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Everywhere I have ever lived – 1970 – 1980 (Part III)


Posted in: Cork, Family, Ireland

Up the stairs again – there was another bathroom on the return and then up to a big landing with several small bookcases.   My parents’ room was the first on the right.  There was always ivy tapping on their window and it regularly had to be ripped back.  My father loves bright colours and my mother had painted one wall of their room bright purple as a surprise for him once.  He was away and, I think, my brother and I must have been at school but my sister helped my mother with the painting and fell into a pot of paint and cut her eyebrow quite badly.  An unfortunate doctor friend came and stitched her up and the painting continued.

I am reminded of a story about my father being away.  Once he came home very late a day before he had planned to and found the gates to the house locked.  He went to the phone box at the end of the road (no mobile phones, obviously) and called my mother who is a very sound sleeper.  She woke up, promised to let him in and promptly fell back to sleep.  Clearly, there were limits to her devotion.

The grounds were a bit like Fort Knox.  Local children (at least one of whom was in school with me, so easily able to, you know, ask for apples) were always coming and stealing (or slogging as it is known locally) apples and we were burgled a couple of times so this encouraged my parents to put in deterrents.  I once impaled myself on a spiky gate between the front garden and the back.  I knew that I wasn’t supposed to be there so I pulled my elbow off the spike and went into the playroom to watch television with Cissie hoping that my red cardigan would hide the blood.  It dripped on the floor though and she instantly brought me off to my parents.  I thought I would be murdered but they were most sympathetic and even brought me in to the study to put on a special kind of plaster (a butterfly plaster) for the night.  I had it stitched in the morning and was rewarded for my fortitude with new black patent shoes and an ice cream something I considered extraordinary good fortune given that my problems stemmed from illicitly climbing the gate.

Next door to my parents’ bedroom was the big room that my brother and I slept in.  Following my lead, he once broke his arm while we were jumping from bed to bed (he was too smart to do it twice).  He was always an attention seeker.  When my sister was born, he was moved to the spare, smaller room next door on his own and she and I were in the big bedroom.  He was scared on his own though, so she was moved in with him and I had the big bedroom all to myself, something of a triumph.  It was a very cold triumph.  In winter I would get up, grab my uniform from the radiator and put it on in bed.  In summer though, I could sit on the window box looking out feeling like a heroine in a book.

I liked Enid Blyton’s school stories and, when my best friend from school (now an esteemed consultant geriatrician and still, quite possibly, the cleverest person I have ever met) came to stay, we would try to stay up until midnight and have a midnight feast but invariably ended up eating everything at about 9.30 and collapsing into our beds exhausted.

Up the last flight of stairs to the attics.  There were two big attic rooms one of which was forbidden to us.  This was my father’s workshop where broken appliances and pieces of furniture came to be mended or self heal as my husband would say.  There was a huge model ship which we were forbidden to touch on pain of, oh I don’t know, dreadful things.  I used to tiptoe in and stare at it, awestruck.

The other attic room looked out over the back garden and this was full of all kinds of odd things – it is what I picture when I read Saki’s “The Lumber Room“.  It was in that room that the meetings of the O.J.G.C. were convened.  The O.J.G.C. was invented by my other best friend (now an ornament to our diplomatic service).  We had badges (the club was perhaps inspired by the badge making machine I had received as a present) and we had a library and we carefully marked the books O.J.G.C.  I still have quite a few of these books knocking round the house and read them to my children who have, as yet, no interest in Our Jolly Good Club (I did say that we all read a lot of Enid Blyton).

We had a good back garden and we spent a lot of time climbing trees – there was one apple tree near the house that was particularly good for climbing; playing cowboys (I had a great gun with caps) and indians; producing plays – curtain created by stringing it between two bushes (there was a whole row of shrubs and bushes alongside the path and sweet pea growing up the wall – I do want to try to grow sweet pea in my own garden now); and torturing poor Michael, the saintly gardener, who let us play hide and seek in the potatoes and dig them up too.  Michael always had a poached egg for lunch and I was fascinated by the way Cissie managed to make them quite round in the poached egg holder – can you still get those things?

There were two little girls who lived in another house in the grounds and, I think, my mother was delighted at the thought that they were built in playmates but one was a bit older than me and the other a bit younger and we never quite hit it off.  I think their mother (very understandably, I now realise) never really forgave me for encouraging the younger to twirl around on the bars of the swing and knock out her newly arrived front teeth.  I met her again recently for the first time in many years and her teeth look fine.

