Footprints in the Mind

By James M Bourke

Footprints in the Mind is a collection of short stories in two parts. I was tempted to call the stories Footprints in the Sand, but on reflection I realized that footprints in sand do not last very long whereas the "footprints" I wish to describe are embedded in my mind. I hasten to add, however, that the stories are fictional. I probably have met some people like those in the stories and perhaps at some subconscious level they are real but my stories are a work of fiction. I cannot honestly say where they come from. They seem to pop up out of nowhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Nov 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9781456822392

James M Bourke

JAMES M BOURKE is currently living in Dublin but he has lived for short periods in counties Tipperary, Laois, Waterford and Cork. He is a retired university lecturer who specialised in Applied Linguistics. He lived and worked overseas for the best part of 40 years in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. He has published many academic papers and monographs on various aspects of language education. Since taking retirement in 2008, he has turned to creative writing and published two novels, two collections of short stories and two plays. He is especially interested in the short story and historical fiction. His most recent book is a collection of critical essays entitled Requiem for the Republic published in July 2021 by AuthorHouse UK. For further details of the author and his previous publications, see his website at http://jamesmannesbourke.net Academic qualifications: Diploma in Education, Dublin 1960; BA General, UCC 1968; MA Applied Linguistics, University of Essex, 1978; Ph.D. Applied Linguistics, TCD, 1992.

Book preview

Part 1

Footprint Stories 1

1

Loss of innocence

Much has been written about the joys of childhood when we are still ‘trailing clouds of glory’ and as close to the angels as one can get. Childhood is the age of innocence, celebrated in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and it is almost impossible for the adult to re-enter the child’s world of fantasy, wonderment and make-belief. It is a mystic world of elves and goblins, giants and monsters, pink elephants and monkeys riding bicycles.

It was such thoughts as these that flashed through James Moran’s head as he and his small team of English curriculum experts set about designing an Early Childhood programme for pre-school children in the Klang Valley, Malaysia. The team leader, Sally Ong, had been trained as a pre-school specialist in language education and at their first meeting she had asked all six members of the panel to reflect on their childhood experience and together they would pool their ideas and possibly publish a paper to be provisionally entitled ‘Re-entering the world of the child.’

Over the weekend, James jotted down a few recollections of his childhood but try as he might, he could not recall anything beyond the age of four. He could still see, in the dim recesses of his mind, the small hill farm in Trusk in County Leitrim where he was reared but which the family had left in 1950s when he father was transferred to the civil service in Dublin. In fact, James distanced himself from Leitrim which at that time had a bad name. For instance, the Sligo mental hospital was known as the ‘Leitrim Hotel’. That perception was almost certainly wide of the mark and it was formed before wealthy Dubliners had discovered the scenic beauty of Leitrim and decided that it was a much more attractive location for a second home than the Algarve or the Costa Blanca.

Sally Ong had hinted that childhood was a magic time, the age of innocence and bliss, encapsulated in W.B. Yeat’s poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus.

I went out to the hazel wood

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

[W. B. Yeats, 1897]

Sadly, James could not resurrect any of the joys and wonderment of his early childhood. His rough notes seemed to portray a gloomy, impoverished and unhappy time when children were routinely beaten and verbally abused for trivial offences. His story would shock and disappoint. He never had any mystic encounter with the fairies, the Sidhe. [1] His father described the stories of the Finn Mac Cool [2] and his merry men, and the plays of Yeats and Synge as ‘a load of bull’. However, his grandparents in Leitrim firmly believed in ghosts and Yeatsian mysticism. Furthermore, they were very superstitious and believed in the spirit world, the banshee, the pooka (evil spirit) and the ‘little people’. They warned him never to go near the fairy fort in Coote’s Meadow and to stay away from the Fairy Glen below the Dough Mountain where children had been abducted by the Sidhe. Should he hear the banshee, he should run away because her wailing presaged death. He was told that in the early 20s, some local men had dug a trench in the fairy mound in Coote’s Meadow hoping to find buried treasure but as soon as they started digging, the earth opened and devoured them. At night, a blue haze hung over the mound as a warning to other looters of fairy mounds. James would not dare approach the fairy mound nor would he enter the old graveyard beyond the railway because he knew that after dark, the undead were abroad. One evening as he and his sister Maud were passing the graveyard, they heard rustling in the bushes inside the graveyard wall and they ran off as fast as they could fearing it might be the Hungry Ghost that was known to accost passers-by. It turned out to be Mrs. Cody’s goat. In those days, there were no lawnmowers to trim the grave plots and the goat did the job instead. The children made sure their bedroom window was latched at night because the Hungry Ghost would frequent houses looking for food. There was no end to Leitrim lore in the 1950s but nowadays people would laugh at you if you mentioned such things as fairies or ghosts.

