I hope you've enjoyed reading the articles about moving to Ireland as much as I've enjoyed writing them...it felt quite odd going back twenty years to the way our lives were then. In some ways it feels like it all happened yesterday and at others it seems to have happened to other people and we were there simply looking in...peeking through the windows.
We've never kept in contact with anyone we knew back then...apart from Harry, who had become a personal friend rather than our immediate boss...
I didn't want to know...it was as simple as that.
It was as though the door shut firmly on the life we led with our people...teaching K. to shower on her own...choose her own clothes for the coming day...remembering the sheer horror of the time I dropped a dish of lasagne and swore out loud...one of our ladies, who had very limited speech, repeated the word I used with great relish and I was terrified she'd repeat it when her Mother visited...letting G. and T. go by themselves to play Bingo at the seaside...the time T. told the Doctor we'd made him stay up all night painting the outside furniture...
G. getting himself so excited about Christmas that he'd have a migraine and need to go to bed before dinner was finished...
Going by ambulance with a police escort when another T. had put her head through the glass in the front door for the umpteenth time...
Audrey, biking like the devil was at her heels to our house the time I'd been interviewed on the radio...and Audrey was well over seventy years.
The carol service we had one Christmas...Carols by Candlelight...the church choir turned up and the organist and the house was stuffed to the very rafters and we ran out of punch within the first ten minutes and I was tipping whatever appeared to be vaguely alcoholic into a huge saucepan...there were crowds of people sitting three abreast on the stairs and everyone sang their hearts out.
There was the day we took everyone to Southwold and Jo-Jo leapt over the seawall and came to no harm and we stopped at a bakers shop and the lady serving gave me a huge box of assorted cream cakes and said there was no charge...
Jo-Jo once ate all the oranges in the fruit bowl before she was taken out somewhere or other by a po-faced S.W. she had violent diarrhoea and was sick into the bargain...all over his back seat.
I'd told him she'd found the oranges and had eaten them, peel and all...
The endless meetings with sober suited SW's and people from the Courts and introducing one to the other and getting the names totally wrong, while the parrot shrieked and I made coffee and tried hard to show an interest while they spoke about sharing their diaries and having a free window...and the resident baby grizzled and I was worrying about a pie I'd put in the oven.
I found I could get rid of them quickly when the girls school bus arrived outside the door...I'd let dear little M. into the dining room and she'd home in on the person the least likely to be nice to her...twisting her fingers round and dribbling copiously, she'd lean heavily on a trousered leg...leaving snail trails on a sharp crease. I'd pretend to have not noticed.
It wasn't our people who were the problem...it was the increasing number of rules and regulations...some were completely ludicrous...everyone must keep their medication in their own rooms was quite probably the worst...every week more and more paperwork came through in the post until we were drowning under a flood of regulations and forms.
It was a different time and a different life.
Thank you for bearing with me and for reading.
Moving To Ireland...Episode Two
