Dear Cathy ... Love, Mary

by Catherine Conlon

  And on that self-same Sunday morning Vivianne said to me that she didn’t want to see me the whole day. I could do what I liked, just get out of the house. That was (or so she said) because I’d woken her up when I came in at 4.30 a.m. Talk about an overreaction! Personally I think she was just taking all of her problems out on me.

  So, that left me (broken-hearted and all) with a day off on a Sunday, with nowhere to go and nothing to do and in a half mind to pack my bags and come home. And, what was worse, Lena had gone away for the day with the family she’s staying with so I couldn’t even cry on her shoulder!

  In the end, I thumbed into Concarneau, did a bit of flag-hopping, bought a few post-cards and sat down at a terrace café to write them home to you. Hope there weren’t any crumbs or tea-stains on them!

  I was thumbing for at least twenty minutes on the way home, when this beautiful black Talbot Matra came and passed me out! Next thing is, the very same car approaches again, stops and in I climb. Should have seen the driver – out of this world! Young and handsome and charming and intelligent. Anyway, he dropped me off at the front door. That brightened my day up considerably. I mean, I was in need of being brightened up.

  The third apology is to Sue, for the fact that I’m sending this to Number 63, and to Mary, who’ll have to spend 10p on a telephone call, unless it just happens you’ve already made plans to see each other.

  Anyway, apart from all of this gibberish misery, what have I in the way of news? Oh, yes! Played in a football match, where us girls were dressed as boys even to the point of moustaches, and the guys turned up in skirts and make-up. We won the first match against the crowd in dustbin bags, but the lads from the kitchen flattened us in the second round, and they went on to win the final. Great day, but very tiring, and painful. And that night we went to a nightclub. So, for three days afterwards, it was sheer agony placing one foot in front of the other.

  Had a vinegar shampoo one night in the Suroît. They all thought it most amusing, esp. Thierry, who did the pouring. Had my revenge the next day, though, on the beach. François very kindly permitted me to help myself to a raw double-yolked egg …

  Also Lena’s boyfriend’s friend (if ya follow!) was here for a few days from Paris. I have NEVER seen anybody so good-looking, so nice, so funny, so talented, so intelligent. I mean, he’s just incredible. The French invented a phrase especially for him – ‘super-chouette, super-sympa’! Unfortunately, he’s gone back home. But his family have got a fortified castle in the centre of France so IF things work out we’ll spend a weekend there. And what’s really great is that Eric does winter sports every year and this year there’s a good chance he’ll be going to Val Thorens where I’ll be au-pairing. By the way, don’t read any romantic implications into this because there aren’t any, even if he did give me the crêpe flower out of his ice cream the night we went eating pizzas!

  On Monday, I’ll have been here for exactly a year. My God, the summer passed so quickly, and looking back on it now, the winter did too. But it didn’t seem like it at the time! I’m hopefully doing something to celebrate.

  A fortnight ago, one of the lads celebrated his nineteenth birthday (actually that was the first night I met Eric, when we went to the pizza place). Afterwards, we went back to his place, and opened a bottle of champagne at two in the morning. The only thing that ruined it was that I was still nuts about Mike, who was sitting just a few places down from me, so I felt rather … Choose a suitable word yourselves!

  Lena got both her Leaving and a place in a nursing school. Delighted for her. (How did Michael do?) Marie-Pierre and Alain gave a dinner for her last Sunday. Jean-Christophe was invited as her partner – naturally enuf. Mine was Loïc, a gorgeous doctor (GP) from Concarneau. Had a great afternoon but ate too much – so did everybody else. Marie-Pierre’s cooking is fabulous.

  Am I boring you with all this nonsensical meaningless jabbering? Please reserve places for me in both the ice-cream parlour and the Central Grill and our usual haunts for the second week in September.

  Excuse the fact that I haven’t answered any points raised in your letters. Not intentional I assure you both. But, anyway, I’ll have all of September and two weeks in October to do so.

  All my love to you both, and to your families. See you in a fortnight or so!

  Tons and tons and tons of love

  Cat

  Kate

  Catherine

  Pink Panther

  These are the names I usually answer to over here.

  Epilogue

  * * *

  SUMMER 2015

  Mary

  Catherine came home on 1 September 1984. We had a precious few weeks together, the highlight of which was hitching a lift to Limerick in a chicken truck to see our beloved Chris de Burgh in his Man on the Line concert. Then she headed back to France, this time to the Alps. Though we didn’t know it in 1984, Catherine would never return to live in Ireland.

