Grab Your Things, We’re Off To France

To get to the rise and thrall of my dangerous liaison with blue-eyed Marine from Nantes, we must head off again to France — but first let me tell you how young Mister Me actually got there that very first time. 

What a wheeze it was, a battered but solid old Renault 16 bought for 400 guilders (about £200) between four of us from a guy in Breda, south Holland, where we were all holed up, and hot damn, we were on the road to Cadillac, south west France. To join Scots Billy and Scouser Dave, who had a regular summer gig there, picking peaches, then apples, and on to the vendage, or grape picking season.

Like so many great youthful adventures, it all started in the pub.

We had dreamed it up the week beforehand, over the usual late Sunday evening wishful drinking in our Ile Teit cafe (pub) hang-out in Breda city centre, and what do you reckon, didn’t one of us actually go and do something about it! Hassled us for the money, sized up and bought the old wine-red banger, and made the whole trip happen. Yorkshire Richie it was, the only one of us with a current driving licence. Right pushy and opinionated were Yorkshire Richie  — even without drink on him.

Forward planning was not how I operated back then. Or anyone I hung around with. The dim-lit journey from notion to deed was paved with obstacle and ambivalence. It usually started out at fanciful implausability, stumbled on into whim, veered off up through vague inclination, before turning into dawning possibility, and finally arriving at action. Or not. If this sounds suspiciously like the flow and ebb of a typical evening’s drinking and thinking back then, I will not dispute this.

All I know is a minor decision could take weeks but equally, a life-changing deviation might spin on a chance conversation or improvised reaction to circumstances. 

Like having gone back to school to repeat my Leaving certificate, I had earlier applied on a passing notion for Physical Education College in Limerick, to be a PE teacher, just because I loved playing football, got called for a late interview, and got a place. So, bye bye repeat Leaving Cert, and hello third level education. Just turned 17, I rocked up to that peculiar bunker-like college building in Limerick’s Castletroy.

Four years of lectures attended, skipped, and dreamt through, occasionally intense study sessions and last-minute cat-eared essays shoved under lecturers’ doors, late night poker schools and pints in the Hurlers pub and beyond later, I didn’t as much graduate as stumble over the line to finish a race I probably never should have entered.

Coming up to my final exams was an accelerated blur of guilty pints and abandoned study sessions, Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill on repeat play on the Hurlers’ juke box. 

 “I did not believe the information

Just had to trust imagination

My heart going “Boom-boom-boom”

“Son, ” he said

“Grab your things, I’ve come to take you home”

Hey, back home

To keep in silence I resigned

My friends would think I was a nut

Turning water into wine

Open doors would soon be shut

So I went from day to day

Though my life was in a rut

‘Til I thought of what I’d say

Which connection I should cut

I was feeling part of the scenery

I walked right out of the machinery

My heart going “Boom-boom-boom”

“Hey, ” he said

“Grab your things, I’ve come to take you home”

Hey, back home”

Deep stuff when you’re half-cut and and a mighty tune to boot. No-one likely to bring me home or sort me out, though. Or anyone I might call upon. So I went from day to day.

My first experience of university could have been the stuff of hallowed halls, harmless posturings and burgeoning romantic prowess, all the while grappling efficiently with the great masters of educational theory and practice. But alas, not.

Academically, I learned nothing, or at least did not dwell on any of it, and practically, even less took root. But I did graduate impressively quickly from faint nausea at my first sniff of a murky Smithwicks pint, to falling down properly drunk, spreadeagled on a raised Formica ledge in the corner of a student disco in the canteen. I had also taken easily to smoking cigarettes. John Player Blues.

That ledge, incidentally, was also the unmarked site of my first encounter with the drunken head staggers, or as I experienced them, my head started to spin, like a helicopter was taking off in my head, whilst simultaneously and paradoxically, I was incapable of independent movement.  

The head staggers in the corner of a college disco seemed normal enough for us unpolished devils who couldn’t talk in that way to the women, or blokes — though this was never even a topic in my unsophisticated and inexperienced circle — we fancied.

For some reason, these same objects of far away pinings, were not in the habit of scouring our swaying ranks of bashful wall-eyed wallflowers, holding ourselves up with our pints, for their Prince Charming.

Anne R, whoever or wherever you are now, you were my first true lust. And you never knew it.

You would be forgiven for thinking we were a bunch of sad and loveless bastards. Maybe we were, but we didn’t know it. Or see ourselves like that. I’m not even sure that my fleeting lusts were in any way authentic. The feelings and the stirrings were real enough, but it was no big deal. Tomorrow and the future were never a worry or a concern, so for me, failure to meet my true love in college, or crack the meaning of life, didn’t bother me unduly. If at all.

I just wasn’t ready then, I guess.

Some of my class and college mates were way more sophisticated, if not always more mature, and did grown-up things, like falling in and out of lust and love — a few couples with the babies after not always explained absences, to prove it — smoke dope and discover vitally important records or bands. One of them even died, falling off the back of a motorbike, drunk and with no helmet. This did truly shock us all and lingered for a long time over what was really a tiny coterie of staff and students.

But most of the time, it seems to me now that most of us just wandered along, neither unduly merry nor overwhelmingly sad.

Deep down, coming out of college that first time. I remained innocently superficial, blundering along in a not unhappy way. There were friendships and affiliations and incidents and low-key escapades aplenty to make those four years in Limerick pass in what was ultimately a pleasant blur.

But my sojourn in Thomond did not end before I was called on to do a second thesis, on the basis that the first one, conceived, researched — ha! — and written in a week, and finished off in the garden of the family home, in the second-hand caravan my brother had bought to do all his prep work in for his primary school job, was never going to pass muster. Or my long circumvented supervisor’s belated scrutiny.

That same caravan I reversed into soon after with the same brother’s first car, a dinky little black Mini, when I took a notion to try it out. Of course, I had never driven before, and the brother was surprisingly sanguine about the whole episode, and the gnarled corner of the shoddily repaired caravan that stood as a brief monument to my stupidity, and probably hastened its demise not that long afterwards, it’s lime green paint ingrained also in the scrapes along the caved in front bumper of the Mini.

New thesis submitted, and passed, there were the actual final exams to negotiate.

These were in three sections, and the third, Educational Theory, or something like that, I only crammed for (using my housemates’ notes, mostly) over the preceding weekend after failing to hitch a lift home on the Friday, with no intention of turning up for the week’s grilling.

After all this, I eventually drove down that autumn with my proud dad to the graduation ceremony for those of us who had passed their repeat exams. I was now eligible to teach. Certified but wholly  unqualified. For life also.

The five months contract I got as a PE teacher in County Galway, filling in for the regular teacher while she was on maternity leave, only confirmed my decision to abandon teaching for … I hadn’t the foggiest notion.

TO BE CONTINUED …

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