I’d know that boys like girls who make them laugh. They like girls who listen and are kind, girls who can hold their own in a discussion and girls who have their own lives and don’t depend on them for everything. I’d know that one day I’d meet someone who “got me” and that I’d be lucky enough to marry him.
If I was a child again, I would worry so much less about being pale-skinned. Instead of burning my skin to fire-engine red every summer, I’d sit in the shade. I’d understand that roasting yourself alive every time the sun poked its head out from behind a cloud was not a good idea. I would refrain from putting oil on my skin in order to “get a better tan”. I would know that a tan was something that I would never achieve, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how many times I burnt myself. Instead of thinking that red was better than white, I’d have the sense to protect my skin from the ravages of sun damage. I would have avoided years of heat rash, blisters and peeling. A big sunhat would have been my best friend instead of a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Oil lathered on to my alabaster skin.
If I was a child again, I would embrace my Irishness and not be ashamed of it. I would be proud of my heritage and understand that wherever I went in the world, people would smile warmly when I said I was Irish. I’d know that this small island on the edge of Europe is known globally as a wonderful place to live. I’d realise that it wasn’t just U2 that made my country “cool”. I would know that talent lay in every corner of this land and that Irish writers, poets and musicians were lauded and feted around the world.
If I was a child again I’d know how lucky I am to be born in this era, in this country. I’d rejoice in my heritage, my culture and most of all in my good fortune to have been given the greatest gift of all: a happy childhood.
Sinead Moriarty was born and raised in Dublin, where she grew up surrounded by books. Her mother is an author of children’s books. Growing up, she was inspired by watching her mother writing at the kitchen table and then being published. From then on, her childhood dream was to write a novel. She wrote her first book The Baby Trail while working as a journalist in London. She is published by Penguin and has, to date, written nine novels. They have been widely translated.
Story 32: Running with the Wild Bunch
Eugene O’Brien
I had a very fortunate, happy childhood. Let me say that up front. We were loved and felt safe and were afforded great opportunity which a lot of children were not. But on the last day of sixth class, running around the playground of St Joseph’s National School, Edenderry, County Offaly, although feeling happy and excited and carefree, there was the first twinge of a butterfly in my tummy. Something loomed on the horizon. Something that would have to be faced. I tried to put it out of my head. There was the whole summer to look forward to but I knew, no matter what, that time runs out, and that life would change. I was to start boarding school.
My grandfather had gone there, and his brothers, and my father and his brothers, and my mother’s father, but still I could not deny the panic in my heart when my parents drove away that first day after dropping me off at my new school. I was shown to my dormitory, I put up my Man U posters and tried to envisage my new surroundings as home, but it was useless.
It was September 1979, I was eleven going on twelve and was about to break a family tradition. I was running away from boarding school. Not the school’s fault: good teachers, grand group of lads. If you could ignore the obsession with rugby, and a slight whiff of entitlement, it was pretty okay, but I just knew that the whole boarding gig was not for me. The upper lines, the lower lines, bad food, first year being called “Rudiments”, life ruled by timetables and the constant presence of a peer group, night and day – no escaping from it at 4 p.m. All of the above and, of course, missing home and family, caused an uncontrollable urge to start walking out the front gates and onto the road. A kind of dream state took over and I was in another world, a world of uncertainty, an adventure, like a movie. I was breaking one family tradition, and kept thinking of another.
The local cinema was bought by my grandfather in the 1950s. Situated in the town square, it was the place where I’d spent every childhood Saturday at matinees. We were served up Disney and other kids’ flicks but also adult fare like the spaghetti westerns. We were upset when John Wayne was butchered by Bruce Dern in The Cowboys. We were Kung Fu experts after seeing Bruce Lee, practising our moves afterwards, high on minerals and Captain Hurricane bars.
