Barefoot Pilgrimage

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

Text © Andrea Corr 2019

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Cover photographs © Jill Ferry/Trevillion Images (drawer); authors own (additional photographs)

Photographs courtesy of the author except where indicated

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Andrea Corr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008321307

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008321321

Version: 2019-09-10

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Dedication

For Brett and especially for our two great blessings, Brett Jr and Jeanie. This baton passes to you.

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Note to Readers

5  Dedication

6  Contents

7  Dear Reader

8  Barefoot Pilgrimage

9  Acknowledgements

10  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Dear Reader

I did not sit down to write a book. This (whatever this may be) began in the summer of 2017. Two years after Daddy had died. Eighteen years after Mum. An overwhelming need to write it all down because if I died now too, this strange, normal, family, human love story as it really was to me, might also die. And then would it have ever really been?

I did not sit down at all, nor consider a destination. I just obeyed the pictures as they came. The questions. The fleeting moments. The present into the past. The present because of the past and back again with a few human, mad-gene detours along the way.

The first story – in the chalet in Skerries – was truly the first door that opened. That dusty room on top of the mattresses, hiding and pretending I wasn’t there. It persisted and it seems to me now insisted I write it down. Not another one. Not a perhaps ‘better’ one. That memory was the first door. The first room. And it began this barefoot pilgrimage.

I walked fast to summon the pictures. I walked fast to slow them down. To still them ultimately and to merely describe, then, the room that I had returned to in my mind. A sympathetic, non-judgemental voyeur of my own life as I lived it growing up. A narrator with the blessing of hindsight. It is what it is and that is OK.

So many of the rooms I loved. They made me laugh out loud, remembering us as we were. That’s a lucky thing to say. Other rooms of course I was happy to write myself out of as swiftly as possible and scramble in the dark for another door.

I tried not to think of you, dear reader, for I am a singer with a debilitating desire to be liked. I tried not to censor it all, clean and smiling like a pop video.

It came to obsess me in a way, once I began. Images from the past were appearing all the time.

Blinding flashes of you startle me awake.

The outside tap on the wall. The musty earth smell of my cat’s paws. The hanging lamp over the oval glass table that you pull down and change the mood of the kitchen … But most of all, Mum.

In my first draft she was barely there. I thought I had forgotten her. That I had forgotten what it was like to be with her. To blissfully take her for granted. But she came back to me on these walks and I think after all that it may have been she that had me do this. Because this does not feel like it was ever a decision of mine and now that I am sitting down writing to you, I think I may understand this first story. I felt a pain in my heart when I heard her voice looking for me. All this time maybe it is me that has been looking for her. And this is Jean Bell’s engraving in the tree.

Barefoot Pilgrimage

Take a picture with words.

Click.

My tanned feet, their nails the colour of the pool before me, the sky above. My naked three-year-old (naked babies I dreamed of) singing while he makes muddy puddles (oh, Peppa Pig and her silly dada, the ‘expert’) with this rented garden’s hose, on this holiday in Portugal.

I’m on my third book and in my head I’m beginning my own story. Maybe I should. Maybe I can do more than the mere minutes of a song, and I can leave it to you to imagine the melody. Catchy pop with more hooks than a what was it …? But I warn you. My weakness is vanity. I want you to like me. So I must picture this unread.

Not all that I remember I am proud of, but when it comes to childhood, I think we can only wonder why, but never blame, and I think there’s a continuous thread that just might explain me, but I still don’t understand. And good God could we just stop analysing ourselves. First-world vocation. And Ireland says, ‘Aye, that’s Catholic guilt.’

The thread. I’m seven, on top of a pile of old mattresses. I can’t even kneel here without touching the ceiling and I’m reading a children’s book I loved, The Wild Swans. It’s a chalet in Skerries, all blue and pink like a playhouse, cardboard walls and perpetual Fisher Price family sound. It’s dusty up here, all close and hidden. I hear Mum in the kitchen and what I’m trying to get at here, Caroline’s voice asking Mum has she seen me. She’s calling my name down the wooden-toy hall but I keep quiet and still and she doesn’t know about here, I don’t think, so I stay hidden. And silent as the breath I won’t exhale. This makes me sad but it’s just what it is and it’s just a story; she runs out calling my name, the cardboard door swinging shut, looking for me.

