Six at the Table

by Sheila Maher

  Mum felt she was depriving us in some way when she served up a salad; she was failing to perform her motherly duties adequately by not providing a hot meal. So with a salad there was always dessert. Usually apple tart and cream. Her tarts were unrivalled and were devoured by neighbours, friends and family – anyone who had ever been sick or unfortunate could be the lucky recipient of one of Mum’s melt-in-the-mouth tarts. The pastry was buttery and light, the sweet apples still had just enough bite, and the dusting of sugar on top mixed well with the generous helping of whipped cream collapsing over it. Sublime.

  Grace Before Meals

  Along with an insatiable appetite, God was something Mum was anxious to pass on to her children. As soon as I could talk, I was helped to memorise prayers that I then recited nightly, kneeling by the side of my bed. Mum was a daily communicant; early morning, lunch time or evening, there was always a Mass she could attend and she worked her life around this. She kept an emergency rosary ring in a tiny pocket in her purse, just in case she was caught without her full set or was ever sitting still long enough to slip in a few quick decades. Otherwise she had her mother-of-pearl beads, which she kept in their small red leather purse and dangled from her hands over the pew during Mass. Wound around her fingers in a unique way, the beads passed through her fingers in a continuous loop. I never managed to master this and instead got my Holy Communion beads knotted and twisted around my hands. Prayer was even more present during Lent, when daily rosaries were foisted on us all.

  We also said a prayer every evening before dinner. Religion may have had to take a back seat for breakfast, and lunch was a disparate affair, even at weekends, with each of us eating at different times, but for dinner we were all together, trapped in the kitchen. As we took our seats at the table, Mum was already chanting grace to the four walls, while she scurried around dishing out the food. We were expected to join in as her backing chorus. If a voice was inaudible, Mum threw a withering look in the direction from whence the silence came and instantly the decibels increased. Bless us, O Lord, as we sit together,

  Bless the food we eat today,

  Bless the hands that made the food,

  Bless us, O Lord.

  Amen.

  No one dared to put a fork near a morsel of food until grace was over. Even Dad had to be seen to at least mouth the words or he got a scolding for being a bad example to us all.

  There was no escape. Visitors were made to endure it too. They either joined in, mumbling, pretending to know the words, or they stared down at their plate of food in embarrassed silence as we intoned this special daily prayer.

  Lilt

  It was thanks to Mum’s devotion to God that I found myself at a religious gathering in Kilkenny, where I experienced my first gastronomic epiphany.

  On the off chance that God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost had passed us by unnoticed, she upped the ante on our religious practices and lured the entire family into joining a motley group of lay volunteers. Unaware of what was in store, we were welcomed into a religious movement called the Focolare. This benign group of holy people believed it was their duty to reach out and spread the love of God. We started to spend every second Sunday ensconced in houses in Rathfarnham, boys in one house, girls in another. I sat in a circle on the floor with a group of strangers – my sisters were in with the older girls – and we shared our experiences of God and how we ‘thought of Jesus’ in our daily lives: when we helped someone; didn’t get angry; or did some good deed.

  I never had an honest good deed to report. As the sharing moved around the circle from good girl to sweeter girl I begged my brain to get creative and come up with something, either a genuine memory or, as was usually the case, a falsehood conjured out of pure imagination. Most times my contribution was a modified and thinly disguised version of what someone else had shared. ‘I thought of Jesus when I helped my granny carry her shopping home’ and ‘I thought of Jesus when I shared my scooter with my brother’ were typically insipid and completely false offerings from me. The truth was that I never thought of Jesus, except when I was in a panic trying to make up a story about how I thought of Jesus.

  I did not fit in at the Focolare. I was a fraud. I stayed very quiet. I spoke when spoken to, and sang in a hushed voice when folk-song practice was on. Even the pretty Filipina girl, who strummed enthusiastically at her guitar while we sang ‘When You are in Our Midst’ and ‘Kumbaya, My Lord’, could not entice me to the extra Masses and sing-songs that were held on alternate Sundays.

