They flew her home, where she was treated in the Royal Hospital in Perth. The staff there noted her politeness, her “fragile smile”. Jodie died three days later, in her mum’s arms.
It had been years, but even without the name, I would have recognised her. There were traces of my grandmother in her face.
I have wondered whether to end it there, but it wouldn’t be the whole story.
I call my mother and tell her I want to record my memories of Jodie. She is puzzled, and for a moment I can’t understand why.
“Am I remembering it wrong?”
It is a hot day, and I am sweltering in my car outside a Cole’s or a Woollies’, and she sounds very far away. She is very far away.
“Well, no – or at least you remember it more clearly than me.”
“Then what?”
“Well, you were just a baby. You can’t have been more than two, because your great-grandmother was still alive. I remember you as eighteen months or so.”
“Wasn’t I three or four?”
“No, you were only a baby. You were on my lap and when you weren’t you never left your pushchair.” Her tone is gentle, certain.
“So I didn’t play in the garden with her? We didn’t run around the kitchen together?”
“No, you didn’t. You couldn’t have. Sorry.”
“Was there Battenberg?”
“I don’t know, sorry.” She says it kindly, but it stings all the same.
So it turns out that none of this is true.
Well, not quite none of it – there was a trip to Ireland at some point in the 1970s but, if I was there, there is no way I could actually remember it.
I don’t remember Jodie. Instead I have – like the character in that Alice Munro story – pilfered someone else’s recollections, along with some old photos and some actual memories which may have had nothing to do with her: Uncle Phil, the pushchair, my grandmother’s taste for cakes wrapped in marzipan.
I so much wanted Jodie to have been real to me, I made her real. This realisation is astonishing, embarrassing – though I hope not insulting to her – but in its own way, it is sad too; another, lesser version of the stab of loss I felt that autumn day in 2002, looking at her photograph on my desk.
It makes me wonder, too, about other things I think I remember; about the other fictions to which I stubbornly cling, the other narratives I have unknowingly wrought. But in the end, I don’t suppose it really matters. My memories – even the ones painstakingly recorded in those leatherbound books – may be invented or stolen or crudely cobbled together, but to me they all pulse with truth.
And in the end, isn’t all memory a reinvention of something? The way, as Munro said, that we keep telling ourselves our stories and telling other people a somewhat different version of them? I’m left feeling like her character, Fame, in The Progress of Love. “How hard it is for me to believe that I made that up. It seems so much the truth it is the truth.”
Jennifer O’Connell is a columnist and feature writer with the Irish Times. She is a regular contributor to programmes on Today FM, Newstalk, RTÉ Radio and RTÉ Television. In the past, she worked as founding editor of TheJournal.ie and features editor of The Sunday Business Post. Her journalism has been published in Image Magazine, Irish Tatler, the Irish Independent and the Evening Herald. She has also worked as a television news reporter and was the series producer of a series of critically acclaimed documentaries made by Liberty Films for RTÉ. She normally lives in Dublin but is currently spending a year in Sydney with her husband James, and their two children, Rosa and Lúí.
Story 34: The Forgotten Child
Andrew O’Connor
When I was a child I had the most remarkable woman in my life. Although we called her our great-aunt, she was actually a great-great-aunt, my grandfather’s relative. Stepping into her house was like stepping back in time. Although the house had long since been updated with the necessities of modern living, the furniture, the ornaments, the ambiance was from a bygone era. There were chocolate boxes from as far back as the 1930s, used to keep letters in, and oil lamps that still glowed. There was a curious atlas that had none of the geography we were being taught in school. The atlas showed a strange-sounding Austro-Hungarian empire, and above it nestled something called the German Empire occupying the spot we were being taught was now West Germany and East Germany. Ireland was marked in the same red colour as the United Kingdom with curious-sounding names like King’s County and Queen’s County which couldn’t be correct as the map on the wall in school gave these places the far more down-to-earth if less regal titles of Offaly and Laois. But the atlas, like most things in her house, was from the era that she had grown up in.
But it was her stories that were of most interest – and how she loved stories! She had dabbled in acting when she was younger and had even written and produced plays. Maybe some other life had been waiting for her, but the destiny she chose was to stay and manage the farm that she had lived on all her life and that she had inherited when her own parents died. She didn’t marry and had no children, but was close to us, her extended family. When I was a child she would have been in her eighties and yet she was sharp and sprightly and could connect so well with children. I never realised just what a link she was to the past. A direct link to the nineteenth century. When she was born, Victoria was still on the throne. When the First World War began she was already seventeen years of age. And by the time the Second World War had started she was well into her forties. What she must have lived through and experienced! So much first-hand knowledge and personal stories revolving around these historic events. And so many questions I would love to ask her if I had the chance again.
The stories she did tell were fascinating. She had known people who had sailed and died on the Titanic. As a child I didn’t realise just how unusual this was. There were always films and programmes on the television about the Titanic, so I just presumed everyone must have known somebody on the Titanic back then. She told of the heartbreak the sinking had left behind for the family she knew who had lost someone. How the man’s mother would wander at night to the nearby sea and stare out, looking for her lost son.
