UPFRONT:IT WAS THE kind of weekend you shouldn't be able to live down. To start with, I proposed to some guy I hardly knew, having spent the whole day following him around wearing only my knickers. Later that night, I got up on stage before a roomful of strangers and sang a song I kept forgetting the words to, while the members of my family present tried to hide in their steadily disappearing drinks. After barrelling off stage and grinning wildly at everyone in sight, I ate my body weight in ice cream and passed out on the floor.
The next day, rather than waking up filled with shame and resolving to lay off the gargle, I slipped on my swimsuit, oblivious to dimpled thighs and pancake-flat chest, and went looking for my new fiancé on the beach. Shameless. Then again, I was only four years old.
Four years old and on my holidays, which were usually taken in the west of Ireland, somewhere in Connemara and generally in the rain. Ah, those heady days of grainy sandwiches and flat lemonade, of Baltic sea dips and the strange and foreign smell of rented houses. Of siblings scrapping in the back seat of the car, perched on top of a mountain of sleeping bags, while the jammy one who got car sick took pride of place beside the window. Of long, long, Polo-minted drives to Claddaghduff, crammed into a Fiat 128 playing I Spy. Of pit stops in Moate for ice-cream cones and at Hayden’s Hotel (or at the side of the road if nature called before we hit Ballinasloe) for the little sister to relieve her ever-bursting bladder.
I know, I know, the past is a foreign country, but in the case of Irish summers past, a foreign country populated with white-legged children forever being rained upon.
Yet, with the month that’s in it, and the gradual appearance of back-to-school tomfoolery in the shops (do mammies still spend their evenings covering school books with brown paper?), I can’t help but be transported back in a fug of the kind of misty, rose-tinted nostalgia – no doubt at complete odds with the truth – to summers past, which if you believe the memory marketers were soaked in sunshine and bathed in innocent bliss. Sunshine me hoop.
Not that the lack of sunshine stopped us. Not a bit of it. Once we got to our chosen destination – invariably a rented cottage, or once, thrillingly, a tiny caravan euphemistically termed a “mobile home” by my optimistic parents – we were turfed out in swimming togs, battle-sore from the back-seat pugilism, and told to make our own memories, bucket and spade provided. In defiance of sub-zero temperatures, we chisellers were set on a beach in the drizzle and encouraged to dip ourselves intermittently in the glacial waves and then huddle in damp towels by the wayward windbreaker – an unwieldy, striped canvas structure that never broke anything except the hearts of those who spent summers trying to get the bloody thing to work.
If the weather was particularly inclement – I’m talking monsoon as opposed to mild thunderstorm – the parents would pile us into the back of the car to “go for a drive”, an activity usually considered by us kids as about as appealing as watching Vere Wynne Jones read the evening news. Going for a drive meant piling back into the sagging Fiat and being carted around to look at the scenery through the water-pocked windscreen as we moaned non-stop in the back until placated by a packet of Tayto.
Despite the rain, the sandy sandwiches and the cramped conditions – the mobile home proved particularly, giddily tight-fitting for our family of five, which may explain its one-off status – my hazy memories of childhood summers are invariably pleasant in the recollection: making instant and random friendships with children who disappeared afterwards into the backs of station wagons and Nissan Sunnys; collecting stones and shells and storing them in secret locations among the craggy rocks, which were instantly forgotten; attending a sort of fast-forwarded Mass with a gabbling priest who blessedly skipped all the slow bits and had us out of there and back on the beach in a record-breaking 15 minutes; looking in vain for crabs in rock pools (big sister always spotted them first); burying our parents in the sand.
Sure, there are less pleasant moments that stand out with staggering clarity against the sweet and hazy summer background: the white and blue bruised flesh of my little sister’s dented fingers after I accidentally slammed them in the car door, and almost threw up my lunch of Campbell’s tinned meatballs; or the momentary panic when I locked myself in the bathroom in a strange house, being old enough to be embarrassed about it, but young enough to imagine living out my days with just a bath mat and a rubber duck for company.
The worst, however, never came to pass: the meatballs stayed down, the door was miraculously opened by my father the hero, and the pervading anti-climax of the journey back was smoothed by the purchase of vinegary chips to eat in the car as we got closer to home.
Sure, there were miserable, anxiety-ridden moments, the usual litany of worries for which adults often fail to give children credit. But those anxieties didn’t stop me from crashing the stage to sing a botched version of Rivers of Babylon to the accompaniment of a mildly perplexed hotel band, or proposing to random strangers. Ah, Connemara in summers past: the kind of place where, with the right mix of innocence and E numbers, anything could happen.