Ten Years' Time

It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

Brian Friel, Translations

I DON'T REMEMBER, CAN'T remember, the house where I was born. Not that I was born in a house. I was born in a hurry at the Bon Secours in Tralee. My mother didn't have time to remove her sheepskin boots, or so the story goes. The little house I was brought back to faced Fenit's main street. Folded in under the roof was a veranda; this is known to me only from one tiny black-and-white photograph, with my father, ever the gardener, ministering to, admiring perhaps, a very large cabbage. He'd been working for more than two years as site engineer for the new Fenit pier, an elongated isthmus leading to Europe's most westerly deep-sea harbour, not five miles from his family home at the Spa. I don't know, and it's too late to ask him now, why he took this, his first job, so close to his original home place, when he'd been so far away all through the war. The new family, my mother, father and firstborn sister, lived on a daily diet of lobster, my father being known locally as 'Lobster King Tuomey' for his luck with the pots. Spartan luxury.

Then there was Macroom, where we moved when I was six months old, my father this time working on a town water scheme. We lived in a plain-fronted terraced house on Main Street. There was a long back garden, a narrow strip between high walls, where he grew vegetables. I have a dim, or dimly received, memory of very large marrows.

Images begin to take shape, still hazy but a little clearer, from our days in Drumshanbo, where we once again rented a terraced house on the main street. Here my father was stationed to build new structures for the coal mines at Arigna, an electricity-generating power plant built to burn the locally mined fuel. One day he brought me inside a very tall chimney, looking up together through the tapering shaft to a little slot of sky, him telling me about the constellations, so it must have been evening time. The Plough pointing to the Pole Star, the Seven Sisters in a huddle, Cassiopeia like a big W, Sirius the Dog Star, the brightest star in the sky. These lessons in basic astronomy continued across camping holidays and from the kitchen step on summer nights.

I began my schooldays in Drumshanbo. The schoolmaster, in a gesture of welcome, showed me how to milk his cow. Warm air inside the dark cowshed, warm milk in a bright bucket. Another day, on the way home from a shopping trip to Carrick-on-Shannon, I threw my new shoes out of the car window, silently, one at a time, each at some distance from the other along the country road, this careful tactic adding, I've been told, to my parents' frustration. My older sister's back seat of the car frustration lay in trying to teach me words, with instructions to repeat after her . Cow, Cow. Horse, Horse. House, Outhouse. I don't know why it infuriated her so, my insistence on outhouse, but then again, I've been told, it worked time after time. Still, it's a nice word, outhouse. Sometimes you can make yourself believe you've invented or discovered even the simplest of words, a sudden moment of epiphany. I remember wasting time as a student thinking about the etymology of the word diagram, the diagrammatic clarity of the word itself, already marked out in lines.

There was some sort of arrangement with the landlord that, on market days, he could pen his sheep in the hall of our house, lining the floor and halfway up the walls with corrugated sheeting. We looked out of the front window at wall-to-wall sheep, sheep spread across and up and down the street. Could this be true? At the back was another high-walled long garden where my sister and I climbed along its stone ledge, made snowmen with tin hats and coal buttons and, again, my father grew his vegetables. Visions of the Virgin and Child appeared over the wall, blurred and radiant figures shimmering in our neighbour's round-arched landing window, worrying me: what was She trying to tell me? After my mother took me to get my first pair of glasses, those disconcerting visions disappeared for good. Sliding down the stairs on a tray and shunting the tray-train into its station under the kitchen table, my own private station for ego-stretching and pestering exchanges with my ever-attentive mother. Who would I be, where would I be, without the sense of purpose driven deep by my mother? She came home from Sligo with the new baby, my middle sister, who still believes she belongs in the west. So now, on the long drive back down south, we were three in the back of the car.