She had been around for so long she knew all the stories about people’s families in the locality, stretching back generations that nobody else could recall. One story she recounted was of the great-grandparents of the people who lived in a house in a quiet wooded area nearby. Back in the 1920s they were a normal family going about their daily business. Until the mother of the family went missing one day. Her children arrived home from school and found her gone. There were no clues as to where she was and when she didn’t turn up as the days went by, panic set in. Her husband and the police organised extensive searches through the countryside and woods but they could find no sign of her.
Fear swept the locality that she had been a victim of malice and nobody would travel out after dark on their own, fearing a murderer was at large. As the weeks went by and the searches continued, the mystery deepened. It was then discovered that the woman was alive and well and had moved into the remote house of a man who lived some distance away. What’s more, the man she had run off to had taken part in the searches for her. When their ruse was discovered, the woman had calmly returned to her family and took up where she had left off. She and her family returned to their normal life and nothing more was said about it. To our modern ears it sounds unbelievable but, as we know, people didn’t talk about things back then except in whispered conversations and it was soon forgotten by everyone. Except for my great-aunt who told the story to us.
There were plenty of other stories of different families. Two neighbours who had not spoken for three generations and the discord had been going on for so long that neither could remember what the feud was about any more. But my great-aunt could remember. The row originated over land back in 1916, she informed us. Then there was the tale of the man who made a fool of the bishop’s sister at a train station that resulted in dire consequences
for him.
The tales of her own family and upbringing were lighter and full of colour. Stories of mountain climbs and picnics, fairs and theatres. A tranquil setting for a happy family.
She was one of three children and had two brothers and they had grown up with their parents on that farm in the beautiful countryside. One of her brothers had emigrated to America, the other had remained in Ireland. Like her, neither of her brothers married and all lived to a good age and lived happy lives.
My great-aunt had outlived her two brothers and when she did pass away that branch of the family ended with her.
This all came back to me recently when I was writing my new novel, which is set in the Edwardian era. As I was researching those times it all seemed so far away that it was amazing to think this woman I knew so well as a child had been part of it. You wonder when you’re writing something set in the past whether you are getting details right, regardless of how much research you do, and with her great love of writing and stories my great-aunt would have loved to be part of setting the correct scene for a novel.
And then, as I continued my research, I came across something that really proves that life is so much stranger than fiction. As part of my research I was looking up old censuses to garner information on the lifestyles of the time. Now with the census being available on line, the process has become simplified and so much quicker. I was looking up the 1911 census and, realising my great-aunt would be a young girl of fourteen at the time, I went to search for her and her family’s details. As I had the address of her family farm it would be easy to look them up and find them. And, sure enough, there she was on the census, living with her parents and two older brothers. But as I studied the information of the household something jumped out at me. There weren’t five people living in that house. The census showed six people living there. My great-aunt, her parents, the two older brothers, and a fourth child. A boy called Jack that the census said was twelve years old in 1911. This couldn’t be right. There were only three children in the family. I knew it, we all knew it, it was a given. And yet here was the census telling me otherwise. I studied the details and there was no mistake. The parents were registered as having four children. His surname was the same.
I started asking my family were they aware in any way of this fourth child, Jack. But it was as much of a surprise to them as to me. They believed there had only been my great-aunt and two brothers in the family. It was like this child, Jack, had simply been written out of history. What is most curious is that my great-aunt spoke so much about her family and of her other two brothers. And yet Jack was never even hinted at, let alone spoken about.
The 1911 census stated that Jack was at school and that he could read and write, and so there didn’t appear to be any intellectual difficulty to be hidden away as was so often the case back then. A multitude of explanations went through my mind. The most obvious one was that this young life had been cut short in tragic circumstances. Perhaps the pain of what happened was simply too much for the family to deal with and they never mentioned it again, so that, even when my great-aunt was in her eighties and all the rest of her immediate family were deceased, this pact not to talk about it or acknowledge it held fast. Perhaps Jack had been a casualty of war. Between the First World War, War of Independence and the Civil War the next decade was ruthless in claiming the lives of millions of young men of his generation. But then don’t families honour their war heros? Unless he wasn’t considered a war hero because he had fought on the wrong side – we had been taught that the Civil War set brother against brother and created feuds that went to their graves. Could something like this have occurred within this family? It couldn’t be something as simple as he had emigrated because the elder brother had gone to America and he was regularly talked about. I remember in my great-aunt’s house there was a very old blessing in a portrait on the wall and her parents’ and two brothers’ names were engraved into the blessing along with her name. But there was no mention of Jack even here. What could have been the circumstances that left this child out of their family history and life?
