Room, preserved for the possible visit of His Holiness or John Francis Kennedy, whoever made it first, complete with The Good Armchairs set at angles appropriate for polite conversation before the tiled fireplace, upon which sit Chester and Lester, china dogs that came one Christmas from my Swain aunts and which in my daydreams often scampered alongside me when I went off with The Famous Five for ginger beer – second-hand Enid Blytons were a speciality at Spellissey’s in Ennis, they were your First Books once and you were to graduate from Enid into Agatha, Blytons to Christies, because books were Mysteries, the whole of life a Whodunit, which is kind of MacCarroll Deep if you think about it.
But don’t, because Look, there’s a glass case with assorted other ceramics, tiny cream Belleek bell with tinier shamrocks, brass Celtic cross, miniature Virgin Mary who, First Miracle of Faha, transformed herself into a plastic bottle with blue cap-crown, a Waterford Crystal clock without battery, never had a battery because it was beautiful and didn’t need to also tell you that beauty and everything else passes – thank you, Mr Keats – and to the left of this a glass-topped table with embroidered doily and tile coaster of Lourdes should His Holiness wish to put down his pint. Once, this room was the sanctum saculorum, the fiddly-dee fiddly-dorum, the Havisham Headquarters of our house, the great untouched – and often undusted – that was kept for special occasions which, like good fortune, to our family never arrived. Then Nan Nonie moved in and a bed was put in one corner of the room – His Holiness would understand – and a belted trunk of her clothes which was always open and because she preferred Flung to Folded lent an air of lewd display that might have challenged His Holiness a little, to say nothing of her Po.
Eventually The Parlour became Nan’s Parlour then just Nan’s. There she keeps her Complete Collection of Clare Champions , an ever-expanding series of yellow mountains of newspaper in which is recorded the full entire life of the county, which means that if you had the time you could start upstairs here reading the exploits of some lads in Troy and work your way through all recorded civilisation right up to the savage blow-by-blow of the Saint Senan’s Under-14s two days ago. The Champions are an inexhaustible chronicle of everything that happened here in Nan’s lifetime. She never goes back to reread it, never does any old-style finger and blackened-wet-thumb googling, flicking the pages to find something. It’s enough that the papers passed through her hands once, that once she lived through that particular week. Now their physical presence filling up the room is a kind of testament to her enduring, to the River of Time and her unsinking through it. That’s how I’ve come to think of it anyhow. No one pays it any mind, or thinks it the least bit odd. That’s the thing about Faha. When Lizzie Frawley was pregnant with an imaginary child, and for fifteen months sat sideways in Mass to accommodate an invisible bulk which she’d sometimes tap gently, no one said a word.
Isn’t Odd nearly God, as Margaret Crowe says.
Because the house is four rooms, each the depth of the building, Mam and Dad had to cross Nan’s to get to their end room. Their room is basically a cave. The entrance is four feet thick by five feet high, a little stone passageway Dad had to duck through to get inside. It was years before he stopped banging his head.
I still call it Mam and Dad’s room.
We are not Well-Off, we’ve never been Well-To-Do, never Upwardly Mobile or Going Places. A poet is upwardly mobile in a different sense, but it doesn’t butter your bread as Tommy Devlin says. Without explanation, I’ve always understood there was a reason Dad never ever bought new clothes, why he wore shoes with oval-shaped holes in the soles, why Mam cut his hair, why she cut mine, why there was a jar on the kitchen window
But don’t, because Look, there’s a glass case with assorted other ceramics, tiny cream Belleek bell with tinier shamrocks, brass Celtic cross, miniature Virgin Mary who, First Miracle of Faha, transformed herself into a plastic bottle with blue cap-crown, a Waterford Crystal clock without battery, never had a battery because it was beautiful and didn’t need to also tell you that beauty and everything else passes – thank you, Mr Keats – and to the left of this a glass-topped table with embroidered doily and tile coaster of Lourdes should His Holiness wish to put down his pint. Once, this room was the sanctum saculorum, the fiddly-dee fiddly-dorum, the Havisham Headquarters of our house, the great untouched – and often undusted – that was kept for special occasions which, like good fortune, to our family never arrived. Then Nan Nonie moved in and a bed was put in one corner of the room – His Holiness would understand – and a belted trunk of her clothes which was always open and because she preferred Flung to Folded lent an air of lewd display that might have challenged His Holiness a little, to say nothing of her Po.
Eventually The Parlour became Nan’s Parlour then just Nan’s. There she keeps her Complete Collection of Clare Champions , an ever-expanding series of yellow mountains of newspaper in which is recorded the full entire life of the county, which means that if you had the time you could start upstairs here reading the exploits of some lads in Troy and work your way through all recorded civilisation right up to the savage blow-by-blow of the Saint Senan’s Under-14s two days ago. The Champions are an inexhaustible chronicle of everything that happened here in Nan’s lifetime. She never goes back to reread it, never does any old-style finger and blackened-wet-thumb googling, flicking the pages to find something. It’s enough that the papers passed through her hands once, that once she lived through that particular week. Now their physical presence filling up the room is a kind of testament to her enduring, to the River of Time and her unsinking through it. That’s how I’ve come to think of it anyhow. No one pays it any mind, or thinks it the least bit odd. That’s the thing about Faha. When Lizzie Frawley was pregnant with an imaginary child, and for fifteen months sat sideways in Mass to accommodate an invisible bulk which she’d sometimes tap gently, no one said a word.
Isn’t Odd nearly God, as Margaret Crowe says.
Because the house is four rooms, each the depth of the building, Mam and Dad had to cross Nan’s to get to their end room. Their room is basically a cave. The entrance is four feet thick by five feet high, a little stone passageway Dad had to duck through to get inside. It was years before he stopped banging his head.
I still call it Mam and Dad’s room.
We are not Well-Off, we’ve never been Well-To-Do, never Upwardly Mobile or Going Places. A poet is upwardly mobile in a different sense, but it doesn’t butter your bread as Tommy Devlin says. Without explanation, I’ve always understood there was a reason Dad never ever bought new clothes, why he wore shoes with oval-shaped holes in the soles, why Mam cut his hair, why she cut mine, why there was a jar on the kitchen window
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