Mo Laethanta Saoire: Catherine Ryan Howard recalls family caravan adventures at Garryvoe
The Fleetwood Colchester touring caravan that housed Catherine Ryan Howard's family for many enjoyable holidays.
Every Cork family who piles into their car to go to the beach on warm summer days goes to one in particular. They have their beach. Ours was Garryvoe.
There’d be the obligatory pitstop for ice-creams at Fitzpatrick’s in Glounthaune. Saying, ‘I can see the sea,’ as you rounded the bend by the green door, the words waiting on your tongue since Ladysbridge. Arriving to discover that whatever warmth was in the city air had been banished by the cold slap of the sea breeze.
Hurrying to the water’s edge anyway, avoiding stepping on what you thought were sand worms but which you later discovered was something worse: sand-worm poo. Pestering your mum for whatever she’d packed in the cooler immediately afterwards, even though it was supposed to do for the day. A warm can of Coke, a bag of Tayto, sandwiches with actual sand. Sand everywhere, in everything, including all over the car for the drive home.
In the early 90s, we stopped doing the drive home. Ten years earlier, my uncle Tommy and my maternal grandmother, Catherine Ryan, had bought a Fleetwood Colchester touring caravan second-hand from Kenneally’s in Bishopstown. (If you can’t figure out the names, let me help: I’m actually Catherine Howard, but I inserted my mother’s maiden name for writing because the fifth wife of Henry VIII had had a bit of a head-start on me when it came to Google, etc.)
The caravan was tiny but incredibly well designed, with every last inch transformed into a storage compartment, work surface or bed. Still, its claim to be a four-berth always seemed aspirational to me, and we were a family of five. We had taken it to such exotic, far-flung destinations as Ballylickey and Waterville, but it mostly lived in a drive in Silverheights – until it was moved to a caravan park in Garryvoe.
A couple of disclaimers. The caravan park was on the stretch of road between Ardnahinch and Stephen Pearce’s pottery, at the Stephen Pearce end, so technically it was Shanagarry. But we called it Garryvoe, so I’ll continue to. And I use the term ‘caravan park’ very loosely. This was more of a field behind a cottage, in that it was literally a field behind a cottage.
The cottage was owned by a woman named Frances who also sold homemade jam and occasionally stayed in her own little caravan on site while she rented the cottage out to holidaymakers. We had direct access to a W.C. the size of a telephone box that doubled as a spider colony, and there was a tap on the wall outside. The pitches had no plumbing or power points and also there were no pitches. Just your designated spot in the grass. It was only a caravan park in the sense that caravans were literally parked there.
I turned 11 on July 5, 1993. There are four and seven years between me and my younger brother and sister respectively and, at that age, the gaps felt particularly pronounced; I preferred my own company. I’d started writing a diary, a hobby that proved very labour intensive because I felt I needed to update it several times a day with the news that there still wasn’t any.
I was regularly dispatched to the shop in Burke’s (actual) caravan park down the road, where I’d add some chocolaty contraband to my mum’s list and then secretly scoff it on the way back. I spent hours on Ardnahinch beach, teetering on rock pools exposed by low tide, pondering Very Important Thoughts of which I was convinced I had many.
But what I remember doing the most is reading.
Stephen King’s The Stand was a month-long project, an 800-page-plus colossus set in a post-apocalyptic America that I’d borrowed from Douglas Library and only thought I could understand. A longform article in one of my mum’s Reader Digests passed away a wet afternoon – it was about Rodney Whitchelo, a former police detective who attempted to extort millions from Heinz by contaminating jars of baby food. (Spot the future crime writer.) But it was reading Jurassic Park that changed the course of my life.
That summer, it felt like the world was gripped by Spielberg-infused dino-fever. I’d end up going to see the film twice, at the Capitol, joining lines that snaked all the way around the corner and continued onto Patrick Street. By the time I heard the first eerie whistle of John Williams’ score and the already familiar font flash up on screen, I was fit to combust. Then I spent much of the next two hours watching the back of my fingers, squirming with abject terror, but I’ve more than made up for it since by watching the movie approximately a thousand times.
But all that was still two weeks away, and we were going to be spending them in Garryvoe. I’d already pored over the latest Smash Hits multiple times. (Take That were the cover stars but, despite my loving them more than I’ve ever loved any strangers in my entire life, I was more interested in the ‘YOU WANT DINOSAURS? WE GOT DINOSAURS!’ cover story.)
What else could hold me over in the meantime? Only a copy of Michael Crichton’s book. I got my movie tie-in paperback from Porter’s in Douglas Court and then clasped my treasure with both hands, eyes fixed on the already iconic logo, all the way to Garryvoe.
In the caravan, I slept on a canvas stretched between two poles that slotted in above the dining table, bisecting the front window and blocking the only sea-view we had: a shimmer so far in the distance, you were never entirely sure it wasn’t a mirage. It was also where I liked to read. And so I did – about a biogenetic gold rush, dusty dinosaur experts digging up bones, a mysterious resort off the coast of Costa Rica, chaos theory, computer programming, a theme park stocked with cloned dinosaurs and, yes, running and screaming and severed body parts.
As I did, two things happened unbeknownst to me: I fell head-first into a life-long obsession with all things Jurassic Park and I found my dream job. I just couldn’t believe that someone had made it all up, that he’d built a dinosaur theme-park on a blank sheet of paper, and that – this was the really unfathomable part – that was his job? I can scarcely believe it today, even though I just turned 39 and making stuff up is now my job, too.
The following year we upgraded to a mobile home (with plumbing and power and a television – absolute notions!) and the year after that we took a ferry to France to tour Normandy’s landing beaches and hit Euro Disney. The latter is best remembered for our getting spectacularly lost on the Périphérique around Paris for four hours straight.
This was 1995, when you relied on pre-printed directions that, alas, didn’t magically get updated when a diversion was put in place. At one point, we accidentally joined the vehicular carnage at the base of the Arc de Triomphe, where 12 roads converge and there are no road-markings. My dad was white-knuckled at the wheel, my mum was on the novenas and the three of us in the back sensed that, for once, we should probably stay quiet.
But there’s no bigger adventure than having my dream job. Joan Didion wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. We tend to look back over our lives and lace narratives of cause and effect through what we know, deep down, were random events. But I know there’s a single thread, shiny and strong, tying that little girl in a caravan parked in a field behind a cottage in not-quite-Garryvoe to the woman – and writer – I am today.
- Catherine Ryan Howard is a crime writer from Cork. Her next novel, 56 Days, a thriller about a couple locked down together in Dublin, will be published on August 19
