It’s all about the money? I think not!

Tags

architects, artists, childhood memories, fishing, fulfillment, money, philosophy, quotes, Richard Buckminster fuller, the yellow bicycle, wild camping

(A childs fishing net is great for plucking prawns from the sea as they float around the rocks on the incoming tide)

~

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”  (Richard Buckminster Fuller)

 ~

I have an irresponsible attitude towards money.

I blame it on my mother and father (He was a follower of the man I have quoted above).

My mother’s mantra was” Never worry about money! it will always come from somewhere”

But interestingly even though she queried the existence of God (she always said her favorite choice of religion would be quakerism) she would look skywards as she uttered these words.

She may have developed her mantra out of desperation.

She was married to an Architect/artist who would have preferred to have been an Artist/fly fisherman/ideologist/ wanderer/explorer/architect!

A man who hadn’t a clue about the cost of anything and wasn’t great about chasing up money owed to him from various architectural projects.

A man who left all money matters in the hands of his wife.

Once he went into a fruit and vegetable shop to buy some grapes for her when she was in hospital having her eighth child.

After handing over a pound he stood with the grapes in one hand and the other hand outstretched towards the shopkeeper (Whose hand was outstretched towards my father)

After a while my father smiled  ‘I’m waiting for my change’ He murmured politely.

To which the shopkeeper replied equally politely ‘And I’m waiting for the rest of the price of the bunch of grapes’.

So you see I hadn’t a hope.

When money was short my mother had to find various means to make ends meet. This happened more frequently towards the end of her child rearing years.

A time when the last of my siblings were trickling unwillingly through the final years of their education and my father was disappearing more frequently off on his fishing trips. (often taking us out of school to row him around various lakes) Though in fairness to him he usually brought home a large bag of trout for tea.

Luckily my mother was also an artist and  ‘money coming from somewhere’ was really thanks to her hard work as one.

Despite rearing eight children she still found time to create.

And find buyers for her work.

I remember walking down grafton street with her one day helping her carry a suitcase.

Bursting with samples of patch quilting, liberty cotton frame surrounds, padded hand stitched silk hanger covers,  wedding ring cushions with lace trims, we took turns in hauling it to the liberty shop in the Westbury center who if satisfied might order supplies of from her.

This was an embarrassing chore for me as I was at ‘that age’ and my mother always chatted to some smelly drunken old man on the bus on the way into town.

When I showed my embarrassment by nudging her in the ribs, she would tell me to be kind and to remember that she might be the only person to whom that individual would talk to on that day and that loneliness was a terrible thing! far worse than a lack of money.

I would cringe further and sink back in my seat wishing I could disappear into it, fearing that ‘Mr drunken smelly’ would hear her but he would be too busy sucking liquor out of a brown paper bag (well a bottle hidden in a brown paper bag).

Any way on this particular outing way we bumped into Mrs Cranny, my old elocution teacher, in the middle of the busiest shopping street in dublin.

My mother and my teacher greeted each other warmly.

‘What have you in your suitcase May?’  My teacher enquired.

To my horror, my mother laid the suitcase on the pavement and unzipped it, opening the lid out on the concrete.

‘I’m bringing samples to the liberty shop. Fingers crossed they like them and I’ll get an order’ My mother explained.

Mrs Cranny peeked in curiously to inspect my mother’s wares.

‘But these are wonderful’ she cried, lifting out a delicate little cushion of white silk with a cream lace edging and two tiny silk ribbons for holding a pair of wedding rings

‘How much is it? I’ll take it!’ A complete stranger was rummaging for her purse in her bag

My mother And Mrs Cranny looked up from the open case in surprise.

A curious crowd was gathering! and they were all trying to peer over each others shoulders into the suitcase .

Some were actually starting to push each other.

‘Ooooh look at those lovely covered hangers’ one woman tried to reach down between my mother and mrs cranny.

‘Wow I love those picture frames! Look at that detail. They would be a fab present for my sister’s birthday’ A girl in a bank person’s uniform was trying to squeeze her way in.

