Mammy Walsh's A-Z of the Walsh Family

  MARIAN KEYES

  Mammy Walsh’s A–Z of the Walsh Family

  Michael Joseph

  An imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Mammy Walsh’s A–Z of the Walsh Family

  There’s this woman I know from bridge, Mona Hopkins, a lovely woman she is, even if I must admit I’m not that keen on her myself, and she said a great thing the other day. I was expecting her to say, ‘Two no trumps,’ but instead she comes out with a saying about her children. She says, ‘Boys wreck your house and girls wreck your head.’ Isn’t that a marvellous bit of wisdom? ‘Boys wreck your house and girls wreck your head!’ And God knows it’s the truest thing I’ve heard in a long time. I should know. I have five girls. Five daughters. And let me tell you, my head is wrecked from them.

  Although, now that I think of it, so is my house …

  There’s Claire, my eldest. She was born to myself and Mr Walsh in 1966, the Swinging Sixties, although we had no truck with ‘swinging’ in Ireland and nobody minded one little bit. Why would we ‘swing’ when we had praying? Also we were after getting our very own Irish television station, RTÉ, so there was plenty to keep us occupied. Not that we knew what ‘swinging’ actually entailed – wearing short dresses and false eyelashes, we suspected. We were delighted with Claire, of course, although I suspect Mr Walsh would have preferred a boy. She was a high-spirited child, a cheeky imp, if you want the God’s honest, and I found her hard to handle, always with the backchat and the opinions. But if I’d known what I’d be getting further down the road with Helen, I’d have been on my knees every day, thanking God for my good little girl.

  For a while it looked like Claire was going to do things my way – she went to university and got a degree, then she married an accountant. But then it all went ‘tits-up’. (Is it okay for me to say that? I never know which slang is acceptable for a woman of my age and station to use and which isn’t.) Yes, everything went ‘tits-up’ for Claire, because her husband left her the day she gave birth to their first child, but she’s a born survivor and she’ll tell you all about it herself in Watermelon.

  In 1969 Margaret came along, and I know a mother can’t have a favourite child, but if I was to have one, it would be Margaret. A good, good, good girl. Obedient, truthful, all of that. A small bit dull, if we’re to be completely frank, but no one is perfect. And I wouldn’t be mad on her ‘look’ – like, would it kill her to put on a lipstick, I sometimes think. The funny thing is that her ‘style icon’ is Kate Middleton, who is so highly groomed and ‘pulled-together’. I too am a great admirer of Kate Middleton – her hair is ‘stunning’ and I saw nothing wrong with those wedge espadrilles.

  Margaret never caused me a moment’s worry. I thought I had that daughter parcelled away nicely, until, out of the blue, she left her lovely reliable husband, Garv, and ran away to Los Angeles – where her friend Emily lived – and got up to all kinds of high jinks, the half of which I do not know and do not want to know. (That’s a lie. I’d love to know it all. I hate when they don’t tell me things, but Helen says the shock would kill me. Anyway, the full story is in Angels, if you’re interested in finding out yourself.)

  Rachel, my middle child, was born in 1970, shortly after Mr Walsh’s job took us from Limerick to Dublin. Rachel, I’ll come clean, was a funny child, by turns defiant, then sensitive, then defiant again. It didn’t help that Claire and Margaret had formed a rock-solid ‘alliance’ and wouldn’t let Rachel play with them.

  Then something happened in 1974, a few months after Anna was born, which might have ‘affected’ Rachel. My father died and even though there’s no such thing as depression, I will admit I went a bit ‘odd’. Claire and Margaret had each other and my sister Kitty came to mind baby Anna because Mr Walsh had to go to Manchester for a while for his job, and I suppose that between the jigs and the reels, Rachel didn’t get all the attention she needed.

  But she made up for it later in life. In spades, as they say! (Or do they? Are we allowed to say ‘spades’ any more? Sacred Mother of Divine, all this ‘PC’ stuff is a minefield. There I’d be, saying a word I’d been saying all my life and suddenly everyone would be looking at me like I’d just murdered someone. Did you know you can’t say ‘Oriental’ any more? All of a sudden, that’s banned! It’s ‘Asian’ now. But Asia is huge. How can you know what part of Asia the person is from just by them saying ‘I’m Asian’?)

