Barefoot Pilgrimage

by Andrea Corr

  Les Dawson, the best bum-noting entertainer.

  And I confess, though I hardly need to now (it’s par for the Corrs … ba-dum) …

  The Benny Hill Show.

  Top of the Pops was a call to prayer, though.

  Time for a quick commercial break.

  (Ah, bloomin’ ads.)

  Let’s ask our expert, Neill …

  You mean which bleach kills germs longest in the lavatory?

  Oh, cock your head to the right on the first revealing syllable and tell me, Neill … please?

  It’s Vortex.

  Oh, so satisfying! Thank you, Neill. And by the way … It looks to me like someone’s been using Ariel on their white coat …

  Things that ’appen te ma bridal gowns. Mud on the emmm, or even …

  Persil?

  Ahhhh, Mummmm!

  Don’t tell me …

  BOLD 3! (Slam the box down on the counter, why don’t ye! Bold as Brasso, you are!)

  Now hands that do dishes can feel soft as your face, with mild green … (altogether now)

  Fairy Liquid.

  Irish Permanent … Come on, Grandad, sure you haven’t said a word all evening and us comatosed watching RTÉ One beside you … He joined in:

  The people’s choice … (Run before we explode, Caroline.)

  Mammies by the sink.

  Mammies Shake n’ Vac-ing.

  Mammies and babies’ bums.

  Milk of magnesia?

  That’s the one.

  Imperial Leather.

  Clinic shampoo.

  Timotei, tell me …

  I could look like you?

  Could you put the dinner on? I’ll be home in twenty minutes.

  Bedeholymuckintiggersamuckholy! Is that a woman telling a man to cook the tea??!!

  Haha says you … very clever!

  I loved the smell of the heating on in the winter. The switch on the wall above the organ, and it omming to a start. The radiators cracking their knuckles and ‘All right, so’ing.

  Oh Mum is on the couch and now I’m laughing. She would sit … lie … recline, in a blue quilted sleeping bag. Whatever she had been wearing on her bottom half, draped over the back of it.

  I was a teenage, smiling Curehead (Stop that, you’re supposed to be depressed), with my similar alternative friends, in the kitchen (‘Mm, do you like The Smiths more than The Cure?) when a slow shuffle-hop sound distracts me and here’s Mammy hopping past, on her way to the bathroom. Losing the sack race in a fit of the giggles.

  ‘Pick up your jeans, Andrea!’ she splutters.

  My jeans??!!

  We holidayed every July in Skerries and it smells to me now of rashers and the sunny peaches outside O’Neill’s corner shop …

  A fruit auditorium

  Perusing me.

  Mm, not sure …

  There’s a lot of cuts on her knees.

  I don’t need to investigate further.

  This one is bruised.

  Her??

  I thought her a gypsy boy.

  Well I don’t mind …

  There’s a box of Tayto in the back room of our chalet.

  (Suck them beside Daddy; he’s grumbling with the noise.)

  It’s funny how a musician-parented family such as we were, in a red Toyota Hiace van (our transport had also become their trailer for the gear), was perceived. Something we were happily unaware of, till a Skerries friend of Sharon’s came home with us to stay.

  As we slowed down the hill of Árd Easmuinn, the van indicating left, she showed genuine shock when we were moving up the drive of a middle-class, two-storey house.

  Kids sang ‘Born on a Dual Carriageway’ to me there, and I sang along. Why not? That’s a good song.

  Irish Snobbery. A contradiction in terms.

  There was a time when Mum got our sizes wrong when buying our school tights.

  Did you keep the receipt, Mrs?

  Of course I did, as always …

  Ah but I wouldn’t want to put a man’s brain in a woman’s head now, would I, haha, he said.

  Ah sure how would it fit, tell me? Ye stupo!

  Oh how we laughed.

  Anyway, I got so tired of pulling them up at home that I got used to walking around, a shackled convict on house arrest, after school. Then one day in the cookery kitchen, I was practising making porridge, stirring away goodo, when a friend exclaimed …

  ‘Andrea, your tights!’

