OPENING DOORS

Inging and  Sheeps  Thinging

We didn’t have scented sacks in those days.

 A hanky was kept up the sleeve of your jersey,  inspected post -blow and shoved back, while you rolled up the cuffs a thousand times. 

The cuffs and neck would already be bagged out and flapping as the English cousins had sent the parcel of jumpers home, we would be rooting and bagsing to our hearts content. 

Michelle front left with her eyes closed

“Have you no hanky?” was a constant refrain as I sneezed around the gaff, being allergic to dust, pollen and cleaning in equal measure.  I was a solitary child, who although could perform at the drop of a hat, was content on the sidelines watching. It may have been the tininess of me but I was always placed in the front for photographs and could project, sing, dance and recite at will. It was always me who was picked to read something out, to stand up and relay her times tables and when the Cigire came calling,  to start the Comhra,   or show him her ekker.  I have always been that performing child, desperately seeking approval and attention. What is more pertinent perhaps,  is that she has been struggling her  entire life to give herself,  the permission to simply be herself.

Myself.   

Nana Mahon wore a cameo brooch on a scarf and sheepskin gloves, and a pleated kilt with a giant pin.

 It was not the pink tipped one that was used for the nappies in our house, floating under the scummy bucket in the yard, after having much of the shite washed off by being flushed down the jacks first.

There was a new baby in our house.   

It may have been remiss of an entire generation to allow defecating infants be wrapped in toweling.    

The nappy would be placed under the toilet seat and then flushed  and possed vigorously until it was safe enough to put down to steep.   My Nana wore a housecoat in the house, over her clothes. Not since Victorian times has there been so much dressing and undressing as there was in a Mahon house. You had your getting up clothes, your round the house duds, your good clothes that you wore down town and then immediately removed when you came in the door, re hung and when complimented said -  what, this old thing? I have it the last 20 years. 

 My Great Aunt Nellie, always had a coiled springy snake bursting out of a sweet tin or a walking talking doll from America  and a door bell that played 15 tunes including Greensleves and Auld Lang Syne.

She was  also the woman they called to wash bodies when people died. 

 I sat on a hard wooden chair in her curved kitchen announcing the visitors as they yoo hooed themselves up the hall, it’s the woman for the SOS money, it’s a man for patrons tickets for the Drama festival, it’s Father Irenaesus , and he’s bad with his nerves today  - and in the laying out of her own father, in what was considered normal at the time – a habit – similar to a friars robe  – she was heard to remark – “Oh, don’t put a hood on me Da”. 

They were inveterate tricksters and would play the most outrageous pranks on each other. Once when the great Grandmother was above in the bed trying to die, a man with a cork leg called to the door and asked how she was.

“She has just passed” says Nellie with downcast eyes.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry” says he removing his flat cap and bowing his head.

The corpse was laid out in the parlour in the habit and as he  tried to kneel sideways while  blessing  himself, his cork leg stretched out straight, My Aunt Molly, sat up in the shroud with talcum powder on her face and began to scream. In a hired trap of a summers day, going to the Patron in Kilmacree, the lady who had the biggest sunhat with the most  beautiful flowers on it had it swiped from her head and placed under the trotting horses arse to catch the piles of steaming dung, and for a finale had it flung in her lap. 

My Aunt Kathleen called in to our house every day on her way to, or from work, regaling us with tidbits of news that she heard in “Cristelles”.   One day she informs that if I keep my nose clean, she will take me to a surprise event. I excused myself from the table and went to the bathroom mirror to check. I was mortified, and only much later realized that it was only a figure of speech.  There was a TV programme that used to be broadcast on ITV on Sunday nights called The Good Old Days hosted by Leonard Sachs. It was a mock up of a music hall circa Edwardian times and all the crowd dressed up in feather boas and evening wear, the men in top hat and tails and the women bedecked. They were touring the show and there was a ticket with my name all over it. There was a great kerfuffle about what to dress the child in – (in my family you are a child till you are about 50 years old, and a girl in your 70’s) and through an onslaught on various wardrobes I was kitted out like a Dickensian orphan with delusions of grandeur.

