Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (5 page)

Although the Dalys lived in the infamous captain’s
former home, the house, though handsome (a Mayo child’s crayon drawing of a farmhouse: a two-storey stone square with a big solid door and five windows), wasn’t particularly grand and the Dalys themselves were regular Mayo folk.

But on the other side of the town in Partry House, another of the local ‘big houses’, Mrs Blosse-Lynch was the real deal: exotically Protestant, imperious and magnificent. The elderly widow of Colonel Blosse-Lynch (or ‘Moo’, as she called him), she lived in isolated shabby splendour with her lady ‘companion’, Pat, at the end of her own long driveway, a couple of miles from the town on the edge of a shallow, sandy-bottomed lake. We knew her because on occasion she’d call my father to attend to her friendly dopey Labradors, but most of the town had no reason ever to meet Mrs Blosse-Lynch – but everyone knew her. She would
put-put
into Ballinrobe in her little Citroën 2CV and park with imperious unconcern in the middle of the narrow street outside the grocer’s, and until she had collected and packed her shopping into the car, the rest of the town’s motorists simply had to wait. And I thought that was fabulous. I already knew a diva when I saw one and Mrs Blosse-Lynch was my first Madonna.

In the hot summer of 1983, after my first year in boarding school, a young American student called Sandra came to stay at Partry House and help harvest the raspberries that Mrs Blosse-Lynch grew in a sizeable plot at the side of
the house. Presumably Sandra had come as part of some kind of student ‘working abroad’ scheme, but it must have been quite an adjustment for an American teenager to find herself living alone with two elderly ladies in the isolated, faded grandeur of Partry House in the West of Ireland in 1983 – a mysterious time, long before Skype and texting, when international telephone calls were so unfathomably costly they were spoken about in hushed tones, and people wrote letters abroad on tissue-thin blue ‘airmail’ paper to keep the weight down because even letters were an onerous expense.

Not knowing many people in the town, and certainly not knowing any young people, Mrs Blosse-Lynch spoke to my father and soon myself and two of my age-appropriate siblings were drafted in to keep the lonely American company. I didn’t need to be drafted: I was eager to sign up. I couldn’t wait to see up close how a magnificent Protestant like Mrs Blosse-Lynch lived, and a glossy-haired American (my very own Jaclyn Smith!) was a bonus.

I already had a very high opinion of Protestants. Not only were most of my favourite people Protestants – or at least I assumed Penelope Keith and Felicity Kendal were – but my mother had lived in Protestant England till she was twelve and, even though she was a devout Catholic, we always thought of her as having Protestant bones, which poked through occasionally when she used her ‘telephone voice’.

Protestant stuff was just generally better. Even their farms were better. One summer we went to visit our English ‘cousins’, the Perrys (they weren’t actually our cousins but were the family of my mother’s childhood best friend) and their farm was amazing. The Mayo mountain farms I went to with my father were hard, mud-worn places, where tough, wiry men picked stones from wet fields and drove wet, suspicious animals into dark shit-splashed sheds. On the Perrys’ summer-drenched Pear Tree Farm (I know, they were really rubbing it in with that), there were giant, rolling fields, enormous gleaming harvesting machines, noisy, exhilarating go-karts, huge prickly hay stacks, and crumbly cheese and crusty bread washed down with homemade cider. I felt like Worzel Gummidge. At home, where we were Irish Catholics, we weren’t allowed to drive dangerous, petrol-filled go-karts at breakneck speed round scrubby fields, but when we were English Protestants, we could drive
and
drink booze! Being English and Protestant was brilliant. Obviously becoming one of Charlie’s Angels was still my first choice but failing that I was going to put down ‘Protestant farmer’ as my second.

And living the exotic Protestant life at Mrs Blosse-Lynch’s was everything I’d hoped. The rheumy-eyed old Labradors wandered distractedly through the house, which, though neat, was showing its age, and the rooms, crowded with the flotsam and jetsam of a storied family life in the big house, were probably a little too
much for Mrs Blosse-Lynch and Pat to keep on top of. Not that I cared. To me, the shabby rugs covered with dog hair, and the comfortable threadbare sofas with sun-faded cushions, were talismans of a glorious past, full of shooting parties and pheasants and petticoats and binoculars and charming people saying charming things over fancy dishes. But the glassy eyes of the dusty animal heads that hung on the walls didn’t just look down on a disappeared past, they looked down on a present where the past still shimmered through, like an image from my father’s old cine projector. Once, while taking off her wellington boots by the stairs, Mrs Blosse-Lynch saw me examining a small, carved wooden box. ‘It’s from India,’ she said casually, and I wondered would she have said, ‘It’s from Mars,’ just as casually, because to me they were pretty much the same thing.

