As always, I was so caught up with Inis Ealga that I didn’t notice how life was passing me by at a terrifying speed. I was still on my own as well. There wasn’t a sign of a man on the horizon, much to the dismay of my brother Seamas, who obviously felt I was wasting my life as a young woman.
‘Will you for God’s sake come back pregnant,’ Seamas demanded one summer as I packed my bags for America.
I was absolutely shocked.
‘Seamas I couldn’t do that, think of the disgrace!’ I told him, no doubt with the disgust showing on my face.
He argued it wasn’t shameful at all.
‘Where’s the disgrace in that?’ he asked.
Seamas was very broad-minded and wise in his ways. He didn’t want me to lose out on motherhood just because I didn’t have a partner.
‘But who will I have a child with?’ I asked.
‘It doesn’t matter who,’ Seamas sighed, as if that wasn’t important.
The argument continued. ‘How could I rear a child on my own?’
‘Betty and I will do it with you,’ Seamas offered, referring to my lovely sister-in-law.
Seamas was ahead of his time, whereas I was way too conservative to contemplate something like that.
‘I don’t think Mother would take too kindly to me getting pregnant with no man in my life,’ was my final word on the matter.
Seamas shook his head in frustration, accepting that he had lost the argument.
‘I just hope it’s not something you’ll regret down the line,’ he told me.
Seamas and his wife Betty had two fabulous children, Declan and Debbie, whom they had adopted. They were a very happy little family, and Debbie and Declan adored the ground that Seamas and Betty walked on. I believe that having found such immense happiness in his own life through children, Seamas didn’t want me waking up one day regretting that I had squandered my chance of experiencing the gift of parenthood.
He was so in tune with the important things in life.
* * *
As my work involved travel, I did get the opportunity to meet lots of interesting males from different parts of the world through music and dancing. One of those was a guy from Czechoslovakia that I first encountered at a cultural event in the Isle of Man. Despite coming from different backgrounds and countries, we hit it off.
He was a musician with a Czechoslovakian group, spoke seven languages, was very intellectual and we were the same age. He was tall and slim with fair hair and he had a personality that was very gentle and quiet. He was a lovely man, but deep down I knew the relationship was doomed from the time it began, mainly due to the fact that we were living in different countries.
Because of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia at the time, his travel was restricted, so I had to fly out to visit him. When I went there I wasn’t blinded by passion or love, so I was sensible enough to realise that I could never settle where he lived. I told him as much because I didn’t want to lead him on and give him false hope.
The relationship cooled, and eventually died away. But every now and then he would get in contact and we’d talk. Then I would go out to see him. This sort of carry-on continued over a few years, even though I couldn’t see it going anywhere.
Eventually he wrote to my mother and pleaded with her to persuade me to move to Czechoslovakia to be with him.
Mother showed me the letter and asked my advice on what she should say in reply. I told her to ignore it. Judging by her expression, I think she felt I had made the right decision in this case.
So that was the end of the relationship.
He did contact me a few years later to say that he had got married and was the father of a young daughter. And he was surprised to learn that I was still a single woman.
* * *
My thirties came and went like a flash of lightning. Matt by now had made me a director of Inis Ealga to entice me to stay after I’d indicated that I was leaving at one point. Apart from lots of world champions that I had produced, I had nothing else to show for the previous two decades. As strange as this seems now, I was still living between the Meleady home and my mother’s house. It wasn’t until I turned forty that I finally had a wake-up call. I decided, man or no man, it was time for me to become totally independent, buy myself a house and put down some roots.
I felt I had left it far too late to move to America. I remember discussing it with Matt’s wife, Angela, one day. I told her of my regrets at not moving to the States.
‘You can still go,’ Angela said.
‘At this point I’m not going to leave my mother on her own,’ I replied.
Mum was much older now and it was too late for her to emigrate and start a new life with me. I couldn’t bring myself to leave without her.
One day I sat down with Mum and told her I was buying my own home on the north side of Dublin. Most of my work was on that side of the city. By my mother’s expression you’d think I’d just told her that I was emigrating to Timbuktu.
‘I want you to come with me,’ I added, and her face lit up.
At this stage we owned our 1930s family home on Cashel Road in Crumlin, having bought it off Dublin Corporation. We discussed selling Cashel Road, and that was agreed. So, now I had some new excitement in my life, going on the hunt for my first house.
Over the following months, I’d cruise around the north-side suburbs in my little second-hand blue Austin car with my mother in the passenger seat, searching for my dream home. It was like a new hobby.
Even though I was born on the south side, I always had a hankering to live on the north side. My uncle Christie, who had a very successful upholstery business, lived in a gorgeous house facing the sea just outside the fishing village of Howth. And I remember trips there as a child.
When I was young we’d often go on family outings to Howth, taking a tram out from the city centre. That was always a nice Sunday outing with my mum and dad, and whoever else was around.