But the abiding image, and one that came back to me on the road home that evening was the opening images of The Wild Bunch. A group of children torture a scorpion in a nest of red ants, eventually setting it on fire, intercut with the Wild Bunch riding into town, the screen freezing on each member as their names popped up on the screen . . . William Holden, Ernest Borgnine et al. I saw the movie when I was nine or ten and the kids had always haunted me.
Walking along the road I started to trot as on a horse. I was the Wild Bunch, trying to decide whether to chance thumbing a lift, aware that the light was fading, and wondering what kind of reception I would receive at home. I’d just explain how I felt and hope that my parents would understand. Reality was beginning to kick in because of hunger and thirst, and the movie world that had been a distraction was fading.
Then I passed a hedge in front of a bungalow with a man clipping away at it with shears. We nodded at each other and then he addressed me, saying that he’d passed me on the road earlier and asking if I had been walking for long. Not long, I replied, going into some yarn about visiting an aunt in Prosperous who had left me at the bus stop but I had missed the bus and she had gone out to play bridge, so I was making my own way home to Edenderry. He didn’t buy this for a second but left the tale unchallenged, instead asking me in for refreshment. I checked behind him and saw a woman in the kitchen window looking out at us. He reassured me that it was okay, so I accepted the offer.
In their kitchen I drank 7Up – it tasted like no other mineral ever had – and they gave me soup, which I devoured. His wife enquired about where I was going, so I repeated the yarn. The man then told me he was a teacher and showed me a class of lads he had taught, and told me that one of them was a very famous sportsman – could I pick him out? I scanned the photo, glad that this question-of-sport session was a distraction from my made-up story of aunts and missed buses, and even more pleased when I recognised Eamonn Coghlan. Before the glory days of Jack’s army, he vied with the show-jumpers as Ireland’s number-one sporting hero.
The photo was put away as the man mentioned, out of the blue, the name of my boarding school and asked if I was aware of its existence, and he afforded himself a knowing smile just to let me know he knew where I was coming from.
They would drive me home. I mentioned the current oil strikes and how petrol was scarce but they insisted and half an hour later they dropped me outside my house. I thanked them profusely and I shook his hand, the kindness of strangers encouraging tears which were welling but not showing themselves until the car had moved on.
My parents were a little taken aback: I should have just rung them but I suppose, in a way, I had been more calculating than I’d realised. I had wanted to make a big impression on them. A statement.
I didn’t start in the local school on Monday, as I’d planned. On my parents’ urging I did go back and give the boarding school another go, but by mid-November I was off again. This time I was better prepared, making the dash after lunch on a full stomach. I hitched two rides and was home by tea. As always, my parents were very understanding. The local headmaster was called and I couldn’t wait to dash next door to my friend since High Infants, Kenneth, and give him the news that we’d be cycling to school together the following Monday.
The lads were very welcoming and although the school was old and rundown with prefabs out the back and an old stove heater in the classroom, with the occasional mouse making an appearance, I couldn’t have been happier.
I sometimes wonder where that couple is now. Is he still teachi
ng or retired by now? Do they still live in the same bungalow, and does he still trim his hedge on September evenings? I suppose he would be in his late sixties now, but that’s only a guess, as is the location of their home, which was somewhere between Prosperous and Allenwood.
Eamonn Coghlan never won an Olympic medal but did us proud in 1983 in Helsinki, winning Gold in the world championships. The boarding school is still churning out captains of industry and rugby teams. The cinema closed in 1996, having battled against the 1980s video boom and a new multiplex in Tallaght. But the feelings it aroused in me and the stories my dad tells me of its heyday when people queued round the square to get in will stay with me, as will that feeling of walking on the road pretending to be the Wild Bunch and knowing somehow that I was doing the right thing.