And this unwinds with life and lots in between to my twenty-six-year-old self, for the first time, watching a camcorder video of our lost mum, Jean, on a boat in California … her voice at my ear so immediate it’s like it rocks me awake:

‘Where’s Pandy?’

And my heart is wrung.

To hear a voice from the dead looking for you. To miss a voice. To miss being looked for. This means something but I don’t know what.

If this is the beginning of the book I warn you, I have to leave lots out and then maybe you can say, ‘Ah, but I want to read the book she didn’t write.’ Or maybe not. Maybe ‘I don’t even want to read that one, thanks very much.’ Now that is the inner chorus of a Dundalk girl who’s come down with a dose of the ‘Who do you think you are?’s.

I have to write this now though. I am scared of people dying. Actually, not people: I am scared of Johnny dying, and he has to read, counsel, manage and sell if he loves it, or not at all. Oh there’s that dishcloth heart again, wrung out and reaching the base of my throat where sobs and yells gather to consider their escape.

Not now.

I’d like to say I always wrote but I’d be lying. There were girls like that in my class, writing poetry because they couldn’t help it and getting published, albeit in our school magazine. I got my first A in honours English in my Leaving Cert. Believe me, it wasn’t coming and it was a shock, but I did know I wrote my best story, that hot June day in the exam hall (why was it always hot for exams and not for holidays?). I actually laughed out loud writing it (shhhh … sorry) and enjoyed it more than anything before. And the world went quiet, as it does now.

‘Soap Opera: Suds or something more significant?’ The latter of course.

And I’d like to thank that boiled egg Mammy made me and the bottle of Lucozade I had with my friend Conor before I went in.

These are bewildering times I find my forty-three-year-old self in. And I can give you my views, though they’re just the conversation you had last night. We’re about to release our T Bone Burnett record, Jupiter Calling. I did think we should consider calling it Love in a Time of Terror, but let’s let music and words do what they will to you personally. Bring you where you uniquely want and here is a place you may not wish to be reminded of …

That other title, though, is the truth of what this record means. Where hate is incited from the most powerful pulpits, we cry ‘Bulletproof Love’. You hear, ‘Go home, you’re not getting in’; we drown it out with ‘SOS’.

Love in a time of profound disappointment and degradation. I think of words, meaning and evolution. Humankind. I’m only human. When did ‘kind’ slip out and ‘only’ skulk in? We’ve swapped aspiration for resignation. Our humanity now, a mere excuse.

And our small failings posed, posted and applauded. A million likes in one hour for a cosmetically altered sixteen-year-old pout (surely that’s not right, Doctor? Mother?). I don’t blame the girl (childhood, remember?) but what will we become?

Darwin, wait – we’re going the wrong way!

But also I might die and Daddy wrote his memoir and his daddy before him. He, James Corr, lived through two world wars. (‘Why am I reading this? Where can I get his?’ Voce piena, chorus to fade …)

You see, my life is permanently passing before my very eyes these days. It’s all near death.

The inhalations! The cold and present breath and the memory in my lungs. Earthly light. Moment. Isness. Human love. Meaning. Here. The body. The swirl and the electricity of the heart, beating away by itself on the eco cycle in a night light while you sleep … even … Sleep. So worthy of a mention here, though so often looked down upon …

Sleep is beautiful …

That’s the thing when you wake up a forty-year-old orphan … fear of that loss, of time running out, of ending, knowingly repeating the same stories, ‘memory lane’ as Daddy called them, just to have them in the room again … and I suppose that means I love life, I love human beings, I love strangers so much sometimes I get a pain in my heart … You lovely lady on the crutch that I came to from my thoughts to realise I hadn’t held the door open for … I went back; ‘Sorry!’ I said, and held it, only for the buggy with my boy in it to topple over.

‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ you smiled into my eyes.

And therein may lie the poetry of human existence, I think. The reach of another someone, someone you didn’t see before and may never see again. However, it’s not all beautiful. I just passed a man bulling his way down the Fulham Road, banging into a woman, all Him and His Rucksack … and their head-nodding verbal exchange thereafter …

Anyway, that said, I still love you, stranger. Fellow human, sharing this faulty planet at the same time.

Mum, a Donegal girl, and Dad, Dundalk born and bred, met at a dance hall in Blackrock: The Pavilion, it was called. She was twenty-one and he thirty … He fixed an eeny-meeny-miny-moe to land on her to dance, and wrote a poem about the destiny and the ‘what if’s involved.

Booze bored

Winter woed

Bed beckoning

Did angels convene

To bring me to Jean

Of wraparound eyes

In passion of pink

First dance

Last dance

We dance forever …

And they did. I’m not saying it was uninterrupted bliss, kiss and laughter … oh they could fight too, but isn’t the fight, in reality, just a different step?

They talked of a pivotal moment. They were at the pictures on a date, when ‘Strangers on the Shore’ played and there it was: recognition, a mutual love of music.

And their shared life rolled out before them.

The other day I found a letter he wrote her, folded up in a box in his bedroom in Dundalk. He is funny throughout, as always he was, and quotes her – ‘you’re very bold, Gerry’, admonishing his wicked sense of humour but also loving it and sharing it, all at the same time. But in the last paragraph he writes:

I find it difficult, Jean, to communicate on paper my feelings for you. True love like great music is beyond the reach of words. Suffice it to say then, that I wish to spend the rest of my life being good to you, to you my love, today tomorrow and always. Ps write soon please?

They had five children. Our brother Gerard, born next after Jim, was killed on the road in front of our house, in the very first days after they had brought the new baby, Sharon, home from hospital. While Mum showed her off to our aunt Maureen, he avoided the locked gates by hopping over our neighbour’s wall and ran out after a ball. The car stopped, but it hit him while moving off once again, presuming he would wait and wouldn’t run back. He was three years old.

Now that I have two children of my own, I find I have no eloquence here … it is too unbearable. So this will be short.

Throughout their lives our parents could not exceed three minutes talking of him. The pain would arrest them all too soon. Therefore I don’t have many stories, but what I do know I will tell you.

Gerard was funny, the image of Dad, and, it would seem to me, clever beyond his years. On being told, one day, that his shoes were on the wrong feet, he crossed his legs and smiled up at them … ‘They’re on the right feet now,’ he said. He would sit on his chair in the kitchen and ask for more toast, more tea (he liked tea) and, feeling Daddy’s impatience, he would repeat, ‘More tea, more toast,’ in a convincing sing-song voice, only to respond to Daddy’s disbelieving ‘Och’ with an ‘Only joking!’

He was also a great singer and now it has me thinking of the destiny and the what ifs … Would he have been the lead singer of a band … A family trio … Jim, Gerard and Sharon …

Caroline and myself, a dream they never had.

‘April 3 1970’

Set me free

Why would I want to hurt you

When I love you

When your blood is mine?

Why would I want to be the thorn in your side

Hold you back from your life

Be the shadow in your light?

I am in the state of bliss

And I am love

That’s all I am in you

I am your purest love

Set me free

Would you want that for me

Would you haunt a child on his journey to man

Would you blame a little boy

Would you wish you were alive?

Set me free brother

My love is your light

It’s in your fingers on the keys

In your song, your melody

I am you and you are me

And we will see eternity

Set me free

And you’ll be free

April 3 1970

There is much that winks and sparkles in a Monet light. And I am Thumbelina tripping across the lily pads … The Children of Lir, the Salmon of Knowledge. The washing blowing on the line, hiding my face in the honeyed pink light of the sheets. Or am I lying on the sheets, cradled in summer smells. Looking up at my mum and the floating white in the blue.

