‘Not all the time. I definitely don’t think so. I remember your mother sent over some dresses of Jo’s for me to have. Beautiful dresses with shop labels. They were hanging in my wardrobe and I said to Mummy, do you think Annie had these before Jo? And she said definitely not, no.’
I said her mother was probably just trying to big up the third-hand dresses as mere second-hand dresses. My sister definitely appeared in our family photos in dresses I’d been in. And if she had to have an unnecessary number of new dresses, it was because I was a considerably fatter child.
‘Oh no,’ said Siobhan. ‘Don’t say that. She was an extremely thin child. And now I’d say you were both extremely thin.’
Siobhan, unless she had something wrong with her eyes, would have seen that Jo was previously thinner and still thinner – but Siobhan had a long day ahead with me, returning to childhood, so she probably sensed it was best to head off descent into any dark pits of sibling rivalry.
Cousin rivalry pits, although not dark, did seem to be murky in both our memories. I remembered parcels of clothes coming from her mother and feeling that if we had to have clothes sent to us, we must be very poor, practically some kind of orphans.
What was sent to us, from Granny and from aunts, were hand-knitted items. Because they knew my mother always said life was too short for knitting. She recently confessed she’d said this in a sour grapes kind of way, because she just couldn’t do it.
‘Don’t you remember the jumpers I made you? I got it into my head that if I was to be any kind of a mother I would knit for my children. I made each of you a jumper and when I put them on you, each one of you looked like a cat in a stocking.’
I suggested that maybe it had taken her so long to make the jumpers we’d all grown a bit by the time we got them.
‘Grown a bit, nothing. Unless when I measured you for your jumper you had one arm six inches higher than the other.’
So apart from occasional care packages from Ireland, we had to have shop-bought knitwear – one person’s posh is another person’s mother strangling herself in loving attempts with wool.
With courage that came close to the bravery of my mother’s determined knitting, Siobhan and I decided we had to go back down the road where we’d traumatized the old man in his vest. If we didn’t do it, we’d miss out on an important childhood landmark opposite their old house.
‘Let’s go into the street from the other end, so we won’t be so easily recognizable,’ Siobhan said, shoving her camera in her shoulder bag. One of the useful things about my cousins was that you could leave them on a desert island and they’d think of something to say to amuse themselves.
Our landmark was an immense cream-coloured church – all pillars and porticoes. Another of the Mediterranean notions of Donegal, set amid grey local stone and snow-bitten cold. And it didn’t end there: beside the church was a gaudy fake rock grotto to Our Lady, surrounded by benches, as if Buncrana had the kind of weather suited to outdoor worship.
Siobhan and I wondered whether Our Lady had actually appeared in Buncrana.
‘A bit convenient if she’d have appeared down the side of the Catholic church like this,’ I said.
‘They’d have built round her, don’t you think?’ Siobhan was younger than me but she was smarter.
Anyway, it was certain that if the grotto was built where there’d been an actual apparition, with possibly attendant miracles, we’d have all made a great deal more fuss about it, been bringing dolls and pets down for a cure, and not just used the grotto path as a short cut down to the beach.
I don’t remember Buncrana town beach being beautiful. It always had a slightly neglected air about it, a sense that there was someone in the town planning department who hated the beach and wanted it to look as unattractive as possible. There’d been permanent piles of construction material beside the swing park and areas were forever being fenced off, apparently for no better reason than to add ugly fencing to the vista.
There’d been no improvement. The little funfair was gone, probably for good, because a factory had been built at the end of the promenade. Great for the last spree of Buncrana’s textile industry; not so pretty on a beach front.
Some time in the seventies, I remembered Fruit of the Loom T-shirts being very popular all over Europe. This American multinational brought work to Donegal and Derry for twelve years – nobody much cared that their factories looked less than charming at the seaside. They cared more when Fruit of the Loom got into arguments about unionization with their Irish manufacturing plants. The company pulled most of their manufacturing out of Buncrana and Derry, moving to Morocco and the Far East, where non-unionized labour would work for less.
Tourism in Donegal was increasing, but it was seasonal, and hundreds of jobs making T-shirts was a more useful thing to see beside the seaside than mere seaside.
