Learning to Love Ireland

by Althea Farren

  The assistant production supervisor at a large meat factory near Camolin would gain direct experience in Production, Health and Safety and in Human Resources Management. Thanks to our excellent supervisory management course, I knew the difference between strategic planning and tactical planning and I was confident that I had the requisite problem-solving and decision-making skills to enable me to ‘manage people and processes in a production area’.

  A company in Ballycanew, not far away, wanted an intern with good communication skills, someone able to work on her own initiative as well as part of a team. I hoped that my window boxes and pot plants were evidence that I had a ‘knowledge of horticulture’.

  The following week, however, I became the luckiest intern in Ireland.

  ‘We need someone to assist us with marketing,’ said the director of Wexeng. ‘We’re a small engineering business and we’ve been very busy until recently. But now we’ve completed most of our projects. There isn’t much in the pipeline for next year, so we’re going to have to be a lot more pro-active about looking for new opportunities. We haven’t promoted ourselves or used our website effectively. That’s all going to have to change.’

  He stood up and went across to the magnificent window. Late afternoon sunshine poured over the desk where I was sitting. If this were my office, I thought, I’d spend as much time as possible at that cathedral-like window, contemplating the roofs of Gorey, eye to eye with the crows perched on the telephone lines. On grey days, I’d want to monitor the easing of the rain and the lightening of the sky above St Michael’s Church spire.

  Wexeng was one minute’s walk from our house at Tara Close. My duties involved reception work, prospecting for new clients, composing newsletters, compiling Operation & Maintenance Manuals, updating the company’s website and learning about engineering concepts. I discovered what Asset Management, Energy Audits, Performance Improvement Analysis and Lean Healthcare entailed. And it was gratifying to be able to modify and improve their profile so that they could attempt to market themselves more profitably.

  The beautiful open-plan conference room on the floor below the directors’ office always smelled gorgeous. Different fragrances would drift down to the ground floor where I worked in reception. Sometimes it was the sharp freshness of thyme or rosemary; sometimes I’d smell honeysuckle or roses or citron or frangipani. During the week a variety of workshops would be held there: Unlocking your Creativity with The Artist’s Way, Homeopathy – Treating the Whole Person, Nutrition – Juicing and Smoothies, Aura-Soma, Reiki and Reflexology. If Aura-Soma was the course being run that day, a multitude of perfumes would tumble down the stairs competing for my attention. If nutrition training was underway, a concoction of bananas, oranges, strawberries, celery and carrots might appear on my desk at teatime.

  Gaynor, Elaine and Roisin hired the conference room from Wexeng for consultations and workshops. When they were in residence, the entire building tingled with energy, purpose and anticipation.

  I was familiar with Reflexology and Reiki. But I’d never heard of Aura-Soma. Elaine explained that Aura-Soma was colour therapy. It was logical to seek enlightenment, awareness and self-knowledge through the senses. The language of colour, she said, spoke to the soul. Her tiers of dual-coloured glass bottles glowed from within, as she did.

  Julia Cameron’s influential book on creativity, The Artist’s Way, had a special place in my heart, and I would have loved to attend one of Gaynor’s popular courses upstairs. How I wished Gaynor had been in Bulawayo when I’d needed her. Then I wouldn’t have had to study Julia Cameron’s techniques on my own.

  I met Roisin, a homeopath, on my second day at Wexeng and was drawn to her immediately. She was gentle and warm; interesting and interested – one of those rare people who make you feel safe. I felt it was no coincidence, therefore, that homeopathy was considered to be ‘a gentle, safe, non-toxic route to the restoration and enhancement of health’.

  Rumer Godden, one of my favourite authors, called her autobiography A House with Four Rooms. She was quoting an Indian proverb:

  ‘Everyone,’ she said, ‘is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time, but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.’

  Gaynor, Roisin and Elaine were teaching people about the need for balance in their lives: how to achieve equilibrium of body, mind and soul. Gaynor made us feel loved, valued and cared for. Roisin gave the gifts of security and acceptance to her friends and clients. Elaine, who challenged us intellectually, was loyal, strong and brave. All three were alive with that ‘sense of possibility’ and that ‘spiritual electricity’ that Julia Cameron speaks of in The Artist’s Way.

