I’ve enjoyed listening to older people’s memories and the lessons they’ve taught me about everyone’s life
A YOUNG PERSON was trying to bully me recently by saying he didn’t give a damn about my mother’s buns or any other stuff I wrote in the newspaper. My recollections of her life were similar to the toxic fumes from an old car, he said. They just got up other people’s noses. At least it got up his nose.
I’m still in my 50s but I know that a lot of older people do get bullied in social situations. They are told that their experiences or stories don’t matter. I’ve seen couples at weddings left too long in the corner, or people in nursing homes staring out the window when the visitors are talking. But for years I’ve enjoyed listening to older people’s memories about love and death; about finding happiness in arranged marriages or how it felt to win the Golden Gloves in Carnegie Hall, about escaping from Letterfrack, or working in a shoe shop in Clare. I once met a woman from Armagh who met her husband for the first time on her wedding day, on the platform of Enniskillen railway station.
I met the companion of my own life in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Monaghan, 28 years ago this month. In those days everyone was naive about sex and spaghetti and drenching salads with oil. In 1984 the Tyrone Guthrie Centre was a radically new idea; a temporary asylum for writers and painters in the heat of creative thought or occasionally in flight from broken relationships and seeking a few weeks respite to get the head sorted. A centre of successful novelists and world famous piano players sitting side by side with unwashed alcoholics trading off some slim volume of poetry published years earlier. A rambling old house where Sir Tyrone Guthrie once played cards with his half-blind mother, and where Alex Guinness once rehearsed Hamlet in the nursery.
A house of dancers, stage designers and mediocre US academics. Though it was males who dominated the dining table when I was there, with some women on the fringes still being marginalised but striving for attention. Women painting flowers. Women painting vaginas. Women making sculpture. Women talking about women. Women talking about feminism. Feminists talking about women and everybody talking about misogyny. Unshaven old patriarchs with pee stains on their trousers talking only about books they wrote decades earlier.
My room was upstairs at the front of the house. There was a writing desk in the corner, and a couch beneath a standard lamp. Two windows looked out on a small lake, green drumlins, and forestry. There was a modern double bed in the corner, but other than that the furniture in the room suggested 1930’s opulence. My typewriter was positioned on the writing desk, where I hoped all the important moments of the next few weeks would occur. My bags were unpacked. I couldn’t believe my luck that I had been accepted for a residency. Through the open window I could see a woman with dark hair and a few chisels sitting on a rug on the lawn with other artists. I could hear birds, bees and the sound of a spade far away in the flowerbeds hitting a rock.
That evening at dinner I was welcomed by the director, the staggeringly intelligent Bernard Loughlin, who had the ability to converse as easily with famous painters and neurotic poets as he had with aspiring writers. Around the table people chatted with enormous sophistication about a fertilizer bag someone had found in the garden, while we all consumed an exotically cooked chicken. But I wasn’t listening. I was watching the dark-haired woman at the other end of the table. The same one I had seen earlier in the day with chisels on the lawn. Already she had caught my eye and changed my life.
So the Tyrone Guthrie Centre is part of my story. And I believe that stories are worth telling, especially love stories. They are an act of defiance, a form of standing in eternity for just a single moment. When I recall my mother’s life or the taste of her home cooking, or the exuberance I felt when I first chanced upon the love of my own life, I am recognising that there was something in the moment that lives on and in the remembrance of it, my humanity is sustained. I suppose it’s no wonder that history is regularly erased by fascists, and that love stories invariably get up the noses of social bullies.