  Rachel spent a while living in Prague then she moved to New York, and somewhere along the line, didn’t she get addicted to drugs! There was some sort of a botched suicide attempt and she ended up having to go to rehab. (She’ll tell you about it herself in Rachel’s Holiday.) Those were the days when no one went to rehab. Nowadays, of course, the dogs in the street ‘check in’ every five minutes. In fact, you’re more likely to be shunned if you haven’t gone to rehab, but at the time it was an awful shock and I was very ashamed of her.

  So, like I said, in 1974 Anna – another girl! – came along and I just ran out of energy. I stopped trying to mould my children to be like me. Feck her, I thought, she can do what she likes. So she lived in her own little world. A sweet little thing, I’m not saying she wasn’t, but very vague. Away with the fairies is the best way of putting it. Feet planted firmly in mid-air. Obsessed with tarot cards and fortune tellers and mysticism and all that codology. And the clothes on her – long, streely, floaty, hippie things. One night she nearly burned the house down, tie-dyeing a coat in a big saucepan on the hob. Another night, her father’s beloved golf trophies were nearly stolen because she’d come home, out of her ‘box’, and left her key in the front door, for any passing burglar to open and pop in, which one duly did. If it wasn’t for the fact that Mr Walsh got up early that morning, his trophies would have been pawned, along with the telly and the microwave.

  But! And I’m holding up my index finger here, like the wise old woman I am! I had Anna pegged all wrong. Anna did the biggest recovery curve of them all. For years, she was bloody useless, never earned a penny, couldn’t hold down a job to save her life. Then she moved to New York and, in a series of moves (she’ll tell you herself in Anybody Out There), got The Best Job In the World™, working as a publicist for a world famous cosmetics house. Never give up on a person, is what Anna’s story tells me.

  In 1978, in a last-ditch attempt to get a boy for Mr Walsh to play with, along comes Helen. And where do I start? When they made Helen they broke the mould – and at least we can be grateful for that. There’s only one of her in the world to handle. All I can say in her favour is that she has a good job – she’s a private investigator. And sometimes, when she needs a hand, I help her out. My favourite is when she has to search a person’s house – I love to have a good gawk around another person’s house and paw through their stuff when they’re not there. I would give every penny I own to be let loose in the Kilfeathers’ house. (They’re our next-door neighbours. Lovely people. We are terrific pals, of course. And yet, I find that I very much hate Mrs Kilfeather. I can’t explain it any better.)

  Mr Walsh is called Jack and I will tell you all about him under U (Useful). (He does the hoovering.) (And earns all the money.) (Not that I let him have any of his own. He’d only spend it. I’m in charge of that end of things.)

  A is for Alcohol. Neither myself nor Mr Walsh is a ‘big’ drinker. Naturally, I’d take a spritzer or two if I was out for a ‘drink’, and of course Mr Walsh is allowed to have a pint of Smithwicks in the clubhouse at the end of his round of golf. So obviously I don’t know where any of them get it from, because they certainly didn’t learn it from us (although problem drinking does exist in the ‘extended’ family), but the min
ute they became teenagers, they all started it (except for Margaret, of course).

  I had a lovely drinks cabinet, full of lovely bottles of drink. Now and again I’d dust them. Those were the days when neighbours brought you back bottles of drink if they were lucky enough to go on a foreign holiday, so I had Ouzo from when Mrs Hennessey went to Greece. My sister Kitty brought us Vermouth from the time she went to Rome and met that married man, but the less said about that, the better. Mr Walsh’s secretary (you were allowed to say ‘secretary’ in them days, not like now, when it’s personal assistant this, personal assistant that) used to go to the oddest places and brought back a bottle of Hungarian Slivovitch. Anna won a bottle of some funny-looking yellow stuff at the Vincent de Paul raffle. The thing is, no one drank any of this stuff, no one was meant to drink any of this stuff. They were ornaments, fine glittery ornaments, in the same way my beautiful Anysley vase was an ornament, until Claire threw it against the wall and smashed it, the time her husband left her for their downstairs neighbour, Denise. Or the way my beautiful ‘Crying Boy’ painting is an ornament.

