There are several scenarios that are generally accepted as the first milestone in adult life:
- Moving into digs for college.
- Sharing a house with between one and a dozen friends.
- Young couple moving in together and using crates as makeshift furniture.
Skip ahead to the frivolous noughties and even moving into a palatial house fully-furnished on a massive mortgage – that was a norm at one point.
I squashed the first three examples into one: It was March of 1993 and I was eighteen years young when I moved into a derelict house in my hometown of Drogheda with my baby daddy and our son.
Loves young dream it was not.
I have moved house often and am so very much jaded nowadays but back then, the prospect of moving in together was intoxicating. So, so exciting. We had NO IDEA how deadly dull and dreary it was going to prove to be. I had been living with my parents and two sisters and the baby, he had been living with his parents, grandma and two sisters unless he was crashing on the couch at my parents’ house – we thought once we had our own little gaff we wouldn’t have a problem in the world.
There are derelict houses, and there are derelict houses and this, at least, had windows,
Taken from Google maps – it hasn’t changed much in twenty years
a front and back door and a roof. It had no front garden, being a town house; and the back yard had a very important feature – our only loo. It was in a shed. The toilet roll would get damp if you left it out there and if you didn’t, you’d forget to take it with you so the result was the same – damp arse either way. If I wanted a shower or bath, I went home. Sorry, not home, Mammy’s house. There was no light but for what spilled from the kitchen window unless some FOOL switched the light off on you while you were out there. I don’t remember having an electricity account so I don’t know why he was so keen to save it.
Do you know what a coal hole is? I didn’t – I thought it was a euphemism. Our actual one was under the stairs. A coal man used to come and deliver it under for me and if he didn’t, I’d buy the coal at a quid cheaper in a yard across the town. All I had to do then was balance it across the hood of the child’s pram to get it home. If you did that with the prams they make these days the whole thing would cave in.
One fairly major source of excitement was the buying of the furniture. We didn’t need to buy a bed because I had this slightly-larger-than-single-double bed that my parents had gotten as a wedding present. That was the main bedroom sorted. The baby had a cot – that was bedroom no. 2 sorted. We bought a brown dralon suite for the living room for £15 from St. Vincent DePaul[1] a charity who had recently opened a second-hand
I – I think it’s the same one! It’s for sale on Gumtree for $86.
furniture shop in Drogheda. The sofa had a hidden feature – a sticky-out nail that turned jeans to tatters and laddered tights. Guests learned to perch on the arm rests. The baby wasn’t mobile yet so no thought was given to ‘baby proofing’ the house. In the kitchen, there was a three-ringed gas cooker acquired by my dad, a short fridge with a letterbox-sized ice compartment and a brand new table and benches. This picnic table style was very in back then, very now. And I wanted it so badly that I spent £59 on it. Our income at the time was £132 [2]so it was a lot to spend out of our limited budget. I need to say here that in those days, we had no mobile phone, no car and no internet; so we didn’t have a lot of the bills that go alongside those kinds of luxuries. Also, you know, BORING.
Because everything cost money, to entertain ourselves we went for massively long walks during the day and I would read books in the evening. We couldn’t afford to go out, we didn’t have a video player (or the money to rent videos) and drinking at home was just not the done thing, not before 1997 anyway. I didn’t mind being out of the house but only because bored babies are so bloody unreasonable; they just won’t listen to the master storyteller Terry Pratchett as the plots and characters are too complex for their tiny proto brains. That didn’t mean to say that we weren’t exposed to late night entertainment; there was a pub across the road and in the later hours the mirth and revelry would spill out onto the street, causing much grinding of teeth. But this was only three nights out of every seven because it wasn’t a very good pub.
One of the nice things about living away from the in laws and family was we could control the noise levels in the house. We tiptoed around the place when the baby slept. The TV (one station, everyone asks so I’m telling you – one station and it wasn’t any good) was kept so low that we began to become experts at lip-reading. We only took breaths when absolutely necessary. This was totally not going to bite my ass later.
Having our own place with a landlord who didn’t mind what we did[3], we were able to decorate it as we saw fit. Well, orange is a great colour. And so is purple. Why choose? We didn’t! We got two gloriously clashing shades mixed up in a paint supply shop, and gleefully vandalised decorated the house. It was a small house, so it didn’t take long. Only trouble was, we ran out of the orange paint with one wall left to go in the living room and had to go get more. When we painted the last wall we realised that instead of orange it was, in fact, a sort of salmon pink which was exactly as horrible as it sounds. Looking around the room at the mismatched walls, the grubby brown carpet and the dralon “bringer-of-tetanus” couch we conceded that it would have to do.
