“Not even for a hundred pounds?” I asked, placing the largest denomination of funds I could possibly imagine on the table. Times were difficult growing up in 1970s Ireland, and I was always aware that money was tight. I wouldn’t have blamed my mother if she’d given in under such enormous temptation – it was a whole hundred pounds after all.
But my mother just smiled, kissed my forehead, squeezed me a little tighter and began to hum the tune of “Danny Boy”. I drifted off to sleep safe in the knowledge that we were all to remain poor, but happy together for a very long time to come.
I am blessed that my childhood was packed full of such tender moments and memories – I wouldn’t change a single thing about it. I remember long, happy, fun-filled summer days on Brittas Bay beach with my siblings and cousins, and walks in the countryside with my mum, dad, brothers and the much-loved pooch of the time – whether it was Sam, Oscar or Harvey, all very much a part of our noisy family life. And I can easily recall the joy in the house as each new bonny Barrett baby joined the brood: my younger brother Chris, his two little legs in plaster for his early months to help turn his feet out the right way; changing nappies for my cute little sister Suz as she giggled and smiled, charming everyone she met (including her big sis). I even look back with fondness at the daily squabbles and scrapes between me and my older brother Paul. The poor fella didn’t know what hit him when his wilful little sister arrived, and our squabbles toughened me up for life ahead.
But I almost didn’t make it at all – when my mother was just three months pregnant with me, the doctor told her that there was a strong possibility that I wouldn’t make it. But she was having none of it. Determined I would survive, she took to the bed and rested up for a month while my father and grandmother looked after my older brother and the house. And I obviously enjoyed being closely minded – so much so that I didn’t want to come out at all in the end . . . Eventually, several weeks late, but in the fullness of health, and by all accounts a pudgy thing with a shock of dark hair, I took my first breaths. I was born at home with a midwife as was the popular trend in England at the time, so my father was right there to witness my birth. Apparently I had excellent timing, arriving quite quickly in the end on Saturday morning at ten o’clock, leaving plenty of time for Dad to go on to cook a roast dinner for my visiting grandparents and our little family. But in all the excitement of the new arrival, Dad forgot to defrost the chicken before roasting it, and on my every birthday until the day she died my grandmother enjoyed teasing him about that iced roast chicken meal.
So, once my mum was back in charge of the cooking, my childhood was always safe, secure and happy. But there are times I wonder how much of my good fortune was down to nothing more than a twist of fate, a small accident of birth? What if I hadn’t arrived into that terraced house in Croydon to Maureen and John? I was late after all and, according to some, not even expected to make it at all. So what if I’d arrived somewhere else entirely? If I were a child again, and born somewhere else, to different parents – how different might my childhood, my life, have been?
Not long ago my work took me to a small project run by Australian missionary Brothers in the Kibera Slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Kibera has some of the harshest living conditions I have ever witnessed. Almost one million people live there in an area roughly the same size as Central Park in New York. It is an extremely poor area and most of its inhabitants lack access to basic facilities such as electricity or a fresh water supply. Small children play on large mounds of rubbish, sewage and scrap; broken-down cars drive along mud-tracks lined by small tin-shack shops, the many gaps in roofs and windows patched up with cardboard boxes and plastic sacks. The houses are built in winding mazes, spiralling up and down the mud hills. As you walk through the narrow lanes, you need to dodge low under protruding, corrugated-iron structures – most of which my mother would have said could have plucked your eye out – and in this case she would have been right. I dread to think what conditions are like in the rainy season when the ground underneath must be slippy and dangerous.
Certainly no place for a child to grow up.
You would think . . .
Yet it was here that I visited the Mary Rice Centre – a small special-needs school and centre. It is a tiny but vibrant place offering these often forgotten children physical therapy and a chance at education, the ultimate goal being to help them make the transition into state schools.
As the school was closed for holidays, we visited some of the children and their families in their homes. Isaac, a child with cerebral palsy was living in a newly built multi-storey building on the outskirts of the slum. Arriving at the complex, I was dismayed to see a pile of rubbish and sewage out front almost half as high as the building itself. There were no lifts inside, and I wondered how this family managed to carry their severely disabled child up the ten flights of stairs to their fifth-storey flat each day. I marvelled at what genius could have decided to give this family this flat, and not one on the ground floor that Isaac could access with greater ease in his wheelchair. I felt dismayed for this poor young boy and his family, and uneasy about my own comparably privileged situation. How could it be right that I could have so much, could be given such a good start in life, while here on the other side of the world a young boy must contend with poverty and physical challenge on a scale that I could barely begin to comprehend.
