Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (2 page)

The hours dragged damply by, and as we waited for the Pope’s arrival we ate our soggy sandwiches, and considered wetting ourselves rather than risk life and
infection by going to the toilets – you had to balance on slippery wooden planks above a hole in the ground already filled with the piss and shit of hundreds of holy pilgrims. And there is nothing like the stench of other people’s faeces to disabuse you of the notion that anything spiritual might be happening.

By the time the Pope arrived – or, at least, the tiny distant dot that sounded like him and everyone insisted
was
him, despite no real evidence (like good Catholics, we were just going to have to take it on faith) – it already felt like we’d been at a mass for days on end, but now an actual mass started. It was longer and more boring than any mass I’d ever been to. 

However, by the time it ended, the excitement was almost palpable, because this was what everyone was really waiting for – the Popemobile! It’s impossible to grasp now but, at the time, the Popemobile was this
huge
deal, a triumph of marketing achieved by the simple act of swapping the word ‘bat’ for ‘pope’. For weeks beforehand we had talked of nothing else in the schoolyard after seeing a report on children’s TV about it being built. It was basically just a jeep with a bulletproof glass box at the back that the Pope would be driven through the crowds in, but the way people went on you’d swear it was the
Starship Enterprise
!

At the end of the mass the Pope would drive through the corrals of people, and it was our chance to get up quite close to him and take the shaky photograph that
would be treasured for years to come. But then it was announced over the Tannoy that because things were running behind schedule, and it was already getting dark, the Pope was going to leave immediately. He might have been God’s chosen representative on earth, successor to St Peter, with a direct line to the Virgin – but he still had to be home in time for
Coronation Street
.

Everyone was crushed. On the verge of tears, nuns looked at each other with stricken faces, and my mother shrivelled before my very eyes. Hundreds of thousands of cold, wet people looked at each other, said, ‘Feck this crap,’ and left. All at the same time. In the dark. It was total chaos. There was no way they could get the buses through the frustrated throngs, so everyone had to walk the eight miles back to Claremorris, down tiny Mayo country roads, in the pitch dark, jostled by hundreds of thousands of other people. My mother, cold, wet and miserable, made us kids, cold, wet, miserable, tired and cranky, hold hands as we stumbled and bumped the eight miles back to the car, my little sister Clare crying all the way. It was a frightening experience. Treasured Pope stools were tossed into ditches, exasperated parents tugged at small, exhausted hands, and my mother, even in the dark, looked tired, and disappointed, and, to me, for the first time in my life, like a
real
person, with all the fragilities that that implies. 

On the drive home from Claremorris, I was exhausted in the back seat, but I couldn’t sleep. My mother’s hands
were illuminated by the light from the dashboard – her knuckles were white as she gripped the steering wheel, and I could see the blood in her veins. I’d never even noticed she had veins before.

The Pope’s visit made me think – really think – for the very first time.

During the interminable mass I had looked around me and had an epiphany of sorts. I didn’t belong there. I looked at the hundreds of thousands of people muttering as one and I didn’t feel any wonder. I felt no joy. I felt afraid. There was nothing spiritual or divine about the event: this was a cult. A cult of personality and hype. A passive mob, a colony of drones; a multicellular organism made up of unicellular minds. A switching off of all critical faculties. And had I had the eleven-year-old courage I would have stood up and screamed, ‘The Pope has no clothes!’ (Which might very well have been true but he was so far away it was impossible to discern.)

It made me question what was presented to me. Made me wary of accepted truths. That day, a crack opened up between me and the world around me. A crack that over the years became a crevasse, then a gorge, and then a chasm. It’s a chasm I’ve come to treasure. The Pope’s visit unhooked me from the dead weight of religion and pushed me into the stream of my own consciousness. It gave me a mind of my own.

I didn’t become an atheist that day – that was a much longer process – but I did take the first step, and became a Protestant.

I
THINK SOMETIMES WHEN PEOPLE
look at me, this big painted ‘lady’, they find it hard to imagine that I came from anywhere. They imagine that I just appeared, fully formed, like the Good Witch Glinda from her bubble. But, of course, I am from somewhere – a small town in the West of Ireland.