Pocket money for the carefully chosen penny sweets and the ‘Och’ that escapes the wicked shopkeeper as the bell tolls our arrival after Sunday Mass. For time is money and time is just 30p today.

Swingball, the paddling pool, breathe in Daddy’s face, all petrol and grass after he’s mown the lawn in straight lines. Hopscotch hop over the fence to my next-door neighbour and early-childhood best friend Paul, don’t let the wire catch, fish-hooked in your bottom lip like poor twister Caroline did and knock knock knock … Spilled milk and a drowning fly for the cats by the door … The sound of Violet’s radio – ‘wireless’ – within, she aproned and singing along, keeping her country with Big Tom … Paul’s heavy flip-flop-flap-slap running free down the hall while a dishwater Mammy hand proffers a sunken queen cake, ‘Ye wee pet’. Make a mental note to disappear before the same loving hand spoons out the cod liver oil. And out the door we run to play to …

‘Paul, your coooaaaaaaaaaaaat …’

… the cement mixer and the delicious slop for our cookery kitchen.

‘Here’s one I made earlier’ – Paul’s best Delia voice as our culinary mud and dandelion creation appears behind the tile door of the brick fridge. Oh, the joys of having a best friend as your next-door neighbour and a dad that is not Bob, but is Tom the builder. The see-saw, a seven-foot, smooth, splinter-free beam of wood on a barrel with more solid grey bricks for brakes, lets you bump your bum happy and he’s lifting off sky high into seventh heaven … Walk-run, (but not too fast coz it will go all cartoon Road Runner on you), scuff-toed, Clarks sturdy shoes on those barrels now for the barrel race and circus time. Kick the can, hide-and-seek, blind man’s buff, climb the trees, night fern smells on my blackened palms and at home later I am still a part of my friend’s life. I hear the slate shovel dragging and slurping in the coal and slack for the fire now, because their house is always kept warm, even in the summer. Always a fire lit. Sure she sunbathes her white talcum puff skin beneath a hat and a wool plaid blanket. While our black Irish, Spanish-invasion mammy next door is brown as a berry and sleek, smelling of Ambre Solaire.

And the doors are closing, night night … Stories, memories and pictures merge and spring vivid, only to dissipate … But there is a shadow. I see it. Yes, of course.

Because I realise now that all that time there was a ghost in our house. And there was one next door, too. Another missing boy named Brian who gets caught in Violet’s throat telling Paul to put on his coat and pull up his hood. ‘Ah Paul, you’ll catch your death,’ as if death really was catching … Don’t allow your first glance at the full moon to accidentally fall through your pane of glass. We are on our knobbly knees holding on to the bursting dam of a laugh through the Angelus and the rosary at six o’clock. A revolving, weary-go-round string of prayers and endless blessing of oneself, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, hand wings flutter swift over heart, Father Son Holy Spirit, bowing heads and pray for us, Father Son Holy Spirit, beads to lips, three holy trinity kisses, bless lips, bless forehead, bless heart, again, again, again as if asking, pleading, ‘How many times will keep us safe and here, tell me, Father Son Holy Spirit, so I can seal us all in for the evening, sacred and sound, Amen.’

Our very own beautiful and beloved ghost, our own missing one behind Mammy’s brown eyes benign. A little boy standing next to Jim. Two little boys had two little toys. In her squeezing-tighter hand crossing the road. In her pause before the tunnel bridge, yielding right of way to the train about to thunder overhead.

