Memories flooded back as I retraced my days with the Small Girl in London
It feels like there are more people than plugs in the big, old, cluttered house in South London, so the residents connect plugboards into plugboards and extension leads are taped across the ceiling beams to get the power to all the devices a household of five young women in a hurry need. It wouldn’t be any of my business if one of those women wasn’t The Small Girl, but because she is, I give her a cursory lesson in the dangers of over-loading power points (a topic that I know absolutely nothing about, incidentally, though that doesn’t prevent me adopting the authoritive tone of an ageing electrician who’s decided to retire out of perennial disappointment at the human race’s electrical shenanigans). Warming to a theme as easily as those exhausted sockets, I help her plot an escape route from any emergency in the house and buy two smoke alarms for the household before I leave. I was a Mammy to her before in London and even if that was more than 20 years ago on the other side of the city, some things never leave you.
It is mad that she has been here for nearly a year and I haven’t been over, madder still that it’s been four years since I last set foot in a city I myself called home for seven years. There was the pandemic, obviously, and then sadness and busyness and a bit of a pointless Brexit boycott. Even when she moved over, she seemed to be perpetually heading somewhere else. But now, finally, we have both paused long enough for me to spend some time in her world and reconnect with a sprawling metropolis at once familiar and strange.
They don’t use money over there any more. Did you know that? The chip in my debit card has stopped working in ATMs, so I borrow £40 from a recent traveller to tide me over until I can get to a bank. I never make it to the bank and when I get back home, I return the same two twenty pound notes. If we are heading for a cashless economy, London is already there ahead of us sending back postcards. The Small Girl points out that this is unfair to homeless people and anyone without a bank account, but I’m too busy marvelling at a vast public transport network that can store up millions of card details every day and automatically debit accordingly to pay her any attention. You need to buy a big bottle of bleach to stop that discolouration in your toilet bowl, I tell her. Safer ground all round.
On our last day together, we head for Crouch End, that lovely part of North London where The Small Girl spent the first three and a half years of her life. In the village, surrounded by a bewilderment of cafés and beautifully-appointed shops, she wonders why we ever left, and I explain that we could never have afforded to buy a house here and that in any case, Ireland is much better than England (death, butter, tea and craic, and then I start struggling, if you must know).
We visit our old flat and her nursery school and the playground in the little park where she sported and played, and she drinks it all in without any real memory of ever having been there before.
We’re walking around the perimeter of the park and she stops suddenly, because there’s something about those railings. And in that moment, I suddenly remember too: how she couldn’t pass here without holding onto the railings and putting her little feet in between the bars to shuffle, painfully slowly, from home to school while I lost my patience and my mind beside her. ‘Why did I do that?,’ she wonders. ‘Because you were three,’ I tell her.
She’s not three now. ‘There aren’t enough hours in the day to be a woman,’ she commented the night before as she and I squeezed our way into gorgeous, shimmering dresses for our big West End night out sipping champagne at Cabaret, the hottest (and most expensive; they may not love cash but they adore money) theatre ticket in town. And now it’s suddenly time to say goodbye to this woman child, as she heads for the Victoria line and work and I turn to the Piccadilly for Heathrow.
On the platform, I burst into tears, big, ugly crying, even though I will see her in three weeks in Dublin. Because for all that London has gifted me so much, right now, I am back where I started. A mammy, standing by while her first born takes her tentative steps through this beguiling city.