Barefoot Pilgrimage Page 4

  I was her alibi and her ally and she was mine.

  She sent her boyfriend to MJ’s, the pub I was in, to get me out of it … To come home early, at least, (and soften the ‘deal with you later’ landing …) from ‘wherever’ I was, when I was not babysitting the two kids Dad had just said hello to, contentedly eating JR ice pops with their mother.

  Confidences, consolation and ‘you are not alone’s in her room.

  No Baa Sha is my sister-friend.

  And when we tickled her on the kitchen floor she was the one with the kicking ‘piranha legs’ …

  God knows.

  Gerry Was a Holy Joe

  Daddy considered being a priest, apparently. Stories of their parish priest coming to visit them and of having tea in the good china in ‘the good room’ (the room, and indeed the china, reserved for holy priest visits and the like) with his mother, Alice, who was – remarkably to me – very religious still. (Before falling in love with James, it was thought that she would become a nun.) She and James walked to six o’clock Mass every morning in the Redemptorist Church, before they opened the shop and even the year before she died they both made their annual Lough Derg pilgrimage … But with Daddy it was a kind of courtship, I hear. And to have a priest in the family was seen as a great blessing. It didn’t, of course, come to pass, but he remained the holiest Joe in our house of God and the odd sermon he gave us, including Mammy the girl, was indeed priestlike … He played the organ every Sunday in the Redeemer Church. Jesu, joy of man’s desiring, Awake … Sharon, when being reprimanded for being late for Mass one Sunday, called him ‘a religious fanatic’ (he was ahead of his time) and Mammy burst out laughing at her wee face putting him in his place. One December, when I was singing ‘Oh Holy Night’ with him playing the organ in our living room, he suggested, ‘Why don’t you sing it with me at Mass, Pandy?’ and we got excited about it and practised every day. When Christmas morning arrived, though, I was suddenly crying scared. So close to the reality of it now … Envisaging myself by him on the organ above the whole church, floating exposed on the balcony and all of the parish below listening … Neighbours and friends and Christmas dolls … The turning heads, the ears, the coughing in the echoing quiet … The solemn pause of the bent and listening priest … I couldn’t do it. I have a vague recollection of being comforted by Mammy before she broke the news to Daddy. There was no real persuasion. I was ever so gently let off the hook. But I knew he was disappointed. It would have been a beautiful moment for him, I think now, when I imagine myself someday with my own child, and he did express that lovingly in a Baa way, over the years.

  He went ahead of us to prepare and we followed on and joined the congregation.

  When he began to play the introductory notes of ‘Oh Holy Night’, then by himself up there and me sitting below in a pew with Mammy, Jim, Sharon and Caroline, my heart started to beat as if there was yet another me up there with him, inhaling before I sing. But no voice, of course. It came and it went. And I was the only one that heard my heart beat for what might have been. I regretted it. And I am sorry now, today, because it would have been beautiful for me too, to sing with my daddy.

  If a place is given such solemnity and gravity as the church is … if it’s a very serious place, then it is near impossible for me not to laugh, to this day. But that was a gift from Mammy, too.

  I am by the open grave of our next-door neighbour, Jack … His coffin is being lowered into the earth so slowly and so very carefully. All bent and reverent, we stand around and pray. And the rain it falls like tears. He is below now, in his eternal resting place, when they throw in a purple, pillowed … a purple, pillowed … body bag!!

  ‘It’s Bessie!’ I thought, appropriately horrified (his wife who had predeceased him) and nudged and whispered to Mum …

  ‘How come they just fling Bessie in like that, Mammy? That’s not fair!’ She shook with laughter at the graveside, hiding her face in her hands, and friends consoled her for being so upset.

  Another time playing in church with my friend Sonia … I was up in one of the sculpted holy scenes, God forgive me, when an old lady came in to pray. There was no escape other than to join my hands in prayer and stand still as a statue beside Joseph. She prayed on. Didn’t seem to wonder what a twelve-year-old girl in a school uniform had to do with Bethlehem.

  Student exchange programme … Return fluent in Aramaic.