My mother shut the case firmly and struggled to her feet .

All I could hope for was that no one from my school was in the vicinity

The disappointed crowd moved away and mrs Cranny and my mother kissed each others cheeks with promises of meet ups for coffee in Bewleys sometime soon.

We headed it on to the Liberty shop and there was no cause for panic. My mother got an order for all of her wares.

Heading to the bus stop she stopped to chat to and give a pound to a young girl sitting on the side of the street with a baby in a blanket.

‘Bless you Ma’am’ the girl called out looking at the pound in her palm in disbelief (a pound was a lot of money back then)

‘Hey what about me ? I helped you haul that heavy suitcase into town’

But I kept my thoughts to myself (She needs it more than you would have been the answer ) because that’s also how my mother worked things out. It wasn’t always the hardest workers or those entitled to it that she gave money to, sometimes it was those that she felt needed it most.

But I was young back then and didn’t understand that life isn’t always fair.

Now that I am older and wiser her philosophy makes sense

And I live my life NOT worrying about money.

But It’s not as though I lie about idely waiting for riches to befall on me, and as I haven’t invented something amazing as Mr Buckminster Fuller suggests, I continue to work hard as a nurse and also am attempting to write a book of short stories.

But I don’t do these two things consciously to earn money!  I do them because I love them (which is where my father’s philosophy kicks in ‘ Do what you love doing! If it earns you a living? How wonderful!  If not, just follow your mother’s advice.)’

Luckily my needs are humble and if I was given the choice between a luxurious holiday in the maldives or a cycling holiday in the rainy misty wilds of connemara, cork or kerry on my trusty yellow bike, I wouldn’t have to ponder it at all.

The warm tropical seas. The tall palm trees swaying in the breeze. The evening cocktails by the moonlit shore?

Naaah!

Give me the small fuschia edged boreens of the west of Ireland to cycle along.

The white sands and small rocky coves.

The fresh wind blowing in from the north west causing white horses to rear their heads.

The unpolluted waters where mackerel can be pulled in on a line with a feather, where prawns float on the incoming tide to be plucked from the sea with a childrens fishing net.

Where the black pearls of mussels can be prised off the rocks at low tide and put straight into the pan with garlic, a dash of cream and a cup of white wine.

Pick a handful of wild thyme growing beside your small fire and throw that in too.

Then sit on a rock relishing your feast looking out to the mist covered islands.

Pull a jumper around your shoulders and watch the sun setting in the west (unlike the tropics it will be getting chilly by now)

Then crawl, made drowsy by the freshness of the sea air, into your small tent and drift off to sleep lulled by the pattering of rain on your tent and the splash of waves so close you could stick out your toe and touch the water.

So Here I am!

On my yellow bike, my home a small green tent.

Poor in money but not in fulfillment

‘Money? don’t worry! It will come from somewhere. But this? This is harder earned. This you need to search for.

And it’s getting harder and harder to find it.

No amount of money can produce it.

It’s worth is immeasurable. It is priceless.

And when I’m here I feel I am the richest person in the world.

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The Lost art of reading maps and other childhood memories.

Tags

bread making, caravanning, childhood memories, families, Hills, holidays, Maps, tea, the burren, the yellow bicycle, travel

My Dad is leaning over the table frowning.

In front of him, a large ordnance survey map covers the place where we should, at this moment, be eating our tea.

We are hungry but know better than to voice this and sit tensely whilst he traces his finger along an orange line.

My mother would like to put the dishes on the table but she also knows better than to suggest moving the map.

Instead she leans over her husband’s shoulder and watches his moving finger.

‘There is is! there’s that wretched hill’  She says suddenly.

My mother never uses bad language. The worst I’ve heard her say was ‘fluther’ and that was only when she was put to the pin of her collar by her unruly bunch.

‘For fluther’s sake can you not be quiet for one minute’ She would mutter her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone as she tried to order the week’s groceries from the new H.Williams store at the bottom of the road.  She had discovered this to be a far easier way of feeding her family than traipsing us all down and back up again with pram and baskets of shopping.