But once inside, my view changed. The flat was small and minimally furnished, but utterly spotless. I was introduced to Isaac’s maternal grandmother and aunt who were looking after him while his own mother was attending a funeral. African women are truly remarkable in how they come together to support and help each other rear their families. The women led me to a small room where Isaac was waiting to meet me. As soon as he saw them his eyes lit up. They embraced, and I sat beside Isaac. He didn’t talk, but he didn’t need to – his smile was as broad as any I’ve seen. Pride and love shone in the eyes of his family, who delighted in his every movement. We talked about their lives, which were certainly very hard, but I learnt how as a family they all pulled together to ensure Isaac had the best life that they could give him, and about how important the Mary Rice Centre was to the whole family. And as we spoke Isaac smiled, took my hand, put on my sunglasses for a photograph, played with my charm bracelet, and tried on the hat I was holding – charming me just as he obviously had his own extended family. And I realised that this was a strong family unit no different from my own. There was no need for me to feel sorry for Isaac. He may have severe physical challenges, and his family had little materially, but he was rich in the love and support of his family, and through the Centre he also had a chance of education and much-needed physical therapy for his condition. He was a genuinely happy young boy – glowing with happiness, in fact. The experience changed my view of the world.
Just a few years earlier in Ireland, and affected by my experience as a volunteer with the Special Olympics 2003 World Games in Ireland, I volunteered at a local social project. Every Wednesday a disco and club was held where adults with special needs could dance, socialise with friends, and play pool, darts and other games. It was here that I met Vincent. If you didn’t know Vincent, at first you might not realise he had special needs at all. It was only after talking to him for a while that you realised he was a little slow – but just a little. A gentle soul, he preferred to have one-on-one chats with the volunteers and older club members than to join in with any of the noisier group activities. I remember one conversation when Vincent asked me if I had my own car. When I said I did, he appeared quite sad and wistful for a moment, before telling me that it was his dream to drive a car. Then he asked if I had a mobile phone. And when I showed him my phone, he smiled and told me that his aunt was buying him one for his birthday in a couple of months. He was so excited about having his first phone that he told me about it again every week that we met.
On club nights, we would sing “Happy Birthday” to whoever was celebrating their birthday that week. I hadn’t told
anyone there the date of my birthday, but a few days after it we sang happy birthday to Vincent. That was when Vincent and I worked out that we were born just one day apart. Just one day, and another accident of birth separated me and this sensitive, thoughtful young man who could only dream of driving a car, and whose year was made when he finally got his own mobile phone. It struck me that so much that I take for granted was aspirational to this young man who just one day later was born into a different situation to me – his mind just ever so slightly different from mine.
So if I were a child again, but this time born into a different place, family or situation – perhaps one like Isaac’s or Vincent’s, life would doubtless be hard. But who am I to judge whether that childhood, that life, would be better or worse than my own? All we ever know is our own reality, our own existence. With the love and security of our own family and people, and the added support of vital services in our community, every child has a chance of happiness.
Just like everyone else, today Vincent is a young man struggling with the cards life dealt him, but he is a happy, sociable fellow who delights in the small things of life that might seem of little importance to others. And the day that I met Isaac in Nairobi he seemed just as happy and content in his supportive family unit as I had done that day when my mother reassured me she wouldn’t give me up for all the money in the world.
I just wonder what might have happened if I’d offered her a thousand pounds though?
Jennifer Barrett is chief executive of a developing world charity, and over the years has worked in a number of fundraising, marketing and development roles across a range of Irish arts organisations, schools, colleges and other non-profit organisations. She divides her time between her home in West Dublin and her busy family home in Wicklow where her large family descend most weekends. A keen photographer, she spends much of her spare time travelling far and wide to photograph and observe whales and other marine life in their natural habitats. It was a particularly magical experience with orcas in the arctic waters of Norway that inspired her first novel Look into the Eye, published by Poolbeg Press.
Story 3: Back to the Future
Shirley Benton
“If you were a child again, would you do anything differently knowing what you know now?” Michael Parkinson asks me.
(Disclaimer: I do not know Michael Parkinson. However, it is two in the morning as I think about this and there’s just something weird about walking around the house asking yourself questions. Obviously, if you pretend you’re being interviewed by Michael Parkinson, there’s absolutely nothing weird about that at all.)
“Well, Parky,” I reply (because, feck it, he seems like a decent sort and we might as well be good pals – do it properly or don’t do it at all, I say) “that’s an interesting question. I suppose now that I think about it, plenty of the issues we battle against as adults go back to childhood . . . take sweets, for example. They might make you fat and rot your teeth but I love the blasted things, and I think I’m not being bigheaded when I say they love me right back. But when did this love affair begin? When I was a kid.”
And after thirty-something years of loving sweets, there will probably never be a day when I won’t feel compelled to do jumping jacks in the ad breaks of TV shows, or to park my car a mile away from the shopping centre and walk there and back in the rain just to get a bit of exercise in. To be honest with you, I could live without all of that. But giving up sweets now as a solution . . . nah. It’d be like the death of a much-loved family pet who managed to live for thirty-odd years – a medical aberration of a pet, yes, but much loved nonetheless. No, it’s too extreme and life’s hard enough. It’s just a pity I ever went near the damn things in the first place.
“So if you could turn the clock back, you’d never have had that first sweet?” Parky asks me.
I open my mouth to confirm that I wouldn’t. And then, slowly, I close it again. Wouldn’t I?
