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a mother’s days

10 Saturday May 2025

Posted by in Dispatch from the Diaspora

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Each day we move a little closer to the sidelines of their lives, which is where we belong, if we do our job right.–-Anna Quindlen

I quit work for a year after my daughter was born. It was the best year of my life, with Sophie attached to me in one of those baby carriers without which I would have been unprepared for motherhood. That’s what the salesperson in Babies R Us had told me.

Some days I made it out of my pajamas, but only if I felt like walking out to the mailbox. I was usually bare-faced unlike Dolly Parton, who is always in full-make up, “ambulance, tornado, and earthquake ready” – and who is always – always – ready with the right words at the right time. Sophie didn’t care what I looked like as long as I was right there.

Some days, I showered. Most days, I think I resembled the child I once was, the one who had to be reminded more than once to wash her hands or brush her teeth because she was so absorbed in play; the child who made wishes on dandelions and chains out of buttercups and daisies. I loved playing with my baby girl, feeding her, dressing her in miniature clothes with impossibly tiny buttons, brushing what little hair she had with the softest toothbrush, and bathing her in the kitchen sink. For twelve idyllic months, with her dad off at work, she was all mine. Drunk on new baby smell, I danced in the afternoons around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison’s “Bright Side of the Road.” Almost 28 years later, I can still smell it.

In those first months of her life, I  spent interminable hours looking at her. Just. Looking. At. Her. I examined every tiny feature and flicker across her face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents. I often paused to ponder how it was that two imperfect people had made perfection.  She would stared back, cooing like a little bird, babbling and gurgling before discovering the beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We called it hand ballet.

Mostly, our baby bounced with joy and curiosity. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or maybe just to let us know she was there. I couldn’t bear it. I hovered. I was one of those mothers who picked her up the minute she began to cry at night. My mother encouraged me to do so, pointing out that there would be plenty of times as an adult when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better.

My mother was right. 

If only we could deposit all those hours of holding and comforting in some sort of emotional savings account, to be withdrawn years later in case of emergency like that night I spent in the ICU following eight hours of surgery, when my teenage daughter wept in bed and rocked herself to sleep.

 I hate cancer.

When it was time for me to return to work after that year at home with her, I was unprepared for the crying – hers and mine – that came immediately before and continuing some time after I placed her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, a cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school where all the other mothers appeared not to have jobs outside the home. Every morning, they loitered in the parking lot in their shorts and Birkenstocks, drinking coffee from mugs filled at home. This was B.S. (Before Starbucks).

While I was not dressed like Dolly Parton for a turn at the Ryman, I imagine I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with boring Anne Klein suits bought on sale at Lohemanns and my hair on the verge of sensible.  An assistant principal at the time, I was trying to impress on someone – most probably myself – that I was “A Professional Working Mother” who could do it all and have it all and “lean in” blah, blah, blah.  I’ve had my fill of leaning in. 

Sophie was unimpressed with this version of me and showed it by crying, daily, all over my dry-clean-only blouses. I made this a much bigger deal than it was, eventually discovering that if I didn’t put the blouses in the tumble dryer, they survived. Realizing there must be a lucrative pact between dry cleaners and the fashion industry, I took a lasting umbrage against the dryer, rarely feeding it anything other than towels and jeans.

Living in sunny Arizona – where any Northern Ireland mother would be impressed with the “great drying” most every day – I never understood why I owned a tumble dryer. Where I grew up, everybody hung the washing out on the line and then ran like hell to rescue it when the rain invariably began. The first thing I bought for my mother with my first real pay check was a tumble dryer from the Northern Ireland Electricity Board. She loved it.

I remember I once asked my late husband about the logic of owning a dryer in Phoenix. He looked at me like I had lost my mind. He loved that machine so much that he used it to dry all clothes, regardless of fabric. His favorite setting was Permanent Press, and he used it for all my favorite clothes too. I never figured out what this setting means. It doesn’t press anything permanently, but it has permanently reduced some of my skirts and shirts to napkin-sized deformities. To be fair, when I was pretending to be a grown-up with a real job that required more than pajamas, he didn’t do my laundry. I did. All my clothes were safe.  

