An invitation from The Irish Times to share experiences of loneliness in a recent series sent me reeling back in memory to late childhood in 1960s Donegal.
I am on the cusp of my 12th birthday and standing with my father in an open yard at the back of a village hotel, as the last few sticks of family furniture are auctioned. I watch as the large-wheeled tricycle, which bonded all eight of us siblings in hours of endless fun and joy-rides over a period of 15 years, is thrown on to the back of a cart and driven out of sight.
The rest of the family have left for the east coast, the house is empty, all our possessions auctioned off, and my father is left with one last job to do before he, too, joins the rest of the family.
That evening he drives me to a small cottage, high on a hillside overlooking a harbour, which is to be my home for the next school year.
I have left behind a long summer of sibling activity: swimming, rock climbing, hillwalking and picnics with a boisterous, lively and musical family. I am now standing at a door entering the home of an elderly couple and walking into a long winter of silence and emotional stagnation.
My father waves goodbye, urging me to do my work well at school, and then leaves. I now know, years later, that it was to be the beginning of a deep experience of loneliness that would inform the emotional landscape of my adolescence and adult life, and irrevocably arrest the natural spontaneity of joy and confidence of my earlier childhood.
During that year, followed by a further five years in boarding school, I, like many other children at that time, was separated from my family for lengthy periods and left in the care of adults who didn’t love me.
A child has no idea they are lonely but will feel a deep sense of displacement, absence, separation and isolation. That is akin to what I felt, but no one would have guessed. I worked hard, as my father had asked, and got the scholarship, which was so valuable to him.
I am back in the little cottage overlooking the harbour, and the woman of the house asks me to draw the curtains for fear the kitchen light will attract the drunk men coming from the harbour bar. I have no idea what a drunk man is. It is midwinter and I can hear the thunder of Atlantic waves lashing against the harbour wall.
The outside toilet is at the top of the small field at the back of the house. I brace myself for the nightly ordeal in the dark. I bend low and crawl on all fours the length of the field for fear that the drunk men might see me.
There is no one to share fears with and no one to confide in. It is the beginning of the experience of burying one’s emotions, of denial, of forgetting the real self and of existing in a separate world.
I am back in the cottage, and it is now Halloween. A feast arrives in a box from Dundalk, packed by my mother. I carry the box into the back room. There are two single iron beds in the room. One is mine and the other is empty. I lay the box on the empty bed, open it and unwrap each small brown-paper bag of nuts, sweets, toffee bars, apples and oranges.
The contact with home, the closeness of my mother and the opening of the bags is a warm and intimate delight, but as I crack each nut, the absence of family, the emptiness in the room, is overwhelming and I close the box.
The memory fades to grey and I go back into the warmth of the small range in the kitchen and my school books on the table.
Nowadays, I am peeling back the layers of buried emotion and reconnecting again with the source of early childhood joy.
When I sing one of the big songs of love or lamentation in Irish, or when I am asked to sing at a funeral, I can easily re-enter that room of childhood loneliness; into the absence and isolation. Much of my singing springs from it and is informed by it. For that gift I am grateful.
- We would love to receive your family memories, anecdotes, traditions, mishaps and triumphs. Email 350 words and a relevant photograph if you have one to familyfortunes@irishtimes.com. A fee will be paid