  I had a very strange tolerance of discomfort, it seems. Caroline scratching her head off, her face, and all getting involved while I continued on happily without even the tickle of an itch. I, of course, was found to be ‘crawling’ when she had on board a solitary lodger … A bachelor, methinks, already on his way out. There was a suicidal bachelor in her attic room. Driving her cuckoo. Yes. That was it. Was nit? Try not to scratch.

  Oh she was so good though, Mum. Over me so carefully, so diligently, gently, with that dreaded fine-tooth comb (it is not a fine experience) way past bedtime, so I would not have the horribly less fine experience later when the community fled the poison. She’d arrest and handcuff as many as she could before I’d ever experience that.

  I think it’s unfair how much mums do with all of their love and how much love and comradeship dads get. How I loved horsey-back when he’d had a few. Me giddy and weakening her silent fight. (Her face is finding this ‘SLTH’ methinks … mmmm slightly less than hilarious …)

  But now I am a mum of two. I have a girl comeuppance and a boy comeuppance. And maybe it is absolutely fair. It is all that I could want, anyway.

  She tried to lock Daddy out once, they told me … Sliding the latch in the kitchen back door and giving out under her breath. I watched her silently and then proceeded to drag a chair to the door, stood up on it and unlatched it as definitively as she had latched it. I see you and I raise you, Mammy. I turned to her then, still up on the chair maintaining the authority this newfound height brought me, and I gave her a look that told her not to even think about locking my daddy out. She obeyed, defeated by the indignant stance of a five-year-old, and they laughed about it later.

  ‘You only see the fight, Pandy. You don’t see the making up.’

  But my daddy was often to be found in the doghouse with a bachelor friend of his, John, who had ‘no responsibilities, no wife and children to go home to’. One Friday night, having gone on the lash together after work, Daddy and John swayed home together. Mammy made them a curry so hot that John bawled and roared over the windowed oval table. Reflected in it, a rabid and grizzly bear seated with a big white tea-towel bib around his neck. His entire being boiling … like a lobster screeching red from the scalding water …

  ‘JEAN!!! ARGHHHHHHHHHH!!!’

  She left the room and laughed. That’ll learn ye.

  Frustrated again one evening in front of the fire, the Irish Times flick-flicking, coughing ‘Ahem’ to gape in front of her face … shaking shuddering with the weight of the serious, frowning Irishman issues it contained, she lit a match and burned it from the middle seam up, Daddy’s stunned face appearing behind the rising flame, his hands still holding either side.

  Aynsley China and boxes of ‘All because the lady … forgives?’ Milk Tray.

  They were the ‘Baa sorry Jean’ peace offerings and the ‘making up’ that I did see.

  On Valentine’s Day she would check the Irish Times and smile when she spotted the anonymous riddle meant only for her. This one I remember …

  Dinner and wine

  Brown eyes benign

  Nellies sublime

  Oh creature divine

  How hungry I’m …

  They, unlike us today, spent very few nights apart … So few, in fact, that I remember them. There are gifts of stained-glass pagodas from the market in
Covent Garden where he went with Jim. A trip to the music shops of London, I’d say. They shelter the dust in the old overripe glasshouse now. Or a visit to his best friend and tennis partner Gerry Crosby, or to his brother Willy, in Dublin. Mum then would seem to have waited eagerly for his phone call like a debutante, for she would cry, ‘That’s Gerry!’ when the phone rang. And she would dress up and have Jodie, shining healthy, to wait for him off the train that came in across our road. Each of them made the other more beautiful, he thought. You could feel then, too, an excitement between them. A shy, smiling strangeness. And I get a glimpse of the two of them independent of us, back in the Fiat 500 on the corner of McSwiney Street.

