“Do you want to see my presents?”
“We can see them later,” Mum insisted. “We all need to get some sleep now.”
Dad looked at his watch – it was now five o’clock in the morning – and nodded in agreement. He’d had enough of the drama.
Marisa Mackle is the author of seventeen books including Along Came a Stork and The Secret Nanny Club. She has published two children’s books illustrated by former Miss World, Rosanna Davison, called Girl in the Yellow Dress and Lucy Goes to Hollywood. She is also a columnist for the Evening Herald and Enterprise magazine. She has a son, Gary, and two and a half cats (one cat divides her time between Marisa and a neighbour). She has a degree in English literature from UCD and now guest-lectures herself at universities. She is currently published in fourteen different languages, including Japanese and Russian, and is a number one bestseller in Ireland and Germany. Her favourite pastimes are shopping, travel, water sports, and of course, reading! She loves everything to do with Christmas and always puts up her (artificial!) tree the day after Halloween. For more information see www.marisamackle.ie.
Story 25: If Only . . .
Mary Malone
What would I do if I were a child again, if only for one day?
Everything? Anything? Something I was afraid to try back then? Something wild or crazy that was strictly forbidden? Something old-fashioned like playing hide-and-seek, transforming a rusty wheelbarrow into a golden chariot or trying to decipher messages from the rustling of leaves in the wind?
My brain is a muddle, my heart is pounding with excitement and I can’t stand still. The promise of one day without responsibility or conscience, one day to hop, skip and jump in puddles, one whole day to have a licence to climb trees and hang upside-down seems too good to be true. The real treat about a return to childhood of course is the immense thrill of not being an adult, not acting appropriately and not giving a second thought to what other people think.
Unleashing long-forgotten memories and dreams, I slip back into the world of make-believe that accounted for a significant amount of my early childhood. Jumping on a spaceship travelling to an undiscovered planet is top of my list, clad of course in the appropriate “tin-foil” outfit that every self-respecting space-visitor wears! The prospect of floating around the universe and snatching a glimpse of the local “planet people” is exciting in itself but the ultimate wish for this temporary return to childhood is to fulfil a lifetime desire to meet real-life aliens!
I have so many questions for those little green people. What’s life like up there beyond the clouds? Can they see us earthlings? Do they control us from a distance? Can they become invisible and make things happen on Earth just for laughs? Do they cause us to stumble over our own feet or fall out of bed for no reason? I would love to find out if they’re responsible for making wishes come true, or is it really enough to close your eyes and visualise? And more than anything I want to convince an alien to come home and live with me – if only for that one day (blame watching numerous repeats of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on that one!). No doubt, now that I think of it, times have changed for aliens too and instead of devising a contraption to “phone home” my alien would be texting or social networking with fellow aliens.
Or perhaps if there’s no spaceship available, I could spend my day riding a huge white horse, clinging on to her mane for dear life as she gallops at lightning speed over ditches and across streams and raising my arms high in the air when we come to an elaborate and dramatic stop at the end of a vivid rainbow. Now that would be amazing, particularly as the only time I ever tried to ride a horse I was around five years old and the gigantic animal sensed my fear and took off through trees, my screams of terror doing nothing to help the situation apart from encouraging him to run even faster so that by the time I eventually fell off, I was scraped, stung and grazed all over from tree branches, nettles and briars. As for my pride, I’m not sure that has ever truly recovered, but the modern-day concern for health, safety and clinical cleanliness simply didn’t exist then – let’s just say once you could pick yourself up off the ground and your limbs were still attached, most falls went unnoticed.
But galloping horses, spaceships and aliens are all figments of my very vivid imagination and while the idea of using that one special day to defy reality and escape into a world of fantasy is appealing, I’m concerned I may be wasting an extraordinary opportunity to rewrite history. What if there’s a way to rejuvenate some of my unbridled childhood spirit (from the era before the galloping horse story) and transport it to 2013 to the adult I am today?