  But Mum’s enthusiasm was strong and she signed us up for a family retreat at a Focolare weekend in Kilkenny. Volunteers from around the country congregated to celebrate God, His love and their mission. We pitched our tent amidst the zealous and the good. Even my parents seemed to me to be racy rebels among this crowd of sandal-wearing, head-nodding and over-friendly missionaries. My Dad cursed occasionally, my Mum had been known to tell the odd smutty joke – out of my earshot of course – and they fought with each other. The other people around us were just too pleasant. Their smiles were too wide. I was distrustful and sceptical, for no other reason than their abiding niceness.

  Most of the weekend went by in a blur of singing, praying and more singing. When not at Mass, we children spent time rehearsing songs and readings for the next Mass or prayer group. But there was time in our holy schedule for us to return to our tents to eat, and it was during one such break that my spiritual conversion occurred.

  I was hanging around outside our tent, dragging my feet in the dry clay and kicking up dust in boredom, when Dad returned from the local shop with some fizzy drinks to be shared over our lunch. Three cans between six of us. He held a Club Orange, a Coke, and a new green-and-yellow can in his hands. I hovered at his elbow and ‘bagsed’ the new yellow drink before anyone else had a look in. Without waiting for food to arrive, I grabbed my glass. After several delicious sips, I tipped my head back and gulped down the remainder in one noisy swallow.

  ‘What’s it called?’ I shouted to Dad.

  ‘Lilt,’ he said, examining the side of the can.

  It was Lilt, and it was divine. The flavours of exotic fruits like pineapple and mango, which I’d heard of yet never tasted, seemed to have been squeezed and pressed tightly into my glass. I had never had anything so heavenly. The fact that it wasn’t as fizzy as other drinks made it taste even sunnier and I could drink it faster, without getting the inside of my mouth stung from the fizz. From my first slug, I was a fan. Lilt left all other soft drinks half finished, going flat and lifeless in their large plastic bottles.

  After lunch, my parents brought me back to my group and the final afternoon folk-song session. As they turned to leave me, the leader asked them if I would like to stay on at the retreat for two extra nights after their return to Dublin. I could stay in a dorm with the other girls and enjoy a special Mass.

  Mum thought this an excellent idea: ‘That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?’ she said, beaming down at me.

  I was seized by fear. I was already lonely at each of the singing and praying sessions. I disliked being away from my family. I most definitely did not want to be separated by what I imagined were hundreds of miles and many counties. We had been sold this weekend as a family holiday, which it clearly was not, and now I was to be left behind, all alone.

  In front of a roomful of my peers, however, no matter how odious they were or how little I cared for them, I was not going to be a baby and cry. I wanted to look up at my parents and tell them that what I most desired was to leave this gathering behind, for all six of us to be squeezed into our old Opel Kadett and to get back to the life of a non-religious. It had already been a weekend of too much sincerity, an overdose of false piety, on my part, and I didn’t think I could sustain the charade any longer. Instead, I just stood by while they agreed to hand me over for two more days.

  ‘I’ve no clothes,’ I whined quietly.

  ‘Oh that’s okay, I’m sure some of the others will share with you,’ the g
roup leader said.

  ‘Where will I sleep?’

  ‘There are plenty of spare beds in the girls’ dorm,’ she said helpfully.

  Clearly I lacked the resources to come up with a clever enough roadblock that would get me away from the Focolare.

  And just like that, the rest of my family packed away our tent and all our camping gear, and with more room than usual in the back seat of the car, they escaped back to Dublin, while I cried silently into my pillow each night.

  Spare clothes weren’t forthcoming. Perhaps they thought none of the girls had clothes to fit my wider girth, so I had to endure itching and scratching and the embarrassment of dirty clothes for two whole days, all the while trying to concentrate on singing and praying and not crying. The ultimate endurance test was the long car journey home, squeezed amidst the limbs of another family. A family with a different smell, no Foxes Glacier Fruits or Bon Bons, and a very quiet car.