I remember one particular excursion on a Sunday afternoon in the summertime when Tony and Seamas were home on holidays with their wives, Lena and Betty. Along with Brian and Mum and Dad, I took a trip by hired boat from the pier in Howth to the Ireland’s Eye island. We brought picnic food with us and had a lovely, leisurely afternoon there in the sunshine. It was so lovely that we lost all sense of time.
In the evening time, we packed up our bits and pieces and went searching for the boat for the trip back to the village. To our horror, there was no boat by the shore. After waiting for what seemed like an eternity, we finally accepted that we’d missed the last one back. We were now resigned to sleeping under the stars for the night. Fortunately, it was summer time, but the thought of sleeping in the open where God knows what kind of creepy-crawlies were going to be on the prowl in the dark terrified me.
Then Brian spotted a shape in the distance. As it came closer, whoops of joy went up from the lads. It was a boat!
‘This is your lucky night,’ the boat man laughed when he pulled up on to the island.
‘I decided to make one more trip out to the island in case anyone had been left stranded.’
The house-hunting would continue until one day, while driving through Kinsealy, my search came to an end.
I Want to Break Free
Relaxing in the front room of my lovely, cosy bungalow home on a leafy road in Kinsealy, I finally took stock of my life.
As I strolled down memory lane in my mind, with the sunshine streaming through the window, I acknowledged that Inis Ealga had been a rewarding adventure in so many ways, not least because of the wonderful friendships and close friends around the world it had introduced to my life. Then there were all the children I had trained, the young people I adored.
But here I was, a middle-aged woman just having bought her first home, unmarried, childless and still tied to a relentless schedule at the Inis Ealga school.
It had been a struggle in my mind for so long, but in that moment I resolved to take the next major step. I was g
oing to leave Inis Ealga.
* * *
In a way I had become a victim of the phenomenal success of Inis Ealga at home and abroad. It became a giant in the world of Irish dancing, which meant I was now running a major operation that occupied my every waking hour of the day to the exclusion of virtually everything else. And I felt trapped there because I didn’t want to let anyone down. So, in a way, I had made myself a prisoner within this popular school of dance.
In reality, there was nothing to stop me leaving at any time. But, out of a sense of loyalty to everyone, I never felt I could make the break. It took a lot of soul-searching, a lot of agonising, and even a lot of prayer in my favourite place of contemplation, Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in the city, before I found the courage to move on.
It is hard to convey in words the terrible emotional trauma I experienced in the lead-up to my departure from Inis Ealga. I dreaded the moment when I would finally drop the bombshell that I was leaving. I had a queasy feeling in my stomach for weeks in the build-up to it. I had invested so much of my life in Inis Ealga, so leaving was going to be a very painful divorce for me. But I was also conscious that, to the children and parents, Marie Duffy and Inis Ealga were inseparable. I knew that I was going to cause devastation in a lot of people’s lives when I left. But what could I do?
I thought long and hard about my exit, trying to find a way to leave without causing too much disruption in the school. I didn’t want to damage the school in any way. I knew that if I set up a Marie Duffy school of dance, a lot of the parents would move their children with me. I felt that the only way to avoid this was to walk away from Irish dancing and embark on a new career in life.
Physical exercise has always been at the core of dancing for me. I always got my students to do warm-up exercises in order to avoid injuries when they were dancing on concrete and all sorts of floors. Every other form of dance, like ballet, were doing proper training and exercise, warming up and cooling down, and muscle toning. It bothered me that this wasn’t applied to Irish dancing, where classes always started off cold, so I introduced it during my early days in Inis Ealga.
Later, the kids used to refer to my pre-dance routines as ‘the Marie Duffy exercises’.
I always kept myself in shape by working out in a gym three times a week. So, when I was looking for a way out of Inis Ealga, it struck me that I could do gym work to earn a living. I then signed up for a diploma course at City Gym in Dublin, with a view to becoming an instructor. I was already familiar with all the gym equipment, and I knew that aerobics training would be easy to do. I could learn all about nutrition and become a nutritionist as well. This was all covered on the diploma course that I enrolled for, so now I had a plan in place and it was time to break the news.
* * *
In 1988, at the end of the All-Ireland Championships, I announced that I was leaving Inis Ealga. By then, Matt had an inkling that I was restless in my life. I think he had seen the writing on the wall for some time, but it was still a shock when I told him.
Even though I had prepared for this moment to ensure that it would cause the least disruption, it was like a death in the family. It was truly awful. There were kids crying, saying, ‘You are leaving us, you are going away.’ I was in bits, trembling and struggling to control my emotions. This was like walking away from my family because I had trained all those children from the time they could walk.
Then the parents were all around me, pleading with me to change my mind, asking if there was anything they could do to keep me there. I just shook my head. I was crying, and they could see that my decision to move on hadn’t been taken lightly.
I woke up the following morning with a terrible feeling of depression, and a huge sense of loss. Inis Ealga was the first thing I would think about every morning. It was the first thing I thought about that morning, except that now it was no longer a part of my life. What followed was a period of mourning.
