I opened a forgotten book the other day and a forgotten photograph fell out. It was a bird’s eye view of the house I grew up in, taken from one of those small planes that used to tour the country for this purpose prior to a follow-up visit by a salesman selling the results.
If I had forgotten the photo, the moment it was taken remained a vivid memory, even though it was in the early 1970s.
You wouldn’t know unless you’d been there, but I’m in the picture, alongside my younger brother, squinting up at the plane.
We had been hoeing weeds along the garden wall, following an extensive campaign of nagging from our mother.
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Rhyme Unreason – Frank McNally on Anglo-Scottish relations going from bad to verse
I can’t put a year on the scene now, but the season is autumn, clearly. The hayshed is full. Recently lifted haycocks have left circles in the grass of a neighbour’s field.
Adjoining that, a crop of barley ripens in what later became a soccer pitch: a pitch that, in a then unimaginable future, would one day host Jack Charlton's Republic of Ireland team for a World Cup training camp.
The aerial view does not do justice to our orchard, long since vanished.
I remember it as a magical place, full of old trees with different personalities and names including “Beauty of Bath”.
It looks rather dishevelled in the picture, an undistinguished muddle of greenery. But the giant beeches opposite the house look just as majestic as they seemed. Not that my mother ever appreciated their grandeur. She was too busy worrying about them falling some windy night and causing an accident.
She worried a lot about the road, with good reason, having seven children. Irish roads were perilous in the 1970s, as ever-increasing car numbers poured onto them without the improved driving standards or policing to match.
The photographs also brings back tragedies involving friends and neighbours, and one in particular that happened nearby. But we were lucky.
Our yard had a slight drop towards the gate, which reminds me of two contrasting car-related incidents from my teenage years.
Once I arrived home to find my father, mother, and two siblings trying to push our Ford Escort up the yard and struggling. I joined in and the extra weight made all the difference. The car shot ahead, almost comically.
My mother laughed with pride at having raised such a strapping son. “You’d know you were there”, she joked. I had announced my manhood.
But then, not long afterwards and less admirably, I also propelled the car in the opposite direction one day.
It was an early driving lesson (unaccompanied) and, for reasons that remain unclear, I failed to engage the brake. Instead, the car glided out the gate and across the two-lane road where I turned it smoothly and came to a halt using natural gravity.
After noting with interest that I was still alive, my second emotion was embarrassment.
Realising that family members had been watching, I hoped it looked deliberate and pretended accordingly.
My dog Rover was less fortunate, alas. It is a lingering regret, still, that I inflicted such a clichéd name upon him. A loveable eccentric, half black labrador, half red setter, he deserved something more distinctive.
But one day after I turned 18, my mother entered in a panic to say that he had just been hit by a car.
It wasn’t the dog she was worried about for the moment, it was the possible court case. Like many of her generation, I suspect she was haunted by the thought that we were only one or two bad moves away from the workhouse. This might be the start of it. My father was out in the fields somewhere, so it fell to me to go and face the man.
It was a long walk. The dog had fled the scene but there was a big, Rover-shaped dent in the bumper of a parked Audi, alongside which the diver stood, waiting. "Sorry about your dog," he said. I shrugged and then heard myself ask: "What about your car?" I had no idea where the rest of that conversation might go. But the man just said: "Don't worry about the car."
Rover had limped into the front shed, where he was breathing his last painfully on a damp clay floor I can still smell. I wished we still had our old shotgun, not that I would have known how to use it. Then he died quietly anyway.
I put him in an empty 10-10-20 bag and carried him with a spade over to the fairy-fort in the field opposite. It felt a bit like burying childhood. A week later, I left to start work in Dublin.