Midnight Feast

By noeleenm on August 10th, 2007

Last night we had a midnight feast…

We didn’t set out to have it, unlike Kasia’s birthday which we celebrated a week after Jan’s, and unlike the dinner we’ve planned for Sunday week for no other reason than it seems like a good idea - and Gail and Jan have been nagging about it.

Since Kasia’s birthday, she’s been to Belgium to visit her parents (her Dad works there and her Mum had gone for a holiday), Jan went home with Leti to receive his Degree, and Gint went home for nine days to Latvia. It was this latter event which serependitiously triggered our midnight feast last night.

Gint arrived home late last Monday night and had to go straight to work on Tuesday morning. By last night he was so tired that he went straight to bed and only woke up at midnight to get something to eat. I had gone to my bedroom around 10pm to work on e-mails for the flood campaign, and came out to check that everything was locked up for the night when I discovered Gint in the kitchen. I had hardly seen him since his holiday so sat down to hear about his travels and, of course, he insisted that we try a bottle of something that was balsamic and herbal and 45% alcohol. I had enough sense – or cowardice – to say ‘no’ to this but instead started grazing my way through the chocolate sweets filled with liqueurs that he had also brought back from his trip.

Then Jan arrived in and joined Gint at the drink – just to be sociable – with the occasional foray into the chocolates – just to be sociable. He was swiftly followed by Kasia, finishing her late shift at the hotel, who spat out the balsamic drink saying it reminded her of medicine her mother used give them when they were small, but was easily tempted by the chocolates.

By then it seemed like an awful pity that Alba had come in and gone to bed before Gint’s emergence from his slumbers so Jan and Gint went up and woke her to come down and join us. She was on antibiotics, she announced, and couldn’t drink, but the chocolates…

At two o’clock in the morning we finally all went back to bed, having decided it was just a little too early for breakfast. I’ve still only the vaguest notion of what Gint did on his holidays, but the bit I heard was interesting enough to make me want to hear more. He visited someplace that was sacred to the Druids, if I got it correctly, and I think it was in the middle of a forest where the birds didn’t sing, and there was something in there about hollows lined with stones, and as soon as I get to sit down with him over a mug of tea I might get it right yet…

It will have to be soon. Kasia’s going home to Poland on Sunday for a few days – where she’ll again see her parents – and Alba is finally getting to go home to Spain for her holiday at the end of September. And on Sunday I spent the evening in my niece’s home in Ashford at a family get-together. They had just returned from a holiday in the Appennines in Italy, and we saw slides of the most fabulous scenery imaginable.

All their stories of their travels are being woven in my head against the background to a wonderful book I read last week, which was set in Nova Scotia and is called ‘The Birth House’, and through the descriptions of Jenni Diski travels in Antartica (and in her head), which I’m totally absorbed in at the moment. These two books – and G. K. Chesterton’s ‘Fr. Brown’ stories, which I was re-reading in the middle – formed another kind of midnight feast for me, this time for my imagination.

Sometimes, though, I think it needs to go on a diet just as much as my body. Does anyone know how you can tell when your imagination has become obese?.

Posted in Books/films/theatre, Czech Republic, House Family, Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Spain, Wine and Some Spirits | Comments Off

Last Post

By noeleenm on October 4th, 2006

This is the last piece I’ll be posting until at least week beginning October 16.

On Friday, I’m flying out to New York for a holiday postponed since last year when one of the friends with whom I’m travelling was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Now, surgery, chemotherapy, and a lot of prayer later, she’s joining us with a mop of short feathery hair, and a smile as wide as a rainbow. We’re all looking forward to this holiday.

We arrive back in Ireland on Saturday, 14th, and on Monday, 16th, the Oral Hearing by An Bord Pleanala (Ireland’s planning authority) into our local authority’s decision to grant permission to put high density construction on the flood plain downriver from our homes will begin…

These Oral Hearings are very like court cases, with the Planning Inspector acting as judge, and each side presenting their case. We have been told that the hearing is likely to go on for at least a week because of its size and complexity: it impinges on two separate local authority areas and two separate applications were submitted for each area – four applications in all.

No doubt the developers’ side will be represented by barristers, hydrologists, engineers, and all the power of expensive PR, including computer generated graphics.

