'There is a feeling deep inside us all that nobody is looking after us anymore'

In the good times we stored up houses like lollipops – now it's raining and we have nothing and we're angry, writes MICHAEL HARDING

THE GENERAL came for a barbeque on Sunday. We sat beneath a canopy on the patio with a small fire and looked out at the rain while the steaks were sizzling. “That was an outrageous thing you did last week,” he said. “Defending Mister Quinn!”

“Yes,” I admitted, “It was rash.”

“Reprehensible,” he continued, wolfing down a rib-eyed lump of cow. “The law is the law, and it must be obeyed.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “It was reckless of me to defend Mr Quinn.”

“You were simply putting coal on the fire,” he continued. “There’s a fire of rage and anger out there regarding that man, and your article simply put more coal on it.”

“Maybe so,” I agreed. “But that’s ironic, because the point of the article was that there is already too much anger in the ether.”

There is a feeling deep inside us all that nobody is looking after us anymore. As we grow older we lose our mother, and as we awaken we lose our gods; that’s the human condition. So there’s no one to calm us or cuddle us; the child inside each one of us is orphaned. In the time of the boom we stored up houses and holiday homes and bank shares like they were lollipops for a rainy day, and now it’s raining and we have nothing; so we’re angry.

I can’t remember it ever raining as much as it does now. In my childhood the sun was always shining as I climbed trees and walked along the riverbank, which meandered around the drumlins leaving beautiful lakes in every hollow. I liked being alone. I often hid under the stairs for that same sweet pleasure of solitude. But the lakes were the most attractive refuge I ever found from other people.

“Where were you?” my mother would ask as I came in for tea.

“Out at the lakes,” I would reply.

And no one ever asked me what I was doing out there. It was the most natural thing in the world to be drawn to lakes.

Of course sometimes the lakes were dangerous. Occasionally a person would disappear all of a sudden and the neighbours would whisper that “the guards are dragging the lake.”

But the lakes never attracted me in that manner. I may have been sad but I trusted the universe. I may have missed my mother from the moment I was suddenly ejected into the world but I wanted to survive.

Years ago I knew of a university professor who walked into a lake and was dragged out with his fist locked around his briefcase. I suppose his briefcase was like a worry blanket, and the lake was like a mother enveloping him in tenderness. But I knew the lake was not my mother. My mother was a slim woman in a frock who made buns. Lakes were enormous spaces filled with water, and that was enough to astonish me.

And then there were trees. My mother often left me in a pram at the end of the garden because I wouldn’t stop crying and eventually the shimmering of a thousand green leaves became for me a calming presence around the pram, and ever since I have retained a sense of the nurturing and maternal power of woodlands. Trees often remind me of my auntie Molly, all blousy and heavy-breasted. But they also have a way of opening up the universe. In their sculpture and structure, in their leaf and light and especially the complex movement of the wind in their branches, trees open to me a space that fills with consciousness and awakens in me a sense of belonging.

I know lots of people who have been angry with their mothers for decades feeling that they didn’t get all the love that was their due as children or infants. Perhaps I was lucky because my mother gave me everything. She fed me and clothed me and lit a thousand candles in various churches for my well-being. She may not have hugged me very much. But she gave me buns and apple tarts.

And beyond that I found a deeper mother in the world and in all its loveliness. And beyond God I found a lake, nothing more and nothing less; that quiet shoreline where I still walk to quench the undying embers of anger and rage. A beautiful lake which will be there long after me and Seán Quinn and the General and everyone else in the world are dead and gone.