Keys to My Life review: Memories flood back for Majella O'Donnell in Thurles
Keys To My Life Brendan Courtney Daniel O'Donnell Majella O'Donnell
An idyllic sea-view apartment in Tenerife, and Daniel O’Donnell saying “hope you don’t get any skeletons anywhere”, is the prologue for Majella O’Donnell’s journey back in time to homes and places that were meaningful in her life in the latest episode of Keys to My Life.
The front door of Majella’s first home in Thurles opens and memories tumble out: “getting my bum smacked at the bottom of that stairs cos I swore”, and “here used to be boxes of cigarettes… I’d nick them and give them to my friends”.
These memories – featuring misdemeanours and mischief – eloquently hint at a deeper, more personal reality. Soon Majella is telling presenter Brendan Courtney how strict her dad was. “I was very afraid of him. I was bubbly, extrovert.” And her dad would berate her: “Would you ever give your tongue a rest, would you ever shut up for five minutes”.
Gazing at images of herself as a child projected onto the kitchen wall, Majella – hand cradling her face in unconscious imitation of her four-year-old self – says: “I want to pick her up and give her a cuddle…because I know I didn’t feel loved.”
This impulse to somehow transport love back in time – to retrospectively mend pain – finds a dramatic echo later when Majella visits the chic Edinburgh apartment where she lived with her first husband and their two small children.
Of her children – babies in that upmarket home where her marriage crumbled and she was beset with PND – she says: “I want to pick them up and cuddle them….I probably wasn’t that great with them when they were small…with my frame of mind now, I’d just love to be able to enjoy them at that age again.”
In the Premier Ballroom, Thurles (“It looks exactly the same…smells the same”), Majella played the female lead in Jesus Christ Superstar. Here she realised “how fantastic singing and performing made me feel”, but – observes Courtney – “there was nobody to nurture the teenage Majella’s dreams of a performance career.”
And then to the Tenerife villa her parents made home in the 1980s, the scene of so much that turned out good in Majella’s life. Newly-divorced in 1999, it became a refuge where she healed the rift with her father and from where she met the great love of her life: a crooner from Donegal.
A non-existent childhood relationship with her father, a serially unfaithful first husband, an un-nurtured performing talent – you feel Majella’s pain as she tells it like it was. And yet you don’t feel downhearted. More you feel uplifted.
Because, while her life and the homes she lived in are the focus, Majella – in all her feisty, good-humoured survivability – is the star.
- Keys To My Life is on RTÉ One on Sundays, and is also available on the RTÉ Player