Our side will be represented by local people, with a town planner as our only real professional. It’s David versus Goliath but we’re convinced we’ll win because the proposal to build where they want to build is so crazy – and so unnecessary.

‘David’s team’ met up again last Monday night to discuss strategy and pool our strengths. Among the other people (other than our immediate community, I mean) objecting to this scheme are an engineer, an architect, and a group of retailers from our traditional Main Street, who have commissioned a damning traffic study as well.

I sat in a corner and tried to concentrate through a streaming head cold that had my head, ears and throat aching, and every bit of liquid in my body pouring out through my eyes and nose.

The only thing I can be grateful for is that it has happened now and hopefully I will be healthy again by Friday morning and the long haul to the States.

Because of the meeting on Monday night, I saw none of ‘the family’ until last night, when I was relieved to find that Maria’s cold, at least, had greatly improved. She went to her training on Monday, and yesterday was out on the streets asking people to sign up to a commitment to donate a regular sum to a recognised charity on a regular basis.

She loves the team she’s working with (all young and multi-national), enjoyed talking to people on the street (busy Mary Street in the heart of Dublin city), and got two new donors to sign up!

“Were they men or women?”, enquired Wojtek.

“Men”, admitted Maria. “I find it easier to ask men.”

Wojtek grinned.

We were all comparing notes in a steaming kitchen as we went about our various meal preparations – all except Magda, whose working hours these days seem to absent her when most of us are at home.

For Wojtek, on the other hand, this all being together at mealtime is something he has enjoyed more over the past few weeks because the adjustment in his timetable has brought his clock more into synch with the rest of us.

“I used to come home early from work in the mornings and there was nobody up, or, if they were, they were still half asleep”, he explained. “And then in the evenings when everyone else was eating I was still in bed till I had to get up to go to work.

“It was so bad that sometimes I’d keep smiling at customers at night to get them to stop and talk to me!”

He has survived his first nights back at work well, helped by the fact that yesterday’s classes were cancelled, due to his tutor’s illness.

Gint is not working today and has agreed to do another ‘anti-flood’ job while he’s off. He will silicone around the double-glazed patio doors leading from my bedroom into the garden. They’re too wide for the flood guards I bought for the front and back doors, so the engineer who sold the flood guards came up with this temporary solution. He maintains that the double glazing will prove strong enough to hold back the strength of the water provided there isn’t a little gap through which it can make an initial break.

“Don’t forget to fill in the little hole for condensation”, he added.

Please God, none of this will be necessary. We’re again enjoying crisp dry weather and if this lasts through the next very high tide warning (6th through 9th October), at least I’ll be home to deal with the problem myself come the next crisis.

When I was repeating instructions to Gint about putting the flood guards in place if he got a call from a neighbour to say the river had broken, and giving him the telephone number of my nephew, who is an electrician, in case of emergency (because power is one of the first things to go in a flood), he demanded to know was he in charge then while I am away…

“You’re chief flood officer”, I prevaricated as the others listened, grinning.

“Then I can bring in beautiful women and have wild parties and…”

“Of course you can’t! You have an important job to do. You can’t be distracted by beautiful women.”

He was still muttering something along the lines of ‘glamorous sidekicks’ and ‘James Bond’, when I left the kitchen.

I had planned to write posts in advance for this time away from Ireland and away from my computer, and actually started to do so but ran out of time and steam.

The plan was, though, to write retrospectively about holidays I really enjoyed. One of those holidays (two, in fact) were spent walking along the Camino de Santiago, and to refresh my memory of place names along the way I picked up one of the books I really enjoyed about the camino experience.

It’s called ‘Pilgrim Snail’, and it’s about the 2,000 mile walk Ben Nimmo did from Canterbury to Santiago de Compostela, busking along the way with his trombone, to raise money for the memorial fund of his girlfriend who had been murdered while working for charity in Belize.

It’s a wonderful book – funny, touching, very visual and even aural. Ben is into trad jazz and the blues, and when he describes playing his trombone in old churches, and on mountainsides, you can hear the music…

Among his favourites were ‘Summertime’, ‘Danny Boy’, ‘Misty’, and – ‘The Last Post’. 

