Autobiography Read Free

doors always open in a way that modernists assume never actually happened. The Blows live at the end house in the square, rammed up against the high wall of Loreto, their annual November 5th bonfire drawing in all of the Square’s residents, unifying the leathery old with the darting young. Even Mr Tappley, who lives alone under his flat cap, creeps out to watch, determined to be unimpressed. Life is taken as it is, and Roy Orbison sings It’s over all the way to number 1.
    Nannie Dwyer is Bridget McInerny of Cashel birth, the family ringleader, my mother’s mother, chiefly a personality and the center of everything.



Nannie remains of Moore Street in Dublin, of astounding memory and continual disgust; her past as the leader of Dublin’s first all-female Queen’s Theater Revue had been unexpectedly nipped in the bud by the unexpected bud of Dorothy, followed by Elizabeth (my mother), Patricia, Ernest, Anthony, Jeane, Mary and Rita, and from thereon self-deflationary battles with life’s important truths, plus the usual Irish companions of shame, guilt, persecution and accusation. Nannie is afraid, and appears older than her years. Her every hysterical observation is steeped in the fear of God (a God who will not save her at the end of it all), and although her life is entangled in love, Nannie doesn’t know it, or cannot show it. Nannie is married to Esty, but she does not like men, or indeed any gooey evaluation of family life. At Christmas dinners Nannie will eat last, setting a place for everyone but herself, yet she will rise first to clear away and wash the dishes. Most fun when most grave, she will play the upright piano for anyone who will listen, her too-long finger nails clipping across mock-ivory until Uncle Liam inevitably tells her that she is murdering music, and thus Nannie will step aside as Pretty flamingo by Manfred Mann lashes the lino. A few years older than Jackie and I, Rita screams at music, and every male singer is ‘gorgeous’. Family life is chaotic and full of primitive drama as everything is felt intensely. There are no electronic distractions and all human endeavor takes place face to face. We are stuck in the wettest part of England in a society where we are not needed, yet we are washed and warm and well fed. The dull-yellow street lights have none of the eye-crossing dazzle of modern illuminating flash. We are fascinated by shop fronts that remain lit up into the night, often the only form of light for miles. The switching on of street lights each evening tells us all that we ought to be at home, or heading there, for where else? There is nowhere else to be. It is the Nelson Riddle intro of The Untouchables that orders me directly off to bed each night, and I wonder what it is about the frozen Eliot Ness that I shouldn’t see. The clumsily cut transition of The Wolf Man from sane to savage sends me darting with fright, and Dr Who , with its lasered x-ray synth swirl, disturbs me just as much. The happy bubble of television shows me the earth and its fragile moments of fantasy, and I, with all the petulance of the pipe dream, am allowed to engage.

In childhood and early youth there is no such thing as 24-hour television, and the two and a half available channels play the national anthem at each evening’s Close Down , which shows a ticking clock – as if ushering us up to bed with the burden of our own thoughts. Television is the only place where we banish ourselves from the community of the living, and where the superficial provides more virtue than the actual. We watch in order to find ecstasy, for at last we can survive in someone else. Our conclusions are our own, yet the landscape is infinite. Cross-legged, I sit on the floor and lean into the screen for Champion the W onder Horse ,where a boy and his horse find sunlit adventure in an America that permits everything, just as Skippy introduces us all to Australia, where a boy and his pet kangaroo find similar sunlit adventures