I was in awe of my dad’s friend Robert, who farmed down the road and used to come by our house in his tractor and let me look at it. I was incredibly impressed with my dad for knowing a real live farmer who would come to our house and say hello. To six-year-old me, this was like a greeting from God. I idolised him to such an extent that I’d get too sheepish to talk, and would instead show my appreciation by taking his wellies once he’d removed them and storing them by the door in the back hall, in an act of wordless, admiring servitude. I would probably have been delighted to wash them for him. One day my dad arranged for Robert to take me farming for the day. To date, this is probably still the greatest thrill I’ve ever experienced. He picked me up at 6 a.m., and I was given a glimpse of the heady glamour of driving through fields, feeding hay to cows and getting waves from other farmers as we went past. I tipped my cap and waved back, making it clear that I too was one of their tribe, since they probably couldn’t make out all the tractors in my lap that would have proved it beyond all doubt.
By the time I started school this passion had faded. I grew out of wellies that were never replaced, and the once-endless supply of nested tractor toys gathered dust before being tidied away for ever. When Robert visited, his wellies remained untouched, and I barely looked up when we heard the gravel crunch of his big fat tyres coming in. By the time I was seven or eight, I was not merely indifferent but actively hostile to the environment. The glory and splendour of the countryside existed, as far as I could tell, solely to provide me with knobbly sticks I could hit things with as I walked along low walls. We defaced trees with our initials and, later, blighted them with our own half-baked Grand Designs: our numerous futile attempts to make tree-forts.
My father was a maker of things, a trained architect and an engineer. His father had been a carpenter. I, on the other hand, was never bitten by the woodworking bug, and certainly not one that would have instantaneously granted me the powers of a master craftsman which, in truth, was what I wanted. What I’ve always wanted: to be good at something while committing as little time, effort and attention to it as possible. I wanted to learn things as quickly as it took a spirited montage to finish: was this so much to ask? A childhood spent watching films in which scrappy gangs of misfits manufacture outwardly ramshackle but entirely viable mansions in trees had led me and my siblings to believe we’d just kind of get the hang of building a treehouse as we went. All we had to do, it seemed, was carry wood to the area and occasionally hammer things until, hey presto, by the end of a Huey Lewis song you’d have a fully finished four-bed clubhouse ready to hold meetings in.
It turned out that there were several steps in between ‘wanting to build a treehouse’ and ‘having the finished article installed safely in situ’. Safety wasn’t even the big concern; we were more than happy for the thing to be a death trap so long as it was recognisably a structure and not a sad assemblage of rotting branches, buttressed by planks we’d stolen from our own beds. The end result would be a precarious platform of damp, angular plywood that provided no shelter – we never got to the point where a roof was a likely prospect – and was significantly more uncomfortable to sit in than the tree limbs we’d just built over. Our best attempts looked like fences that had been blown away in a gale and become lodged in a tree, rather than something that was deliberately placed there by human design. Nevertheless, we’d still spend a few hours sitting in this mangled arrangement, as if hoping to convince ourselves that it had been time well spent. ‘Ah,’ we’d say, our knees bent round the accessible part of an out-jutting plank, feeling it crack and groan under our weight. ‘This is the life.’ After each attempt, we’d go back inside disillusioned, vowing never to try again, and it would be a few weeks before Daddy worked out why our mattresses kept collapsing out of our bedframes.
We had miles of greenery around us to amble through but settled instead on caking ourselves in dirt and leaves by tumbling down the slope behind the house – the one that bordered on the cows – as an improvised slide. The electric fence that sat at the bottom of this slope should have been a disincentive, but we were no fools – we knew that we were protected from hitting the fence by the thick barrier of stinging nettles that we rolled into instead. We climbed trees and poked at streams. We traipsed through hedges looking for blackberries. We really wanted to find caterpillars that we’d keep as pets. We’d store them in a jar, which we would invariably forget about, only to discover some months later a grisly glass prison of exploded, furry mould. Nowadays, I’m incapable of holding myself back from rambling through the square mile that traces around our house, down towards the river, swinging right to trace the path over the border and towards the nearby village of Carrigans. The entire time I do this, I’m constantly chattering to my wife or anyone else foolish enough to accompany me, loudly lamenting my own inability as a child to see this very real wood for these very real trees, when I would have covered the entire countryside in concrete if it meant a chance of a cinema or a Laser Quest setting up nearby. It’s a conversation I’m sure they relish.
Despite my rural upbringing, I feel as though I developed very little kinship with nature. The only time I did feel like a proper country boy was when friends from the city would come out and not know how to climb over cattle fences or tramp through paths without getting their runners muddy. I’d laugh at their fear of large, stupid cows and lie about the names of trees and birds we’d encounter. I never got caught until one day I couldn’t identify an oak, which is probably the only tree that every person in Derry knows since it’s the official tree of the county. To me, knowing all the names for trees would have been as pointless as a city boy remembering every brand of satellite dish on his road. Of course, I had even less need to memorise a hundred types of dinosaur, or star, or prime number, but I did all that – because I was an indoor kid at heart.
The front door of our house was reserved exclusively for trades-people, postmen and visiting priests. The back hall was the real anteroom, as well as the area in which phone calls were chiefly made, with the little table common to every home in the Irish countryside, on which stood the phone, the phone book, a torch and a rack of keys (perhaps 4 per cent of which were identifiable). We had a religious icon over the door, a tiny little Blessed Virgin with a font of holy water at her feet, guaranteeing protection for all who passed over our threshold.