Eugene O’Brien wrote the play Eden, first performed in the Abbey Theatre in 2001. It won the Stewart Parker award, the Rooney prize for literature and the Irish Times/ESB Award for best new play, and has been performed in many countries and London’s West End. His second play Savoy debuted in the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, in 2004. He has written three plays for RTÉ radio drama: The Nest, Sloth, and Numb (nominated for the Writers’ Guild Zebbie Award). He wrote the screenplay for the film Eden, which played at many festivals including New York’s Tribeca festival (winning Best Actress for Eileen Walsh) and secured an American release with Liberation films. His critically acclaimed television series Pure Mule and the two-part follow-up Pure Mule – The Last Weekend were nominated for fourteen IFTAS.
Story 33: My Cousin Jodie
Jennifer O’Connell
I am compelled by some unfortunate chink in my genes to record things. I’ve always done it, beginning with the diaries I kept from the day of my sixth birthday until the day of my nineteenth. I stopped writing them at roughly the same time I started recording things for a living. With all that practice under my belt, you’d think I’d be better at it.
But memory is strange, slippery territory – this memory in particular. It isn’t even a memory, so much as a series of disconnected images, like one of the films my father recorded on his old cine camera. The tighter I try to hold onto it, the more it frustrates me. I want to remember, not for her, but for myself. Because of what happened later.
First, the background. It was the late 1970s. An Ireland of the Troubles and tightening our belts. An Ireland in which everything really did seem to exist in shades of brown.
My mother insists that I was a beautiful child. Documentary evidence of the time doesn’t really bear this out: it records instead a solemn, round-faced baby who became a solemn, round-faced girl, observing the world from her pushchair with a faintly cynical frown.
I remember that pushchair – I ensconced myself in it shortly after my birth and refused to move until, sometime around my third birthday, my mother sat me on the fashionable orange-and-white rug in the hall and explained to me in no uncertain terms that it was time I learned to walk.
For now, my world still revolved around the buttercup-yellow Stanley in my granny’s kitchen, the Quaker-run nursery school I attended with my impish, curly-haired big brother, and outings in my mother’s Renault 4.
The strict set of rules that governed the life for a child of the 1970s had not yet made themselves known to me. Fun, at the convent school to which I would shortly graduate from the pushchair, was looked on as something faintly perilous; a laughing child was an incendiary device. There were rules about the kind of shoes you could wear (no patent; slippers in the classroom); rules about when you could sharpen your pencil; rules about who could sing in the school choir and who must mime; rules about when you could dúl amach go dtí an leithreas; rules about when you could bí ag caint or bí ag rith or just bí.
But for now, my world was small, safe and blissfully rule-free.
It was on one of those endless hot summers that nostalgia insists punctuated every Irish childhood at regular twelve-monthly intervals. We drove up in the old Renault 4, air billowing in through the hole in the front passenger seat, to my great-grandmother’s house in Woolengrange. Even writing the name still gives me a little thrill of expectation.
She swept into my life in Uncle Phil’s black Morris Minor, which was a sleek, curvy piece of machinery with a tan leather interior and a purr like a panther’s.
I liked Uncle Phil. He was my granny’s favourite brother and a priest, but he was not like any priest I had met before, or since. He wore glasses like Buddy Holly, he laughed often, he spoke to me like I was an adult and, later, when I could read them, wrote me proper letters on seminary notepaper.
My pushchair was parked under the big apple tree in the garden as the Morris Minor glided up. I must have been expecting them. I’m sure I had been told about it in advance, but I remember the feeling of surprise as its doors sprang open and out of it emerged Uncle Phil with a man who looked like a film star – a man with startling blue eyes, black hair and a leather jacket.
They stood blinking in the sunlight and the door stayed open for a minute or two longer until finally she climbed out. A girl in a dress the colour of candyfloss, a bright slash of colour in the sepia-tinted world I inhabited. Her hair was the exact shade of yellow of the middle stripe in a Loop the Loop ice lolly.
We were cousins, though I couldn’t fathom how, because I knew all of my cousins – I could already recite their names by heart – and we’d never met before. But I didn’t want to question it. She was an unexpected gift I had no intention of returning.