‘And a pound of rajabari tea’ She would finish and glaring at us, replace the receiver onto the cradle.

(My dad was fussy about the tea he drank and even when it came on the market refused to drink tea bagged tea. ‘Dust swept up from the tea warehouses’ He declared.)

She has also spotted the offending hill before my dad does because her eyes are sharper eyes than his. They have to be. She is responsible for keeping them on the above mentioned large brood of unruly children.

One christmas as she was guiding her young family in through the doors of one of Dublin’s large department stores, a man coming out the other way with an equally sizable bunch, gave me a clout and, grabbing my coat, pushed me in among his.

My mother was furious and turned on him like an angry hen,

‘I’m so sorry I thought she was one of mine’ He blubbered apologetically, a wild look in his eye ‘My wife is in hospital’ He continued ‘having our eight and I thought it would be a good idea to take the kids to see the christmas lights. I think I am going mad. I’m terrified of losing one of them. The wife would never forgive me. I find it hard to tell one from the other’.

My mother patted him sympathetically on the shoulder. She understood men well. Hadn’t her own husband landed her children in dangerous situations now and again. Rowing boats etc without a life jacket between them. The fact that he always brought them safely home was probably due more to the survival instincts of the children then his care.

She bid him good luck and trundled us down o’connell street, paying no heed to me holding my smarting cheek.

I always wondered what my life would have been like if my Moms sharp eyes hadn’t spotted me and I had disappeared into the folds of another family forever.

I might have had a proper dressing table for one. (An object I had always longed for). We had drawing tables and work tables but no frilly- girly- shiny -mahogany dressing tables. Even one without the oval mirror would have made me happy .

But back to my Dad, or better still my Mom.

‘There’s the hill right there’ she repeated.

‘Well spotted May’ my father said pushing her finger aside and drawing a large X on the spot.

We all breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed. Now that we had found the hill that caused the burning of the the clutch last year, maybe my Dad would fold the map away and we could proceed with our tea.

But he wasn’t finished yet.

‘We can make a detour this way by making a run at the shorter hill. His finger was following a yellow line now. He looked worried all the same and so did we.

‘Making a run at it‘ had connotations known only to us Peppards and brought with it the familiar smell of a burning clutch.

As much as we wished that sentence didn’t exist, it continued to be mentioned over tea.

(I should state here that my dad was always in charge of the mealtime conversations)

For ‘making a run at it’ meant crossing one’s fingers and holding one’s breath and hoping no one would come hurtling down the other way on the narrow street forcing you to drive slower.

It meant hoping that we wouldn’t get stuck behind a tractor

or worse still a herd of cattle .

But like it or not ‘making a run at it’ was sometimes the only way my father could get the large caravan (it needed to be large to contain us all) up a steep hill with his vauxhall estate.

Filled to the brim with rain gear, painting gear, fishing gear, boating gear, baking gear, (just as he refused to drink tea bagged tea he equally refused to eat shop bread) children, dogs and once even a cage of black mice (mine! no way was I going to leave them at home) it had a tough time on these journeys.

And we leant forward hopefully in our seats as though our sheer will would help it pull us up the hill of some market town without burning out the clutch.

Last year when the clutch burned out we had to sleep in the caravan on the edge of town overnight as the car was left into the local garage (we were very lucky there was a garage) and wait for a new clutch to be delivered from dublin the next day (it arrived on the mail train! no courier vans back then).

We were mad because we were missing a day of running barefoot along white sands, netting shrimps in clear turquoise waters, climbing rocks and diving into freezing atlantic waters.

My Dad was mad because there was nowhere in the town he could fish.

My Mom took it all in her stride and made a delicious dinner on a small caravan stove, made up our beds and tucked us in.

We fell asleep to the noise of the odd car passing instead of the crash of waves.

But that was last summer and now it was late spring and we were preparing for our next journey west.

‘Where would we be without maps’ my Dad sighed contentedly. Happy now that the decision of our route to the west of ireland is made.

