Like one of my Uncle Tony’s homing pigeons, I often find myself wandering back to Sandymount. It used to be my playground. On one of those glorious days recently, when the endless rainclouds cleared and the sun came out like a surprise party, I met a friend for lunch in Crudo, and when she went off in a taxi, I wandered around the Green.
I sat on a bench and admired the bust of Yeats where we once took a family photo back in the day. Daddy hadn’t long to live but we didn’t know that then, small children with questionable haircuts, and teenagers in 1970s gear, standing beside the poet, in the village of his birth, gazing steadily down the camera.
I allowed myself to go back that day. It felt a bit like time travel, made golden by sunshine. I was in the mood for drowning in nostalgia. I walked past childminders and their charges, admired the carefully tended flowers, made a spiritual pilgrimage to the bakery where for decades the Borza family fed fried everything to the village. I thought about batter burgers and briefly considered going into the bookies, but I stopped myself, worried I’d fall back into my old ways, my father’s daughter, drawn to singing, gambling and making friends out of strangers.
There was a time when I would have thrown all my babysitting money on the greyhound in the red jacket. I squinted behind my sunglasses outside the betting shop, all the better to see myself standing there, surrounded by older men, in a smoky room. If I won, and I hardly ever did, I’d lose the winnings later playing cards with Billy Burke in his flat, which always smelled of egg and chips. He’s gone now, but I close my eyes again and see Billy cycling down towards the villas, grey mane of hair flying in the wind, moving like Jagger.
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I let myself remember. Learning to ride a bike outside Ryan’s pub, wobbling past the hardware store on my rusty blue Raleigh. Robbing orchards and picking blackberries in fields that are long gone. Buying penny sweets and pink cake in Miss Roddy’s and getting my Smash Hits from Mapother’s.
When I’m back there, Sandymount still feels like home. I gravitate to 8 Sandymount Green. There was poverty and tragedy in that house, as there is in too many houses and too many families, but I mostly remember all of us eating miraculous loaves-and-fishes meals at 6pm sharp around the kitchen table. Meat loaf. Whiting surprise (Thanks to a leaflet from a fish-promoting Bord Iascaigh Mhara recipe. The “surprise” was pineapple). Sometimes our mother would put a whole roast-chicken dinner in tinfoil and we’d eat it on the strand, on days like these.
I can’t go home. Not really. It’s not there any more. My mother sold the white house with the blue door and “Inglenook” carved on a wooden plaque outside. It was demolished and turned into a plastic surgery, and more recently a doctor’s clinic. My mother made that home a healing place. A refuge. It feels right that healing still happens there now.
Home is where the feet are, as someone told me years ago. I think it’s why I’ve never been properly homesick
Dublin is a different place. Sandymount is a different village. I’m not sure a family like ours, a widowed single mother with eight children on benefits, could live there any more. I love to visit, but I’m happiest on the other side of the river. A northsider now with northsider children who roam around North Strand and Clontarf and Raheny, places I’ll never really know the way I know my home village. Still, it turns out D3 suits me better than D4.
Home is where the feet are, as someone told me years ago. I think it’s why I’ve never been properly homesick. I felt at home in Birmingham, where I lived in a squat as a teenager. I felt at home in London, where I worked in a Garfunkel’s and got married for the first time. I felt at home in Belfast, where I met the man who would become my second husband, eventually.
I feel at home on the cancer day ward of the Mater hospital, where Albert and Noel and Mary Beth and a rotating crew of kind and efficient experts take care of me every few weeks. I feel at home in my bed, where I do most of my reading and thinking and writing. Watching The Apprentice with my husband and teenage daughters, eating still warm banana bread, that’s home too.
I felt at home on the pages of The Irish Times Magazine for the better part of 15 years. That was until I flounced off 10 years ago, declaring that I didn’t want to write about my life any more. I even threw myself a leaving party. But it turns out I couldn’t quit, and continued to write personal columns elsewhere in the paper. I was, and not for the first time, saying more than my prayers. Writing about life, the extraordinary ordinary, is what I do. It’s what I’ll do for as long as I’m let. And I am grateful beyond words for that.
This weekend, I am back in the Saturday Magazine. Changed. As we all are. Changing. As we all must. It’s great to be back. A sort of homecoming. It feels a bit like time travel.