Ballinrobe is your typical Irish country market town. It has a couple of streets, a church, a town hall, a cattle mart, and there was great excitement when Tesco arrived. And even though it now has a Tesco, it hasn’t really changed much since I was growing up there, a boy called Rory, in the 1970s.

Growing up in 1970s Ballinrobe, the much-loved son of the local vet and his well-respected wife, surrounded by five noisy brothers and sisters and countless animals, it was idyllic: easy, free, fun. The weather seemed better than now, the summers longer. All my most vivid and
immediate memories are of warm sunny days, poking things with sticks or pulling the seeds off tall blades of grass in one stroke between your fingers so they form a precarious flower on your fingertips. Our parents had built our house in 1967, a modern ‘architect-designed’ (that was always important) flat-roofed bungalow on a large plot of land right at the edge of the town, down a tiny narrow lane known as the Bog Road, just off one of the main streets. For many years the only other residents of the Bog Road (though some gardens and sheds of other houses backed onto it) were the dead souls in the overgrown ancient graveyard next door, with its crumbling, spooky ruined abbey, and past that, the Traveller families in their caravans. They called the Bog Road home all year round and came to our house every day looking for the boss or the missus, depending on what they wanted.

There were technically only six O’Neill children, but our big garden, with easy access to the fields, woods and slow-moving river behind it, meant our house was a Mecca for other local kids, some of whom became indistinguishable from our actual siblings. Eve, whose own house backed onto the Bog Road, was as likely to be eating dinner in our house as her own, and my brother’s friend Denny ended up living with us for a number of years after his parents died and is still a brother to us.

During the school holidays, we’d go out in the morning and spend the day exploring the woods, swimming in the
lake, scrambling over rivers, or playing ‘Grace O’Malley Pirate Queen’ in the neglected graveyard, as we sailed our tombstone pirate ships through the undergrowth and leaped aboard those of our hapless victims, with bloodcurdling pirate screams. Later we sat on the same lichen-covered slabs, ate jam sandwiches and talked about the time Sparks Guckian had found a skull in the bushes even though none of us had actually seen it. But he had.

You’d be gone all day and your mother wouldn’t worry or care where you were as long as you were back by teatime with all your fingers and toes. Even now, they have an admirably relaxed attitude to child safety in County Mayo. Like the rest of the country, every Mayo garden seems to have sprouted a trampoline in the last few years, but in Mayo nobody has a safety net round it. My own sister’s family have one that sits awkwardly on the edge of the bone-shattering tarmacadam driveway while my nieces and nephew and their friends are catapulted in every direction at the speed of broken collar bones. But sure they’ll be grand. (And they are.)

As a vet’s family we were always surrounded by animals – dogs, cats, budgies, rabbits, sheep, ponies, chickens, hedgehogs … We adopted most of them, strays or foundlings that appeared one day and never left. Some adopted us. On more than one occasion my father attended to an animal that then simply refused to return to its original owners, cleaving instead to him. Tiger Ryder,
a farting, slightly bad-tempered wire-haired terrier who belonged to the Ryder family up the road, was brought to my dad after he’d been badly attacked by a large dog. Dad patched him up and spoke to him in the way he has with animals, and every morning thereafter we’d find Tiger Ryder on our doorstep and nothing could keep him away. So Tiger Ryder became an O’Neill, even though he never changed his name.

There were no rules about the animals because there didn’t need to be. The house was big enough, with its sprawling garden and little copse of trees, so the animals, like the kids, came and went as they pleased. But we were a country vet’s family so we weren’t sentimental about them. They were part of the family, wandering in and out as they pleased and falling asleep in front of
Hill Street Blues
on the TV like the rest of us. Apart from little funerals and occasionally a tombstone at the bottom of the garden when they passed away, they were just animals. They ate dog food and left-overs and were largely ignored till all hell broke loose when my father arrived home from work.

To enable us to make pocket money (and teach us some kind of responsibility) my dad would buy my brother and me a bull calf each (Barney and Beany, or Ernie and Bert) to look after. Every morning before school we’d mix up their feed and shiver in the morning mist watching their noisy, mucousy breath clouds and letting them suck and chew wetly on our fingers till I worried they
would suck them right off. When they were a year old Dad would take them to the mart and sell them. After deducting what he’d paid for them and their feed, we’d get to keep the profit.