That long drive was to Cobh, where my father's company had the contract to build new ground for the Haulbowline Island steelworks. From Kerry to Cork, to Leitrim and back to Cork, four house moves through three counties by the time I was five. In these place-based recollections of childhood, memories from Cobh come more strongly into focus and are more likely to be first hand, their reliability tempered only by the normal distortion of six decades' distance. If they are not really all true, they are all certainly real. Our street-fronting flat led back to a tiny yard where a red sandstone rockface ran weeping with water. No room for vegetable growing here. I slept on an iron frame bed in a side pocket off the hallway, a bed-sized alcove in the undercroft of the stairs to the upstairs flat. I lay defended by a wooden sword laid across my chest, made for me by my father, bluntly pointed at its white-painted tip, sanded off on its second day to a safer chamfer, its hilt painted silver and gold. I was not scared in the dark, not until the night when, brushing my teeth in the bathroom at the end of the hall, I glimpsed in the mirror a hooded figure loping out of the gloom. I turned round to see this creature bounding up behind me, long arms swinging low to the floor. My heart jumped. The bogeyman leapt sideways into the shadow. Out stepped my laughing father, his human face half-hidden by a monkey mask, removing the disguise of his oversized duffel coat. His joke, not so funny for me.

Our first Cobh Christmas delivered a handmade redpainted wooden train, steam engine and carriage, solid enough to sit astride and ride around the flat, but not for the outdoors, the street being too steep to go railing. Harbour Hill is a really steep street, running down and around a dogleg bend to the small harbour at the centre of town, where my father kept a shiny varnished sailing dinghy, Shearwater II - was there ever a first to this second? It was our only boat, and leaving it behind when we moved again was a blow to the heart. One day, I noticed a carton of golf balls in the bottom of the boat. One by one, I dropped them in the water, announcing, with the empty box held out as evidence of a successful experiment, ' Daddy, I've news for you. Golf balls don't float!' No ice cream that day.

The day of the ice cream was when I tripped over a stray rope while trying to pull the dinghy up the slip. I was picked up crying, with scraped hands and knees, a bloodied nose, a sore and swollen upper lip, by my aunt, my mother's younger sister, who was staying with us at the time. She brought me into a little timber-boarded sweet shop across the road from the pier and bought an eight-penny wafer, the biggest I'd ever seen, intended, I now suppose, to reduce the swelling. Opened up out of their boldly striped red and white packaging, those blocks of vanilla ice cream would have been carefully marked out in scored lines ready for dividing. Shopkeepers had a special trowel-like gadget for doing this, three-penny slices being the usual measure on a Sunday after mass. I'd broken my front tooth in the fall, so that extra thick treat brought more nerve pain than pleasure that day, but a memorable pleasure nonetheless. Another day we sailed all the way around the sheer-sided hull of the two-funnelled Mauretania as she was towed into harbour. We bobbed with excitement in her wake. Years later, in London, watching Fellini's Amarcord, with all the awestruck townspeople out in their boats, waiting in silent rapture for a passing liner's emergence out of the dark, brought me sailing back to Cobh.

That patient aunt, on this or another visit, was to reveal a particular flaw in my character, a persistent flaw, one not to be proud of. Pride. Noticing my interest in her knitting patterns, she sat down beside me, with needles and wool, and gently offered to show me how to knit. I stood up and made my escape, declaring over my shoulder, 'I can knit!' This moped-pedalling aunt was an unusual woman, independent living, chain smoking. She enrolled me for an annual subscription to Animals magazine, with its own embossed and rigid folder to bind all the weekly issues in neat order. She always arrived with interesting books: The Social Life of Animals, by Marcel Sire, with its description of forty thousand bees working together in a hive, made a lasting impression.

She drove up from Limerick to mind us five children when I was twelve, a few years after the family had moved to Dundalk, while my parents went off on their first non-family holiday, two weeks in Venice. On the first day we clashed over boundaries, she being too strict, or maybe too careful, never having looked after a houseful of children, me demanding to spend the long summer days unstructured by any aunt-imposed lunch or dinner schedules. I hot-headed for the door and cycled off to the Blackrock baths for a cooling swim. That same day my bicycle was stolen from outside the swimming pool. I tramped the four-mile...