None of this was exactly the kind of joyous experience that early childhood is supposed to be. James thought for a moment that he had better not dwell on it and instead invent a rosy picture of an idyllic Irish country upbringing, fishing in the trout stream, playing among the hay stacks, collecting butterflies, beetles and insects which is what normal country children do. He would tell his colleagues that he was bewitched by the magic hills and dales of Leitrim, its woodland and lakes and that he, just like his peers, had spent a lot of time chasing moonbeams. How could he admit that his childhood was exceptionally abnormal, full of fear and holy dread? His poor mother was a God-fearing woman driven to distraction by the uncaring and crass behaviour of her alcoholic husband Peter. He was a sheep farmer and had a most irritable disposition. When he came home from the pub, full to the neck with porter, he would be out of his mind with rage. He would talk lovingly to his dog Sam but he seldom had a kind word for his good wife who had to endure his drunken gibberish and his foul mouth. Apart from his obscene language, his personal habits were equally obnoxious. He would smoke his pipe in the small kitchen and fill the room with its putrid fumes. He had the habit of spitting across the floor in the direction of the fireplace and when he was very drunk he might urinate in the wardrobe which he mistook for the toilet. Living under the same roof as a bad tempered alcoholic father did little to enhance the childhood memories of James and his siblings.

Most nights, James would find his mother in tears, on her knees in front of a picture of the Sacred Heart, praying her heart out and begging the Good Lord to look kindly on her wayward husband. James and his two sisters would join her for the rosary which was recited every evening. Sadly, for James, childhood was a period of misery and deprivation rather than joy and enchantment but how was he gong to tell Sally Ong and the other members of the team that his childhood was a ‘valley of tears’? They would want to know something about his first day at school and what his school and fellow pupils were like. He still had a vivid memory of his old schoolhouse in Trusk. It was named Trusk Model School, built in Victorian times, of local granite, an architectural gem compared to modern box-like schools. It was a three teacher school. The principal, Mr. Benson, taught the Upper Primary pupils, Mrs. Sadler taught the Lower Primary pupils, and Miss Fortune taught the infants in an annexe to the rear of the main the main building. There were only four or five pupils in each class and they were combined for many lessons but received separate instruction in the 3Rs. The principal was known as ‘Benson the Brute’. He was known all over Leitrim for his bad temper and the merciless floggings he administered daily with a black sally rod. He believed that knowledge had to be beaten into thick Irish skulls and he had no compunction in beating the living daylights out of his terrified pupils. Mrs. Sadler was a gentle soul and possessed all the attributes of the good teacher. She too had to endure the brutish behaviour of her principal. Miss Fortune was in charge of the kindergarten, and she was the first teacher that James encountered. He would never forget his first day at school.

Miss Fortune gave James and the other new junior infants some modelling-clay, showed them how to work it and demonstrated how to make an umbrella. She then left them for some time but James struggled to shape his piece of clay into an umbrella. When Miss Fortune returned to inspect their work, she reached for James’s creation, held it up and announced to all: Young man, that’s not an umbrella; it’s a mushroom. Then she smacked him soundly across the face. That humiliation remained with him all his life.

James was no angel. Looking back, he shudders at some of the weird things he did as a child. One Saturday, while his mother had gone shopping, he found a bowl of eggs in the kitchen. He took it upstairs, sat on the landing and threw the eggs down one by one onto the stone floor below. When his mother came home, she found the hallway covered in broken eggs. She hesitated for some time before giving James a few good smacks for his naughtiness but she saw the funny side of it too and often laughed at it later.

