Seánie


Shaunee Mack Brinn lived across the road from me. He was an only child and had the best of every kind of toy imaginable. He was the same age, or slightly older than, my eldest brother.

One of his proud possessions was a superior kind of board-game, called Monopoly.

He invited my two brothers into his house to play Monopoly, but not me. According to him, I would be unable to play the game because I was not able to read. What nonsense! I could count squares, I could recognise properties by their icons, I could remember the names of things when told, and, anyway, somebody could read out my cards as necessary.

However, Roger and Jerry disappeared into Shaunee’s house, and I was left bereft, hanging round the gate.

Since Roger’s birthday and mine were only two days’ apart, mother suggested that we would share a single birthday party. This would be my fourth birthday, and Roger would be seven. (Or maybe I am a year or two out. Maybe I was five, Roger eight and Shaunee nine, who knows?)

“That’s fine,” I said, “but Shaunee Mac Brinn is not to be invited.”

“Why not?” asked mammy.

“Because he does not allow me into his house to play Monopoly, but only invites Roger and Jerry.”

“Well,” said mother, “Shaunee is Roger’s friend, and has to be invited.”

“He is not my friend. He has rejected me, and my own two brothers deserted me and left me all alone.

“Well,” said mother, “You must stand on your own two feet and make your own fun. You can’t always be hanging onto your brothers!”

“The point is,” I said. “Shaunee rejected me, and there is no way that I will have him at my birthday party.”

“You should be sorry for Shaunee,” said mother; “He doesn’t have any brothers of his own, so he has to borrow yours. But, when the game is finished, they come back to you, and Shaunee is left alone all the rest of the time.”

“He can’t come to my party.”

“Look here,” said mother, “If all the other children of the Keyhole are invited, Shaunee can’t be excluded. He is coming and that’s that. Just put up with it.”

“If he is coming, it’s not my party. I will stay up in my room, and I won’t come down at all until the party is over.”

“Well,” said mother; “We’ll put it like this. We'll call it Roger’s party, and then I will take you somewhere special for your own birthday. You can come to Roger’s party like anybody else, and you won’t have to admit that Shaunee came to your party. So, is there somewhere special you’d like to go, or something special you’d like to do, for your birthday?”

I had a flash of inspiration.

“I’d like to go for a ride in a stage coach.”

You see stage-coaches in the comics. In the cowboy comics, important people come to town in stage-coaches pulled by four horses at a canter, and sometimes at a gallop, the coach hopping along the bumpy track. In the English comics, fancy women with lots of jewelry and wealthy men with cigar-boxes, pocket watches and fat wallets, ride in the stage-coaches and Dick Turpin holds them up.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” says mam. “But stage-coaches are obsolete.”

“What’s obsolete?”

“They don’t exist anymore. Look. When the first people came to Ireland, they had no carriages or coaches or even hand-carts. They walked or went by boat. If they wanted to carry anything over land, they made a lattice out of sticks or rushes, and dragged them along. Much later, along came the wheel, and they made carts pulled by oxen. Later horses came in from the Continent, and they made chariots and horse-drawn carts and coaches. Then came the stage-coaches, but they came to an end when the canals were built. Then the railways came along and put the canals out of business. Stage-coaches, my boy, are long gone, long obsolete. At this moment in time, motor cars and buses are making the railways obsolete. So, would you like, instead, to go for a ride on the zoo bus, or for a ride on the elephant’s back?"

Nothing, for me, could take the place of the stage coach. But Shaunee was a guest at the birthday party, and life went on.

What I got for my birthday was a bumper colouring book. In it were illustrations of every nursery rhyme and children’s story imaginable, Three Little Pigs, Snow White, Red Riding Hood, Simple Simon …, as well as examples of Still Life like bundles of flowers, and trees, plants, landscapes, butterflies …

Since there were so many pictures in the book, I decided to invite each guest at the party to colour in one picture, of their choice. Everybody did their colouring there and then with the crayons available, except Shaunee. He had to be something special!

Shaunee said he wanted to colour his choice of picture with his own paints that he had at home. With great virtue and constraint and indulgence, I agreed, and Shaunee took the colouring book home with him.

Next day he brought it back, and was I delighted!

He had chosen the picture of a vase of flowers. His painting was as inspirational as anything I have ever seen in an art gallery, even in the Louvre. The flowers were painted in bright, strong colours, all reds, orange and purple. The vase was painted in a dark, dark blue, and the background in light blue and light grey. The image stood out gloriously and three-dimensionally from the background. Not the usual scratchy child's colouring-in-between-the-lines.

I should have kept that book as a treasure, but it was discarded in due course with all the other debris of childhood.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)