One summer that I remember we did get a very wet week. We had a cousin visiting from Leeds who was a little older than us and who we thought was the height of sophistication. He cycled the nine hilly miles to the nearest town in the pouring rain and bought us all colouring books and pens and pencils and paints. He was a talented artist and before the week was over he had taught the older ones how to draw cartoons and the younger ones how to colour between the lines. My mother would have applied to have him canonised if she knew how.
About once a week, at around eight o’clock at night, when the weather permitted, somebody (I don’t know who) brought a wooden platform to the beach and put it on a flat grassy patch away from the sea and sand. Three or four musicians would come and people would arrive in dribs and drabs by bike and car and the occasional horse and cart and the dancing would begin. It was mainly céilí and old-time waltzing but it was great fun, especially for me as it was the only night I was allowed to stay up as late as my sisters.
I have no clear memory of how long these holidays lasted, whether it was two weeks, four weeks or more. Several years when the holiday was over but the weather remained good we stayed on for up to two weeks into September. Our father would cycle several miles to the bus stop each day and get the bus to work while we remained on in the beach house. When we arrived back in school two weeks after everybody else the teachers were none too pleased but our parents believed that childhood should be about fun, and in any case there was a lot of education to be had by communing with nature. I’m not sure they ever convinced our teachers but in the end they just accepted it.
The nature of holidays has changed in many ways since the days when my family spent the summers on holidays nine miles from where we lived.
Advice to children: If you are enjoying something, live in the moment and don’t worry about the future. If you are unhappy or sad for more than a few days tell a trusted adult. They will almost certainly be able to help.
Miranda Manning took up writing many years ago when she was a stay-at-home mum. For the first year or two she had little success but when the first magazine arrived in her letterbox with her story in it, she was over the moon. Since then she has had a number of stories and articles published in magazines and newspapers both in Ireland and the UK. She also has had flash fiction published in a charity book called Celebrating What Really Matters in aid of the Irish Hospice Foundation (Christmas 2011) and she contributed a short story to the charity collection All I Want for Christmas in aid of Barnardos (Christmas 2012). She lives in Galway and has three adult children all of whom have flown the coop. Her debut novel Who is Alice? was published by Poolbeg in May 2013.
Story 27: My Big Regret
Eugene McEldowney
When I look back, I realise that I would change very little about my childhood. I grew up in a time of austerity far worse than people are experiencing now. I had few of the material comforts that most children today take for granted. There were no computer games, no mobile phones, no Facebook, no videos, no television. Many of our neighbours experienced real hardship, even hunger. Yet my memories of that time are largely happy ones. I was blessed to be part of a loving family and I felt secure.
Belfast in the late 1940s, shortly after the end of the Second World War, was a place of severe shortages. Parts of the city were wastelands after they were bombed by the Luftwaffe in two air raids that killed over a thousand people and demolished whole streets of houses. Food, clothes, even basic commodities like bread were rationed. The ration book became a very important item in every household. Everybody was issued with one and to purchase even a small bar of chocolate you had to give the shopkeeper a stamp along with your cash.
But I never remember going hungry. My father was an electric welder which was a trade in steady demand after the war so he was rarely out of work. And my mother was a thrifty housewife who was well able to produce nourishing meals from very little. She was also an expert in recycling, way before it became fashionable. Worn clothes were cut up and turned into short trousers and little jackets for me and my two brothers on her sewing machine.
We never felt out of place wearing these home-made clothes. Everyone else was wearing them so what was the difference? It wasn’t as if people had the money to buy new ones even if they were available. It was l954 before rationing was lifted and people were able to get their hands on brand-new clothes.
The same thing applied to consumer goods. There were two hundred houses on our street and only two cars. One was an old-fashioned black London taxi and the other was a Morris Minor, which belonged to a salesman who presumably got it as a condition of his job. There were no televisions. I remember the first one to arrive on our street and the crowds of children gathering, not to see the television itself but to gaze in awe at the aerial on the roof.
The area where we lived was Ardoyne in the north of the city. It was a large Catholic neighbourhood dominated by two symbols that remain forever etched in my mind. One was the twin spires of Holy Cross church looking down on the long rows of little terraced houses. The other was the linen mills which provided a lot of the employment in the area, mainly for women.
The linen mills were going strong when I was a little boy. I can still remember the loud wail of the hooters sounding out over the district to announce the start of a new working day and the lines of mill-girls, linking arms and singing as they went to work. But already, the mills were doomed by technology and the invention of new synthetic fibres. By the time I had grown to become an adult, they had all closed their large forbidding-looking gates and the hooters had fallen silent.
You might think with the deprivations we faced we would have been unhappy. Far from it. We had everything we needed in our cosy little world. We had toys, not the flashy, expensive toys of today but little motor-cars that you wound up and scooters that you pedalled with your foot and skates and marbles and footballs, even a bicycle. We had plenty of friends. People had big families so there were always loads of children to play with. I was never short of company.