I know, as someone with Girl Scouts in her blood, I should remember its haunting melody and its lovely words more often at times when I’m as stressed as I have been over the past weeks:-

‘Day is done, gone the sun,
From the hills, from the lakes, from the sky.
All is well, safely rest,
God is nigh.

Posted in Books/films/theatre, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Poland | 4 Comments »

A Hip Hop Weekend

By noeleenm on October 2nd, 2006

This weekend was the last of Wojtek’s holidays. For the past two weeks he has been attending his DJ and Music Production course each day – and coming home more and more exhilarated by it!

Tonight, though, he goes back to work, and working through the night while studying during the day – no matter how much you love what you’re studying – is very hard indeed.

To his great delight, he has found a soul mate in Maria, from Germany. Maria also loves the type of music Wojtek enjoys. My description of it – ‘rap’, ‘hip hop’, etc. – as ‘monotone’ didn’t go down very well with either of them. And, when I asked to have the characteristics of ‘hip hop’ for instance explained to me, Wojtek told me that it’s something you can’t explain, you have to feel… Hmmm.

Today I went looking for a word I have lost, which I came across in one of Robert Crais’ books, describing a white man who talks like a black man. I feel it describes Wojtek when he talks about his kind of music.

I didn’t find the word, but I came across instead a review of a book called ‘He Talk Like a White Boy’ by Joseph C. Phillips, giving the other side of the coin.

Phillips’ description, quoted in the review, of how he tried to get to know rap made me laugh out loud – “As an illustration of my lack of commitment, I soon decided that playing an album all the way through didn’t necessarily mean I had to be in the same room while it played.” – and print a copy of it off to bring home to Wojtek!

Even though, like Phillips, hip-hop and rap do nothing for me, I still enjoy immensely Wojtek’s love of the music, and his excitement at creating and changing it. Whatever ‘different beat’ gives that kind of buzz to someone, I’m all for it…

Maria’s eyes were not so bright all weekend, though, because the damp Irish weather we’re experiencing, in between warm bursts of sunshine, has caused her to come down with a head cold.

It was Maria’s first complete weekend with us, and she alternated between trying to cure her headcold with Lemsips and warmth and rest, ensuring she has everything in place for her first day of work today, talking to her family and friends on the phone, and taking photographs of her housemates and surroundings so that said family and friends would have some idea of the kind of place and people among whom she is now living.

She was delighted, and justly so, to have landed a job, as well as a home, so quickly after her arrival in Ireland.

Her new job is as a fund-raiser for a professional company who raise money for charities by appealing to people in the street. She will start off today in training and then will work on Dublin’s streets, but later will have the opportunity to travel to different parts of Ireland with the fundraising team.

My first concern was that she wouldn’t be working just on commission, but she assured me she will get a basic pay. I explained I was worried because I don’t give to professional fundraisers, and I know I’m not alone in that, feeling that I want my charitable donation to go direct and entire to the charity in question. So I’ll give directly to a charitable organisations I support, and I’ll give to volunteer collectors whom I wholeheartedly admire, but not to someone who makes a living out of it.

Knowing one of them now makes me feel uncomfortable about that, especially as I’m aware that charities need all the money they can get, and they probably have to resort to using professionals to keep up their work.

Maria said that they were told the money they collect goes direct to the charity: their job, in fact, is to try to get people to sign a pledge to send a fixed amount of money on a regular basis to one of the charities they represent – very well-known charities, incidentally.

The fund-raising company’s fee, they said, is paid from last year’s budget in each case. That, for me, immediately raised the question of why had they money left from last year’s budget if they’re in dire need of funds? Surely, it’s because they deliberately keep some money over for this, so what’s the difference if it’s from last year’s collected-on-the-streets donations or this year’s?

But for once I kept my mouth shut on the subject, feeling that Maria, brand new in Ireland, brand new in our house, brand new at this job, and with a head cold, has enough to contend with without engaging her in an ethical discussion about her job.

It has been great to see how well she has settled into the house, now even able to follow Gint’s rapid-fire conversation, sometimes with strange grammatical twists and often with the most outrageous statements delivered completely dead-pan. Newcomers to the house tend to end up peering rather worriedly at him, but Maria is now laughing along with the rest of us at his antics.

Gint didn’t have a lot of weekend to share because he was working on Saturday, as well, and yesterday he mixed and laid cement to give an even base to the entrance to our back porch.

