My Life with Maeve Dalton: 'We all looked so different to one another — but our mother treated us all the same'
Maeve Dalton at home in Glounthaune. Picture: Eddie O'Hare
Our error of judgment might have gone unnoticed, had I not declared the cash to my mum that day.
I was in Junior Infants when a little girl in my class began slipping coins my way each week, in the misguided belief that charity begins in the classroom.
It was 1978 and I was the only child who looked like me in my school. One of seven children living in Cork, I had been adopted by Irish born and bred parents.
My two older brothers are my parent’s biological children, and I like to think destiny brought the rest of us together.
My older sister landed first, aged approximately one month old. She is half Irish and half Libyan.
Two years later I exploded onto the scene, having been born to an Irish mother and Jamaican father.
Over the next few years, the “stork” continued to visit my parents.
With a penchant for the exotic, he delivered a half-Irish/half-Indian brother, and another sister who is half-Irish and half-Italian.
I didn’t know I was any different, but while my classmate saw colour, it wasn’t in the way that one would expect.
The missions were the order of the day back then. My own recollection suggests that my class was collecting for Trócaire, but mum tells me it was the Missions so I have to take her word for it.
Everyone - Junior Infants included - wanted to do their bit.
Teachers constantly reminded us about the importance of giving to the “black babies” in Africa.
When one of my friends went home to request money, her mother had no idea that this “black baby” was me.
It was genius really, because that same little girl decided to cut out the middle man by donating to the child sitting beside her in school.
She probably assumed that I was starving, despite the fact that we were the best-fed family in Cork.
It wasn’t really an issue outside the home either, with the exception of an isolated racist incident that I experienced during my youth.
The story of the little girl gifting me cash on the other hand is one of pure innocence. It’s not something that could ever be viewed as offensive because we were both innocent parties.
I was, after all, very happy to accept the money without any real understanding of why it was coming my way.
People sometimes talk about the racism and discrimination they faced as children growing up in Ireland who were black or mixed race. This was the flipside.
The little girl thought she was doing the right thing and I was going home with more money than I knew what to do with. In our eyes we had done nothing wrong.
As soon as my mum found out where the money was coming from, she approached the little girl’s mother to explain what was going on.
This woman was understandably mortified, while my own mum found the whole thing hilarious. All she could do was laugh.
I don’t remember her speaking to the child’s mum, but it’s a story I’ve grown up with that continues to be spoken about to this day.
My family loves to laugh about it, because it reminds us of more innocent times.
I look back at that story now and smile, because the way we saw the world was beautiful. Life was definitely less complicated then.
When you talked about things like the missions, in those days, they seemed a lot further from home.
These were faraway places we didn’t know much about that only nuns and priests visited. In some ways, I think children were better off knowing less.
There were some other misunderstandings over the years, albeit not as many as we got older.
To this day everybody knows our family because we all looked so different to one another.
I’ll never forget when my brother Noelie brought friends home for the first time. They must have assumed that he had foreign students in the house or something.
It was confusing for people when we were introduced as brothers and sisters. We found ourselves explaining quite a lot when meeting people for the first time.
None of us ever felt any different though, because my mother treated us all the same.
Mum never saw us as different. She praised us the same, and disciplined us the same, because we were all equal.
She did things right which is why we all had a lovely childhood.
I was good in school. You might say I was a bit of a nerd because I loved reading and wrote poetry.
My own son's life is very different from how I grew up. There was no such thing as travelling when I was a kid, but life couldn’t be any different for Finn.
He’s in secondary school now but his first holiday abroad was at the age of three months old. We went to Madrid.
I think both of us had very happy childhoods which is all that any of us can really ask for.
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