My safe clothes and my sensible job held no clout with Bonnie.  Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I would hand over my wailing, flailing girl, and Bonnie would attempt to placate me with repeated reassurances that Sophie would be fine as soon as I left. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to say it at least three times,  Bonnie showed restraint and never once rolled her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation. I wrestled with the reality that Bonnie had other children to attend to. She would not be spending hours  like Madonna (mother of Jesus, not Lourdes) at my perfect child or cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when Sophie did something for the first time. Anything.

I would miss the first time Sophie watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or blew bubbles or cracked a nut in the classroom nutcracker. Not your typical developmental milestones, but Bonnie’s boss had deemed them important. I would miss telling my husband, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that our brilliant child had experienced another genuis-level achievement like that time she spoke her first word – daddy – or when she clapped her hands for the first time, or let go of our hands and stood straight like a little warrior to an ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”

I was jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie, with some magic trick up her sleeve, who would  charm Sophie’s tears away. Every day, I walked away from the little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” pretending to leave but I stayed in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, prolonging the agony, listening to Sophie cry. When the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and a final shuddering stop, I reapplied my makeup until my face matched the boring business suit and no glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remained. Off I went – to work for other people’s children.

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Around this time, I discovered a book by Kathi Appelt who understood the rhythm of these daily separations – and reunions – and experienced it again when her son was 12 and going off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he prepared to go off to college—and inspired by Emmylou Harris’s Sweet Sorrow in the Wind—she wrote “Oh My Baby Little One.”

I found it on a discard table in a Borders when central Phoenix still had a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday.

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Every bedtime, I read to Sophie the story of lovely Mama Bird who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love would still be with him. Magically—and in the shape of a little red heart— it would slip inside his lunch box or sit on his shoulder during playtime or nestle on his pillow at nap-time. At the same time, it would curl around Mama Bird’s coffee cup as she went about her daily business.

And every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask Sophie, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper to me as though it were our secret:

All around, mama. The love is all around.

It eased the morning goodbyes when I left her with Bonnie and all the other teachers throughout the years. There were lots of them. They never seemed to understand that I was Sophie’s first teacher, that I knew her best, so by the time she was in 2nd grade, she had become a tourist in Arizona’s public education system, hopping from school to school, becoming ever more resilient, while I kept searching for that one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine. We never stopped looking. I’m not sure the superhero teacher ever showed up, and Sophie’s formal education is now over with her post-graduate program completed.

One summer morning, I watched from my car as she strode onto a community college campus to study art with students who were ancient – at least in their twenties. As tall as me but braver, I knew she knew I was watching and waiting for her to turn around and wave. She did. She never lets me down.

So blow a kiss and wave good-bye – my baby, don’t you cry. This love is always with you. Like the sun is in the sky.

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Sometimes, in an unguarded moment – my mother in Northern Ireland, me in Mexico, my daughter in Arizona –  between emails and Zoom meetings, home improvement projects and grocery store runs, things that matter and things that don’t, we’ll each wonder what the other is doing and pick up the phone. Looking for love.

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I can’t help but smile as I recall my daughter as a three-year-old, fighting sleep with all her might and poring over Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations, searching for the tiny red heart cleverly hidden on each page.

Those drawings inspired a growing collection of hearts found in unexpected places over the years. Scatted around my home – and hers – are  little reminders in stone and glass and fabric that the love actually is all around – something we have known long before Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister told us so.

If you’re looking for love, you can always find evidence of it at the airport, where those who stay and those who go are often telling the only truths that matter:

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.

