs, which he viewed from a perspective that was ‘not left-wing, that’s for sure,’ according to Oncle Pierre. My father was surprised to learn that his father-in-law knew all about Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike in 1920, and Roger Casement, the Irish patriot hanged by the British in August 1916 for treasonably acting as Germany’s ‘willing agent’; Joseph even knew the name of the gun-filled trawler, the Aud, with which Casement’s U-boat had a rendezvous off the coast of Ireland.
‘Papa was a cultivated man,’ my mother said quietly. ‘There was no one like him in the whole of Mersin.’
On the subject of cultivation, it was Joseph’s dream to own an orange garden. He bought books about the farming of citrus fruit and kept an eye open for land that might suit his purposes. He loved having oranges about the house, buying them in crates that he kept on top of a cupboard, out of the children’s reach. It would seem that his love affair with citrus fruit endured even after, on one view, it had played a decisive part in the most disastrous episode of his life.
It is lunchtime, and hours of planning, shopping and cooking by my grandmother and her servants are about to pay off – or not. The lamb cutlets have been consumed approvingly, the correct acridity of the babaganoushe has been noted, the böreks have not been criticized. Now everything turns on the watermelon. That so much should hinge on this fruit is strange, since its quality will merely reflect on the choice made by the majordomo, Ahmet, at the market that morning; but that is the way it has always been: in the final analysis, the pastèque is the king of the table.
A rich red tranche is forked up from the serving dish and placed on Oncle Pierre’s dessert plate. Pierre frowns, noting the consistency of the fruit’s redness. A hush descends at the table as he brushes the dark pips from the flesh and inserts a morsel into his mouth. All the while, my grandmother watches anxiously. Oncle Pierre chews, then swallows. ‘Pas mal,’ he concedes. ‘Sept sur dix.’
Mamie Dakad is happy and relieved, and general conversation resumes.
‘Everything is marvellous, Georgette.’ The speaker, in French, is Madame Olga Catton, an old friend of the family. Olga has a strong, gravelly accent in every language she speaks, her r’s rolled with a regal finality; and indeed everything about her suggests a tsarina in exile. She takes out a cigarette and fixes it in her cigarette holder. My sister Ann, who knows the routine, offers a flame from a silver lighter. ‘Here you are, Auntie Olga,’ Ann says. ‘Thank you, darling,’ Olga says in English. Olga sucks on her cigarette holder, and her eyebrows – plucked into nothingness and replaced by a stroke of pencil – curve upwards appreciatively. ‘You’re so pretty, my dear, you really are.’ She turns to Mamie Dakad and says in Arabic, ‘She takes after her mother – the eyes, the hair, the chin.’
Mamie Dakad says, slightly begrudgingly, ‘She has her mother’s colouring, perhaps. But the bone structure is the father’s.’
Pastries – pains d’Espagne and sablés topped with icing sugar and home-made apricot jam – are brought out to accompany the fruit.
Oncle Pierre stands up suddenly and authoritatively jangles a fistful of keys. ‘Right, I’m off.’ He looks at his watch. ‘How are you going to the beach?’
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