W2F-008 Sweet Killough-0.txt
ONE

PICTURES KEEP TUMBLING out of the filing cabinet of memory. Are they real? Or are they echoes of stories told or conversations half overheard? Or the whisperings and gossip of adults? Or the fantasy of a child surrounded by other children with active imaginations?

Sitting on Daddy's shoulders coming down the Chapel Brae after first mass on a Christmas morning. It is dark - mass must have been at about six or seven o'clock. There are no streetlamps, but the lights in windows and through open doors all down the street to the corner are bright enough for navigation. The air, sharp and cold. The sky, perfectly clear, an arched dome studded with stars. 'That is the Plough - can't you see the shape? - those seven over the Water Rock. And follow those two, the pointers, to that very bright one. That's the North Star, right over the North Pole. That's where Santa lives.' Carmel, walking alongside, saw it at once. Not to be outdone, I saw it too, and identified the wrong pointers, and the wrong Pole Star, and the wrong starting point for Santa, who landed on the roof at night, as long as you were asleep, climbed down chimneys and filled stockings pinned to the mantelpiece or laid on the fender. The beam of the lighthouse sweeping the sky. First a long beam, then a couple of short ones. Regularly, every couple of minutes, providing our own illuminations, but no sign of Santa. Then home into warmth and light and breakfast. Then banging the table with a knife and fork at dinner time and calling for 'more turkey'. And running up to the chapel afterwards to see the animals in the crib and put halfpennies in the slot, which made the plaster angel on the collecting box nod her head in thanks. Creeping up with Carmel to look through the grimy, uncurtained windows of a nearly derelict house occupied by a gruff old man and seeing a body slumped in a chair before the empty grate, newspapers on the floor, rats eating them and nibbling at his toes. A young woman in a bathing suit of great elegance and style, diving off the quay into a full tide to impress her banker boyfriend and disclosing, to a small boy sitting on the edge, a hole in the bottom of her costume. A man potting a billiard ball with a flourish of the cue to end a break, and shouting triumphantly in a strange accent, 'In like a baird, Michael'." And since a baird was what Daddy shaved off with a cutthroat razor in the morning, it was hard to see how it could get into the pocket. Or a glass-sided hearse waiting in the gateway to bury the people across the road. Or crouching in the graveyard among the stones watching funerals. Or a widow who had been weeping at the funeral of her husband, spitting on the grave after the will had been read. Or the nuns in a group sitting on a rock, not noticing the tide coming in, until they stood like penguins in their full gear, long black robes and stiff white hoods, as the water rose around their narrowing perch, refusing offers from the girls to lead them to safety through the water, or from the bigger boys to carry them off, jumping from rock to rock, until a rowing boat arrives from round the pier to lift them off and carry them to dry land. Or standing by the bedroom window, frozen with fear, as a young man walks in through the open gate and picks up my new leather football, a present for my birthday, and walks off with it under his coat in broad daylight on a summer evening. And standing there for some time after he has gone, and running crying to the bar to complain, and Ray rushing out in a useless search up and down the street. And the shame, for years, of not having shouted out to frighten him off, or of not running for help in time, or of not standing up for my rights, and the suspicion of not having kicked up a row until it was too late to do anything about it. Or sitting in a boat holding onto the line streaming over the side, and feeling the tug and pulling in, hand over hand, until a twisting silver shape lodges itself under the keel, inaccessible. Or going on a long expedition with Carmel up the Point Road, past Barney O'Prey's, and deciding the lighthouse is too far and taking a short cut towards the Institution across Ranaghan's bog, up to the ankles in mud, having to jump ditches filled with water and across sheughs and stiles and barbed-wire fences until emerging on solid ground behind the chapel, and the distress and anger when we got home, late, bedraggled and dishevelled. Or a little man walking up and down at the corner explaining to other men: 'Finance - that refers to money matters.' Or Daddy coming back late on a special train from the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin with a green plate with a picture of the pope on it which hung on the wall over the room door for years, and praying all day that his train would not be stoned or burnt or wrecked on the way home. Or the parcels from the outside world at Christmas and Halloween, the turkey from Waterford wrapped in sacking with the postmark on the label, the barnbrack from my Kerry grandmother, made specially from ingredients she had supplied, wrapped in tinfoil from the inside of a tea chest, then in newspaper, then in brown paper, but still smelling sweet in the postman's hands. And the weekly papers, sent after having been read, folded so as to allow the name and address to be written in the white space beside the title, and tied with cord: the Waterford Star and the Kerryman, and the Christmas number of the Cork Examiner, full of ghost stories - banshees, horseless carriages, headless riders, men carrying coffins who disappear over cliffs or into thin air, hearses and funeral processions appearing from nowhere, spectres rising from the sea and out of the air - enough to keep any young boy in the house for years with his head under the bedclothes. Visits to genteel old ladies who gave you tea and seed cake or Marietta biscuits. Hospitable houses where you would get a piece, a slice of baker's bread spread with butter and sprinkled with sugar, or a soda farl or curranty cake. Or a yacht lying on its side, flat on the waves on a lee shore, the masts gone, the sails too, or the great geyser from the Sucken Hole, or the east wind in the winter, or the collier riding high on the evening tide as it sails light, or the train, or the brick, or the harvest, or the people and the sayings and the songs.

