Of course, they loved mitching school, especially on mart days when they could stand at corners and smoke, chat and spit like grown-up men. They loved action films, bad language, rude gestures, double entendres and free classes. It goes without saying that they hated school, but most especially they hated Irish.
‘Ah, Miss,’ they’d moan when I gave them homework. I spent days on the past tense, An Aimsir Chaite, hoping they’d respond to the simplicity of speaking in this one tense. I tried to incite them to tell me what had happened to them – ‘Cá raibh tú?’ Where were you? ‘Cad a tharla?’ What happened? ‘Inis dom faoi sin!’ Tell me about that. I’d get them to repeat lines. In between they’d continue their whispered talk about Rambo and Arnold Schwarzenegger and whatever programmes they’d seen on television the night before. They also loved looking at wounds, gouging their names into the desks or onto their bags, and fighting and firing chalk at each other.
I taught them the Irish version of that lilting song, ‘The Whistling Gypsy’ and discovered that they especially loved the chorus, which they corrupted joyously to suit their own designs, rhyming ‘do’ with ‘screw’. Ah, dee do ah dee do da day. The rude alternative corrupted the line entirely but at each chorus they’d sing that Ah dee screw section with renewed gusto and abandon, laughing and cheering themselves on, stamping and banging on the tables as we did a run-through for the recording that I was making.
It was only when I played back the tape that you could hear a pin drop as they listened to themselves in wonderment. It was a moment of discovery and wonder for me, too, as I realised that they wanted that – to be shown versions of themselves. It was like holding a mirror up to them and they were fascinated by what it revealed.
Day after day, they’d troop in and look up at me in anticipation of the recorder. It was as if they expected I was going to do a magic trick. ‘A Bhuachaillí, tógaigí amach bhúr leabhair,’ I’d say – Boys, take your books out – knowing I was a kind of commander-in-chief and that my job was to maintain order and reign in the troops when a skirmish broke out along the battlefront that was my classroom.
One Friday afternoon, when it was clear they only wanted to be away out the door and were only looking for an excuse to shout, jump out of their seats, tell a joke and run around the room, I brought two of them up to the top of the class to act out a make-believe exchange between a garda and a cyclist with no lights.
The seated boys showed no mercy as they egged on the two at the top, who did their best with the dialogue, blushing and stumbling over the words – until someone threw a pencil at the blackboard and the heckling and stomping gathered apace. I stormed up from the back of the classroom to try to restore order, the class at its most frenzied. Struggling to bring them under control, I looked about me wildly, wishing I could be beamed up. To my horror, I noticed one of the school’s caretakers peering in through the door’s glass panel. With his raised eyebrows and obvious shock, it was clear he disapproved of the chaos.
The day the inspector – aka the cigire – came, they did their best, whispering to each other to shut up, punching any neighbour who spoke out of turn. Their loyalty to me was never in question.
Today I miss those gentle if wild boys of Tipperary. And I feel great regard for them. I hope they are still laughing and sparring in the foothills of the Galtees. I hope they have work and I hope that on occasion they fill their lungs and sing ‘The Whistling Gypsy’, or ‘An Spailpín Fánach’ in Irish, complete with their own bawdy take on the lyrics.
40
Secrets of a Lost Diary
I recently came across an old diary I kept in the mid-1980s. My entries are cryptic. It’s clear I was not a diligent or consistent diarist. There are short awkward bursts as I try to strike the right tone and experiment with words and style.
On Saturday 10 August 1985, I describe heading home to Ring from a day’s shopping in Dublin with my sister: ‘The train is crowded,’ I wrote, ‘people are standing. The sky is grey and it has rained a few times today. Poured! This country is getting more like Yugoslavia every day. Crows and nettles, rain and grime.’
I had obviously started to see the world at that stage!
It is the travelling element of life back then that surprises me most. In one entry I wrote that we went to Clonmel to shop for a dress for my mother who was going to a wedding. Halfway home we ran out of petrol. The forests were burning on the mountains and we could see the flames from the road, I wrote, obviously drawing strong parallels between my life and War and Peace.
In another entry I describe Miriam and I thumbing home from Cork, which was then about a two-hour journey. It seems it was a freezing, bitter day and it took us hours to get home. We hitched rides from eight different vehicles – all hyphenated with long waits in between. It seems we had been to a party in Ballincollig where I was heartless, giving a man in navy blue cords and a tight jumper a phoney phone number. The jumper was pulled down to cover his pot belly and fat bottom, I wrote: clearly the cruel objectivity and disinterest of my youth was fully intact.