How strong is the link between childhood and adulthood? Is there any possibility that the antics and actions in our earliest years play a significant role in the adults we become? At what point in our lives do we lose the fearlessness we’re born with? Is there a specific defining moment for all of us? Or are life experiences responsible for the gradual erosion of our dreams? Perhaps it’s the people and obstacles we come in contact with that alter our perspective and diminish our belief that anything is possible and within reach if we want it badly enough. Would a trip further down memory lane help me recognise the twists and turns along the path of my life that obliterated options?
To try and describe this notion further, a cone-shaped party hat comes to mind. As a child I spent more time looking through them than wearing them on my head (I never could bear the confining feel of elastic around my throat). Viewing through the narrow end with a child’s perception on life shows the world as a magical place to be explored. As adults (sadly), we frequently look through the cone in the opposite way, tunnelling our vision as we focus on the road ahead. But an opportunity to look at the world through a child’s eyes again would not only be spectacular, it would be transforming.
“What will you do when you grow up?” is one of the most common questions a young child is asked. And with the precious commodity of innocence still intact, the answers are mostly entertaining and far-reaching, have nothing to do with the economy or where business or industry is heading but everything to do with what fires the excitement within the child at that point in time when everything seems possible and curiosity and simplicity are the order of the day.
Looking back on more of those fun-filled childhood days, my greatest unfiltered memories (unsurprisingly as it has turned out) are the endless hours I spent lost in books and escaping to imaginary worlds with my favourite author, Enid Blyton (undoubtedly the real reason I’m an author today). With books in short supply at times, I was content to read the same stories over and over until the world of midnight feasts, tuck boxes, mysterious noises in the night and of course the happy-ever-after endings merged with reality. Re-reading seemed to extend the enjoyment I got from these tales and as a result, The Naughtiest Girl, Famous Five, Secret Seven, Mallory Towers, ghosts and goblins and an expanse of magic from the pages of these books provided the basis for hours of imaginary play with cousins (girl cousins that is – the boys were too busy playing Cowboys and Indians, three-goals-in, penalty shootouts and tug of war with my brother).
Needless to say, our parents were quick to let out a fairly stern shout (little concern in my family about hurting your feelings) when they discovered the bed linen missing off the beds and being used as a mattress in the tree house or a cover for the person on lookout as they waited for whatever baddie we were expecting to attack. Collectively, we (boys and girls on these occasions) became sprint runners when a sliotar went through a window or, even worse, when somebody’s hand went through a pane of glass because they had been mysteriously ‘shoved’ as somebody passed them out in an all-important game of chasing, minutes before the cousins had to leave.
Freedom, hours of uninterrupted play and lots of laughter and squabbling sums up these memories. Keenly aware, however, that I’m assessing them now through rose-tinted glasses, I force myself to play good cop/bad cop and unlock a few horrible moments too – the cruel jokes from schoolfriends or the disappointments when I lost a ra
ce or came last in a competition even though I’d tried my hardest; the places I wasn’t allowed go and the fury when I thought my parents were stricter than everybody else’s and were being totally unrealistic. On this last example, I can confirm that I know better now and they certainly knew better then!
Nothing unique in my childhood memories, I’ve no doubt, yet as an adult and a parent looking back I recognise that despite the simplistic nature of those days and the absence of any great materialism, I took for granted the wealth and importance of what mattered most – an inordinate sense of freedom and the opportunity to seize the magic of being a child without a care or concern in the world.
Initially writing two thousand words on this topic seemed a simple task, an idea I could almost write in my sleep – until I sat down to put words on a page. In truth, I found it one of the most complicated pieces of writing I have ever put together. What I’ve realised on my trip down memory lane is that despite arguing otherwise at times, childhood sets the foundations for our future, our families provide the cornerstones and values we carry with us through life and, for me at least, the praise and criticism I received in my earliest years still lurk in the recess of my mind waiting to nudge against my confidence or fears at the most unexpected of times.
