About Me

My photo
I like to write and I like to party, but mostly just the writing. Disclaimer: A lot of these stories are true ones. The memory of growing-up in and around Killybegs. When you hold a mirror up to small communities, sometimes there are those who don't like the reflection. Capote knew this only too well. If you find the refraction just a little too much and would like the angle of incidence changed in your favor, please email me at georgevial@hotmail.com and I will be happy to make a name change here or there.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

The Film Crew

My mother writes poetry, good enough to have her own book and renown in literary circles, but when I was a wee lad she was still one of the ‘emerging’ breed. She was always writing on cigarette boxes, magazine covers, shopping receipts, if a pen could scratch the surface then she had penned upon it. Submitting her work to every award, contest and event and sure enough people began taking notice of her.

Anyway, one day I arrived home and there was a television crew at our house at the Five Points. They were from Channel Four or the B.B.C, one of the British stations and they had come to film my mother reading her poems in her native setting, like she was some kind of animal hanging out of a tree or something!

Mum was a rural housewife-poet and was touching the hearts of all those other housewives out there, with the idea that they too had passion and dreams beyond the ability to lay back and do their duty and produce children. This made her somewhat of a feminist at the time and many women looked up to her, even though she was really just a young girl herself.

Well back to the filming. They took Mum over to Connaghan’s garden because there was great view of the mountain, Conerad, in the background and that must have looked fierce rural to the city film crew from over the sea.

Being only a wee lad I was a bit shy and as interested as I was in seeing what was going on I stayed back a fair distance and kind of spied on the crew from our garden.

I had a good view of my mother. The wind was blowing her hair back from her face, she was holding her papers in one hand and looking at the camera with a real stoic eye and even though I couldn’t hear her soft voice from where I was, I could see her lips moving. She was completely poised and looked in control of the event. I could see why all those other housewives looked up to her.

Then out of nowhere came a burst of language “Jesus fucking Christ, ya bastard and fucking cunt, get the fuck out! Out! Out!” Quickly followed by our Boxer dog Judy running through the half-closed patio door with an entire spiced beef between her jaws. The voice belonged to my Dad, the inspiration of most of mum’s work and the dog had just snatched tonight’s dinner off the table.

The film crew jumped to a start, the mystic moment of my mother’s reading shattered in a rupture of reality. Her composure broke, her face slacked, the camera appeared to grow in size beside her and even the mountains behind shrunk.

Dad’s voice kept up it’s litany of words and I could hear the director of the crew saying in his English accent “Take five people, let’s try this again in a few.”

The dog was nowhere to be seen, but wherever she skulked off to she was wolfing down the spice beef and for days after the poor girl was shitting fire. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Neither inside or outside sounded like a good idea, so I walked down the road to see if Michael was in, at least until six o’clock when it was time for dinner and see what kind of a replacement Dad had come up with. Something told me it just might be roast Boxer if he could find her in time.

I guess the film crew was going to have a lot of editing to do before they could portray my mother on tape as the feminist poet from the wilds of Donegal.

No comments: