I made the mistake of telling my mother about my intention to make Alison my bride. She thought this was adorable. Since my feelings for Alison were profound, mysterious and disturbing, I considered my mother’s amusement very crass. And when she told her friends about my little romance and they laughed about it, charmed, I was humiliated and resolved never to tell my mother anything important ever again (I still don’t). In any case, it made sense to keep my love a private matter. In a class full of seven-year-old boys with less rarefied romantic sensibilities than my own, this soppiness towards a girl was not the sort of thing you wanted to advertise. (I had never found girls yucky, although I pretended to, and when years later the other boys in my class admitted to liking them I felt an odd mixture of relief, unwelcome competition and that certain smug pride: “Girls? Yeah, I’ve been into them since way back, when they were just starting out . . .”)
So I walked around with my secret. I was intoxicated by the love that swilled around my belly like some dark, sweet poison. It made me feel special and different, but isolated. I needed to share my secret and Alison, for all her refusal to communicate with me telepathically during our games, seemed the natural person to talk to. I asked her to marry me, and she consented. Gavin Cleary officiated at the wedding which took place in the school yard one lunch time. I had grave misgivings about telling him my plans – he was a gossip and he played with the girls – but he claimed to know the words to the ceremony so I had no choice. When the time came, it irked me that he was clearly making it up as he went along. It compromised the seriousness of the occasion. We got to the part where I was supposed to kiss Alison. It should have been a moment of perfect happiness for me. I was just turning to my new bride, about to look her solemnly in the eye and pucker up, when Gavin began giggling. I glared at him. He giggled more then he shouted out in his giddy-whiny voice, calling people over to see us kissing. In a moment a small group was gathering to gawk at Alison and me, and a chorus of “Kissin’! Kis-sin’! Kis-siiinnnnnn’!” went up, desecrating the holy moment. Alison ran off embarrassed. I was left red-faced and furious to face the pack of baying children, the girls thrilled, the boys disgusted by the sight. I struggled to squeeze back a tear. I wanted to punch Gavin Cleary right on the nose. I wish I had.
After the disaster of the wedding our games together became less frequent, but my love for Alison was as overwhelming as ever, and was now causing me some distress. Still, I knew that she and I were destined to be together, and it became apparent that the agents of Destiny were to be Mr and Mrs Nicholl.
My later dealings with resting actors who take gigs teaching drama in primary schools have made me question my judgement of the time, but back then Mr and Mrs Nicholl impressed me as the most glamorous and inspiring couple in the scintillating history of show-business. They wore colourful jumpers and baggy dungarees. Their gestures were expansive and their voices went up and down a lot. They wore hats, both of them, indoors.
Mr and Mrs Nicholl taught us the essential components of the actor’s craft: how to sway like the wind, how to be a tree. It was a rigorous training in the classic tradition and it prepared us for our big class project, which was to put on a show, The Frog Prince. The text was probably chosen because of its classic fairytale elements: a princess, a transmogrification, a marriage and gold. For me, though, it will always be the story of a frog trying to become a prince, and it reminds me of how if I had had the courage to ennoble myself to that royal estate, my life would have been quite different. I am not Prince Charming, nor was meant to be, as the poet said.
Alison’s personal beauty made her the obvious choice to play the princess. Conor Dolan was cast as the prince. He had the profile of a handsome grown-up and a pretty regal bearing for a seven-year-old. Conor was a friend of mine but the thought of him marrying my princess was hard to take. When he approached me and expressed the shy hope that I would not think him soppy because he had to marry the Princess and, worse, kiss her, I stared at him in outrage and pity and ferocious jealousy and kept my secret to myself.
I started rehearsals as a dream-sprite but found myself rising through the ranks of daffodils and fairies to more substantial roles. I was soon elevated to the position of a page, and thence – owing to my prodigious talent for knowing where I was supposed to stand and Conor Dolan’s inability to remember his lines – to the title role. I suppose the Nicholls’ reasoning was that since they couldn’t get a decent prince to play the part they might as well make use of a fairly serviceable frog, which I was.
I liked being a frog and I was pretty good at it. Frogs seemed to me superior to princes in most respects. Talking frogs are funny, talking princes are not; frogs have cool slippery skin and hilarious googly eyes and can hold their breaths for ages at a time; princes just hang around with sceptres and things, which is fine if that is what you are into, but on the whole given the choice between being a frog and being a prince, I found my natural tastes and talents lay consistently with the ranine.
The one thing a prince has going for him, however, is that he gets to kiss princesses. You don’t get to kiss princesses unless you man up and assume the dignity and bearing of a prince, unless you do something brave or difficult to earn her.
It was very exciting to play the Frog Prince. A neighbour, Helen Byrne, made me a green felt frog mask. It had eyes made of a split ping-pong ball and a pink velvet lining and it made me look very like Kermit the Frog. (It even had a Kermitty uvula and Kermit’s uvula is perhaps the most famous in the business.) To this day I feel a great deal of kinship with the put-upon Muppet frog.