But given a chance now (in 2013) to be a child for one more day, I’m wondering how best to conquer that magical opportunity with the additional trappings available to children in today’s technological world. In fact, I’m dubious if this modern era could provide equivalent magic – wouldn’t gadgets and social media be too much of a distraction? Or perhaps my adult cynicism is once more narrowing my vision and blocking my view of a new and improved world where party hats no longer have silly elastic strings and galloping horses come with a stop button!
All things considered, certain facts remain the same: children run and jump and skip, play with their friends and cousins and savour the long school holidays. Being a child in today’s world is filled with the newest and latest in computer games, communication, advertising and the inability to keep up . . . but it isn’t really about what we have or have not, it’s about our perception of life and which end of the cone we hold to our eye.
For those children relying on the help of Barnardos’ excellent facilities, resources and support, I hope that one day they too get to look back and remember their childhood with warmth and positive emotion.
Mary Malone lives in Templemartin, Bandon, County Cork with her husband, Pat, and sons, David and Mark. As well as being a novelist and freelance journalist, she works full time in the Central Statistics Office. Mary’s fifth novel, Where There’s A Will, was published by Poolbeg in April 2013. Currently she is also very busy ghost-writing a non-fiction book due into the shops by Christmas 2013. For more information, please email: [email protected] or visit her website, www.marymalone.ie
Story 26: Holidays
Miranda Manning
I know we all remember childhood summer holidays as permanent sunshine, though there must have been rain. I remember one holiday when there was rain for a solid week, but that was the exception. One week out of a whole Irish summer wasn’t bad.
For several years my family rented a house about nine miles from where we lived. This was not a holiday home in the current sense of the term. It was one of four houses which were literally just about thirty yards from the edge of a cliff. The others were sometimes occupied by other families who became friends over the years and cards would arrive at Christmas or birthdays from Tipperary or Cork City from our holiday friends even though we never met them during the year. One year we got the largest house and the other three were occupied by a pack of Boy Scouts. I’m sure my mother was disappointed that year because her holiday friends weren’t there.
The houses weren’t very well equipped so we had to bring some of our own furniture. We didn’t have a car at the time so my parents had to hire an open-backed small truck to take us there. Some of my older sisters and my brother would cycle, as far as I recall. Our parents travelled in the cab with the driver and I and at least one sister or cousin or friend travelled in the back with the mattresses, beds, a few chairs, assorted pots and pans and our jet-black cat. Keeping the cat from jumping out of the open-topped trailer was a job in itself and I remember being rigid with fright in case he succeeded.
The first day would be spent assembling beds, unpacking food and deciding who would sleep where. Once we were unpacked it was total freedom. There were only a few houses near the beach and the nearest village was about a mile away along the cliff. Going by road was much longer. There was another village about two miles away by road. I have no recollection of how we got groceries delivered but my parents must have organised it some way (though there was no phone) because we were all fed and watered with the same regularity as we had been at home. In any case my mother, who was a great cook, was able to feed the multitudes with the very limited mod cons that were there. In retrospect I often wonder what she got out of the holiday. It seems to me that her work was harder and she wasn’t the outdoor type. I only remember her in a swimsuit (or “swimming togs” as we called them then) once and she sat on the rocks with her feet in a rock pool. It was my father who was into swimming and rock-climbing. A strong swimmer himself, he taught us all to swim – some more successfully than others.
It was my first experience of dining al fresco. We had breakfast outdoors every day that was fine enough. Not exactly patio furniture. There was a large field in front of the houses, between them and the cliff, and we carried out the kitchen table and had our Corn Flakes out there. It was in the days before pasteurised milk and the only milk available was goat’s milk which we got from a woman called Mrs Patsy two fields away. She kept two or three goats and always had plenty of spare milk. I never liked goat’s milk and it hadn’t yet been discovered as a health food. The weird taste took a bit from the pleasure of eating Corn Flakes in the open air. But that’s just a small quibble. I think it was the only thing I didn’t like about those holidays. I never figured out whether Patsy was a surname or a Christian name but I think she was married to a guy whose Christian name was Patsy. She had no children herself and always gave us a great welcome, sometimes providing a scone to eat on our way back home.
