WHEN I was four years old, growing up in the concrete sprawl of south east London, my grandfather bought me a hurley for Christmas. It was a curious gift for a child. We were far removed from the Irish community and I was the only boy in a very small family. Yet I was much taken with this exotic thing. A boy's hurley 46 to 51 centimetres (18 or 20 inches) long. White tape banding the bottom part of it.
I did splendid things with that stick. Many things except hurl with it proficiently. I banged nails into wood. I assaulted friends in heated fights. I swatted bumble bees. I sent the blossoming tops of daffodils flying through the air.
I never attained any great skill at hurling and now, as middle age creeps up, it is unlikely I ever will. Yet the memory of that gift warms me. It marked a continuity, the culture of home reaching out to claim my imagination.
My grandfather had played in the green and white of O'Toole's early in the century. He never claimed to have played well, not even the claims that a grandfather is entitled to make to his only grandson, but he played with, and knew others who played with, a splash of genius.
I grew up listening to stories of Johnny McDonnell and Paddy McDonnell, of the Synott brothers, Josie, John and Stephen (the clan had five other lesser lights as well) of Joe Joyce, Johnny Carey, Paddy Carey, and just about anybody who wore the blue of Dublin back in the 1920s. Teams O'Toole's, St Mary's and St Joseph's from the same parish of Seville Place, off the north strand in Dublin, won successive All Irelands for Dublin in the early 1920s. My grandfather never quite got over the thrill of that.
There were nine O'Toole's men playing for Dublin in a challenge match on 21 November 1920 Bloody Sunday when 13 people, including Tipperary player Mick Hogan, were shot dead by Black and Tans in Croke Park. Members of the Tipperary team hid out in little houses around Seville Place afterwards.
The fact that the members of the two teams fled Croke Park together, and relied on each other for support and shelter in the aftermath of that day, fascinated me more as a child than the gruesome facts of that atrocity. The story of the Bloody Sunday game was always pre-ambled for me with an explanation of the great rivalry that existed between Dublin and Tipperary at the time.
Many of the O'Toole's and Dublin team ended up being interned during the years that followed. My grandfather's accounts of what happened to them all off the field were vague enough. Off the field, those men weren't any more exceptional than most of their generation. In times of trouble they were luminous because of their abilities in the matter of the native game. For me the whole business of nationalism and football and the unique interconnectedness of GAA people, was already well mixed up in my mind before ever I played the game.
We were a watery kind of GAA family ourselves. My father hurled a little for St Brendan's, and my mother, my grandfather's only child, worshipped weekly in Croke Park through the 1950s when St Vincent's was enjoying its most glamorous era. By the time the Dublin team of the 1970s had arrived we \were living in Ireland again and I was taking up space in a solid GAA school, plodding about solemnly in a St Vincent's jersey most weekends.
As time goes by, all of this seems more valuable. If the games are rooted in our history and our culture so, too, are the experiences of those who play and watch them. There is something precious and time worn about the games, but the spirit of them is conversation, laughter and passion. Certainly, hearing the national anthem played and sung on All Ireland final day is different, more spine tingling, than hearing it rendered on many other occasions. And hearing two old men argue about a passage of play from the 1920s is equally unique and usually more fun.
I'm always slightly surprised and initially at a loss, when I meet an Irish person who didn't grow up with some involvement in the GAA. The playing of the games seemed to mark out the rhythm of the sea sons for the rest of us, and it is a conversational reflex on hearing what part of the country somebody claims provenance from to pass comment on the waxing or waning of that region's GAA fortunes.
When we were kids we played soccer, lots of it, but never seriously never for medals or glory. I followed Leeds United, but was always vaguely aware that Leeds United was a business whose fortune depended on the effectiveness of their training and recruitment policy. Leeds United would never come to my school when they won a league and make in jokes about the teachers. Leeds United would never pack us into their cars on Sunday mornings and drive us to games on county council pitches. Great GAA men did those things though.
We measured ourselves against each other on football and hurling fields. Some of us never amounted to much in those measurings, but merely having been there brings good memories and the regret that we didn't try harder.
There is something depressing about passing into one's mid 30s and appreciating that the time has passed, that there is no chance to go back and exploit fully the potential you might once have had.
The pleasures left, though, are significant Gaelic Town is a world of talk and stories. Walk into any place with a picture of a team on the wall and if you can talk and listen you won't be asked to leave at closing time. At times, life in Gaelic Town can be claustrophobic, almost inescapable.
The politics and attitudes are broadly green and rural, and generally conservative, and when conversation strays discomfort can set in. Yet that is just a reflection of the country at large, a country with growing pains and insecurities and deep held fears. The games give us a chance to celebrate ourselves, to celebrate with each other, to meet each other on common ground.
LIFE goes on and the grip of the games seems never to loosen. This community within a community seems to endure forever. I see men and boys buried in their graves with their jerseys draped over their coffins. I see families marry into each other and becoming Gaelic Town dynasties. I see entire communities consumed by the passion of a season, generations welded together in the love of the game. I see children in my home place running around in jerseys of Dublin blue, and no end to the rhythm of our Gaelic seasons.