On another occasion, while his mother was out, James was playing hide-and-seek with his two sisters. He went into his father’s study and climbed up on top of the old ebony piano and lay across the top. However, his mother found his footprints on the leaf and he got a flogging that he can vividly recall to this day.

One day when he was in Senior Infants he shocked the bigger boys by telling them that his penis was more than a ‘pisser’. His school mates asked him to explain. James said: I seen Bill Whelan’s bull riding a cow, so there. One of the boys was shocked at his wickedness and told Miss Fortune what had said. She sent him home at once with a note to his mother requesting her to ‘wash his filthy tongue’. She said to him I could redden your little arse . . . but I know your good mother will do that anyhow. And of course she did. But somehow, James could accept punishment from his mother because he knew that deep down a mother’s love obliges her to administer an occasional punishment.

However, the naughty James had not quite learned his lesson. Some weeks later, he discovered that Miss Fortune was said to be romantically attracted to a local farmer, Tom Flynn. On her way to school one winter’s morning, her bicycle skidded on the icy road and she fell off, hurting her leg. Naughty James noticed her limping and hatched a plan to pay her back for beating him on his first day at school. At that time, his mother always had a small bottle of whiskey on standby for medicinal purposes. She would make punch from boiling water, cloves, lemon and a dash of whiskey out of a ‘Baby Power’—a small 150 ml bottle of Powers whiskey. James used to collect and keep the empty bottles and one day he decided to concoct a rub for Miss Fortune’s leg. He urinated in the bottle and gave it to his teacher saying that on his way to school Tom Flynn had requested him to present it to Miss Fortune with his compliments, adding that it would cure her leg in no time. What a kind man he is she said, please tell him I am most grateful and that I shall let him know if it works. Shortly afterwards, she broke off all contact with Mr. Flynn but nobody other than James knew the reason. Looking back, he is utterly amazed that in his youth he was such a mischevious little brat.

Over the weekend, James wondered what he should say to the other members of the curriculum panel when they re-assembled on Monday morning. When his turn came, instead of telling the true story of his miserable childhood, he launched into a sweetness-and-light version that bubbled with happy reminiscences of an idyllic and joyous childhood, growing up in a loving family on a sheep farm near the delightful village of Trusk, looked after by his caring parents and leading a life of bliss with his fun-loving sisters. He did not mention the harsh treatment that Miss Fortune had meted out to him on his first day at school but instead he painted a rosy picture of a rustic rural school where there was a harmonious relationship between the teachers and their eager pupils. He did not mention any of his childhood pranks and the many beatings that he had endured.

As soon as he finished his story, the other members applauded and Sally Ong thanked him, adding that his successful career in language education had its genesis in a fruitful and stress-free childhood and that he was fortunate the scars of a troubled childhood had not been visited upon him. His story was a cheat, but life itself is a cheat, he thought so there was no need to agonise over it. He was pleased that he had given his audience the kind of narrative that he knew they expected. But in his moments of quiet reflection, he wondered how seriously his childhood had blighted his future life. Perhaps he was ‘damaged goods’ on account of his horrific upbringing and as a result he found it hard to resolve the existential dilemma facing every human as a being who searches for meaning and certainty in a universe that has neither, as expressed by Irvin Yalon, the noted American psychotherapist. He would look up at the stars on a frosty night and ask himself: What is the meaning of life? He concluded that suffering must be part of the human condition. According to the Buddha, the meaning of life is suffering. And James felt that he had had his fair share of suffering. The history of mankind was a sad tale of man’s inhumanity to man. He wondered whether his mother’s piety had a salutary effect on him to counterbalance his father’s drunkenness and abuse as well as his unhappy school experience. He still recalled with horror the dreaded catechism lessons at school in which Catholic doctrine was imparted by a swinging cane. However, he recalled with glee one particular question and answer in the penny catechism.

