Free Rory & Ita by Roddy Doyle

in the skirt. We were eating strawberries and ice-cream. The garden was small but strawberries and ice-cream were a rare treat; we could have been in the Garden of Eden.
    I smell lavender and I remember my Aunt Una. Shewas beautiful, and she always smelled of lavender. My cousin Maeve told me that it wasn’t lavender water; it was her soap. A bar of lavender soap was one of the first things I bought when I started to work. I might never be as beautiful as Aunt Una but I would do my best to smell like her.
    Last year, I saw an advertisement on the television for Bacardi Breezer. Gay young things twisted across the screen. The word ‘breezer’ was the trigger. I saw my brother, as a cheeky, bold little boy: ‘Julius Caesar let a breezer, Off the coast of France, Napoleon tried to do the same, And did it in his pants.’ This, to Joe, was the height of daring boldness.
    The songs ‘The Boys of Wexford’ and ‘Boulavogue’, particularly if sung completely off-key, will for ever remind me of my father. He loved Wexford with an abiding love. I phoned my cousin Jim one day. He asked me to hold on for a few minutes, and I was delighted to hear ‘Boulavogue’ on the other end of the line. Let others stick to ‘Greensleeves’; Jim Bolger Senior would have approved of Jim Bolger Junior.
    A few years ago, in December, President Clinton visited Ireland. Banner headlines boasted of the President’s third visit to us. But we were also told, for some strange reason, that he had only once visited the American state of Nebraska. ‘Nebraska’ was the key to the memory of my late brother-in-law, Jimmy Peoples, sitting in our kitchen, strumming Rory’s guitar and singing: ‘Take me back to old Nebraska, And if anyone should ask ya, I’ll be waiting where the cornfields grow, In a tumble-down old cottage, Where a humble bowl of porridge, Is the most delightful meal I know.’ He sang it so beautifully, and with such sincerity, that youwould have sworn that he was born and reared in Nebraska.
    It could be mid-June, in the sunshine, or any other time of year, and I get the whiff of cigar smoke. I am back in Terenure, in our sitting room, on Christmas Day, and my father is smoking his annual cigar. The cigar was taken carefully from his breast pocket, both ends were rolled carefully and gently between his fingers. The gold paper band was removed. When I was very young, I wore it as a ring. As one cigar per year did not merit the purchase of a cigar clipper, he used his small folding scissors. He opened it slowly, and snipped the top from the cigar. A match was lit, and placed to the cigar. And, with one or two puffs, the top glowed. My father lay back in his armchair, with an expression of all-this-and-heaven-too on his face. How I loved that smell, and still do.
    Last Sunday, at Mass, the reader spoke of Jeremiah, the prophet. He lost me there. I was back in Kate Dempsey’s little cottage, outside Kilmuckridge, in Wexford. Kate is blowing the fire with her bellows. ‘Jeremiah, blow the fi-ah – puff, puff, puff.’ Over and over we say it, both laughing until the kettle boils and I am sitting down to my special tea.
    Kate Dempsey helped my Aunt Bessie on two or three mornings each week. I would stand and wait at the back gate until I saw the little black figure make her way over the brow of the hill, and down through the fields, a short cut to the house. I always went to meet her. I first met her when I was ten. She seemed old then, but she seemed no older when I last saw her, at age twenty-five. I walked the fields with Kate when we brought in the cows. I helped her spread the washing on the hedges and lawn,to bleach. We went to the market in Kilmuckridge to sell the chickens. Bessie allotted me two chickens each year, for holiday pocket money, and Kate fought my corner for me. ‘There’s something wrong with that scales. You’re robbing the child. Ah, give her another few pence for sweets.’ Each year, I visited Kate for a