Snapshot: Our first home after living in a caravan
Here we are, Mum and me, standing proudly on the would-be doorstep of our nearly finished house, sometime in 1965. The photograph (fuzzy in parts, like my memory of this landmark) was taken on the Box Brownie camera that Dad took to Egypt when he did National Service.
These things I recall with clarity: the grimy plank bridge over the threshold, the gun-metal breeze-block entrance hall walls and, most worryingly, the hole in the ceiling where a staircase should have been but wasn’t and the ladder up into the space beyond. It was still only the skeleton of a house, but this absence of stairs was shattering.
We’d lived in a largish caravan since I was six months old (the result of the brutal 1960s rental market – no pets, no children). However, Dad’s office job with a construction firm meant that there was always space for us on their building sites.
During those three caravan years we moved through a handful of construction sites around the Midlands while Dad’s firm worked on the M1 and other roads. The caravan was slightly too long to be towed by car and was mysteriously moved to the next site by other means. We generally ended up just outside a small town, surrounded by fields and trees.
This real house was the most thrilling possibility. But how would we get upstairs? Dad teased me, saying it would be like living in a tree house – I’d have to be careful when I carried my teddy up that ladder at bedtime …
But I could tell it would be fine. Mum couldn’t stop smiling. I twirled in the living room, aeroplane arms wide, till the floor lurched. Our house!
When the time came, I was happy to wave farewell to the pull-down bath in the caravan’s minuscule kitchen, to the chemical toilet lurking outside and to the nightly palaver of conjuring my bed from its daytime settee disguise.
There were no gardens or proper pavements for ages, but who cared? I had my own bedroom.
I don’t know what happened to the caravan, but I do know that our house still looks like the perfect house to me.
Julie Burke
Playlist: My brother, chauffeur and chaperone
Heartaches by the Number by Guy Mitchell
“Heartaches by the number, troubles by the score / Every day you love me less, each day I love you more”
Recorded by Guy Mitchell in 1959, this song was very popular when I first started going to dances. Young lads cycling around Kenmare would whistle the lively tune as would the milkman, who was known locally as Clark Gable.
All the big show bands played it.
Friday night dances were held in the lake house hall in Clonee, Tuosist, 10 miles from Kenmare, Co Kerry. The dancehall was a long barn with a red corrugated-iron roof, a few feet away from the lake. En route to the dance, each person had to sing a verse of a song and everyone joined in the chorus. Heartaches by the Number and The Blackboard of my Heart were among the favourites. We travelled in my older brother’s 1958 Ford Squire estate car with teenagers squeezed into every available inch.
But my brother was no pushover as chauffeur and chaperone; there were reasonable rules and we complied. Seats were allocated as payment for washing and ironing shirts, etc. Points were gained also by polishing his uniform boots and gaiters and working with wadding until the brass buttons gleamed. All departure and return times were his domain; otherwise, he left us to our own devices.
To begin the night, the band played waltzes and a Siege of Ennis to get warmed up for the quicksteps, sambas, rock‘n’roll and jiving. It was great fun to dance merrily to the tragic lyrics of Heartaches by the Number.
Eileen Connolly
We love to eat: City farm lentil and korma soup
Ingredients
A few handfuls red lentils
1.5 pints vegetable stock
1 onion, chopped
1 or 2 large tbspn korma paste
1 carton passata
Finely chopped vegetables: as many and as varied as you like
Fry the onion and peppers gently until softened then add the korma paste and fry for a couple of minutes. Add all the other ingredients, bring to the boil and simmer for about 20-25 minutes or until the lentils are soft. Inspired by the cafe at our local city farm, over the years this soup recipe has been passed from friend to friend.
When he was little, my youngest son wasn’t keen on eating vegetables, but in the form of this soup they would slip down surprisingly easily. When I was having chemotherapy several years ago, I’d pop in as many vegetables as I could in an attempt to ward off any free radicals that might still be lurking about and I like to think it worked. Use up any vegetables that are in danger of going to waste or thicken it with more lentils to make a curry.
Now both boys have left home and brew up this soup with their own twists – one son’s soup-making skills drew the attention of the lovely young woman who is now his girlfriend, so this recipe really does have amazing powers.
Jane Lindsay
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