The days seemed endless – particularly during the hot summers. We swam, climbed, collected shells, built sandcastles and explored to our hearts’ content. When the tide was out we played our own versions of cricket, hurling and tennis. We carefully marked out the pitch or tennis court on the wet sand even though we didn’t have any measuring tape so we couldn’t have got the dimensions right. I didn’t really like cricket or hurling and was usually the last to be picked on a team. I had great difficulty hitting such a small ball with a hurley or a cricket bat. I was a bit more successful with the tennis racquet – there was a lot of debate about whether my shots actually got over the imaginary net but at least I hit the ball! Come to think of it, looking back now our days were quite repetitious but I don’t ever remember being bored. We just enjoyed it. There seemed to be no fear of drowning or falling from the cliffs. The only rules we had to adhere to was not to swim until at least an hour after having a meal, not to swim near the rocks, and always to swim parallel to the shore. Our parents seemed to think that there were few dangers and maybe they were right. I don’t remember anybody ever being drowned on that beach, which subsequently became very popular. Most weekdays the beach was deserted except for ourselves and our holiday friends. But on Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays and Sundays there might be about twenty carloads of people from nearby towns when businesses were closed and people had time off from work. In some ways we considered this akin to an invasion of our territory, given that we almost regarded that particular strand as our private property. The bad bit about that attitude was that, on the days when the townspeople came, our father insisted that we pick up any rubbish they left behind and dispose of it correctly. He was the first person I ever met who had a sense of keeping the enviro
nment as nature intended and was decades before his time in that regard. I don’t ever remember using sunscreen, but there was a white cream made by Nivea which some people on the beach used to cool down, after the damage was done. To this day the smell of a Nivea product brings me back to those days on the strand. We did occasionally wear sunhats but my memory is that we lived in our swimsuits and if it got cooler we donned shorts and tee-shirts. We were all fairly sallow-skinned so we never got sunburned, but I do remember a woman from the town getting badly sunburned on one hot Wednesday and there was no remedy immediately available.
We had the most brilliant picnics. We had an enormous white enamel bread bin with a red lid and on really fine days we would fill that up with sandwiches and bring bottles of lemonade and a few flasks for the adults and we would spend the whole day on the beach without returning to the house for anything. On a good day there might also be chocolate or apple tart but that was rare enough. My older sisters sometimes brought a book and there would be uproar if they lost a library book. This sometimes happened if someone accidentally or even deliberately (as I recall doing on at least one occasion) buried a book in the sand. The librarian was a really nice man but he didn’t take kindly to lost books and was religious in his fervour about applying fines, so someone cycled into town every fortnight to change the books.
In the evenings after the day on the beach we usually just went back home and played cards or read and, being the youngest, I was always the first to be sent to bed. When the weather was particularly fine we were allowed to stay up later than usual when the mackerel and sprats came in and we watched people fishing from the beach. Sometimes our father caught some fish and we ate them for lunch the following day. I remember one year racing down to the beach to see the mackerel because they had come in late. I was at the rear of the group being the smallest and for some reason the cat followed us. While we were watching the men fishing the cat dipped his front paw delicately into the rock pools and caught the occasional slow-swimming shrimp. This didn’t appear to be a violent act, which of course it was, but a slow graceful dance that was carried out with amazing precision. I found it interesting that the cat instinctively knew what to do. Where had he ever seen a shrimp before and how did he know it was a fish? Some of our friends collected periwinkles and brought them home to be cooked. My mother never encouraged us to do this. I think she may not have relished the thought of putting them into boiling water alive. Similarly she never cooked or ate lobster in her life as far as I know.
If I Was a Child Again Page 15