When I was a child, life was simple and happy and good. Unfortunately at the time I probably interpreted that as being boring but now I value the carefree, safe and content bubble that was my world when growing up. My parents were always there for me. There was never any trouble in the house and neither one took it upon themselves to put anything or anyone in front of the precious child that had been bestowed upon them. I guess I was one of the lucky ones and if I had one wish I’d like to bring my own children to that place where everything was simple and as it should be in an ideal world.
In recent times, in particular, when life has been hard to bear, and thoughts of childhood and that safe place where no one could hurt me have been comforting, I’ve often thought of how lovely it would be to revert back to being a child again. How nice it would be to be the recipient of love and affection where someone else could take charge and control and be the oracle of all wisdom and knowledge that the role of being a parent brings with it. No one actually tells you when you give birth that as well as being a mammy you also take on the responsibility of being a multi-tasking octopus who holds the answers to all questions no matter how ridiculous or difficult they might be. I learnt in my fledging days as a mother that the answer “Because that’s the way God made it” was a good response to most riddles and then my children could take up their confusing analogies with the Almighty as obviously it was His fault for making the sky blue and more bizarrely for making toes and hands go wrinkly in the bath, which was the source of a great amount of analysing and debate in our house.
A favourite childhood memory of mine involved helping to bring in the hay with my cousins who lived on a farm next door. My mother kept me looking like a porcelain doll with ringlets that Nellie Olesen from Little House on the Prairie would have been proud to sport the rest of the year, so part of the attraction of hay time to me was probably the fact that I could embrace my inner desire to be a tomboy and get mucky and dirty for a change. I used to love the sweet smell of the hay and climbing all over the bales and rolling down the hills after the grass had been cut. Mammy and Daddy would also have been there helping out and one of the biggest and most startling factors about them being involved was that it was the one and only time I can ever remember my mother wearing trousers. It stands to reason obviously that nylon tights would not survive a minute when faced with lugging about prickly bales of straw but in my wee head it was a novelty and therefore something to celebrate.
Even as a child I was an incorrigible bookworm who had an insatiable appetite for the latest Famous Five saga in Enid Blyton’s repertoire. A real treat for me was to get picking the latest book in the collection from Jeffers book shop in Portadown where Mammy and Daddy would take me. We used to go out for “wee runs” in the car and Daddy would be pointing things out to me with regard to scenery or places of interest but then gave it up as a bad job when he realised that he was always addressing the top of my head which was permanently buried in a book.
I often find even now as an adult, if I’m ever getting it tough, that opening one of my childhood treasures brings great waves of comfort and consolation. I can still remember Mammy and Daddy reading excerpts from Enid Blyton’s Br’er Rabbit books and chapters from The Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Those were a gift from my Aunt Ann who lived in St Louis Missouri. I was nine years old and still have them in the same presentation box to this day. I wish that my children had grown up in an era where there was less emphasis on gadgets and games and more reliance on books for fun.
As I was on my own I was in the privileged position of getting to choose a friend to go on holidays with Mammy and Daddy and me. There were trips to Bundoran and Rossnowlagh in Donegal and Salthill in Galway and then there was the amazing trip to America to visit my aunties and cousins when I was nine. My daddy often recalls our day out to the St Louis Arch on the 4th of July, American Independence Day, when it absolutely deluged and I announced in a very loud lispy Irish accent that the rain was wetter over here than at home and then couldn’t understand why everyone had chuckled around me.
When I hit secondary school I went to St Joseph’s Convent Grammar in Donaghmore. People will say that your schooldays are supposed to be the best days of your life whilst shuddering and making faces but in my case I found it to be true. Although I probably disliked homework and was the world’s worst mathematician, I look back on my days at school with great fondness and only wish I had taken the time to appreciate them a bit more when I was actually there.
One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t keep a diary as a child. I often wish that I had kept a journal mapping out all the things I did, places visited and experiences had, and if I could go back in time that is one thing that I would be instructing my younger self to do. Along with that advice I’d be informing the young Fionnuala to be more careful in her life choices and not to allow a man to approach unless he was riding a white horse and answering to the name Charming! I’d also tell her to appreciate her parents a bit more as they were and are a couple in a million.
I’d love it if my children could experience the happy times that I had and also if they could see what life was like when people had less to live on but probably coped better than they do today, although prising my daughter away from her mobile phone and getting my son to step away from the XBox remote might just be pushing it. I think my younger children, however, would appreciate the outdoorsy approach to life when playing “let’s pretend” was very real and sky was the blue canvas above us as opposed to a digital satellite dish.
