Learning to Love Ireland

by Althea Farren

  Priscilla could do nothing to stop it. She and her fellow nurses were warned not to assist Vimbai afterwards.

  So we slunk away, like beaten dogs, ashamed. We went back to our beds, leaving the girl lying there, out in the clearing, silent and still.

  The next morning, I was on duty at the hospital. While I was busy attending to our patients, something moving outside on the dusty track leading to the hospital caught my eye. It was Vimbai, crawling slowly, dragging her body through the dirt. Leaves and grass stuck to her hair. She was moaning in agony. She smelt foul – her wounds had already become infected.

  I was the senior person on duty. The decision was mine. I could not leave this poor girl to die. But if I did anything to help her, I could suffer the same punishment. I had never been placed in such a situation before. Drawing a deep breath, I made my decision. ‘Silas,’ I said to our hospital driver, ‘take this young girl to Shabani in the ambulance. Go now. Quickly.’

  Priscilla had entrusted me with her memories. I was glad to be of help to somebody who had lived in a war zone where terrible things had been done to innocent people as a matter of course.

  I’d love to say to some of my neighbours here: ‘Forget about the weather. Talk to me. Tell me who you are. I want to listen.’

  I can’t, of course. They’d think I was being intrusive, nosy or just plain nuts.

  In Coming Home, a compilation of immigration experiences by the Safe-Home Programme in 2008, Frances Browner narrates the stories of young men and women who emigrated in the dark, jobless years of the 1950s and 1960s to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Larry and our friends, Liam and Colleen, who Safe-Home settled in Mayo, fall into this category. Frances herself, having lived in the US for years, speaks of ‘closing the circle of emigration by coming home again’.

  Dave, who lives here at Tara Close, roams the streets of Gorey. We often see him when we are out shopping. He responds quietly to our greetings, and we go our separate ways.

  For me, he evolved into a personality only when I read his story in Coming Home.

  At the age of twenty-one, Dave went to England. He enjoyed being on the move, and worked on farms and construction sites around the country, meeting other Irish people in pubs and dancehalls. When he left school at fourteen, he couldn’t read or write, though he ‘picked it up’ later. He drank too much. Many people drink ‘to deaden the sadness’, he says. After a serious heart operation in 1991, the turning point in his life, Dave wanted to come home. ‘Coming home is everything. Somewhere you can turn the key and it’s yours.’

  He feels in retrospect that he should never have left Ireland. But all six children in his family emigrated – it was the norm then. When he returned on holiday 27 years later, he fell in love with Ireland again, and particularly with Ferns, where he was born. He found that he loved the scenery – he’d never really noticed it before.

  ‘When you get close to dying, you start thinking there’s more to life than drink, work and stopping on your own. Life is good in Gorey, because I don’t take it for granted.’

  He wasn’t a lonely recluse at all. He was a gentle, shy man, now at peace with himself, who appreciated the friendliness of the people he met when he was out walking.

  It might have taken a while, but coming home had given him back his voice.

  He knew that he was somebody.

  INTERLUDE

  I don’t know when I’ve seen Audra and Sean looking happier or more relaxed. They’re standing together in front of a bust of Thomas Moore. A river flows a few metres below them under one of those beautiful old stone bridges. The sun isn’t shining, but it isn’t freezing cold either. I know that, if I look closely, I’ll be able to see goose bumps on Audra’s bare arms and shoulders. People from Africa find April days in Ireland chilly.

  A little later they have their backs to us. They’re gazing out across the river, now silvery-grey, as it meanders towards the sea. They turn and kiss. Usually they’re quite undemonstrative. They often hold hands, but I’ve seldom seen them looking at one another like this.

  They walk across a green carpet of grass, and pause in front of a gorse bush. Audra’s cream dress springs into relief against the mass of yellow flowers. Larry, Brian and I join them. Behind us, the river winds off to pass under another ancient bridge.