Why these memories and not others? Anything remembered is bound to be distorted, anything observed, seen through a lens, anything recorded, selective, but what I hope this account conveys is the experience of living in Killough in the thirties, seen through the eyes of a child. The picture is impressionistic, in places pointilliste, with image overlapping image and pigment on top of pigment, a constant interplay of light and shade, blurring, obscuring, fudging the edges, but in the end, I hope, viewed from a distance, and in perspective, conveying an overall sense of place and time and providing a feeling of what it was like to live there. The people who move in and out of my memory are not all the people of the village, or even the best or the worst of them. They are the ones who for some reason, perhaps a kindly act or a bizarre action, or perhaps only for a telling phrase or a snatch of a song, lodge in the memory and are imperfectly re-created.

In previous generations the romantic dream was of descent from noble blood, or great wealth fallen on hard times, leaving a latent residue of decency or pride or good breeding ready to be discovered by the appropriate fortunate circumstance or fairy prince. Then there was rags to riches, log cabin to White House, and greater merit in having made it on your own than through inherited wealth or privilege. And very often nowadays autobiographies seem to claim extreme poverty and hardship, to child abuse and harassment, and to the more exotic reaches of incest, sexual perversion, rape within the family and psychological torture and emotional deprivation. That I can claim none of these is not, I hope, a result of self-censorship or an impaired memory but of a reasonably happy childhood in a village community that was supportive, caring and generally compassionate. I shall try to avoid the Water Rock of self-glorification and the glair of self-abasement in recalling those days and that place. I describe people, perhaps not as they were but as I remember them. Events change too, and the order and sequence imposed by memory may not stand up to historical analysis or carbon-dating. Some people dominate in the mind of a child more than they might otherwise be entitled to, others are altogether forgotten, wiped from the tablets of memory.

If my mother looms large it is because she gave me most of the words, but it was my father who took me on the walks, and most of the people quoted were talking to him and not to the invisible child who eavesdrops and overhears, silently taking it all in. This is not intended as a moral tale, or social satire, or a history of Killough, or an autobiography, or to poke fun at people, or to hurt. It is a small bit of my memory, and an oblique tribute to the kind and decent people and to the small community who provided warmth and friendship and the wealth of their experience and a sense of belonging to me as a child.

TWO

THE IMMEDIATE STARTING POINT that jogs my memory is a faded sepia snapshot. Five figures sitting on a low sea wall alongside the road at low tide, a calm sea behind, and in the background, flat coastline on the other side of the water. The time, probably the summer of 1930. Four children and a young woman, two girls about six or seven years old and two toddlers, similarly dressed and clearly twins. It is a bright, sunny day. The little girls in summer frocks and ankle socks; the young woman, wearing a flowered dress, a coat and a cloche hat, sits solidly on the wall, conscious of the responsibility she has for the children, while the infants sprawl against her knee in a careless way, one more sober and sedate, the other full of repressed energy. Who are they? Why are they there? After the fleeting moment caught by the camera, what has life in store for these children? In the snapshot they are the focus, the centre of attention, the fixed point in the firmament.
