Category: nostalgia

A few weeks back I received some very sad news that MaryD, the mother of a close childhood friend, had died.  This post is dedicated to Mary and all the memories I share with her son Eoin of our years growing up in Manchester.

Mary and Eoin moved into the street, almost exactly opposite to our house in Didsbury. Like many of the other kids in the road, they were Irish and Catholic, so we would often troop off to Mass together. Eoin and I played football with a family of three boys from Cavan who were also neighbours. Mary was immediately an influence on me, in that she was an adult who loved football and Manchester United, and also TV. In my musician household of Southern England and Mexican interlopers to Manchester, neither football or TV were thought to be fit subjects for interest. But Mary was the TV critic for a major national newspaper. Supporting Manchester United was a long family tradition – she knew all the history of the club and was a season ticket holder at Old Trafford. I was immediately drawn to the company of Eoin and his mother.

I can honestly say that I spent most of my happiest days of childhood at MaryD’s house. Watching TV with someone who actually worked in the media was an amazing thing. Mary would often bake us delicious lemon or orange buttercream Victoria sandwich cakes and we’d eat them watching Doctor Who. Mary told Eoin and I, ahead of time, that the Star Wars phenomenon was about to be overshadowed by a huge new film called ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’. We watched ‘Dallas’ from the very first episode, informed by Mary’s audience interaction of exclaiming at the TV comments like ‘God help you Sue Ellen, but you’re an eejit!’

They would be trips to the local book shops to buy Eoin the latest Asterix books, and on Saturday afternoons when United didn’t play at home, we’d sit upstairs and read Roy of The Rovers and 2000AD comics. Mary was always handy with unsolicited advice when we started making home movies. (Exactly like in ‘Super 8’.)

Mary’s job sometimes gave Eoin and I rare opportunities, like the time that she took us to watch the new ‘Seaside Special’ show being recorded and we went to lunch with our heroes, The Goodies and a friendly man called Bill Cotton. Later, Mary told us that Bill was in charge of BBC1. My ten-year old daughter was in awe when I recently told her that at her age, I’d met The Goodies!

When my mother went through horrible marital problems, it was Mary who cooked for her and made sure that she didn’t waste away. Both Mary and my mother suffered from quite serious depression during the early 1980s and even if we couldn’t always be enough support for our mothers, Eoin and I were able, in some sort of gruff, unexpressed teenage way to support each other. Not so much ‘hugging and learning’ as blowing off steam writing spoof rock songs and obsessing over Blake’s 7, Dallas and Manchester United.

From the age of eleven, both Eoin and I were the children of single mothers. We saw at close hand how much stress it put on our mums. I was always impressed with how positive Mary managed to be in front of me, even if it was an effort. I don’t know if she realised how much of a haven their home was for me. To be able to escape from a pressure cooker environment across the road was sometimes the main thing that made life bearable. Not that it was always a picnic at Eoin and Mary’s either – we all had our problems.

When Mary and Eoin moved back to Ireland, I was devastated. Mary had always encouraged both of us to write (stories, screenplays), so Eoin and I kept in touch. I remember those letters as pretty melancholy. If Eoin and I were angsty teens when together, we suffered even more when apart.

In 1993 my husband and I took our one-year old daughter to visit Mary and Eoin in their home in West Ireland. Eoin’s daughter was seven then. This is the only video footage I have of Mary, and it’s a typical scene – Mary cooking one of her classic Irish breakfasts. Sunday breakfast with Eoin and Mary was my favourite way to spend the day after Mass. It’s a fitting memory.

Years later, Mary embraced the web and put her acerbic journalistic skills to a new use. MaryD Loughrea became one of my favourite bloggers, putting the world of West Ireland to rights via her blog.

Today in Loughrea, friends and family of Mary’s will gather for a party to remember her. I’m there in spirit, Mary!

With thanks for all the good times, lots of love and prayers.