He will be chief ‘flood officer’ while I’m away, with full instructions on what to do if he gets a phone call saying the river is breaking its banks. We had been warned though by the company who sold me the floodguard gates for front and back that the surface must be completely even to get a correct seal. Thus, Gint’s work at the back gate yesterday, with much: “Ouch, I’m getting too old for this”, as he crouched to spread and smooth and level the cement.

This morning there’s a footprint in it, and Im quite sure we’ll all be asked to produce our shoes to be measured against it…

Despite Gint’s working hours, all of us except Magda – who was the only one of us working right through the weekend – had a glass of wine together on Friday night, and on Saturday night Gint and Wojtek went to a disco together, Maria opting out because of her head cold.

They had also talked about going to Glendalough on Sunday, feeling that Wojtek will never, ever have another weekend off again, but the combination of the weather and the disco conspired against them.

Today, like the seven dwarfs in the Sleeping Beauty, we each shouldered our picks, or our laptops, or our rucksacks, and headed off one by one singing…

Have you ever heard “Hi he, hi ho’ sung in rap?

Posted in Books/films/theatre, Flooding, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Poland | No Comments »

Special Needs, Special Gifts, Special People

By noeleenm on September 29th, 2006

I haven’t experienced such energy, such vitality, such rhythm, and such sheer enjoyment in a musical since ‘Mamma Mia!’ – the show based on the songs of Abba – till Bray Lakers staged ‘Dance through the Centuries’ in a sold-out Mermaid Theatre in Bray last night.

Who are Bray Lakers…? Well, they’re a club formed for young people with special needs in Bray and its surrounding area. Mostly they’re in their twenties, and the range of their disabilities includes Down’s Syndrome and Fragile X. The range of their abilities includes drama, singing, playing percussion, and, above all, dancing.

The volunteer producers had come up with a linking device of a full screen black and white ‘home movie’ (crackles and all!) as a backdrop, but, instead of showing these young men and women as children, it showed them in rehearsal for the show. Often our old-style seafront or promenade were used for the rehearsals, which added to the ‘home movie’ effect.

It started with a young man and woman from the show strolling on the beach, throwing stones languidly into the water, and then suddenly realising that they were late for the show. Text, reminiscent of the silent movies, underscored their horror-struck mime.

They were seen rushing up off the beach, frustrated by a closed railway crossing, the boy hauling the girl away from a shop window where she stops to admire jewellery, and finally rushing into the theatre – where they appeared in reality on-stage in front of the now blank screen.

It was neat. The slap-stick, burlesque music changed to a slow, romantic number and they danced together as a voice off-stage explained how dance and rhythm came almost before memory, with the beat of the heart…

The heart to which they referred, incidentally, was an absolutely enormous red velvet prop hung to the left of the stage. It was prepared in the home of my friends, the O’Reillys, whose Miranda and Darren were both dancing in the show. The entire family stepped over and around it for weeks – as they did around the 75 costumes that Elaine was making on the dining room table meanwhile – and then found it wouldn’t fit out through the kitchen door! The problem was eventually resolved, and the heart transported – slowly and precariously – on the top of a station wagon to the theatre.

From heart beat it was an easy transfer to African drums and tambourines, which a group of the youngsters played as the ‘cavemen’ came dancing and whirling on stage. One young man, Derek, was in his element as the caveman who was attempting to catch his cavewoman (Derry), club her, and drag her off to have his way.

First he lost his wig of long bushy hair. It was promptly claimed by another dancer to his great, exaggerated dismay. At the end of the scene, still unsuccessful in catching Derry, he appealed in mime to the audience for more encouragement, dragging out the delighted response until his mother finally stood up in her seat and with a firm gesture of her thumb towards the wings indicated in no uncertain terms that he was finished! He saluted her with his club, calmly – and took another bow before he left.

By now the screen was showing rehearsals of the Egyptian dance scene in black and white, the sinuous dance movement with hands and hips and knees proving a bit too much for some of the young men and women – a foretaste of what was to come!

As black and white gave way to glorious coloured costumes in this less-engrossing-for-the-participants dance, some members of the cast could be seen wandering out of line temporarily to search for mother or father or sibling or friend in the audience. Beaming smiles and waves signalled successful identification, until a hissed prompt from off-stage drew their attention back to the dance again.