  ‘Be Careful What You Wish For’ for Mum

  Head dishevelled like I’m Einstein

  In a hurricane of fury

  I don’t remember the last time

  I woke up naturally

  I’m a coffee addict double buggy pushin speed walker

  Happy hour means a whole lot more to me

  So this is what it’s like

  Flung from one day to the next

  Try to get the balance right

  But I haven’t got it yet

  Be careful what you wish for

  You know I wouldn’t have it

  Any other way

  I just remembered

  It’s my birthday today

  So I’ll have burnt toast

  And you can eat up all my cake

  I didn’t wanna know how old I was anyway …

  Four years when you are a child is a big age difference, ten huge … and one year is practically none, therefore my playing memories are Caroline’s. She is almost always with me in them. We were ‘the children’ of the house and Jim and Sharon were grown up, even when they weren’t. That’s why Caroline is my twin twister. And why I was born with one ready-made best friend and two mothers. She was naive to my cunning and it made me laugh all day long, every day long. I was absolutely free of worry. She was not. It was great.

  ‘Caroline, will we steal a biscuit?’

  ‘OK, let’s.’

  So we would steal a custard cream each. I would pretend to eat mine while, unwittingly, she devoured hers. Then I would put mine back.

  God! I’m laughing here but this is awful!

  You’ll be surprised to hear that I didn’t do this just once.

  But how we entertained ourselves and each other every day. The two of us. Wrapping the duvets around our bodies and tying a belt around our waists to emerge adorned in Victorian dresses. We would take a walk of the room, how better to show off our figures, and we would drink from silver goblets. Whoever then was queen would recline on the sofa and be fanned and fed grapes by the other. We would play mammies and babies. She the mammy and me the baby. And I would remind her frequently with my eyes closed (Ah look … the little curly baby) to say, ‘Shhh, the baby’s asleep.’ We would do the slow silent drift, two ghosts in Muppets nightdresses, from our bed back to the living room, and linger and float behind the corner, spying on the TV … circling closer and secretly watching with them, until we were spotted and made to flee.

  ‘But we haven’t had our cereal!’

  Bathtime was a complete laugh. We simmered together to a slow, steady boil in the bubbles before we exploded out, newborn down the stairs, into the living room for the unannounced evening performance of giddy bums.

  (Bare bums are just funny. Always were and always will be.)

  Betimes, she, the twinkle-toed ballerina, would pirouette gracefully into the living room and I would enter abruptly and with gravitas, her intimidatingly handsome danseur, in school tights with tennis balls stuffed down them.

  (They are funny too.)

  She was subtle. I was not. Green eyeshadow and red lipstick. The whole bold and dirty face in carnival colour, to her Lady Diana. She would have a modest bosom, economising on the toilet-roll padding, and I would have, well … just … huge … gigantic … Forget about the toilet-roll padding, I’m all in with facecloths or clothes or blankets or, if handy – happy days! – balloons.

  Oh, that reminds me: we used to laugh at the sound of a word. Particularly when Mammy said it.

  My breasts.

  Breasts.

  Say it? It is funny, isn’t it?

  Breasts.

  Yes. It is.

  ‘Twisters’

  Pillowcase sledging

  Down the stairs

  Tennis balls in tights

  Living room ballet

  Her rollers heat

  She’s ready to bounce

  The night

  Her slips

  Our long hair

  Dolly tissue silhouette

  Lipstick I blush

  My smile

  Outran my mouth

  The yucca plant

  The skeeting gun

  Play tears

  Play tumble down

  After bath

  Our towel capes

  They flee the crib tonight

  Victorian dresses

  Heaven blessed

  Our world

  No kryptonite

  I miss that home.

  Music

  Dad, as well as working in payroll for the ESB for forty years, was a musician. A keyboard player and an organist, he played various gigs, weddings, funerals and pubs around Louth. He used to joke – self-deprecatingly, yet, I believe, sincerely – ‘If only my talent were on a par with my passion.’ He found himself in need of a singer and, such were the times that they lived in, failed to look to his wife, likely peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink.

  ‘I’m doing it,’ she said, matter of fact and, ahead of her time, that’s what she became … the singer of The Sound Affair.