Although I still felt that I had made the right decision, it didn’t stop my heart from being broken. Every evening when I left my course at the gym, I’d cry like a hungry child on the way to my car. I knew that just up the road the children I regarded as my own were in their dance class. I never expected to miss them this much. But I persevered, taking my new life a day at a time and trying not to dwell on the past.
The pain eased gradually and I could see the light coming into my life again. When I left Inis Ealga I held on to my classes in the national schools so that I’d have an income, and then in the evening I would do the course for the gym. There was one three-month period where I had to take time out of teaching for my course, but for most of the nine months I managed to juggle the two.
I was enjoying my diploma course, as I loved education and was passionate about it from the time I had been held back a year in primary school. Even during my Inis Ealga days I took a course at the Grafton Academy of dressmaking so that I could work on costumes for shows.
I also did a short course in a London school of hairdressing to style my pupils for their dance competitions. Back then, the dancers didn’t wear wigs. Some of the dancers would have great heads of hair; others would have poor hair. I took it seriously enough to learn how to style hair so that each child went out on stage happy with their appearance and feeling the same confidence.
So I was hungry for new skills and for more education all the time. I had even done a three-year public speaking diploma course at The Adult Education Institute in Eccles Street, Dublin, to overcome my nerves on the stage when I was faced with the task of doing stage management and announcements at the dancing competitions.
I was all about self-development, so whenever I had time on my hands I would fill it with one course or another.
My course in the gym covered the A to Z of everything from aerobics to weight training and nutrition, and when I graduated with my diploma I then had options for a new career path.
However, while I was prepared to leave Irish dancing, it seems Irish dancing wasn’t ready to let me go. Several of the parents continued calling to my home in Kinsealy, pleading with me to reconsider my decision to give up teaching. I was flattered that they felt so strongly about what I had to offer their children.
Every time a parent came and talked with me, I would mull over the conversation afterwards. There was no way I was going back to Inis Ealga after finally taking the momentous decision in my life to cut the ties. But the parents who came to see me, or spoke to me by phone, weren’t asking me to rejoin Inis Ealga. They wanted me to run my own classes for their children that I had been teaching before I left. They all stressed how much the children were missing me. Every time I talked to parents I felt guilt that I was denying their kids the skills I had as a teacher, and the great relationship I’d had with them.
After a while I began to get a proper perspective on my life. One of the people who helped me through it was my friend Laverne Showalter from Chicago. Laverne was like my big sister or a mother to me at that time, as she talked me through the huge emotional experience of cutting my ties with Inis Ealga.
I realised then that my love and passion for dancing hadn’t diminished since I left Inis Ealga. I did feel that a weight had been lifted from my shoulders, but that was down to not having the burden of running the school. My life was simpler now, less demanding, and I had control over it. I began to think that maybe I could run an Irish dancing class, but on a smaller, more manageable scale.
In the end I relented and agreed that I would take on twelve of the children whose parents had become more like personal friends. I had one rule: I would not take on any Inis Ealga dancers who were current All-Ireland or world champions, nor would I take boys. If I took boys I felt that would split up the Inis Ealga teams – and they were renowned for the standard of their teams – and that wouldn’t have been fair to the school. So that was agreed with the parents, although some of them were disappointed that I wasn’t taking their sons, as I had been teaching them before I left.
A
nd so I started with twelve pupils, including three O’Brien sisters, Derval, Niamh and Aoibheann. Their mother, Monica, had been among the parents who encouraged me to start teaching again for the championships.
I’m so glad I did.
Niamh and Aoibheann would go on to dance in the famous line at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest. After Riverdance, they then joined Feet of Flames and Lord of the Dance.
And Niamh would later find true love in the world of dancing with her husband, Michael Flatley.
I first met the O’Brien girls while I was with Inis Ealga and also running a class once a week where they lived out in the country at Kilbride, Co. Meath. Their mother, Monica, had a great love of Irish music and dancing. Derval was just four when Monica took her to my class in Kilbride, and Niamh was soon on her heels as a three-year-old. Niamh would be running around the hall while Derval learned her one, two, threes. The youngest, Aoibheann, was in the pram at that stage, and she joined as soon as she was up on her feet.
Derval, Niamh and Aoibheann took to Irish dancing like ducks to water. As they developed and started showing real potential, Monica then asked me about taking them into the city classes at Inis Ealga in North Great George’s Street. So they became regulars at Inis Ealga, and they went on to figure in the top three at competitions. Derval finished second on two occasions at the World Championships after being just narrowly pipped at the post. Emma Jane Lavin, who was world champion for many years, was in Niamh’s class at the time. Niamh would always come second to Emma at major events. She was up there with the best of them.
Monica O’Brien then held a feis in Kilbride for quite a few years, so Derval, Niamh and Aoibheann were totally immersed in the world of Irish dancing as they were growing up.
Lady of the Dance Page 6