An Old Friend
by Margaret Cahill
Last Christmas, while on a visit home, I took a walk into town one evening to stretch my legs and get out of the house for a while. On my way back to my parents’ house, instinct drew me up a driveway I hadn’t set foot on in at least twenty years. Though I’d passed the gateway thousands of times on my way to and from town when visiting them, I’d not seen the old house it led to in all that time, nor had I thought of it much. In the 1980s and 1990s, our lives were intertwined with it when the building was used as the local office of ACOT, the national agricultural advisory and training body, which has long-since been rebranded as Teagasc. My mother did the cleaning there on Wednesday evenings and Saturdays, and my father did the gardening throughout the summer months. As children, my siblings and I were roped into helping with both. Though the house was named Sheena and the gate still bears that name, we never called it that, but referred to it by it’s institutional name, ACOT.
Even as a child it was obvious to me that the house had been the grand home of a prosperous family in former times. The ground floor retained an air of grandeur that hinted at its past, with high ceilings, dark wooden panelling on the walls, huge polished wooden tables, heavy wooden doors with decorative brass plates and knobs, and large casement windows looking out onto the lawns with their mature trees. There were servant call bells in many of the rooms that would have rang a bell in the ornate wooden-framed box that hung above the kitchen door. Though the sound of the bell had been deactivated by our time in the house, a star beneath the room name would quiver in the box to indicate which room a bell had been pressed in. I’m not sure which astounded me more, the technology involved, or the idea of having servants in your home that you could summon at will.
While the ground floor retained some of the grandeur of the past, the upstairs rooms had lost much of their elegance by being converted into, what were then, modern offices. They opened up a different but equally enthralling world of wonder to me. Each employee’s desk had a phone that was theirs alone to use. At a time when many homes in Ireland still had no phone, the idea of having one that was yours alone to use seemed like such an extravagance. My sisters and I never tired of using the internal phone system to call each other from different rooms, and our mother used it to keep tabs on our whereabouts and the progress of our work.
One of the offices had a huge electronic typewriter with a small four-inch wide LCD screen built into it that displayed the words the user was typing, and it wasn’t until you hit the Print button that the text would be committed to the page. Thinking back now, I realise this must have been an early form of Word Processor. In the 1980s, having yet to see even the most basic of computers, this was an extraordinary and magical machine to us. There was also a franking machine, so that the office could process their own post; a ring-binding machine, with a pull-down handle that reminded me of slot machines on holidays; and a photo-copying machine that was so large, it was housed in a room of its own and took ten minutes to warm up before you could use it.
My cleaning duties included collecting dirty cups from the office desks, emptying the office bins into a huge black sack I dragged along behind me, polishing dark wooden tables with Mr Sheen, and buffing the decorative brass plates on the heavy wooden doors. I loved being sent to do jobs in the Conference Room, which was housed in a newer, separate, single-story building out the back. I had no idea what people did there but it had a kind of mysterious importance to it. The allure of the overhead projector always kept me out there longer than it took to straighten up the tables and chairs and empty the bins. We had no access to the transparencies needed to use it properly, so were limited to throwing poorly-formed shadow puppets onto the walls. It never got boring.
Scattered throughout the house was evidence of the activity carried out by those who worked there. There was a huge detailed map of the county laid out beneath a glass overlay that was perfectly cut to fit the table it sat on, so that it could still function as a table when the map wasn’t in use. The ingenuity impressed me. Every room seemed to have booklets and pamphlets about fertilising grass, dealing with mastitis in cows, and a myriad of other farming-related topics I’ve since forgotten. The walls of the reception areas always had a poster about some invasive beetle or other we should be on the look out for.
I preferred the cleaning work inside with my mother over the gardening work with my father. With her, we had time to linger, to explore, to imagine, in between the small jobs we were given. Outside, we mostly mowed lawns and tidied the huge tufts of ornamental pampas grass that were always threatening to get out of hand. I hated the painstaking task of picking up twigs and branches from the lawn before it was mowed. Even worse was the tedious raking up and collecting of the grass afterwards and the wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow that had to be dumped in the old orchard, out of sight. It dragged out a seemingly simple job interminably. There were no mysterious things to explore here and little to fuel the imagination, not that there was any time for daydreaming with my father in charge. He was not one for tolerating messing or dawdling.
As I grew older, I graduated from general skivvy to grass mower and got to drive the ride-on lawnmower. With its accelerator pedal and two gears (forward and reverse) it was as near as I’d get to driving a car for at least a decade, and made me feel very grown-up. In the days before Health & Safety had been heard of, I would lift the seat, jump-start the mower with a spanner at our house (the key had stopped working and no-one saw the need to get it fixed) and then drive the three hundred or so metres down the busy main road on it, with cars zooming past me.