There was a lawn tennis court, and even though it hadn’t been tended in years it was still usable, and we would play tennis or croquet while Mrs Blosse-Lynch watched and Pat brought out cucumber sandwiches (actual cucumber sandwiches), which we thought were hilarious and disgusting till we ate them and found out they were crunchy and delicious.

Years later the fully fledged gay version of me looked back and, based on no evidence whatsoever, fantasised that Mrs Blosse-Lynch and Pat were lesbian lovers; pioneering, no-nonsense, tweed-skirted, wellington-wearing lesbians, who’d make each other boiled eggs
and listen to the wireless together on their arse-worn sofas while shaggy Labradors snored on their faded lesbian rugs. I thought this was a wonderful idea, but when I mentioned it to my mother she rolled her eyes and did that ‘Rory!’ thing she does when she thinks I’m being ridiculous. And when I mentioned to her that I was writing about Mrs Blosse-Lynch, she said, ‘Oh, please don’t put in about you wanting them to be lesbians! You’ll upset someone.’ But it shouldn’t. I wanted them to be lesbians for me. I wanted to come from a town where lesbians lived in ramshackle houses with dozy old dogs, because that town would have felt more like home to an older me.

There was a dilapidated boathouse at the bottom of the garden on the lake shore, and we would push out the big old row-boat and row through the reeds, then swim in the clear water and dive down to push our hands into the soft sandy bottom (all the other lakes around had dark bog water and rocky bottoms – even Protestant lakes were better!). We’d dry off in the sun, asking Sandra about America and giggling because we found out that Mrs Blosse-Lynch’s name was actually Lois, which my sister Edel would repeat in a posh accent. My red-haired and Irish-freckled brother Fergal fancied Sandra, with her American hair and tanned American skin, and he kissed her. They had a summer romance and we all wished she would come back every year so
we could play croquet and eat cucumber sandwiches and hold boxes from India.

We were only a couple of miles from our own house, yet we were in another world. A world that reminded me of the worlds I had already discovered between the pages of books or on Saturday-afternoon TV with the curtains drawn. In Partry House I was one of
The Famous Five
or
Little Lord Fauntleroy
or Mary in
The Secret Garden
. And I was already beginning to realise that I liked other worlds, because other worlds didn’t care if I liked football and other worlds didn’t care if I went to mass. Mrs Blosse-Lynch didn’t care if I went to mass – she didn’t care if the whole town was sitting in their cars waiting for her to pick up her groceries!

I
HAD NO IDEA WHAT
I wanted to do with my life when I finished school. I didn’t yet know who I was so how could I possibly know who I wanted to be? I knew what I
didn’t
want to be: I didn’t want to be boring. And at sixteen, as far as I was concerned, everything was boring. Ballinrobe was boring, school was boring, exams were boring, football was boring, mass was boring … Everything was just so
boring
. I would lie in bed refusing to get up in a vain attempt to stave off the inevitable onset of another day of inevitable boringness. I had taken to my bed like a Victorian lady with the malaise, and the only thing that got me out of it was Pierce Brosnan and Stephanie Zimbalist in
Remington Steele
.

I, of course, was the smart and sassy Stephanie, my jacket sleeves pushed up to three-quarter length, exasperated by, and secretly in love with, the suave and handsome Pierce, whom I hired to be the face of my detective agency
because the sexist 1980s wouldn’t take seriously a cute, sassy lady private detective. I would have put down ‘Smart and Sassy Lady Private Detective Teamed Up with Pierce Brosnan’ on my CAO form if it had been an option but unfortunately, and ridiculously, it was not a course offered by any of the recognised colleges.

I did know a couple of things, though.

I knew I was interested in art – or, at least, I knew it didn’t bore me and that was roughly the same thing. I spent most of my waking hours doodling on everything within reach, much to the exasperation of everyone who owned anything within reach. Books, desks, newspapers, magazines, tablecloths, walls – everything slowly became engulfed in a tide of cartoon doodles of glamorous women with evening gloves and nipped waists, lantern-jawed men, fat opera singers, goofy dogs, majestic horses and futuristic cars.

