Family

The Princess is firmly on the mend and her spots are no longer sore. They are revolting though and falling off all over the place [“Mummy, I don’t want my yoghurt” – “Why not, honey?” – “My rash fell into it” – Delightful]. We are watching the boys anxiously for signs of spots. They had to go to the doctor for shots this morning and he reassured us that the spots on Michael’s face are just a heat rash. Our paediatrician is very nice and everything but he assumes that we know everything. “No fever, no disease, which of course you know”. Er, no, actually. “For the chicken pox, no aspirin, which, of course, you know”. Er, no, didn’t know that either. Of course, it’s not nice to be patronised by your doctor, but surely there must be a middle ground. I am reminded of a post by GP mama some time ago (which I cannot find to link) where she described lecturing medical students and asking them where their prostate was and none of them knew. She said “remember this moment, because in years to come, you will think that you learnt where your prostate was at the same time as you learnt where your tummy and your arms and legs are”.

Over the weekend the Princess developed a spot on her eyeball, painful, alarming and according to google (bloody google), potentially dangerous. On Saturday night after they were all in bed we agonised about what to do. Should we call the paediatric service in the local hospital? But suppose that they said come in and we would have to wake her up. When she had gone to bed at MIDNIGHT on Thursday and 10.00 on Friday and we were teetering about on the end of our tether. Eventually, concern for our daughter’s welfare (just) outweighed our desire to sit down and have a nice cup of tea. Some tired doctor from the paediatric service was summoned to talk to us (who’d be a doctor?) and she said, unlike the internet “oh yeah, very common, buy some zovirax ophthalmologique”. Excellent, another medicament to acquire which she won’t let us apply, at least it may be useful for the boys or for us.

Oh yes indeed, a series of checks with our parents has revealed that neither Mr. Waffle nor I have had chicken pox. My mother waxed eloquent on mumps and measles (“you were deaf for two years between four and six, you became an excellent lip reader” – a skill I have, regrettably, not retained) but no chicken pox. By all accounts, chicken pox is very infectious and deeply unpleasant for adults. The best dressed diplomat sent me an email with what, I am sure, she intended to be cheering words: ‘if it’s any consolation, it’s much better they get it at this age. The older you are, the sicker you are. I got it in my mid 20s [and it was dreadful]… [s]o you’re saved the trauma of being the middle-aged mother of a twenty-something driven to tears and the foetal position.” Not, in fact, cheering, in the circumstances. Let us trust that our parents have just forgotten our suffering through the pain and anguish of chicken pox.

I met an Irish friend for lunch recently who told me that teaching of history in Irish schools stopped at 1916 because it got too contentious after that. This made me think about the Irish civil war which took place in 1921-22 and this made me think about my family history and as, to think is to blog, here it is or some of it. As you know, this blog is not normally a place to think about such things so you may feel free to tune out here and come back another day when, doubtless, there will be more tales of small children and all the fun that goes with them.

Our friends in the North, in particular our nationalist friends are very fond of telling us that “the Southern state was founded on violence” which of course it was but it was all violence from a long time ago whereas their violence is that bit more recent. Though of course, some of us still resent the fact that the Black and Tans burnt Cork Also, in the wake of our violence, there was some serious hatchet burying. Ireland is a small island. Still, our animosities live on in our politics. In Ireland we don’t have left and right, we have what is affectionately known as “civil war” politics. Unusually, the losers in the civil war got to write history and essentially ended up in government most of the time since 1922. It’s not quite clear to me why this should be.

All of my grandparents were on the losing side in the civil war, so my parents could never vote Fine Gael. Even I would hesitate. My father’s father campaigned for De Valera in Clare in 1923 and my parents still have a rosette in the attic somewhere. My grandfather seems to have been quite a busy man in Cork during the war of independence and after. One day my aunt pointed to a set of steps and said “my father was nearly shot by snipers on those steps”. What with the war of independence and the civil war and everything, things seem to have become a little unpleasant for my grandfather in Cork so he decamped to California with my grandmother and his infant son. It was unfortunate that he chose to do so at the start of the Depression. I don’t think they were exactly on the bread line, though. My grandmother’s letters home to her sister are full of unhappiness about the quality of their maids. It’s all such a very long time ago. We have somewhere a sad picture of my father as a small boy with about 30 other small boys all holding hands except for one little black boy who’s standing off to the side on his own. Mind you, we would have done the exact same thing with the travellers in my primary school in the 1970s, if the nuns hadn’t made us hold their hands. See, the nuns, they’re not all bad.

