There’s a place

The very idea of it was a joke to my Ballymena family. An outside toilet. A minute’s walk from the house. At the bottom of the haggard. Flushed by winter rains. I never told them the men rarely, if ever, used it. They headed for the fields – a particular field. But I loved going there.

It was a small wooden structure a little bigger than a roadside phone box. Tin roofed. Always freshly painted by my grandmother and, for a few summers, by me. Painted by left-over colours from some other house job. Surprisingly, it didn’t smell at all bad.

A roughly made lid revealed a dark hole. A long drop to the night soil beneath, if you were interested enough to look. Often a breeze wheezed through the cracks, soughed in the tall sycamore trees. Crows called and wheeled above. Small birds kept me company. Torn and squared newspaper hung from string on a painted nail. Brush strokes against the wood grain of the wall.

As an eight or nine-year-old, when I stepped onto the sloped sandstone slab, entered, and closed the flimsy door with its clumsy catch, I shut out the world. The squabbling between my grandmother and grandfather as he came home softly drunk from some fair, to sit down to a dried-out diner; the bickering between the two of them and their remaining adult son; the edge of my grandmother’s voice as she pulsed with unspoken disappointment at the turn their lives had taken; her sharpening tone when she spoke of her Catholic neighbours, particularly her son’s marriage to one; the whisperings of the IRA raid. All, it seemed, mirroring tensions around my own home.  Adult’s lives played out in ways that left me confused, if not scared.

But inside, I imagined a place that was mine alone. Where I was the master and needed none of them: a tiny hinged table in the corner; a folding bed; shelves to store food and put a lamp; everything I needed. Dry and weatherproof on rainy and stormy nights, cosy even. Well, maybe no room for a toilet. But then there were always one or two things that needed further thought. I’d figure them out next time.

Then I’d open the door, watching for that sometimes-slippery sandstone slab, and go back to the waiting farmhouse with all its affection and next-day plans that spun me through those Leitrim summers.