  Having admitted that, though, I was kind of a holy child really … I loved – I still love – the hymns. ‘Be Not Afraid’, ‘Here I Am, Lord’, ‘Walk in the Light’, ‘On Eagle’s Wings’, ‘Abide with Me’, ‘Take Our Bread’, ‘How Great Thou Art’ … I love the hope that they sing.

  ‘Lord of the Dance’ frightened me at Easter time, though …

  I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black

  It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back

  They whipped and they stripped

  And they hung me on high

  And left me there on the cross to die …

  My children sang it with their school this Easter, I noticed, though it is a non-denominational school in London. Scary words, happy tune. They didn’t seem fazed. The horror not real enough yet; long may that last. Strange seeing young, happy faces singing these words.

  I prayed before bed every night in a superstitious and strict order … Opening the set with ‘Oh my God you love me’ and finishing with ‘Oh angel of God my guardian dear’ (there was rarely an encore) … It troubled me a little that they were all about blessing me through the day, so sometimes I’d substitute ‘night’, just so God would be clear. Another time, realising to myself that the prayers, having been learned off by heart, had lost their immediate meaning and truth, and that I drifted off helplessly reciting them, I altered them … A little shake-up … keep you on your toes … knees …

  Our Father, who art in heaven

  May thy name be kept holy …

  And that has brought me back into the double bed with Caroline, and Mammy and Daddy at the door, the hall light illuminating them in golden silhouettes. I remember them saying ‘Goodbye’ and I would cry before the door shut: ‘Say night night!’ …

  I must have had an innate fear of goodbye. Actually, maybe we all do. Maybe it’s not a fear, but a presentiment.

  If I still couldn’t sleep after my prayers, my God blesses and the night nights, I would roll my head on the pillow from left to right and chant ‘Mammy Daddy Daddy Mammy Daddy Mammy Mammy Daddy’ over and over again. I had to mix them up in that way so neither was said more or continually take the lead and thus be favoured, but still it was very hard worrying about that. Of course, dizzy as I’d end up with all that head-rolling, conscious equality and self-hypnosis, I would roll off the precipice eventually into dreams.

  Poor Caroline.

  Have you ever tried to make your side of the bed, by the way? Caroline could do that. Perfect, down-the-middle neat with a one-eyed teddy bear named Tony on her pillow. Beside the aftermath of a tornado … I’d say making the whole bed was easier but what point would that make …

  Jean Cried at Movies, Adverts and Soap Operas

  That she was proportionately vocal when sneaked up on by a baddie is questionable. And when she didn’t sit down and watch with us, preferring to watch the chicken turn gradually from stark naked to clothed and sit glorious and resplendent in the new NEFF oven they had purchased, she’d say:

  ‘Look, Gerry, I’m just delighted with it!’

  (The very same ‘delighted!’ she would later be, watching the rug that Caroline and Frank bought her and Daddy in India grow lush on our Dundalk living-room floor.)

  When she did not sit down with us being otherwise kitchen-distracted, she would drive you demented or to bed, calling in every ten minutes:

  ‘What happened?’

  Or:

  ‘Who’s that?’

 
The tears rolled yearly down her cheeks watching Gone with the Wind and she’d laugh open-mouthed as if splashed in the eyes while she cried and we watched her. I also have a suspicion that she quietly thought Daddy a bit Irish Catholic uptight, not letting us watch Dallas or Dynasty or The Colbys or look at the cover of Prince’s Lovesexy or the lyrics(!!) of Prince’s Lovesexy …

  She loved to cook, though she ‘couldn’t even boil an egg’ when they got married, and there is the legend of the stubbornly rigor mortis turkey she’d had in the oven for twelve hours of Christmas one year (an early attempt to domestically woo James and Alice). But that is not the Mammy I knew … This is she …