  It was around this time that I realised that those first shockingly violent farm invasions in 2000 which had turned our lives upside-down seemed a world away now. At last, Zimbabwe was becoming less and less relevant to me.

  It wasn’t as though the worst was over and that things had moved on in Zimbabwe. Mugabe and his cronies were still in place, the people were still oppressed and corruption and lawlessness were still indisputable realities.

  But now I was discovering that I could hold the horror and sadness of it all at arms’ length. I could actually push it away. Since I couldn’t do anything to change the situation, I’d accepted, finally, that there was no point in trying to live in two places at the same time.

  I still felt distressed and guilty, though, when I couldn’t remember exactly where in Bulawayo the National Merchant Bank was. (It had been our bank for years.) Was it in Fife Street or George Silundika? I could no longer visualise clearly the beautiful plants I’d tended so lovingly in our garden. I didn’t have the faintest idea what the value of the Zimbabwe dollar had been on the day we’d left. Or how effectively the country now functioned since adopting the US$ as its legal tender. And how could I have forgotten some of the names of our factory workers?

  I had been sure that these things and so many others would be engraved on my mind and soul forever. A line from Psalm 137 kept coming into my head:

  ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning...’

  And how could it be now that we simply shrugged when confronted with embarrassing reports about Morgan Tsvangirai’s messy love life? Didn’t it matter anymore that Susan, his wife of 31 years, had been killed in what many believed was ‘a black dog’ (Zim-speak for assassination by motor accident)? Many believed that Morgan had been the intended victim. Didn’t it matter that his promiscuous cavorting once again raised questions about his judgement and his fitness to lead the embattled, violated people who had suffered so much for so long?

  It was because I had reached Oberg’s fourth and final stage of culture shock at last – acceptance and integration.

  It was because I was becoming ‘somebody’ again.

  And it was because I was learning to love Ireland.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Stinging rain on the streets outside sliced through our guests’ coats and jackets. Hefty blasts of wind propelled them through the door and into the warm, steamy embrace of The Book Café. It certainly wasn’t the balmy July evening we’d hoped for.

  I’d been amazed at how many feisty music lovers were prepared to trudge in their wellies through acres of mud to attend Ireland’s biggest music festival, Oxegen, at Punchestown Racecourse. For four days tens of thousands of them slept in tents in the driving rain. Irish people don’t allow the weather to discourage them from supporting cultural events. Even when the writers, musicians or artists are blow-ins.

  Being a blow-in wasn’t so bad, after all. I’d met more people in the last six months than I’d met in the previous five years.

  We’d invited the whole town to attend the launch of It’s a Little Inconvenient, which was being hosted by Zozimus Bookshop. I’d finally decided to publish the book myself.

  I hadn’t been this e
xcited since we’d launched Voices of Zimbabwe in Harare and Bulawayo in 2001.

  Zozimus Bookshop in the Book Café had become a special place for Larry and me. Originally the premises had been an indoor market. We’d walk past the hand-made soaps, the jewellery and clothes, the wooden signs that said ‘Bless This Home’ and the homemade cakes and sweets. We’d head for the second-hand book section with the Dickensian ambience owned by the tall man with long grey hair and a puckish sense of humour. No matter how cold it was, John always wore light, loose-fitting clothes and sandals with socks. We’d discovered that he knew everything there was to know about books. He’d been a director of a well-known bookshop in London before he and his family had decided to move back to Ireland and settle near Gorey. While John and Larry discussed Thomas Davis or Bernard Shaw, I’d wander about looking for replacements for the books I’d had to give away in Zim.

  Then Boots (yet another chemist for Gorey) took over a large part of the building. Anne and Ben’s restaurant and Zozimus Bookshop elected to remain in what was left of the Main Street premises, and many of the other occupants opened their own businesses in various empty shops around the town.