  Anyway, when Claire was about fifteen, doesn’t she start this lark, secretly going from bottle to bottle, taking a little pour from each of them, until she’d filled up a lemonade bottle, then drinking the lot. The Lord alone knows what it tasted like, but she didn’t care. All that mattered was that she got inebriated. Or scuttered. Or stotious, mouldy, spannered, locked, poluthered, crucified, twisted … They say the Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, but we Irish seem to have at least a hundred for the state of being intoxicated. Gee-eyed, that’s another one I’ve heard them use. So, without me knowing one screed of it, Claire was getting ‘gee-eyed’ on a regular basis, using my drink from my lovely drinks cabinet, and over time the levels on my beautiful bottles started dropping. So what does the bould Claire do? She starts topping them up with water, that’s what she does. And kept topping them up with water. And kept on topping, until some bottles – most importantly the vodka – was one hundred per cent water.

  In the normal run of events I might never have found out, except that one Saturday night we had visitors over, our neighbours Mr and Mrs Kelly and Mr and Mrs Smith. (The reason we invited them was because the Kilfeathers next door had had a ‘do’ the previous week and had invited several of the neighbours, but they snubbed us and I suppose I wanted to show them that we had friends too. The ‘cut’ and ‘thrust’ of suburbia can be a savage thing.)

  So in they came, the Smiths and the Kellys, and the thing is that, even though we hardly drank, these were the days that the few times anyone did drink, they were expected to drink spirits. Not like now when it’s Chardonnay this and West Coast Cooler that and if you order a brandy and port, they bundle you into the car and they deposit you at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Myself and Mrs Kelly were ‘on’ the Smirnoff, but Mr Walsh, Mr Kelly and both Mr and Mrs Smith were drinking real alcohol and they ended up getting scuttered, stotious, poluthered, etc. and, to my eternal shame, doesn’t Mr Walsh admit that he’d found some loophole to avoid paying all our taxes! I was scandalized! (At people knowing, I mean.) (I was quite pleased with him for holding a few pounds back from the ‘taxman’.)

  Then the Smiths ‘upped’ the ‘ante’ by telling us that Mr Smith had had an affair the previous year! Everyone was red-faced and in convulsions, laughing and roaring crying, except for myself and Mrs Kelly, who were sitting there stone-cold sober and far from amused. And then it dawned on me what had been going on …

  Of course, I couldn’t forensically test the vodka there and then; I had to get the scuttered people out of my home. But the next day I established what my ‘gut’ had already told me. So what do I do? I moved my lovely collection of bottles out of the drinks cabinet and into a cupboard with a lock, that’s what. But within days, one of them – I suppose it was Claire, it was hardly Margaret – had managed to pick the lock, and this kick-started a kind of guerrilla warfare. I kept moving the drink – under beds, out behind the oil-drum, I even rang Mr Walsh’s sister, who, handily enough, happens to be an alcoholic, and she recommended the cistern in the toilet – but they kept finding it!

  Even today, I can’t keep drink in the house. None of my daughters are living at home at this precise moment. But it’s only a matter of time before another of them has a crisis in her life and moves back in with myself and Mr Walsh. It’d annoy you – we don’t feel able to fully savour our ‘Golden years’. What if we wanted to up sticks and sail round the world? (Frankly, I can imagine little worse than being stuck in a confined space on the high seas, with no access to my ‘shows’.) (And if anyone was going to have the bad luck to be kidnapped by Somali pirates, it’d be us.)

  B is for Bublé. As in Michael. I ‘fangirl’ this highly talented young man. A voice to match ‘Old Blue Eyes’ and a very kind heart – did you see on the YouTubes how he got that youth up on stage to sing with him? (I keep ‘abreast’ of technology. Helen shows me how. She’s not good for much, but she’s good for that.) Yes, Michael Bublé is a consummate artist. And he has a lovely chunky pair of thighs on him.

  C is for Cooking. Like all Irish women of my generation I have a great gift for cooking ‘good plain food’. Eating my food is not a high-risk activity, as my daughters claim. It is not an extreme sport. It is not like playing Russian Roulette when all the chambers are loaded. They haven’t a clue, those girls. Boiling is a good thing; it kills off germs. And flavour is a bad thing; it can upset your stomach.