  The baking at Christmas. The smells, bags the bowl, the spatula, the serrated knife, I don’t care, I want it, I am willing to bleed for it … Dundee cake batter. Up on chairs by her and the Kenwood chef spinning around singing and overcome as we were with the festive season and its aromatic cheer. Her roast potatoes, her salad sandwiches, her chicken sandwiches – her chicken soup! – her coleslaw, her shepherd’s pie (cottage pie, really … we Irish seem to prefer the name ‘shepherd’s’, though of course we know well that beef has nothing to do with sheep). Her stews in the winter … Jim would eat two huge bowls with a whole, fresh, delivered-by-the-bread-man McCann’s sliced pan and a glass of milk …

  (I made ‘Mammy’s Irish Stew’ the other day having thought of this … and our Filipino mother’s help, Raquel, said with genuine kindness as I served her and her daughter:

  ‘Don’t mind, ma’am. We eat anything.’

  She lay me down and massaged me this morning to ease my sick feeling and couldn’t see me smile into the pillow …

  She has my mother’s hands.)

  Mum answered the call of the blackbird from her kitchen window, like I can’t help but do now. It is the only bird song I know, however. But Jean knew all the songs. She could name that tune in one. So Dad bought her a bird book, a pair of binoculars and a bird feeder, which hangs there still on the rhododendron over the rockery. (A mammy herself, that tree. She has two babies in the front.) And in the days where water giggled and flowed over those rocks and Jodie the bear-dog pranced about (he was a Border collie Mum brought home one day, much to Dad’s displeasure … short-lived displeasure, as of course she knew it would be … She watched the seduction through the kitchen window. Gerry seated on those rocks. A black-and-white fur-ball at his feet, looking up at him in a silent, dog-to-man face-off … the picture of a landslide victory), there was a clematis weaving through the arch of a trellis and the flowers that hung from it were like vivid pink jewels of Eden. Their long, mower-lined garden was a thoroughfare of evergreens to lead you to the pink dream of a cherry tree when in blossom, and a crab apple tree. In the beds there were pansies, primroses and optimistic daffodils: my favourite flower, which I seemed to witness shivering and freezing yearly, through that window, almost as soon as they’d awoken to shine … Got to admire them for coming out at all, I think.

  And they have the most beautiful smell … of hope.

  Ah, but there’s no hope beyond the cherry tree because that was far away to me. And it was the dark and ominous end of another’s garden where my own mysterious bad boy Boo Radley, bowl-haired, tricycle-riding Damien Omen, lived.

  He threw rocks at my swimsuited back one day and set the stinging bees on me … I think. I passed him a few winters ago walking down the hill of Árd Easmuinn and thought, as we are grown up now, that I’d say hello … He didn’t respond, didn’t look at me, just walked on by and when I gave up on my stupefied watch of his boy-man person getting smaller down the hill, and turned to continue, I was hit by a snowball in the back …

  For old times’ sake.

  I gave a bunch of dandelions to my teacher once, not realising, of course, that they were weeds. I had heard the rumour, though, that they made you pee the bed. Not there as well, I thought. We made daisy chains and proffered our chins for the do-you-like-butter buttercups test. And there was a vegetable patch with cabbage, lettuce leaves and rhubarb growing … And the warm, ripe Irish tomatoes tang in the glasshouse behind this patch, which made your eyes water when you walked in and were engulfed in the foreign humidity and the zinging smell of greenhouse life …

  Yes … Jean had green fingers beneath an earth-worn oven glove.

  She made clothes upstairs on her Singer sewing machine, too … three jumpsuits with moonstone pop buttons in different materials for Sharon, Caroline and me. Mine was a little see-through when the wind hit me, I noticed. So I put on one of Sharon’s bras, got on my bicycle and cycled fast down the hill of our road … I put my hands in my pockets for further grown-up, casual, bike-gliding cool and fell over like an armless skittle. Now let that be a lesson to you.

  She made Jim’s Communion suit, too: wee navy shorts and a striped waistcoat over a navy blue polo neck. He looks mortified beside her in the photograph. And she is wearing a beautiful outfit she also made … Sharon and I, both, have worn it since … A black, sleeveless, slim wool dress, with a high neck and a band of glittering silver beneath a pink-satin-lined black cape. She entered it in a fashion competition before we were born and was ‘robbed’, they said, of first place.

