The crazy imagination of mine, that led to the whole previous story, not only came from both my parents – both creative, imaginative people – but from the environment I was raised in.
I was living on a farm on the outskirts of the village of Kilmuckridge, known for being near the beach to the hundreds of tourists that pass through it each year. Nowadays that’s not much of a distance for me to get there from home, but when I was young, it might as well have been deep space. It was the late 80s, and both Mam and Dad were working and looking after me and baby Cathal. Micheàl was in primary school, so he got to see kids his own age during the day, whereas I spent most of the time on my own. The economy being what it was back then (which is to say, “fucked”) there was no way we had money for playschool or anything like that, if it even existed at the time. So for a lot of the time, it was me and one or other of my parents, my grandmother, Gretta (henceforth to be called Granny K.) or our neighbour Iris, who babysat from time to time. As you can imagine, there’s not going to be much conversation beyond what few games a grown-up can play with a three-or-four-year-old, and there was housework to do, so a lot of times I was left to my own devices.
This is not to say I was ignored. I can remember lots of instances of Dad drawing me hilarious pictures of rabbits and foxes, and me trying to copy them, or Mam bringing me a plate of Philadelphia sandwiches, which were my favourite until I got sick of them. I haven’t eaten Philadelphia since 1992.
No, I was just…bound to where I was by distance, money, and the fact that the only kind of car I could drive was the kind you had to run along the ground with your hand to get going. And even then it always kept turning over. So I turned to my imagination to fill the time before Micheàl came home from school, and it was helped greatly by books, music and television. I know it’s clichè, not to mention a supposedly bad thing, to expose a child to too much television, but during those years TV was like having another child in the house, one who knew all the things I liked. I’m told I used to go crazy for kids’ shows (don’t ask me what they were, all I remember are colours), and would always sit and watch “Murder, She Wrote” with my mam. Only years later would I realise that that show was in fact about the world’s most effective and efficient serial killer, but more on that stuff later.
Music was a totally different trip for me. To say it lit my brain on fire is both horribly cheesy and totally accurate. I wore my mam’s old cassettes of Elvis and Johnny Cash out listening to them, crooning “Suspicious Minds” in the worst Elvis impression you ever heard, on account of my balls hadn’t dropped and I still sounded like a girl.
Between this, and the Roald Dahl stories my parents read me, I became something of a dreamer, and would spend days roaming around the house with my curly hair and dungarees, looking like a Goodies action figure come to life, rooting in the various cupboards and corners for anything of interest, curious like most kids, but rather than just wanting to satisfy my curiosity, I always felt like if I found something interesting, I’d have to figure out what I was going to make it do.
Even after I started school and got to interact with other children and the fearsome Ms. Kennelly, who’s modus operandi for disciplining her class was to take a kid who’d been naughty up from his seat and shove her wedding ring finger up under his neck, then basically neck-poke him across the room to the wall, where she’d press nail and ring into the poor kid’s gullet while she scolded them, I kept up the habit of looking around for weird things to do things with. Speaking of Ms. Kennelly, I remember being at my graduation from secondary school and hearing a couple of my classmates drunkenly describing what they’d like to do to her as revenge for her punishment technique. Some got it more than others.
It was in this spirit of rooting for imaginary treasures, being around six or so at the time, that I came across a couple of books in the bottom of the airing cupboard. Most of them looked old, but the one on the top looked new: The title of the book was “Everywoman” and it was, for want of a better word, a sex manual.
I know what you’re thinking; My dad had stashed a little visual aid in the airing cupboard, right? You’d be wrong. Mam is a nurse, and this book was basically a medical manual on the mechanics of intercourse(there’s a much better way of putting it than “sex manual”) left over from her days working the maternity wards. Not registering the pictures all that much, and having discovered the joy of reading at school, I decided that I HAD to read that book, and proceeded to do so. I’d barely gotten to the second page when I happened on a word that stumped me. Since it was my mam’s book, I decided to ask her what it was. So I got up from the floor where I was reading, walked out into the back kitchen, where Mam, Dad and Granny K were eating dinner, took a breath and asked, “What’s a va-geen-a?”
Cue horrified look from Granny K.
Cue Mam dashing from the table to the airing cupboard to grab the offending book.
Cue Dad laughing like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
Mam did explain what it was. I’d seen the picture and read the words, so there wasn’t much choice, really. But she forbade me to read that book from that point on, and to only come to her if I had any questions about boys and girls. So the book, unfinished, was moved from the airing cupboard to a secret location. The top shelf of the bookcase.
I want to go on record right now and say that that book caused me more trouble before the age of ten than “Ulysses” has caused since its publication. First, I got a whack on the arse (which sounded worse than it stung, but left the desired impression) for reading out loud to a neighbour’s child the paragraphs on “Fell-attio” and “Cunnilingus” which I had no problem pronouncing…Insert your own tongue joke here… Then I got a scolding for asking what the baby in the picture was doing hanging from his mother’s va-geen-a. Finally, and most bizarrely considering the content of the book, I got the biggest bollocking for ripping the cover off when trying to take it down from the shelf!