  When I finally got home, I didn’t tell Mum and Dad about the rest of my stay in Kilkenny. I brushed over the details and displayed a remarkable bravado. I didn’t hint at my loneliness and tried to remain blasé about my utter relief to be home. Instead of Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit, all I brought back in my heart with me to Dublin was my new-found love of Lilt.

  Picnic by the Side of the Road

  We never found the lay-by on the road to Barley Cove.

  ‘There’s one after Cashel on the Cork side!’ Dad chirped optimistically, leading us on and on without a break, in search of the elusive lay-by. It was August, and the car was hot and stuffy, but another forty miles sped by, with a lot of complaining and fighting in the back before Dad was instructed to pull in the next time he saw a ‘safe place’.

  We ate our picnic on the main Dublin–Cork road, on a grassy verge, three feet from speeding cars and articulated lorries. We huddled around the open boot, which was crammed with camping gear and suitcases. Mum had squeezed in the picnic bag at the edge for easy access. In it were the staples: ham sandwiches, egg sandwiches, scones and cakes. Surrounded by the noise of cars whizzing by at sixty miles an hour and trucks flinging dust and grit our way, we munched through round after round of sandwiches. At least it wasn’t raining, because then we would have had to eat the picnic in the car, with windows fogging up from steaming teacups and damp breath.

  Before we got back in the car, we peed by the side of the road as discreetly as we could, Mum holding her jacket around each of us for privacy from the world at large. Then we continued on to West Cork.

  We passed the time in the car playing ‘I Spy’, counting cars of different colours and making the alphabet from car registration plates and road signs. We got stuck at the letter Q and stared intently out the window willing the next Quinnsworth to come into view. But mostly we were bored and whinged at regular intervals, ‘How many more miles? How many more miles?’

  We arrived in Cork city late in the afternoon. Rain had been pounding noisily and ceaselessly on the hollow tin roof of Dad’s car since Fermoy. Cork was a very big county, we were reminded; there was still a long way to go to get out West. We all brightened up on spotting a sign that said ‘Goleen 15 miles’. As if on cue, a chorus of ‘Goleen, Goleen, Go-lee-eee-een, I’m beggin’ of you please don’t take my man’ broke out. These lyrics, stolen from that catchy Dolly Parton number, were all we could remember and they were repeated for several miles until we tired of that game too.

  Goleen, I knew, signified the ending of our journey and a few minutes after passing through it I saw the colours in the distance. Not the azure blue sea, or the kelly green fields, or grey and white cliffs, but the orange, reds and blues of tents pitched in the camp site. From our position on the sweep of road that led from Goleen to Barley Cove, I watched through the pouring rain as the tents came into focus, I saw the chaos of the camp site, and I strained my eyes to find a blank spot where we would pitch our tent and make our home for two whole weeks.

  Chicken ’n’ Chips

  In the slanting August rain, Dad ran into the camp site office to pay his fee and get instructions for where we were to squeeze ourselves in. The heavy rain meant that we ‘smaller’ children got to stay in the relative warmth of the car with Mum while, in the dimming light with rain swiping at their faces, Dad and Catherine set up the trailer tent. This year, the new extension had to be added on to the original trailer, and from our snug position in the car, we heard Dad’s cursing and Catherine snivelling and begging to be let back in beside us. But Dad needed her help and permission was refused. After several setbacks and collapses, the tent was ready. Dad lit a kerosene lamp, and from its place on the ground, it shed a warm light over the ubiquitous orange canvas. We sploshed across in its direction and stood inside the small space that was our new home. Despite the damp, the mud, and the even louder thudding of rain on the canvas roof, it seemed cosy.