We moved back in with Mammy while we waited for the paint fumes to dissipate. Baby daddy finished the bedroom, stairs and landing while we were gone. He did a grand job considering we didn’t bear any design basics in mind when we chose the colour purple – it was a good, rich colour that bathed the upper level of our house in permanent night. I didn’t sleep at all back in the folks’ place. I would put the baby to bed, tiptoe quietly out of the room and then a sudden noise – my sisters talking, a chair scraping, a toilet flushing, the stars coming out – would startle him and I’d have to go back to him. In the end, I took him into the bed beside me where he would nestle closely to me. It was adorable, right up to where he would smack his head off my nose. Pain is multi-sensory and has colour. Explosions of colour. (And by the way, taking him in beside me in bed because he wouldn’t settle on his own? Totally not going to bite me on the ass later.)
When I lived at home, meals were provided thrice daily. They were hot or cold, depending on the season and your tardiness. I ate what I was given and never gave the “how” of cooking much consideration. If it wasn’t for the Hamlyn All-Colour Cookbook
The greatest cookbook – I still have my copy
we would have been in serious bother. That book was a godsend. I faithfully attempted many of the recipes with varying degrees of success. If it was savoury, it would turn out perfectly. If it was sweet, it would be inedible. I decided that cooking was science and baking was witchcraft and that was that.
Money was really quite tight so in June when a friend of mine said there was a place on a community employment scheme that would enable me to earn extra money, I applied for it. The job was working as part of a team painting and decorating the homes of elderly people. I once hung wallpaper around a chimney breast. That’s like, post grad paper hanging and it only took me all day. Other people begged to help but I wouldn’t let them, preferring to battle onwards through my tears because I’m a little OCD and very bloody-minded. I learned all about how I’d made a complete hash of my own house and was taught the value of magnolia. Magnolia walls. Magnolia skirting. Magnolia effing dado rails. We had gallons of the stuff. Once, a couple turned down the prescription magnolia paint. “Nay,” they countered, “We have this paint which we have procured with our ownst coinage, please apply it to yonder walls.” (I am paraphrasing; it was ages ago). I was giddy with excitement until we opened it. “Oyster” the colour’s called. Snot grey is what it actually is. I learned a lot about colour but what I mainly took from the experience was that whoever assigns names to shades on colour cards is a criminal mastermind. That, and also if you kick a can of gloss paint over a carpet it makes your supervisor go an interesting shade of burgundy/carnelian/maroon.
When I was signing up for the job slash course, I didn’t tell them that I was going back to school that September. They didn’t know that the day I broke the news that his eldest daughter was pregnant, my Daddy made me promise that I would do my final exams after I had the baby. I said I would but to be fair I would’ve promised to join a convent and swear a vow of silence to make him ok with the whole thing. So when the last week of August came, I told them I decided to go back to school and they had no choice but to let me go. I’m convinced I heard wails of grief as I walked away, given the rest of the day off as a reward for my long weeks of dedicated decorating.
I signed up to attend Sixth Year at St. Laurence’s Community College in preparation for the Leaving Certificate the following June. I wasn’t allowed come back to my previous school. The headmaster there was insisting that if I was to come back I had to repeat Fifth year too and I really didn’t want to go through two more years of school. He pointed out that the English curriculum would be different and doing it in one year would be difficult. Enter aforementioned “bloody-mindedness” – Challenge! So I thanked him (I hope I wasn’t rude, it really was ages ago and I was quite the dickhead) and applied for the other school who couldn’t care less whether I had attended school at all, ever, and they even let me drop Irish and choose subjects that clashed with other subjects so long as I promised I’d study them in my own time. I kept a straight face all the while hiding the truth – I’d do anything they asked so long as it didn’t involve nappies and bottles.
By the end of September, school was going great, I’d settled in, made new friends, met up with old friends who were there to repeat their exams because they needed more points for the college courses they preferred; good swot types. But as the autumnal weather begun to creep in, our little old end-of-terrace house was proving difficult to heat and started to show signs of damp.
“You’re not having my grandson in this place over winter!” my Mammy declared when she saw the black bloom of mould on the walls.
And with that, I was home; under her roof and under her wing – in under six months.
[1] St. Vincent DePaul – saviours of the under-financed of Ireland. I loved you then. I love you still.
[2] Adults got £59.20 and a child dependant got £12.80 in 1993 from the government. And butter vouchers.
[3] Now, about the relative who gave us the house at a low, low, LOW price… he is an absolute diamond. He may well read this at some point and think “that’s the ungrateful wagon”, I mean, I AM ungrateful AND a wagon but in this case, I really appreciate what he did for me and he really didn’t get enough thanks or reward back then. If you’re reading this, THANK YOU C.H. you’re a legend.
To be continued>>>
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