  For years and years I was cooking dinners for them. I was trying this and trying that and getting recipes from the neighbours and tearing suggestions out of the paper, and all they ate was cornflakes, so in the end – ‘by popular demand’ says Claire – I gave it up. Yes, I had a ‘rush of blood to the head’ and I went and I put on my coat and I got my handbag and I said to Mr Walsh, ‘Come on, get up, we’re going out!’ ‘Where?’ says he, afraid he’d miss some of the golf on the telly. ‘OUT!’ says I. ‘And bring the cheque book.’

  We went to an electrical shop and bought a microwave and a fine, big, upright freezer, the biggest they had, which I filled to bursting with convenience food. So now, any time any of them come into the kitchen, whinging, all pathetic like, ‘I’m huuuungry,’ I take them by the hand and open the freezer door with a flourish, demonstrating all the lovely frozen dinners that are in there. ‘Take your pick,’ I say. Then I lead them to the microwave and say, ‘All hail the microwave, the handy little television-like gadget that will defrost that yoke in your paw. Befriend both of those machines, they will prove invaluable in your fight against hunger in this house.’

  Yes, I felt guilty, of course I felt guilty. That’s my job as a mother. What’s that thing they say …? Oh yes, ‘A woman’s place is in the wrong!’ But there was no point me carrying on with the cooking, no point whatsoever; we’d all have ended up with scurvy.

  The freezer and microwave were the very last gadgets I bought for the kitchen. Claire, who fancies herself as a bit of a ‘foodie’, calls it ‘The Kitchen That Time Forgot’. Now and again I hear people going on about kitchen aids and microplaners and I ‘tune out’. I couldn’t be more bored if you paid me to be. The worst present Mr Walsh could give me would be a blender. But I suppose that goes for most women (as in ‘Blender? I’ll give you blender … while you’re asleep … and you haven’t got your paw over your nethers like you usually do …’).

  C is also for Confectionery. On account of not having any proper food in the house, we have plenty of biscuits, cakes, buns and ice cream, to compensate. I mean, we have to eat something. C is, of course, for Cornettos. We keep up with all the new ones. Most summers they ‘tweak’ Cornettos, adding new flavours and ‘limited editions’, but I must say Cornettos have really stood the test of time and are far handier to eat while driving, than a cone from a machine.

  Magnums – late-comers to the party compared to the years of trusty service the Cornettos have given – are also big favourites in t
he Walsh household. As doubtless you know, Magnums ‘play around’ with the basic concept a lot, which can be fun. But the summer they launched the Seven Deadly Sins range, I could not rest easy until I had tracked down and eaten all seven of them and it took me for ever to find Lust. I finally located it in late August in a Texaco station in Westport five minutes before they closed. Mr Walsh says I shouldn’t regard those ad campaigns as an order. And I don’t. I see them as more of a challenge.

  C is also for Cleanliness. My house is very clean and Mr Walsh does hoover under the beds, no matter what Helen might tell you. But I will admit that when I go on missing person cases with Helen and we have to break into houses to look for clues, I find it’s amazing how dirty people’s houses are when they aren’t expecting visitors. (Also I find it ‘comforting’. So shoot me, as they say.)

  D is for Depression. Except there is no such thing. I heard a great saying: ‘Turn that frown upside down’ and I produce it whenever people start ‘going on’ about depression. I have never been depressed. When Rachel went into the treatment centre, I had to attend a Family Day and they accused me of having a breakdown after my father died. The colossal cheek of them! A breakdown, I ask you! I had four children under the age of nine – when would I have found time for a breakdown? Besides breakdowns weren’t even invented back then! It’s just a new thing, like erectile dysfunction and Attention Deficit Disorder. Erectile dysfunction, my eye – he just doesn’t ‘fancy’ you any more! And Attention Deficit Disorder, my other eye! Being bored, that’s all it is. Yes, if I’m misfortunate enough to have to go to the circus, I also want to hop out of my seat and run amok and kick the clowns, but I sit still with a smile plastered across my face because I’ve had good behaviour bet into me.

  There’s no such thing as depression and if I was ever to feel a bit ‘down’ – although I never do – I have a great cure: I put on some lipstick and go to the pictures.