  The next task was unpacking and feeding. After a long day on the road, with only sandwiches and snacks to eat, Mum needed to get something warm and substantial inside us. And so the first things to be organised were the table, the table-top cooker and a couple of battered saucepans she kept for camping. The contents of a Tupperware container were spilled into a saucepan, and within a few minutes the beef stew Mum had prepared before we left Dublin was piping hot and ready to eat. She ladled it onto our waiting plastic plates, and even though I wasn’t particularly hungry, I mopped up every spoonful. This dinner set the dietary balance straight. It recalibrated my system after a day of Foxes Glacier Mints, Hula Hoops, and sugary drinks. It set the tone for the holiday and reminded me what a pleasure it was to eat a hot dinner outdoors. It was like a picnic, only better.

  Kevin and I succumbed to tiredness first. But before we could go to bed we had to trek across the camp site, with Dad guiding us by flashlight, to the bright toilets. We brushed our teeth, shivering while moths and dragonflies buzzed and pinged off the bare light bulbs above us. Back at the tent, I was glad to zip up my sleeping bag and cuddle up beside Kevin. I drifted off while the rest of the family sat only two feet and a few millimetres of canvas away from me, playing cards. I awoke the next morning with Lucy and Catherine fast asleep in their sleeping bags, their feet up beside my head and Kevin’s. On the other side of the trailer Mum and Dad lay, their two sleeping bags zipped together.

  Camping food was good but basic. The shop on site was expensive, so Mum and Dad did their best to avoid it. They’d brought as many provisions as they could pack from Dublin supermarkets and there was a preponderance of preserved and tinned foods. Tinned beans and peas were the main vegetables on offer, and after the first few days, when the fresh meat was finished, Spam salads featured prominently. But it was undoubtedly the night my parents threw caution to the wind and ordered chicken ’n’ chips from the on-site chipper that provided the best meal of the fortnight.

  Kevin and I got our chance to get the dinner from the chipper because Catherine and Lucy had started hanging around with boys in the play area of the camp site. The instructions were simple – a whole chicken and four large bags of chips, no salt, no vinegar – that much Mum and Dad preferred to do themselves.

  Kevin and I walked to the chip shop and joined the queue of adults waiting to be served. When our turn came, we placed our order and stood waiting in the tiny shop, relishing the delicious smell of old chip fat as it seeped into our pores. I calculated several times the cost of four chips and one chicken, to be sure that I had enough money with me. When our order was ready, I paid for the meal and reached up for the large brown paper bag and watched as the grease stain on the bottom grew larger before my eyes.

  Kevin and I walked a few paces out of the shop with good intentions. Bursting to try a chip – just one – I asked Kevin if he would like one. Always keen to do my bidding, he immediately agreed and poised his hand over the bag as I unfurled the top.

  They were hot, fat and greasy. Everything you wanted in a chip.

  ‘You got a bigger one,’ I complained to Kevin, so I took another
to even the score.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ he said, as he reached in for a second, feeling around for another big one.

  ‘You did it again!’ I said, taking two this time.

  That was how it started. Before long we were wolfing them down with abandon, until I stopped to look into the cooling paper bag and realised what we had done. The four thin white paper bags inside the big brown one were all clearly visible now. A few fat chips and all the small burnt shards of potato were all that remained at the bottom of each one. A feeling of dread slid down into the pit of my stomach.

  Back at the tent I handed over the bag to Mum, who had six plates lined up on the foldaway table, each one ready to receive a fair share. She easily ripped the soggy bag apart and stared down in disbelief at its meagre contents.

  ‘Is this all you were given?’ she snapped.

  ‘Yeah, the bags were quite small,’ I said, turning to Kevin for support.

  ‘Did you ask for large?’

  ‘Yeah, hmmm.’ I was trying my best to avoid uttering a direct lie.

  ‘Tom,’ – Mum beckoned Dad for a second opinion – ‘these don’t look like large bags.’

  Dad stared at what was left of the chips. ‘Well I’m going over there to give that gangster a piece of my mind,’ he said, getting red in the face, his sense of justice offended. And without hesitation he charged over to the chipper.

  He came back several minutes later, redder than ever.

  ‘You two,’ he roared at us. ‘What were ye playing at? How many chips did ye both eat? You better tell me the truth now or you’ll be in more trouble than you are already.’