I’m enjoying the current TV series ‘Pan Am’ – not so much for it’s alleged similarity to ‘Mad Men’ but for its personal nostalgia value. My mother worked as a stewardess during the same period – the late 1960s – first for Aeronaves de Mexico (now AeroMexico) and then for Lufthansa. She’s pictured here modelling, I think for Lufthansa. Then after being ‘grounded’ by the twin miseries of marriage and children, she worked in reservations for Lufthansa, in Manchester. When her marriage to our stepfather broke up, she returned to the airlines to keep her three children fed and sheltered, this time working for Pan Am.
I choose to write ‘twin miseries of marriage and children’ because I noticed that the Pan Am TV series uses themes that would have been very familiar to my mother, and therefore strike me as accurate. ‘Pan Am’ presents the life of an airline stewardess as one of the few glamorous, exotic escape possibilities for intelligent, attractive women, usually from ‘respectable’ families. One of the main characters actually runs out on her own wedding in order to escape and work for Pan Am. The leading man, a dashing blond pilot named Dean, even warns his lecherous co-pilot not to ‘ground’ the stewardesses when they are admiringly talking about the women as evidence of natural selection in action – beautiful women who achieve flight. The implication was that marriage and children were traps to be avoided – unless you snagged a rich, successful bachelor; another good reason to become a stewardess.
My mother had her offers of marriage – they were more or less a staple of the job, my mother said. She’d started working for Aeronaves de Mexico after divorcing my father, and left my sister Pili and I with our grandmother while she worked short haul flights mainly to South America and the USA. There was a pilot named Hans who showed up with what I remember as increasing regularity, but she was never willing to divulge too many details.
When she was more or less forced to stop flying for Lufthansa, I remember she was rather depressed. We’d moved to Manchester then and lived in a freezing cold flat in a Victorian house in Stockport. The walls were unpainted, the floors were bare boards (and not polished or anything). Mummy dressed up in knee-length leather boots and fashionable A-line skirts and silk scarves, then rode the bus to Manchester city centre, to the sleek offices of Lufthansa in St Anne’s Square. Often, she told me, she would cry all the way there, mascara running down her cheeks, tears for her lost, globe-trotting life which had been replaced with a desk-based existence. I couldn’t blame her. Those years in Stockport were sometimes pretty drab, living through the 3-day week, her husband away on tour with the Halle Orchestra for days and weeks at a time, as well as many evenings. It could have been a very happy time, on reflection; she was in love, she had two healthy little girls who were pretty happy in school, her job relieved her of domestic tedium and brought her in contact with some lovely women, Lufthansa employees who remained lifelong friends; Annie, Ann Samy, Marijke, Maya the dancer.
But for a woman in her twenties, how could that compare to the excitement of flying to a new city, every day, of being responsible for the safety and well-being of airplane loads of well-heeled passengers?
Poor old ‘Pan Am’ – even back in the 1980s the writing was on the wall for that company. Poor service, an ageing stock and the dread entry into the market of Freddie Laker and frill-free flying; things began to get very difficult. When we were enjoying (?) our family right to free travel on Pan Am (standby-only – it could take days to get to Mexico City, with long waits in airport lounges), my mother used to despair of the low standards of customer service, compared to what she’d been used to provide. The passing years had made her stop pining for the job, too. ‘Hours on your feet and being polite to passengers who are rude to you? You can stand it when you’re young…’
By then she was studying and researching Spanish and German 18th century Romanticism. Not quite her true vocation either – that would have been singing. But it did seem, finally, to have cured her wanderlust.
My own memories are slight but definitely and powerfully glamorous;living in a stylish apartment in Frankfurt, my mother playing the Getz/Gilberto album that her cellist boyfriend had given her, looking sharp in a navy-blue, fitted uniform before a flight to the Middle East during which some handsome German or Arab would doubtless ask her out for a drink, or propose marriage. I found it impossible ever to begrudge our mother any sadness she felt for losing that.