  I progressed with accountancy, qualifying at twenty-one. I toyed with the idea of moving to London but I didn’t want to be too far away from my ageing parents. As luck would have it, as I approached my mid-twenties the International Financial Services Centre was taking off and many of the large accountancy firms were hiring. So, in 1990 I moved to Dublin to work for Arthur Andersen. I went on to work in aircraft leasing with the Irish subsidiary of a Japanese firm, Nissho Iwai. This led to my current role (head of finance) at the Irish Stock Exchange – ironic, considering my worries of turning into a capitalist thirty years ago!

  Being a hopeless romantic meant I never gave up on my search for Prince Charming, which led me to kiss some frogs during my twenties and into my thirties. At eighteen I was sure I would be a spinster if I had not walked up the aisle by twenty-four. Along the way I came to realise that I was complete and whole as a woman in my own right. Nonetheless, as I approached my forties, I found my soul-mate – a funny, handsome Dubliner called Charlie. I don’t have children of my own but Charlie has two daughters and three sons (and two grandsons to date), whom I love dearly. That her true love would turn out to be a separated father of five was definitely not something eighteen-year-old Mary could have got her head around!

  The letters between Catherine and me have opened a window to my eighteen-year-old self that I have found incredibly moving. There’s something about approaching fifty and losing your mother that makes you take stock. Reading the letters has made me do that on the double: I can see how much I have changed and how much I have stayed the same. Thirty years of experience has given me a broader perspective and I am more open-minded than I was in 1983. I am also less insecure, having a clearer view of who I am and what I stand for. I have learnt to accept myself, warts and all. I’d like to think my values have remained the same. The more I learn the more I realise I don’t know.

  Our eighteen-year-old selves would have thought our almost-fifty-year-old selves completely over the hill. Back then, I thought of life in terms of a destination: heading towards that age of perfect maturity. Now I know it’s all about the journey. Approaching fifty, I’m still on my journey and will be to the day I close my eyes.

  The changes in Ireland in the intervening years have been immense. The internet has revolutionised so many aspects of our daily lives – communication, travel, shopping and music. Cheaper flights have made the global village a reality. Social and legal change has also been huge. And yet emigration has come back again to haunt us. Like myself, Ireland is on a journey and has a way to go.

  The letters have brought back wonderful memories of love and laughter shared with friends and family, many of whom are no longer with us. Back then, we thought they would
be around for ever.

  Mostly the letters remind me of the true value of friendship and how it can last a lifetime. Catherine and I have stayed close. These days we rarely write long letters. Instead we stay in touch by phone and social media.

  In 1974, Catherine was a ‘bossy big-sister’ type. These days she’s no longer bossy but I still regard her as my big sister, even if she is only six months older! The next fifty years will be great fun and I hope I get to spend at least some of them in Catherine’s company.

  I hope you enjoyed meeting our eighteen-year-old selves. I hope that you have a best friend too.

  Love,

  Mary x

  Catherine

  I never meant to be a permanent emigrant – travelling and living abroad was something I was going to do for a couple of years before settling down. I believed that I would return to Carrick-on-Suir, marry and have delightful children, who would wear the same school colours I had hated through my teen years – brown and peach.

  And a big part of that vision of my future back in Carrick was Mary. I imagined we would continue our Saturday dates, perhaps replacing our youthful ice-cream treats with trendy cocktails as we matured into our twenties and thirties.

  But the road I followed took me further and further from Carrick. While au-pairing in the Alps after I left Brittany, I met a French family who had emigrated to Squaw Valley, California. They were looking for an au-pair for their two children, and as I still didn’t know who I wanted to be when I grew up, I saw this as an opportunity for more travel. Six months quickly turned into two years, during which I spoke more French than English. In due course the children outgrew the need for full-time care, but I remained in the Sierras. By now, I had fallen in love with skiing and the outdoor lifestyle. For the next fifteen years, I worked in the hotel industry and met people from all over the world.

  As the letters show, I was an even bigger romantic than Mary (she agrees!). Though my youthful passions were intense, luckily they were not lasting. As I reread letter 27, all about the lost love of my life, Mike, the one who broke my heart into ‘smithereens’, I was amused to find that I could not remember a single thing about him, or about our short-lived romance. The eighteen-year-old me believed that if I had not found ‘the one’ by my mid-twenties, I was doomed. As I approached my mid-thirties, after many romantic heartbreaks and disappointments, I gave up on love. But, like the cliché, when you stop looking, your prince will find you. Mine was a divorced father of two teenaged boys who showed up on an all-ladies snowshoe outing, innocently invited along by a mutual friend. In August 2004 I walked up the aisle as a harpist played ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’. It was a small wedding – I didn’t invite anybody from ‘home’ because I didn’t want to be a bride and California tour guide in the same week! Sadly, Mary’s mother Peggy had had a brain haemorrhage that April and was still very ill, so Mary couldn’t be there.