Either because things had calmed down in Cork or because it wasn’t working out in America, my grandparents decided to come home with their now two children. [Imagine, had things worked out differently, I could have been a Californian girl, taller, tanneder and in the movies]. If you knew my father, you would be amazed that he  once spoke with an American accent but apparently he was a source of great interest in his home town and people used to ask him to talk so that they could listen to the “little yank”. A lot of Cork people went to work in England, in particular to Ford’s in Dagenham and used to come home flush with cash. They were known, somewhat disparagingly, by the locals as “Dagenham yanks”. I suppose they were pleased to have access to my Da’s authentic Orange County accent. He used to enjoy pretending to be Al Capone whose activities he had followed in detail while in the US. It was just as well that they came back to Cork because at the ripe old age of 35, my grandfather died of a heart attack and my grandmother, my father and my aunt moved in with my grandmother’s unmarried siblings. I remember going to visit them when I was a small child. We would be bribed with taytos and allowed to put the packets in the fire and rescue them with a tongs when they reached the size of miniature tayto packets, it was tremendously exciting and done in silence while my father read the paper and had a gin and tonic and my two great uncles also read their papers. One of my great aunts was always a little strange which was explained as “she had a twin who died”. It never seemed a great explanation to me, particularly when she used to wallop me on the side of the head when I had a lollipop in my mouth and cackle “oh I thought that it was a gumboil”. My aunt assures me that they all adored me but I found them a bit unnerving. My father’s maternal grandfather was quite old when he married and he remembered attending a famine funeral when he was a young boy. It seems amazing to me that I have such a direct link to the famine.

When I was rereading “Emma” by Jane Austen recently, I said meditatively to my loving spouse “I wonder whether I’d have been able to draw, if I’d lived in the 18^th century”. “No,” he said, “because you would have been a scullery maid”. I was deeply indignant and checked with my mother. She told me that until her grandmother had housed and fed an IRA battilion during the war of independence, which nearly beggared them, her family had been quite well off [please note that my mother’s family’s impeccable republican credentials are confirmed by the presence of one of my great uncles in the well-known painting “Men of the South” – well known in Cork anyway – where the artist’s subjects put the heart crossways on him by turning up to pose in his studio with their guns]. My grandmother’s grandfather had had a large farm the revenues from which allowed him to build a school and pay a schoolmaster following Catholic emancipation in 1829 so he must have been doing alright. One of his sons married my great-grandmother, the last Emperor. Stop sniggering. Her maiden name was Emperor and there are no more of them left in Limerick. I don’t know where the name came from but it is odd, you will concede. There were 11 girls and two boys in her family but the boys never married and the name died out. My mother muttered vaguely that she thought that her great grandmother’s mother was one of seven sisters who had all been married on the same night. A sort of Limerick version of “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”. The reasons for this are unclear, something about Whiteboys though since they were, as far as I know, Catholic, I can’t imagine why this should be.

My father says that my siblings and I were brought up too soft. It has never been quite clear to me what hardship he was hoping that we might encounter but maybe he just meant we were spoilt. My great grandmother said that my grandmother spoilt my mother and her brothers. My mother says that her middle brother was certainly spoilt terribly. When she was a baby, he went into hospital for an operation. The wisdom at the time was that children shouldn’t be visited by their parents as it would upset them. He went into hospital walking and talking and he came out 3 weeks later neither walking nor talking. My spoiling grandparents were devastated. The poor little mite was only 2. With all this spoiling in my background, is it any wonder that the Princess can wind me round her little finger?

