Eighty Not Out Read Online Free PDF

treat for me, as fizzy drinks along with sherbet and gobstoppers were not allowed at home.
    My mother brought gifts back from the regatta week: a cressgrowing set, a devilishly difficult maze puzzle in Bakelite with nine small silver balls to be trapped at the centre, and a blue Box Brownie. Later that summer she acquired a trailer for camping equipment and we – my mother, Rosemary, Johnny and I – set off for Dunaff Head in Donegal. The weather was not propitious, so we ended up sleeping in an abandoned Black and Tans barracks on the headland. The following year we went across Ireland to Sligo and Achill Island, where I looked in vain for amethysts. The first pictures taken with the Brownie are landscapes with slightly sloping horizons, and Conrad, our dachshund, makes his first appearance. At Emlagh, near Roonagh Quay where the ferry now sails to Clare Island, we asked permission from Mrs MacHale to park the caravan on her land. She was unsparingly hospitable, allowing us to use her little stone well fed by pure spring water, and giving us a daily supply of warm milk from her one cow. She insisted that I should try my hand at the milking, with dire results; a true suburban child, I hated warm milk, and was none too keen on the proximity of her curious cow. I did my best to co-operate, but it must have been evident that I was not in my element.
    I suspect the acquisition of camping paraphernalia and a caravan was an attempt to show my grandmother Eileen how well my mother could manage as a single parent. Grandma Eileen had paid for three summer holidays at Drumaweir Hotel in Greencastle. For me they are treasured memories, but for my mother, enduring the daily company of Grandma can only have been stressful. Her antics, such as emerging dripping from a swim to exhort fellow guests, quietly enjoying the sun in their deck chairs, to join her, as the water was ‘really warm’, and her claim to have met the ghost of my grandfather, referred to as ‘dear Dav’, at dusk, in a pink cloud, on her way to the shore, tested the other guests’ ability to repress mirth and adopt a sombre expression of sympathy. She was a fast, impetuous driver who used the horn frequently, and her car bore evidence of past impingements; offers to ‘take the child for a spin’ were difficult to refuse without being downright rude. These visits to Greencastle must have been punitive for my mother who had happy memories of visits dating back as far as 1910.
    Gramp and Rosa had brought my mother to Drumaweir when she was fifteen, and Rosemary a toddler; it was a family-run hotel and she had formed a lasting friendship with the owner’s daughter. Here she first met the Stevenson family, and she told me that in 1912 Hugh had talked about how, when he was very young, Eileen had played her role as wicked stepmother – ‘those rings of hers can cut you know’. They had played croquet and badminton; there had been wild horse-play, and my father, two years younger, had pushed my mother into a clump of pampas grass. She had stayed as a guest of the family, without her parents, in the summer of 1918, grieving for the loss of her fiancé, Jack, who had been killed just before Christmas 1917. But the wound had already begun to heal; in August 1918 her diary records dancing into the small hours in the boathouse with officers from the US navy who were stationed at Culmore. They seem to have had no difficulty in getting hold of assorted vehicles, in which they went joy-riding as far afield as Malin Head.
    Gradually contact with Grandma dwindled to visits to Belfast, when she stayed at the Royal Avenue Hotel, and we would be summoned to lunch. It was clear she would have liked to see more of me on my own, and in this respect I fear my mother was insensitive, seldom releasing me; when she did, strict rules were dictated about the hour of return. Once only do I remember Grandma coming to visit us at Knock. She thought,