I was driving east along the big road that carves through Tyrone the other day and saw an endless stream of caravans clambering the other road to Donegal.
Lucky them, I thought. We weren’t heading there this summer as we were for Brittany in August, and I yearned for the freedom brought by a trip to the most beautiful place on earth.
It’s where my family went when I was growing up: we had a Volvo estate with two jump seats in the back and I was there with my cousin Joe, both 10. The roof-rack was piled high and we heard the mud-flaps dusting off the road as we sped away from Belfast. We were free, two gunners in a turret on a WWII bomber plane, crying with laughter at every car my da overtook.
There was a vomit bin in the boot and of course the sight of it created psychosomatic symptoms in Joe, whose retching had me aching with laughter. The chaos and the car stopping and the dry retching and the climbing up the hill beside the picnic spot on Boa Island, and the happy parents pretending to be cross and the sheer laugh it all was. And the holiday hadn’t even started.
When we eventually got to the house we had rented we ran around shrieking, checking out the bunk beds. Then almost immediately my father got sick. This happened every year: a by-product of his workaholic nature where he over-compensated in the weeks before, slaving in the bar, leaving himself so exhausted his system demanded he lie down for a week.
We were oblivious. There was freedom on the beach, and ice creams and amusements in the nearby town, but far and away our favourite part was fishing at the pier. We had graduated from dropping crab-lines round the harbour to cheap and cheerful fishing rods which we loved and readied like Hemingway’s old man and boy; but try as we might we struggled to get a bite.
We tried everything and concluded that the most successful anglers were using hooked feathers on the line and casting far out.
So, we purchased the feathers up at the shop and set to casting our rods, but the problem was our short arms couldn’t make the requisite distance, and no mackerel were fooled into gulping down our hooks. Joe had an idea: go down to the end of the pier and climb down the side to the rocks at the bottom to get closer to where the shoal is.
And it worked. I swear there is no exhilaration comes close to feeling the weight of fish on your line and the sight of three or four of the glistening green and black mackerel on the hooks.
I swear there is no exhilaration comes close to feeling the weight of fish on your line and the sight of three or four of the glistening green and black mackerel on the hooks
The sea was getting choppy by now and on a number of occasions the water slapped up round us angrily. A few of the anglers up above shouted down to us but we were in the zone, multitudes of fish weighing us down.
Then I slipped. It was effortless; I felt the cold and saw only darkness and experienced the awful power as the ocean swallowed me, and when I came up the pier was far away and I was under again. I remember still holding my rod for some reason, as though I could bring the catch to heaven. And I remember the figures on the pier, and the powerlessness, and going under again for the last time perhaps.
Then I saw a body flash through the black waves and grab me with superhuman strength and I was pulled to the pier where a crowd dragged me out, flipping and splashing and gasping for breath. Like a fish.
It had been my father who had saved me. He had felt better for the first time that evening and had gone out for a walk and coincidentally went to the pier where he saw a commotion and instinct took over, he would tell me later.
He was sick then for the rest of the holiday.