I always remember the sense of wonder and delight that new places and experiences create when you’re young and, given half a chance, I’d bottle that feeling and keep it forever as I think it’s important no matter what age you are to retain a certain amount of awe about what’s happening around you.
So basically I suppose what I’m saying is that if I had the chance to be a child again I’d like to be armed with the adult knowledge that you only ever get one shot at it and every moment is precious! I’d also like to congratulate my parents on a job well done and perhaps I’d elaborate on the “Tom Cruise is really my birth father” idea a bit more but, then again, maybe not as I don’t think Scientology would be my cup of tea!
Children of the world – life is for living. Savour every moment and don’t wish your childhood away, because once it’s gone you’ll never get those days back and some of us adults would literally give our eye teeth to have the chance to go back to a time when the world wasn’t a scary place full of conundrums, difficult decisions and the sad but very real fact that sometimes the people you thought you could rely on the most are the ones who let you down the hardest! No, we’d like to go back to a time where the world actually made sense.
Fiona Cassidy is the bestselling author of Anyone For Seconds?, Anyone For Me? and Anyone For Secrets?. She also writes educational plays and has written a children’s story. She facilitates creative writing workshops for adults, young people and children, and also delivers classes from a therapeutic perspective for trauma sufferers. She lives in Galbally, County Tyrone with her four children Colm, Úna, Áine and Orán.
Story 11: Reflections
Carol Coffey
If for even just one day
I could be a child again
Yet take with me all I’ve learnt since
Into that world of innocence
If I could tell the younger me
Not to fret about what cannot be
That being so very, very small
Is not so terrible at all
If I could take her by the hand
And walk with her past the bully’s stand
And try my best to make her see
That he is just as scared as she
Her fears I’d try to alleviate
Like Mother’s rooster at the gate
And monsters in the long green mile
Will someday, I’d tell her, make her smile
I’d tell her to ke
ep close to her heart
The happy times that made her laugh
For these sustain me every day
Through harder times that come my way
The laughter of my siblings’ games
Cowboys and Indians in the rain
From Christmas mornings by the fire
To swinging on an old worn tyre
Before that lovely day would end
I’d tell the younger me again
The things that make her sad today
Will slow and dim and fade away
I’d say the things for which she aches
Will not a happy childhood make
The bike, the doll, the fancy clothes
Will not sustain her in the cold
And adolescence with all its woes
Will be more painful than she knows
Hopes and expectations raised
Crushed upon the light of day
But childhood dreams now worn and dashed
Will lead her down a different path
Where unexpected wants and wishes
Bring forth a different kind of riches
But I suspect that even if
That day could be conferred on me
My younger self will not be told
Or listen to one so very old
For this journey she must make alone
Decisions on the winding road
Its twists and turns, its knocks and dents
The richness of those life events
And finally before I’d leave
That little child would smile at me
And ask why I no longer watch the sky
Or count the passing clouds go by
Why I don’t take picnics in the rain
Or jump in puddles in the lane
Why there’s no sparkle in my eye
And why on earth I’ve stopped saying “Why?”
And with those words we make a pact
On her advice I now will act
To keep my counsel I will vow
For she knows more than I know now
She knows to laugh and live and smile
And move through life with open eyes
And open heart and soul and mind
Her eyes trained forward – not behind.
Carol Coffey was born in Dublin and after a ten-year stay in Australia has settled in County Wicklow. She has a degree in Education and a Master’s Degree in Behavioural Disturbance. She is a teacher by profession and continues to work in the area of special education. She has written four novels, all published by Poolbeg. Carol has used her extensive background working with children with disabilities to bring the world of special needs to the wider population through her writing. Her first novel, The Butterfly State, published in 2009, centres on a young autistic girl. The Penance Room is set in outback Australia and provides an insight into the isolated world of the deaf child, while Winter Flowers, set in Dublin, examines the generational effects of dysfunctional upbringings on parents and their children. Her most recent novel, The Incredible Life of Jonathan Doe, examines the life of an amnesic man living in a homeless shelter in America and challenges our notions of identity and the importance of finding out who we are and where we belong.
Story 12: Bells, Bibles, Lupins and Love
Roslyn Dee
Some childhoods last longer than others. Some are quickly gone, consigned to the past for all sorts of reasons, while others can be summoned up at a moment’s notice, hey-presto-like, as if by magic. And even when you least expect it.
