The Stolen Child

After my mother died, I was brought up by my father's family down the country, while my father kept his job teaching primary school in Dublin. Some summers he visited us. But most summers I went up to be with him in the city. Before I was old enough to travel by myself my grandmother made the train journey with me and shared my holiday.

We country people were, of course, greatly taken by the bustle and novelty of "town," as the natives quaintly called their wonderland. But after she had made her first few inspections of the latest hats and frocks in Cassidy's and Kellet's, and had had high tea and a movie at the Metropole, my grandmother became querulous and awkward. She condemned as a waste of time and, worse, of money the things my father suggested that we do—and he had to have us doing something, the three of us at home all day together being an obviously insupportable prospect to him. She found the seaside too far away. An afternoon at the National Museum was not a trip to our jeweled past but a forced march through a child-infested, stocking-laddering maze. When my wish was granted to go out to what was then called Collinstown to see the Viscounts and the Fokker Friendships, she couldn't share the uplift that the planes gave me. All that arriving and departing made her glum, and the long bus ride home was full of "the aerodrome" being such a cold old place and how she had seen nothing there but people putting on airs.

No doubt she did find city life exhausting. But what tiredness also meant was homesickness. The longer we stayed the more out of place she felt. Being taken out of herself was unnatural, isolating, made her a mere citizen, whereas at home she was somebody.

As was her custom, however, she did everything but speak directly about the way she felt. She let yawns and sighs do her talking for her, and when these did not deliver the message she turned bossy. Commands to "turn off that old thing" (the radio) became more frequent and more arbitrary. My father and I were called in from our summer evenings—endless daylight, endless backyard games—to kneel for the family rosary. Words begat words. Family tensions drizzled into the vacation air, as though we really were at home, in her house, the place from which my father went away from me. And it was at such times that my grandmother brought up Father Willy. Was he back in the main house again now? She would love to see him.

It was only natural, I suppose, that my grandmother would want to pay Father Willy a call. He had all the credentials necessary for a permanent place in her good books. Not only was he from our town, he was from Chapel Street, where she herself had been born and raised, along with Father Willy's mother and father and all belonging to him, "the old stock," as she rather imperiously put it, because the past was not a mystery to her, it was authority. And Father Willy was close not only through clannishness. He and my father were best friends growing up. Remembering that, her past loomed large in earnest. With each new reminiscence she translated recall into repossession, put the seal on her own need to be attended to by dwelling on small boy banalities. Inseparable, they were, the pair of them, swimming through the whole summer, kicking a ball above in the Fair Field all the livelong day. (She gave them bodies.) They were the two smartest lads in the town. Brother Carey told her that. (She gave them minds.) She could still see the two of them inside the altar, the mites, swinging the thurible, lifting the missal. Willy was a great hand at the gong, gave it a hammering that could reach Russia...