{"id":1025,"date":"2019-03-18T17:26:06","date_gmt":"2019-03-18T17:26:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/lifewritingprojects\/?page_id=1025"},"modified":"2019-03-26T13:33:16","modified_gmt":"2019-03-26T13:33:16","slug":"unearthing-memories-by-shelagh-doonan","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/lifewritingprojects\/unearthing-memories-by-shelagh-doonan\/","title":{"rendered":"Unearthing Memories by Shelagh Doonan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Empties<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/b>I watched<\/span><\/p>\n

as from the dark sweet<\/span><\/p>\n

crumbling soil<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

rising from his fork<\/span><\/p>\n

appeared potatoes <\/span><\/p>\n

white and hard.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He dropped them in the bucket.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTake these to your mo\u2019r\u201d.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

A man of few words.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the kitchen she was<\/span><\/p>\n

waiting with a boiling pan.<\/span><\/p>\n

A scrub of spuds<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A sprig of mint<\/span><\/p>\n

and soon their floury skins were peeling back.<\/span><\/p>\n

Drained and piled steaming<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

into the good round dish,<\/span><\/p>\n

my grandfather picked first<\/span><\/p>\n

from the top of the mound<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

with his special two-pronged fork<\/span><\/p>\n

and peeled the skin off each spud<\/span><\/p>\n

with his special knife.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Two decades on, in the same<\/span><\/p>\n

Dark, sweet soil<\/span><\/p>\n

I unearthed <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Cache after cache of<\/span><\/p>\n

Guinness empties,<\/span><\/p>\n

the dark brown glass<\/span><\/p>\n

glinting.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Betty\u2019s centenary <\/strong><\/p>\n

Meat, nylons, fags<\/em><\/p>\n

Meat, pillows, strong string<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Paint pelmet, stain floor and cabinet <\/em><\/p>\n

Mend slacks, meat, stockings, face pack, fags<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Mr Schilling, Probation Office, Barnes & Avis<\/em><\/p>\n

Mr Schilling, Campbell\u2019s, the Liakhoffs<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Cement cracks, skylight, fix stair carpet.<\/em><\/p>\n

Post heavy stuff: gum boots, flippers, big jumpers<\/em><\/p>\n

Cut Ter\u2019s hair.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Coke is better for use in blast furnace –<\/em><\/p>\n

purer form of carbon.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Born in a Fiery Horse year<\/p>\n

with Mandela<\/p>\n

she left school at 14<\/p>\n

kicked over the traces<\/p>\n

in rural Co Down<\/p>\n

churned butter<\/p>\n

managed a grocery<\/p>\n

joined the Air Force<\/p>\n

worked on spitfires,<\/p>\n

married, divorced, married<\/p>\n

navigated the next five decades of<\/p>\n

child rearing, \u201cThe Troubles\u201d, pottery classes,<\/p>\n

mad in-laws, delinquent brother,<\/p>\n

thankless union work, school jumble sales,<\/p>\n

blossoming summer school,<\/p>\n

free-style needlepoint<\/p>\n

pioneering Chinese cookery<\/p>\n

BBC editorial<\/p>\n

chemotherapy and<\/p>\n

death.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Scrabo Hill<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In County Down there stands a hill, above the other<\/span><\/p>\n

Drumlins thereabout.<\/span><\/p>\n

On top, a tower, a mid-Victorian folly supposed to show <\/span><\/p>\n

A tribute from a grateful tenantry.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One 1960\u2019s Saturday my father and I rode up there on a <\/span><\/p>\n

Turquoise Vespa,<\/span><\/p>\n

To climb the tower to see the view to Ailsa Craig <\/span><\/p>\n

But mainly to drink Fanta.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

No silencer on the Vespa exhaust,<\/span><\/p>\n

So heads had turned as we had sped <\/span><\/p>\n

Through towns<\/span><\/p>\n

And broke the peace on Scrabo Hill.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Three decades on, my mother and I ad libbed, <\/span><\/p>\n

Took turns in wool and silk to re-create Scrabo Hill.<\/span><\/p>\n

A ploughed field here, a whin bush there. <\/span><\/p>\n

Pale green of silage cut. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Laburnum and irises around<\/span><\/p>\n

The Big House, grey paths to cottages, a letterbox.<\/span><\/p>\n

Social strata, seasons, stone and thatch<\/span><\/p>\n

All caught in impromptu cross-stitch.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Unearthing Memories<\/strong><\/p>\n

In my writing, I have often found myself going back to my memories of the people and places associated with my Northern Irish mother. Writing has helped me to make sense of and make peace with my mother, and the contradictions of the caring, hardworking but fiercely sectarian woman she was.<\/p>\n

I like the compressed, holographic way a poem enables you to evoke the arc of a whole life in a small space, or hint at the complexities of family dynamics in a few words.<\/p>\n

In these three poems, the theme of \u201cunearthing\u201d comes through in different ways:<\/p>\n

\u201cEmpties\u201d describes my childhood self watching the literal digging up of potatoes by my grandfather, and later, in the same earth, the discovery of his large numbers of buried Guinness bottles, revealing both the practicalities of pre-recycling days, and hinting at his possible shame about his excessive drinking.<\/p>\n

After my mother died, I discovered a number of her pocket diaries, and was very struck by the contrast between their small size and the rich amount of material they contained, almost entirely in the form of lists: <\/em>of appointments, of shopping and of her hours of work as a jobbing shorthand typist, all meticulously recorded in her copper plate handwriting. \u201cBetty\u2019s centenary\u201d uses these verbatim lists to bring her to life.<\/p>\n

In \u201cScrabo Hill\u201d, I have brought together memories of both my parents, and a piece of improvised \u201ctapestry\u201d my mother and I made, depicting a familiar landmark and imagined landscape. The poem describes both personal <\/em>and public <\/em>histories, and the tapestry reminds me of the boldness of \u201cmaking things up\u201d.<\/p>\n

\n

[Back to Traces<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Empties \u00a0I watched as from the dark sweet crumbling soil \u00a0 rising from his fork appeared potatoes white and hard. Continue ReadingUnearthing Memories by Shelagh Doonan<\/span>\u2192<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1025","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P90GIn-gx","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/lifewritingprojects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/lifewritingprojects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/lifewritingprojects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/lifewritingprojects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/lifewritingprojects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1025"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/lifewritingprojects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1119,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/lifewritingprojects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1025\/revisions\/1119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/lifewritingprojects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}