Before I bought my first car it’s clear that travelling by bus had been central to my life. In one entry, I describe a day we went to Dublin on the express intercity service. RoseAnn and I left at 7.45 a.m. and headed off on the three-hour journey zig-zagging along a winding secondary road, pulling in to stops in towns along the way. From Waterford we went to Thomastown and then Kilkenny. We slept on and off, trying to make ourselves comfortable in the upright seats. I recall an incident of someone suffering from a bout of travel sickness, which was a fairly common occurrence. In Carlow, the driver gave us a few minutes to dash in to ‘powder our noses’ and/or grab a cup of tea in a little coffee shop at the stop. We were stiff-legged by the time we pulled in again at another stop, in Castledermot, County Kildare, to leave out some passengers and get a chance to stretch our legs. It was here, in a pub, that the preserved arm of the strongest man in Ireland was on view in a dimly lit glass case.
As we entered Dublin, we sat up in our seats to take in the sights. Passing Heuston Station, the adrenaline started to pump and the combined effect of the traffic, the cyclists, the lorries and the olive green waters of the Liffey had us wiping clean the fogged-up windows, too exhilarated to be nonchalant any more. Crossing over O’Connell Bridge, we were pulling in to Busáras in no time and it was still only 11.05 a.m.
After that we walked up towards Henry Street and Arnotts. I remember how shopping was always a key part of those trips when we’d rifle through rails of clothes, jackets, tops and coats in the hope of spotting a bargain. I also list Grafton Street and Powerscourt as ports of destination. Then it was off for a rendezvous with Miriam, who was then studying in Dublin, and we had to drag ourselves away from all the boutiques, jewellery and shoe shops along the way to be in time for coffee in Wynn’s Hotel.
I write that we couldn’t stop laughing when Miriam unwrapped our mother’s tea braic, which we had carried with us. There and then she cut into it, making no attempt to hide her activity from the waiter who was leaning against the counter nearby, keeping a weather eye on us and our foosterings. It was coming up to teatime and getting dark outside when we said goodbye and made our way back to Busáras. I record that we got home that night at 9 p.m.
An entry from another day: back in Dublin, I describe the rain and a bus stop where I alighted amid people in transit, criss-cross lives that make patterns, infinite knots and tangles. Budding writer that I was, I added that it was futile to try to stop the zig-zag, make meaning or give structure to the hap-hazard effortless onward running trail of lives in the capital. Standing on the footpath I tell myself that I can dissolve into its orb or ricochet away.
As I return the diary to my bookshelf, I think that perhaps it’s worth holding on to and that it’s not time to toss it away just yet.
41
Praying in Prague
When I saw the little gold statue
locked behind glass,
a trapdoor
I fell down the years
to my gran and Passage East
with her rosary beads
and her devotion to the Child of Prague.*
Right beside the statue
I saw a framed picture of the Little Flower
and with that another
bolt came undone
and I tumbled through the tunnel of time
to my Auntie Gile
and her statues and her prayers to
St Thérèse of Lisieux – the Little Flower*
and the child of Prague.
Like a current,
The two women and their litanies ran through me.
Their big eyes,
full of beseeching and pleading,
took me back to then
when I was a child and a statue
was a focus in our lives.
When it stood in a place of pride
in Passage on a sideboard by the stairs.
And I saw my gran’s lips move as she got down on her knees
And in Helvick years later, on my aunt’s bedroom window
on a doily in the sun
I recalled the saint
framed by blue water all the way out to sea,
with our eyes lingering there on her little doll-size face.
The statue was a presence then,
to my child’s eyes,
benign and calm,
it was the pulse in a corner
that directed heat into our hands.
That day in Prague,
a volt from the two of them,
their eyes large with longing
shot back up through me
when I knelt on the kneeler
in the little chapel
in front of the golden statue of the Child of Prague,
and the picture of the Little Flower.
I cried for the time that was gone
when prayers were directed
through a blessed prism heavenwards,
when back then it was to them, so clearly, an important ritual.
Their joint invocation
blew like a whistled breath.
As I remembered them long ago
I felt their lives rush through me,
whispering,
when I bowed my head to pray.
* This statue of the Infant Jesus, which is based in Prague, is referred to as the ‘Child of Prague’. There was great devotion to this statue in Ireland all throughout the twentieth century. Many Irish households had their own nineteen-inch statue but the original Roman Catholic wooden wax-coated statue, which is studded with diamonds and decorated with a gold crown, resides in the Discalced Carmelite Church of Our Lady Victorious in Prague. Legends claim that the statue once belonged to Saint Teresa of Ávila of the Carmelite Order.
** St Thérèse of Lisieux – who was also known as the ‘Little Flower’ – was a Carmelite nun. She entered the convent in Lisieux in France at the age of fifteen. After a long struggle with tuberculosis, she died in 1897 at the age of twenty-four. The impact of Story of a Soul, a collection of her autobiographical manuscripts, printed and distributed a year after her death, was huge and as a result she became one of the most popular saints of the twentieth century. She was beatified in 1923 and canonised in 1925.
42
The Green Ray
I’ve spent evenings watching the sun sink into the sea in the hope of seeing that elusive green ray, that final splash of colour. It happens just before the sun dips into the ocean, the green rays of the sun remaining visible for a fraction longer than the red and orange rays. This green light phenomenon occurs when the dying rays are split into their separate parts by a sort of celestial prism, resulting in that final parting flash of green.