In the Mexican village I call home, the weather is perfect for a clothesline strung across the backyard. Great drying. My mother would love it here. Reminiscent of the rhythms of rural County Derry, it is a place peopled with the kind of characters that fill Seamus Heaney’s poems – men like my father, makers of things.

One day, a stonemason working on the wall around our house, asked me about the corazón shaped stone in the pile of rocks on our street. Would I like to use it on the new wall?

I would.

Home is where the heart is.

Happy Mother’s Day.

every day is teacher appreciation day

06 Tuesday May 2025

Posted by in favorite teacher, Frank O'Connor, Great teachers, Memoir, Mr. Jones, Music, Short Stories, Teacher Appreciation Week, Teaching, Themes of childhood

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There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.

I won’t be the only one to invoke Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides during this Teacher Appreciation Week  We should honor our teachers and their craft. Navigating multiple challenges and crises wrought by COVID, millions of them learned to teach from their homes, to harness the power of whatever technology was available to them to maintain a connection with their students, many of whom they didn’t see for months, many of whom dropped out.  They learned to improvise—with phone calls and postcards and hand-written letters to the families without access to home computers and the online Zoom classrooms reminiscent of the Brady Bunch grid. In spite of their efforts to keep students engaged, the effects of COVID disruptions resonate in 2025, with many students still far away from full academic recovery in math and reading.

The most important subject — and good teachers know this — is their students. Good teachers understand that all students enter the classroom—online or off— with the same basic needs –  to feel safe, to learn, to matter. Some children, especially those struggling during the pandemic with hunger or poverty or an unsafe home, will always remember the schools and teachers who went above and beyond to make sure they made it through.  As Henry Adams once said about a teacher’s effect on eternity.

He can never tell where his influence stops.

On this teacher appreciation day, come away with me to the classroom with your favorite teacher’s name on the door. You know the one. Maybe it was the teacher who knew you were really good at art and entered your  drawing in a contest without telling you. Maybe it was the kindly English teacher who cut you some slack when you didn’t finish a book report because your mother was in the hospital, and who you overheard one day tell a student during detention, “You will never earn enough money to do a job you do not love. Never.” Or maybe it was the history teacher who, decades later, is the reason why your mind drifts to the fields of the Antebellum South every time you use a cotton ball.

Each of us should have this extraordinary teacher. 

Mr. Jones and me

For me, it was Mr. Jones, my English teacher. I was a teenager when I first encountered. I knew nothing about pedagogy, but because of him, I learned what great teaching looked like. It looked like Mr. Jones in his classroom every day at Antrim Grammar School. Then a young man at the beginning of his career, he wore a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and on its lapel, a “Save the Otter” button. Naturally, he was well-read, but more importantly, he was accessible.  The best reader in the room, be brought vividly to life Chaucer’s Pardoner and other questionable characters, knowing the bawdy exchanges that would most appeal to our adolescent sensibilities. With impeccable timing, he knew when we’d had our fill of Richard Church’s Over the Bridge or the Great Expectations of Charles Dickens. And, at such times, he would pause to wax philosophical or tell us to underscore in red great chunks of text we should learn by heart. Like this:

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

“Great stuff!” he would add for emphasis. Every time. 

Mr. Jones created a classroom that was a place of hope during often hopeless and harrowing days in 1970s Northern Ireland.  The daughter of working-class parents who pushed me to do well in school, I was the first in our extended family to pass the 11+ exam that gained me a spot at Antrim Grammar, the posh school, where the headmaster and teachers showed up to morning assembly in Hogwarts-style black gowns. Insecure and unsure of my place there, I loved how Mr. Jones took us away from all that, indulging with good humor, our wrong answers and red herrings and the questions we were never afraid to ask.   I remember one day I raised my hand to ask what “pre-Raphaelite” meant, and I jotted down the definition in the margin of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native.  A few minutes later, I raised my hand to ask if I could go to the toilet, and when I returned to the classroom, Mr. Jones asked – but not unkindly – if I had  looked in the mirror to consider if perhaps I too had pre-Raphaelite features like the coquettish Eustacia Vye. Of course I had looked in the mirror.  I also  remember the day I said out loud that I was surprised one of the women in the novel had turned out to be “that type of woman,” and Mr. Jones, glasses balanced on his head, looked right at me and said, “Yvonne, there is no type. Remember that.” I have never forgotten it.