 I was also wearing a fun-fur and my Mothers  lace “Going Away” hat tied on with a silk scarf as if I was about to go about the roads in a shooting brake. We took ourselves off to the Theatre Royal and were seated and waiting for the show to begin. Kathleen passed me a bag of lemon Bon Bons and the curtain went up.   I noted that the show was lame,   a poor touring relation to the extravaganza broadcast every week, and the acts  were over -done, hamming it up for the Stalls and the Gods.  I could see through the layers of pan -cake the desperate neediness, the isolation, of the performers.   A magician with a top hat came out and made a considerable performance about drawing a ticket from it and he called our number.

Kathleens hand shot up involuntarily while she said a bold word.

“Join me on the stage my dear” he called and before I knew what was occurring I was being walked down the aisle by the hand and up the side ramp by the orchestra pit with a spotlight on me. To be fair to him, the old pro that he was, he didn’t miss a beat and tried to continue with his act despite the presence of a minor, albeit dressed as a miniature Lady Bracknell.

I did not get to say A HANDBAG?? But I did get to stand perilously close to the edge of the stage and  smile beatifically into the darkness. I recognized my Aunt from her hat. He did something mildly suggestive with a pound of linked sausages, and I had to take them out of, and put them back into the hat, to much laughter and his feeble attempts at double entendre. When it became too impossible to continue he asked me where my Mother was.

He grimaced showing his false teeth.  I watched in fascination a bead of perspiration trickle down his upper lip.

I pointed out my Aunt who was clapped energetically all the way to the stage. Her hands were shaking as he continued the trick with her, while I watched from the apron. I could see the chorus lining up in the wings and smell that indefinable aroma of performance - make-up, adrenalin, and alcohol. In the foyer at the interval as she told and re-told the story she said “I’m not the better of it yet” and sipped a Hennessy.

After my foray stage side I was hooked, and what with being the smallest and the loudest in the class I was picked more and more to do things. 

The Mahon Family with new bullethead baby 1970

“Read this out loud” Recite this poem – sing this song – learn this part. Do a little dance for us.

In the Convent of Mercy School I made friends with a small Orphan called Wilma, who wore a navy pinafore  every day and  had  a haircut that looked like someone went at it with a knife and fork.  

God alone knows what nameless horrors she may have been undergoing in the laundry with the fire escape underneath it, behind the Nuns walk where the college boarders met young ones for the shift.  One day Wilma and I were colouring in, talking about the childish things that little girls do, and the next, she was gone. She never came back  and I wondered all my life what happened to  her, and hoped against hope that she got her happy ever after and her dreams came true and she was taken away by a family she loved, and was loved by.

Mine told me that I was a changeling and had been swapped for a Tinkers child.

 I was the all -singing all- dancing Michelle then and was up and down the roads to the Arklow Music Festival like a dog at a fair.   

 I camehome with certificates and medals and plaques up the wazoo.   I stood on my mark and spread my arms wide while I entreated the audience, and specifically the judges,   to listen to my case of the old woman.

“She’s SOMEBODY’S Mother, boys, you know, although she is old and feeble and slow” –

I could milk it. Also I knew instinctively where and when to pause, and when to look out from under my eyes, and when to give them the Bambi’s.

As I have said before, I was a quick learner.

Although one would not have conjectured as much listening to me banging the piano. It may not have helped that Sr. Helen had a stick she had named Harry and was liable to bring same crashing down onto one’s tiny knuckles if one hit the wrong note. It was enough to unsettle Liberace and was to prove too much for my sibling, who cried and refused to come back. I had no option, as Sr Helen was my teacher AND   mentor and was responsible for all the trips to Festivals and competitions. Once, when I had won the medal, she took me into the Cafolla Grill in Arklow and bought me a take- out meal of a Burger and chips to eat in the car on the way home. I spent my time in the back seat staring at the greasy parcel and imagining horrific pile ups where bits of me would be all over the road.  

