Local memories in Friday book launch
Eithne was one of the six Brennan children of the the family whose hardware business is still a bustling enterprise. There’s a certain symmetry in the fact that the launch in Woodbine Books is in the building that was then the family home.
Eithne began writing the series of memoirs that became A Risky Business while attending writing courses in Dublin. There’s another piece of symmetry in the fact that the launch will be carried out by John MacKenna, who was one of her tutors.
By some of today’s standards, growing up in Eithne’s Kilcullen had its risks, as suggested by the title. I grew up in the same village at the same time. The fact that we children were allowed to roam the fields and woods and ruins and river on our own at tender ages marks a much different assessment of risk than is the case with parents of today.
But they were also much more innocent times for children in those same 1950s. Which A Risky Business underscores. The innocences of family life as children. Of the interactions with children from other families. With adults, especially through a family in business. With aunts and uncles. With teachers, and other formative grown-ups.
Eithne has written these down. But the secret of this book is that she is not writing as an adult looking back. More she has delved into that part of her memory where a child’s own recollections are stored, and written them as that child experienced them.
In a country village of the time, there are obviously country matters, seen from a child’s perspective. So there are gymkhanas and hunts, and recollections of the period the family lived in the country, at Carnalway, before moving back into the village.
There are revisits to schooldays, to teaching nuns, to excursions to Glendalough and wondering why St Kevin throwing a persistent woman to her death was apparently a good thing. There are the occasions of sad inevitability. A Mamma’s illness, a Dadda’s death.
Every story in A Risky Business is very personal, as the best memoir should be.
The book is published with support from the Heritage Department of Kildare County Council.
This article was first published in The Kildare Nationalist.
(NOTE: This article was amended to correct the stated number of Brennan children from five to six. When I was counting them, I forgot to include Eithne herself ...)
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