For a childhood is an ephemeral thing, hovering somewhere out there on the edge of memory, little droplets of remembrance that flit across the consciousness from time to time, triggered by a scent, perhaps, or a specific colour, an old film, a piece of jewellery, or maybe by something as random as the faded pattern on a china cup you happen upon in one of those “vintage” shops. Touchstones, all of them, for a time that is itself trapped in time.
For me it’s many things – Pears soap, the LP cover of South Pacific, the voice of Jim Reeves on my parents’ first turntable, Camp coffee, Perry Mason on television, Midget Gem sweets, the tune “Santa Lucia” (emitted from my mother’s gondola-shaped music box), pink “John Church” roses, dahlias, Donegal . . . All random hallmarks, fragments of a long-ago memory that instantly roots me in my past.
And when my mind wanders there, searching in that hinterland of my early life, dredging the seabed of my memory, it is to my grandparents’ house that my thoughts inevitably turn. If I could step through a CS Lewis-style wardrobe, right now, today, I’d choose to find myself there with the two of them, in the small front room of the terraced house where they lived their long and happy lives together.
It’s more than half a century since my mother’s parents first became so central to my world. And twenty-one years now since Jeanie, aged ninety-two, took leave of this life, the sixteen years of widowhood without her Johnny finally over. “Go on, you old fool,” she used to say to him in her quiet way when he, much more gregarious and expressive, would turn on his gentle charm and make her smile.
Always together. Always in harmony. A marriage, celebrated at the end of the Great War, that, despite their different temperaments and an age gap of almost a decade between them, endured way past the fall of Saigon. Till death did them part.
In their home on the Long Commons in Coleraine they made their life – John Dean, my grandfather, being from the locality and she, Jeanie Bradley, reared beyond the town, in the family cottage that sat along the seashore near Magilligan, that County Derry stretch of the Atlantic that sweeps dramatically around the northern tip of this island. The majestic crags of Binevenagh mountain overhang the coast here, the Mussenden Temple (that godsend landmark for every Northern Ireland Tourist Board campaign) sits high on the cliffs at nearby Downhill, Derry city lies less than twenty miles distant, and the hills of Donegal beckon from just across the choppy waters.
It was a life that revolved around my mother, their adored only child. Later, the net widened to include her handsome young husband. Then next into that family fold came my sister and finally, eight years after her arrival, it was my time.
It all seems so long ago now, that close-knit, happy childhood of mine. And yet I only have to glance around the bedroom I share with my husband today and I’m back there – right back in Jeanie and Johnny Dean’s living room.
For there on my dressing-table is my granny’s little trinket box; over there, by the door, is that low-seated “nursing” chair, re-upholstered now in a different fabric, but still intact; and just there, on the windowsill, where the sunlight glints off it, is a cream and gold ornament, shaped like an opened book and with the words of The Lord’s Prayer, now somewhat faded, inscribed on it. If I close my eyes I can still picture it on the top shelf of the bow-fronted glass cabinet in that front room of theirs.
It’s fitting, indeed, that the Lord’s Prayer ornament should have survived the passage of time, for Jeanie and Johnny lived their lives under the benevolent shadow of their church – St Patrick’s, on the main street of Coleraine, and just a two-minute stroll from the Long Commons.
It was there that my grandfather sang in the choir as a young man, there that he attended the Boys’ Brigade and there too that, for over fifty years, he rang the bells every Sunday morning, a master of the art of campanology. Oh, the thrill of being taken by the hand up to the belfry, that magical place from where the call to prayer was sounded every week, the assembled bellringers led by my granda’s expert hands. Full circle ringing, the clapper, the full peal, the muffled peal . . . the language of the art form that is bellringing still has resonances for me all these decades later.
For Granny, meanwhile, her godly contribution was a commitment to weekly worship, always in Pew Number 101, and to her midweek women’s Bible Class meetings, as much a female get-together, I suspect, as a religious meeting of minds. A chance for the women of the house to escape for a few hours and talk about things that, w
ay back then, held no interest for their menfolk. A kind of before-its-time, all-girls book club – minus the Merlot, of course.
And so it was that Sunday School and weekly church attendance became part of the fabric of my childhood. With my own mother up-front in the choir stalls, and my granda, fresh from his belfry endeavours, having slipped into the bellringers’ pew at the back of the church just as the service began, it was with my granny that I sat on many a Sunday morning. Years later, when I returned on university holidays from England, and later again, when visiting from my Dublin home, I’d often pitch up at St Patrick’s and slip in beside my granny in Pew 101, my church-filled childhood flooding back over me. The enduring power of ritual.
If I Was a Child Again Page 7