  She also made Caroline’s and my confirmation dresses. The same drop-waisted, cup-sleeved pattern but again in different materials, which she let us choose ourselves from the selection in Dearey’s Drapery on Clanbrassil Street. Caroline’s was summer peach cotton, which she wore with a white brimmed hat and silk peach ribbon and a pair of white dainty shoes. She even had a wee white handbag … Lady Diana is here and she is only beautiful. I, as you probably imagine at this point, did not choose colours appropriate to this religious and solemn occasion and I think it’s remarkable now that Mum ever allowed me. Lovely, really, and loving, allowing me an early expression of individuality even though she must have seen … Letting the baby go a little because she is twelve. But there’s no getting away from it: the Holy Spirit descended upon a holy show the day I was confirmed. He probably ascended right back up again, in fact, as soon as He caught sight of me, and called an emergency meeting with the other blessed Two. The Twinity.

  It was black with small white flowers, red-painted shoes, black nylons (honestly), a red hat with a black-and-red polka-dot ribbon. And la pièce de résistance … a widow’s black netting over my eyes. Unsurprisingly the teacher did not want me in the class photo. She tried to hide the siren in the back. But there’s charcoal staining the pastels like a naughty thumbprint and you just can’t rub me out.

  There are clothes of Gerard’s in a crumpled brown Dunnes paper bag in the cupboard above her wardrobe. A suit she made him. A beige wool blazer with round brown buttons. Trousers and shorts to match. There’s a green polo-neck jumper that he is wearing with those shorts in a photo I’ve seen of him sitting between Mum and Jim on a blanket on the front lawn. He faces the camera in one of these photos, but in another he is the only one looking away. He is looking behind him towards our next-door neighbour’s house. To his friend Brian, maybe. That is chilling to think of now. I held his worn brown Clarks shoes in my hands. And I smelled the striped T-shirt that would’ve been close to his body. God love them. Mammy, Daddy and Jim.

  Mum also helped us all with our knitting and sewing for school. They don’t teach that anymore. I see the checked blue tacking square and now I hear the sound of her needles knitting … very easy and fast. It was too obvious when she had done a few rows for us, as those beautiful smooth rows of plain and purl invariably led to a disturbing section of holes. Crazy golf. Making you wonder, had the knitter suddenly suffered a stroke?

  I knitted my husband a scarf for Christmas one year. I still don’t know how to ensure the sides don’t curl in, though. And as he is tall, I overdid it on the length a bit. He is six foot two and it curls round his neck to drape – no, to drip, really – down to the floor and curl once more, in a grand finale, by his shoes. Like two pet animals s
leeping at the feet of their master. It was a very Dickens Christmas.

  ‘Pandy’ by Gerry Corr

  Dinner done

  Time for some fun

  So we watched TV

  Little Pandy and me

  Perched high on my knee

  Little eyes to see

  Old friends on screen

  So many there’s been!

  Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew

  Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub

  Captain Flack and Barleymow

  PC Copper and Aunt Flo

  Now back at work

  Old nostrils perk up

  Is it horse manure?

  I’m really not sure!

  So slow to perceive

  You’ll never believe …

  She peed on my knee

  While we watched TV!

  Goody Goody Yum Yummmmmm!

  Oh I loved The Goodies! Bearded men were always a fave, as Daddy had a beard. I cried when he considered shaving it, so he didn’t. Years later, in a Santa Monica hotel, Jim and I shaved his head over the bath and freed him from a comb-over and ‘the tyranny of hairspray’.

  Gerry Says No!

  Thank you, Andrea and Jim. It’s hard to be convincingly angry when the wind is lifting your hair like a lid and you racing up the road for twelve o’clock Mass …

  Not the Nine O’Clock News, Spitting Image, Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, The Kenny Everett Show …

  ‘It’s all done in the best possssssible taste!’

  Dallas … ‘They’re all rolling in and out of bed with each other. Turn over!’

  (Pam’s finding rolling a little painful today, sorry.)

  Terry Wogan’s Blankety Blank chequebook and pen!