As far as he was concerned, other than to drive the car, his work was done.

It was now up to my mother to take over and start organising the packing. A feat in itself, taking up to two weeks to accomplish and needing the organization skills of a quartermaster preparing to move out a large army.

But back to maps.

One of my older sisters had the thankless job of navigating. On leaving the house, My Dad would put the map in her hands with the instruction ‘Give me the directions in plenty of time, I can’t turn this rig out on a coin you know or stop it suddenly!’

This was true and My Dad made a great show when he was taking a corner. Making a huge and exaggerated turn of the steering wheel almost crossing to the opposite side of the road whilst doing so.

‘It’s the next left’ My sister the navigator would pipe up from the back seat where we were sliding about on sleeping bags and pillows.

‘What’ My father would roar ‘ how can it be so soon’ and he would keep driving straight on while we watched the sign post for Galway or Mayo or Kerry or where ever we were heading, pointing to the left.

After a while he would pull into the side.

‘Give me the map’ he would thunder.

Silence from us in the back. We knew better than to giggle at his red face.

‘Now I’ll have to find a place to turn’.

As if it was the fault of the map reader.

Turning often involved unhitching the caravan and reversing it manually if the road wasn’t wide enough, which meant us all getting out to help. Luckily cars were few and far between back then and some of us were employed to stop any car that did happen along while the manoeuvre was taking place.

And what did we do (the none navigators) to amuse ourselves on this long route?

We played ‘Waving at the passers by’. A game where we waved manically at everyone who passed us or whom we passed, and laughed uproariously at their expressions as they tried to remember did they know us.

Which was fun until we waved at an old farmer cycling his bike. . When he lifted his hand to wave back, his bike wobbled and he fell into the ditch.

We thought this was the funniest thing ever.

Not so My Dad. He was furious and his hand came flying back giving however he could reach a wallop. Unfortunately it was the one person too busy to be part of the game.

The innocent map reader got the brunt of his hand.

One would imagine after all that childhood trauma I would have turned my back on maps and veered towards sat navs and gps instead.

But far from it and my love of maps lingers almost to the point of passion.

I have most of the ordnance survey maps of ireland.

Worn and sellotaped at the folds from years of use, nothing pleases me more over the winter months, than to spread them out on my own table and and follow the lines as my father once did and and imagining, through reading the contours, and sounding the place names what they looked like in reality.

I have one favorite map that is more mended than any of the others.

A black and white Tim Robinson map of the Burren.

Crumpled and sellotaped and spotted by the leftovers of errant flies. I pour over this map endlessly.

Not only am I not distracted by the color (now I must employ my imagination to even greater extent) but it shows every holy well and archaeological site in the area.

Last october I headed to clare in search of one particular well which has the cure of the eyes (A good map reader needs a sharp pair)

It was half way up a hill not unlike and running parallel to corkscrew hill.

A solid switch back climb, too steep for me to cycle, though I have seen racing cyclists make it to the top.

so I walked and pushed up and up. It never bothers me to walk with my bike. I am out exploring after all and sometimes things can be missed even whilst cycling.

Alongside me, the hazel and willow scrub were filled with finches, who flitted past with no fear.

Stopping at various view points, I looked back over the grey burren fields, laid out like immense stone amphitheaters.

Here and there late rock roses bloomed, their heads crouched low in the crevices of limestone. and sometimes a late flowering bloody cranesbill peeked shyly at me.

The majority of tourists were gone and I was only passed by a few cars mostly making there way down the steep road.

At last I reached the place I had marked on the map I noted a truck with some spades and shovels leaning against it, pulled in on the ditch.

Ignoring it I made my way through the scrub and started my search for a trail that would lead me to the well.

As I pushed further into the undergrowth I could hear rustling as though of animals.

I pushed into the scrub following the sounds.

A man’s cursing and then sounds of much crunching.

‘ya feckin’ boyo’ followed by a massive crunching sound.

In a clearing three men in luminous jackets with Clare county council written in red across their backs, were picking hazelnuts and cracking them between teeth.

