Archives for November 2008

In 1970 my father took up a supplementary job that came with a large house.

I loved that house and you are going to hear a great deal about it.  My mother always called it Irish Georgian on the basis that Georgian styles came to Ireland rather later than they did to England but it said 1884 over the front door which is very late Georgian indeed.  It was a substantial rectangular house over four storeys.  It was set in reasonably extensive grounds with a large back garden with metal swings, 12 apple trees and a big vegetable garden off to the side.

In the hall, there was a picture of the laughing cavalier and a long mirror in front of which I would prostrate myself looking at the dust motes dancing in the sunlight that streamed through the fanlight. The great thing about a big house was how much you got to be left alone. There was a chaise longue against the wall which was used as a kind of stair gate when my brother and sister were of an age to hurl themselves down the stairs.  I can remember sitting there with my mother trying to learn how to tell the time, desperate to get away.

Off the hall, on the right was the telephone room which had an unpleasant red floor which had to be regularly and laboriously waxed.  It was an uncomfortable, functional room and, I think, it also held a chest fridge freezer.  It was from the days when people didn’t chat so much on the phone.
My father’s study was off to the left as you came in and we were only allowed in there on special occasions, like when he filled up his little steam train with water and let it steam around the carpet.

The kitchen was further along, past the stairs on the right.  It had a large wooden table which I used to like to sit under.  My memory is that we children took all our meals in the kitchen with Cissie (who minded us) except on very rare occasions when we were allowed to eat in the dining room (birthday parties, I seem to remember). I have no recollection of ever cooking except at Christmas when we would all help to make the Christmas cake in a big bowl that had a beige knitted jumper pattern on the outside.  Whatever happened to all those bowls?  We would ice it later to look like a snowstorm (my mother who made and beautifully iced her own wedding cake was conscious of the limitations of her children in the icing department).

Off the kitchen was the playroom which was small and dark with bars on the window.  On the floor there was yellow lino with black and red dots.  The deeply unappealing black and white portable television was there mounted high up on the wall.  We could watch it from a leather sofa with stuffing poking out.  The only time I remember either of my parents watching the television was when the Pope came to Ireland in 1979 and my mother spent some time on the uncomfortable sofa while I languished in bed with a cold wondering why no one was bringing me up orange juice. By way of aside, I must tell you about my cousin who was offered the opportunity to serve mass for the Pope.  He asked what would happen, if he didn’t agree.  He was told that he would have the day off like everyone else.  He took the day off to the lasting horror of all his relatives.

The playroom looked out over a flat roof where, I think, the boiler was housed.  It is probably for that reason that snow sublimated off the roof.  My mother attempted to bring this to my attention once and I was not interested.  To this day this incident is dragged out as evidence of my complete lack of scientific curiousity. My mother was always keen to bring science into our lives.  I was on a course recently where the tutor tried to explain critical path analysis to the participants.  I longed to say that it meant putting the potatoes on first because they took longest to cook – my mother’s line “CPA would suggest that…” was an integral part of our childhood.

There was a small back stairs from the playroom up to Cissie’s bedroom and my mother’s sewing room.

From the kitchen I could, at a running jump, reach the dining room without putting a foot on the hall floor.  The dining room had a large table known as the “governors’ table” which belonged to the house.   One hideous day the governors’ table had my initials carved on it with a compass.  I have no recollection of doing this but honesty compels me to say that there were really no other likely culprits.   There were serious recriminations and I was very abashed.  That Christmas I asked for Topp’s furniture polish and spent many futile hours rubbing at the table.  The governors didn’t seem to mind.  I remember that one of them was a rather unpopular bishop of Cork (very holy and all that but not a great man of the people) of whom I was very fond as he gave me 50p every time he came to a meeting.   There was also a mustard velvet sofa in the corner of the dining room (people, it was the 1970s) that my mother had reupholstered herself and where Hodge (our cat) used to hide when she was little and it all got too much for her.

At the end of the hall there was a bathroom and a random room for gathering stuff, sort of the dividing line between inside and outside.  Like a shed but inside.

Tomorrow, we might go upstairs.  Hold on to your hats.

Oh, and in other news, a big round of applause for the Americans.  Yes, they can.

