A DAD'S LIFE:The past is a blast, as long as it's not repeated
TITANIC IS on the kids’ radar. How could it not be? A century after the event, everywhere we turn sinking ships proliferate. A friend recently emailed a photo from his Belfast hotel room where his bath plug was a Titanic. A little nautical irony there?
The thing about tragedy is the drama. Would it be wrong to suggest that there was an element of schadenfreude at the sinking of a ship touted as unsinkable? “They Said It Couldn’t Happen!” screamed the 1912 headlines, stopping a gnat’s hair away from “Betcha Feel Right Stoopid Now”. The reported fatalities, the lack of lifeboats, the band that kept on, they all played second fiddle to a global, behind-the-hand snigger at the folly and arrogance of everyone involved.
It was calamity. A horror. A disaster. The subject material for countless articles, books and movies – and, 100 years on, they keep coming. How many ways can a story be told where everyone knows the ending?
Anyway, due to the nippers’ new-found interest, I may have to sit, once more, through James Cameron’s movie – this time in 3D. I would nearly rather have been on board. The only benefit of that flick is that it gave us Kate Winslet, but I can hardly enter the theatre and instruct the elder child to wake me up when Rose gets her kit off. Wouldn’t be right.
They like historical drama, the brats, and the bigger the better. If it’s historical they don’t fret. They think if it’s in the past it can’t happen again. Surely the human race isn’t stupid enough to allow history to repeat itself. They are young.
Their notion of history intrigues me too. “Dad, when you were young, did you know it was the olden days? Did you, like, walk around going, wow, everything’s so small and a slightly different colour?”
I point out that Polaroids fade and that my olden days were far more classy than their olden days are likely to be. We had Boney M and David Soul.
I dug out the 1911 census online. My grandfather is listed as being a year old and sharing a house with his grandfather, who at the time was well into his 70s. This was in north Mayo and the family had lived on the same plot of land for at least a couple of generations.
It gave me a chill to think that someone I had known well as a child had lived with another ancestor who had not only been alive during the Famine, he had been a teenager. There, in one of the most blighted parts of the country, what terrible things had he seen? What had he been forced to do to survive? He was only four generations away, yet a survivor of a terrible and prolonged slaughter of innocents. And with that, it struck me that we all are.
Just for us to be here now, we must assume our ancestors did whatever it took to make it through those times. As I’ve also finally got around to reading Joseph O’Connor’s amazing Star of the Sea, what it took is fresh in my mind.
In evolutionary terms, we are a breath away from the experience of famine, its horrors hardwired into us. Yet until I had a touchstone to hang its nearness on, those miserable years were as alien to me as genocide in Rwanda or the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Why should I be surprised that my kids regard the 1970s as a different planet?
They watch the news and beg for assurances that the murders and wars they hear about won’t affect their lives. It’s a daily request for me to reiterate lies. In history we can revisit tragedy in story form, safe in the knowledge that we have moved beyond the mistakes of the past. It’s fun to watch Titanic with the nippers – hell, I’m sure we could even manage a Famine-based sitcom at this stage; it’s a bit more difficult to present daily scenes of conflict in Mogadishu or Grozny as entertainment.
“Dad, will there ever be a war in Ireland?” asks the elder.
“No, love, we’re safe as houses. As long as you didn’t invest all your money in houses.”
She ignores my ramblings. She asks about the Easter Rising. She asks for dates for the world wars she has heard about. She wants to know why those things wouldn’t happen again. “Because we’ve learned to do anything to avoid them.”
She looks worried, and rather than convince her on this topic, I tell her about this action-packed movie I’m going to bring her to, where the boat sinks . . .