One good deed

Press, 24 September 1988, Page 27

One good deed

Black Baby. By Claire Boylan. Hamish Hamilton, 1988. 210 pp. $39.95. An uninspired title, and an even worse cover picture, do not make this book one to pick up with immediate delight. Nevertheless, it is a charming study of an elderly maiden lady in Dublin who, at the age of 12, paid 2s 6d to the nuns to support a "little black piccaninni” in Africa and named her as reward. Alice, now a lonely and somewhat forgetful 67-year-old, has the wonderful intrusion into her life of Dinah and is convinced that this is the child of five decades ago come to brighten her waning years. Quite suddenly Alice’s life is transformed by Dinah — in actual fact an English-born black barmaid generous with her ideas and her body — and finds that the “circumstances of her life that had worn thin in fibre instead of working it into some secure complicated weave” now have exciting substance. Dinah replants the father’s garden, which had become an overgrown jungle, and Alice’s last few months on earth are flashed through with happy recollections of a kind, singing parent and some gentlemen callers that seemed to want her as their partners before her mother sent them packing. Without treacly sentiment there is a warmth in this novel which demonstrates an understanding of the entry of new human feeling into an old person’s existence waiting to die amid the chilling duty of real relatives waiting for property to come their way.—Ralf Unger.