Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(33)

Where I grew up is, in short, the kind of place you might see on Grand Designs before a really annoying couple erect a black cement monstrosity their neighbours will hate, complete with arty windows made specially in Germany that arrive two months late and way over budget. The view from the back of our house is dotted with distant houses and tall windmills that look down over the north-eastern banks of the Foyle. It’s gloriously picturesque, giving the scene from our living-room window the near-perfect charm of a Windows Desktop wallpaper. As a child, of course, all of this was lost on me, since I had about as much interest in scenery as I had in BBC Parliament. When I’m back home these days I can barely keep my eyes off the landscape, stunned into slack-jawed amazement, not just at the view itself, but at the fact I lived within it for most of my childhood and didn’t give it a second thought.

Most but not all of my childhood, that is. I was once an avid agriculturalist. Aged six, a short while after my mother’s death, I became obsessed with the idea of becoming a farmer. I was in it for the machines and was besotted with tractors most of all. I had several myself, all different sizes, as if caught at different stages of their life cycle. I had very small ones that I could plot on little model farmyards of various scales, then I had slightly larger ones with moving trailers and attachments, which I could push by hand. I then had big ones, in which I could sit and pedal myself around, usually still holding a good selection of those other tractors in my lap, just in case at any point while riding round on my tractor I needed a quick reminder of just how much I loved tractors. I wore wellies, quilted gilets and flat caps while driving around pointing at things I wanted to farm. What exactly constituted farming was, to me, somewhat hazy, but I guessed it was basically riding on my tractor while saying ‘ey up’ to dogs and nudging everything I saw with the digger attachment. Long days of this grew tiring for both me and the people and things I was trying to farm out of the way, but the life of a farmer is not for the faint hearted. And so, the dog was farmed, my siblings were farmed, and any random objects that I encountered also farmed. I received tractor calendars for Christmas and would turn the pages excitedly on the first morning of every month, delighted to find whatever new model was there waiting for me. It bothered me that these calendars were invariably sold by the manufacturers themselves, and so would only show makes from said manufacturer. Brand loyalty meant less to me than variety. Craving a mix of tractors each month, I soon had a John Deere calendar and a Massey Ferguson one, hung side by side, so as to give me the broad diet I deserved.

I was in awe of my dad’s friend Robert, who farmed down the road and used to come by our house in his tractor and let me look at it. I was incredibly impressed with my dad for knowing a real live farmer who would come to our house and say hello. To six-year-old me, this was like a greeting from God. I idolised him to such an extent that I’d get too sheepish to talk, and would instead show my appreciation by taking his wellies once he’d removed them and storing them by the door in the back hall, in an act of wordless, admiring servitude. I would probably have been delighted to wash them for him. One day my dad arranged for Robert to take me farming for the day. To date, this is probably still the greatest thrill I’ve ever experienced. He picked me up at 6 a.m., and I was given a glimpse of the heady glamour of driving through fields, feeding hay to cows and getting waves from other farmers as we went past. I tipped my cap and waved back, making it clear that I too was one of their tribe, since they probably couldn’t make out all the tractors in my lap that would have proved it beyond all doubt.

By the time I started school this passion had faded. I grew out of wellies that were never replaced, and the once-endless supply of nested tractor toys gathered dust before being tidied away for ever. When Robert visited, his wellies remained untouched, and I barely looked up when we heard the gravel crunch of his big fat tyres coming in. By the time I was seven or eight, I was not merely indifferent but actively hostile to the environment. The glory and splendour of the countryside existed, as far as I could tell, solely to provide me with knobbly sticks I could hit things with as I walked along low walls. We defaced trees with our initials and, later, blighted them with our own half-baked Grand Designs: our numerous futile attempts to make tree-forts.

My father was a maker of things, a trained architect and an engineer. His father had been a carpenter. I, on the other hand, was never bitten by the woodworking bug, and certainly not one that would have instantaneously granted me the powers of a master craftsman which, in truth, was what I wanted. What I’ve always wanted: to be good at something while committing as little time, effort and attention to it as possible. I wanted to learn things as quickly as it took a spirited montage to finish: was this so much to ask? A childhood spent watching films in which scrappy gangs of misfits manufacture outwardly ramshackle but entirely viable mansions in trees had led me and my siblings to believe we’d just kind of get the hang of building a treehouse as we went. All we had to do, it seemed, was carry wood to the area and occasionally hammer things until, hey presto, by the end of a Huey Lewis song you’d have a fully finished four-bed clubhouse ready to hold meetings in.

It turned out that there were several steps in between ‘wanting to build a treehouse’ and ‘having the finished article installed safely in situ’. Safety wasn’t even the big concern; we were more than happy for the thing to be a death trap so long as it was recognisably a structure and not a sad assemblage of rotting branches, buttressed by planks we’d stolen from our own beds. The end result would be a precarious platform of damp, angular plywood that provided no shelter – we never got to the point where a roof was a likely prospect – and was significantly more uncomfortable to sit in than the tree limbs we’d just built over. Our best attempts looked like fences that had been blown away in a gale and become lodged in a tree, rather than something that was deliberately placed there by human design. Nevertheless, we’d still spend a few hours sitting in this mangled arrangement, as if hoping to convince ourselves that it had been time well spent. ‘Ah,’ we’d say, our knees bent round the accessible part of an out-jutting plank, feeling it crack and groan under our weight. ‘This is the life.’ After each attempt, we’d go back inside disillusioned, vowing never to try again, and it would be a few weeks before Daddy worked out why our mattresses kept collapsing out of our bedframes.