Unweaving the Thread of an Irish Childhood

I first met Monica Tracey at a poetry reading at Hastings Writers' Group and, thoroughly enjoying the soft musicality of her Irish voice, I had the cheek to ask her to read my effort out for me. It paid off - never has one of my amateur attempts at poetry sounded so full of magic - the voice of a good story teller can cover a multitude of sins.Unlike me, Monica Tracey commits no sins when she commits words to paper. When we talk about a writers' voice, it might seem that actual sound doesn't matter but it really does. An accomplished story teller chooses words and phrases, timing and tone, in such a way that the reader can hear the music of a tale. It's a wonderful skill and, as well as having a lovely accent, Monica Tracey has a tremendous writer's voice. When she writes poetry it purrs, sings and even dances off the page and stays with you long after you put the book down. 'Unweaving the Thread' is a novel, and yet it's still poetry. It's great when poets get the hang of wr
iting novels.The book opens with the narrator, an adult with a babe in arms, making her way back from London to the home of her childhood. We don't learn for a long time what has set her running for home, but we feel its shadow. The language which delivers her viewpoint is quite neutral at first, but once back in Ireland, the story of her past is told in a subtly changing tone, weaving together phrases, stories and songs which illustrate the Irish storyteller's style and also the way the parents of young children living through troubled times have the knack of knowing and yet not knowing things, explaining yet not explaining.I was fascinated by the way choices of word and phrase related to the painful divisions of nationality, religion, social class and gender that the children learned quite instinctively to handle - for example, the way the narrator never thought of her 'lazy eye', which was treated and cured at the hospital, in the same light as the 'skelly eye' of an uned
ucated innocent whom the narrator's mother would not allow anyone to call a 'half wit'.As the multiple troubles of post-World War II Ireland close in, the reader hears the chimes of doom so clearly between the lines of the children's skipping songs and games. The children are aware of the effects of their mother's difficulties - sometimes almost subliminally. They are passed to the reader in throwaway comments like...It took us over an hour because Mammy had to stop often to rest and get her breath back....and sometimes more forcefully...He sat at the table, his head in his hands. I didn't know that big men cried.'What's wrong with Mammy? Can we see her?'He said we were to play quietly and he carried the cradle back up to the loft. He had brought it down a week or so before and he had whistled 'My Bonny Lies over the Ocean' as he polished it....but it is only the reader who asks why a woman who clearly doesn't have the constitution for pregnancy is constantly pregnant.To me,
such incidents felt like a training for coping with the politically and religiously inspired violence that is the background to their lives. Later in the book, the family take in a woman who is injured and traumatised - burned, bruised, and with cruelly shorn hair. The woman is unable or unwilling to tell them what has happened but they treat her wounds and send her on her way with an air of grim familiarity which speaks far more than a full account of her experiences could have done.Incidentally, there is a lot of shorn hair in the book - whether a part of 'punishments' meted out by reactionaries, a cure for nits, the results of an unwise perm, an accident with church candles or the deliberate action of a novice nun, there seems to be a common intent to the action.One of the many dichotomies the characters of this story must skip round is that between urban and rural Ireland. When the children are sent away to the family farm (their mother needs to rest) it is as if they h
ave travelled back in time and in the same way that they don't quite learn the facts about the troubles in town, while in the country they don't quite learn about the ravages of visits from the Black and Tans in the family's past, or the dark tales of murder and retribution in more recent times. The piecemeal telling of these incidents is rarely distinct from the fireside whisperings about horrors such as Cromwell, ghosts and banshees.Do these people who talk of saints and fairies in the same breath really know the details of all the things they are carefully avoiding? I think the answer lies in a story of a visit to the narrator's Uncle, who delivers the post by boat to the islands off Donegal.The narrow channels between the islands were often choked with seaweed that sprawled over the water, bulbous and shining like monstrous toads. My father raised his oar out of the water. 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' he murmured and crossed himself and we wondered if we were to be marooned
there forever.Mickey's knowing oar coaxed apart fronds of sea-grass and sea-reeds that were tangled under the water. He said they were the long green hair of the fairies of the deep. If you looked at them they would reach out and wrap you in an embrace you would never escape from. Mickey fixed his eyes on the gap between two moutainous walls, his oar caressed the jagged edges of hidden rocks and he inched his boat out to the open sea.On their return, they are left to guess about the story behind the words they overhear from a neighbour who said that their mother has had everything taken away but she was not mending.In much the same way, they are left to guess about the name 'Gilmour' which hostile children taunt them with, and piece by piece they uncover the story of his murder and the reasons behind it, after witnessing the older women digging up and burning some bones.Years later, the narrator, as an adult in London, finds herself coping with the suspicious death of a pre
datory man in remarkably similar fashion. Was her troubled childhood good training for this, or a part of the cause? Perhaps a part of the clue to that lies in the remarkable fairytale her father tells to his young son. I will leave that one for the reader to discover.For all its dark content, this is a joyful, loving book and the musical language and clever story-weaving make it an absorbing and enlightening read.Anyway, good news - I spoke to Monica again this week and she tells me the sequel is on its way. Can't wait!Unweaving the Threadby Monica TraceyPub Marino Books10.95 EurosReview originally written for the Booksy Review Forum by Kay Green, administrator of the Earlyworks Press Writers' & Reviewers' Club

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