My musical education

In these seemingly random conversations, Mr. Jones revealed to us a little of his life beyond the classroom and his taste in music – Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Jackson Browne – thereby influencing my own. He even let me borrow his records. But then back to business, he would painstakingly guide us through the required reading for O-level and A-level English exams, the routines and rituals of his classroom elevating an ordinary space into a place of possibility. Every. Single. Day.

Conversely, I also encountered teachers who didn’t seem to like children very much – the strident PE teacher who watched as we showered and questioned the validity of notes our mothers had written to excuse us from swimming because we were menstruating. She even asked for evidence. There were teachers who used sarcasm and big words as they undermined working class parents who lacked a formal education but more than made up for it with hard work and a desire to know the things to do and say that would help ensure their children a place at university, a competitive edge in a world foreign to them.  Parents like mine. 

When I think back to my parents observing their university-bound daughter, I am reminded of something Seamus Heaney once told Dennis O’Driscoll:

Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days, I was outside the loop, my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible – no phone, for God’s sake.

 

My First Teacher

From this vantage point, my mother – my first teacher –  took pride in all aspects of our education, from sewing labels on our uniforms to “backing” our textbooks. I can see her in my mind’s eye, at our kitchen table, late one September evening after our first day back at school.  One at a time, she places each of our new books  carefully on the middle of a sheet of brown parcel paper. With a few quick snips, folds, and tucks, she has it covered, ready for us to write our names on the front.

One September, because she was ill and in the hospital, I took it upon myself to back my new history textbook.  Like so many things, this was something my mother had made look easy. Clumsy, I could not fit the brown paper neatly under the spine at both ends, so I gave up and went to school, my book un-backed. For my sins, I was subjected me to a memorably sarcastic tirade from a teacher who made me stand up while he berated me in front of everyone, told me I was useless, and that he didn’t want to hear another word about my mother in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. She may as well have been on the other side of the world in that instant, and almost 50 years later, I can still feel the sting of embarrassment on my face.

I never forgave him. 

Full circle

In the classroom across the hall, however, and because of Mr. Jones, I mattered, and I knew that I mattered.  This might explain why I became a teacher and remained a teacher for so many years, driven I suppose by the hope that kids in my classroom might feel they mattered too. 

By the time I had spent more than a decade as a teacher, Mr. Jones had moved on to s new teaching post at Friends School in Lisburn. It makes me smile to consider the possibility that, on the same day, Mr. Jones and I might have been introducing our respective students on either side of the Atlantic, to Robert Frost’s Birches.

Years later, curious about where his career had taken him, and hoping to connect with him so I could say thank you,  I searched online, where I found in the Friends Summer 2012 Newsletter a tribute to my favorite teacher, now middle-aged and retired 

Mr Terry Jones, Senior Teacher, joined the staff at Friends’ from Antrim Grammar School as Head of the English Department in 1996. At the heart of his teaching was an abiding love of literature, an endless enthusiasm for books and reading, that enriched and enlivened all in his classroom over the years. At the heart of his work in school were kindness, warmth and good sense – qualities that drew the best from pupils and fostered the good relationships so important in our community. A man with many interests, those good relationships extended throughout the staff at Friends’ and Terry Jones was a most highly valued colleague and friend. Calm and steadfast in upholding what is really important in education, Terry Jones made an immense contribution and his example will be a pattern for those who worked with him here in years to come. There is no doubt that retirement will be busy and fulfilling and Terry Jones has our thanks and very best wishes for the future.