I also had a red satin cloak. The cloak was made by the same neighbour (a friend of our teacher Mrs Kelly, it turned out, and I remember the shock of understanding for the first time that it was possible for a teacher to exist outside the classroom) and it was beautifully put together with red lining and a special princely-looking clasp at the throat. This cape was to be kept for the critical moment in the drama when my character was transformed. I had to duck behind a covered table, remove my Kermit head, put on the red satin cloak (and a crown) and assume my princely form. Helen Byrne and my mother both thought that I looked very handsome as a little prince, but although I liked the cloak and considered it very good for being a vampire, I was not really that interested in being a prince, and when the crucial moment came I discovered that I was not prince material anyway.
Of course it was an honour to be cast in the title role of this exciting and challenging piece, but the really thrilling part was that I got to marry Alison, and kiss her. I could not think about anything else. I felt as if I was being inflated like some happy balloon and might drift skyward at any minute. I watched kissing couples on television and in the street and felt very privileged and important that I was soon to join their ranks. When we rehearsed I was a professional – on time, off book, committed – and I never forgot that we were not yet married, that this was just a rehearsal. When we went over the early scenes where the princess rejects the frog I knew, although I could not control the awful feeling of rejection in the immediate moment, that true love was going to triumph and that Alison and I were going to end the play standing together on stage, hand in hand and married.
And all the time I dreamed of kissing her. The thought of pushing aside her blonde hair and touching her cheek with my lips made me more happy and giddy than I had ever been before. Waiting for my mother to pick me up after rehearsals one afternoon, I sat looking out at the dark rainy day and caught my reflection. Without really thinking about it I pursed my lips. It looked stupid, but I persisted. I watched my face as it drew near to the ghostly image in the glass. The hard persistent rattle of the rain on the window sent a shiver up my spine in the stuffy classroom. My lips approached those of my reflection and I leaned forward on my elbows, over the grey mottled plastic of the school table, and I kissed the pane like a sad, silly little Narcissus. The glass was cold and flat and I immediately pulled away, feeling very stupid but thrilling still to the thought
that soon I would be kissing a real face, Alison’s. As I withdrew my mouth from the window, I saw Mrs Nicholl behind me, reflected in the glass. I turned around in a sweaty panic of embarrassment. She told me quietly that my mother had arrived to collect me, but she had a look of grown-up concern on her face that made me sick with worry.
At our next rehearsal Mr and Mrs Nicholl announced that because we were all part of the show and because it was fun to decide things together as an artistic collective, we were going to take a vote on the ending of the play. There were two endings to choose from.
The first ending was the traditional one: because the princess has allowed the frog to sleep on her pillow he is transformed into a handsome prince. She is persuaded, as so many women have been, that he really has changed for the better, accepts his suit, and marries him. In this version Alison and I were to hold hands, kiss, take our bow and leave the stage to live happily ever after together. This is the proper ending, the correct ending, the ending that all nature cries out for.
The other ending was described, in a phrase that took on a very bitter irony for me, as “the funny ending”. In this perversion of the natural order of things, the prince – having undertaken to find the princess’s golden ball at the bottom of the pond, having elicited from the princess an undertaking that he may eat from her plate and sleep on her pillow as his reward, having written her a little song and having, by any reasonable standards, wooed the living bejaysus out of her – rejects the woman he has struggled so hard to win, saying something utterly fatuous like “Oh no, Princess, I could never marry a woman who sleeps with frogs!”
As if a proper lover would act like that, as if any prince worthy of the name would be so stupid as to destroy his own happiness for the sake of a lame joke like that! The spiteful twist at the end of the “funny” version seemed designed to give my princess her comeuppance. It is true that the girl in the story is a little bratty. She is openly rude to the frog, makes some quite cruel remarks about his physical appearance and would renege on her deal with him if her father did not insist that she keep her word. But she’s a princess, so what do you expect? We could have made it work.
We raised our hands one by one to vote, first the girls and then the boys. There were more boys than girls in the class and I wonder now if Mrs Nicholl was counting on the votes being divided along lines of sex. The girls, with admirable artistic discernment, voted unanimously for the ending with the kissy stuff, and my heart leaped in my breast when I saw Alison’s hand go up, an earnest of our plighted troth.
Then it was the boys’ turn. We voted on the funny ending first and about fourteen hands went up. I kept my hand down. It wasn’t “about” fourteen hands; it was exactly fourteen. There were twenty-nine in our class, fourteen girls and fifteen boys. Fourteen boys had voted for the funny ending. Fourteen girls had voted for the real ending, the true ending.
“Now,” Mrs Nicholl said, and she was looking at me as she said it. “The romantic ending – hands up?”
I could have put my hand up. I could have had my happy ending. I could have kissed Alison and become a prince. But I remembered the jeers that had spoiled the solemnity of the wedding, my mother’s kindly but humiliating laughter, the impossibility of explaining to the world feelings which I was too small to understand myself. Mrs Nicholl looked at me, I looked away. I shook my head with a tiny movement, barely turning my neck at all as I stared at my blue shoes, my chin almost on my jumper and a shameful red heat moving up my spine to my cheeks. I had been offered an opportunity to raise my hand, to determine my future, to claim my woman and to act like a prince, but I bottled out and, in bottling out, condemned myself to the funny ending.