  The following year, after too many years of dealing with the reality of life in the ski industry – high property prices, uncertain employment, shovelling snow – Rod and I moved to Bend, Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest. I became a first-time home owner and now work in food services in our local hospital.

  As a girl, one of my favourite television shows was The Oregon Trail, a story about the early settlers in the western United States. The ford on the Deschutes river was originally named Farewell Bend by those using the wagon trains – they waved goodbye to each other at the curve in the river as some followed it north and others headed west – and that gives Bend its name. It seems an appropriate home for a wanderer.

  Mary and I were both well into our forties, and watching the sun set into the Pacific Ocean, when my dream of us sipping trendy cocktails as we put the world to rights came true. In spring 2009 Mary and Charlie made a trip to the west coast and Rod and I drove down from Oregon (450 miles) and met them in San Francisco. She had visited me in California twenty years earlier, in the fall of 1988, not long after she finished her final accountancy exams – her first major overseas trip. We toured around northern California and went on a camping trip to Yosemite. I have awful claustrophobia and cannot sleep in a tent. So, I would have my body inside the tent, with the zipper closed firmly to my neck and my head outside. There are a lot of bears in Yosemite, not to mention the deranged killers of our overactive imaginations. Poor Mary lived in constant fear of waking up to a headless tent-mate each morning. Despite my best efforts during that trip, I couldn’t get her to relocate to the States!

  I had paid one sad visit to Carrick in 1991 – when my father died, too young, of cancer. I would not visit Ireland again until 2006 when Mary’s parents, Peggy and Mickey, welcomed Rod and me into their home. Peggy served tea and apple tart and said ‘tis’ a lot and Mickey played the button accordion. Except for the shiny new sparkler on my left hand, it was as if I had never left. Like so many Americans, Rod is part Irish – a Shanahan on his mother’s side – so we celebrate St Patrick’s Day every year, and as we do, Rod and I still talk about that day in Peggy’s kitchen as one of our best memories of Ireland.

  I am looking forward to the next half-century and the future adventures. I am over thirty years and six thousand miles from the life and letters Mary and I shared. But when we talk on the phone it’s as if the years and miles don’t exist … and we still keep an ear out for ‘yer wan’ listening in!

  Catherine x

  THE BEGINNING

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  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  First published 2015

  Copyright © Catherine Conlon and Mary Phelan, 2015

  Jacket photographs by Jeff Cottenden

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted

  ISBN: 978-0-241-97521-3

  PART 1: CHANGE – AUTUMN 1983

  * Our former English teacher.

  * Sister Regina, our former religion teacher.

  * Catherine’s grandparents and younger sisters.

  * A private housing estate in Carrick-on-Suir.

  * Mary’s maternal grandparents.

  † Mary’s aunts.

  * A type of black pudding.

  * In Ireland in 1983 contraceptives (including condoms) could only be dispensed by a pharmacist on presentation of a doctor’s prescription. That’s why I was shocked to see condoms on sale in the college shop – it was illegal!

  * Education minister.

  * Mary’s American penpal.

  * Girls.

  * Miss Hallinan, our former Irish teacher.

  † Sister Perpetua, the new principal of our former secondary school.

  ‡ Sister de Porres, Sister Perpetua’s predecessor.

  * Sister Patrick, the retired teacher who ran the second-hand-book borrowing scheme. Neither of us could afford all new books so once we got our book list every year we went along to Sister Patrick to see if she had any of those we needed. Every ye
ar you had to answer all of her questions as to why exactly you couldn’t afford new books and assure her that you had tried to get them second-hand elsewhere. She had a relatively small stock of books so she was trying to ensure they went to the most deserving. She used to wear her glasses down on her nose and would peer at you over them for what seemed like an eternity before giving you a book. We always said that any intelligence service would be proud of her interrogation techniques and nicknamed her 007.

  PART 2: CELEBRATION – WINTER 1983–4

  * Catherine was not able to get home to Carrick for Christmas and spent it with her father and sister Celia in London.

  * Girls.

  † Eleanor was training to be a nurse in Dr Steevens’ Hospital in Dublin. It was one of the last hospitals that insisted that the trainee nurses wear full veils (just like novices in a convent). Even in 1983 that was unusual.

  * Marita joined the class a few weeks in.

  * Catherine’s father’s partner.

  * Student priests and brothers. Catherine’s home was next door to the Rosminian order’s college at Glencomeragh.

  PART 3: AWAKENING – SPRING 1984

  * The cat turned out to be female so the pronoun changes further along!

  * Women’s Affairs minister.

  * Health minister.

  † Home of the accountancy class, a former army barracks over a mile from the main campus.

  * Students from Greenhill.

  * While at school Catherine had entered a competition and won a place in a writing class with Maeve Binchy.