At the heart of his work were kindness, warmth, and good sense – the likes of which we saw from teachers everywhere during COVID-19. Perhaps it took a pandemic for us to notice that good teachers are essential.

Remember to thank one of them.

Pints with Mr. Jones, Belfast 2015

where the kettle’s always on

30 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in Dispatch from the Diaspora

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It is Mother’s Day in Northern Ireland. I had marked the day on my calendar but still forgot to send a card, time running away from me like Bukowski’s wild horses.

The water is wide, but it will take only a second to transport me back to my mother’s kitchen. I’ll pick up the phone to tell her about my good intentions this Mother’s Day and sorry about the card. She’ll tell me in the parlance, to catch myself on. I’ll make a mental to note to call the florist in Magherafelt tomorrow.

In my mind’s eye, mummy is always standing at the ironing board in her kitchen, just as she was one morning on a recent visit. It’s raining again, and there’s no craic, she tells me, hoping I’ll have some news. She’ll ask me if I ever did get that kettle. She still can’t get her head around the fact that anyone living in this century does not have an electric kettle. “Some people have two. My God, no house should be without a kettle in this day and age.”

People from back home don’t understand that people everywhere else don’t have the kettle going at all times. To be fair to me, there’s not much point, because the only other person here who would drink tea with me the way Northern Ireland people do is from Enniskillen, and he moved to the other side of the village so I don’t see him enough anymore to merit buying an electric kettle. And I’ve lived with Scott long enough to know that he’s not about to start drinking tea either. He’s a coffee man, a heathen who has to grind the beans himself. A couple of months ago, we had invited friends visiting from Dublin to come over to watch a Six Nations match. One was a coffee drinker, her husband a tea drinker. A proper tea drinker. Excited to find out I had a stash of Barry’s tea bags in the cupboard, he volunteered to put the kettle on, but he stopped short when he spotted the red kettle sitting on our gas stove. He didn’t know what to do. “You don’t have a proper kettle?”

No. But I have an iron, purchased in Guadalajara to atone perhaps for that time in Phoenix when, in an act of mild rebellion, I donated my ironing board to Goodwill, no small act for someone raised by a mother who ironed everything, including handkerchiefs, socks, and dishcloths. My mother is a master. The last time I was home, I sat in the kitchen and watched as she expertly smoothed out with hot steam the stubborn wrinkles in my favorite old denim shirt. When she paused to make a point about something I’d forgotten, I was drawn back to all those times she eased into a story I’d heard a time or two before. Lessons from behind the ironing board I call them, and they include the one about taking time to consider the lilies and to mark her words that there is plenty of time for work and plenty of fish in the sea; and, to believe that what’s meant for you won’t pass you by.

Implicit in her admonishments not to wish my life away, was the fact that she was not wishing my life away. We’re a long time dead.

Mostly, my mother has tried to strike a balance between shielding me from the world’s dangers as they play out on the news—from bombs in Belfast shops to tsunamis and hurricanes in far-away places I have never visited, and mass shootings anywhere in the United States—while at the same time encouraging me to find a voice to explore its realities without hurting myself.

I wasn’t open to what she had to say all the time, especially not when I was in the throes of adolescent boredom, my eyes rolling to the heavens in response to the kind of home-spun wisdom I never thought I would miss. Not all the time, because our world was Northern Ireland in the 1970s, and I couldn’t wait to turn my back on it.

Maybe this is why the granny’s words in Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast packed such an emotional punch, “Go now – don’t look back.” When I was very young, I heard my own granny say the same to my mother.  “Go. Follow the sun.” She and my father had toyed with the idea of immigration—pondering a future in Canada, South Africa, Australia, America—places some of our neighbors had chosen. Ultimately, they remained where they were, and I wonder about any regret they feel, especially when they watched my immigrant life unfold from afar, their American grand-daughter growing up so far away, with everybody else’s grandparents always there for all the special days— for birthdays and Christmases and trick-or treating.

