mns  2006-10-22 10:26  Miscellaneous Pieces   

We were about nine or ten years old, my cousin Deirdre and I, during the height of the cold war.
Almost every day brochures came through the letterbox telling us of the expansion of Communism and the imminent dropping of the Atom Bomb. While we at home, were being advised to build a nuclear shelter in the back garden, my cousin, a boarder in a convent, watched a map on the wall on which the nuns had pinned tiny red flags. These initially were positioned in the Soviet Union, but as the days and weeks went by, the red flags multiplied and moved systematically across Europe in the direction of our island, and with them the terror of slaughter and the end of existence, as we knew it.
At home, my parents tried to retrieve the frightening literature as soon as it thudded on to the hall mat – not always successfully, as I was determined to know what was in store for us.
I was reminded of this when a leaflet for the National Planning for Nuclear Emergencies came with the post earlier this year, and I found myself thrown back to a time and place when I was gripped with icy fear.
Looking at the advice on restrictions, sheltering, agricultural measures and evacuation, I wondered where the iodine tablets were, and if they arrived should I keep them in the fridge and how I would tell my daughter without alarming her. And then I thought of a day all those years ago when I went into school having read one of those brochures in the early nineteen-sixties.

I was not the only one who was upset that morning, and our Latin teacher Maeve Binchy came in and saw these rows of pale faces, some of us in tears. She asked what was wrong, and dismally we told her of our fears, that the red peril was on its way, that we did not have shelters in the back garden, and that we did not know what to do. Listening thoughtfully, she assessed the situation, then she smiled encouragingly at us. She said that when the Communists arrived they would be coming into Dun Laoghaire. Where else could they possibly land, she asked? And that she, for one, would be down at the end of the East Pier to wave them in, and that we’d all have a party and everything would be fine. Sure, weren’t we known as the land of welcomes! It would be cead mile failte to the Russians and they’d love us.
Never has a classroom full of children brightened up so quickly. It had not occurred to us that there might be an alternative!

I have carried that memory of hope with me all my life; the knowledge of the possibility of choice, of keeping our intellectual glass at least half full, and the memory of the fear that was dispelled that morning so that I never again in my childhood was frightened by the arrival of an army bringing mayhem and chaos.
My cousin told me there was no such relief from the fear in the convent, where the red flags increased in number and the nuns prayed for the survival of Catholicism, and the girls feared rape and torture.
Putting down the government’s brochure with its emergency plans and countermeasures, I remembered when I was nine years old and I thought, where are you Miss Binchy – I need you again.

mns  2005-07-01 20:29  Miscellaneous Pieces   

When I was a child, the principal of my school, who was also our geography teacher said, 'We will not buy a globe until the world has settled down.' I can still recite the countries of South America as taught to me by her, and recently I was quite startled to discover that long before I had ever started school some of the countries she taught me had ceased to exist.
There were other teachers, thank goodness, but without a doubt the crème de la crème was our Latin and History teacher. She never actually said 'the
world is your oyster girls,' but she demonstrated that it was.

She travelled.

For most of us, travelling was a summer's fortnight in Kerry or Donegal, or a month locked up in Irish College outside Dublin. But Miss Binchy was practising on taking the world by storm. Borders did not deter her, nor foreign languages bring her down. I was concerned about her during her travels. School without her would have been unbearable. Her trip to Israel where she worked in a kibbutz - that left us almost speechless, because who of us had heard of a kibbutz, let alone knew how it functioned?

'Read Leon Uris. He will give you a greater understanding,' she said, as we contemplated Miss Binchy up a ladder picking oranges. She brought that kibbutz into the classroom - the heat, the sweat, the laughter, evening meals shared - the long hot summers of adulthood that could, that would be ours if we learnt our Latin and read our history.
We made notebooks, packed with facts and fiction.
'Illustrate them,' she said after we had made up potential pre-famine potato recipes, and our notebooks were coloured with turf fires and people brandishing pikes, and Oliver Cromwell pointing to Connaught.

She took us to Warrenpoint. We were allowed to use the dodgems, which inspired us into hiring rowing boats, which we took out in groups and used as dodgems on the lake. The other teacher with her said, 'don't fall in.'
Miss Binchy said, 'Have fun, but don’t fall in!'

She brought us to Wales. On our departure from Caernarvon we convinced the bus driver that she was already on board, and off we set, hearts pounding – how would we explain her disappearance when we arrived back in Dublin?
We watched her run after the bus and wondered what she was waving at us, until someone pointed out that it was our tickets for the ferry. Sick with laughter we contemplated our fate – to stop the bus and let her on or to drive on merrily to Holyhead.
The bus driver saw her in the mirror and he pulled in. By the time she got her breath back, she had almost forgiven us and it was hardly ever mentioned again.
Another time she took us to meet an Italian broadcaster who had an apartment on Mespil Road. 'This is the life!' we thought, as she sat on a sofa with him drinking coffee, and we in our gymslips and knee length socks with our ties at half-mast sat cross-legged on his floor sipping orange juice.

Once, as I stood outside a classroom door, having been most unfairly ejected by the maths teacher who seemed to think I had been whistling the National Anthem (I who can neither whistle nor sing), along came Miss Binchy and took a look at my pale face, 'You will grow up,’ she said. ‘I promise. It won't always be this awful.'

