The Wa Taw in Ma Yaw Ka ..........................

Can I get me holly days Doctor?

 Finally I asked the Doctor’s wife for time off to have a holiday and she gave me a shrewd look.

Are you coming back this time?

I’m going to Majorca, says I.

It was to be my first time doing lots of things. 

Getting on a plane, burning to a crisp and eating Iceberg lettuce.

 In Ireland we only ever had a huge dark green lettuce with a copper spade mark across one leaf,  and on it we placed the following –

-       A slice of ham (rolled)

-       A slice of corned beef (rolled)

-       An egg cut with  an egg slicer with paprika shaken on it

-       A spoonful of potato salad from a tin

-       A scallion

-       Half a tomato

-   Childrens Meat

-   Salad Cream 

-   Beetroot with a bit of black on one ridged slice

Irish Salad

This was usually followed by a slice of rhubarb tart (from The Star Bakery) with ice-cream.

My friends and I had sourced a brochure from a  travel agents and despite a recession of epic proportions had booked and were paying into the credit union weekly for a package holiday to the sun. 

There was supposed to be 3 of us but there was ultimately 4, as one of us who shall remain nameless invited a friend.

On the May bank holiday my cousin and I stood hitching outside The Talbot Hotel to blag a lift to Carne for the  crack. Our families had left in convoy the night before and it did not raise an eyebrow that two young women would be out thumbing lifts.

 That was how we got around then.

 A hackney was only for going to Dublin for the big shop on the 8^th of December, when every person in the town went to the City, and every country craythur that could put one foot under the other  climbed out from under warm rocks, put twine around their trousers, and went to town. 

The only 2 hackneys in the whole town were Syl Carley, and Walter Busher, 

one you rang to book a  big car for a wedding or a funeral, 

the other you stood on the step in the rain at 3 am and rang the top bell and waited for his head to appear in the window.

 My Nana Mahon booked Syl once for the Christmas Shop and had her purse lifted by a gurrier in Dublin. She never forgave or forgot. 

"I'm not the better of the time that GURRIER took me purse up in that Dublin, that he may die roaring for a Priest" 

That Gurrier!

 The cars were smiling and waving and making those turn off gestures where they shrug their shoulders and smile ruefully. 

An open topped sports car came hurtling  around the corner, its occupants 2 males in tennis whites, pulling in with  a screech of brakes up the road.

“I don’t think much of yours” I laughed as we ran up alongside  trying to keep our hair fluffed and without breaking an ankle in the stilleto heels. 

We were wearing geometric dresses and had our hair backcombed into  Robert Smith bouffants a mile wide, with purple lipstick and eyeliner. 

It seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea to stop for a drink on the way, and thus to make dates to see them at the slow set in Cedars that night.

Katrina & The Waves were singing about walking on sunshine and I was in a frenzy on the floor when my tennis coach turned up and tapped me on the shoulder. 

(*through gritted teeth*) "Get more Harmony hairspray quick"

I smile now to think of the fun we had that night, the laughing, the flirting, 

the way we danced to REO Speedwagon , 

swaying in his arms, knowing inherently that if I angled my neck an inch, it would be kissed.

By the time it was boarding the plane time, I was in love and hysterical at the idea of being separated.

 Apart from bullying a friend of mine into knitting a jumper in a hurry, with chessboard pink and white squares -  to wear in 40 degree heat - I played the single he had sent me in the post over and over. 

“I’m gonna KEEP  on lovin’ YOU and it’s the ONLY thing I’ wanna  DO ……..”   

It had a black and white photo of him inside the sleeve.

 He is wearing his tennis whites and is pouting beautifully while pretending to serve a killer volley.

Take it NOW

 I arranged to meet him on the day of the flight.

 Like all country people we got off the bus with our cases and marched into McDonalds for a burger at breakfast time. 

Then we went to meet my love and his wing man. Suffice to say a veil will be drawn over proceedings but that a lot of imbibing in various hostelries all day culminated in me singing on top of a piano in Casper & Giumbini’s  in Wicklow Street that night, watching as the barman placed the phone on the counter. Through a fog of drink I heard the wing man mutter and slur, over and over,  that he was in fact in no fit state to say evening mass, and could one of the lads in the house take one for the team.

In the airport I did a bit of wallfalling, a bit of crying and a lot of messing about with a security guard and a hat. 

I have no idea how I was allowed on the plane.