I think that it was Saki said of some crowd that they “unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally”. I feel a bit like that myself, so I’m spreading it round the internet. Well otherwise, how will I remember it?

The publishing exec came to visit for the weekend. The Princess nearly expired from happiness. The publishing exec is officially her “favourite person in the whole world”. The Princess spent the weekend in a state of high excitement, laughing constantly (slightly manically). The publishing exec had to accompany her everywhere including to the toilet in the swimming pool where she informed her horrified aunt that she was “going to do a big poo”. I should clarify that said aunt is not the lucky parent of children herself and so is not inured to the presence of the poo of others in her daily life the way you and I might be. When the publishing exec wasn’t playing with, carrying or otherwise occupying herself with the Princess, she was cleaning the house. She can come again. Furthermore, she brought us, inter alia, volume II of the Supernanny book. I am disappointed that all of Supernanny’s wisdom was not given in volume I. I must say, though, that having had to read it, for work purposes, the publishing exec, applies it to our little girl (at least, I assume that this is where she gets her child minding tips from and that she hasn’t got little mites of her own stashed in the attic in London). And damn it, it does seem to work. It is unclear to me whether this is because Ms. Frost is a genius or because the Princess would do anything for her aunt including wearing a hat in the sun.

At this juncture, I could give you loads of gossip from the world of publishing, but I want my source to continue to feed me information so I will restrain myself. I am proud to report that she used something from my blog in a cartoon for one of her books. She quelled my delight somewhat by commenting “the book needed cartoons and I had to draw them and think up all the captions myself; they’re not very good” (who knew, just how much content an editor provides?). All I will say is that the publishing executive does a lot of celebrity biographies which she considers mildly depressing because many of the celebrities are rather young to produce meaningful biographies and the literary content isn’t maybe what she was hoping for when she graduated with her double first in English and then went on to do her thesis on the metaphysical poets. On the plus side, her employer buys her Grazia, Cosmo, Heat, Hello and pretty much whatever celeb rag you’re having yourself and pays her to read them on the job. Watching big brother is research. Do you want her job? Well, off you go and write a thesis on the metaphysical poets.

The publishing exec is the youngest member of her family. Mr. Waffle and her other brother (the piccolo cugino’s papa) were born in Montreal and Costa Rica respectively. By the time the publishing exec was born, the family had moved back to Dublin permanently and begun holidaying in Kerry. This is her parents’ excuse for the fact that their family photo albums contain many pictures of her older brothers as babies and youngsters but only one blurry snapshot of her as a baby. “We were abroad when the boys were little”, they argue “we were really photographing the countryside”. Nevertheless, the publishing exec remains a little testy on this point. Mr. Waffle, in the manner of older brothers, can be provoking. After our trip to the swimming pool, the publishing exec expressed regret that she had not taken the Princess swimming on her back “like Dad used to do with me in the Blue Pool” she said referring to a serviceable but rather unglamorous swimming pool around the corner from her parents’ house. “Ah yes,” said Mr. Waffle, delicately taking his life in his hands “I remember doing that with him in Barbados, I think we saw a barracuda”. As the baby of her family, I can’t help feeling that her mother’s proposal that when we all go to Kerry, the publishing exec should share with the Princess has not met with enormous favour.  Or maybe, she just doesn’t fancy being awoken by her niece bouncing off the walls from 5.00 am.  Hard to know.

In only one respect was the visit mildly unsatisfactory; we have a three bed roomed flat, so the arrival of visitors sees Mr. Waffle and me decamping to the boys’ bedroom. This is not ideal. I think that future visitors may have to be routed to the guesthouse round the corner. On the other hand, it was nice to see the publishing exec getting up to entertain the Princess at 6.30 am in response to incessant knocking and the odd kick aimed at her bedroom door. Come and visit us; have a little break. The problem is not so much the moving bedrooms but the fact that the boys sleep even less well than usual when we are in their room. Last night the four of us ended up sleeping together. It was very warm. Daniel is the Prince of Perspiration, the Grand Vizier of Glow, if you will, and this morning we were all rolling round in the small puddle he had created with his hot, chubby little body. Lovely.