I still feel a kind of guilt about leaving Northern Ireland, leaving them, especially now that our once massive extended family has diminished in size. The last of my dad’s brothers died a year ago. My mother’s brothers and sisters are all dead too.

Maybe the best thing would have been to stay, to strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night, to “stay on where it happens.” To keep going, like my mother and father, like my childhood friends, my cousins, like all the families most grievously harmed by our Troubles, all hurt but also buoyed by hope and the promise of peace.

But I left, unafraid of what the future held, taking what Doris Kearns Goodwin once described as a “spectacular risk.” Over 60 now, having spent much of my adult my life in Arizona and the last five years in a Mexican village, I know well the unguarded moments of dislocation that bring a visceral longing for “home,” perhaps even for the things that sent me away in the first place—for Northern Ireland, wild and green, its low hanging clouds full of rain, the coastline, the accent, the colloquialisms, the oul’ banter.

One day last Spring, armed with what seemed an acceptable translation on my phone—“pinzas para ropa”—I drove over cobbled streets that would not be out of place in Ireland, to a little shop in the village. “Si, si amiga,” and the young woman behind the counter handed me a bag of brightly colored plastic clothes pegs. Victorious, I returned to our sunny back garden, where there is a clothes line.

While the workers took their siesta, the cumbia no longer at full blast, I did a load of whites and turned my back on the dryer, because—and every Irish person will understand this—“God, there’s great drying out there.” Standing back to watch my blouses flutter in the warm breeze, my mother was with me.

On a day like today, the thousands of miles between us fall away, and my mother is young again rushing in from our wee back garden with a great armful of shirts and sheets rescued from the clothes-line just before another rain.

Thank you for being there ma—for being home for me.

As between clear blue and cloud,

Between haystack and sunset sky,

Between oak tree and slated roof,

I had my existence. I was there.

Me in place and the place in me

Happy Mother’s Day.


How to Open a Book

06 Thursday Mar 2025

Posted by in Memoir, Northern Ireland, Themes of childhood

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Some years ago, science fiction writer, John Scalzi, penned a homage to the libraries of his life prompting me to do the same today, World Books Day. Not a bricks and mortar library, my childhood library was a bus full of magic that visited a housing estate on Antrim’s Dublin Road every week. Although a world away from the United States, it was probably what Thomas Jefferson had in mind:

I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time.

Mobile Libraries Offer Valuable Services To Rural Communities

. . . the library came to me. Every Wednesday, the mobile library parked around the corner, its desultory young driver oblivious to my excitement as I climbed the steps up into the back of his van, an improbable space transformed by well-chosen books into what Jefferson may have envisioned. There, I fell in love with books. It was our Aladdin’s Cave, unexpected treasures waiting for anyone who ventured inside.

The “library man” was reminiscent of an early Dr. Who. My brother does not share my opinion of him, finding him not at all desultory, rather a cool cat with wire-rimmed spectacles who could have handily passed as a member of Clifford T. Ward‘s road crew. Irrespective of our impressions or the library man’s academic qualifications, he was also just another “man” among a diverse cast of men that peopled our childhood: the coal man, the bin man, the bread man, the milk man, the Braid mineral man, the insurance man, and, of course, the ice-cream man. The library man also brought with him a female assistant whose task was to hand out the books. You can imagine the disappointment of one of the children when he reached up to her with 5 pence, expecting an ice-cream cone in return.

Unlike Mr. Softee’s van, the mobile library was an industrial-gray and did not announce its arrival in Green Park Drive with a tune. It lumbered around the corner, its sides emblazoned with scarlet letters proclaiming it property of the North Eastern Education and Library Board. My brother remembers the mobile library in minute detail, from its gray carpeted floor and the impossibly huge steering wheel at the front, to the doors that opened in the middle to reveal the welcoming sight of a full length of a van festooned with books neatly arrayed from floor to ceiling. At one end, there was a counter, behind which Dr. Who was stationed with the nice lady who gave out the books. As Keith describes it, “the counter spanned the width of the vehicle and could be partly opened when Dr. Who wished to venture out from the inner sanctum to assist with queries from pesky kids and pensioners.”