  When John went to St Louis to deliver a lecture on Oscar Wilde or to Dublin to talk about James Joyce and Ulysses or to Kerry with his family, I got the chance to help out. His customers came from Zürich, Berlin, Cork and Galway, as well as from Gorey, Courtown and other parts of County Wexford. Occasionally, whole families came down from Dublin on book-hunting expeditions.

  ‘Where’s himself, then? Have you given him the day off?’

  ‘That’s not a local accent. Are you from Australia? Or New Zealand? No? South Africa, then?’

  ‘There are boxes and boxes of my father’s books in my attic. I’m sure there are some on the 1798 Rebellion. Do you think your man would take a look?’

  ‘Have you ever seen anything as exquisite as Edith Holden’s watercolours in The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady?’

  ‘Tom Crean Iceman: The Adventures of an Irish Antarctic Hero. What a find! He’s much more interesting than Scott or Shackleton. My son did a project on him last year.’

  ‘I’m so sad about Maeve Binchy. You haven’t read any of her novels? You’d love her descriptions of family relationships and you’d learn a lot about life in Ireland’s small towns. I can’t believe there’ll never be another book after A Week in Winter’.

  ‘At last. A place where books are served with coffee and chocolate cake...’

  Two- and three-year-olds were fascinated by the cheetah cupboard. They loved opening the door in his chest to show their mums and dads the books hidden inside. Four- and five-year-olds cuddled up to the giant teddy bear on the couch to leaf through My Dinosaur is Scared of Vegetables and Thomas the Tank Engine.

  Zozimus was a blind nineteenth-century poet who used to wander about Dublin reciting verses and songs. His real name was Michael Moran – ‘Zozimus’ was a pseudonym, John said, borrowed from a holy man of antiquity. I’d never heard of him, probably because he wasn’t in the same league as WB Yeats or Seamus Heaney. John felt protective towards him and the other neglected poets. In their illustrated anthology Ireland’s Other Poetry: Anonymous to Zozimus, John and his co-editor, Hector McDonnell, explained that they had assembled ‘...a big collection of poems that rhyme. Irish poems mostly, but not in Irish, in English...’

  They’d included ‘Saint Patrick was a Gentleman’ – a ‘recitation’ by Zozimus:

  ...There’s not a mile in Ireland’s Isle

  Where dirty vermin musters,

  But there he put his dear fore-foot

  And murdered them in clusters;

  The toads went pop, the frogs went hop,

  Slap-haste into the water,

  And the snakes committed suicide

  To save themselves from slaughter...

  Roisin, Elaine and Gaynor had spent hours dropping leaflets around the town to publicise the launch of It’s a Little Inconvenient. They’d stuck up fliers in shop windows and emailed their many contacts. Our son, Brian, had flown over from London and our friend, Colleen (a former member of our Bulawayo book club), had travelled by train all the way from County Mayo to join us. Mike Auret, who had been director for the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, was there with his wife, Di. He was to write a review for the Irish Catholic. It had been many years since we’d last seen each other in Bulawayo. After spending much of his life fighting injustice in all its insidious shapes and forms, first in Rhodesia and then in Zimbabwe, he and Di had retired to County Offaly.

  After John had introduced me to the assembled audience, I explained that, since the referendum in 2000, each election in Zimbabwe had been rigged – ZANU couldn’t risk losing to the opposition MDC. Before an election took place, Mugabe would conduct a systematic campaign of intimidation. Afterwards, he and his party would mount a sinister military operation designed to punish the individuals and communities who had voted against them. Those who had voted ‘the wrong way’ would be tortured, raped or murdered. Their homes and all their possessions would be burnt, stolen or destroyed. The tendons on the legs of their cattle and goats would be cut. Even the animals deserved to be mutilated for their association with the MDC.

  I described the ladies’ book club to which I’d belonged for so many years. I told them how soaring inflation had forced us to spend millions of dollars on basic commodities. We’d queue for hours and sometimes days to withdraw our cash from the bank. When our banks had run dry, we’d been forced to buy cash from the supermarkets to pay our workers’ wages.