Actually it wasn’t the sea you could see at Buncrana. It was Lough Swilly, deepest sea estuary in Europe. This meant that, although frequently rained on, Buncrana beach was sheltered. Not so the spectacularly beautiful beaches my uncle Joe liked to seek out, further up the peninsula, on the Atlantic coast. Beaches of sweeping sand dunes and waves that came out of nowhere, smashing paddling children into tears at the water’s edge.
‘My father loves driving around the Donegal countryside, that’s why we’d go to those obscure beaches,’ Siobhan said. ‘He’d say, “I hear Death Drowning Blizzard Beach is the best in Donegal.” But it was only a excuse to drive for miles.’
I did recall long drives through the mountains in small cars, being kept amused by spotting dozens of little grottoes to Our Lady set at remote roadsides. Most of these statues were weather-beaten but never untended; they’d have jamjars of wild flowers in front of them, or incongruously bright sprays of garden blooms at chipped holy feet.
Donegal had kept much of its magical remoteness and still had a considerable Gaelic-speaking population, despite streams of people coming in from Dublin and the North, buying second homes, or completely relocating, to spend the future surrounded by stunning scenery and a simpler way of life. This influx had caused some decrease in simplicity and intermittently the scenery was marred by frighteningly inappropriate architecture. Not only the houses painted the colours of clowns’ trousers, but extravagant structures thrown into the landscape, to show that the owners were very fancy folk. Fancy folk who couldn’t see their split levels, colossal water features and glassed-in decks just looked wrong.
We drove toward the interior of the Inishowen Peninsula and were pleased to find it was still possible to drive for miles and not see another car. There were still tiny farms on hillsides, tumbling down into the rocks around them, or possibly growing out of them, they seemed so ancient and rooted.
‘I bet there’s old people in those houses who see no reason to care that the rest of the world exists,’ I said, feeling wistful about how right those old people might be. The rest of the world had nothing to compare to the craggy, gorse-covered face of Donegal.
‘You might think that,’ Siobhan said, ‘but my father told me he’d been out walking in these kind of Donegal wilds and seen an old man cutting turf. My father was betting to himself the man would be a native Gaelic-speaker, with all manner of fine old mountain wisdom. He sat down to smoke, hoping for a chance of striking up conversation with the man. My father’s Gaelic’s very good indeed and the thought of a chat: with a remote old mountainy man would be just a joy to him. Anyway, a wave of a cigarette packet brought the man over. “That’s lucky, I’d come out without mine,” the man said, in an American accent. Turns out, he wasn’t some ancient turf-cutter left over from the nineteenth century. He cut turf for his own fire in the wee farm cottage he’d inherited from his parents. He’d come back from a life spent working as a hotel manager in New York. He looked out over the mountains and said to my father: “You dream of coming back to this in New York.” My father said he understood and asked, “Did you ask yourself why you ever left?” “Oh no, I kn
ow that,” the man says. “It’s a piece of heaven but there’s no eating in it.”’
‘Don’t tell me it’s all Americans up there, don’t tell me that.’
Siobhan smiled. ‘Just trying to save you from disappointment.’
Before tourism and returning money, Donegal had fishing, turf-cutting and subsistence levels of farming. This is why it was only recently occurring to locals that the patches of new building and development could be controlled to be less fearsome-looking. If all the scenery was scarred and marred by incomers and their schemes, one of Donegal’s assets, the beauty of the place, would be lost. Meanwhile, every second son in Donegal was a surveyor and estate agent and money was finally being made without having to cross the Atlantic to find it.
The tiny country roads Siobhan and I were exploring were proving to be too much for us. It had been snowing heavily for a couple of days, now the snow was melting into mud in some patches, or hiding ice in others. We decided to abandon the old remote routes to the Atlantic beaches and head for a cup of coffee somewhere overdeveloped.
‘Anyway,’ I said as we turned back, ‘we would get to one of those beaches and we’d be all alone on remote sand dunes and be set upon by the crazed ghost of one of your disappeared dogs.’
