Two women playing folk was a rarity and our cases began to clink under the weight of coins

ould ye like to play at a feminist céilí?’ It was quite a conversation starter but, following a summer spent playing traditional music as a female duo, not a particularly surprising one.

Our adventure had started three months previously when Treasa and I headed to Scotland, to spend our summer break from university working as waitresses. She was already an accomplished button accordion player and I was an amateur, but enthusiastic, guitarist and singer so we decided to bring our instruments along too. Treasa had a great store of traditional tunes and, after years spent with the Walkinstown Folk Group there wasn’t a John Denver or Chris De Burgh song safe from my strumming. If the situation called for it, I could play hymns too – all of the musical bases covered.

Impoverished students that we were, it didn’t even occur to us to book plane tickets and we travelled instead by bus, train and ferry, three months’ worth of clothes in our rucksacks and our instrument cases carving blisters into our palms. It took us two days to reach Oban, a pretty town that serves as the gateway to the Scottish islands and the restaurant and B&B that was to be both our place of employment and our home. In those pre-internet days we had found the jobs in a book called Summer Jobs in Britain 1992 and it must have been a worldwide bestseller because our co-workers came from as far afield as New Zealand and South Africa, making the entire experience feel more exotic than we were expecting.

The first few days were spent settling in, learning essential skills like how to explain haggis to American tourists and how to convince British coach parties that Scottish notes were in fact ‘real money’. Then word reached us that there was to be music in the bar next door that evening and that the two ‘Irish musicians’ would be welcome to join in. Not even sure if they meant us, we headed to the bar to be greeted by the resident musician – an Irishman himself – who generously agreed to share the stage. What followed was an unforgettable summer during which we worked in the restaurant by day, in the bar at weekends and spent many weekday nights playing music, everything from Irish tunes to, more incongruously, Tori Amos covers from her recently released Little Earthquakes CD. Ten weeks later we set off for the bright lights of Glasgow to see if we could make money by music alone.

Amazingly, we did. We had tried busking in Dublin before but Grafton Street was a hotbed of talent in the early 1990s and we were just one more Mary Black cover band. In Scotland, however, we found our audience. I’m sure things have changed but back then, two women playing folk and traditional music was a rarity and those instrument cases came into their own as they began to clink under the weight of the coins.

‘Would ye like to play at a feminist céilí?’

The question came towards the end of the summer as we brought yet another Indigo Girls rendition to a close.

‘Why us?’

‘We’ve never seen lassies play music like that before.’

Were we tempted? Of course we were. It would have been our first professional engagement, a paid gig. I can’t pretend we hadn’t talked about it that summer, imagined just going for it, taking the music thing as far as it would go. But the date of the céilí was a week after we were due to leave Scotland, and we were young and conformists at heart. The summer had been an adventure, but DCU, the 19A bus and our childhood bedrooms were calling and we had homes to go to.

We headed back to Dublin the next day, via London this time, the trip taking most of our savings, and the sliding door closed on my musical journey. College got busier and we never really busked again. Soon my guitar was only taken out at the type of house parties that make the neighbours groan.

The next time I left home it was to work in local radio and, given the lack of boot space in my Nissan Micra, I had to choose between my guitar and my newly purchased, massive Apple Mac computer. The Mac contained my dreams of writing a novel one day and so the guitar remained behind.

Treasa on the other hand never stopped playing. She later became a very successful professional musician, even living in Scotland for some years, and still works in music. As for me, although my guitar stayed in its case for years I took it with me from house move to house move, never quite willing to give it away.

I finally rescued it from the attic a couple of years ago when my eldest son showed interest in lessons and muscle memory carried me through a couple of renditions of Closer to Fine and Trip Through Your Wires before my fingers began to ache. The chords were still there.

I chose what seemed like the conventional path at the end of that summer. But when I think back on all we did, the tunes we learned, the friends we made, the sheer neck it took it took to stand up in front of strangers and launch into a performance – it was an experience worth far more than the few pounds we made. A gift of adventure and of confidence that lasted long after the final notes had faded away.

The Belladonna Maze by Sinead Crowley is published by Head of Zeus and out now

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