The Most Difficult Door

Abstract

The first and only week that my Irish grandmother and my English grandmother spent together in the house of my childhood was early in the summer I turned thirteen. Thirty-seven years later, I remember it as the only still point of my shifting, shifty genetic inheritance and of my ambiguous nurturing. ‘Mongrels’, my brother and I used to call ourselves. We were so very conscious of belonging to neither the Ireland our mother came from, nor the England of our father. We were growing up in Belfast, chief city in the country of neither parent, Northern Ireland, and within a social and intellectual community where it was assumed we were Protestants. We were in fact practising Roman Catholics. Well, three of us were; my father was argumentatively agnostic.

Be wary, but don’t fear the darkening street.

I give you this, my opened map of flight.

The Most Difficult Door (Rumens 1987: 67–9)