How this vet’s girl found her Irish roots
Famous for her role in All Creatures Great And Small, Carol Drinkwater is now a successful novelist whose heart lies in her home here
IT was February 4, 2016 and actress and novelist Carol Drinkwater sat on the sofa in the large salon of her second home, outside Paris, next to her 91-year-old mother, Phyllis, from Laois.
The two enjoyed a very close relationship and Phyllis had moved a year earlier to live with Carol, 69, and her documentary filmmaker husband Michel Noll on their olive farm in the south of France.
‘We’d been talking about going to Bantry on our next trip to Ireland for the West Cork Literary Festival. I had my arm around her, saying, “We’ll do this, we’ll do that…” She said, “I’m really looking forward to that.” She got up to go to the loo and when I looked up, there were two steps down, and she sat down and I said, “Why are you sitting down?” Her body went like that…’ she says, tilting to one side.
‘And I ran in front of her, put my arms around her and she literally went…’ — Carol exhales deeply — ‘...like that. I said, “She can’t be dead.” I rang Michel and he was 20 minutes away and I said, “I think Mummy’s dead.”’
The ambulance crew, who had to put a hysterical Carol out of the room, explained her mother’s heart had ‘just stopped’. Although she knew Phyllis had reached a good age, she had expected to have her for another six or seven years.
‘She wasn’t ill. We’d just come back from a two-week holiday. We’d been to one of the French islands in the Indian Ocean, the three of us. She was in her bikini saying, “I’m 91 and I’ve got a better figure than anyone else on the beach!” You know, I thought she was in great shape.’
As she talks about her mother, Carol wipes tear after tear from her eyes. Almost 16 months on, she admits her grief feels very raw.
Carol was born in London and had an English father but renounced her British passport in favour of her Irish one and keeps a frequently visited holiday cottage in Offaly. She considers herself ‘completely’ Irish.
Phyllis even gave her the idea for her latest novel, The Lost Girl, which centres around the November 2015 Paris attacks. The pair had been sitting on the sofa watching the news at the time.
‘I was crying watching it and I had my arms around my mum. By then we knew that some men had infiltrated the Bataclan and that 1,500 spectators were taken hostage and that they were just literally shooting them. It was just horrific. My mother, with her arms wrapped around me, said, “Every one of them has a mother sitting there waiting to know if they’re safe.” What she said stayed with me and that was the seed for the book.’
It is book number 22 for Carol, who is perhaps still best remembered for playing Helen Herriot in the popular 1980s TV series All Creatures Great and Small.
The Lost Girl centres around a teenage runaway whose estranged parents go to Paris to find her — arriving on the day of those terrible attacks. Lizzie has been missing from her home in London since 2011 but following the Charlie Hebdo attacks is sighted leaving a pen drawing — which a lot of Parisiennes did — at the Place de la République.
Her father, Oliver, an actor, sets off to find her. Her mother Kurtiz, a photographer, says she will meet him in Paris.
Oliver buys a ticket to see Eagles of Death Metal because he and his daughter used to go to their concerts before she vanished — and he is convinced she will be there.
Meanwhile, Kurtiz meets an ageing actress in a Parisienne restaurant whose connection to the family becomes apparent later. ‘It was a very emotional story to write. Mum died about three months after that night, so while I was writing it the relationship of mother and daughter became really poignant for me.’
Phyllis McCormack moved from the tiny parish of Coolrain, in Co. Laois, to London, during the blackout in 1943. She trained as a nurse and eventually became a ward sister. She met professional entertainer Peter Regan — that was his stage name, his real surname was Drinkwater — who’d had Irish grandparents. Carol was born in Islington — but says she has never loved England.
