Barefoot Pilgrimage. Andrea Corr
Yes?
Who is your very best friend?
You are!
I’m gonna help you mend …
Rice Krispies in the bowl but didn’t you eat cornflakes …?
We both call each other Bosom, as in bosom buddies from Anne of Green Gables, and we still do. We grew differently however … Well, let’s just say that she alone grew into our name.
All grown up, we lose each other one day around Grafton Street in Dublin and then simultaneously find each other. She is outside Davy Byrnes. I’m outside The Bailey.
‘BOSOM!!’ we shout and the doorman beside me gives us both a good look over as she crosses to my side.
He says to me with his mobile eyes unblinking, ‘I can understand why she’s called Bosom, but why the hell are you called Bosom?!’
Ah, she’s had her ups and downs, my Bosom. A newspaper got a detail wrong once (it happens sometimes) and gave the ecstatic news that my best friend ‘Busty’ was to be my fourth bridesmaid.
Up the Town
‘Well!’ is how we said hello in Dundalk: an exclamation rather than a question.
An oddly hopeful ‘How are ye?’ when the auto-response was more often than not: ‘Strugglin’.’
Or Dad’s and my favourite: ‘Ah, same ole shit, another day.’
We would later abbreviate this to ‘SOS’.
‘How are you, Daddy?’
‘Ah, SOS, Pandy. How are you?’
And one day, my hand in his, walking up the town, he said to a man going by, ‘How’s the form?’
And I looked up and asked, ‘Has that man got a farm, Daddy?’
We would walk on the dark, cold early evenings, frost steaming from our talk, and do a crawl of the churches to see the baby Jesus in the manger. New born in the hay, in a red glow of light.
And there was the weekly scram to twelve o’clock Mass, for Daddy’s above at the organ, you see, looking through the mirror for our heads bent in prayer. His dark wee angels. If he didn’t spot your head you could allay his suspicion later, with the mention of a bum note peeking cheeky out of Bach. Well, it was bound to be true.
Mammy eventually stopped attending Mass. She said sitting there made her panic.
But now I look back and realise that a lot of people were, in truth, struggling at this time in Dundalk. This was the late 70s, early 80s. The milk at the back of the classroom was necessary. There were a lot of single-parent households with dads away, peacekeeping in the Lebanon. Of course I was a child. I had no real notion, then, of any household being different to our own. One mum at home plus one dad at work until he returned to do the peacekeeping you just couldn’t mute the way you could hers. And to give you a piano lesson.
But it must have been very hard. Years later, I met a girl I’d known at that school who told me of a time when they literally ran out of food and that milk was all they had. I remember a friend of Sharon’s who put me on a stool beside him by our cooker and turned making ‘the thickest ever pancakes!’ into a game.
Pride, it seems, can be the last casualty of poverty. It hurts my heart to think of it now. I didn’t know he was hungry.
Dundalk became a refuge for Catholics who had been burned out of their homes in 1969. The burning of Bombay Street. One of the council estates, Muirhevnamor, became known locally as Little Belfast and it was understood that there were places you did not go, unless you ‘sympathised’.
And then of course the border, the soldiers, and Daddy’s wicked sense of humour. Jim in the back of the car as it slowed … Mum complaining to Dad, ‘Oh Gerry, I hate seeing these men with guns.’
And Daddy responding, ‘Don’t worry, Jean. They only want little boys.’
Poor Jim. That was too bold, Gerry.
Although I can still see the H-block graffiti glaring and desperate on the grey, ominous brick of the tunnel bridge, beneath the train track, generally I was as oblivious to the ongoing conflict as I was to the hunger. Not surprising, really … I was a full and happy child.
But no matter what, you still grow in the soil you’ve been planted in and here, I discovered that morality, right and wrong, can be complicated and confusing.
The Baddies and the Goodies
For some reason, Caroline and myself would often be early for school and we would play with the caretaker, who we loved. Then one day he wasn’t there any more and the Redeemer School was on the news. They had discovered weapons hidden in the roof of the assembly room.
‘But that was a goodie doing the work of a baddie?’
I happened to be born in Dundalk on the day of the deadliest attack of the Troubles in the Republic.
On 17 May 1974, four car bombs exploded at rush hour in Dublin and Monaghan, killing thirty-three people and a full-term unborn child. I have discovered since that my father-in-law, Dermot, just missed being in Talbot Street the moment the bomb exploded. He was to buy a bottle of shampoo for his young wife, Pat, in a pharmacy on North Earl Street, just a hundred yards from where the bomb would go off. But it being a beautiful day, he decided to keep on walking and buy it closer to home. As he turned off Talbot Street on to Amiens Street his ears rang deaf and the ground shook beneath his feet.
Bold Gerry, Baa and the Outstretched Contrite Hand
Once upon a time there lived a husband and a father who had a wicked sense of humour. He was possessed of many gifts, not least of all being sporty as a youth. However, one day, his curious, rebellious soul led his fit but mortal coil into his dying sister’s forbidden Victorian sick room. She, Eileen, a dark-haired white form, lay on the bed with a bleeding cough and a fire in each cheek. Some time later, Eileen having departed, Gerry (for that was the name of the young man) found himself chronically tired and not at all able for his Gaelic football or his tennis. When his new friend Dolphin Cough, Eileen’s old bestie, started pulling red flags from his mouth, he was quickly dispatched to the sanitarium for eleven months wherein he made his living, not dying, as a bookie and had a romance with a nurse. And luckily for all of us (or was it?) was just in time for Waksman’s cure: streptomycin.
In the meantime, a shy girl was begotten and born to William and Lizzy. When she turned fifteen William would depart, his time-bomb heart tick-tocking him into the Great Unknown. And Lizzy would out-linger, though her brain would depart on the early train to beyond, long before her body would follow. She, clad in shoes, a skirt and a blouse beneath a cross-your-heart, Father Son Holy Spirit, bra.
Jean (for that was the young maiden’s name) was beautifully unaware of her growing beauty, gap-toothed and lost as she was in the cloud of testosterone she and her three sisters predominantly inhaled.
6 hungry boys + 4 potatoes each makes 7 million peelings old …
‘What happened to your hands, Nanna?’
‘I put them in the fire, Caroline.’
‘Did you put your face in the fire, too?’
… and only the girls paying keep … Well I think I’ll just go and boil a head of lettuce and get it over with. Inhalations were deeper on McSwiney Street than elsewhere, and exhalations late.
You see, when God looked up from Jean’s incisors, he got transfixed by her eyes and He threw in an infinity of love. Teeth could only mull over this wonder while enjoying a cocktail stick. But they, hard as they were, could never know this love.
Love me just a little bit and I’ll cast such love on you, but I won’t smile in photos. That’s something I won’t do.
She