Up the stairs which had amazing banisters which I never once slid down owing to my parents’ fear that I would crack my head open on the cast iron radiator below.  I’m not sure but I think we were told that this had happened to a visiting child in the past.  We were certainly frequently told about the boy who poked his sister’s eye out by sticking a pen through a keyhole while she was looking through it.  There wasn’t as much shielding of small children from the harsh realities of life in the 70s.

The wallpaper on the stairs was raised and featured a jungle jumble of flowers and leaves.  For many years, even after we left the house, my copybooks were covered in remnants of this paper so it remains green in my memory.  I distinctly remember, also, running a crayon all along it from the hall to the attic.  It was a lively pattern so I feel that the crayon wasn’t all that noticeable.

On the windowsill on the landing, there was an unhealthy pot plant and, years later, after we had moved out of the house, I went back to visit and on that very banal landing, I had a Proustian moment – the smell of dust and another dying spider plant bringing me vividly back to my childhood.

Up some steps, I think and then into the bathroom on the right.  There were several large trees which grew near the back of the house.  A large lime tree brushed against the bathroom window and made it dark in winter but green and speckled in summer.  There were always pigeons cooing gently; I thought that they were cuckoos. The bathroom also featured the hot press.  When my sister was a baby, I had to run to the hot press to get nappies for her.  I can remember flying from the drawing room to the bathroom in the dark, terrified. I have no idea why I didn’t turn on the light on the landing.  I had been given a present of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verse” and the trio of poems “North-West Passage” about a child going to bed had a profound effect on me, particularly “Shadow March” which was illustrated by a small boy holding a candle which cast a gloomy light around him.

On up the stairs from the return, the guest bedroom was on the right.  When my Nana came to stay, she stayed there.  I used to sneak into her bed in the mornings and she would hold her arm in the air and I would try with all my might to pull it down. When Nana came to stay, we would put flowers in her room and, if it was May, there would be cherry blossom from near the front gate.  I seem to remember that on one occasion I put in a little May altar but cannot remember the reaction I got.

One Easter, inspired by my father, I hid all the chocolate and sweets I got during Lent (which I could not eat because I was off them for Lent, you see) in the wardrobe in the spare room.  My father had done the same thing in his youth and on consuming them all on Easter Sunday morning had made himself so sick that he had never had an interest in sweet things ever again.  I was undeterred by the negative part of the story.  I’m not sure whether my constitution would have withstood the chocolate feast but, in the event, there was no need to as my little brother got there first.

Once, I spent one whole afternoon in the spare room lying on the bed reading “The Swiss Family Robinson” entirely undisturbed by anyone.

When my sister was christened, we had a party in the house and all the guests were in the drawing room.  A friend of my mother’s asked where she was and I brought her next door to the spare room where my mother was breastfeeding my sister and they were both mortified and I can still remember how very puzzled I was by that and wondering what I had done wrong.   My 3 year old brother was, meanwhile, going around the room polishing off all the sherry left over by careless guests which meant that all he could do by the end of the party, somewhat to my parents’ consternation, was roll around on the carpet giggling.

The drawing room was next door to the spare room and was  the most splendid room in the house.  It had two or maybe three large windows facing towards the front looking out over an ornamental garden with a bird pond in the middle (which always froze in winter – so exciting to break the ice) and one looking out to the side.  The only time I ever remember being smacked was when I swung on the curtains while my mother was entertaining and brought down the curtain and the  pelmet.  I ran downstairs and retired to the coal house outside weeping bitter tears.

You came into the room at the top and opposite near the window was a door which led to a walk-in drink cupboard.  There was a large bookcase against the back wall (formerly belonging to the canon in Kilmallock, I think) and then a lot of space for building card castles and running around before coming to the couch and armchairs around the fireplace.  The couch, due to my brother’s regrettable habit of wiping his nose on its back boasted little silver trails which were regularly removed.  In another corner there was an enormous baroque floor to ceiling gilt mirror.  Years later when the house had been made into offices I visited it.  The drawing room was full of desks and documents and filing cabinets but the mirror still stood, incongrously by then, in the corner.  It made me very sad.  What is now my parents’ dining room table – taking up almost all the space in the dining room nestled inconsequentially in the fourth corner of the room.

Outside the drawing room there was a little door to the right leading to the stairs down to the playroom, Cissie’s room and the sewing room where my mother created her works of genius: curtains, clothes, dolls’ clothes whatever you were having yourself really.

Shortly, the third floor.