  Brian, Larry and Sean stand together, centre stage now, with their arms round one another. Larry pretends to throw a punch. Audra and I watch them clowning. Her mother would have been very proud of her. She is beautiful.

  After a quiet ceremony at the registry office in Wicklow, they are having their wedding photographs taken at The Meeting of the Waters, where the Avonmore (‘Big River’) and Avonbeg (‘Small River’) come together to form the Avoca. Of this place he loved, Thomas Moore wrote:

  ‘There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet,

  As the vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet;

  Oh, the last rays of feeling and life must depart,

  Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart...’

  Several months pass...

  Sean and Audra have arrived to spend the day.

  Smiling, they hand us an envelope. I take out the pretty card, a turquoise butterfly decorated with beads and velvet ribbon. It’s one of those cards that have been left blank ‘for your own message’. Inside is a small, square photograph under which Sean has written: ‘Hi there, grandparents. I’m looking forward to meeting you soon. Sorry this picture’s not great, I’m a bit unhappy about my nose, and I sure hope I’ve got my mum’s calves, not my dad’s...’

  The photograph is an indistinct black and white scan of the baby they’re expecting in February 2010.

  We’re to have a grandchild at last.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Three years ago, I thought that adjusting to the Irish climate would be our worst problem. Would we ever get used to the short days and the long nights of winter that began at four in the afternoon? I wondered how long it would take before we learned to cope without the sunshine and warmth we’d been used to.

  I’d assumed that I’d make friends easily; that I’d join a book club (perhaps even found my own); that I’d jettison my southern hemisphere identity and become Irish – not merely the holder of an Irish passport, but a proud, patriotic Irishwoman who merged easily with the locals.

  But none of this had happened.

  I had loved the warm, exuberant people we met in 1982 when we toured Ireland on my first trip out of Africa. I’d been delighted by the banter and the blarney. Twenty-eight years later, I had realised that Maurice Walsh’s quirky characters weren’t driving the buses and delivering the mail. This wasn’t the old Ireland – the magical land of myth and legend – with crocks of gold at the ends of rainbows and diminutive red-bearded leprechauns mending shoes and granting wishes. Present-day leprechauns were to be found among the crowd at rugby matches or marching in St Patrick’s Day parades.

  I had expected that after two or three years, I would feel a sense of belonging and acceptance, the beginnings of a new identity. Instead, I’d become aware that I was beginning to cultivate an ‘us’ and ‘them’ attitude, which was making me feel angry, disillusioned and ashamed.

  We always used to laugh about ‘whenwes’. This derogatory term was used to describe former British settlers or expatriates, who talked nostalgically and incessantly about their former homes in colonial Africa. The original ‘whenwes’ came from east Africa – Kenya, in particular. In 1978 Rose Martin, the wife of one of Larry’s police colleagues, produced an extremely successful book of cartoons called The Whenwes of Rhodesia.

  When we were in Rhodesia, we used to have parties every weekend... When we were in Rhodesia we had a maid – yes – only one – though some of our friends had two or three... When we were in Rhodesia the steaks were much bigger than this puny offering... It was always hot at Christmastime in Rhodesia, not bloody freezing like here...

  Larry and I had been confident that we’d never be wh
enwes. We’d never preface every other comment with ‘When we were in Rhodesia...’ or ‘When we were in Zimbabwe...’ But it had turned out to be surprisingly difficult to shrug off the infuriating urge to draw comparisons.

  When we were in Zimbabwe we’d never have allowed our children to behave like that... God, that kid in school uniform actually stopped Larry and asked for a cigarette... I can’t believe it... When we were in Zimbabwe nobody’s dog would have been allowed to crap on the pavement in the middle of town... The birds here are so bloody boring. Our birds in Zimbabwe were magnificent, weren’t they – such bright colours – such variety? Do you remember the lovely red bishop that used to sit on the fence near the swimming pool? And the hoopoes on the lawn that Dexter used to chase? And, as for the animals, all they’ve got here are foxes and deer. Not like our animals. Lion and elephant and giraffe and buffalo and leopard and rhino and cheetah and hippo...

