W2F-016 Place and Displacement-0.txt
Place and Displacement
Clairr O'Connor
My parents left home when I was fifteen. It wasn't unexpected but it was still a shock. Home was Limerick. Limerick city. My father said he was going home. Home to Listowel, Co. Kerry. Ever since I could remember he 'd been saying he would go home one day. Perhaps I had heard it so often, I no longer listened. When I was five he had said, "One of these days I 'll go back. Limerick is fine but it's not home." Naturally I was confused. Limerick was the only home I knew. Kerry was for the holidays. Ballybunion, Stack's mountain, Listowel, daytrips to Tralee. My mother came from Ballyalnan, a little village near Newcastle West, Co. Limerick. Summer holidays were divided between Kerry and Co. Limerick.

My parents boasted about the virtues of their respective counties. Did this move to Kerry mean that my mother had lost? An independent woman from a very early age, my mother left her village after her Inter Cert. and went to England to train as a nurse. A thrifty country woman she brought her rustic virtues to a war-torn London making delicious meals out of meagre rations to the delight of her city bred London nursing friends. On a visit home to visit her widowed mother and her sister she met Ned O'Connor on the train from Dublin to Limerick Junction. He proposed to her some months later having first checked out her Catholicity by writing to her parish priest in England. An almost priest, my father has remained fervent to this day.

They married two years later. My mother returned to Ireland to live. She got a nursing post in Limerick and my father worked in Shannon Airport, the duty free section. Unlike most of the women of my mother's generation, she continued to work outside the home after she had children. Nursing was very important to her. She was a meticulous homemaker as well. A splendid plain cook, there was always a pot of home made soup available, brown bread, scones, pies and special cakes for birthdays and Sunday teas. A woman of tremendous energy she applied her skills at home and at work. Her children's clothes were labelled and shelved. As a child, I both admired and felt intimidated by such order. As an adult I now realise that she probably insisted on such detailed order as a means of cutting off the criticism that was levelled at women who worked outside the home during the fifties and sixties.

I did not want to move to Listowel with my parents. I was in my Inter Cert year at school and pleaded impending exams as my excuse. But the truth was, I didn't want to leave the Shannon, my friends, the familiar geography of my existence; King John's Castle, Cannock's clock ringing the hours. I helped my parents pack and waved them Listowelwards with a smile. That night I howled my despair at their desertion into my pillow. I had got what I wanted but somehow I had lost. A hard one to figure. I had been left in the care of my aunt Mary until the end of the school year and my exams. Meanwhile my parents and my younger brother settled into the house in Convent Street in Listowel. I did not sleep that first night of their going. I hugged the night until dawn came. Then I got up and made a cup of tea. I trod warily, anxious not to wake my aunt.

I took down one of my grandmother's cups from the top shelf of the dresser. It was stark white with a decoration of a single bare branch of an oriental looking tree. This tea set was only used on Sundays. I felt a delicious sense of trespass as I drank thirstily from its restrained elegance. I thought if my grandmother (my mother's mother, Ita Nash) was here now I would be able to tell her of my confusion. She had lived with us until her death two years previously. She had been a playmate in spite of the generation gap. She allowed me to win at snakes and ladders and I enjoyed dressing up in her long dresses. A good musician, she played the fiddle, tin whistle and concertina. At family gatherings she played, my father and brothers sang and my sister and I danced reels and hornpipes.

As I sat there drinking out of the Sunday cup the morning after my parents'defection it suddenly came to me why my father had been harping on about going "home" to Listowel for years. When my grandmother had died two years previously I was so distressed that a few days after the funeral I decided to leave home. I was thirteen at the time. I talked to my best friend Breeda about it. She was Breeda with two ee's just as I was Clairr with two rr's. I wanted to go to Newcastle West and its environs, my grandmother's home territory. She had two sisters living within a six mile radius of each other outside the town. It was early January. I looked up the bus schedules and cashed in £ 5 of my post office savings and Breeda and myself headed for the country. I felt quite heroic. It was a stylish way to grieve, I thought - to go back to where my grandmother came from.

