"My sister took the place of our mother"

Poet, playwright and novelist Dermot Bolger, and his sister, novelist June Considine, say they have benefited from a 'tremendous shared history', writes PETER CUNNINGHAM.

‘I WAS 14,” June Considine says. “I remember waking up in the middle of the night when my mother was giving birth to Dermot in the next room. Our aunt, who lived nearby, and a midwife were in there too. I remember being very frightened and going to the door of the bedroom with my sister, and being told to go back to bed, that everything was all right. Then I heard Dermot crying.”

She brought her new little brother for walks in his pram, and gave him his first haircut.

“He was my kid brother,” she says. “He had a big head of curls and I remember them all falling to the floor.”

Tragedy struck in 1969 when, Bridie, their mother, died. Considine, newly married, moved back home for six months.

“I was a child of two halves,” Bolger, the youngest of four siblings, says. “When our mother died, with Dad at sea, June and my sister Deirdre did the child-raising.”

June says: “Up to then it had been a caring role, now it became more a mothering role.”

“I always remember her taking the place of our mother,” Bolger says.

A few years later, back at home once a week to tidy up and keep an eye on things, Considine found crumpled scraps of paper in Bolger’s bedroom. “I read them and felt a tingle going down my back. He was writing poetry,” she says.

Bolger became the chief babysitter to Considine’s children with her husband, Sean. “June was my first audience,” Bolger says. “I’d always try and have a new poem ready to read to her every time I came to babysit.”

Not long afterwards, Considine and Bolger together attended a writers’ workshop run by Anthony Cronin and Sean McCann at the People’s House on the Grand Canal. Their first assignment was to write 200 words about a bridge.

“We went to the bridge in Malahide railway station and got locked in. We had to climb out over the wall,” Bolger recalls.

He also remembers that Considine and he were the only ones in the group to write the prescribed 200 words – it was the beginning of writerly discipline for both sister and brother.

Bolger, although the younger of the two, began writing in earnest before his sister.

“He went with his dream at a very young age,” Considine says. “He had more confidence. For me, it was still a dream.”

Today, as successful and acclaimed writers, the siblings are still very close. “She is the first person, outside of my wife and children, to whom I would turn for advice,” Bolger says. “I am intensely proud of her achievements.”

“The shared history is something tremendous,” Considine says. “If families are fortunate, and the memories are good, that’s what hold them together. We were fortunate.”

JUNE CONSIDINE writes for both adults and children. She has been shortlisted for a Hennessy award. Her new novel, The Prodigal Sister, written as Laura Elliot, is published by Avon/HarperCollins.

Dermot Bolger is the author of seven volumes of poetry. His plays have been performed worldwide, and received many prizes, including the Samuel Beckett Award. His latest play, The Consequences of Lightning, returns to the Axis Arts Centre, Ballymun, from May 19 to 30