  Stop, stop.

  It was alienating, wasn’t it? This distancing of oneself. This smug clinging to a way of life that was no longer a reality.

  The company I worked for in Enniscorthy was shutting down. Having tottered along, dangerously unstable for months, it had finally succumbed to the recession and was about to be liquidated.

  ‘What the fuck,’ Stephen said. ‘I’ve always wanted to work from home.’

  And, with a hug and a wave, he took off to start his new life.

  The thought of being a job-seeker again was not appealing.

  I was extremely relieved when Fintan asked me if I’d like to stay on and work for his electrical division. The work would be similar and I’d have the office to myself. I’d have to take a 10% pay cut, but who in the private sector hadn’t had to ‘make sacrifices’ and ‘take the pain’? Fintan’s electrical business, like most other small businesses, was struggling to survive.

  My usual routine of invoices, quotations, letters and filing was interrupted towards the end of June.

  Maureen, a friend of my employers, had a psychology assignment to hand in. She had to compare the theories of Carl Rogers with those of William Glasser. She couldn’t type and she had two weeks left. Fintan asked me to check her notes and type the project for her.

  It was fascinating. Psychology had been one of my first year subjects at university in the 1960s. We’d studied the behaviour of rats in mazes and the salivating response of a dog to a bell. We’d attempted to assess a subject’s personality and inner conflicts through his/her interpretation of Rorschach’s inkblots.

  While reading Maureen’s notes, I came across a section on the subject of ‘Culture Shock’ that made an enormous impression on me. Here, at last, I found an explanation for the despair, frustration and sense of dislocation that is the experience of so many of us in the Zimbabwean diaspora. I thought of Stuart, a farmer, who, after four or five years, was still unable to come to terms with life in a small village on ‘Mud Island’ (his disparaging name for the UK). I thought of Mary, struggling to adapt to teaching in Australia. In a recent email she’d written:

  Of the twenty kids in my Care Group (form class), nine are serial behaviour offenders. I am supposed to love them, nurture them and forge a warm relationship with them. At the moment my relationship with them is that of prison warder to inmates. They are expected to keep their form room clean themselves. When I asked them to pick up the rubbish on the floor, they all looked at me for a second, then turned round and carried on talking. I put up an inspirational saying by the Dalai Lama on the back wall, and by the end of the day someone had attached a snot-laden piece of loo roll to it.

  These kids are definitely First World (which means ‘I come first and I couldn’t care less about anyone else’) and I am like a fish out of water.

  Glenda has been teaching here in Perth for four years and, even at her school (which has a better reputation than mine), things are not as they should be ... Earlier this week she asked a boy four times to move a desk for her. He just looked at her. Finally, she moved it herself and reminded him that she was responsible for writing his reference at the end of the year. His response was: ‘I don’t think my employers will be interested in whether I moved a desk or not.’

  I did finally cry buckets on Thursday...

  In 1954, Kalervo Oberg, a Canadian anthropologist, gave a talk entitled ‘Culture Shock and the Problem of Adjustment to New Cultural Environments’ to the Women’s Club of Rio de Janeiro. He discussed the feelings that people experienced after having been ‘suddenly transplanted abroad’, and identified the stages of ‘Culture Shock’ as:

  The ‘honeymoon stage’ when everything was new and exciting.

  The hostile, aggressive reaction stage when disillusionment replaced the initial euphoria.

  The adjustment and adaptation stage where one’s sense of balance was regained.

  Acceptance and integration.

  Culture Shock, Oberg said, was ‘precipitated by the anxiety that results from losing all our familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse. These signs or cues include the thousand and one ways in which we orient ourselves to the situations of daily life’. A person removed from his familiar surroundings experienced anxiety, a loss of identity and helplessness. He felt that he could no longer communicate effectively. Since he had lost the cues that influenced his responses – ‘words, gestures and facial expressions’ – he was unsure as to what was appropriate or inappropriate,

  Oberg discussed some of the symptoms of culture shock he’d observed in his studies of different cultures. These included depression, loneliness, aches, pains, allergies, insomnia, a desire to sleep too much or too little, lack of confidence, feelings of inadequacy and insecurity, the developing of obsessions such as over-cleanliness, feelings of being exploited and alcoholism.

