Every year, my friends ask me where I’m going on holiday and every year, I give them the same answer: that we’re off to my husband’s family place in Connemara. His dad is a native and he has been holidaying there since he was a child. We love the wide open spaces, the gorgeous beaches and the rain that we can see approaching from Slyne Head with ominous regularity.
We lived in London for some years, but would still make Connemara a regular fixture on the calendar. We took our son for his first holiday there when he was one, and I have a photo of him sitting on the beach, grabbing fistfuls of white sand, a puzzled look on his face. They didn’t have that kind of thing in Islington.
When we returned to Ireland to live, the holidays became frequent. My husband’s family had colonised a boreen overlooking a lovely harbour and built there, so we’d enjoy Auntie Pauline’s generous hospitality, or Uncle Mick’s. Each lent us their home without us even needing to ask: the only thing that changed hands was a bottle of whiskey when we were dropping by to collect the keys.
Later, my husband’s parents realised a long-held dream and built their own holiday home, next door to Uncle Mick’s, and summers were spent with my brother- and sister-in-law and their kids, huddled behind a windbreak in full waterproofs, watching the kids jump in and out of the water in the wetsuits which we’d congratulated ourselves on buying, whilst my sister-in-law and myself shared stories about the horrors and joys of motherhood.
There were the climbs of Diamond Hill, the top of which we never quite reached; there were the circuits of Ballynahinch Castle grounds which we always did on rainy days, because we could shelter under the trees; there was the cooking of the mackerel and pollock that we caught at the end of the pier; there was my husband’s 40th birthday in a blistering heatwave, when the extended family gathered for a barbecue and the call went out to the relatives throughout Connemara, who all appeared to bask in the sunshine and eat and drink copiously.
It wasn't an idyll, of course. I can still remember days of endless rain, watching the kids fight over Monopoly while I wondered if noon was too early for a glass of wine or to retire to bed with the yellowing copy of The Shell Seekers, which had been on the bookshelves for years; there were the trips to hospital in Galway two holidays in a row, when my son broke his arm and ribs respectively - "Oh, it's you again," the hospital doctor said when we pitched up the second time. There was one gloomy Halloween which I spent alone with the kids there, pushing a buggy and two mystified children in full fancy dress down a dark country lane in search of trick or treating; there were the nightly tick-checks and the regular trips to Lidl to buy supplies, which never makes a holiday feel special.
One year, we threw caution to the winds and went on holiday to Spain. We were sulking because it was the seventh awful summer in a row and we were only too delighted to enjoy 35-degree sunshine for two weeks. We felt a bit smug that we’d avoided weather Armageddon for a bit, but of course, we missed the place. Because the secret is the shared memories we have of it and the sense of continuity that comes when four generations of a family have holidayed there.
We pass the ruined holiday home in which my husband spent three miserable, rain-sodden weeks when he was seven years old and everyone yells “it’s the rat-trap”. Then there’s the cove in which he would spend hours as a child, climbing the lethal cliffs to look at the cormorants’ nest on top of the caves (the 70s really were a different time), the same cove where my son spent many happy summers using his Scout experience to light a fire and cook sausages on it; there is the big splash of paint on the road to Galway, still there after Great-Grandad dropped a can of paint out of the back of the car in 1977; there is the farm on the Roundstone road where I bought our first dog, a timid eejit of a Yorkshire Terrier who is now part of the family.
Maybe I’m being sentimental, but it seems that the memories are all the more poignant because, this year, the annual trip to Connemara, laden down with bags, fishing gear, wetsuits, inflatable boat and outboard motor, has changed. My eldest, now 17, deigned to come for a week with his girlfriend before departing for Dublin to get up to God knows what; my daughter, 15, announced that she’d finished with Connemara as it has no wifi. Only my 11-year-old was still enthusiastic about the rainy walks and the freezing swims.
Little did I know that last year would be our final “proper” holiday as a family. We’d all been there, grandad included, around the table in the kitchen, eating the lobster that had been foolish enough to wander into the lobster pot we had put out in the bay. We laughed and joked and argued about the most humane way of dispatching it to its maker: I had had to hide in the garden while it was put in the pot.
This year, it was just the three of us, and it simply wasn’t the same. It’s the end of an era. But hopefully, in the coming years, our children will return, as we did, maybe with their own children, and the cycle will continue.
All That I Leave Behind by Alison Walsh is published by Hachette Ireland
