I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter

Last year when my youngest was in Irish College I made the rookie error of writing my first letter to her as Gaeilge. She stopped short of sending it back to me covered in red pen correcting my many errors. Instead she simply said ‘it’s OK to write to me in English, that way I’ll actually be able to understand what you’re saying!’ Cheeky little madam! Though it’s true i had relied heavily on Google Translate to help me. Some of the sentences had a bang of the kind of garbled language used by emailing Princes who just need your bank account details.

This year we made a pact that we would keep with the language we both know best. It’s funny writing to someone who you normally eat three meals a day with. We are used to verbal communication, writing seems more formal and a lot more effort. But three weeks is a long time to be apart and we are both hungry for news from the other’s camp.

Used to writing homework that needs to be legible for correction, she still has an elegant schoolgirl cursive. My handwriting is mostly just notes to myself so I’ve long dispensed with checking for legibility. In fact, I often scribble wise and witty thoughts in notebooks that no amount of staring and squinting will ever unlock.

Her first letter arrives and I decide to delay opening it while I make a pot of coffee so I can take my time over it. I laugh at how quickly she is immersed in Irish and dips in and out of both languages. ‘I played leadóg inné’ and Tar eis sport we go back to the house for tae’. Tae cracks me up every time because it insists you pronounce it in a very comic Irish accent (tay). It is another big meal after the already huge meal at lunchtime (dinner agus milseog, gach lá). Tae is not tea, it is another feast.

After the initial read, I go back a second time to read between the lines. Does ‘Tá na céilí an-spraoi’ mean more than that? Is ‘Ta cairde nua agam’ as harmless as it sounds?

I am turning into my mother. Though she took her role as my moral guardian so seriously that she wouldn’t even let me go to Irish college. She just said ‘You learn more than Irish in those places’ and that was the end of that. What else did you learn I wondered.

Instead I spent my summer holidays with my cousins where she assumed the same tight rules would stand. But summers in Cork were a lot freer than home and we spent long days wandering up the back fields, or down to the baths. The baths were what other countries would call a Lido, a few pence in and you could spend the day in this outdoor swimming pool. We certainly got our money’s worth and during Olympic years some of the braver ones attempted the dives we had seen on telly on the diving boards there. I preferred to have a go at synchronised swimming but inevitably the movement of raising my leg out of the water caused my head to go underwater and I had to give it up before I drowned.

We were always outside, playing hopscotch on the road, or stump as Corconians call rounders. After dinner if we got bored, we might pay runaway knock. I remember once an older kid came up with the suggestion that we tie one long piece of string loosely to all the doors in the park and give it a big pull causing all the knockers to clang at once. We would be hiding at the top of the park, visible enough to see all the neighbours come out at the same time. I don’t know if we ever pulled this off, but the image of it has come back to me many times over the years and made me smile.

An older brother of a neighbour there had an insane record collection and I remember one summer my mind was blown by his vault of music. It seems I discovered Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry, Fleetwood Mac’s Go Your Own Way, and Thin Lizzy’s Boys ar Back In Town all in one afternoon, what an education. On reflection, that playlist suggests the guy may have been nursing a broken heart, but his pain was my musical enlightenment.

I wrote letters home every week and Mum wrote back. I remember one summer she wrote ‘we’re very worried about The Brother, he’s listening to a lot of heavy metal’. Had he got involved with a crime gang or joined the Mooneys she couldn’t have been more concerned. Their Frank Patterson records were not going to be a shared passion, instead they had been pushed aside to make room for AC/DC. Mum may have briefly hoped this hinted at him becoming an electrical engineer, or that Led Zeppelin pointed towards an interest in aircraft. But she was pretty sure when Black Sabbath arrived that her hopes for a priest in the family were dashed.

I really wish I’d kept all those letters Mum wrote during summer holidays. She had a gifted turn of phrase and would turn the most mundane events into hilarious stories. There was one about the time a very genteel nun called to bring her holy communion. They were in the kitchen and just at the right wrong time a mouse scurried out from behind the cooker, the nun dropped the host and my father was called to calm everyone down and pour large sherries. I can’t do justice to its retelling but I remember choking with laughter when I read it back then.

I’ll definitely be keeping the litirs that are coming from the Gaeltacht, they are treasures for the future, documenting the summer of the leave taker and the left.