I grew up envying the others – the rough boys and the fearsome whelps who could release their wild inner-self at the drop of a cigarette butt
MY MOTHER vanished once, in Clerys when I was nine. She told me to stay at the door while she headed for the corsets, and so I did. And then the corsets attracted me, but I couldn’t see mammy. I burst into tears and a strange woman asked me why I was upset and I said, “I’m looking for mammy but mammy is gone.”
“She’s not gone,” the woman said. “Your mammy will always be there.” Which is something I remember when I see the whitethorn return each year, and the ditches grow green.
There is something in nature that mothers me. Something beyond the touch of a birth mother’s hand, or even the tenderness of other women; something hidden in the cherry blossom, and the chestnut leaf, and in the frills of foliage everywhere on the ditches. When I stand beneath the chestnut in the garden I get a crazy sense of being cared for.
In Mullingar, my mother sleeps in her armchair. My daughter skids on the waves of Belmullet. And my wife pots plants somewhere far away. But alone in the garden there is something feminine in the translucent leaves that envelop me as I stand beneath them.
I loved spring as a child. I grew up in suburbia in squared off lawns, but even there the adults recognised the sudden arrival of spring and with the clockwork regularity of ants they all went at the grass of Holy Week with lawnmowers in unison; manual lawnmowers that coughed quietly through the blades of grass. Only the doctor had an electrical machine, which roared like a Honda 50, and although he was the doctor he was considered uncouth for disturbing the quiet of Saturday afternoon. Whenever I walked by his garden both he and his machine seemed as angry as the bees I imprisoned in my jamjars.
I was a mammy’s boy then. I grew up envying the others, the rough boys and the fearsome whelps who could release their wild inner-self at the drop of a cigarette butt, and go off like warriors to do battles, and win football matches, and then meet girls in dance halls and woo them wonderfully, because they were already complete men; their male psyches had been validated in gallant adventures. “Home is the sailor, home from the sea,” cried the girls, “and the hunter home from the hill.”
As a young man I was far from wild. I talked women blue in the face for years rather than take the risk of loving them. I kept girlfriends up till four in the morning rather than move to the bedroom.
“I love women,” the General always says. “You’re the type of person who understands them,” he adds sometimes when he wants to be cruel, “and they will never thank you.” I remember once going off to an island on the west coast with a girlfriend to visit a writer who lived there.
I hoped that by association with such a real wild man who lived on an island and ate the rabbits he shot and the fish he hooked I too might appear to her as truly masculine; a hunter worthy of her attention. I was wearing a green vest and short trousers and sandals and my hair was long, as we got into the boat with a burly bronze-armed ferryman.
“What do you think of the writer on the island?” I questioned.
I hoped he’d say, “That writer on the island is a great man,” and then I might chirp up that I too was a writer.
But the man in the boat held the rudder in his bronze fist and governed his tongue as he negotiated us out of the harbour.
“There was a writer came here some years ago,” he said, “and he went away and wrote a book about everybody. And he’s never been back since. And if he came back and asked for a ferry into the island I would allow him into the boat certainly, but he would never reach the island.”
He looked into the ocean and was silent for a long while. “Writers would lick it up off the floor,” he said with disgust, and then he turned to me and said: “What do you do?”
“I’m a teacher,” I blurted out, with trepidation as my girlfriend looked away and I felt a kind of shame on my cheeks as the sea-swell slapped against the boat and flung its fury in our faces, like an angry mother.