yourself. I read loads of books there on my top bunk, the days ticking by slowly. I’d always run out of actual kids’ books and have to dive into my granddad’s stack of masculine adventure novels. There was a real lurch trying to get into a story of a mercenary on the run from the East German police when you’d just finished a book about a boy who had magic shoes.
They farmed sheep there and occasionally we’d have to help out, acting as auxiliary sheepdogs when the sheep were being herded, or taking lunch out to the shearers when they clipped them in a nearby pit. There were actual dogs as well and we’d be so bored we’d dote on them to a degree they found exasperating. These creatures had to have a complex skillset – able to run after sheep on a hill but also to put up with little children who wanted to make them wear a blouse.
The highlight of every week was the arrival of the baker’s van. This guy drove around the middle of nowhere selling cakes and sweets and stuff, and we would clean him out. We’d be sitting on rocks with nothing but fields for miles eating these bright purple or luminous yellow cakes. Every Sunday a wee bus came to take everybody to Mass in the local town of Dungloe. Mass was crushingly dull and sometimes in Irish, but afterwards you were in town till the bus left. A proper town with sweets and penknives and toy guns and footballs.
Dungloe was famous in Ireland for its annual summer beauty contest called ‘Mary from Dungloe’. Irish communities from all over the globe would contribute fresh and conventional-looking examples of their gene pool. You’d have a Chicago Mary and a Glasgow Mary; who knows what their real names were? The whole thing was exactly like Father Ted’s ‘Lovely Girl’s Contest’ and everyone for miles around seemed obsessed with the thing. One year a local girl won – Moia McCole, the Donegal Mary. She lived at the bottom of our hill and everybody was really excited. They drove about at night honking on their car horns and there were big bonfires and parties. The Sunday World printed a photo of her where she was leaning forward a little too far and you could see her nipple. I cut it out and had a wank behind a big rock.
There was a peculiarity in that part of the world whereby people sometimes had a second name related to their job. I guess it started because so many people had the same first names and surnames. The guy who delivered the post was Dimrick the Post. There was a baker in Dungloe who my mum’s family knew as Anthony the Cake, but my dad’s lot called Anthony the Bun. It was great meeting people who were called the Van or the Loaf. It was like a whimsical branch of American wrestling.
Often we’d get driven to the pub by my uncle where we’d drink something called ‘Football Special’ in life-threatening quantities. We particularly loved it because it had a head on it like a pint of beer. Looking back it was actually a thick chemical scum. It also meant that we were basically drunk on sugar.
The main pub we went to was called Tessie’s. It was a run-down place with a stone floor and barrels in the corner. On cold nights you all sat in Tessie’s kitchen by the fire. Everybody played a card game called ‘25’ for tiny stakes – fifty pences was about the limit. In reality it was just an excuse for people to curse each other and the games were always accompanied by explosions of laughter. They’d curse each other for playing their hand badly or too well, for winning too much or being a sore loser or a cheap bastard or just a bastard. One time some American tourists wandered in and asked if they sold low-alcohol lager – they asked half a dozen drunks playing cards on a barrel as a dog ate crisps off the floor. After a disbelieving pause everybody screamed with laughter. This wasn’t just rudeness; nobody there had heard of such a thing as low-alcohol lager and it sounded like a ridiculous contradiction.
We kids loved going to the pub and would get really upset on the nights the men would go without us. It’s possible that we were cripplingly addicted to the sugar high. Some nights we’d go to bed then hear the car leaving the drive, so we’d run out after them. We knew we couldn’t stop them going without us. I think we just wanted to leave them with the image of us in their rear mirror, standing in the doorway in our pyjamas forming a tableau of disappointment and recrimination.
There was a relaxed attitude to drink-driving, in that you were basically allowed to drink-drive. I saw a guy one night struggle to get his key into the car door for a few minutes then hop in and drive off. My uncle would have about ten pints some nights and then drive us all home. I guess the feeling was that we weren’t going to crash into anyone, because barely any fucker lived there.
One year I went over to Ireland with my mum in winter. It was really beautiful in the snow. My cousin Mark was there too and every morning we’d pull our wellies on and walk for miles in a different direction, always finding somewhere interesting. I think it’s my memory of this period that makes me fantasise about living in the country. In reality I know there would be no shops and I would kill myself.
I was generally pretty bored and under-stimulated when I was a little kid. Other than going out to play in the backs, we didn’t really do much of anything. My brother and I got a Spectrum computer one Christmas and it totally took over our lives for a couple of years. There were loads of addictive games which to a modern child would seem like playing with a jobbie on a stick. It’s amazing what people were doing with less memory than is currently in the average vibrator. Those games were like little coding haikus. There was one called Schooldaze, which was a chillingly realistic depiction of school. You had wee tasks to do for your own benefit but everything got derailed because you had to spend all of your time in classes or you’d get punished. I intensified the reality loop by sometimes failing to do my homework because I was playing the game. There were some surprising freedoms in it too. You could, for example, just fuck yourself out of the top-floor window and fall to your death. The Headmaster would stand over your corpse and say, ‘You are not a bird, Eric’, quite callously I thought. Also you could go into the empty rooms and write swearwords on the blackboards, which we thought was unbelievably hilarious. The teacher would give you lines if they actually caught you but seemed remarkably calm about teaching a class who were looking at the word ‘Cuntbucket’.
There was also a game called Emlyn Hughes’s Supersoccer. Like everybody, we hated Emlyn Hughes but the game was strangely compelling. There was a bug where if you put a heavy tackle in on someone they would just sort of die – lie down on the pitch and just never get up. Their inert form would be repositioned by the computer for free-kicks. You could also score from a kick-off by taking a really big run-up and just blooter it into your opponent’s goal. My brother and I had a tensely negotiated agreement not to do this and we both did it absolutely every time.
I was about eleven when I started going to the cinema by myself; my parents just had no interest in that kind of thing. I really wanted to see Star Wars because everybody at school had the action figures and was talking about Return of the Jedi. Eventually my dad said he’d take me. What he actually took me to was the first Star Trek movie, the really shit one with the baldy woman in it. I’ve never had the heart to tell him.
The first thing I went to see on my own was Footloose. I was really into old rock and roll records and thought it sounded brilliant. I borrowed my brother’s fake leather jacket and sat in the cinema with the collar turned up. It’s still pretty weird that those guys were Kevin Bacon and Chris Penn, and that it was basically gay.
I started taking my sister along to the local cinema in Muirend, a real time capsule with staff who looked like they were being hunted by Ghostbusters. There was a doorman called Frank. Strictly speaking, what he was actually called was ‘Frank the Wank’, something people shouted at him everywhere he went. I was on a bus years later and two teenagers saw him coming out of a newsagent in his civvies and actually got off the bus to shout it at him. I’d drag my sister along to my choice of movies – which meant every rubbish fantasy film that came out, things like Krull and Beastmaster. I think my parents would give me the ticket money for both of us if I took her along, so I’d bribe her with Maltesers and she’d sit there dispassionately watching Rutger Hauer have an unconvincing swordfight with a man dressed as a cyclops.
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