And we had plenty of things to entertain us. In the 1950s, Ardoyne was almost open countryside. There were fields to explore and every Sunday my father would take us for walks to Carr’s Glen or by tram to Cave Hill from where we could look down on the entire city. There were two public parks nearby with swings and slides and sandpits to play in. There were several cinemas within walking distance that held Saturday matinees where we could watch Gene Autry ride his horse into the sunset and laugh at the hilarious antics of the Three Stooges and Abbot and Costello.
And we had a public library with a children’s section where I could lose myself for hours, engrossed in the adventures of Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island or Huckleberry Finn sailing his raft down the Mississippi river. It is to that library on the Oldpark Road that I owe my love of reading which I have carried with me throughout my life and which has never left me.
There were lots of other diversions to keep our young minds occupied. There was Smithfield market where my father would often take us on a Saturday afternoon. It was like Aladdin’s cave: stalls of second-hand books, used clothes, antiques and knickknacks of all sorts including German helmets from the war, Samurai swords, even discarded sashes that the Orangemen wore on their annual excursions every July 12th to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne.
There was the Ulster Museum at the Botanic Gardens with its glass cases of antiquities, home to the fabled Mummy Woman whose display we always approached with fascination mingled with fear and trepidation. I have since learned that her real name was Takabuti and she lived in the Egyptian city of Thebes almost 3000 years ago. She arrived in Belfast in 1835, having been exhumed from her Egyptian resting place by a local Egyptologist called Thomas Greg.
During the summer holidays there were trips to seaside resorts like Bangor and Portrush where we got to travel by steam train, which was an adventure in itself. Like most little boys, I never remember wind or rain but only long sunny days and sunburn and the treat
of fish and chips and Coca Cola in Morelli’s cafe when the day was over.
Ardoyne was a safe place to grow up in the 1950s. Crime was relatively minor and murder practically unheard of. I can only remember one murder case and it kept the city enthralled for months. As I have said, there were few cars so traffic accidents were rare. Our only brush with the law occurred when we played football on the street and the sight of a policeman would cause us all to run and hide in case he took our names and wrote them down in his notebook.
Like many things in Belfast, education was segregated along religious grounds. The Catholic children went to the local school and the Protestants went to their schools across the Crumlin Road. Sad to relate but in a city with a Protestant majority in the 1950s, I never had a single Protestant friend till I went to Queen’s University many years later. And not only were we divided along religious grounds but we were also segregated according to gender. The boys had one school and the girls had theirs.
I have no bad memories of school. The teachers were largely dedicated and enthusiastic. Corporal punishment was rare and only used in cases of serious misconduct. I was a good student and my interests in reading and composition were encouraged. It was at school that a music teacher called Dermot Maginness selected me for the church choir and I will always owe a debt to the hours he spent training us to sing.
But it is in my schooldays that I find the one big thing I would change if I was a child again. We were all working-class boys, many of us tough and streetwise and occasionally cruel. But there was one boy who didn’t fit into this category. He was a small, shy, nervous boy with a shock of dirty brown hair. His name was Ambrose Skelly.
Ambrose seemed to be devoid of most of the skills required to survive in the environment he found himself in. He was useless at football and most boyish games. He couldn’t fight. He wasn’t clever. He couldn’t tell jokes to make us laugh. There was nothing exciting or interesting about him. And, unlike most of us, he had no brothers at the school to protect him. Poor Ambrose was the perfect victim.
His name alone would have singled him out. I know now that St Ambrose was a highly regarded doctor of the early Christian church. But none of us had ever heard of him before and the name lent itself to jibes. Ambrose – Bendy-nose. His surname was even worse. Skelly – Rubber-belly or Skelly-eyes (meaning squinty or cross-eyed).
But what really damned Ambrose was his stammer. I’m sure he must have had nightmares when called upon by the teacher to read out loud. It might take a full minute before he could even speak and then it was a painful stumbling and struggling before he succeeded in getting a sentence out. Meanwhile, the tittering and sniggering would spread through the class like wildfire till at last poor Ambrose, his face red from embarrassment, would sit down again.
I don’t know why the teacher persisted in asking him to read. Maybe it was a belief that it would cure his stammer. Perhaps it was to show that he was no different to the rest of us, which he clearly was. But it must have been hell for Ambrose.
There is a kind of animal wildness that can sometimes grip young boys when they are in groups and lead them to do things they wouldn’t normally do on their own. Ambrose felt the full brunt of it. At break times, gangs would often gather round him in the schoolyard and taunt him. They would make fun of his stammer. They would call him names. Occasionally they would shove and push him. He was like a wounded hare surrounded by a pack of dogs.