  He suggested ways of getting over culture shock as quickly as possible. A person in this position should attempt to learn the new language, try to find out about people’s interests and values and make an effort to share in their activities.

  When I googled ‘culture shock’, I came upon an article by an anthropology post-graduate from the University of Oxford who’d worked for the summer in a remote rural school near the city of Kisii in the highlands of western Kenya. (Rachel Irwin: ‘Culture Shock: negotiating feelings in the field’ Anthropology Matters Journal 2007, vol. 9 (i).) She had initially been disturbed by the threat of disease and infection and the risk of travelling in the ‘matatu’ (privately-owned minibuses).

  ‘The reality is,’ she writes, ‘that when overcome with irrational fears and anxieties, it is hard to leave the house.’ Home becomes ‘a safe place’. Depression and anxiety affect one’s ability to perform ‘even the simplest tasks’. As loss of identity occurs, one begins to question the relevance of one’s ‘world view’.

  She says that she ‘never fully left’ Oberg’s second stage and ‘certainly never fully adjusted into the fourth and final stage’. But she did accept that the customs of the Kisii people were ‘just another way to live’. When they got home, she and her colleagues transformed terrifying episodes (such as fleeing police checkpoints at breakneck speed in dangerously over-loaded matatus) into ‘hilarious anecdotes’. She quotes C. Geertz, who, in The Interpretation of Cultures, describes man as ‘an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun...’

  For his doctoral thesis, Oberg had studied social organisation among the Tlingit, an Alaskan Native tribe.

  My own challenge ought to have been far less dramatic: I was living in a first world country among people who spoke the same language and whose customs were similar to mine. And yet, after nearly three years, I was mired somewhere between Oberg’s second and third stages.

  I knew that I could never go back to Zimbabwe. If I went as a visitor, I’d be opening all those wounds that had partially healed. My house and garden belonged to someone else. Betty, our housekeeper, worked for someone else, Dexter was someone else’s dog and Mission and Olly were Cheryl’s cats. Although I kept in touch with most
of them through email, my friends had moved on. My place in the book club had been taken by another person. Alfa was someone else’s company and the people who worked there had new loyalties.

  I no longer had substance in the Zimbabwean context.

  In December, Larry and I left the dreadful weather behind and flew to Durban to spend Christmas with Glyn and Ian. I couldn’t wait to see my sister. And I couldn’t wait to be in South Africa again.

  From the moment we stepped off the plane in Johannesburg, I felt that I was home, even though it was seven years since I’d last been in South Africa. At the new OR Tambo International Airport the queues seemed to move just as slowly in the huge new arrivals hall as they had done in the old airport. There weren’t enough signs. We were misdirected several times, failed to make our connecting flight and had to catch a later plane to Durban.

  We wondered when they’d be addressing these problems: the World Cup was only six months away.

  But it was familiar. We knew what to expect and what to do about it.

  Each languid morning, we wakened to the scurrying sounds of a vervet monkey family playing on the roof of Glyn and Ian’s house. The noisy duet of black-collared barbets in the trees outside our window alerted us to the generous warmth of the sun pouring into the room. Sometimes we heard Ian being summoned by the plaintive wails of Natasha, the hungriest of their three beautiful, fluffy Persians.

  As we breakfasted on the patio, a line of ships in the hazy distance awaited their turn to be escorted into harbour. Around us, bees buzzed from flower to flower, butterflies quivered and shimmied above the table and motionless geckos basked on stones nearby. They seemed to know when the cats were somewhere else. Every so often, the surprisingly raucous call of a hadeda ibis flying overhead interrupted our conversation.