How being on the horns of a dilemma caused a posh person’s fall from Grace

SO there I was, last Friday, ready to put on a Viking helmet and leap into one of the amphibious craft that were used to land GIs on the Normandy beaches during the Second World War.

I’d paid up front for me, Grace, and her mother to be entertained by raucous driver guides on a Viking Splash tour of Dublin. Grace Brennan is a slender wand of a girl possessed of an air of reserved wisdom unexpected in a nine-year-old American. Or a nine-year-old from anywhere, for that matter.

In the event, circumstances prevented me joining the two of them, so mother and daughter went off without me. The mother sent me an email afterwards saying it had been a riot and that at a certain point she had said to Grace (nine -year-old wand of wisdom) that she was very sorry I’d missed it, because I’d have loved it.

“No, she wouldn’t have,” Grace replied, “because she’s all posh and proper.”

I didn’t know whether to go to A&E for shattered self-esteem or to remedial teaching in down-and-dirty. Posh and proper? Moi? Has this girl heard me swear? Now, I have to admit that I was kind of glad when circumstances prevented me going on the Viking Splash thing, not because of posh but because of reclusiveness. That much jollity in a confined space would be a challenge.

And then there was fear of possible nausea. But it’s not posh and proper to be less than enthusiastic about throwing up in front of strangers, is it?

Being scrupulously honest, here, I have to admit to doing one truly posh and proper cringe about the prospect of someone putting a Viking helmet on me.

It’s not that it would disimprove my image. My wardrobe is so haphazard that anybody who knows me wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see me in a Viking helmet and anyway, nobody would recognise me in it because one of those twin-horned yokes is probably better than a baseball hat for concealing identity. All the wearers look exactly the same, their horns turning in unison as the guide directs them to some bit of the city they definitely should not miss.

The thing that bothered me about the helmet-donning was the fact that what I would be donning was a pre-donned helmet. Let’s face it, overseas visitors to Ireland don’t have enough space in the one bag they can now check in for free to be bringing home horned helmets.

It’s not like you could put it in one of those squeezy polythene bags that theoretically allow you to stuff three times the normal amount into your case.

Try putting a Viking helmet in one of those and you’ll have the vacuum punctured immediately.

So I figure the Viking Splash people take an environmentally-friendly approach to their helmets, recycling them on every journey.

But one of two things I was always told by my mother, going to school, was “Do not ever put another girl’s beret on you and don’t ask why”. The other thing she told me and my sister as we headed off each morning on our bicycles was “And if you see the bus, get off the bicycle.”

Having once had the life-changing experience of colliding with a bus full of nuns, back when nuns were really nuns in the veil-to-floor sense, my mother believed there was no negotiating with buses. You surrendered to them on sight.

This is a principle by which I have abided throughout my life and look at me — still alive. I’ve collided with a tree, a Jeep, an estate car, a statue of Our Lady on a roundabout, and a van delivering sausage rolls — but I’ve never had the smallest argument with a bus.

The nearest I got was the day a bus pulled out in front of me and plunged straight into a bridge that was too low for it to get under, doing the forehead of the bus no good at all. I drove the long way home, soothed by a quiet sense that the force was with me. Or it was against the bus driver, which was just as good.

I abided, all the way through school, by the rule barring me from putting another girl’s beret on me, mainly because I have a huge head. It doesn’t show that much in the picture on this page, but that may be air-brushing.

The truth is that I have a head the circumference of which is about the size of an overweight person’s waist. Whenever I’ve bought goggle-and- snorkel sets, the elastic keeping the goggles on gets so strained by the sheer size of the head it has to circle that my eyes bulge like I was rehearsing for a film about a sea monster.

BERETS have a tight band that keeps them on, and even on a large-sized beret, that band and me never got on. Or at least the beret never stayed on. Even if I pulled it brutally down, Lewinsky-style, the thing would rise up and pop off, leaving me looking as if someone very tall had tried to garrotte me and failed to go down far enough to reach my neck. If you have enormous problems keeping your own beret on, you’re unlikely to get promiscuous in the beret department and so it was a long time before it struck me that I should ask my big sister why beret-sharing was so dangerous and why we weren’t allowed to ask the reason.

“Headlice,” she said, without looking up from her book. I asked her what headlice was and she laid the book down with the exaggerated patience only an older sister can muster and told me they were plural, which confused me even further. “Bugs. Insects. Creepy crawlies,” she said, getting madder by the minute.

One of the things you learn from being stupid in your formative years is that other people hate you for it. I was particularly stupid at maths, and my sister, my father and the maths teacher formed an orderly queue every day to A) hate me for being so thick and B) hate me for pretending to be thicker than I was, because being that thick wasn’t possible. However, even explaining quadratic equations failed to madden my sister as much as trying to explain headlice to me did. I sat, stunned, in the face of a diatribe involving stinking shampoo, eggs clinging to follicles, fine- tooth combs, and vague warnings about the potential to bring shame on the entire family.

All of which came back to me when the Viking Splash opportunity came up. I’m sure they fumigate, hose, and scour the helmets between uses, and maybe wearing the helmets is voluntary, but I was still worried. I had to cancel anyway, and the outcome was a devastating dismissal from a nine-year-old.

I’m thinking of doing up a T-shirt reading: “My friends went on the Viking Splash and all I got was called Posh and Proper.”