And then it occurred to me that perhaps he didn’t die young at all. Perhaps there had been a ferocious feud and he had simply moved away to a new life. Perhaps the bitterness of this falling-out led to the rest of his family not ever mentioning him again. Imagine if this fourth child did marry and did have children. And perhaps his descendants are alive and well today, unaware of his and their own background. Perhaps this branch of the family didn’t die with my great-aunt at all and lives on through this forgotten son and brother. So many questions and the person, my great-aunt, who could answer them is long gone and chose never to talk about it.
I wonder, if I had the chance again, if I could garner some insight from her. Little did I know that, of all the stories she told, the most interesting and mysterious of all was the one so close to home.
Andrew O’Connor is the bestselling author of seven novels including The House, Talk Show and Full Circle. He is a graduate of NUI Maynooth and Trinity College Dublin. His latest book, The Secrets of Armstrong House, was published by Poolbeg Press in October 2013.
Story 35: The B-Game is Okay Too
Brian O’Connor
The number is seared in my memory – 1051: almost exactly halfway between the sanctuary of 1100 and the disaster of 1000, a middle-of-the-road purgatory for an anxious, middle-of-the-road, thirteen-year-old schoolboy. A figure with the potential to determine the rest of my life, apparently.
In a randomly divided crop of sixty first-year youngfellas, there had been Christmas and Easter exams, the total marks of which would determine the concrete division of the crop into “A” and “B” classes for second year and beyond. Get into “A” and it would be honours all the way. But “B” was, well, it didn’t bear thinking about.
Except there was nothing else to think about: to the extent that the summer holidays before going back were dominated by fear, and prayers that the class would be dull – not thick, but unexceptional, nothing to write home about, average, very, very average. That way the cut-off would be a thousand. And an ordinary 1051 would be enough. Except it wasn’t.
The classes weren’t called 2A or 2B, but 2T and 2R. Nice, neutral stuff that disguised nothing. When we gathered our bags and split into our intellectually cleansed classrooms, I remember a corrosive, colon-scouring sensation of shame. I can also remember the smell of the new room, dusty and ancient, with a faint tang of stale piss and mouse-shit. And envying the raucousness of those who clearly didn’t give a rat’s about the new demarcation. Their parents didn’t care about T and R. Mine did.
Having a teacher for a parent is tricky anyway. They can smell bullshit the way a Springer scents a wounded bird. There’s a remorseless inevitability about it, a refusal to entertain excuses, for the simple reason they’ve heard them all.
Having a father who’d emerged from a small 1940s North Kerry farm to earn a scholarship to a secondary school where everything, even Latin, was taught through Irish, and whose intelligence and self-assurance were so acute he spent the night before his Leaving Cert kick-off reading the Sunday Press, meant excuses as a currency were worse than useless.
I would have traded a decade of my life to avoid telling him. Months of dread revolved around his reaction. The walk home was crammed with painfully adolescent obsession, even worse than the months of anticipatory fears before that.
And it was bad. Even with hindsight, maybe half a decade would have been a fair swap. Diabolical predictions of a pass Inter Cert – this was a long time ago – and a failed Leaving Cert fought for oxygen with accusations of rank laziness in a seemingly never-ending tirade. My assurances, accurate as it happened, that the classes were being split for logistical purposes, and upper-level classes would be available to everyone, were dismissed as wishful thinking. My future was set – and it wasn’t promising.
Except it wasn’t set: it hadn’t even started. How could it, at thirteen? The class assurances were tru
e, as mostly were the accusations of laziness. And I ended up getting resolutely ordinary exam results, unexceptional, and very, very average.
I finished education in 1987, a dull, dark and consumptively awful time in almost every way. It makes the current economic and social climate look like Spring Break – whoo-hoo! Most youngsters hadn’t an employment pot to pee in, at least not in Ireland. Aspiration wasn’t a mouse-click away. The music was as lumpen as the fashion, both conspicuously lacking any sense of joy. And any possible sexual consolation required multiple layers of illegal latex products, as well as the production of a blood sample and a doctor’s cert.
But, and this is the “but” I would stress to my thirteen-year-old self, it was the beginning: not the end of the beginning, not halfway, certainly not the end of anything. Once out of education’s artificial cocoon, everything only started; a daunting idea in one way, but liberating too.
It doesn’t mean you slide through school doing damn all. In fact, given the time again, it would be nice to relish the scholastic struggle more, attack the books with a bit of brio, always recognising though it is only a warm-up for the real deal.
That, though, is to indulge in the ultimate middle-aged fantasy: going back and applying what you know. Movies have been made about it. More males than will ever admit play similar personal movies through their brains long into adulthood. However, since that’s the premise of this entire project, let’s indulge a little, while realising such a fantasy is filmed through a prism that can never fully recapture the desperate self-consciousness of adolescence.
Someone very wise said if you don’t look back five years and feel embarrassed at your younger self, then you’re doing something wrong. In which case, yours truly, every day, and in every way, is getting better and better. Never mind five years: try one. And then guess at the crimson levels of embarrassment when it comes to over thirty.
If I Was a Child Again Page 20
