Learning to Love Ireland (5 page)

‘The children are our future. And that is why, ultimately, we're screwed unless we do something about it. If you haven't noticed, the children who are our future are good-looking, but they aren't all that bright. As dense as they might be, they will eventually notice that adults have spent all the money, spread disease, and turned the planet into a smoky, filthy ball of death. We're raising a generation of dumb, pissed-off kids who know where the handguns are kept. This is not a good recipe for a happy future.'

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

Strands of shredded paper had escaped, and were swooping and soaring around the complex. Two large wooden crates took up the entire driveway in front of Number 3. Larry's head and upper body appeared and disappeared as he lifted out armfuls of items cocooned in corrugated board or bubble wrap. He alternated these with scrunched up bundles of dusty clothing. I carted each pile into the house and then came back for the next load.

After months at sea, our belongings had finally arrived. A forklift operator had dumped the crates outside our house and left us to it. Larry had opened the crates with a crowbar and then climbed inside to get to the objects he couldn't reach.

I wished we'd decided on sending only a single crate, since so much of our stuff was redundant. We'd made all sorts of uninformed decisions and miscalculations. I knew now that most of the clothing would never be worn. It was unsuitable and unfashionable. Because they were too bulky, I had given away jerseys or ‘jumpers', as I was learning to call them now: in Ireland ‘jerseys' are sports gear. I should have disposed of the lighter garments instead, since it seemed that there wasn't going to be a summer in 2007.

In fact, we should have ditched all the clothes, which would have left room for Larry's boxing trophies. Cleaning them would have been hard work though, and finding a place to display them would have been even more challenging. We'd donated all except the three most important ones to Christian Brothers College in Bulawayo.

Nothing ever went to waste in Zimbabwe. We'd given away mountains of stuff to our workers who could no longer afford to buy clothes for themselves and their families. In Ireland, that didn't appear to be a problem. Charity shops were inundated with bags of unwanted clothes and other ‘junk'. Disposing of ‘rubbish' wasn't easy, if the charity shops declined it. It would then have to be recycled, and we had no idea where, when or how this happened.

The last item was impossible to lift out of the trunk – it was my mother's camphor chest. Larry had to rip open the entire side of the crate to get it out. Although it was covered in dust and one foot was rickety, the exquisite carvings of oriental figures were undamaged.

When I opened the lid, the strong fragrance of camphor brought my African childhood back to me and, with it, the smell of the freshly laundered sheets and pillowcases that our mother had always stored in this exquisite container. Here it was now in my Irish home, linking my past to our future.

But first we had to tackle the problem of a house swamped with cardboard packages, two large crates full of shredded paper and a heap of grimy clothes.

We'd looked forward to the arrival of the crates for months, and yet we felt a perverse reluctance to get on with the next phase of unpacking. We decided to do things gradually, starting with those items that mattered most and which were easily identifiable – our pictures and ornaments.

As familiar flowers, trees and animals took up their positions on our walls, the bare little house began to come alive at last.

We put the printer's tray up in the hallway. Wooden printer's trays with brass corners had been very fashionable at one time in Zimbabwe. They were an excellent way of displaying tiny ornaments and mementos. I had a lovely collection that included brass swans, pottery vases from South Africa, a thimble from Holland, an owl with blue eyes from Cyprus, a Swarovski crystal hedgehog from Austria (my most beautiful and expensive piece) and a delicately painted Russian nested doll or matryoshka. And, of course, a Zimbabwe bird, our national emblem. The famous soapstone carvings of this bird appeared on walls and monoliths of the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe, which was built, it is believed, some time between the 12
^th
and 15
^th
centuries by ancestors of the Shona people. The ruins gave their name to modern Zimbabwe.

I'd decided not to keep my fondue sets, although I'd loved that style of entertaining. Men were less keen on fondue dinners – they found them frustrating and preferred large, underdone steaks. Immersing individually cooked morsels of meat in a variety of sauces, tasty though they might be, wasn't their idea of a satisfying meal. And the barbed fondue forks were as lethal as fish hooks. Everybody had heard story about the hungry guest who'd got the barbs stuck through his lip. He'd been carted off to hospital. Most Zimbabwean men regarded fondues as hard work. I'd thought that men in Ireland wouldn't be any different, even though there might be fewer steaks.

I wished now I had kept them, along with my beautiful crystal glasses, my set of Chinese bowls and my special casserole dishes. But there wasn't space in our tiny kitchen, and we weren't likely to be doing much entertaining anyway.