We are all home birds. As a child I did not do the sleep-over thing and if it was enforced, lay awake all night in a strange alien environment,  listening to clocks ticking in other peoples  quiet spaces, crying under the foxford blankets or even a brand new continental  quilt with a smell of Benjy off it , for my Mam.

I cry for her still.

 Siobhan at this stage was pregnant for the third and last time and in March of 1970 brought a new baby to the house, a girl.

Now I had a sister.

Nicola was a quiet baby, and I loved fussing around with her, and dressing her up like a doll. Because there is 7 years between us - she starting school as I finished – she is unfamiliar to a selection of my peers, and of course she has a different surname. In a photo taken of us as a family when the new baby is only a few months old, we are all bunched up in a corner of the living room by the piano.

 It was to let in the light as this was the 70’s now and luminescence  was at a premium.
Strike a match someone in the name of God till we read the clock.

The photo of us bunched in the corner shows a young family in in the 70's, the last baby born. There is pride and delight on the faces of Little Thomasina  and Siobhan, and I look like a demonic angel, plotting and conniving to get away with mucking furders as soon as the photographer leaves. The brother is winking with an exaggerated facial tic and the blue eyed baby, with a head like a bowling ball, is staring fascinated directly into the lens.

My Godfather Richard (Mance) Mahon sings in The County Hotel

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We lived in Black & White in Ireland then. My Father must have had to imagine very hard when the snooker was on, as one could never be sure if it was the yellow or white gone down the hole.

In off, oh Jesus, he’s gone in off.

A landline was a luxury and we ran across the road, or into the neighbours,  or the Guards  would come around and tell you there was a call for you and to ring your homeplace in a hurry. 
It was a time when  Tinkers  would call to the door with a battered  pot and ask you to "make tay" and try a get a shilling for the babby or sell you a floral carpet  and silky pillow cases that would be kept for visitors.  

Nobody but a Bank Manager had a credit card and clothes were let out on "Appro" which meant parading up and down the front room in a succession of ever more awful coats and anoraks to hooting and applause. Appliances were bought on HP and a book was run in the grocers, not in Paddy Powers.
We watched Bunny Carr saying "Stop the Lights" before we found out he had run away with the  money, we tried to "Draw along with Blaithin",  we farmed along with The Riordains, and learned the price of Bullocks and Heifirs on Mart & Market with Cowjack.   

Count John McCormack was singing Panis Angelicus on Radio Na h'Eirinn, and Frank Patterson was singing "She is far from the land" and we were shouting  back "And she can't swim a stroke" -  

Beckett was alive and well and hating Paris, Edna O Brien had left Ernest Gebler and walked from Chelsea to Wimbledon to start a new life minus the sons she adored.

Women burnt bras and started to challenge church and state, travelling to dispense the contraband of contraception from the North, with suitcases filled with french letters and pills.
We had The Old Grey Whistle Test and Radio Luxembourg and pantomimes, tops of the town, drama festivals, bingo, roller discos, make and model competitions, pongo in the CYMS, Irish dancing classes.

“You’re dancing on your arse Sandra “  roared Tommy Roche to one of the big girls who knew curses and chewed with her mouth open  and I walked out the door  of the C.Y. with the fright and spent the entire class on the drenched  misty woodenworks, poking at the limpets and  looking at the sea until it was time to go home, where my absence was discovered when Siobhan found the money for the class balled up in my coat pocket,  in my hanky.

Why didn’t you go Shell? Says she to me quietly later when she opened her palm and showed me the coin.

I don’t like it, Mam, I explained.  They make me afraid. Don’t make me go back. 

I forget the opening piece at SHELLSHOCK

MDM April 19th 2014

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