The Invisible Prison: A Midlands Childhood

Belfry

If you wanted to get high in Portlaoise about 1972 or 1973 (and you were still only ten years old), you joined the altar boys. Someone said that from the red-brick belfry of St Peter's and Paul's church—the town's periscope, as I used to think of it—you could see right inside of the prison, just a few hundred yards away. If they were out in the exercise yard, you might even see the prisoners themselves in their manacles and chains, in gray two-piece suits with the black arrows pointing to their heads the way they did in comic strips. It was a fascinating idea: that the biggest mystery in our town, in our world back then, could be exposed even partially by simply climbing up into the belfry of the church.

And because everyone wanted to see inside the prison, everyone wanted to be an altar boy.

The day the little puppet-frail parish priest came into our national school and made his tour of the classrooms, talking to himself in that whispery, sibilant way he had, and playing with his hands in the manner of someone delicately untying a knot, I forced to the back of my mind the image of myself dressed like something from a Christmas card, and instead concentrated hard on the possible view of the town, my town, that would spread out below me. And, like most of my friends in the classroom, I put up my hand.

Somehow we managed to force to the back of our minds the thought of all the early mornings and late evenings that would lie ahead, all the hanging around outside and waiting, at funerals especially, among upset people, all the traipsing to and fro between the overheated vestry to the ice-cold church, as our brothers and fathers, and fathers before them, had done.

And the truth was, yes, there were cold evenings, and colder mornings. But the belfry of St. Peter's and Paul's was worth it. From the second- or third-floor windows of its concrete, red-brick-encrusted tower, you could see a town that was breathtaking, captivating, and, if you were like me and suffered a little from vertigo, dizzyingly so.

You could see Main Street, the lower part at least, starting its gradual rise and swinging up away from the not-yet overgrown Triogue River, still alive with pinkeens. You could see, running up through what had once been our back garden and was now picked out by two lines of sulphurous yellow sodium lights, the great four-lane curve of the town bypass, or "the link road" as it was locally known (rather than by its cumbersome official name, James Fintan Lawlor Avenue). You could see Rankin's Wood to your left, the bloated crowns of the trees obscuring the trunks and branches below so that the whole wood looked like a single entity, which it was, a living creature even then struggling to survive at the edge of an expanding town. And, over to your right, out the opposite window, the Burying Ridge, the town's oldest graveyard, changing shades of green as its long grass was blown this way and that. As if the spirits of all the quaintly named townsfolk of a hundred or two hundred years before—the Ramsbottoms, the Hendersons, all those mellifluous names—had never quite gone to sleep.

On a cold funeral evening, you might be stood in the crosswinds of that belfry for twenty minutes or half an hour, watching out for the first sighting of the hearse and cortege on their way in from the hospital. It would be bitterly cold up there. But once the polished chrome and hood of the hearse came into sight, all thoughts of the cold disappeared and it was time to approach the bell.

If you were lucky and one of the older boys was too busy smoking, or was down somewhere outside the church chatting to some young one, you could grasp that huge, barely flexible rope that hung down through the middle of the...