On arrival at our destination, I told the white lie that my parents knew where we were. There was still a week to go of the Christmas holidays from school. My relatives accepted my story. In that thoughtless way that children can, I did not think about the anguish my parents and Breeda's would go through when they discovered we were missing. I banished them from my mind and gave myself up to the moment. I rekindled my spirits at the open hearth, stamped my feet on the front door mat of the flagged floor kitchen as I came in and out like my cousins did. I watched my grand-aunt make bread and listened to her stories of when she and my grandmother were girls. There were tales of dances at the cross roads and house dances galore, matches made at harvest times and egg money put aside for material for dresses. I tried my best to be useful. I took my turn with the goose duster and polished the black range with zebrite. My grand-aunt liked to bake in a pot over the open fire but her daughter preferred the range. Three days into my runaway visit, my grand-aunt and her two daughters took the pony and trap into Newcastle West. They promised to bring me a bag of bull's eyes when they returned. They came back earlier than expected and in some agitation.

I learned that they had rung my mother at the nursing home where she worked. Sister had told them that Nurse O'Connor hadn't been at work for the past few days. Clairr and a friend had gone missing. My parents were in a terrible state. The gardai were doing their best but so far there was no sign of them. I was suitably mortified when my runaway status was exposed. Only then did the full seriousness of what I had done dawn on me. I wondered if we 'd be sent back to Limerick in the pony and trap. But no. The Volkswagen was seen as a more speedy vehicle for our return. My grandmother's relatives did not scold us but it was clear that they thought we were "bold" for putting our parents through such needless worry. At home, I was greeted by a white-faced father and mother. According to my own logic, I explained I had to go away to be near my grandmother. My mother was furious. She said hadn't she enough trouble with her mother dying besides her daughter running off all in the same week.

My father said he could understand that I had wanted to be near my grandmother's relatives at a time like this. A daylong funeral wasn't enough at all to have a proper conversation with all of the people who had come for my grandmother's burial. If it had been in Kerry, the wake would have gone on for several days and I 'd have been so exhausted at the end of it that I wouldn't have had either the energy or inclination to run off anywhere. I was grounded for months after that, only released from the supervision of the household for school and music lessons. I wrote letters to my dead grandmother in my journal (a hardbacked copy book) complaining about the unfairness of it all. I wrote her replies as well. She was on my side of course. I wished that she could play me a tune to cheer me up.

As I drank from my grandmother's cup in my aunt's house the morning after my parents had left Limerick for Listowel, it occurred to me that my father was going home to Kerry to be with his own people just as I had followed my grandmother's people to Newcastle West after her funeral. Twenty years in Limerick had not made him a Limerickman. It had copperfastened his resolve to return to his home town. And so, he had taken early retirement from Aer Rianta and gone home to Listowel to open up a little bed and breakfast business. My father's mother, Katherine Kirby had died while still in her forties. Dead more than twenty years before I was born, obviously, I never met her. But from the earliest days she looked at me from photographs. Prim-featured, her hair always held under different hats, she looked at me and at the world as if she knew the measure of things. She played the piano well and married Bill O'Connor against her father's wishes. He charmed every woman he met. Or so the story goes. I have no recollection of meeting him.

After Katherine died, he married secondly and begat a large young family. My father and his sister Kathleen, lived with other relatives instead of in their father's house. Though my father has never said this to me, I think he must have had feelings of being dispossessed from that time. His need to go home to Kerry was a primitive one, to live again where his young romantic mother had played the piano for himself and his sister. Aunt Kathleen, my father's sister, died when she was twenty six. I never met her but I 'm told I inherited her high instep but not her sweet disposition. In the mid sixties, when my father's stepmother emigrated to England, eight years after her husband's death, my father went home for good. He knocked the old house and built a modern one. The gate and yard face Convent Street and the garden overlooks the island where the Listowel races are held every September.

At various times in our early childhood, my brothers, sister and I had accompanied our father to the races in September. It was a wonderful feeling being released from the schoolroom when our Limerick friends where confined by school and its curriculum. The horses racing, the crowds, the town open for business were invigorating. We were treated to endless lemonade and chocolate. I brought home a leprechaun snowstorm and a cup and saucer embellished with shamrocks from one such outing. I bought them in one of those shops that sold everything from fertilizer to knitting needles. They cost six shillings and ninepence. And of course, there were my father's relatives pressing half crowns and even the odd ten shilling note into the hand.

We didn't visit his cousin Nora and her husband at Stack's mountain during race week. Stack's mountain was for the summer. Nora had no children but was amazingly tolerant of us and our soft city ways - like wearing shoes in the summer for instance.
