Andrea Corr - Barefoot Pilgrimage

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

Text Andrea Corr 2019

Cover layout design HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Cover photographs Jill Ferry/Trevillion Images (drawer); authors own (additional photographs)

Photographs courtesy of the author except where indicated

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Andrea Corr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008321307

Ebook Edition October 2019 ISBN: 9780008321321

Version: 2019-09-10

For Brett and especially for our two great blessings, Brett Jr and Jeanie. This baton passes to you.

I did not sit down to write a book. This (whatever this may be) began in the summer of 2017. Two years after Daddy had died. Eighteen years after Mum. An overwhelming need to write it all down because if I died now too, this strange, normal, family, human love story as it really was to me, might also die. And then would it have ever really been?

I did not sit down at all, nor consider a destination. I just obeyed the pictures as they came. The questions. The fleeting moments. The present into the past. The present because of the past and back again with a few human, mad-gene detours along the way.

The first story in the chalet in Skerries was truly the first door that opened. That dusty room on top of the mattresses, hiding and pretending I wasnt there. It persisted and it seems to me now insisted I write it down. Not another one. Not a perhaps better one. That memory was the first door. The first room. And it began this barefoot pilgrimage.

I walked fast to summon the pictures. I walked fast to slow them down. To still them ultimately and to merely describe, then, the room that I had returned to in my mind. A sympathetic, non-judgemental voyeur of my own life as I lived it growing up. A narrator with the blessing of hindsight. It is what it is and that is OK.

So many of the rooms I loved. They made me laugh out loud, remembering us as we were. Thats a lucky thing to say. Other rooms of course I was happy to write myself out of as swiftly as possible and scramble in the dark for another door.

I tried not to think of you, dear reader, for I am a singer with a debilitating desire to be liked. I tried not to censor it all, clean and smiling like a pop video.

It came to obsess me in a way, once I began. Images from the past were appearing all the time.

Blinding flashes of you startle me awake.

The outside tap on the wall. The musty earth smell of my cats paws. The hanging lamp over the oval glass table that you pull down and change the mood of the kitchen But most of all, Mum.

In my first draft she was barely there. I thought I had forgotten her. That I had forgotten what it was like to be with her. To blissfully take her for granted. But she came back to me on these walks and I think after all that it may have been she that had me do this. Because this does not feel like it was ever a decision of mine and now that I am sitting down writing to you, I think I may understand this first story. I felt a pain in my heart when I heard her voice looking for me. All this time maybe it is me that has been looking for her. And this is Jean Bells engraving in the tree.

T ake a picture with words.

Click.

My tanned feet, their nails the colour of the pool before me, the sky above. My naked three-year-old (naked babies I dreamed of) singing while he makes muddy puddles (oh, Peppa Pig and her silly dada, the expert) with this rented gardens hose, on this holiday in Portugal.

Im on my third book and in my head Im beginning my own story. Maybe I should. Maybe I can do more than the mere minutes of a song, and I can leave it to you to imagine the melody. Catchy pop with more hooks than a what was it ? But I warn you. My weakness is vanity. I want you to like me. So I must picture this unread.

Not all that I remember I am proud of, but when it comes to childhood, I think we can only wonder why, but never blame, and I think theres a continuous thread that just might explain me, but I still dont understand. And good God could we just stop analysing ourselves. First-world vocation. And Ireland says, Aye, thats Catholic guilt.

The thread. Im seven, on top of a pile of old mattresses. I cant even kneel here without touching the ceiling and Im reading a childrens book I loved, The Wild Swans. Its a chalet in Skerries, all blue and pink like a playhouse, cardboard walls and perpetual Fisher Price family sound. Its dusty up here, all close and hidden. I hear Mum in the kitchen and what Im trying to get at here, Carolines voice asking Mum has she seen me. Shes calling my name down the wooden-toy hall but I keep quiet and still and she doesnt know about here, I dont think, so I stay hidden. And silent as the breath I wont exhale. This makes me sad but its just what it is and its just a story; she runs out calling my name, the cardboard door swinging shut, looking for me.

And this unwinds with life and lots in between to my twenty-six-year-old self, for the first time, watching a camcorder video of our lost mum, Jean, on a boat in California her voice at my ear so immediate its like it rocks me awake:

Wheres Pandy?

And my heart is wrung.

To hear a voice from the dead looking for you. To miss a voice. To miss being looked for. This means something but I dont know what.

If this is the beginning of the book I warn you, I have to leave lots out and then maybe you can say, Ah, but I want to read the book she didnt write. Or maybe not. Maybe I dont even want to read that one, thanks very much. Now that is the inner chorus of a Dundalk girl whos come down with a dose of the Who do you think you are?s.

I have to write this now though. I am scared of people dying. Actually, not people: I am scared of Johnny dying, and he has to read, counsel, manage and sell if he loves it, or not at all. Oh theres that dishcloth heart again, wrung out and reaching the base of my throat where sobs and yells gather to consider their escape.

Not now.

Id like to say I always wrote but Id be lying. There were girls like that in my class, writing poetry because they couldnt help it and getting published, albeit in our school magazine. I got my first A in honours English in my Leaving Cert. Believe me, it wasnt coming and it was a shock, but I did know I wrote my best story, that hot June day in the exam hall (why was it always hot for exams and not for holidays?). I actually laughed out loud writing it (