Some months are named after gods, and some after numbers. August is named after an emperor. It is surely the most beautiful month name, suggesting the colours of montbretia, goldstorm, blackberry - rich imperial purple and gold, harbingers of autumn which is lurking, schoolbag on back, just around the corner.
My father always got his holidays in August, so the month glowed in our family calendar, the magic time when the workers were released and became their own masters, for a whole fortnight. We were poor, and sometimes did not go away on holiday at all. But usually we did - either because we were not as poor as I thought, or, that my parents, in particular my mother, had exemplary budgeting skills, as well as imagination and vision.
These visions materialised as bare, sparsely-furnished houses, without a sea-view. I don't know how they were found - presumably by means of small ads. "Small house to let. Miles from beach. No mod cons." Often, no toilet.
At first our holiday destinations were not far from home - probably because the car, an old 1950s Morris which had to be cranked up before it would start, could not be relied upon to make a longer journey. One of our best holidays was in Wicklow, where we rented a small chalet on a farm. It did not have running water, and the toilet was in a little hut some distance from the house, discreetly hidden in a spruce copse. Finding it in the dark was a delight: my brother and sister and I had to go at least once every night, dragging our father out of his bed to shepherd us through the trees. When a visitor, our beautiful, stylish aunt from Liverpool, said - of the ferny abyss near which this convenience was romantically perched - "Now that's the sort of place the fairies live in!", our bliss was complete. The beaten path through the trees, the mysterious sounds of the night, the sad fortitude of our father, and now the prospect of encountering a fairy! (I imagined them in their Elizabethan-Enid Blyton form - small, wearing ballet dresses, with gauze wings and big eyes.)
We spent every afternoon at the Silver Strand, where we had a swim, a choc-ice and a picnic. My father worked the primus stove - it always took much arduous pumping to get it to ignite. Everything seemed to involve a lot of cranking on our holidays, even making a cup of tea, which was what the primus eventually yielded. We used to sit by the side of the car, sheltered by a windbreak which my father had made by nailing polythene to wooden stakes (we never bought anything, if he could make it. Usually he could). After tea we would force our parents to play ball games with us, Donkey being our not very original favourite.
When I was about 10 we began to go to Donegal on holidays, to the place my family came from, which we had never visited before. We stayed with relations there - I think we hadn't gone before because of the car, and also because my mother preferred more independent holidays. In general, mothers prefer to avoid holidays with in-laws, but children are less particular and we liked our Augusts in Donegal.
The house where we stayed was close to the beach and we spent our days there, fishing in rockpools, swimming, exploring. In the evenings we visited relations, who treated us to late-night snacks of tea and boiled eggs and cooked ham and soda bread and rhubarb jam and fruit cake, and anything else they had in the cupboard. We played with their donkeys, which people still kept, or their children. This was the Gaeltacht, and the children were supposed to speak Irish to us, but in fact we spoke English and taught them the games of the Dublin streets - Red Rover, Pussy Four Corners, Plainy Packet o' Rinso. They knew Donkey already. Everyone does.
Once or twice we had a big picnic on the "shore" - a great aspect of Donegal was that they had different names for everything, even in English - names which nobody in Dublin knew. Shore and Burn and Wean. Once we even had a camp fire, lit, I think, by a visitor from Scotland - in Donegal, in August, there were always visitors from Scotland. Normally we didn't light fires - it was going too far, almost as wild and unthinkable, to our working-class minds, as camping. The primus was as close as we were willing to go to the life of the great outdoors. A crowd of cousins and aunts and neighbours and locals all gathered on the beach, eating and drinking (fizzy orange, and tea - nobody I knew drank alcohol in those days, as far as I can recall, it just wasn't done). It was heaven - the fire, the mountains rising at the other side of the lough, the lapping water, the river flowing into the sea. We stayed until darkness fell and then drove home - some of the Scottish boys sitting in the open boot of one of the cars, singing football songs melodiously into the dark.
Night fell. That happens in August, sooner than you might wish. This makes me wonder why the industrial holiday falls then, rather than closer to midsummer, when the days are endless and there is none of that tinge of autumnal yearning that sneaks into the air in mid-August. My mother would have said: "It won't seem so long till Christmas, that's why." And that makes sense. But perhaps it's related to the farming calendar. Traditionally August is the month of the festival of the first harvest - the festival of Lunasa. It is the time for fairs and regattas and carnivals all over Ireland - Puck Fair, Lammas Fair, Dingle Regatta. In August, we have always celebrated the fruits of summer. We draw the goodness of summer into ourselves, before it disappears.
There were Augusts when I was a small child when we did not go away. But I don't remember much about them, whereas the holidays we spent in raw bungalows, run-down chalets and damp cottages I recall in detail, as periods of undiminished excitement. This in itself must indicate something of the significance of going on a holiday. Taking a rest at home is fine, but going to a new place is a great adventure, the one adventure which most of us can have regularly.
A journey is a story full of surprises, even if it is a journey from south Dublin to north Wicklow, and a house that is not home opens windows of wonder for a child (a child under the age of 14, that is - for most teenagers, a family holiday is, of course, a free sample of hell). You don't need great riches to be a child explorer. All you need is a grown-up who will pick up the phone, answer the small ad, and make the momentous decision: "We're going to Brittas Bay in August."
Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's latest novel is Dunmharu sa Daingean e (Cois Life). A collection of short stories, The Pale Gold of Alaska, will be published by Blackstaff Press in October