‘The Holy well Mam?’ They appeared red faced, caught in the act! ‘We’ll show ya’

When they were gone, I knelt and splashed some of the clear water on my eyes and taking out a tiny bottle filled it to the brim.

I planned to use it daily over the winter months. Ensuring that my eyes were always up to map reading and that even without a map, they would lead me to places of such greenness and magic as this Holy Well surrounded by mossy rocks and hazel scrub in the heart of the grey stone fields of the Burren.

But there are times too when I like to leave my map behind and just explore and see where I end up.

Then when I get home I open it out and find where I was lost. A sort of backwards use of a map I suppose you could call it.

(if that makes sense).

The getting there (breaking old traditions and starting new ones).

Tags

camping., childhood memories

Tradition : A way of thinking, behaving or doing that has been used by people in a particular group, family or society for a long time.

(For the first time in about fifty years I am breaking the ‘mannin’ tradition. When I was training to be a nurse and then a midwife I always managed to get down even if it was just for a week. When I had my own children I continued the tradition, as did my sisters , and though our father is now dead and my mother no longer able for the camping life, we continue the tradition. But this year for different and for one very happy reason, I will not get down. Instead of being sad about it I have decided to write some memories of my childhood summers there, where bare-feet and freedom to swim, fish, boat, explore or sometimes just BE were the order of the day. Where the word boring did not even enter our heads and where, when we eventually had to leave and head back to the city we cried bitter tears as we watched the twelve pins disappear into the distance…..but first we had to get there.)

Six children, one of them struggling with a toddler, are running down a grassy bank towards the sea.

They are barefoot.

Their shoes lie abandoned in a messy heap on the floor of the car in which their parents are still sitting.

Their mother, holding a wiggling baby on her knee, braces herself against the dashboard with her free hand.

‘Careful’  She is saying, then,  ‘Maybe I should get out and follow the children?’.

‘Nonsense’ her husband is frowning in concentration and cursing loudly as a strong smell of burning clutch mingles with a smell of seaweed and wafts in through the window.

He struggles with the gears and the car followed by a large caravan ease forward. ‘Now that wasn’t too difficult’ He states with obvious relief.

‘I hope we can get back up again!’ the woman looks anxiously in the car’s wing mirror at the steep sandy hill they have just driven down.

‘We’ll worry about that when the time comes’  He absent-mindedly  picks up a babies nappy and mops his brow with it. A smear of baby spit joins the streak of sweat on his forehead.

The children have disappeared out of sight in the direction of the sea.

My father always had a fear of burning clutches and therefore so did we.

I can still recognise the smell of one a mile off and if I’m in the company of my siblings we will eye each other knowingly and burst out laughing.

‘D’you remember?’

Each of our memories are different but are very specific.

Mine is of winters when my dad would pour over maps laid out on the dining room table, looking at towns through a magnifying glass keeping a sharp eye out for steep hills, clutch burning hill’s.

To this day I can name any town in Ireland that has such a hill in it.

My dad was a perfectionist but he was also a lover of the wilds, of fishing and exploring and bringing his large brood initially camping then caravanning. These were not a good choice of pastimes for a perfectionist and caused him much stress.

His Vauxhall estate car hadn’t quite the capacity to haul the large caravan needed to accommodate us all, along with a dingy, tents, dogs and all the paraphernalia for a months holiday in the west with its unpredictable weather.

Therefore every hill was approached with trepidation for fear the engine would ‘give up’

As for what we needed to bring with us?

This was the 50’s and 60’s, a time before Google and long range weather forecasts so all eventualities had to be taken into account…

my father sometimes conceded to ringing the met eireann though, to get some idea as to what we were letting ourselves in for…

He would dial the number on the black house phone, listen gravely to the monotonous tone coming down the line, before shouting ‘rubbish’ into the receiver and slamming it down on the cradle.

We would smirk and continue to pack out shorts and t shirts into pillow cases and then like ants we would scurry to and fro carrying everything but the kitchen sink out to the caravan under the watchful eye of my mother who could spot a smuggled teddy bear or doll a mile off.