‘Not ghost necessarily. A dog still alive but full of rage and bitterness. He’d smell we were the family that abandoned him and tear us to shreds.’
The shred-tearing might have been unlikely. My cousins always had Jack Russells – tough dogs but, no matter how cross, probably not beyond us to fight one off.
The Jack Russells would survive well with the family until holiday time. Then, despite all instructions to keep hold of them, keep an eye on them, they’d go off into the dunes after rabbits, be lost for hours and have to be declared dead down a rabbit hole by my uncle. He’d keep the search going as long as possible because the caterwauling grief that would erupt from his own children, their cousins and associates, at the moment he had to declare a dog death would be an unbearable turn of events for a soft-hearted man.
One summer he had a reprieve from this annual dog tragedy, saved by a Jack Russell called Sam. Sam had been kept on his lead, kept an eye on… Cousin Maggie diligently had Sam’s lead hooked round her foot while she tried to get changed for swimming. Changing was never easy with Atlantic winds whipping up stinging sand and whisking away towels. Sam was pulling and pulling to get away but suddenly he discovered he didn’t just have the perverse and stubborn type of brain common to Jack Russells – he discovered himself to be a dog that could make plans. He moved closer to Maggie, he sat still and waited until she lifted her foot. He’d worked out that the closer he was, the looser the lead was. So all he had to do when she lifted her foot was shake his head to pull the loop of the lead and he was a free dog, off across the rabbit-rich sand dunes.
What Jack Russells didn’t know was that if they went down a rabbit hole after a rabbit, they couldn’t necessarily get out again. We would try not to listen to Cousin Raymond, who was a bit too good at describing either the slow, bewildered suffocation of a dog roaming the underworld, or the sudden choking of a dog as a sand dune collapsed around him.
We searched and called for hours. ‘Sam! Sam!’ we cried plaintively. We peered down rabbit holes, we began to weep in unison. It was getting dark and my uncle had to announce the search at a sad end. Maggie cried the hardest, blaming herself for the death of Sam. Some of her siblings blamed her too, and there was fighting as well as grief, while adults tried to pack us flailing and sobbing into small red cars.
As compensation, my father rashly announced that he would take everyone to the ice-cream shop on Buncrana high street for Knickerbocker Glories.
‘You see, that was posh,’ Siobhan recalled. ‘We’d never heard of Knickerbocker Glories.’
I assured her that our London childhood hadn’t been wall-to-wall Knickerbocker Glories either.
‘I think my father just said the first exciting-sounding thing that came into his head. We were all in such a state, he knew just saying “ice cream” wouldn’t do it, so he blurted out something wildly lavish he remembered from the Beano.’
I did recall him looking slightly baffled as he realized he’d three Formica tables full of tear-stained children eating huge glasses of coloured ice cream and glacé cherries. At least fifteen of us, gorging on the shop’s top-priced item. He’d paid up cheerily with a very large note, but seemed evasive when I’d suggested we might still be sad about Sam the next night and maybe we’d need the Knickerbocker Glory cure again.
Luckily for his holiday spending allowance, there was no need for another such extravagance. The next morning we went back to the beach and, standing there barking, shameless, his lead lost somewhere in his overnight debauchery, was Sam. Sam fine and dandy and not even emotionally scarred.
After that, Sam survived for years. My cousins’ family had found the dog that was smart enough for them, the dog they could count on.
Siobhan thought the coffee shop on Buncrana high street was where the palace of Knickerbocker Glories had been. The sweetshop also looked familiar. The high street had definitely expanded, far more shops and bars, some of them so flashy they would have sneered to serve a Knickerbocker Glory. Even though the working people of Derry were more likely to go for a week in Spain than on the traditional trip to Buncrana, it was still a thriving seaside town. There were always people from the North, like my family, who didn’t see that Spain had anything but the weather on Donegal. Spain also didn’t have the contrast, the startling moments when the sun did shine on Donegal and display the place as spectacular.
Today when the sun came out, Donegal looked like Switzerland. Snow-covered mountains glinting in winter white light. We took a detour to a local beauty spot, Father Hegarty’s Rock.