Out of your mind with grief: it’s a good line. I hear that many relationships do not survive the death of their child. I’d say survive remains the one right word in this brutal sentence for at least a very long time. Condemned to life … missing … It makes sense really. Maybe you could pretend you’re still the happy, naive and untouched by the darkness twenty-eight-year-old you were a matter of days before, if you don’t look the loss in the eyes any more. But no … You couldn’t even … The wrench in your chest and the yearning … No, I won’t go there now. I’ll close that door. But they had no choice. Door always blowing open; a wailing, crying mouth and a cot in the echoing emptiness within. A foot for every year …

Gerard Corr, 12 August 1966 – 3 April 1970

‘Jean and Gerard’ by Gerry Corr

Last night you cried

Remembering him

Your tears pierced the ice

Of numbed remembrance

And I fled

Like always

I wish I could stay

And essay his perfection

On the faltering steps of love

Like before

Tear-racked morning eyes

Watch new buds leap

From dead clematis

As new essays

In lost perfection

Assuage the pain

Once again

I inhale September deeper than any other month. I hold its breath and repeat, ‘I love this time of year’ as surely as I’ll say ‘Merry Christmas’ in December. The happiest sound is a playground swarm on the bell. The fallen leaves and the conkers. And with the outside foggy cold on my own children’s cheeks, I breathe into my first days at school.

The Redeemer School was a five-minute walk from our house. Árd Easmuinn, the area in which we lived, shared a primary school with what was a council estate called Cox’s Demesne. It was a sprawling rectangular bungalow of classrooms off corridors and right angles on corners. Every turn an afterthought. I see blue walls, maps of Ireland, stripy straws spilled on the linoleum floor, coloured crucifix links, sycamore leaf rubbings and my Moses project. I smell márla – our play-dough – the thick red and yellow gloop of paint, newsprint, fat crayons and a cloakroom at the back of the class.

‘An bhfuil cead agam dul go dti an leitreas, más é do thoil é?’

The, till now, unsolved mystery of the puddle beneath the chair.

‘Ní raibh cead agam …’

And something sacred to me then, that I cannot grasp now: a rectangular box. What did it house? It swam to the top when I watched Krapp’s Last Tape. Something intangible but fantastic to me.

There are triangular cartons of milk on a shelf and lessons that don’t include spellings or times tables. Firstly I realised that I was a short-haired girl here and not a boy. It dawned on me at around the same time as I discovered that my desk mate, Julie, with corduroy trousers beneath a skirt, was a girl.

I met my best friend Niamh on my first day and our lives have walked down parallel hawthorn-hedged lanes ever since. Our unrequited and disappointing loves engraved on the seen-it-all-before, though bent in sympathy, secret-keeping trees. Our hands reach out every now and then, and back we go to the field after the drinks cabinet and the Dolly Mixtures, the stone wall and a song about a green puppet called …

Orville?

Yes?

Who is your very best friend?

You are!

I’m gonna help you mend …

Rice Krispies in the bowl but didn’t you eat cornflakes …?

We both call each other Bosom, as in bosom buddies from Anne of Green Gables, and we still do. We grew differently however … Well, let’s just say that she alone grew into our name.

All grown up, we lose each other one day around Grafton Street in Dublin and then simultaneously find each other. She is outside Davy Byrnes. I’m outside The Bailey.

‘BOSOM!!’ we shout and the doorman beside me gives us both a good look over as she crosses to my side.

He says to me with his mobile eyes unblinking, ‘I can understand why she’s called Bosom, but why the hell are you called Bosom?!’

Ah, she’s had her ups and downs, my Bosom. A newspaper got a detail wrong once (it happens sometimes) and gave the ecstatic news that my best friend ‘Busty’ was to be my fourth bridesmaid.

Up the Town

‘Well!’ is how we said hello in Dundalk: an exclamation rather than a question.

An oddly hopeful ‘How are ye?’ when the auto-response was more often than not: ‘Strugglin’.’

Or Dad’s and my favourite: ‘Ah, same ole shit, another day.’

We would later abbreviate this to ‘SOS’.

‘How are you, Daddy?’

‘Ah, SOS, Pandy. How are you?’

And one day, my hand in his, walking up the town, he said to a man going by, ‘How’s the form?’

And I looked up and asked, ‘Has that man got a farm, Daddy?’

We would walk on the dark, cold early evenings, frost steaming from our talk, and do a crawl of the churches to see the baby Jesus in the manger. New born in the hay, in a red glow of light.