At the bottom of the garden, through a small gate, there was a chapel.  We never went to mass there as my father had to sit in a special seat and do a reading and seem very enthusiastic about leading the singing and he didn’t like that.  My brother was christened there (I think the only baby ever baptised in that church) and I disrupted the ceremony by insisting that my father and not my mother sit in the carved chair whatever the priest might want.  I had firm notions of what was right. I remember skipping down the path to the church with my father wearing my favourite dress with the American flag on the chest and looking up at the stars, very excited to be allowed out at night; I suppose that that can’t have been the christening – he was hardly christened at night – but that memory is so vivid that I am reluctant to deny it.

I was very happy in that house and, despite my mother’s spending every Saturday morning perusing the Examiner’s property supplement, it never occurred to me that we might move.  One morning I came down to the kitchen and found Cissie in tears.  She told me that it was because we were moving out and, as she worked in the house and would be staying there, she wouldn’t be minding us any more.

Despite my disbelief, we did move out.  My mother, herself a product of large houses, was very sad and also somewhat concerned about where we would fit all our furniture.  I was appalled.   My father was rather glad to be shedding one of his jobs.  My brother and sister were too young to really care although for a long time afterwards whenever my sister got cross she would announce “I’m going back to my own Cissie”.

There was no going back though.  On our last day before leaving, I went around to each empty room and said goodbye.  Two more families lived in the house after us, then it was offices for a time and then the trustees decided to knock it down.  It was riddled with dry rot – something that had been treated while we were there (my mother became something of an expert on dry rot in all its forms) – and not really of any particular architectural merit.  For many years, the small gate that led to the chapel survived.  It hung at the top of a short flight of stone steps on the way to nowhere in particular – the house and garden both gone and replaced by an underwhelming, though not unpleasant, modern building.  I would look at the gate and remember Saturday afternoons spent swinging on it admiring wedding parties emerging from the chapel below.  Even the gate is long gone now.  Sic transit.

More tomorrow.  Possibly.

Everywhere I have ever lived – 1970 – 1980 (part II)


Posted in: Cork, Family

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.

Everywhere I have ever lived – 1970 – 1980


Posted in: Cork, Family

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.

Is this turning into some kind of reactionary campaigning blog?


Posted in: Reading etc.

A couple of years ago, I read an interview with a photographer wherein he said that the desire for celebrity photographs is entirely driven by women.  I stopped reading all the trashy gossip magazines.  In-flight fodder became slightly more worthy. I still look at the headlines in the shops but I do not buy.

It is distressing.  The way Brittney Spears had a nervous breakdown in public was horrific.  Kerry Katona’s widely publicised problems shouldn’t be widely publicised.  I don’t care whether these women courted the press at any stage in their careers.  They shouldn’t be hounded.  I can see no public interest in it and a great deal that is disturbing.   And, loath though I am to admit it, the photographer was right.  The phenomenon is driven by women, women like me.

I read a very cool review of the work of Annie Leibovitz in one of the Sunday papers. Her work had no humanity.  But what is wrong with a little glamour?  Surely this is what we pay film stars for.  Why are we so obsessed with their feet of clay?

I never buy gossip magazines any more and, you know, you shouldn’t either.

This preaching thing? I should warn you, I may get worse before I get better, it’s hard to stop once you start.

OK, tomorrow, definitely tomorrow, my next house.

Modern living


Posted in: Family, Mr. Waffle

Mr. Waffle: We’re very post-modern this evening.

Me: Eh?

Him: You’re changing plugs (all of our appliances have two pin plugs, in Ireland we have a three pin plug regime).

Me: Mmm.

Him: And I’m sewing a button back on Michael’s trousers.

Pause.

Him: That’s tomorrow night’s blogging taken care of then.

Today was a rather less post-modern experience as our childminder (normally v. reliable) couldn’t make it until 3.30 and I had to hare round at lunch time collecting the children and bringing them home (also denting car and losing wing mirror in office car park).  My saintly mother-in-law drove across town to mind them in our house until the childminder came.  Childminder has got the job in high finance that she was looking for (yes, really) and will shortly be handing in her notice.  I am exhausted from it all and must shortly turn to interviewing new lucky candidates.

Will save the description of my second house for tomorrow.  You are on the edge of your seats out there, aren’t you?

Everywhere I have ever lived – 1969-1970


Posted in: Cork, Family, Ireland

My parents’ first house was a nice, central semi-detatched Edwardian house on a hill which my father paid for in cash.  I find this even more impressive now that I have a mortgage of my own. About a year after they moved in, I was born.
I have asked them which bedroom was mine and they can’t remember.  I have also asked my mother what she did with me when she went back to work.  “It was the summer holidays”.  “I was born in March.” “Oh, so you were, I think a friend of your nana’s who lived on the Grand Parade came in to mind you.”  Feckless pair.