Ireland

I was born in 1969 and although, if everything goes according to plan, I will live most of my life in the 21st century, I am completely and utterly 20th century in my way of being. My four grandparents were born in the 1890s. They were children at the start of the 20th century and I feel through them I have a direct and tangible link to what life was like then. My parents were born in 1925 and 1936 and through them, I know an earlier Ireland when times were pretty tough but there were definite compensations for middle-class people like my parents who sat near the top of the social heap.

The 20th century is familiar but the 21st century is constantly surprising me with weird things. Mr. Waffle likes to say that I had the last Victorian childhood (didn’t everyone rush to bring father’s slippers to the drawing room when he came home?) and in some ways it was a bit old fashioned. My parents were older and when I was a child we lived in a reasonably big house. My parents had to join a formal dinner so my brother and sister and I ate separately in the kitchen with Cissie who minded us, cleaned the house and lived in a bedroom up the back stairs. The gardener came two days a week and we all loved him. Cissie would make him poached eggs and he would sit and eat them in the kitchen and I was not encouraged to come in and torture him with my chatter although I was keen to do so as he was a very kind, gentle and patient man. It was a time when people said all the time “Children should be seen but not heard.”

My parents had yielded to Cissie’s entreaties and ours and in the playroom there was a small black and white portable television on a high stand (or so it seemed to me) and, inadequate though it was compared to my contemporaries’ set ups, I loved it. I don’t ever remember my parents watching television in the 1970s – can this be true? It was not the 50s but in lots of ways, looking back, it felt a bit like it. Ireland was more detatched from the rest of the world then too. Air travel was still glamourous and exotic and ruinously expensive. So just to say, I may only have been born in 1969 but I feel I definitely had a link to a slightly earlier life. Sometimes, it seems so far away and alien to me; can that have been me kissing the bishop’s hand and receiving a 50p piece when he came to visit?

I suppose the really important thing is that I was 31 at the turn of the century and some of the most formative moments of your life are lived by then. Tell me, are you a 20th person or a 21st century person?