Barefoot Pilgrimage. Andrea Corr
they couldn’t help it and getting published, albeit in our school magazine. I got my first A in honours English in my Leaving Cert. Believe me, it wasn’t coming and it was a shock, but I did know I wrote my best story, that hot June day in the exam hall (why was it always hot for exams and not for holidays?). I actually laughed out loud writing it (shhhh … sorry) and enjoyed it more than anything before. And the world went quiet, as it does now.
‘Soap Opera: Suds or something more significant?’ The latter of course.
And I’d like to thank that boiled egg Mammy made me and the bottle of Lucozade I had with my friend Conor before I went in.
These are bewildering times I find my forty-three-year-old self in. And I can give you my views, though they’re just the conversation you had last night. We’re about to release our T Bone Burnett record, Jupiter Calling. I did think we should consider calling it Love in a Time of Terror, but let’s let music and words do what they will to you personally. Bring you where you uniquely want and here is a place you may not wish to be reminded of …
That other title, though, is the truth of what this record means. Where hate is incited from the most powerful pulpits, we cry ‘Bulletproof Love’. You hear, ‘Go home, you’re not getting in’; we drown it out with ‘SOS’.
Love in a time of profound disappointment and degradation. I think of words, meaning and evolution. Humankind. I’m only human. When did ‘kind’ slip out and ‘only’ skulk in? We’ve swapped aspiration for resignation. Our humanity now, a mere excuse.
And our small failings posed, posted and applauded. A million likes in one hour for a cosmetically altered sixteen-year-old pout (surely that’s not right, Doctor? Mother?). I don’t blame the girl (childhood, remember?) but what will we become?
Darwin, wait – we’re going the wrong way!
But also I might die and Daddy wrote his memoir and his daddy before him. He, James Corr, lived through two world wars. (‘Why am I reading this? Where can I get his?’ Voce piena, chorus to fade …)
You see, my life is permanently passing before my very eyes these days. It’s all near death.
The inhalations! The cold and present breath and the memory in my lungs. Earthly light. Moment. Isness. Human love. Meaning. Here. The body. The swirl and the electricity of the heart, beating away by itself on the eco cycle in a night light while you sleep … even … Sleep. So worthy of a mention here, though so often looked down upon …
Sleep is beautiful …
That’s the thing when you wake up a forty-year-old orphan … fear of that loss, of time running out, of ending, knowingly repeating the same stories, ‘memory lane’ as Daddy called them, just to have them in the room again … and I suppose that means I love life, I love human beings, I love strangers so much sometimes I get a pain in my heart … You lovely lady on the crutch that I came to from my thoughts to realise I hadn’t held the door open for … I went back; ‘Sorry!’ I said, and held it, only for the buggy with my boy in it to topple over.
‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ you smiled into my eyes.
And therein may lie the poetry of human existence, I think. The reach of another someone, someone you didn’t see before and may never see again. However, it’s not all beautiful. I just passed a man bulling his way down the Fulham Road, banging into a woman, all Him and His Rucksack … and their head-nodding verbal exchange thereafter …
Anyway, that said, I still love you, stranger. Fellow human, sharing this faulty planet at the same time.
Mum, a Donegal girl, and Dad, Dundalk born and bred, met at a dance hall in Blackrock: The Pavilion, it was called. She was twenty-one and he thirty … He fixed an eeny-meeny-miny-moe to land on her to dance, and wrote a poem about the destiny and the ‘what if’s involved.
Booze bored
Winter woed
Bed beckoning
Did angels convene
To bring me to Jean
Of wraparound eyes
In passion of pink
First dance
Last dance
We dance forever …
And they did. I’m not saying it was uninterrupted bliss, kiss and laughter … oh they could fight too, but isn’t the fight, in reality, just a different step?
They talked of a pivotal moment. They were at the pictures on a date, when ‘Strangers on the Shore’ played and there it was: recognition, a mutual love of music.
And their shared life rolled out before them.
The other day I found a letter he wrote her, folded up in a box in his bedroom in Dundalk. He is funny throughout, as always he was, and quotes her – ‘you’re very bold, Gerry’, admonishing his wicked sense of humour but also loving it and sharing it, all at the same time. But in the last paragraph he writes:
I find it difficult, Jean, to communicate on paper my feelings for you. True love like great music is beyond the reach of words. Suffice it to say then, that I wish to spend the rest of my life being good to you, to you my love, today tomorrow and always. Ps write soon please?
They had five children. Our brother Gerard, born next after Jim, was killed on the road in front of our house, in the very first days after they had brought the new baby, Sharon, home from hospital. While Mum showed her off to our aunt Maureen, he avoided the locked gates by hopping over our neighbour’s wall and ran out after a ball. The car stopped, but it hit him while moving off once again, presuming he would wait and wouldn’t run back. He was three years old.
Now that I have two children of my own, I find I have no eloquence here … it is too unbearable. So this will be short.
Throughout their lives our parents could not exceed three minutes talking of him. The pain would arrest them all too soon. Therefore I don’t have many stories, but what I do know I will tell you.
Gerard was funny, the image of Dad, and, it would seem to me, clever beyond his years. On being told, one day, that his shoes were on the wrong feet, he crossed his legs and smiled up at them … ‘They’re on the right feet now,’ he said. He would sit on his chair in the kitchen and ask for more toast, more tea (he liked tea) and, feeling Daddy’s impatience, he would repeat, ‘More tea, more toast,’ in a convincing sing-song voice, only to respond to Daddy’s disbelieving ‘Och’ with an ‘Only joking!’
He was also a great singer and now it has me thinking of the destiny and the what ifs … Would he have been the lead singer of a band … A family trio … Jim, Gerard and Sharon …
Caroline and myself, a dream they never had.
‘April 3 1970’
Set me free
Why would I want to hurt you
When I love you
When your blood is mine?
Why would I want to be the thorn in your side
Hold you back from your life
Be the shadow in your light?
I am in the state of bliss
And I am love
That’s all I am in you
I am your purest love
Set me free
Would you want that for me
Would you haunt a child on his journey to man
Would you blame a little boy