Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(43)
The smoke was a constant of my childhood. Aside from a brief break in the late eighties, my father smoked several packs of Hamlet mid-sized cigars every day, until he finally gave up a few months before his fiftieth birthday in 1997. A rough cough caused him to take some time off work, which was entirely unprecedented. This clearly spooked him – missing work, I think, more than the sickness itself – and without any fanfare he quit his thirty-five-year habit and never had so much as a puff again. Back in 1992, however, the cigar smoke permeated every object in our house, and especially the fabric seats in the minibus. It’s likely they also gave his eleven children a not unpleasant, woody aroma we probably couldn’t smell off ourselves. This smell was only momentarily pleasant, however, since it quickly grew stale and acrid on everything it touched, which was, well, everything. This could also have been a contributor to the frequent, horrible bouts of car sickness which beset several of us, most especially Fionnuala and Dearbhaile, both so inclined to vomiting on road trips that travelling with them was as precarious as cycling through a minefield carrying a large, open vat of parmesan soup in your lap. I think Fionnuala’s record was the time she was violently ill before we’d even reached the end of our drive. Even after wiping, bagging, cleaning and airing for a few minutes, it put a rather unsavoury pall over the next few hours’ travel.
Having dragged ourselves to England, we drove south and boarded an overnight ferry from Portsmouth, itself a heady thrill. There was something so monumentally eventful about driving into the belly of a giant boat and climbing through its innards to a waiting bed. The clank of each step through the petrol fumes in the blindingly lit car hold, all the way up the twangy metallic stairs to the carpeted cabins. Cabins! This alone, the prospect of staying in the eight-by-four metal box with my older brother Shane, was as exciting as boarding a rocket ship to Saturn’s moons.
Once we were on the boat, as so often seemed to be the case in my childhood, I was given much more autonomy than one might expect for a six-year-old. It was assumed that wherever one of us wandered, we’d always be in sight of one or other sibling. Dara, who was sixteen, spent most of the time trying to get served at the bar, or peeling off for cheeky smokes in the face of hurricane-speed winds on the deck. My joy was to check out the labyrinthine ball pit and the ferry’s cavernous arcades. I dread to think how small and depressing these would seem to my older eyes, how damp and sad and, doubtless, riddled with germs. But, at the time, this was heaven itself. I was fascinated by the arcade games Double Dragon, Metal Slug and Streets of Rage blaring their screens and flashing their lights in attract mode, that half-state of activity that is an irresistible draw for impressionable kids. I’d happily jump on the console and bash away at buttons, unaware that I was having no effect whatsoever on the things happening on screen, or that money was required for it to happen.
I don’t know what Daddy was going through on this journey. I can hardly imagine. Was he wearing the haunted look of someone so awfully bereaved, now carting ten minors on a 1700-mile journey across a continent? Or was he just getting on with it, as usual, letting the constant stream of small jobs keep him going? I barely gave it a second thought, so excited to be on ferries and in foreign supermarkets and then, oh bliss itself, arriving at the French campsites where we would stop at night and hear unfamiliar birds and even more unfamiliar speech from those around us. I was too young to care about playing the massive, forty-a-side football matches that my older brothers were using to make friends, so I contented myself with exploring the site for beetles or caterpillars I could poke and prod, on one occasion finding a particularly great stag beetle that I carried around on a stick to show other holidaying children, none of whom spoke English.
‘Look,’ I said, but slowly, in the hope this would allow them to overcome their stubborn refusal to recognise English words. Seeing that this was working, I shook the stick in a manner that conveyed, quite clearly, the meaning ‘You have admired my stag beetle, we are now friends.’ They understood me and, like the beetle himself (obviously all beetles are boys), desired to join my gang. The beetle demonstrated his own fealty by gripping the stick I held out from my body like a holy object, and my new pals did the same by flanking me on all sides as we approached other small children with this, our great news: the beetle was here. A charming détente established itself among us, this multilingual cohort of nerds who had come together to look at this beetle and maybe touch its carapace, using that wordless universal language of making an ‘o’ with your mouth as you stroke a very cool insect. It was a touching reminder of the unifying nature of pointing at things and wondering what they are.
It’s likely that I got these dauntless communication skills from Daddy, who has always evinced a strange confidence in his ability to be understood in other languages, despite not speaking any other languages. He was no academic slouch, but was of a more mathematical bent, although his schooling had taught him a smattering of Greek, Latin and Irish. But he has the curious and endearing trait of presuming he’s very good at most things until precisely the moment it is proven he isn’t, at which point he will politely pretend he never tried in the first place.
He once insisted that he could ‘probably speak most European languages’, due to that aforementioned Latin and Greek he’d learned some forty years previously. ‘You’ll notice,’ he offered, ‘that most Spanish words are very much like English words, but with o on the end, and so on.’ It’s tempting to examine just how much heavy lifting ‘and so on’ is performing in that sentence, but suffice to say when we quizzed him for a moderate length of time he conceded that he may have simplified the concept of language acquisition just a tad. When words failed him, he subscribed to the Basil Fawlty method of speaking in English, but with a foreign accent.