Learning to Love Ireland

by Althea Farren

  We didn’t have disposable nappies when Sean and Brian were babies. We didn’t have the gadgets and contraptions available today that amuse infants and young children and keep them safe. Cot monitors and bath thermometers and specially designed car seats and mobiles that play Mozart and Forest Sounds...

  Audra and I were looking forward to dancing lessons. We could visualise her wearing a powder puff tutu and little pink ballet shoes. Sean said he was going to take her to Krav Maga classes. He explained that this was a system of hand-to-hand self-defence developed for the Israeli Defence Forces. He got positively lyrical describing the techniques designed for attack situations.

  Larry sent Sean and Audra an article from the Irish Times about a twelve-year-old girl who had disabled an intruder and then chased him out of the house...

  Our adorable Bailey had a hundred different moods and expressions. One moment she was amusing us with shrieks and chuckles. Seconds later, she was crying – she’d realised she was hungry.

  She enjoyed her christening, except for the part where she had to be held over the font to have water poured on her forehead. I could sympathise. Her ordeal reminded me of our visit to Cork in 1982 when I had to lean backwards over the battlements at Blarney Castle to kiss the Blarney Stone, while the attendant held onto my legs to stop me plummeting 200 feet.

  We were hoping it wouldn’t be long before she enjoyed her swimming lessons.

  We’d all heard stories about very young children who’d managed to ‘save themselves’ when they’d fallen into a lake or pool. Teaching one’s baby to swim as early as possible was the sensible thing to do. Water Babies instructors taught aquatic breathing, propulsion, buoyancy and basic water confidence. Within a matter of weeks, some babies would be floating comfortably on their backs.

  When Sean was a toddler, he thought he could walk on water. On two occasions he climbed into our swimming pool without making a sound. One moment he was playing beside us; seconds later, he was drowning, face-down in the water. Brian also loved the pool, but he’d been more cautious. He’d throw a tantrum each time we hauled him out to warm him with hot chocolate and vigorous towelling. Through chattering teeth, he’d insist he wasn’t cold.

  From our seats in the viewing area, we watched Sean and Bailey join the class in the heated pool for her third lesson. The instructor was a lively young woman. She wanted the babies to look at her – no easy task – there were twelve of them. She spoke slowly and clearly, smiled and waggled her fingers. Most of the babies seemed happy, relaxed and cooperative. Bailey, on the other hand, appeared determined not to enjoy herself.

  Sean chanted the directions and went through the motions, along with the other parents:

  Splish, splash, splish, splash,

  Around in a circle

  And... UP in the air!

  He hated singing, but he was prepared to make sacrifices for his daughter.

  After a while, the mums and dads were instructed to sit the babies on the edge of the pool. They had to settle them and then swing them down into the water. They were to repeat the activity two or three times. But Bailey didn’t want to sit. She wanted to stand. And when she wanted to stand, nothing else would do. Surprisingly strong, she stiffened her legs and refused to bend them. She became a rigid little board that intended to stay where it was.

  The next part of the lesson involved wetting the babies’ faces. ‘Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy – round and around and around...’ Bailey was tired of this nonsense. It wasn’t fun like bath-time. She wanted out. She wanted her mum. She wanted her lunch.

  She was unmoved by Sean’s rendition of ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’. Sean was distressed. Bailey hadn’t shown the other kids how it was done. Perhaps she wasn’t going to be an Olympic swimmer after all! Perhaps next week her mum should swim with her...

  Audra wrapped her in her special towel and held her tightly. She peered out from under the hoodie with its bear’s face and ears and stopped crying. We told her that she was a clever girl.

  When they emerged from the changing room she was wearing a cute denim skirt with warm tights and clutching Denzil the Dragonfly. She saw us waiting near the pool entrance with the other sports fans, and gave Larry the most wonderful smile.

  ‘You’re my Granddad,’ her smile said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  There were those awful, arid days when you couldn’t think of a thing to say. Or when what you wrote was drivel. Or when you read what someone else had written and you thought ‘I’ll never be able to write like that’.

