Keys To My Life review: Nostalgia and sadness as Mary Kennedy reveals childhood memories
Mary Kennedy and Brendan Courtney on Keys to My Life.
Within minutes of setting foot in her 1950s-built childhood home in Clondalkin, broadcaster Mary Kennedy slips inside the hall cupboard.
“This was our phone booth… a big Bakelite phone on a shelf there …you’d close the door and be on the phone for hours.”
Wedged in the cupboard, Kennedy shows Keys to My Life presenter Brendan Courtney how you opened the door from the inside — one finger in a well-placed hole in the wood. She’s full of glee. And you can just imagine the delight of teen conversations that felt like life depended on them.
Keys to My Life places its subjects right back in the locations where life-shaping memories were made. It’s a powerful way of unearthing gems of memories and it has a potent effect on the one remembering. “It’s so lovely to remember,” says Kennedy, her pleasure tangible. The viewer can’t help but be invested.
There’s a lot of fun in this episode. Standing outside the first flat she rented — 45 years ago in the medieval core of Rennes, France — Courtney asks if this was the red light district. Kennedy isn’t sure, but she “certainly saw some red light activity when walking home at night”.
Was she terrified, Courtney wonders. “I was more terrified of the mice that used to come out from under my sink when I was in bed.”
This episode also plumbs the dramatic potential inherent in how we relate to memories — whether we regret, exercise hindsight or even deny them. In the eighth-floor apartment of a modern-looking tower block in Rennes, where she also lived, she recalls getting news her beloved dad had ‘taken a turn’ in Dublin. Arriving in Ireland, she found he’d already died. Neighbours recommended she not see him, to remember him as he was.
In hindsight, she regrets this. “I would have liked to see him laid out in the coffin.” This scene is deeply emotional, as is her bitter-sweet recollection of arriving back to this apartment, post-funeral, and finding a letter from her dad, written days before his passing.
But Kennedy is grateful: “I feel very happy to have the opportunity to remember.”
Coláiste Bríde in Clondalkin, where she taught, and the suburban estate where she began married life — and where her marriage subsequently broke up — are other meaningful locations in this journey of remembrance. As the episode closes, Kennedy’s downsizing, packing up 20 years of living in the home she calls a “party house”, where she shared 18ths, 21sts and 30ths with her children.
But when she tells Courtney what she thinks life’s about, past or future don’t really come into it. “It’s about living in the moment and enjoying life.”
- Keys To My Life is on RTÉ One on Sunday nights, and is available on the RTÉ Player