Question: Is it a great misfortune to fall into moral sin?

Answer: It is the greatest of all misfortunes.

He enjoyed responding with exaggerated emphasis on ‘Miss Fortune’. His mother was none too pleased when she heard him telling his sisters how he got at Miss Fortune with his catechism pun. Moreover, he showed no remorse for tormenting her and instead announced that he would crucify the bitch if he could.

In spite of his unhappy childhood, James had a successful career teaching English as a second language in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. He loved Malaysia and his position as an English language adviser to the Ministry of Education. He was sorry that he had lied to his colleagues abut his deprived and dysfunctional childhood. Perhaps he should have confessed, poured out his tortured soul and conceded that but for the grace of God he would have ended up in a mental asylum. However, in Leitrim, one does not speak ill of one’s family. When he was growing up, he was told It’s a dirty bird that soils its own nest. He would not be the dirty bird and he would not dishonour his family. However, he felt that his concept of honour forced him to lie to himself. He would tell everyone that his parents were totally wonderful people, that his childhood was entirely happy and that his teachers, barring Miss Fortune, were second to none. He recalled how the poet Sylvia Plath did what most of us do. Rather than blame her mother for the pain she inflicted on her, she blamed herself. She felt that she was bad and was being justly punished by her good mother. The problem with lying to ourselves is that we end up believing our own lies, which can lead to some kind of neurological snarl-up in the brain in later life. However, James consoled himself that his lying was merely a form of cover-up and that it was acceptable to lie to others on personal and family matters as long as you always told yourself the truth. He hoped that he would never have to tell his wife: I never slept with that woman. And he was not referring to Miss Fortune.

End notes:

[1] Sidhe, pronounced ‘Shee’, from the Irish ‘aos sidhe’ meaning ‘people of the fairly mound’. The little people of Irish folklore lived beneath certain hills or in certain glens. They are supposedly the remnant of the ancient Tuatha Dé Dannan. The Sidhe figure prominently in W.B. Yeat’s poetry.

[2] Finn MacCool was the legendary Irish warrior hero defending Ireland. The heroic deeds of Finn and his merry men, the Fianna, are recorded in the Fenian cycle, including a trip to Tír na nÓg, land of perpetual youth, the Irish equivalent of Elysium.

2

Stinger Mulligan comes home

In the autumn of 1965, Robert Mulligan, alias ‘Stinger’, returned to his ancestral home in the townland of Lisronan, nestled in the foothills of the Slieve Bloom Mountains, a few miles northwest of Portlaoise,—the county town of County Laois, which foreigners sometimes confuse with Laos in Southeast Asia. He was born on a small hill farm in 1910. In fact, he was born on 29th December 1909, but his father could not register his birth until 4th January, 1910. By that time, he could not remember the exact date of Robert’s birth and he told the registrar that he was born on or about the new year and so Robert’s birth certificate reads: Robert Aloysius Mulligan, born 1st January, 1910, in the townland of Lisronan, Maryborough, Queen’s County, to James Mulligan and Margaret Goode.

Robert was living in London where he had a small second-hand furniture business in Kilburn as well as two letting properties. He and his two brothers had joined the British Army in the late 30s and they had seen active service in North Africa and Italy during the war. Like thousands of other Irishmen, they had enlisted in the army not out of patriotic duty but out of sheer necessity to find gainful employment. Robert had a good war and he had the most incredible stories about his war experiences in the Egyptian desert and his dealings with the Arabs and POWs. It was impossible to say how much of it was authentic and how much was sheer fabrication. It was in North Africa that he acquired the nickname ‘Stinger’. The troops used to play cards and when Robert won a rubber, he’s say Oi, oi, oi, the bee stings again. The name was appropriate in another sense too. Laois people are known to be ‘cute hoors’ [1] who were tight-fisted and could live in your ear. It was rumoured that Stinger used to trade objects taken from the bodies of dead Axis troops for cigarettes. It was also said that when he was on guard duty at the army base, if he had to deal with a marauding band of Bedouin, he would shout ‘Allahu Stinger’ [2] and they would flee like rabbits into the surrounding desert.