Buncrana’s recent reputation as a home from home for Republican fighters tied in with a quarrelsome history. In the eighteenth century it had been the site of an English garrison and was the location of Wolf Tone’s arrest during the 1798 rising. The stories of Buncrana’s part in the struggles of Ireland against the English were not part of our childhood holiday landscape – except for Father Hegarty.
When Catholic priests were persecuted, Father Hegarty had stood up for his faith but had to flee when English soldiers came to put a full stop to his rebelliousness. They’d chased him up to the headland, now known as Father Hegarty’s Rock, and slashed his head off with a sword. It had bounced back down the cliff path fourteen times.
This was where we came into the story. Taking the walk up to Father Hegarty’s Rock with Granny, to say a little prayer for the poor man, was made more interesting by looking for the fourteen dents made by the bouncing head. We’d scatter around the path finding dents, waiting for Granny to examine them and pronounce them as yes, head-shaped, or disappointingly only a place where the rain had moved a stone. Once, to everyone’s envy, Maggie had pointed out a small boulder and said there was a bloodstain on it. Granny had agreed it could well have been blood, adding a new strand of goriness to the adventure – bits of mashed litter examined to see if they were spilt brains, a piece of animal fur poked at with a stick to see if it was a scrap of scalp… Part of Granny’s charm had been knowing exactly how to keep children excited for hours – give them some kind of morbid quest and they’d be no trouble at all.
Granny’s robust attitude to gore sat a little strangely with her poise and properness. Siobhan had spent much more time with her than I had, and although I remembered you could win high praise from Granny for being well turned out, with brushed hair and shiny shoes, I didn’t remember references to Miss Bamford’s Academy for Young Ladies.
‘Oh, you must remember,’ Siobhan urged. ‘She’d say, “You look just like a young lady from Miss Bamford’s Academy for Young Ladies.” Or she’d tell you off and say, “Siobhan, no one would ever do such a thing at Miss Bamford’s Academy for Young Ladies.”’
Where Granny came from, in the hills of County Tyrone, t
here were one-room village schools, surrounded by sheep. There really didn’t seem to be a place for such an exotic establishment.
‘You never know,’ Siobhan suggested. ‘Maybe there was a Miss Bamford who thought the daughters of country farmers needed to be refined, you know, just out of her sheer madness. They were all up there in the hills, walking with books on their head, pouring tea into china cups correctly and saying “how now brown cow”.’
We giggled over Miss Bamford for some time, deciding it was probably some made-up place of Granny’s. After all, she could keep children busy for hours looking for a dead priest’s head dents. She’d have been capable of concocting Miss Bamford’s as some sort of Saint Trinian’s in reverse – an imaginary standard of fine behaviour for us all to aspire to.
I asked one of my uncles if he’d ever heard of this hedge finishing school. He’d said, ‘Finishing school? People in those hills were as finished as they’d ever be by the time they were ten years old.’
But Tyrone country life wasn’t as frill-free as he thought.
‘That was a real place,’ my mother laughed when consulted. ‘It was in Lifford, just over the border from Strabane. Your granny and her sister Rose, for some reason, were sent to this academy for young ladies. Maybe it was because they were the two youngest of five girls and it was decided that they’d be sent in a different direction in life… I don’t know. But they were sent off from the wee farm on the hills to board in this establishment. I think they did learn a lot of grooming and deportment, poetry and music appreciation, that kind of thing. Mainly, though, it was a secretarial college. They’d learn all these peripheral things but the main idea was to be a better class of secretary. Granny hadn’t the slightest interest in the shorthand and typing, she loved the music and poetry side of it. But Auntie Rose had been mad for the shorthand typing. She got all kinds of distinctions and applied for a job in the big department store in Strabane as secretary to the manager. Unfortunately there was a young lad, Dekkie Doherty, who worked in the store, who was from our village. He was, well, you’d sort of say the village idiot but he was also a bit likely to make a grab at young girls in places they shouldn’t be grabbed. And my grandfather said that no daughter of his was working in the same establishment as Dekkie Doherty. And that was that, Auntie Rose wasn’t allowed to take the job.’
Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry Page 7