  There were those occasions when, as you were lying in the bath with your mind in neutral, a marvellous image or phrase suddenly presented itself. While it was hovering like a hummingbird on the edge of your consciousness, you jumped out of the water to commit it to paper. But the pencil slipped from your wet fingers, rolled under the bed and your luminous insight dimmed, flickered and then...evaporated...

  There were good days, too. When dictionary.com supplied the perfect word you wanted. When you were on a roll and the cooking and the ironing could go to hell.

  Larry’s book, Once an African, tells the story of Sean Butler, who, in search of adventure, goes out to Southern Rhodesia to join the British South Africa Police on a three year contract, as Larry did himself. Sean’s three years go by very quickly, and he decides to stay on in the exotically beautiful country he has grown to love.

  The white Rhodesian idyll cannot last, however. The liberation movement is becoming stronger and its demands for black majority rule more persuasive. In 1980, the phoenix that is Zimbabwe rises from the ashes of the colonial regime, and Rhodesia ceases to exist.

  Larry wanted to expose Gukurahundi, the Mugabe regime’s unpunished genocide carried out by the North Korean-trained 5th Brigade of the Zimbabwean army just three years after independence. This was Mugabe’s first use of food as a weapon of suppression. More than 400,000 Zimbabweans were driven to the brink of starvation before 5th Brigade was disbanded in 1986. The victims were largely from Matabeleland and Midlands provinces which supported ZAPU led by Joshua Nkomo. An estimated 20,000 civilians (the figures could be even higher – estimates vary) were murdered and buried in mass graves or thrown down disused mine shafts. Thousands more were raped, mutilated and tortured.

  Larry’s story was inextricably linked to the tragedy of Zimbabwe. He wanted the world to know how Mugabe had brutalised and subjugated his own people.

  He was drafting and re-drafting; I was editing and re-editing the revisions and our arguments and tight-lipped silences would be in direct proportion to the number of corrections and gratuitous suggestions I’d made. He acknowledged that I was a necessary evil, but he wasn’t a masochist, he said, and he didn’t have to enjoy the pain.

  One of the worst and most common mistakes writers made, I’d read, was to send their work to agents or publishers before it was ready. Their submissions would be rejected and they weren’t likely to get a second chance. You could run out of potential publishers, if you ignored this advice. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to be objective when you’d poured your soul into your creation. I knew now that I’d jumped the gun when I’d sent It’s a Little Inconvenient to South African publishers just after we’d left Zimbabwe.

  It hadn’t been ready.

  Each time Amazon.com sent me an email advertising a new book by a Zimbabwean author, I felt envious. Most of the authors were young.

  In his memoir, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, Peter Godwin draws the reader’s attention to the ironic reality that, in trying to polarise blacks and whites, Mugabe had created ‘a real racial unity... a hard-won sense of comradeship, a common bond forged in the furnace of resistance to an oppressive rule...’

  Although Godwin’s parents are professional people (his mother is a doctor and his father is an engineer) they’ve been struggling to survive. And yet, however ‘mad and sad’ Zimbabwe has become, his parents can’t bear to leave it.

  When Peter’s father dies, Harare’s crematorium
has run out of butane gas. Bulawayo’s crematorium, too, is out of order. The overcrowded mortuary in Harare is running on a back-up generator with enough fuel to last only two more days. Peter has promised his father that he will have his body cremated, so the family has George declared an honorary Hindu. (Funeral pyres for non-Hindus are illegal.)

  Journalist Douglas Rogers in his book, The Last Resort, also describes his parents’ struggle to keep going. They’d built a backpackers’ lodge on their game farm near Mutare on Zimbabwe’s eastern border. ‘Drifters’ had attracted back-packers and visitors from all over the world until Mugabe’s policies brought tourism to a halt. In 2005, the government appropriated the Rogers’ game farm and lodge and cancelled their title deeds, although the land was unsuitable for commercial farming. Both their home and business were designated as being ‘vested in the President of Zimbabwe’. Once listed in Lonely Planet as a recommended stop on the Cape-to-Cairo backpacker trail, under its new black management Drifters has become a sleazy resort for wealthy black city slickers, prostitutes and diamond dealers.