When swans at Bray Harbour appeared next on the screen, and the title ‘Swan Lake’ followed it, there were a few nervous expressions to be heard sotto-voice in the audience. But it worked…

The ‘ballet dancers’ came on, engrossed in the gentle music of Tchaikovsky and moving and bending with a slow, graceful absorption that was elegant in itself. The leading couple attempted no strenuous leaps or fancy arabesques, but moved together with a gentle, serious grace that was somehow very touching.

This gentleness carried into the next scene – Pocahontas’ wedding – which was shot first in a field of flowers, with a beautiful tranquil girl and a handsome smiling lad standing beneath a tree full of blossoms, and looking as if they might indeed be pledging their troth to each other. The close-ups of their gentle, happy faces helped create an atmosphere that transposed itself onto the scene on-stage. It was like managing to look at a wedding album, before the wedding.

But it was to be the end of the low-key performances as the black and white screen showed now the cast preparing for a good, old-fashioned cowboy shoot-out! Each performer swaggered into the rehearsal room in turn to take aim and shoot the viewer.

On stage, the victims of the shoot-out (some lowering themselves oh-so-carefully as they died!) quickly made a miraculous recovery to join in a barn-dance of immense vitality. It was followed, immediately, by the Can Can…

The second part of the show started quietly again as one young woman with a really lovely voice sang solo, but it was the only quiet moment for the rest of the night.

In a scene more reminiscent of ‘The Field’ than Michael Flatley’s glitzy show, the lads lined up on Bray beach in caps and shirts and braces and old-fashioned trousers, hands deep in their pockets! When they were all in place they went into their version of Riverdance.

I don’t think I have ever laughed so much and cheered so much at the same time, as they repeated it on stage, this time joined by the girls, who were a little more elegant, but no less boisterous.

One girl was dressed like the lads, though, and the reason for her ‘cross-dressing’ only became apparent when she was joined in their finale of Riverdance by Daniel, tall, crewcut, and gangly – and dressed in a glittering Irish dancing dress. He brought the house down.

It was Daniel’s Dad, John, incidentally, who was Master of Ceremonies for the night. He did a brilliant job of it, engaging the audience in an on-going patter that kept the show ticking over so well between acts that he had to be forcibly dragged off the stage, along with the microphone, at one point. The ‘haulier’ was one of the black-clad volunteers who moved props, danced prompts in the wings, and even occasionally joined in discretely on-stage, when shyness anchored the cast’s feet.

By the time Riverdance had come to a whooping end, the lads were throwing their caps into the audience. I was half-expecting a shirt or two to follow. They were on a roll…

That exuberant energy was the starting point for their final dance – Rock ‘n Roll. They danced ‘as if nobody was there’, belting out the rhythm. And then, suddenly, somebody else was there, too.

‘Elvis’ strutted up from behind the audience somewhere, complete in his glitzy black suit with gold turned up collar, and bouffant hairstyle, and climbed on-stage.

I have seen the young man who played Elvis dance before at parties, and his movements are studied and stylised and absolutely rhythmic. Again the audience was on its feet.

Derek, the cave man, who had been rock and rolling with the best of them, watched his friend dancing for a while, looked at the audience reaction, and then strolled over to Elvis and invited him to jive…

They did.

It was one of the most enjoyable shows I have ever seen, and, judging by the standing ovation that lasted right through their final number – with the cast clapping and cheering us back – it was one of the best shows anyone else in that audience had ever seen either.

Bravo, Bray Lakers… Bravo, bravo, bravo…

Posted in Books/films/theatre, Ireland | No Comments »

The Wind that Shakes the Barley

By noeleenm on June 28th, 2006

It was a harsh wind, indeed, that shook the barley in Ireland’s fields in 1920.

The execution of the leaders of the 1916 Rising was a grave mistake by the British. James Connolly, one of the last to be shot, was brought to Kilmainham Gaol on a stretcher because he was already dying from wounds received in battle: Connolly had to be tied to a chair in the Stonebreaker’s Yard to hold him upright while they executed him.