She wore pink gingham. She was two years older than me and she came from Australia. She said it like it was a question. “Australia?” She was Jodie, the daughter of my granny’s youngest brother, Gerard, the man with the film-star eyes.
We played in the back garden. We drank TK Lemonade and ate Afternoon Tea biscuits, Mikados and Coconut Creams. My granny produced a Battenberg cake, carefully unfolding the brown-paper bag to reveal the pink-and-yellow chequerboard squares encased in a thick layer of sickly sweet marzipan that seemed to swell in your mouth. The mark of a sophisticated foodstuff was that it tasted like nothing encountered in nature.
We all gazed at Jodie in wonder – or I did, anyway. She raced around the big, stone kitchen, a little blonde whirlwind, and stopped every so often to put a sticky hand on Uncle Phil’s knee, leaving a glistening trace of sugar and marshmallow on the knee of his priest’s smart black trousers as all the adults looked benignly on.
She liked animals. We played with toy horses that Uncle Phil had brought. I called mine Clippity Clop.
I don’t remember saying goodbye. She climbed into Uncle Phil’s Morris Minor, and I sat back in the pushchair as they vanished down the hill.
There won’t be a happy ending to this story. You know that already, don’t you? It was nearly twenty-five years later before I next saw her face.
The autumn of 2002. I was working in my dream job, the editor of the features section on a national newspaper; getting paid to record things at last.
Jodie, though I didn’t know this yet, had managed to fix herself up with precisely her dream job too – she had just left her PA position in a publishing company to set up her own mobile dog-washing business, Aussie Pooch. Jodie still loved animals – she had even become a vegetarian.
That summer, I had got engaged to my long-term boyfriend, and we had just returned from a holiday in Italy to plan our wedding there. Half a planet away in Australia, my twenty-nine-year-old cousin was making plans too, for a trip to Indonesia.
We had recently moved into a new house: a pleasingly symmetrical, pink brick Guinness-built house with white-painted sash windows, nasturtiums running riot in the garden, and a bright red door. The house looked like a bit of the English countryside in inner-city Dublin; it had cast-iron fireplaces, ceramic light fittings and, in some rooms, seven layers of carpet and lino. Every time we opened a newspaper, its value seemed to have doubled. Life was good.
Jodie, too, had just bought her first house, in the Southern Sydney subu
rb of Como, in a joint mortgage with her mum. Life was good for her too, really good. Right up until the moment when it was interrupted.
Another decade has passed now, and I’m writing this on my balcony in Sydney, her city, and looking across at her skyline. I have the strangest feeling that someone should have pressed her phone number into my hand before I got on the plane and told me to look her up. I like to imagine I would have, that I would have called up Aussie Pooch and said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but we met once when we were very small . . .”
But we don’t do, do we? We mean to, but we hesitate, and then the moment slips away, and there are children to be collected from school or football, work deadlines to be met, dinners to be cooked, gardens to be sat in, and now, of course, I’ll never know whether I would have.
It’s more than ten years now since that autumn day when I was sitting at my desk with a chicken-and-sweetcorn sandwich, and I opened the newspaper. The photograph was an older version of the Jodie I remembered in a pink dress, with a broad smile and the same blonde hair, taken alongside her friend, a friend whose name, I would learn, was Michelle. Shelly, they called her.
Bali, the headline roared. She was at the Sari nightclub at Kuta beach at eight minutes past eleven, on 12th October 2002. She must have heard the first blast in Paddy’s Pub across the road but, if she did, she would have had only twenty seconds to react before the second bomb, right outside the Sari.
Jodie did regain consciousness despite the burns that covered almost her entire body. Afterwards, a British woman who sat by her stretcher until it was loaded onto a plane to Perth told how, when they finally got some painkillers for her, she wouldn’t take them. She said: “Don’t worry about me – the girl in the next bed – give them to her.”
If I Was a Child Again Page 19