  Their first gig was brutal, they have told us. After it was over, a member of the audience remarked:

  ‘No harm to yiz, but youse are the worst band I’ve ever seen.’

  But on the way home in the car, Mammy said to Daddy, ‘I just love it.’

  And so they played for twenty years. Got a lot better than that first fateful night and built up quite a following.

  Now that I’m a mother I think about what an important release this must have been for her. An expression of herself beyond us and Dad. Something so few women got back then. The person in the mirror she looked up to as she put rollers in her hair and put on her make-up. Her own unique and secret truth that she found in the words she sang.

  And there was colour in her wardrobe then. Her stage clothes and shoes. Someone that she was that I don’t have full access to.

  I think there may have been an underlying fear in Ireland that if a woman, never mind a mother, was exposed in the open, they just may be stolen or even fly away (ah … ‘Don’t be stolen’ is something Mum and Dad used to say to each other …) Actually, when I think about it, this must still be a factor when we think of the resistance to women having free choice about their own bodies. Sure we can’t be trusted of course. We’re not up to ‘the run of ourselves’ and may lose it …

  You don’t think of this when you watch your mother as a child. But you do when you’re cooking ‘pasgetty’ for your children’s packed lunch in the morning. The morning after you played London’s O2. And a proper Irish housewife of my mother’s era would never be out and exposed like that. It was made a little more permissible alongside her husband, I imagine.

  I think I felt the danger once. When I hear ‘Love Me Tender’ I see the arm of a fellow musician steal over her shoulder to teach her to play it on guitar.

  Yes, I suppose it may put the whole house at risk.

  Let’s sacrifice the woman and all will be well.

  This …

  … is the scene we grew up in. A home immersed in music. The radio always on. The weekly charts like Mass. Th
e stereo set to record. The original illegal downloads.

  ‘Quick, quick, get it!!’ Mum would shout from the kitchen and whoever was there would run, frantic not to miss the first line, as this was about transcribing the lyrics for the lyric book. This is what they would learn, rehearse and play in The Coachman’s Inn, The Muirhevna Inn, one of the many inns, the following weekend. Thursday through Sunday.

  She had an ear for what would be a hit. They performed ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ weeks before it was in the Top Ten. Indeed, this was often where people heard what were to become their favourite songs for the very first time. ABBA, the Eagles, the Carpenters, Simon and Garfunkel, Roy Orbison.

  She is coming alive as I write. Maybe she really did come alive in this time. What music did for her, what it awoke in her? It is a physical blooming in front of my closed eyes now.

  And maybe I did feel the physical change in her, and just maybe this is a memory, too. From 1974 (you see, I was hiding there, that brutal first gig that hooked her) through the 80s, into the 90s when they, oh so reluctantly, surrendered. The lugging in and out of the gear had gotten too much for them. Not the music. Never the music. So on a bittersweet happy new year, The Sound Affair was over.

  There are not many vivid evenings when we got to watch The Sound Affair, at home being babysat most of the time and a pub being ‘no place for children’. I am around for her preparations, though. The smell of Friar’s Balsam. Her head beneath a tea towel inhaling the vapour from a bowl at the kitchen table. Olbas oil on her pillow. A singer’s paraphernalia in her mammy handbag. Lozenges and Sinex sticks. Rehearsals and late-afternoon naps for them both before they left for ‘Mammy and Daddy’s Sing’.

  Our weekend habits told the story, too, of our working musician parents. Our house rose late, unlike our neighbours. Kept its eyes closed way into morning with drawn curtains. And the glass milk bottles stood still and waiting at the front door. The sun shining directly on their silver-and-red foil tops. Early bird-pecked for the cream.

  You snooze, you lose.

  But we loved weekends. The lie-ins. They seemed so happy and relaxed, those late mornings, early afternoons. She would cook a big fry and we would all appear around the table at various stages. I’d say they retained the glow of the previous night’s gig and felt good. And maybe they both stood outside of themselves, on those mornings after. Looked through the kitchen window and saw in there that they had it all. Just about. I think I recognise that feeling now.