  The recently-discovered Marange diamond fields aren’t far away and Douglas wants to see them. Near a rural town he is accosted by screaming children trying to sell him ‘diamonds’. He’s tempted to buy one of the pebbles to get rid of them. A police vehicle pulls over and the children disappear. Six policemen question him with pistols drawn. Later he’s told that if he’d been found with a stone he’d probably have been shot.

  Unfeeling is Ian Holding’s novel about a young boy who is traumatised by the murder of both his parents. They have been hacked to death by thugs on the instructions of a ZANU (PF) crony wanting to ‘reclaim’ their farm.

  I didn’t find the murder the most shocking aspect of this book. What I could not forget was the description of a buffalo carcass Davy comes upon in the bush. There is a gaping hole in its stomach...

  ‘He notices something odd: a small round paraffin tin standing by the buffalo’s hind legs. He looks in, sees rotting meat piled to the top. Then, the buffalo quivers. He staggers back in panic, a quick snatch in his heart. He can’t believe what he’s seen, but it moves again. A shudder. He stoops down, peers in. A small child, clutching a dagger, is hunched up inside the bloodied, bone-shelled carcass, chopping and scraping off flakes of meat...’

  It took ten months for It’s a Little Inconvenient to be rejected by all the Irish publishers to whom I sent submissions. One of them was encouraging, though:

  ‘I know Zimbabwe has been a very hot topic this year, but unfortunately, we have learned from experience that this does not translate into book sales. I do hope, however, that you manage to find a good home for your book.’

  In July 2010, Dublin was designated a UNESCO City of Literature, joining three others: Edinburgh (2004) Melbourne (2008) and Iowa City (2009).

  Some good news at last after the relentless negativity dispensed by the media: our Anglo-Irish Bank debacle, failures within the health service, worsening FÁS scandals...

  Gorey was less than two hours away from one of the world’s foremost cultural centres and we hadn’t seen a show since ‘Riverdance’ in 2007.

  Peter Crawleys’s review in the Irish Times (29 September 2010) of ‘Death of a Salesman’ convinced me that it would be criminal to miss out on one of my favourite plays. I remembered discussing the difference between tragedy and pathos with my pupils in the 1980s. Could Willy Loman’s situation be compared to Hamlet’s, Antony’s or Macbeth’s? When could a person be considered ‘tragic’? Did he have to have heroic stature?

  The Gate Theatre was a lovely old building in the heart of the city. We were early, but we went inside and took our seats in the cosy auditorium. The curtains were open. Willy’s darkened house was before us on the stage. There was a sense of growing excitement and anticipation as we awaited his entrance.

  The world ‘in Michael Pavelka’s marvellously sinister set actually seems to be snapping closed on Willy: the toppling façade of a Brooklyn brownstone and a sharply canted stage meet each other like the jaws of a trap...’ Peter Crawley had said.

  Harris Yulin was a weary Willy Loman, worn down by years of exhaustion and disillusionment. He had pursued The Dream all his life and The Dream had consistently eluded him. The Dream had also eluded his sons, Biff and Happy. Like Willy, they are frustrated and confused. At the end of the play, Biff says that Willy has blown him ‘so full of hot air’ he ‘could never stand taking orders from anybody’. Willy’s dreams are ‘the wrong dreams’.

  Shortly after our trip to Dublin to see ‘Death of a Salesman’, Audra won a Green Card on the Official USA Green Card Lottery. Only 50,000 of these are issued annually. Like so many before him, Sean believed that America offered a better opportunity for prosperity and success than most other countries. He was in a rut here, he said, and Ireland, with its serious economic and unemployment problems, was not the answer to his future and to the future of his family. Audra loved her job at Cappagh Hospital, so she was less sure......but they were leaving for Boston in November.

  They’re taking our granddaughter away from us,’ said Larry, who was still lying awake at 4 a.m. ‘When will we ever see her?’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It’s not what we say; it’s how we say it! Assertive behaviour means stating your own feelings whilst acknowledging the other person’s point of view...