And there was the weekly scram to twelve o’clock Mass, for Daddy’s above at the organ, you see, looking through the mirror for our heads bent in prayer. His dark wee angels. If he didn’t spot your head you could allay his suspicion later, with the mention of a bum note peeking cheeky out of Bach. Well, it was bound to be true.

Mammy eventually stopped attending Mass. She said sitting there made her panic.

But now I look back and realise that a lot of people were, in truth, struggling at this time in Dundalk. This was the late 70s, early 80s. The milk at the back of the classroom was necessary. There were a lot of single-parent households with dads away, peacekeeping in the Lebanon. Of course I was a child. I had no real notion, then, of any household being different to our own. One mum at home plus one dad at work until he returned to do the peacekeeping you just couldn’t mute the way you could hers. And to give you a piano lesson.

But it must have been very hard. Years later, I met a girl I’d known at that school who told me of a time when they literally ran out of food and that milk was all they had. I remember a friend of Sharon’s who put me on a stool beside him by our cooker and turned making ‘the thickest ever pancakes!’ into a game.

Pride, it seems, can be the last casualty of poverty. It hurts my heart to think of it now. I didn’t know he was hungry.

Dundalk became a refuge for Catholics who had been burned out of their homes in 1969. The burning of Bombay Street. One of the council estates, Muirhevnamor, became known locally as Little Belfast and it was understood that there were places you did not go, unless you ‘sympathised’.

And then of course the border, the soldiers, and Daddy’s wicked sense of humour. Jim in the back of the car as it slowed … Mum complaining to Dad, ‘Oh Gerry, I hate seeing these men with guns.’

And Daddy responding, ‘Don’t worry, Jean. They only want little boys.’

Poor Jim. That was too bold, Gerry.

Although I can still see the H-block graffiti glaring and desperate on the grey, ominous brick of the tunnel bridge, beneath the train track, generally I was as oblivious to the ongoing conflict as I was to the hunger. Not surprising, really … I was a full and happy child.

But no matter what, you still grow in the soil you’ve been planted in and here, I discovered that morality, right and wrong, can be complicated and confusing.

The Baddies and the Goodies

For some reason, Caroline and myself would often be early for school and we would play with the caretaker, who we loved. Then one day he wasn’t there any more and the Redeemer School was on the news. They had discovered weapons hidden in the roof of the assembly room.

‘But that was a goodie doing the work of a baddie?’

I happened to be born in Dundalk on the day of the deadliest attack of the Troubles in the Republic.

On 17 May 1974, four car bombs exploded at rush hour in Dublin and Monaghan, killing thirty-three people and a full-term unborn child. I have discovered since that my father-in-law, Dermot, just missed being in Talbot Street the moment the bomb exploded. He was to buy a bottle of shampoo for his young wife, Pat, in a pharmacy on North Earl Street, just a hundred yards from where the bomb would go off. But it being a beautiful day, he decided to keep on walking and buy it closer to home. As he turned off Talbot Street on to Amiens Street his ears rang deaf and the ground shook beneath his feet.

Bold Gerry, Baa and the Outstretched Contrite Hand

Once upon a time there lived a husband and a father who had a wicked sense of humour. He was possessed of many gifts, not least of all being sporty as a youth. However, one day, his curious, rebellious soul led his fit but mortal coil into his dying sister’s forbidden Victorian sick room. She, Eileen, a dark-haired white form, lay on the bed with a bleeding cough and a fire in each cheek. Some time later, Eileen having departed, Gerry (for that was the name of the young man) found himself chronically tired and not at all able for his Gaelic football or his tennis. When his new friend Dolphin Cough, Eileen’s old bestie, started pulling red flags from his mouth, he was quickly dispatched to the sanitarium for eleven months wherein he made his living, not dying, as a bookie and had a romance with a nurse. And luckily for all of us (or was it?) was just in time for Waksman’s cure: streptomycin.