‘I never felt at home. I never felt I fitted in there. When I used to come back here for the holidays I felt at home here. And I always went back to England with a broad Irish accent and it would be knocked out of us straight away. Nevermind that I then went on to drama school and learned to speak the Queen’s English,’ she adds, in her plummy accent. ‘I knew I’d never live there. I’d never settle there. I don’t like the English system. I think the class system is very unfair. But particularly as a young Irish girl, or partly Irish girl, in those days, Ireland was the poor cousin back then.’
THERE was a sort of snobbery about it?
‘Yes. Exactly that. I think the best thing that could come out of Brexit could be a united Ireland. I’d love it. Because I’d like to see Ireland be Ireland again. People in the north are still Irish, they just happen to have a different governor.
‘Our Mummy was very Irish, very proIrish. She would whisper to me, “I don’t like these British!” I’d say, “Why are you still here?” She’d say, “I should have gone back!”’
When did Carol get rid of her British passport?
‘Quite some years ago now, I can’t remember precisely when. What I did first was get the Irish one, so I had two passports. Then I think it was around the time that Blair went into Iraq, I thought, “That’s it. I don’t want to be connected to this. I don’t want anything to do with them. I’m taking up my Irishness completely!” And that’s what I think and that’s what I feel. The only tough time is when it’s Ireland and France playing rugby or something — who am I going to shout for? When it’s England and Ireland there’s no debate,’ she laughs.
Carol met her French husband over 30 years ago on the set of an Australian children’s mini-series called Golden Pennies. He produced the show and proposed to her on their first date.
‘I just thought he was a Frenchman and this was his line. I didn’t believe him. But he asked me again when I saw him at breakfast the next morning and it went on from there. But it was four years before we got married.’
She moved to France soon after they began their relationship and the pair bought an old ruin that became their olive farm. Carol has written bestselling non-fiction about her French adventures in olive farming — The Olive Tree and The Olive Route. They were awarded the appellation d’origine contrôlée for their own organic olive oil. She does miss the camaraderie of acting though, and says, ‘If the right role came along and it was a cameo in a film, or a very short run in town, or a guest appearance on TV, that would be wonderful. Because I do have my life, I do have my writing commitments and contracts and I do have my farm and my marriage.’ When she and Michel married almost 30 years ago, Carol became a stepmother to his twin daughters. ‘Oh, they were at a difficult age. They were somewhere between 11 and 13. So it was very difficult to accept a foreigner, an actress. It wasn’t easy when Daddy found some‘I body else. But one of them also then married and had a stepdaughter because her husband’s wife had died in childbirth, it was a very tragic story. So she had a daughter with this man she married and we went out for lunch and Clarice, my stepdaughter, said, “Honestly, it’s so hard being a stepmother.” I said, “Clarice, tell me about it!” And that sort of bonded us.’
She is philosophical about not being a mother otherwise. lost my own. I miscarried my own. It’s okay, I’m through that now. I have plenty of other wonderful things in my life. I have time to do my work, I have two great stepdaughters, I absolutely love them. They have five children between them. My husband is Pappy to all these lovely children. It’s perfect. It works very well, actually, for me.’ down After to our her interview, holiday Carol cottageis headingin the triangle of Tipperary, Offaly and Laois. The first time she returned there without her mother, last year, she was unable to get out of the car.
‘It was our little bolthole. And that’s what we were talking about that afternoon, about going there and to the Bantry West Cork Literary Festival again. She came with me every year. The organisers of the West Cork Literary Festival were amazing when she died because they said she was
of the festival,’ says Carol, wiping away another tear before composing herself.
‘She prayed to St Jude every day and I would say, “What are you praying for?” She said, “That I’m not a handicap to anybody. That you don’t ever have to bring me the bedpan.” And she just went like that,’ she says, clicking her fingers. ‘So it was what she wanted.’
Carol Drinkwater reads from The Lost Girl at the West Cork Literary Festival on Sunday, July 16, 6.30pm in the Maritime Hotel. For more, see: Westcorkliteraryfestival.ie
I lost my own. I miscarried my own. It’s okay, I’m through that now.