The play went on and I was accounted a pretty successful Frog Prince. I looked to Alison for some hint of regret but carried on acting when it did not come. I even got a laugh. A laugh is not a kiss. And, as I played that last idiotic line – “I could never marry a woman who sleeps with frogs!” – and smiled with professional modesty as the crowd of parents laughed and clapped, I was a bit like Shaw watching the applause that greeted Arms and the Man: the only person in the theatre who knew that the whole affair was a ghastly failure. But for me it was a personal failure rather than an artistic one.
For the rest of my time in primary school I continued to hanker after Alison. Everybody knew it though I never had the courage to admit it. Even now I am not sure if Mrs Nicholl engineered the whole changed ending out of some prurient disapproval of my seven-year-old’s longing. It doesn’t matter: she tested my love and my love was found wanting. And even though for years after, those long years of eight and nine and ten years old, although I still cherished the hope that Alison and I would get to live happily ever after, I also knew that I had blown my chances that day, when I failed to become a prince and condemned myself to being a frog forever.
Fintan O’Higgins is a writer from Dublin. His professional work has included storylines and scripts for television soap operas Emmerdale, Fair City and Ros na Rún, as well as a feature film, Capsizing the Stars (Blueprint Pictures, supported by the IFB) and stage plays, including The Departure Lounge, commissioned by Rough Magic as part of their Seeds programme. His poetry, fiction, essays, translations and criticism have appeared in The Stinging Fly, Comhar, The Raintown Review, the University of Alabama’s Birmingham Poetry Review and elsewhere. He has performed his poetry around the country, at the international Literary Death Match, the Brownbread Mixtape, and Nighthawks, both in Dublin and as part of the Electric Picnic. He has won various small prizes.
Story 38: Irn-Bru and Déjà Vu
Geraldine O’Neill
The difficult thing about imagining if you were a child again is that you always think you would go back and relive your life more brilliantly with the adult brain and experience you have now. How fantastic that would be! Or would it?
You might drive yourself – or everyone else – mad because you would be out of step with all the other kids your own age, looking at things the way grown-ups do. Children usually take each minute, each day and each event as it comes, while older people tend to plan and analyse things.
And what if you were only going back in time for one single day? Wouldn’t it be a better idea to enjoy every minute doing all the things you loved when you were a child?
Thinking about this brought back memories of routines and episodes in my younger life that I hadn’t recalled in decades. Different things came flooding back into my mind about growing up in Cleland, a small mining village in Scotland, in our lively family home with four sisters and a younger brother. Apart from my parents, we also had our Papa (Dad’s elderly uncle) living with us – a quiet gentle Irishman who we all loved. Our local school was only a minute’s walk away – so close that we could see the schoolyard out of the windows at the back of the house.
If I could go back in time, here are some of the things I would choose to do again:
I would love to relive a Christmas Day when I was about nine years old. I think this is a good age, as I still had Santa to look forward to, and with so many children, our house would be full of excitement and discussion about him coming for months before. It was usually very cold in Scotland at that time of year, and if we didn’t have snow to look forward to, there was often frost and ice, which were almost as exciting. From October onwards we would be playing out in the street in our knitted pixie hats and gloves, making slides, and if we were lucky building snowmen in the gardens.
The night before Christmas we would all be bathed and have our hair washed and we would sit around the big coal fire in our pyjamas and dressing-gowns eating fruit. We usually had small bowls with half of an enormous orange or an apple my mother had carefully peeled and quartered for us. Occasionally we had something different like a pomegranate, which took ages eating with a teaspoon.
My mother bought the fruit from a local man who drove around the villages in a converted single-decker bus three evenings a week. I can still picture the green-painted bus, with
the owner – Matt Robertson – dressed in his brown shop-assistant’s overall, standing behind the long wooden counters. I can easily recall the citrusy smell of the boxes of fruit he had on the shelves (which had a lip on them to stop them sliding off when he turned the corners) and the open sacks of potatoes, carrots and onions.
Matt also sold things like tins of peas and packets of dried lentils, and I always think of him when I see a small tin of my mother’s favourite white butter beans.
While we were eating our fruit we usually watched television – shows like The London Palladium or Steptoe and Son, or, if it was a Saturday night, we would sit glued to a wrestling match, cheering on the popular wrestlers like Mick MacManus, Kendo Nagasaki or Jackie Pallo.
Around nine o’clock, we would all be shooed to bed where we would lie for hours whispering about the toys and sweets we hoped to get the following morning.
It was during those nights when the only light in the room came from the yellow streetlamp outside our window that my two younger sisters, Kathleen and Patricia (who shared the room with me) would ask me to tell them a story and my imagination would run riot. I could make a story up in minutes, adding yards to it as I went along. We all had a comic each delivered to the house on various days – Bunty, Judy, The Dandy and The Beano. Often, Kathleen or Patricia would ask me to make up the next episode of The Four Marys or one of the other serial stories. Of course my version was usually more dramatic than the way the comic told it, and although they often giggled to each other at my unbelievable, far-fetched versions, they never really complained. It was either listen to me or lie bored in the dark.
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