I have often thought that she got us at the right age and that's why we are hers forever, but then I look at her readership and know how many other hearts she captured afterwards. She hadn’t even reached her prime when we knew her.

mns  2005-05-30 09:17  Miscellaneous Pieces   

My mother was an ardent fan of the theatre, and when I was nine I became her theatre companion – a weekly pursuit that lasted for five years.
Every Tuesday evening, we had dinner early, and then opening the hall door, she would say, ‘Look at the moon.’ And I would respond, ‘Look at the stars.’
And off we’d go.
I loved those Tuesday nights – it was a special time between my mother and me. I sat quietly, learning that there were some plays which captured me, and some I couldn’t begin to comprehend. There were nights when I would trail home behind her, tired and disillusioned. But I hung in there, and finally I struck gold. The very first time I saw one of Michael MacLiammoir’s one-man shows, I was hooked. I skipped down O’Connell Street, past Nelson’s pillar frantically asking questions because I was smitten with the notion of Dorian Gray.
I couldn’t understand why someone would not want to grow up. Growing up meant becoming like my mother and father, and that seemed attractive. ‘He didn’t want to grow old,’ my mother explained as I danced like a dervish beside her.
‘But Granny and Grandad are old,’ I said, ‘and they’re happy.’
I was bewildered. Here was something I couldn’t understand at all.
‘He didn’t want lines on his face,’ she said. ‘So he made a pact with the devil that his portrait would age instead of him.’
First thing after school the following day, I dug out a photograph of myself, and in the manner of Dorian Gray I took it up to the top floor of our house. My idea of the devil was so terrifying that I kept saying over and over, ‘I’m not making a pact with you – I’m only putting this up here, just to see what happens, because I don’t want lines on my face either.’
The next week we started Scéal Seadhna in Irish class, and to my horror, the devil appeared in it. I got this terrible feeling I was being given a warning – such was the theatrical fancifulness of my mind. Worse was yet to come – I had to read aloud, and images of fire, and a man with horns, and a tail with an arrow on the end of it, and a gigantic pronged fork danced before me, the heat of the flames scorching my imagination.
The moment I got home I headed for the top floor and endeavoured to remove the photo from behind the skirting board where I had carefully slotted it.
Suddenly it slipped further down and disappeared completely.

I was panic stricken. I kept reminding myself that I had done nothing
wrong – all I had done was to put a photograph behind the skirting board, and Dorian Gray wasn’t real anyway, my mother had said that. She’d said he was a character in fiction. But I could see MacLiammoir’s face as he told the story of Gray’s perpetual youth while the painting in the attic aged.
‘Dear God,’ I prayed.
I feared eternal damnation.
Over the next weeks I tried with tweezers, pliers and knives to prise the skirting board apart and salvage the photographic image of me … to no avail.

The years have passed and they are all gone – my grandparents, Nelson on his pillar, MacLiammoir, my austere father and my laughing mother… even the house where we once lived has long been reduced to rubble.

Hopefully the photograph and my pact with the devil went with it.

mns  2005-01-04 21:10  Miscellaneous Pieces   

When I was four years old, I was given a dolls’ house, brightly painted in cream and red with two squat chimneys and a pointed roof. In the eaves was a large battery, which my father had positioned and off which ran an electric circuit, so that when I pressed the little blue buttons in the front garden, tiny light bulbs were switched on in the house. My mother had stuck a broad red velvet ribbon on the stairs as a carpet, and pieces of felt in the different rooms on the floor. The walls were covered in pastel shades of marbled paper, and the furniture varied greatly in both quality and design from blue plastic beds, to a mahogany table, chairs, and piano. The painted fire blazed in the downstairs grates, and the kitchen dresser was stacked with tiny plates.
The dolls’ house people lived there – they consisted of two sets of twins, Bert and Nan, Freddie and Flossie, and their three uncles. The uncles resembled pale pink snowmen with legs, and blank featureless faces, kindly chaps who ran the show for the four tiny dolls whose clothes distinguished boy from girl. All the dolls were made from rubber and while the twins all looked like they had come from similar moulds and were of a similar texture – Nan was different in that she could not swim. In their house I ran them up and down the stairs, I made them a tray from an empty packet of Sweet Afton, and they used this as a toboggan in their front garden on the days I deemed that it was snowing. If it was raining they slid down the stairs on it when the uncles were busy elsewhere. Nan practised daily on the piano, and the others went fishing in an imaginary stream while sitting on the garden wall. At night they slept safely in their blue plastic beds, while the uncles sat guard downstairs.

Housebound they were not. I took them out. A favourite place was Stanley Falls in deepest darkest Africa and while their uncles went looking for Dr Livingstone in the jungle, my four twins stood at the side of the bath while I put in the plug and turned on the taps. They plunged from on high into the down flow of water where they twirled and spiralled until they resurfaced further down the bath. Except of course poor Nan who invariably had to be rescued either by her siblings or by one of the uncles who had fortuitously happened to return early to check on proceedings. Mouth to mouth resuscitation and the pummelling of her little rubber back, and Nan’s breathing returned to normal and she lived to try to swim another day.
Over a period of years, she lost a foot, possibly bitten off by a lion on the loose, or trampled on by a herd of elephants. Or, indeed, as my mother
said, maybe I had been responsible when I had the measles and couldn’t think of anything better to do. And of course Freddie and Flossie never looked quite the same after I put their heads in my pencil sharpener and pared them.
Thirty years later I definitely saw them on Star Trek, multiples of them in fact, with elongated heads and benign but intelligent expressions on their now grown up faces, their adventurous natures having brought them beyond the final frontier to a braver newer world.