The green ray is mentioned in the 2007 film Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and J. R. R. Tolkien writes about the significance of the green flash in The Hobbit.
I first learned about the green ray, however, when I saw a French film by the great new wave director Eric Rohmer. Le Rayon Vert was screened in Trinity College in Dublin in the late 1980s. This was just after a turbulent time in my life, where – after four years – I’d decided to quit teaching and had moved to Dublin to pursue a career in journalism.
I loved the film’s central character, Delphine, who is lonely and out of kilter with the world. She was about my own age at the time and she was living in an apartment on the Left Bank in Paris. I immediately identified with her and her uncertainty. As the story unfolds, the viewer is drawn to her more and more. She doesn’t know what to do with herself in the city over the holidays. Her friends have decamped to the country and to cap it all her boyfriend has split up with her. She is invited to Brittany to join friends but she can’t settle there. She goes off to the Alps to be with other friends but she can’t content herself there either. Then she tries Biarritz but, again, everyone seems to be happy and having fun except for Delphine.
The film, in truth, is about finding your path, about finding peace and purpose in life and in true cinematic fashion Delphine finally meets up with the man of her dreams, a fellow traveller, whom she accompanies on a walk along a cliff top to watch the sun go down. The romantic conclusion kept me enthralled, but I think there was also something about the film’s metaphysical dimension that captivated me. In her travels, Delphine heard the story of the green ray as written by Jules Verne. He wrote that if you are lucky enough to see this ethereal light, you will know the truth that is in your own heart and in the heart of those near you. Naturally Delphine and her companion see the green ray together and immediately she knows what is in her heart and in the heart of the young man, and she knows peace.
‘This ray has the virtue of making him who has seen it impossible to be deceived in matters of sentiment,’ writes Jules Verne.
I remember walking home after the screening, trying to imagine what it would be like to know your own heart, as I surely would if I ever saw the green ray. When I came out of the auditorium it was a balmy sunny evening on Nassau Street and I was full of the possibilities of chance encounters and first love. It was the time of day when there is a pause in the evening; the point at which the end is nigh but the light just seems to hang there, waiting, as if the earth is savouring the last bit of heat from the sun. I listened to a ball striking the cricket bats on the lawns within Trinity and I remembered how James Joyce first spotted Nora Barnacle as she walked along the footpath on Nassau Street. I imagined how she must have looked when he saw her that day in June, with her rousse auburn hair and her free and elegant gait, her long skirts and her fine Galwegian eyes.
As I made my way home towards my flat in Sandymount, I half expected to see my own Joycean lookalike approach. With intense eyes, broad clothes-hanger shoulders and gallons of Gallic charm, I imagined him running up to ask if I’d enjoyed the film and if I’d like to go into the Mont Clare Hotel for some vin rouge. But I passed on into the darkening evening, going by Merrion Square and Northumberland Road, watching purply orange colours streak across the sky like lipstick. I held my breath as I went along: Nora, Delphine and I basking in the light, mystically connected by a story about the truth that’s in the heart. I’ve never seen that luminously charged green ray. But one day, I expect I’ll be surprised. I’m sure I will.
43
In a Train
The platform outside waits chill,
in the hum of its vacuum
people pass to and fro,
steps ricochet from dome to dome.
Penned in, we listen to the rustling settle.
We have windows and corner seats in which to huddle,
A clammy heat is just bearable,
but feet must not unfold or travel under any table;
tidy, they must remain quiet, like good children,
they must not fidget.
Elbows must not flap, eyes must not travel,
only covertly
to sneak bewildered glances at
/>
women in ironed dresses, pearled, nail-varnished,
nyloned,
with a book or a magazine.
Ladies who look unconcerned and disdainful
and ever downwards except with a sigh
they might look up and with their ebbing breaths think –
how long more must I endure, I am worn out, my skin is creased
and, like dough, my glorious breasts lie jiggling on my swollen, solid belly.
Like mice we sit
quiet,
with shiny beady, dull eyes,
but nothing to suggest the sprinkling and drenching rawness of every other day.
The land lies telling us secrets,
we don’t slow down,
the tractor churns the clay and puffs
and we speed by.
Resting cows that ignore us,
draped on green, thinking.
They have their own lives to live.
They ponder and remain
gloriously flaccid.
A man on a chimney, a man that stands out, up against the grey sky,
unique, erect,
where are the chimney-climbers on this train?
44
The Two Germans
They were both very tall and very handsome. In fact, they looked as if they’d stepped out of a fashion magazine. One was called Christian and the other Heinrich. They were university students in Germany, soft spoken and gentlemanly. They explained that they were from Bavaria and I remember asking them if they were able to ski. Oh yes, they gushed; they skied every winter.
Beyond the Breakwater Page 12