Our Life's Travails

There’s a photograph of me on my First holy Communion Day, standing alone in the school playground. I look awkward in my shorts and knee-socks, a small boy seemingly ill at ease in a world of other small people.

My peers appeared more confident, often bold, while I was painfully shy. On the playing fields, where sporting prowess was a currency much valued by the other lads, I had little to trade. Sometimes they mocked me for it. I learned early that it was possible to feel most alone when surrounded by our peers.

I’ve been thinking about that photograph as the 300th anniversary of the publication of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels approaches. In many ways, the Manchester of my childhood was my own Lilliput. Yet, unlike Swift’s Gulliver, I wasn’t a giant stranded among little people; I was one of them, yet somehow never felt at home. But, I did have an escape from Lilliput, and, like Gulliver it involved a hazardous ocean journey across stormy seas. Come June, my siblings and I would sail across the Irish Sea from Liverpool to Dublin to spend our summers in our very own Brobdingnag, the Land of Giants we knew as Cavan.

If Manchester was where I felt diminished among my fellow little people, Cavan was something else entirely. It was a land of summer freedom, of different landscapes, and a different sense of belonging. I loved being among the giants in this grown-up world. My grannies, aunts and uncles, and my most favourite friendly giant: Johnnie.

Johnnie was a reclusive old man who lived alone in one room of a part derelict farmstead on a hill in Cavan. He wore an aged suit, shirt and tie, garments which were fused to his skin through years of constant wear. But I didn’t judge Johnnie, because Johnnie didn’t judge me. We bonded over the love we shared for our respective sisters. That summer my sister, Maria, had moved away from her kid brother to enter the grown-up territory of first love. While she was moving emotionally beyond my reach, Johnnie’s sister, Evelyn, had moved physically beyond his, to a far-off land called America.

Johnnie and I were two unlikely companions, a shy boy and an old recluse, united by the affection we held for sisters who were making journeys into worlds beyond ours.

I don’t know if Johnnie could read or write, but he did give me Evelyn’s letters to read aloud (I still have them). They were simple pieces of communication, often only one or two sentences long, “My Dear Johnnie, we had a terrible thunderstorm over here, and our neighbour died of the fright” Johnnie immersed himself in that single sentence, like I’d read him a tale as epic as Gulliver’s Travels itself.

One afternoon I climbed to the top of a hill in Cavan. At its peak I stopped and looked up. Clouds sailed by like great galleons on a blue ocean, sailing to somewhere unknown. I looked down at myself; my shorts were too long, my t-shirt too small, I hitched up my socks which were a shoe size too big. My clothes were like me – ill-fitting.

Boyhood didn’t fit me. I didn’t fit in with the boys at school; I fitted in with Johnnie. And I was all good with that for I like what Johnnie had. He was safe and secure living in one smoke-sooty room in in his crumbling old home. He had a donkey to care for, and a cow to milk. One afternoon I sat with him in the smoky room and watched him feed sugar to a fat mouse in his hand. The mouse scurried away and ran under a door. “Do you ever go through that door into the other rooms, Johnnie?” He spoke mournfully, “I never open that door, too many ghosts are in the rooms beyond. I’m safer here.” I jumped in, eager to hear a story of ghosts and ghoulies. But instead he said, “I’m safe from the lonesome, here.”

I didn’t quite know what he meant, but I liked the idea of being safe from the world like he was. Now, I know little of Johnnie’s life before I knew him. He must have had his own life’s travails, reasons to retreat into that single room; but he had arrived at a place of peace and quiet.

Three hundred years after Swift sent Gulliver sailing into the unknown, I find myself reflecting on my own life’s travails. I never became a giant, nor conquered Lilliput. But I did cross the Irish Sea, discovered my own Brobdingnag, and found a giant of a friend. Johnnie helped me understand that there was more than one way to be a boy. And perhaps I’ve carried that with me: sometimes all it takes is one friendly giant to help us see the world – and ourselves – in a different light.