  Zimbabwe’s ‘blood diamonds’ were making the powerful and the obscenely rich Mugabe elite even more obscenely rich and powerful. Diamond revenue was also being used to pay the salaries of soldiers and policemen, since they were crucial to Mugabe’s strategy for retaining power.

  Mugabe’s policy of black empowerment tended to discourage foreign investment. He had ordered foreign-owned companies to relinquish 51% of their businesses to government-nominated, ‘indigenous’ Zimbabweans. In spite of Ireland’s economic difficulties, it was unlikely that our first world government would authorise a takeover of Apple, Google and Facebook...

  Surrounded by friends and well-wishers new and old on this special night, I found myself experiencing that same warm glow of belonging that had enveloped us in Bulawayo and Harare in 2001.

  It would be Larry’s turn next. His novel was nearly finished.

  We drank a toast to Once an African.

  A number of people who’d read It’s a Little Inconvenient encouraged me to start a book club in Gorey along the lines of our Bulawayo group. Several of John’s customers at Zozimus Books had been equally enthusiastic and supportive. We’d begun meeting on the first Thursday of the month and already had a strong nucleus of eight or nine regular members.

  We were allocated one of the conference rooms in the spacious new library. The venue was perfect. We were surrounded by hundreds of recently published books all pleading to be read and by knowledgeable librarians who wanted us read them. We didn’t even have to wash our coffee mugs. They went straight into the library’s dish-washer.

  ‘Just as well we’re not all reviewing the same book as most of the reading circles do,’ said Josephine. ‘After listening to Theresa’s comments on The Casual Vacancy, I’m definitely not going to read it.’

  Lev Grosman of Time Magazine had eulogised it, while Gillian Bowditch in the Irish Times had taken great delight in slamming it, portraying JK Rowling as a rich snob.

  JK Rowling’s new novel wasn’t a comfortable book. Her characters weren’t examined with the gentle, subtle touch of a Jane Austen or even a Joanna Trollope. She’d wielded her knife forensically, stripping back the layers to expose hypocrisy and callousness. The smug, self-obsessed adults of pretty little Pagford weren’t nice at all.

  ‘I was in a hurry when I came into the library last week,’ said Carole. ‘I pulled out a Jennifer Johnston that I knew I hadn’t r
ead and went over to the desk to book it out. The librarians were all busy, so I thought I’d try their new machine. I stuck the book in and the screen said “This is Not a Novel”. So I stuck it in again. “This is Not a Novel”, it said. I must be doing something wrong, I thought, feeling a bit embarrassed. I’d read the instructions before inserting the book. No one was watching, so I took the book out, waited a moment and then shoved it back in. Same story. I went across to the desk. “I can’t get your machine to work,” I said. “What are you taking out?” the librarian asked. This time I looked at the title properly. I was taking out This is Not a Novel.’

  Everyone laughed. Jennifer Johnston’s titles were becoming more interesting as she got older.

  Gaynor had read Shadow Story – one of her earlier books – and had been fascinated by the way she handled the burning Irish issues of the day – particularly the problems arising from ‘mixed marriages’.

  ‘The Railway Station Man focuses on another of Jennifer Johnston’s favourite topics – the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland,’ said Elaine. ‘It’s the story of ‘dysfunctional relationships’ and ‘suppressed emotions’ and the effects these can have on the lives of the victims. You have the feeling throughout the book that ‘something bad is bound to happen’ and sure enough it does, quickly and abruptly. But I won’t give away the ending...’

  She was planning to read The Christmas Tree next. It was my favourite and I was hoping she’d like it as much as I had.

  Roisin had read Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin. She’d had her long auburn hair cut during the week, and looked so different with her new pixie style that I hadn’t recognised her at first in the crowded foyer.

  ‘It’s set in rural Mississippi in the 1970s, so Larry, who is white, and Silas, who is black, are unlikely boyhood friends. After a young girl disappears, Larry is blamed, and the cloud of suspicion that hangs over him from this moment on never lifts. He’s ostracised by the local community and becomes isolated and withdrawn. Silas, on the other hand, becomes a successful baseball player and, as a mature adult, the town’s policeman.