A steep hill on the front lawn led to an unprotected drop of ten or more feet onto the footpath by the main road below. Full of the bravado of youth and always needing to prove how tough I was, I had no fear of driving up the sharp incline at speed or of mowing treacherously close to the edge. Now in my late forties, more keenly aware of the fragility of my body, I can’t even think about it without imagining tumbling down, cracking my head open and severing fingers on the sharp rotating blades.
I knew that in recent years a small housing development had been built on the grounds of the house and that it had adopted its name, Sheena. As I walked in from the main road, I found that the original driveway of the old house had been widened and footpaths added to each side. My view of the house itself was obscured by a tall solid wooden fence on my right that ran along the edge of the front lawn I used to mow. Ahead of me, I could see nine modest-sized, modern houses arranged in a semi-circle where the orchard had once stood.
As I walked on, I reached a break in the fence where a set of gates formed the new entrance to the much-reduced grounds of the old house. I stopped as the house itself finally came into view. I was amused to see the huge and still unruly stack of pampas grass was still there, to the left of the front door. The curved driveway leading up to the house was covered in such a thick layer of moss that it was hard to distinguish where the front lawn ended and it began. A metal pole with a disabled parking sign was the only modern intervention into the scene. I’d heard that the house had been used as an office by the Courts Service of Ireland for a few years, but since then, it was unoccupied. I was glad to see that the windows had not been smashed and there were no signs of break-ins, unusual for a disused property but it was probably because few people knew it was here, hidden from the main road as it was.
I was somewhat surprised by the appearance and size of the house. I remembered it as being much older and much bigger. To a child who grew up in a 1970s bungalow with tiny rooms, in which I had to share not only a room but a bed with my sister, it had seemed like a large, sprawling mansion. In truth, it was probably no bigger than the large family homes that have sprung up everywhere around the countryside in the last twenty years, with their electric gates, double-height entrance halls, sun rooms and dedicated playrooms for the children.
I took my phone out of my pocket to see if an internet search would tell me anything about the house. The memory of the great big electronic typewriter inside, that I was in awe of all those years ago, and the contrast with my exponentially more powerful multi-functional smartphone, made me acutely aware of the passage of time and the changes that had occurred during the thirty years since I had been within the walls of this house.
I found out that it had been built in the 1930s by a prominent solicitor in the town. I couldn’t quite grasp that it was only ninety years old. Standing there, I realised that not only had I remembered the house as being older and grander than it was, but I had used it as a kind of historical reference point. When I’d read accounts of life in the Anglo-Irish ’big house’, real or fictional, it was a bigger version of this place that I imagined. When servants were scrubbing pans, boiling great pots of potatoes or complaining about their harsh masters, it had been an enlarged interpretation of the kitchen from this house I’d had in my mind’s eye. The dark polished wood of the staircase had also formed the backdrop for scenes in many stories I’d read. None logically fit into the actual size, appearance or age of the house but I had borrowed from and mutated my memory of the it to place them there. Maybe it allowed me to really inhabit the stories I read, and step into the shoes of the people in them.
I was surprised to realise the extent to which I had carried different versions of this house with me for the more-than thirty years since I’d been inside it. It was as if the place had two sets of memories for me, the real ones of working in the house and garden, and these other flights of fancy and imagination that were fuelled by fiction. Growing up in an Irish Midlands town in the 1980s, there were few outside influences apart from the two-channel television and library books. This house, which was so different to our own and any other I had ever been in, inspired me at an impressionable age in ways I hadn’t been aware of. Standing in front of it with all of these memories washing over me felt like meeting an old friend again, one I was pleased to see was still standing and in good health.
As I turned for home, I thought of how shaped we are by the experiences of our childhoods, by where and how we grow up. In my case, that wasn’t always constructive and positive but I was grateful to have experienced this house when I did, for the sense of wonder it brought to me as a child and for the memories of it that lingered. I couldn’t help but wonder if we’d both be still be around in another thirty years, and if we were, how different we, and the world, might be.
Margaret Cahill is a short story writer who grew up in Offaly and now lives in Limerick. Her fiction has been featured in The Irish Independent, The Argyle, Loft Books, Roi Fainéant, Bending Genres, Idle Ink, Bulb Culture Collective, The Milk House, époque press é-zine, Ogham Stone, Honest Ulsterman, HeadStuff, Silver Apples, Autonomy anthology, Incubator, Crannog, Galway Review, Limerick Magazine, Boyne Berries and The Linnet’s Wings. She also dabbles in writing about music and art, with publications on HeadStuff.org and in Circa Arts Magazine.