Barefoot Pilgrimage

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

Text © Andrea Corr 2019

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Cover photographs © Jill Ferry/Trevillion Images (drawer); authors own (additional photographs)

Photographs courtesy of the author except where indicated

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Andrea Corr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008321307

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008321321

Version: 2019-09-10

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For Brett and especially for our two great blessings, Brett Jr and Jeanie. This baton passes to you.

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I did not sit down to write a book. This (whatever this may be) began in the summer of 2017. Two years after Daddy had died. Eighteen years after Mum. An overwhelming need to write it all down because if I died now too, this strange, normal, family, human love story as it really was to me, might also die. And then would it have ever really been?

I did not sit down at all, nor consider a destination. I just obeyed the pictures as they came. The questions. The fleeting moments. The present into the past. The present because of the past and back again with a few human, mad-gene detours along the way.

The first story – in the chalet in Skerries – was truly the first door that opened. That dusty room on top of the mattresses, hiding and pretending I wasn’t there. It persisted and it seems to me now insisted I write it down. Not another one. Not a perhaps ‘better’ one. That memory was the first door. The first room. And it began this barefoot pilgrimage.

I walked fast to summon the pictures. I walked fast to slow them down. To still them ultimately and to merely describe, then, the room that I had returned to in my mind. A sympathetic, non-judgemental voyeur of my own life as I lived it growing up. A narrator with the blessing of hindsight. It is what it is and that is OK.

So many of the rooms I loved. They made me laugh out loud, remembering us as we were. That’s a lucky thing to say. Other rooms of course I was happy to write myself out of as swiftly as possible and scramble in the dark for another door.

I tried not to think of you, dear reader, for I am a singer with a debilitating desire to be liked. I tried not to censor it all, clean and smiling like a pop video.

It came to obsess me in a way, once I began. Images from the past were appearing all the time.

Blinding flashes of you startle me awake.

The outside tap on the wall. The musty earth smell of my cat’s paws. The hanging lamp over the oval glass table that you pull down and change the mood of the kitchen … But most of all, Mum.

In my first draft she was barely there. I thought I had forgotten her. That I had forgotten what it was like to be with her. To blissfully take her for granted. But she came back to me on these walks and I think after all that it may have been she that had me do this. Because this does not feel like it was ever a decision of mine and now that I am sitting down writing to you, I think I may understand this first story. I felt a pain in my heart when I heard her voice looking for me. All this time maybe it is me that has been looking for her. And this is Jean Bell’s engraving in the tree.