When he arrived in Lisronan, he was warmly welcomed by his aging parents and the neighbours who came from miles around to see him and hear his story. Mountain people are very clannish and see themselves as one big family bound together by ties of marriage and tribal affiliation. When you marry a Lisronan person, you marry the whole parish and when a neighbour is making hay or threshing corn, all the men go along to help without being asked. It took Stinger some time to tune in to the community spirit and neighbourliness that had long vanished elsewhere. Even when people were driving along the narrow roads, they would not pass each other without stopping, winding down the window and having a chat. The local people were fascinated by Stinger’s DKW convertible and they’d ask Where in God’s name did you get that yoke? They were also fascinated by Stinger’s London accent. The Laois accent is as broad as a double ditch and Stinger’s clipped Estuary vowels, h-dropping in words like ‘here’ and ‘herbs’ and glottal stops for ‘t’, seemed weird to them. He pronounced ‘bacon’ as ‘baikon’, and said things like I like it ere much to the amusement of his family and friends who thought he was putting on airs. Stinger was equally fascinated by the local dialect. People would ask Howeyeh? and the response was Stout, thank God (meaning, very well) or Grand entirely. They often said Gower dat as an expression of disbelief, and Pon me word to assert credibility. God was sometimes referred to as the Man Above. He winced when he heard the Laois accent, which to his ears, was as flat as a pancake.

However, he loved the people and their quaint and stress-free way of life which was so removed from his busy life in London. He had no reason to complain about his life in London where he had prospered after the war years. At first, life in the big city was sheer hell. He worked on building sites and lived in squalour in a flat in Kilburn. He soon discovered that in London if you have a special talent you can exploit it and make a lot of money. Stinger had a talent for brick-laying, building, carpentry and plumbing. Soon he was earning good money at property maintenance and he did not waste a penny but invested in a dilapidated Edwardian house which he converted into six flats. He used some of the rental income to expand his second-hand furniture business and the rest he invested in a second property, in the High Street, the ground floor of which he let to a building society and he converted the upstairs into offices which he let to a firm of solicitors. Stinger was now a respected landlord. Money was pouring in for all sides and he bought himself a delightful residence in St. John’s Wood. At that time, the Paddies were moving up in the world, moving out of the Kilburn and Camden ghettos, becoming professionals and landlords,—the new Jews of North London. Stinger ceased to support the Labour party and joined the Conservatives, becoming an ardent supporter of Margaret Thatcher in Finchley. He supported the London-Irish rugby club and became a life member of the Rotary Club. He dare not mention such things to his folks back in Ireland because they would say it was far from clubs that he was reared and a man reared next to pigs and cattle had no business mixing with the gentry over in London.

In spite of his good fortune in London, Stinger had no desire to lose his Irishness. He loved everything Irish except their habit of denigrating people who had shown some enterprise and achieved success in various fields. Stinger described such people as a sow that ate her own farrow. What he really liked and envied was the social harmony of the country folk living in the hill country. In Lisronan, nobody watched television in the evening. They played cards sitting on long wooden benches called ‘forms’ in front of a blazing turf fire, or a visiting story-teller might call and tell stories, usually in English and sometimes in Irish. The Irish stories always began with the words Fadó, fadó . . . (Long, long ago . . .) The story teller might also sing traditional songs to the accompaniment of a fiddle, spoons, and bodhrán. On special occasions there would be ‘sean-nós’ dancing (traditional). Stinger loved all of this rich cultural heritage and he was pleased to find that his old settle-bed [3] was still there. He used to sleep there alongside his dog Bran.

Nothing much had changed in Lisronan since he had left some thirty years previously. His two sisters had emigrated, one to Canada and the other to Australia. His elder brother had, like him, joined the British Army and his oldest brother Brian inherited and managed the farm. It wasn’t much of a farm—mostly poor land that had been reclaimed from the mountain but with careful husbandry, his father and grandfather before him managed to till land and grow crops of potatoes, barley, turnips, mangolds and cabbage. The mangolds were cultivated as food for the cattle. They had a dozen