Laethanta Saoire: Cork author Gareth Hanrahan on holidays with his grandmother
Cork author Gareth Hanrahan.
We’re all in our little worlds, most of the time. Things of uttermost importance to one person go unnoticed by others, even those in the same space, even those closest to them. I’m there looking for the car keys that are not in the bowl where they , I’m tearing the whole house apart now, storming around the kitchen like a whirlwind,
And one of the kids looks up.
Daddy?
Yes (please say you know where the keys are)
You want to shout (oh there they are)
We’re in our own little worlds, and rarely do they touch, especially across generations.
But, sometimes there are moments like sparks, arcing across the gap.
My grandmother was vice-principal of South Presentation School. I remember wondering if she actually liked being a teacher, as she always referred to students as those ‘terrible girls.’ Those terrible girls would be out on the street again, perhaps, or making noise outside her classroom. The phrase entered the family lexicon. We all used it.
Before becoming vice-principal, she’d been a teacher in Tipperary. She moved home to Cork after my grandfather’s death, but she still knew people there, so every summer we – my mother, my grandmother, and I – would decamp to her friend’s farmhouse. We’d drive up, the names of towns a litany. Mallow, Mitchelstown, Fermoy, Clonmel, Dragan, as it was in the beginning.
My memories of the first few visits are disjointed, like old photographs found scattered a drawer. The flies crawling over the sides of the cows, and how ineffective the swatting of the tails seemed. Climbing around a barn filled with bales of hay. The terrifying greyhounds kept in a shed, and how they’d snarl and pant through the little gap under the door.
There were other children living on the farm, my grandmother’s friend’s grandchildren, which made us friends twice removed, or at least obliged them to include me. Some summers, we got on well; others, less so. Our worlds intersecting only briefly, Brigadoon friendships, both parties shaped by the unknowable intervening eleven-and-a-half-months. We were never that close.
Apart from that one summer, where we all went to a savage land of sorcerers and barbarians - Allansia!
The choose-your-own-adventure gamebooks had a phase of wild popularity in the mid-80s. Behind lurid covers depicting monsters, and those even-more lurid bright green spines you could spot from across a bookshop, were tales of fantasy where YOU were the hero. Turn to paragraph 16 to drink the potion, or paragraph 264 to smite the skeleton.
By chance, both the farm kids and I were into that summer; better yet, my grandmother could be convinced to drive us to the bookstore in Clonmel every few days to restock. A feverish routine quickly evolved – each of us would start playing a different book.
When we’d completed the quest (or, given the astounding difficulty of some of the books, once we’d given up), we’d swap books. Adventure after adventure filled the summer days, each of us immersed in our own tale. We’d trade tips, call out warnings and cryptic clues. Beware the manticore! Bring gold to pay the boatman! Don’t turn left in Deathtrap Dungeon! A private language rich in occult jargon, messages shouted across worlds.
Even when we weren’t playing, even when we were out walking or helping on the farm, we talked about the books, and it bled into our surroundings. The land became enchanted. That old tumbledown wall surely must be the crumbling remnants of a castle. That muddy copse of trees, a doorway to the fabled Forest of Doom. The dogs in the shed – slavering hellhounds (SKILL 8, STAMINA 6, but extra damage from their fiery breath if they roll a six).
It’s one thing to be lost in a book while you’re sitting there reading it, but it’s something else entirely when the book so charges your imagination that everything takes on that mythic sheen. That summer’s sunlight filtered through from a different world, transforming whatever it touched.
I can only imagine what the adults thought of us – but they probably didn’t. They had their own concerns, their own interests, their own worlds that only tangentially intersected with ours at the best of times. I remember being brought on a drive to visit other friends of my grandmother who organised events connected to Charles Kickham or Elizabeth Bowen or some other long-dead author whose books lacked the virtue of containing even a single goblin or dragon. I sat in the back seat, trying to roll dice as we bounced along country roads.
On the way back, we stopped at a padlocked gate. An overgrown laneway led a low building, long abandoned, weeds growing in the doorway, spilling out of the shuttered windows. It was the school where my grandmother had taught for years, a place of huge significance to her. It meant nothing to me then. Maybe I squinted at it, tried to imagine it as the entrance to a dungeon, but it was too drab, too concrete. I was relieved when we all piled back in the car and drove on.
When you live with teachers, the last two weeks of summer are always tattered, the unscheduled timelessness of July infiltrated by meetings and lesson planning and the feeling of impending doom. We left Tipperary and went home (turn to paragraph 400). We went back the next summer, but it wasn’t the same. We’d all moved on, each in a different direction. Still friends, but fewer transmissions, fewer moments of connection.
A few years later, my grandmother retired from teaching, so the annual pilgrimage to Tipperary no longer had to be part of the summer holidays. She could drive up for a few days whenever she wanted.
She passed away while I was in college.
During the pandemic, I embarked on a project to read one short story a day. After working through all the collections of short fiction I owned, I ended up buying a collection of Elizabeth Bowen’s work, which turned out to be weirder and much more to my taste than I expected.
One of the stories, 'Daffodils', is about a nervous young teacher who encounters some of her students during the holidays, and awkwardly tries to relate to them outside school. She refers to them as ‘those terrible girls’. My grandmother had read that same story, had taken that phrase and used it, passed it onto the rest of the family divorced of context. When I read it, the phrase leapt out off the page, a connection arcing across years and generations. It felt like a moment out of time, like I’d just encountered her again years after she was gone.
As I write, summer is here. I won’t try to fill the children’s days. I’ll let them find their own enchantments for the most part, let them inhabit their own worlds. But I’ll show them some things that are important to me, and hope for a spark or two of connection.
Right now, if we’re lucky.
But if it’s something that they only notice many years later, that’s all right too.
- Gareth Hanrahan is a novelist and game designer from Cork. He recently published, the second instalment in his fantasy trilogy