I knew this was wrong and I didn’t join in. But I did nothing to stop it either. It might have been self-preservation, a fear that told me if I sided with Ambrose I could be next for the same treatment. I don’t know why he didn’t report it to the teachers. Perhaps he felt it would only make matters worse because snitches were despised in the school. I don’t know if the teachers were even aware of it. Maybe Ambrose believed if he did nothing, it would eventually stop.
But I have always regretted that I wasn’t brave enough to go to him and put my arm around his shoulder and tell him I was his friend and he was not alone. I don’t know why I didn’t speak out against the bullies. I feel ashamed now that I stood by and did nothing.
I lost track of Ambrose Skelly when I left at age eleven to go to grammar school. Years later, I asked about him and was told that he had emigrated to London. I never saw him again. But I have never forgotten him or his pale haunted face as he cowered from the taunts of the schoolyard bullies. I hope he found peace in his later life. I hope the treatment he endured never happens to another child.
Eugene McEldowney is a former journalist with the Irish Times where he held the position of night editor. He is the author of fifteen published novels. He is a well-known singer on the traditional music circuit.
Story 28: Custard Beasties and Other Despicable Things
Siobhán McKenna
My favourite pastime was mud. Playing with it, wetting it, moulding, eating it. If there was a mud pile around I probably wasn’t far away. My favourite playmates were boys. For a time the two collided; I got to play with mud and boys. Life was fun and dirty in the cleanest possible sense.
I blame it on my father. If he’d wanted a son, I’d never have guessed. Instead, I remember the pride in his voice, as he spoke with his Cork lilt. “I’m the only male in the household. Except for the cat, Claudius. They” [my mother, my sisters and me] “gave him the snip and changed his name to Cleo. So you see, it’s safer to keep quiet around here,” he’d declare and cross his legs for emphasis.
I would have liked to be a boy. Thankfully, undeterred by tradition, Dad bought me train sets, Scalextric racing cars, and Buckaroo. I loved them.
“Your mother says Sindy is derogatory to women and will give you the wrong aspirations for life,” he’d say, handing me a fishing rod.
I didn’t have a clue what he was on about and I didn’t care. I loved my boy toys. When I could wrestle them out of Dad’s hands, that is.
It’s little surprise then that I found more boyish pursuits to keep me entertained. And the best mud pies could be made at the end of the back garden under the apple trees. For hours I’d lose myself in an imaginary world of mud people, castles and heroines. Anyone looking on would see only a gloopy mess. People often say that when they gaze at the sky they can see animals, faces and story lines unfolding in the shapes and movements of the clouds; for me it was like that with mud.
My mother would ask me to help her bake, which I viewed as a cleaner version of playing with mud, though I was loath to wash my hands. She’d give me some dough in a separate bowl, which would be kneaded with my beloved mud and the odd blade of grass.
“Show it to Dad, he’ll love it,” she’d tell me, and I’d proudly present my culinary endeavours to him with little bits of stone and grass embedded in them. I guess that was her payback for him encouraging me to be a tomboy. But it was also a prelude to what would become one of my fondest childhood memories.
“Siobhán! Brian’s at the door for you.”
The boy next door.
“My mummy sent me in to play with you,” he said by way of explanation as to why he was standing in my back garden wearing his Crimplene shorts and T-bar shoes.
Sure that he’d tease me, I blocked his view of my mud empire. But it turned out he liked mud too. We were both loners. Quickly, we decided we were the only two normal people on our road. Our relationship and view of the world lasted throughout our childhood and beyond. We had our own language and laughed at things other people couldn’t see the humour in. As we progressed into our teens, we became versions of Wayne’s World and Dumb and Dumber.
It was one of those summers that, in your mind’s eye, went on forever and was filled with lazy sunny days. Back in a time when I had time to get bored. Life was slower and the depths of my decisions were whether to have a Vesta curry or a pouch of Smash for lunch. Those were the days when I could eat an entire packet of Mikado biscuits and still disappear if I turned sideways.
It was on one of those days that Brian called in and started moo
ching for food in the presses.
“There’s nothing there,” I said, as he opened the door of the press where the goody stash should have been.
“Your house always has something nice to eat. Your dad can’t resist buying chocolate.”
“He’s a diabetic now – Mum won’t let him.”
“Where’s his secret hiding place then?”
“Down the side of his Parker Knoll, but it’s no use. I’ve already checked and there’s just empty wrappers.”
“Has your mum not been to the supermarket then?”
I shook my head. “Not until Friday. Yours?”
“No. It’s not right, you know. Don’t they know we’re off school? The least they can do is make sure we don’t starve to death!”
I nodded in agreement. What were parents coming to?
“There’s custard powder and jelly cubes,” I said.
If I Was a Child Again Page 16