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This area behind the counter was a veritable cockpit from which Dr. Who ran his show. “For Office Use Only,” nobody else was allowed back there for a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the library man ‘s fastidious filing system. Governed entirely without computers, it relied on little cardboard boxes of index cards, the notations on which were most likely based on the Dewey Decimal system we had to memorize for Mr. Smyth some years later at Antrim Grammar School. I have since forgotten Mr. Dewey, but clearly remember the day Mr. Smyth taught us, with flair and panache, how to open a book. While as non-vital a lesson as how to conjugate a verb in Latin, it nonetheless still crosses my mind every time I buy a new hard-bound book.

In fairness, our library man never seemed to mind how we opened our books. He knew what we liked, and he let us order books that he would bring the next week. My mother often ordered books for my brother, and she would wait patiently while he retrieved them from a special stash behind the counter. As she loved to read, I don’t remember her ever borrowing a book for herself. Other than my mother, I remember the occasional grown-up poring over the Agatha Christie collection or asking the library man to set aside Jaws for the following week. It was generally accepted that the mobile library belonged to us, the children of the Dublin Road.

With its never-ending supply of books, we were never lonely.

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It was there that I discovered prolific children’s author, Enid Blyton. My best friends were her ‘famous five’ and the posh girls who attended the fictional St. Clare’s and Malory Towers boarding schools. Written in the late 1940′s, Enid Blyton’s books are now regularly lambasted for reinforcing class and gender stereotypes. Yes, yes, they did. But I can’t imagine my childhood without her books, page-turners that provided hours of delight and sheer escapism for a working class girl in 1970s Northern Ireland.

Famous Five: Five Have Plenty Of Fun - Enid Blyton - The Bookshop

To this day, I cannot bring my presumably enlightened and evolved self to criticize Enid Blyton or any of the worlds she created. Every time I opened one of her books, it was to  immerse myself in secret passageways, coastal caves that needed exploring, treasure maps, midnight feasts, and the unsavory albeit formulaic plans of ne’er-do-well adults that were, foiled, in the eleventh hour, by “the five,” armed only with torches, the batteries of which never ran out. Each of their adventures began or ended with a picnic in uncharacteristic British sunshine, and without fail, the menu included piles of ham sandwiches and chocolate eclairs, washed down with the obligatory “lashings of ginger beer.” I read these books over and over, borrowed and re-borrowed them. In my ten-year old imagination, I was the “sixth” friend. I belonged with them. I was every bit as feisty as ‘tomboy’ George, as clever as Julian, playful like Dick, and kind as Anne. And, Timmy,  the dog, loved me best!

My brother read Enid Blyton’s books too. He began with the adventures of children who ran away from home to join Mr Galliano’s Circus. Duly inspired, he tells me he often fantasized about hiding behind the counter and waiting for the mobile library to careen out of the Dublin Road estate, a safe distance from our house, before pouncing on the unsuspecting library man with his plans for life as “a literary stowaway on the road.” My wee brother, the Jack Kerouac of Antrim Primary School, who knew even then that this was but a delightful reverie, and that our beloved library was likely bound for a prosaic council parking lot, where it would sit behind a padlocked gate with nothing more romantic on the horizon than Artie Warwick’s petrol station, wee Hughie’s pub or perhaps the laundry of the Masserene Hospital.

Along with Enid Blyton’s entire oeuvre, my brother ran away in the pages of all of the Asterix the Gaul books, most of the Adventures of Tin Tin, a collection of Hitchock inspired adventures, and The Three Investigators, one of whom bore the splendid name, Jupiter “Jupe” Jones. He also read The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and reached the inevitable conclusion that Nancy’s sleuthing skills were superior. He even admits to reading the entire non-boy Malory Towers series. Such was the allure of Enid Blyton.