The perpetrator of the smuggling would be turned shamefacedly against the tide of ants to replace the beloved creature sadly back on his or her bed.

There was no room in our already bursting load for luxuries.

Our all important rain gear and my father’s fishing waders were packed in a large plastic dustbin. An ingenious idea as it could be left waterproof-idly outside the caravan thus leaving more space for us to draw and paint or read inside on those wet days…

It would take two to carry out this bin, a job we avoided as it was slow and cumbersome and left us out of the competitive racing game we secretly played.

As any member of a large family knows, competitiveness is rife where the best parental attention you might receive was a clip in the ear for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I suppose being children and therefore optimistic we were forever hopeful that we would get a hug or better still, some praise for packing the caravan so swiftly. So we would race each other with our loads.

My father didn’t partake much in the packing. He felt his duty was the tedious drive ahead so other than making sure his hardy rod and fishing equipment were on board he considered it a job for his wife and children.

Coming near the hour of departure (he was a punctualist as well as a perfectionist) he would sit into the driving seat, toot the horn loudly and enquire crossly ‘What’s keeping your mother?’

M

eanwhile my mother would be frantically checking had every body been to the toilet (nothing worse to a mothers ear than hearing a plaintive voice from the back after just a mile down the road) and that chore completed she would herd all her chicks into the car, and getting in herself(baby on knee) would turn and count us, (her biggest fear besides the toilet one was the possibility of leaving one of us behind, especially a valuable one like the ‘water getter’ or the ‘tent putter upper’.

Then, happy we were all on board she would turn and say serenely to my father ‘now not too fast dear’ (as if) and off we would go, waving goodbye to our house, to running water and flush toilets, to proper beds and cookers that lit easily.

If my mother dreaded these holidays which must have meant a lot of extra work for her she never let on.

But I am jumping ahead of myself here .

Back to the matter of packing!

I never remember a first aid box being included but I do remember the skill with which my second oldest sister, standing at the door of the caravan, would take and place the ferried goods from the rest of us, and put them in their proper places making sure the load was correctly distributed, mostly over the wheel area and up front because even the youngest of us knew that too much of a load placed to the back of the caravan would lead to the dreaded ‘snaking’. A thing to be avoided at all costs…

‘Is she snaking’ my father would roar from behind the wheel and we would stop our games of silent wrestling in the back and look anxiously over our shoulders watching for signs of the tail of the caravan swinging rhythmically into view….’No’ we would shout back in unison over the drone of my youngest brother who would for some reason chant to himself in a sad voice ”its too darn late to go home’ and the above mentioned sister would sigh with relief that her packing was successful.

When I think of it we never had the ‘snaking’ problem thanks to my sisters good packing and to the slow speed we were travelling at.

In later years I wonder did my dad make it up in order to make the journey seem more exciting and dangerous

Anyway snaking or not we would resume our silent wrestling as a means of occupying ourselves on this long and tedious journey. I say silently because any noise from us would bring my fathers hand sweeping back and he would roar ‘quiet’ over the increasing sound of the struggling car engine and he would threaten for the umpteenth time that if we didn’t behave he would turn round and drive home and we would settle down again until boredom overcame us once more.

He also had a thing about unexplained noises in the car and when the engine wasn’t struggling our journey was interspersed with his ‘sushing’

‘Shhhhhh’ he would whisper out of the blue ‘ what’s that noise’ and we would strain our ears frantically (afterall there might be a word of praise for the identifier of unexplained sounds) but no matter how hard we listened we would hear nothing.

‘shht! there it is again’ he would say

Once my eldest sister fainted because she held her breath too long while trying too hard to listen.

Beside wrestling there were other games we played too.

Waving at overtaking cars was one and as we drove further into the countryside waving at old farmers on bicycles ..

I remember one time an old farmer wobbling into the ditch as he, thinking he knew our smiling faces and waving hands, took his own hand off the handle bar to wave back and lost control of his bike. we screeched with delight as he fell then once more my fathers hand came sweeping back.