It wasn’t that my parents were trying to shield me from sex; it was more that, with the kind of imagination I had, and the fact that I was a tubby little loudmouth (Goodies action figure with talking function!), they were trying to shield visitors, and especially Granny K, from the anatomical tirade that I would surely unleash after reading that book. Which, in retrospect, was fair enough.
But they had no problem with answering any of my questions about it. In fact, I distinctly recall sitting on Dad’s knee as he and Mam watched a sex education video, complete with the sex act filmed from inside the woman’s vagina. I saw my first cum-shot on that video, as part of an illustration of the creation of life. And to be honest, despite their frank and simple explanations, I hadn’t a fucking clue what was going on.
I was 22. No, seriously, I was only seven or so.
That’s how my parents were, and are. They gave us plenty of room to express ourselves and think for ourselves, so long as we didn’t break house rules. If you did, you got a warning. If you repeat offended, you got a warning. But if you kept it up and didn’t listen, you got a noisy slap on the behind for yourself (House Rule #29 – Thou shalt not describe oral sex to neighbours). A lot of people would consider those slaps on the backside to be abuse nowadays, but they weren’t done in violence. It was just a reminder that if you didn’t do the right thing, then bad things would happen. In fact most of the time just the threat of the noisy slap was enough. One time, Micheàl got his last warning and Mam got so mad she whacked the wooden spoon off the table to bring home her point. The spoon hit the table and broke in half! Micheàl ran, crying. Mam’s point was made.
But back to being a kid in the country.
Even though I’d spent a while on my own, and was alone in my own little world with its dream machines and proto-porn uncovering exploits, there was never any boredom or feeling of loneliness at home, for me or my brothers. We had fields to run around in summer, going on nature walks, picking fruit off the trees, all that good postcard stuff. There were cows to look at and the dogs to play around with, all that good bread advert stuff.
Then there was the pond.
The pond was at the bottom of one of our fields, and it was a little slice of heaven during the summer. All of us would head down there and paddle around for a few hours, taking to it like ducks to l’orange, splashing in that excited way that kids do…No, don’t go away! I swear, this is the last “Prince Of Tides” type moment, it gets good again in a sec, hold on…
One day at the pond, we were doing the usual messing and splashing, when I waded over to something on the far bank that had caught my eye. It was lying on the water’s edge, not moving. It was brown, and its skin was covered with what looked to me like wet feathers. Once again having uncovered a treasure, I picked up the dead bird with its odd lank tail and shouted over at Dad on the far bank “Daddy! Look! I found a dead bird!”.
Dad: “That’s not a bird. That’s a rat”.
Terror struck me like a reverse-angle kick in the nuts, and I looked at my “dead bird” again, my wistful imaginings of nursing it back to health gone in a flash. I was, in fact, holding the decapitated corpse of a rat. That’s right. The rat had NO HEAD. I know what you’re wondering; a) How did I mistake it for a bird? and b) How in the name of Charles Darwin was I going to nurse it back to health?
None of these things crossed my young mind. All that crossed it in that instant was “AARRRRRGGGHH!!!” I flung the headless rat into the brush by the pond, rinsed my hand like a crazed maniac and sprinted back across the pond in a revulsed, gambolling sprint. The pond dried up a few years later, but never once in a subsequent visit did the rat’s head ever appear. Thank fuck.
It was shortly after the incident at the pond that our cousins from that far off land of OVER THE ROAD began showing up at our house with increased regularity. Siobhàn, the youngest, was/is a red-haired scamp who could be fun and angry in one go and was always good for a laugh. Nuala was slightly older, blonde, but much the same as Siobhàn. Raymond was the oldest and the only boy, and to be honest I don’t remember playing with him all that much. But I do know that with Cathal able to move a bit now and with Micheàl bringing over new playmates, things were way more interesting to me than anything that had been printed in “Everywoman”.
Almost everyday after school, Dad would steer the K-Mobile – the car-tractor hybrid that he built himself from old parts in his spare time, and which still turns heads to this day – loaded with myself, Micheàl and the cousins into the yard, where we would spend the rest of the day playing in the sandpile outside the house (we didn’t need a sandbox. Dad, as ever, thought outside of it). I have a memory of wishing aloud to Dad and the others that I was allowed to marry either Nuala or Siobhàn, such was my happiness at having all these cool people hanging around all the time. My defence for that statement is two-fold: I was a little kid who didn’t know any better, and I live in hillbilly country.
As I found out when I was older, the reason our cousins were coming over so often was because their parents were splitting up, and they needed looking after while everything was being sorted out. I never knew at the time. I was having too much fun.
Before I finish up, I want to tell a story that came from this period, one that my aunt Peg loves to tell:
Micheàl and Siobhàn were out in the sandpile one day, while Peg watched from the kitchen window. Micheàl wasn’t long in school, and was apparently worried about what to do if any older boys gave him a bit of hassle. Siobhàn, without hesitation, put her hands on her hips, leaned over to Micheàl from her spot on the sandpile and gave him advice Yoda would envy. “You know what to do if anyone tries to bully you, Micheàl” she said, “give him a KNEE, straight in the MICKEY!”.
Wise, wise words.