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Equal to our books from the mobile library was the impressive variety of comics delivered weekly by a lanky paper boy, Hugh “Pick” McGarry. For my brother, there was The Beano and The Dandy, the latter filled with characters whose names I still remember, Desperate Dan, Minnie the Minx, and Beryl the Peril.  First came The Twinkle, “the picture paper especially for little girls.” Then, there was The Bunty— notable only because I have yet to meet a real-life person named Bunty—The Judy, The Mandy, and then in our adolescence, The Diana and The Jackie. In my mind, The Jackie was a bona fide woman’s magazine, complete with fashion and make-up tips, quizzes on how to “win his heart,” and the much anticipated pin-ups of pop stars of the day, usually one of the three Davids— Bowie, Essex, or Cassidy. In the early 1970s my bedroom featured a young David Cassidy grinning from my wall. I remember doing quizzes in The Jackie to see if, by some stretch, my personality might possibly match his.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a young Gloria Steinem, was making her mark, navigating in a way she would describe to Oprah Winfrey thirty years later:

I had learned in Toledo, growing up, how to get a man to fall in love with me. Now, this is an important survival skill and we should recognize it. It’s a survival skill because if you make much less than men, if you need marriage, society says, in order to enjoy sexuality or have a child, you learn as a survival skill, in a deep sense, how to get men to fall in love with you.

I don’t know how many women in 1971 Antrim knew about Gloria Steinem or even if her books were available to them in the mobile library, but I would wager they knew exactly what she was talking about.

The Dublin Road children are all grown up now with children of our own. We live in houses where you might find high-brow books—literature—the likes of which we would never have sought in the mobile library. We know that James Joyce’s Ulysees is “better” than Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, but none of us would want to imagine an Antrim childhood bereft of the latter.

Former Children’s Laureate, Michael Morpurgo agrees and remains a staunch advocate for Enid Blyton, whose books his father banned from the household, deeming them superficial and unfavorable to his development as a reader:

But he was wrong. Her books were terrific page-turners in the way no others were. I had all sorts put into my hands when I was very little – I was offered Dickens at eight – that were not suitable for boys my age at all. But with Enid Blyton, I found I could actually get into the story, and finish it. They moved fast, almost as fast as comics, and there was satisfaction to be had on every single page. Were they great literature? Of course not. But they didn’t need to be.

No. They didn’t. Not for me, nor my brother or any of us who devoured those adventures. It was this eclectic mix of books borrowed from the mobile library, our cherished comics, and the thick volumes of Great Britannica encyclopedias that planted in us an unshakable love for the printed word, a passion for books. Behind this, were parents who cared not what we read but only that we read. They spent a small fortune on those weekly comics throughout our childhood, more volumes of The Encyclopedia Britannica and annuals every Christmas that included an updated Guinness Book of Records, and, as we grew older, the classics appeared in beautiful hard-bound leather editions.

In my sixties now, the halcyon days of the NEELB mobile library are in my rear-view mirror.  How I loved it. And, it loved me back, unconditionally, granting me free access to experiences and places that would otherwise have been beyond my grasp. I think it was the greatest gift my mother ever gave me—taking me to that space filled with books. I could borrow any one I wanted. “Get whatever you want, pet.” Again and again.

I was what author Philip Pullman once described as one of the “citizens of the republic of reading. Only the public library can give them that gift.” For anyone who questions the value of public libraries or the power of reading to forever change the trajectory of a child’s life, he would say this:

 But what a gift to give a child, this chance to discover that you can love a book and the characters in it, you can become their friend and share their adventures in your own imagination.And the secrecy of it! The blessed privacy! No-one else can get in the way, no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what’s going on in that wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You’re a citizen of that great democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that gift?

And I would agree.