It seemed to us that one of the favourite pastimes in Ireland was criticising the government. The Health Service Executive (HSE) took constant flak. Every day, journalists reported malfunctions within the health system, TV presenters discussed its shortcomings and radio broadcasters gleefully regaled their listeners with stories of patients left on trolleys and a litany of other failures.

We wished we could send the whole lot on a visit to Zimbabwe. Then they would experience the reality of understaffed hospitals and clinics without drugs. There would be no trolleys to incense them. Sick people would be lying without blankets on the floor in the corridors or on the dusty ground outside. Many would be dying from AIDS, little more than living corpses.

My experience of the Health Service in Ireland was far more pleasant. I'd recently discovered that everyone is on first name terms here. In doctors' waiting rooms or dentists' surgeries, I would be addressed as ‘Althea'. I had no objection to the lack of formality – it was just different from what I'd been used to – and, in a way, rather nice.

Every two or three weeks I went to St Vincent's Hospital in Dublin for skin cancer treatment, my legacy from all those glorious sunny days spent basking like a lizard in the sun. When I was a teenager, we used Brylcreem (‘a little dab'll do ya...'). Not for our hair, though. We'd discovered that you caught a great tan with a bit more than a dab. It beat cooking oil, anyway. You tended to blister if you used cooking oil.

I'd arrived in Ireland with two sores that wouldn't heal. One on my neck and one on my shin. There were other bits and pieces elsewhere, but these were the bad ones. Dr Kirby and his team performed a series of examinations, biopsies and excisions. I was given anti-biotic ointment and dressings each time I had to have a procedure. Qualified nursing staff took out my stitches. This was my first experience of the state's healthcare system and it was very reassuring.

I'd applied to have my degree and teaching diploma recognised by the National Qualifications Authority of Ireland (NQAI). John, my contact there, said that I needed certified photocopies of the list of subjects studied and results attained, and an official translation of the degree parchment which was in Latin. He also warned me that I needed to supply the requested documentation within three months, as ‘applications will not be held on file after this time-frame has expired...'

Oh great, I thought. I had attended the University of Natal, which is no longer the University of Natal, in the late 1960s during the era of ‘apartheid-ruled South Africa'. Years later, I had studied for my teaching diploma through the University of South Africa, the world's first correspondence university. And surely it would be reasonable to assume that ‘Gradum Artium Baccalaurei' meant ‘Bachelor of Arts'?

I told John that I was likely to need longer than three months, but that my sister, Glyn, in South Africa was already in touch with the relevant institutions. In fact both universities were extremely efficient. They complied with all John's requests and Glyn posted everything off to me.

We both breathed a sigh of relief.

I waited, and waited, and waited. The South African postal service had a record of the registered package leaving the country, but there was no evidence of its arriving in Ireland. Numerous parcels and registered letters had apparently vanished without trace in the UK's postal strike.

We had to start all over again.

Larry had just reached the magic age of 66,
which meant he was eligible for a free travel pass. If we were together, I got to travel free, too – one of the amazing benefits Ireland offers its senior citizens.

Using his free travel pass for the first time, we travelled by bus to Arklow to apply for the same ‘entitlement' for Northern Ireland. When (not if) this was granted, we'd be able to go up to Derry and Donegal more often to visit Larry's family.

Afterwards, we wandered down to the Tourist Information office to collect a few brochures.

‘Is Arklow in County Wexford or in County Wicklow?' I asked the friendly young lady. I knew it was close to the border.

‘Sure, it's in Wicklow at the moment,' she said.

Before catching the bus back, we decided to get a closer look at the wind farm that stood 10 kilometres out to sea on the Arklow Sand Bank. The brochures informed us that ‘this was the world's first project to deploy wind turbines in excess of 3 megawatts. Ireland's first offshore wind power project... generates enough energy to serve the annual electricity needs of about 16,000 households...'

HG Wells would have been fascinated by the massive, pristine structures. We stood on the quay looking out at the future. There were seven now, but eventually 200 turbines generating 520 MW of electricity would be erected. The wind farm would stretch over a distance of 25 kilometres and would generate enough energy to supply around 10% of Ireland's total needs.

Through the windows of the train the hills and fields gradually materialised, white and brittle under a thick covering of frost. It was a bitterly cold November morning.

I'd decided to get in touch with recruitment agencies now that our ECDL course was over. I'd been to one in Bray, I was on the books of another in Wexford Town, and we were off to Dublin to visit a third. I'd hoped to find a job closer to Gorey but, as before, there were very few jobs on offer in the southeast.