  Although few of us were likely to find jobs in these uncertain times, what we were learning was interesting and practical.

  The Supervisory Management Course was taking place in a chastened Ireland with a sense of urgency. Economic hardship and the lack of employment prospects were biting hard. For three hours on Monday evenings in one of the Amber Springs’ conference rooms we applied ourselves to a variety of new concepts, which included Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Hertzberg’s Maintenance and Motivation theories and the Blake and Mouton Leadership Grid. There was little time for socialising. At 9.30 p.m. everyone made a dash for the hotel car park. Often we’d have to sit with our heaters on until the ice on our windscreens had melted and we could see through them again.

  On Friday mornings I attended a Networking for Employment Course, which was lower key and more relaxed. We all agreed that Caroline, our mentor from the Local Employment Service, deserved the freedom of Gorey for keeping so many of us occupied, motivated and off Prozac.

  ‘Don’t wear anything like this,’ said Lucille, our lecturer, ‘when you have an interview.’ She waggled her head at us. The long yellow bananas dangling from her ears jangled and swung backwards and forwards. One got stuck in her hair and she eased it free. ‘Distracting, aren’t they? Don’t wear ties with flamboyant designs, tops with plunging necklines or large brooches. Dress smartly and formally. And no hats.’ She nodded across at Liam, a nice-looking young man who was attached to his beanie.

  ‘You must research the company – number of branches, date of establishment, etc. You should also compile a list of possible interview questions and responses. You have to convince the panel that you are the best person for the job...’

  Many large companies now used psychometric testing. Usually in the form of multiple choice questions, numerical, verbal and diagrammatic tests were designed to evaluate reasoning abilities. Situational judgement tests assessed how a candidate would respond to different work scenarios. The verbal ability tests Lucille made us do weren’t too bad. But my lengthy struggle with the numerical reasoning test was a sobering indication that I wouldn’t have a hope in the competitive, fast-paced Irish arena.

  The FÁS JobBridge National Internship Scheme was a recent initiative to provide the job-seeker with an opportunity ‘to gain valuable experience in a working environment’. An intern could improve his skills, explore a new career path and enhance his career prospects. A placement would be for a six-month or a nine-month period. At the end of his internship, a conscientious person might be offered a permanent position. Interns would receive an extra €50 per week on top of their job-seekers’
benefit.

  There had been some sceptical reactions. Grasping employers would exploit interns... Unscrupulous managers would use them as slave labour... The scheme impacted negatively on real jobs... This was ScamBridge, not JobBridge... Why pay an employee if you could get someone to work for nothing?

  In a few months I’d be 66, off job-seekers and eligible for a pension. But I wanted one last tilt at the job market, even if it was only as an intern. It was nearly a year since Fintan had been forced to shut down his electrical division as well and all of us had been made redundant. Thousands of SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) were in trouble in Ireland.

  I applied for the position of Library and Alternative Format Production Assistant at St Joseph’s Centre for the Visually Impaired in Dublin. The ‘alternative format’ aspect of the job description meant that the intern would be participating in the transcription of books into Braille. I was impressed by the Centre’s ‘sense and grow’ project, where the students were able to observe the behaviour of the animals and birds housed on the campus. They could handle the animals, listen to bird calls, taste the fruit and smell the flowers. Practical tasks were an important aspect of their curriculum and had therapeutic and educational value.

  The gardens and walks at the Centre were beautifully laid out and I was sure the students must be very happy in this caring environment. But the four to five hours of travel every day from Gorey to Drumcondra and back would have worn down a twenty-year-old. And the interviewing panel was quite clear that there would be no job at the end of the internship.

  Over the next few weeks I applied for a variety of other intern jobs. There were two vacancies at South East Radio in Wexford Town. The radio station required interns who were interested in news, politics and current affairs. These individuals should be active in the community, well-read and articulate. They should have a love for radio and a good knowledge of music. They should also have ‘a nose for stories or angles for good radio items’.