 I spent the entire flight in the tiny stainless steel toilet poking tomato skin down the vacuum and leaning my tear stained face against the mirror while the stewardess banged on the door. A combination of alcohol poisoning and turbulence do not good bed fellows make.

 There was a smell of Marlboro as soon as the door of the plane opened and the heat hit us like a wall. We told each other we had never felt heat like it. 

Which was true. 

We gasped our way onto the coach and drove through the sleeping volcanic country side and I marveled at the sights, the villas, the whole glittering Island displaying herself like a debutante, teasing us with coquettish glimpses of impossible flowers and plants, orchids and succulents, flashes of blue, azure, aquamarine  and tourqoise from the pools and the flickering sea.

 Our apartment was small and aptly named for the Bougainvilla that hung from every available inch.

 I laid all my stuff on the bed near the wall,  unceremoniously claiming  it as there was the tiny matter of someone sleeping on the floor, or verandah. 

It was not going to be me and that was for damn sure. 

I spent the first morning of my sun holiday nursing the hangover from hell and writing a 5 page letter home about the flight. 

We explored and came up with the general consensus that the place was the size of Rosslare, with a couple of beach bars and a supermarket. It was on the 4th day we realized the whole town was just around the next corner , the one we had stopped walking to, because of the heat. 

We were young Irish girls  let loose on an island with sun, sea, sand  and sangria. 

I will let you do the math. 

I met a Scottish postman who wore about 50 gold chains and gave me a string of spectacular love bites in a ring around my neck. I spent a lot of time alternately holding in my stomach in my togs and trying not to get thrown in the deep end of the pool. 

It used to come between me and my sleep and I would hyperventilate at the thoughts that one of the random gangs of marauding British teens would hurl me by wrist and ankle into the pool to screams and applause.

 I was persuaded  to go on the water slide. 

It took about half an hour to get to the top and they positioned me in the middle so as I could land on someone and the one behind would take up the slack by pulling me up by the hair. We practiced the manouevure of this many many  times on the way up, as the man checked our wrist bands. 

The fatal flaw was my friend deciding to do it facing front down, and she tore the hips off herself on the seams the whole way down, and was in agony by the time she hit the water. I sank like a stone and the thought that flashed through my mind as I plummeted past all the legs was – this is it and I became calm. A stunning Spaniard pulled me up by the straps  and I lay  flopping like a mackerel on the warm tiles gasping and heaving up lungfuls of blue water. As soon as I could breathe I said

 “Again!”

Be grand, sure

We had made friends with sisters who holidayed together a couple of times a year and were addicts for the sun, darkening till they looked Spanish themselves. They laid out all day come sun or shade, They were also addicted to Barry’s Tea, Black Pudding, Rashers and Superquinn sausages and had a veritable feast of vacuum packed meats in their cases. They even brought butter and bread and YR sauce for the sangers. They had dressing gowns and took off their make-up and sat around wearing moisturizer and conditioning their beautiful hair like mermaids,  and all they ever said all day every day was

 “Fuck off, no WAAAAAY” whether we were telling them the time or the third secret of Fatima. 

 I stayed in their house on an estate in Crumlin, drinking in the workingmans club with all their Aunts and Uncles. In Crumlin too, they sat around in their nighties spending the livelong day constantly shaving their legs,  plucking their eyebrows, eating rasher sandwiches,  and drinking cups of scald.

I have the Johnston, Mooney and O'Brien in me handbag

We ran amok in Spain, the first time for any of us that we had been away from our parents for any extended period, and also abroad, in a foreign climate. One night after consuming my own height in vodka and coke from a barman with a gamy eye, I collapsed in a heap on the shining Spanish street tiles, and was revived by an ex- pat with a home perm and a t – bar chain ,

who used espresso and salt as an emetic,

 and I woke in a foaming pool of various liquids, rubbing my eyes in disbelief. 

We bought dolls and lace and perfume and fags and fell around an ornament shop filled with Lladro and crystal like hysterical young bullocks before we were ousted. I bought my sister a model of a fat arsed puppet on a spring who would bounce around the ceilings when you pulled his legs. 

We lay around the pool all day talking about men and what we would eat that night. 

Or both. 

 But as the bus idled at the terra cotta walls in the baking morning heat and the last stragglers ran aboard clutching souvenirs and love bite marks in equal measure, the driver admired his square blue chin in the mirror from behind his shades as he manoevured the coach around the tiny curves and we left the sun drenched slopes of one Island far behind and flew back to the mild green temperate Island that I was delighted to call home, on the night that LIVE-AID was on.

To be continued.

MDM August 5th 2014