School was a walk away. (On rainy days we’d ask our dad for a lift and he’d say, ‘You’re not a lump of sugar – you won’t melt!’ Eventually we’d only ask to hear him say it.) The crumbling cinema showed double bills and I fell in love with child star Jodie Foster. I got stung on the tongue by a wasp while eating an apple at the lake and it swelled up so that I had to call my mother from the phone box to come and get me. On Bonfire Night my dad would cook sausages on a dirty shovel and we’d eat them and think they were the best sausages ever. I told the teacher in front of the whole class that I didn’t like football; he and the other kids looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. And one time I was cycling along the river path and a guy went to cast out a fishing line without seeing me and the hook caught in my hand.

There’s a lot to be said for growing up in Ballinrobe, County Mayo.

The one thing Mayo didn’t have was glamour. It had grass and cows, fish and football, but no glamour. Glamour was in short supply in 1970s Ireland anyway, and what little there was rarely made it past the Shannon, and usually came from abroad. When Mrs Nixon, the wife of the disgraced president, came to Ballinrobe in a helicopter and shook hands with people at the local
agricultural show, the whole town nearly had a stroke. She was like something out of a ‘fillim’.

But glamour came to our house once every few years in the shape of Aunty Qy, my mother’s younger sister. She even had a glamorous name; Columba, which everyone shortened to Q or Qy for some reason. Aunty Qy. She was gorgeous, and had this rich, husky voice, redolent of Katharine Hepburn’s. She had wanted to be an actress, and did a bit on radio, but mostly she was just beautiful. Seven different men proposed to her and in fact my mother met my father when he came to the house to take Aunty Qy out. But Aunty Qy said no to all her suitors until a wealthy American, an ex-naval officer, proposed. He was twenty-five years her senior, but he was dashing and exciting, and in grey 1950s Ireland, he was in Technicolor, and he took her to America.

In 1970s Ireland, America still retained a sense of real glamour. It was a faraway exotic place we’d probably never see, where Mary Tyler Moore and Charlie’s Angels lived with giant refrigerators and bouncing hair. Aunty Qy would arrive home with her husky drawl, in a swirl of beige pantsuits and menthol cigarettes (cigarettes
with mint in them
!) and the glamour would almost knock me over. She’d smoke and drawl and sing, ‘I’m a Woman’ and her bracelets would clank as she’d take out gifts wrapped like they were in American movies, with shiny paper and glittery bows, and inside we’d discover new and amazing things: Pez dispensers, magic tricks, a
jumper
with a hood on it
! America had everything! We’d never seen the like! The whole town was talking about us and our jumpers with the hoods.

All the other kids wanted to have an aunty Qy. I wanted to
be
Aunty Qy.

She was like no one else I’d ever met. She was exotic and glamorous and
different
. She was like a character from a movie, a 3D emissary from a 2D world I’d only ever seen on screen or in books. But she was flesh and blood, undeniable tangible evidence of a big world out there, somewhere past Roscommon. I feverishly imagined this other world and fevered to be part of it. This bigger, brighter world full of new and different things, exciting and full of possibilities – where people wore jumpers with hoods on them.

N
UNS
, C
HRISTIAN
B
ROTHERS
, F
RANCISCANS: THESE
monochromatic figures took charge of my education from when I was four, hovering through my childhood like
Star Wars
extras who’d wandered onto the wrong set, smelling of soap and the chalk dust that clung to their robes, like stains left by passing clouds.

Like every other child in Ballinrobe, at four years old I went to the Convent where, for three years, Sisters of Mercy with made-up names, like Sister Alphonsus or Sister Gertrude (I knew these couldn’t actually be real names: they were comedy names, like the generic ‘Sister Mary Ramsbottom’, who starred in every joke my father told that called for a nun, as most of his jokes did), taught me reading, writing, Irish and ‘sums’. They also prepared me for my First Holy Communion, an event that was clearly meant to have great significance but was entirely wasted on six-year-old me. I remember it only because
my mother made me a suit, and after the boring church bit we had a party with cake and sandwiches in the school hall, where the girls jealously guarded their little white handbags with their ‘communion money’ in them.