You see, rightly or wrongly, lots of the recollections that live in my happy-memories-of-childhood box seem to involve the sugary stuff: the bag of pick ’n’ mix my granny would place in my outstretched hands when she came up to ours of a Sunday night just before Where in the World?, which couldn’t be confiscated by a parent because Granny gave it and what Granny said went; the planning that went into the buying of the penny sweets and rolls of stickers in Molly Burke’s on Main Street, Toomevara; the anticipation of candyfloss (a substance I would have sold a kidney for on dreary Mondays when it was bacon-and-cabbage-dinner day) on the rare occasions when the circus came to town. I don’t know if the pleasure derived came from the sweets themselves or the overall happy-vibe scenarios, but I do know that those memories would have been impossible without them. So no, maybe we’ll leave the sweets alone.
“Ah, I wouldn’t go that far now.”
Parky’s giving me a dubious look. Time to steer the conversation elsewhere before the interrogation begins.
“You know what I’d change, actually? I’m a terrible hoarder, and my mother told me that began around the age of six. I’d keep single Sindy Doll shoes even if I’d lost the other shoe down the street taking the dolls for a walk – someone might have called to the door with it a few months after or something, you know how it is in small villages – and Jackie magazines that had been published four years previously, that kind of thing. God, I loved my Buntys and my Jackies – it would have been criminal to throw them away when I had more than enough time on my hands to reread them. There was a time when I could neither get in to or out of my bedroom because of the piles of magazines stored behind the door, and I had to come and go through the window – that was kind of funny actually, looking back on it –”
“You think?”
“Em . . . no, no. I’m joking, of course.”
I’m not.
“Of course.”
I always thought you were friendlier than this on the television, I can’t help thinking.
“So if someone could have waved a magic wand over your six-year-old self, would you have wished for the gift of tidiness?” he asks.
Here’s where we’re going to fall out. “Oh, I was always tidy, Parky. I knew where everything was – I just had a lot of it, that’s all. And I can assure you, any free carpet space was spotless.”
“Sure, sure. How many inches would that have been, do you think?”
I glower at him.
“Okay, let me rephrase. So you wish you’d been the kind of child that threw out, say, their colouring books when they’d finished them?”
“God, no. Do you not remember how nice it was to look back over all the colouring you’d done?”
“I . . . can’t say I do, no.”
“You haven’t lived, Parky.”
He gives me a look that suggests he’s not the one who’s guilty of that. But I bet he doesn’t have a collection of vintage Kellogg’s Cornflakes bicycle-spoke reflectors from the eighties. Or a stack of Telecom Éireann CallCards. And I do. Hah!
“Anything else, Shirley? Say, if you had one day to be a child again, what exactly would you do?”
I think about the things that are really affecting my life now – things that, unlike a fondness for sweets or a penchant for keeping things longer than I should, I can’t do much about because it’s too late. I think about the things that are affecting the lives of those around me, both people I know and people I don’t, and wonder if there is anything I could do on my one day of life as a child again that would make a difference. And I suddenly visualise myself going back to the late eighties (admittedly I’d be a rather old child then, but I’d also be at the age to exercise a level of articulation that our younger selves don’t have) and, like The Ghost of Christmas Future, visiting the political leaders of that time and telling them exactly what was to come. What their legacy would be. Because, to my mind, the foundations of what our country now is, what it stands for, were laid down long ago and built upon by others following their example. What did we learn from being ‘the sick
man of Europe’ in the 1980s recession? From the brain drain that inevitably resulted from that decade’s unemployment levels? From the sense of stagnation felt by those who remained? What did every single person who was in charge of our country from the post-recession period onwards do to ensure that our nation would not end up in this situation again if we somehow found ourselves with money to do something with? Why did we go into the boom of the late nineties with such a blinkered, greedy vision of spend, spend, spend rather than saving our extra money?
It’s not that simple, of course. A considerable portion of our economic woes can be attributed to a global jigsaw of problems. But if you were to say to anyone on the street that we as a country did all we could to help ourselves before the inevitable day when it would all come crashing down, that we kept our house in order while times were good, you’d be hard pressed to find someone to agree with you. The man whose mother is currently on a trolley in a hospital corridor, still waiting to be seen after eight hours, flicking through a newspaper full of details on the latest banking scandal to distract himself from his family’s hardship, wouldn’t. The overworked hospital worker doing the job of several people wouldn’t either. The person walking to the supermarket to save money on petrol, who’s wondering how much longer it’ll be before her family home is repossessed, would laugh at you if you said that to her. Issues like drastic cuts in healthcare-spending personally impacting people’s lives, negative equity and a consignment to pay a mortgage on a house in a ghost estate that will never be finished, and an inability to pay bills at the end of the month due to cumulative mortgage-interest-rate hikes – the kind of issues that have my fellow countrymen awake at two o’clock in the morning for reasons other than being a night owl like myself – are almost normal to us now. A level of personal responsibility is demanded from all of us, but the buck has to stop with someone. We were not the experts, yet we are the ones to pay. If those in power knew then what we know now, would someone – anyone – have done anything differently? If they were given an understanding of the undercurrent of anger that pervades 2013 Ireland, would anyone have cared enough to put reasoned measures in place to prevent, or at the very least alleviate, the current pressure on this country’s inhabitants?
If I Was a Child Again Page 2