Looking back on summers past – Áine Ryan

Reviving reveries


Áine Ryan

SEEING the world through child-like eyes is a magical lens that one misses as the years flit by. The most mundane things excited wonder, awe and even a sense of danger.
I remember after our family moved lock stock and barrel to Dublin when I was aged 11, we returned to our home town of Tullamore for a number of years for our Summer holidays. We would all pile into the black Anglia – BIR 718 – and set off on this cross-country odyssey which involved marathon gate-counting sessions, sibling battles over window seats and emergency stops for me to get car-sick on the roadside. (Travelling was not my forte.)
Back then Palace Lake could have been the Atlantic Ocean and the municipal outdoor swimming pool a state-of-the art Olympic venue. The midlands town was filled with the mysteries of the Grand Canal and the laneways leading to the old Tullamore Dew stone mills.
The wooden footbridge over the canal was the main thoroughfare to Puttaghaun where many of my childhood friends lived. For years later its rickety and rotten wooden steps would incite recurring nightmares about either falling into the canal, or worse still dangling screaming from between two of those menacing, but gaping, steps.
Even though it teetered on the edge of the town, Puttaghaun was filled with rustic nooks and crannies that allowed games – that survived from one summer to the next – involving new identities and fabricated dramas, only Enid Blyton and the Secret Seven or the Famous Five could equal.
Earlier this summer my mother and siblings met in Tullamore for a family reunion and journey down memory lane. While the passing of the decades has left many of the landmarks intact, I was totally taken aback at how the town had contracted.
My childhood reveries meant that the steeple of the church poked right up into the heavens and main street stretched on and on for miles leading to the Arden Road bridge.
It was a scorching hot Sunday as we made our way from our hotel over by Convent View, along the canal, and into Elliffe’s shop for ice-creams. Beaming behind the counter was my childhood friend Cepta Elliffe.
Time suddenly stood still and over 40 summers merged into one.