One foot in the past
By Joe Horgan
A friend of mine, another second generation Irishman over here like myself, was going through some old photographs recently.
You know, the usual stuff, lads looking impossibly young, larking around surrounded by beer bottles, running through green fields, standing outside Irish pubs on a summer’s day.
He set to reminiscing about coming over here aged 18 to visit his gran and bringing a gang of friends with him, some who’d never been to Ireland before. He’s living in that very house now, and so I guess he had a right to be nostalgic.
I live near a different town but I know his place well enough, so at one stage he threw a photo over to me to have a look. I knew the old fashioned eating-house they were all standing outside of, squinting into the sun, and I noticed how little over the years it had changed.
Take a closer look, he said, and remember this was taken in the middle of an ordinary day. Of course, then I saw it. The street alongside them was deserted, totally devoid of cars, in a place where you’d now find parking on the odd Sunday only.
Christ, I thought, similarities there are, but they are like two different countries, the one we have now and the one in that photograph. And of course, they are.
So, as you do, we set to recalling the past through a sentimental, warm, summer-focus lens. For those of us to whom Ireland was the summer holidays, that is virtually unavoidable.
I recalled that in the remote caravan park we stayed on we walked everywhere. And there was only one car in the field, and if the gent who owned it spotted us walking the couple of miles to mass he would insist on driving us in.
I remembered the drive down from Cork city being along a crumbling winding road in a country without motorways. That crumbling road is now a major thoroughfare. I remembered the walk back home from the pub at night as not being dangerous from cars but from the chance of falling in to the ditch from looking at the stars. He remembered exquisite beaches that were always deserted and enchanting, and which are now on a summer’s day a car park for both vehicles and bodies. You could go on, but all you end up doing is making yourself feel old.
Yet something about that chat was more than two people romanticising their youth and Ireland. We have both returned here and begun families. Here in this loaded place of our youth and our parents’ past. Tir Na Nog was always a dangerous place, like any enchantment.
And therein lies the essence of it. Those of us reared in Irish families in Britain, have such a loaded relationship with this island. Coming back here to have children only intensifies that. We dream in some way that we can give our children those golden summer holidays, those days of endless freedom, in a land that will be their home. And we can’t.
Not that we don’t on many, many days come near. My two girls have times here that I trust not only I find idyllic. They’re lucky and I’m lucky too that because of my parents I knew that this was possible. But it’s not my childhood and it’s not my parents. It’s theirs and this is 2004.
So there are more caravans than ever in that small field now, the beach gets body-to-body on a summer’s day, and the sunlight bounces off a stream of car windscreens.
My friend no longer walks through the town with his gran as she stops to talk to everyone because she is gone and most of those who said hello to the little boy she held are gone too. There are more new people in the town than ever before and the latest housing estate is still unfinished.
Then comes the really strange bit. The one thing that we both agreed upon as most unsettling is the amount of English accents you hear. At times overwhelmingly so, in a way that is truly bizarre. Yet, they sound no different to us, at least not to the average local. An English accent is an English accent. But here in Ireland? And so many of them?
My friend said that an old man he knows said that he notices now at Mass that the local accent is changing, is becoming watered down. Perhaps the influence of an all invasive media plays its part in that; perhaps economic success is curtailing local speech. Perhaps it’s all those English people.
Strangely enough, as fathers, this concerned us greatly. I am proud of my accent as it tells some of the story of who I am. I wanted my children to have local accents too — no matter where we would have ended up. Them having an Irish one is of course an added bonus. My daughter who has just started school has an accent not unlike her mother’s English one.
It intrigues me or if I’m being honest it concerns me. The first few months of school have brought a local twang in places and I’m monitoring this with care.
I was beginning to think along the lines of elocution lessons. I think now she might just be mirroring the genesis of my own accent, which my mother insists was Cork before starting school.
Whatever, she needs to learn. I won’t have that kind of language in my house.
The complexity of our relationship with this island is never-ending. It’s funny. It is really as if even here we are living in one Ireland and everyone else is in another.
As for all those English people?
I have no idea what Ireland they live in.
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