The phone line crackled. My sense of someone there faded, returned. I still had to get used to the delay. I knew it was my mother. Seventy seven years old at this time – mid-July 2003 – she had recently had a stroke. But because today was my 50th birthday, she would be less inclined than ever to let the stroke or her other health problems prevent her from making the call.
A clunking noise. She was stooping to place the phone on the table between the two kitchen windows before leaning her hands on the table. A flurry of creaks, scrapes and rustles. She was edging into her chair, making herself comfortable as best she could before speaking. Quietly then, out of the welling silence, she said, “I love you.”
Just those words. The first time she had ever said them to me. The gift I had yearned to receive as a child, the prize I had stopped hoping for – at last it was mine, on the morning of my 50th birthday. Her words delighted me. Yet, for a few moments, I couldn’t rightly take them in. They sounded strange – as if I was eavesdropping on a conversation between two other people.
Why, I have often asked myself, was there this inability on my family’s part to show affection and to express it in words? We “agreed well together”. We were gregarious and close, could say what we thought about anything except the relationships between us.
The conventions of that place and time, the deeply conservative Ireland of the mid-20th century, became a restriction we learned and which seemed to permeate how people around us believed they had to conduct themselves. This reticence applied not only in the rural west of Ireland, where we lived, but also in town and city far and near. In my family’s case, I still regret we couldn’t be more open with our feelings.
Our parents never engaged in overt displays of affection, yet I could tell they were in love. They enjoyed each other’s company and a great gallantry existed between them. They made sacrifices to ensure a better life for us. Money might be scarce, but we always found fresh food on the table, clean clothes to wear, a dry roof over our heads. Maybe it was enough for them to regard love as these things, born out of the goodness of their hearts.
But, for whatever reason, the consoling hug or pat of affection was absent. From the time when we were small we took our lead from our parents. I suspect that if we told them we loved them, they would have dismissed the idea as “foolishness” or even as verging on “inappropriate”. Our words certainly would have embarrassed them.
Now my mother had said the words – to me. I could feel them sinking in. And as the whitebeam tree beyond the window danced in my sunlit back garden, showing its silver under-leaves to the breeze, I could hear her laboured breathing.
Our once-a-week phone call was a conversation going back decades. I would visit her each summer in the roomy old farmhouse in County Galway where my two brothers, my two sisters and I had been reared. Together we would walk the wetland meadows in our wellington boots, pausing every so often to listen to the cry of a curlew or to watch a snipe feed off the muddy places.
“Will you stay with us for a week in Dublin?” I would ask when we had reached the wide, shallow stream spreading out from Keaveney’s Well. “Hardly now,” she’d say. “Amn’t I on a year round holiday here?”
More and more we relied on the phone. Our talk sustained and developed the rapport that existed between us. My childhood had often been joyous and untrammelled, at other times I felt sad and troubled. I showed aptitude at school but found it hard to go along with the pragmatic, “put up and shut up” life espoused by the adult world.
My mother farmed; my father ran his own sawmill, joinery and hurley making business. We children were required to help them both. Increasingly, as I grew older, I neglected my herding and farmyard chores. I mishandled chisel and wood planer no matter how patiently my father tried to instruct me in his craft. I wasn’t cut out for the role expected of the first-born son in terms of farm life or carpentry. I worried what, in fact, I was cut out for.
Nature gave me solace. I skived to the wetlands that bounded our farm, relishing the open solitude. Time passed as I listened to a skylark singing his sprightly, unbroken song as he rose, or dallied on the banks of small rivers that, like me, seemed to be going nowhere.
During my early teens, my feeling of not being able to fit in deepened. I couldn’t fit in, so I kicked up. I jumped from trees and high stone walls, fracturing my bones. I overnighted on sawmill trailers and under furze bushes. I cut my hands on barbed wire fences.
My parents grew increasingly bewildered. My mother interrupted her chores to help me through my recuperations. She told me stories about her mother, who rejoiced in the name Molly Headd and who wrote prize-winning ballads, as well as about her own childhood and her love of learning. She had wanted to go on to secondary school, but it was the time of the second world war and educational opportunities were limited – all the more so for girls.
Through her stories, she found a way to reach me. She recognised and accepted my difference. Her hopes on my behalf got me hoping. Her stories helped us both, I now understand, to tap in to the imaginative sides of our lives. That bond between us continued after I had left home and become a teacher and a poet.
In 1978, when I was in my mid-20s, my father died in an accident while felling timber for his carpentry business. He was 63. My mother, a young 51 when he died, cried openly and fiercely. Then she got on with her life. For many years after she would retreat to the pantry at odd moments to cry quietly to herself.
The custom of the time was to leave the clock stopped for a full year, and the TV off, and to put all forms of social life on hold. That is what my family did. But the outward signs of mourning couldn’t begin to catch the depth of our grief. I returned to my teaching job in Dublin, still in a state of shock. Months would pass before it occurred to me to tell my friends and colleagues about the death. Slowly, I too came to cry. I regretted that I hadn’t been able to tell my father how much I loved him.
Through the years and the regular phone call, my mother and I helped each other to accept our loss. Our talk facilitated a continual mending. We learned to savour the old, spontaneous laughter coming back to us and to rejoice in my father’s life, and in our own.
In my heart, and in my mother’s heart, we had known all along how the other felt. Still, the words needed to be spoken. And when she said them, quietly, on the morning of my 50th birthday, I felt freed. I took a moment to absorb the words, and then said into the phone, just as quietly, “I love you.”
The Hurley Maker’s Son is published by Doubleday Ireland, £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.Free UK p&p over £10 on online orders only
