My parents loved clubbing. They joined of cricket clubs, hockey clubs, tennis clubs, rugby clubs, bridge clubs, golf clubs and countrywomen’s clubs. Yes, they met at a club, a tennis club.
Phoenix Park on wet Sundays was where my father played cricket for Parkheath. He wore a jumper with extra long sleeves that my mother knitted – which interfered with his bowling. He kept up his relationship with cricket and we had many photos of him smiling beside very famous cricketers. Well, that’s what he said they were.
One winter, my father, a slight, thin man, joined Clontarf Rugby club and played for their first 15. Once. Their best players were flattened with a flu. His ears took a few years to regain their former shape. Golf was one of his great successes. His secret? His huge handicap. (Bad player, high handicap.) No one could beat him. Our house glittered with Waterford Crystal, we had steak knives for every occasion.
My mother took her Bridge seriously and, being perfect, any defeat had to be her partner’s fault. In the countrywomen’s club she spent a lot of time making rugs and doing Irish dancing.
Brookville Lawn Tennis and Hockey Club was the best. Being a member meant looking devastating in white – and – smoking, a lot. The clubhouse was in a permanent fog. Smoking had its own rituals – asking others for a light, giving around cigarettes, taking cigarettes, drawing long and deeply on each cigarette and gazing through the haze with great sophistication.
I thought my parents were very young, foolish and vain, and a little giddy for their age. They embarrassed the hell out of me. I wanted a mother who was middle-aged, fat and with a bun, just like all my friends’ mothers. The two of them played in mixed fancy dress hockey matches, my father as Shirley Temple, my mother as a fireman. In the evenings they danced to the sound of an off-key piano played badly, until it was time to bring me home and put me to bed.
They are gone now, to the clubhouse in the sky. Both died of cigarette-related illnesses. And Brookville Lawn Tennis and Hockey Club? If it was still there it might be smack in the middle of the Artane Roundabout in Dublin.