It would take us two or three days to arrive… mostly it was fun but now and again the tension would build up as we approached a town with a hill and we would pray silently that there was no market or tractor to stall us and burn the clutch…

We would automatically lean forward as my father wound down the wind and anxiously sniffed the air as we headed upward asking ‘do you smell anything’? and we would all sniff like mad.

If we had behaved in what my dad viewed as reasonably good, we would stop in kinnegad for an ice cream cone.

Kinnegad is a small town (now bypassed) about sixty miles west of Dublin. Nowadays it would take an hour to get there. Back in the day of my story it took at least two.

We were ready for a break at that stage and the town had some pluses.

The most important being, of course, it had no hill’s.

But for us it was the ice cream cones. Bought from the little shop on the corner where we would turn left for Galway they were out of this world.

Smooth, thick and creamy as though made from jersey cow milk they were worth behaving for and we eaked them out for as long as we could. And being us it became a competition as to who could make theirs last the longest.

For my dad the plus was the pub across the road where they let him use the facilities without buying a drink.

My dad was one of those men who was never cheeky and would never try and slip into a pub toilet unnoticed. He would always ask permission. Sometimes the proprietor would demand he buy a drink, so, the fact that he could use the one in this small town freely raised it considerably in his estimation.

‘And my wife’ ? He would ask when he was leaving and he would scurry back across the road with my mom in tow….as we got older I began to worry that the pub owners might think we were ‘travellers’.

But no one would mistake my parents for travellers. Eccentric they might have been, but they had something special about them. ‘Arty’ I suppose would be the word used nowadays.

We had a few more stops to make along the way. One overnight one at the Ballinahinch lakes but by this stage we were impatient to get to our final destination and we wished our dad would just keep driving throughout the night.

But we always got there eventually.

To that old familiar gate tied with shut with a piece of rotting rope gate

Kicking off our shoes we would tumble out alongside the designated gate opener and before she had even started her struggle with the knot in the rope would have scrambled up and over the rusty bars and running delightedly, our bare feet drumming on the hardened sand, would follow the road for a while before wheeling en mass like a herd of young horses over the grassy bank, our heels kicking up in delight, (we were not allowed scream or shout unnecessarily).

‘How the hell am I suppose to tell the difference between you being in trouble or just having fun?’ He would roar.

So we learnt to curtail our squeals and put our energy into running with speed.

The odd leap into the air was our way of showing our glee at being free from the confines of the car.

Then as we take that short cut over the grassy bank and beat the car to our favourite camping spot, we sigh with relief at its emptiness,(though a wild place others may find it by mistake as we did years before).

We throw ourselves on the flowered carpet like grasses in the sun, Flowers that are splattered here and there like tiny stars. some so minute they are visible only to our knowing eyes and allow all the stresses of that long journey be washed away by the sound of the waves before we are up and away again making sure nothing has changed since the year before.

Checking that the sand is just as white, the sea as turquoise blue, the rocks as smooth under our bare feet and we would have continued further and further along this magical place but a roar halts us in our tracks

‘Where do you think you are all going! there’s work to be done!’

Our Dad is standing on the edge of the beach, fishing rod in one hand, the rope of the dingy, oars lying askew in it in the other.

We run back more slowly this time,

‘Your mother needs help and don’t forget to put down the legs of the caravan before you start unpacking’ He instructs as he passes us, pulling the dingy behind him. His wellingtons scrunching over the tiny cowrie shells.

We climb back up to where the caravan is now unhitched from the car and is nestled cosily in the same sheltered hollow as the year before and the year before that again.

My mother has started unwinding the legs.

The baby has crawled beyond the rug and has happily found something to chew on, probably a hare’s dropping.

my eldest Sister heads off to the well with a bucket.

We get to work, pitching small tents for those who don’t have a bed in the caravan, circling them around the main encampment.

We smile at each other as we hammer in pegs and tauten guy ropes.

Another year has come around.

we are ‘back’.