And I knew I wanted to find other queers. By that point I knew
technically
that gays existed – I’d read about them, I’d heard about them, I’d seen them on the telly – but, rather like my then increasingly tenuous belief in God, I believed in gays only as a matter of faith. I’d been told they existed so I had to accept that they did, but I still hadn’t met a real-live, fully paid-up, card-carrying gay, and I was beginning to worry that if I didn’t meet one soon I’d become a gaytheist. I needed proof.

So I applied to art college.

It was a very small one on the edge of Dublin in Dún Laoghaire with only a couple of hundred students, and on my very first day I sat in the queue for registration beside an impossibly handsome bleach-blond Mohawked punk, who was wearing a pair of pyjamas with a
Playboy
centrefold safety-pinned to the back. He was so beautiful and so exciting I couldn’t bring myself to look directly at him, terrified that if I did I might not be able to stop myself throwing myself onto his lap and kissing him full on the mouth.

But my small art college turned out not to be the homo-filled, gender-bendin’ 1986 gaytopia I’d hoped for. In fact, there turned out to be only one other definitely queer student. Handsome, brown-eyed, exotically coiffed and dressed like a
Face
magazine cover, Niall was universally thought of as one of the school’s most talented students, so he was a good one to have onboard but, still, he was the only one. And Niall was a year ahead of me so even though we would eventually become close friends and lifelong collaborators, that first year it was up to me to find queers on my own.

In the Dublin of 1986, still seven years before homosexual acts were decriminalised, just finding other gays was a job worthy of Jessica Fletcher. Today, with two clicks of a cursor, gay kids can be chatting to other gay kids or watching the badly lit homemade pornography of an exhibitionist French couple and their horny friend Pascale. And if they have the right app on
their phone, they can tell you how many metres they are from the nearest Dominant Verbal Top, who likes holding hands and nights in on the sofa with a glass of wine and a movie. And everyone knows where the brightly lit, rainbow-flag-flying gay bars are. The world and their granny can tell you where The George is and chances are Granny has already been there one Sunday to see Shirley Temple Bar’s
Bingo
show.

But in 1986, on Saturday afternoons, I would take the 46A bus into the city centre on my mission to find the gays, these creatures of myth and legend and crude schoolyard jokes. I was still a country boy, and the city was still exciting and full of possibilities to me. I was blind to the crumbling plasterwork, peeling fly posters and boarded-up shop fronts of depressed eighties Dublin, and all I saw were interesting people hurrying to interesting assignations. I would wander the streets, soaking up everything and everyone, and fumble with the change in my pocket, separating out the return bus fare and counting what was left.

Every now and then I’d see that elusive creature who made my pulse quicken a little: another gay. I couldn’t always be totally sure – my gaydar was still underdeveloped, and the New Romantics were muddying the waters at the time – but sometimes I’d get a glancing eye contact that confirmed my teenage suspicions. I would go to Marx Bros café, which was popular with punks and cycle couriers and, it was rumoured, with
‘the gays’. I’d buy coffee from the shaven-headed server (was he a gay?) and sit nervously at a table, cautiously eyeing the clientele for signs of gayness, signs of me. I’d buy
Hot Press
magazine, and in the back there were small ads where farmers were looking for farmers, and nice ‘regular’ blokes from the midlands were looking for other nice regular blokes who could travel.

And there was always an ad for ‘Ice Breakers’, a monthly meeting of a gay youth group where nervous and skittish new gays could meet other nervous and skittish new gays over cups of tea in a room at the Clarence Hotel and be nervous and skittish together under the watchful eye of an experienced proper gay. Nowadays, of course, the Clarence is fancy and U2-owned, but in 1986 it smelt of polish and served roast dinners to country priests who were up in Dublin to see the bishop. So, on the first Thursday of the month, I found myself sitting in a circle of hotel chairs announcing to strangers that I was gay, while in the room next door a circle of strangers announced to each other that they were alcoholics.

I’ve never been one for chair circles or groups so I sipped my tea and dunked my biscuit and felt uncomfortable throughout, but I had definitely, without doubt,
finally
found some other gays. Only a small handful of nervous gays but that was enough – they were my gay slippery slope, the thin edge of the homo wedge – and after the tea and biscuits the two guys who had led the meeting
brought us to a gay club and that was all I needed. Here were the gays! And lots of them.