News of the executions, carried out over several days, sent shock waves around the world. The leaders of the Rising had been mostly teachers and poets, including Padraic Pearse, and Joseph Mary Plunkett who married his Grace in prison just hours before he was executed. The harshness of the summary justice meted out to them provoked international protest – but, more importantly, it turned what had been the apathetic, and sometimes downright hostile, attitude of the Irish people themselves to the rebels to sympathy, and, finally, to rebellion also.

In 1918, Sinn Fein – the political wing of the Irish Republican Army – won an overwhelming mandate in the General Elections in Ireland, then still part of the United Kingdom. The result was two-fold. In 1919, the Anglo-Irish War began, as poorly armed Irish men joined the IRA in a mainly guerrilla war against the English presence in Ireland, manifested by their police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary. In a parallel move, Sinn Fein set up the First Irish Dáil (Parliament), declaring it to be the true Government of Ireland.

The British Government’s response was to advertise in Britain for men willing to “face a rough and dangerous task”. From the men who answered the call, many of them ex-soldiers (although in Ireland it was always claimed that they were mostly ‘the sweepings of England’s prisons’), a force was created to back the RIC. They were called the ‘Black and Tans’, because the response to the recruitment drive – and the pay of ten shillings a day – was so enormous that they had to be dressed in a mixture of British army and RIC uniform.

Alongside Cromwell, the Black and Tans became the most hated name in Irish history because of the brutality of their ‘reign’ in Ireland.

It is against this background of the Black and Tans in Ireland that the film, ‘The Wind that Shook the Barley’, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes, opens…

It stars Cillian Murphy as Damien, the young doctor who changes his mind at the last minute about going to London, and instead joins his brother, Teddy, and the young men they grew up with, in fighting the Tans around their West Cork village as members of an IRA ‘flying column’, as these guerrilla units were known. He is convinced to stay and fight by the wanton brutality he sees inflicted by the Tans, rather than his brother’s arguments, but it was the torture of his brother by the British that set off the first exodus from our local cinema, according to Gail, with whom I went to see the film. I didn’t notice them leave. I had my eyes fast shut against that scene, but didn’t shut out the sounds of his cries, nor the sounds of his comrades singing what is now our national anthem to give him support – and to defend themselves against his agony.

It is a very harsh film, despite the beauty of the West Cork countryside, despite the lament in the song from which the film takes its title, sung with tremendous power by an older woman of the village at a young boy’s wake, and despite the attempts to refuse to be brutalised by their own reprisals.

…And it became harsher…

There is a naturalness in identifying with the oppressed, particularly when the people at the rough end of the brutality are your own people, and you’ve grown up hearing its history in song and story. But when the issue of how to deal with informers comes up – and the informers are also your people, and very young, frightened people – reaction becomes more complicated. And when that extended through the Treaty that divided Ireland into 26 counties of the Free State, with six counties still remaining in British hands, and all of them still subject to an oath of loyalty to the British King, then it becomes very complicated indeed.

There is a scene in the film, after the news of the Treaty was broken, in which the men and women of the local IRA debate the action they will take – to endorse the Treaty or not. It is powerful, thought provoking, and very honest.

It builds on a theme introduced earlier in the film, as to whether the local Irish (as distinct from Anglo Irish) landowners should be given preferential treatment, because they provide the money for arms. Some of the leaders of the IRA unit believe they should: they are realists. Others believe this is totally wrong, repeating the injustices of the English landlords: they are idealists, socialist as well as republican.

This division yawns even wider when the Treaty is discussed, with some believing they are selling out their people in the North, and their dead comrades, if they accept a compromise, while others believe it’s the best they can get, and must – realistically – be accepted.

One of the men who argues strongly on the republican and socialist side uses a phrase that they are changing “only the colour of the flag, and the accents”, if they accept, and for me, in today’s Ireland, that carried a resounding ring of truth.

The final depiction of the division of this small West Cork community into those who fight on the Republican side in the ensuing Civil War, those who fight on the Free State side, and those who refuse to take up arms on either side against men with whom they had once fought side by side, is heartbreaking.

…And that this film was made by an Englishman – Ken Loach – shatters one of Ireland’s biggest stereotypes of all…

Posted in Books/films/theatre, Ireland | No Comments »

The Child Within

By noeleenm on June 26th, 2006

They say that people who don’t have off-spring of their own have the highest ‘a-a-ah’ factor when it comes to babies and very small children. I’m a case in point. I find myself smiling at utterly unknown children in their buggies, or holding my breath as they stagger uncertainly, but determinedly, slightly ahead of their parents, in the focused way that toddlers do when they first discover the heady freedom of being able to move under one’s own steam in a self-chosen direction.

They’re fascinating and beautiful, and often comical, as the young of most species are, and they evoke in me not only wonder and tenderness, but the fierce sense of protectiveness that is normal in a grown-up of either sex. …But not all adults feel that way…

What is it that allows some people to badly neglect, or even intentionally harm, little children? Is it that they lack imagination enough to feel the terror of vulnerable, defenceless little beings? Is it that they’ve been damaged themselves so much as children that hurting someone weaker than yourself becomes somehow the terrible norm of their lives? Or can it be that some people are truly evil…

And if the ‘repeating the cycle’ theory is true, then why is it that some people who survive terrible childhoods become even more fiercely protective of children than those who have never had a hand or voice raised against them in real violence, while others go on to reproduce their own childhood nightmares in their children?

It’s a question I’ve never had a chance to examine at close quarters, thank God. I grew up in a home where adults were the protective walls that surrounded us: you might try to escape them sometimes to get into mischief, but you knew, without thought, that once you had slipped back behind their shelter, no one could harm you.

What started me thinking in these last few days about children who are hurt, and the adults they become, was reading Robert Crais’ latest novels – ‘The Last Detective’ and ‘The Forgotten Man’.  Very well written, they are two of a series of ten detective novels (I haven’t read the others), featuring Elvis Cole and his partner, Joe Pike. The background story of the characters’ lives builds gradually over each novel in such a way as to become equally important as the fast-moving plot of the individual book. Each story is enriched and explained by the unfolding characterisation of Elvis Cole, in particular, whom Robert Crais created, following the death of his father, “using elements of his own life as the basis of the story”, according to his web site.

Both Elvis Cole and Joe Pike come from ‘dysfunctional’ families. Elvis has never known his father, and his mother – who seemed to suffer from a psychiatric disorder – continually abandoned him without warning. Joe’s father was a drunk, who beat his wife and child on a regular basis.

‘The Last Detective’ opens with the kidnapping of the young son of Elvis’ girlfriend, and ‘The Forgotten Man’ opens with the police informing Cole that a murder victim has just claimed with his dying breath that he was Elvis’ father… Children, families, and the enormous importance of blood family – no matter how terrible that family – are the real motifs in both books. Murder, and ‘who-dunnit’, are incidentals, as they are in most good detective novels.

Incidentally, I was unsurprised to discover, while surfing Robert Crais’ web site, that he screen wrote the television series, ‘Hill Street Blues’, and was nominated for an Emmy for his work. It has the same grim realism, laced through with occasional heart-stopping tenderness, as his books.

I knew someone once – a gentle and caring young woman – who had grown up in a home that was made dysfunctional by alcoholism. She had not been physically beaten, but she felt her childhood had been stolen by the consequences of the abuse of alcohol within her family home, and its resulting secrecy, shame, and crippled relationships. Part of her answer was to join ACOA, a “Twelve Step, Twelve Tradition program of women and men who grew up in alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional homes”.

Like Alcoholics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, and Over-eaters Anonymous, it is based on acknowledging the past in a safe, supportive environment; recognising how present behaviour is rooted in that past; and facing the future by replacing the crutch of addictive behaviour with faith in a Higher Power. I have no doubt that someone who is a member of any of those programmes would explain them a lot better than that, but, if I explain it badly, it is from ignorance only: I have a huge admiration for people who climb those twelve steps from hell to healthy behaviour.

Captain Frank Furillo (played by Daniel J. Travanti) from ‘Hill Street Blues’ fought his addiction to alcohol right through the series, with the help of the AA. Chris Cagney (played by Sharon Gless) in ‘Cagney and Lacey’, another television series for which Robert Crais wrote, also battled alcoholism.

Crais refers often in the two novels I read last week to ‘the child within’, a phrase I became familiar with through my ACOA friend. It means that within each adult there still lives the child, frightened or adventurous, that was formed in our earliest years.

We are lucky, beyond measure, if that child still looks out at the world with wondering eyes, expecting love.

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