The Invisible Prison: A Midlands Childhood

Abstract

If you wanted to get high in Portlaoise about 1972 or 1973 (and you were still only ten years old), you joined the altar boys. Someone said that from the red brick belfry of St Peter's and Paul's church?the town's periscope, as I used to think of it?you could see right inside of the prison, just a few hundred yards away. If they were out in the exercise yard, you might even see the prisoners themselves in their manacles and chains, in gray two-piece suits with the black arrows pointing to their heads the way they did in comic strips. It was a fasci nating idea: that the biggest mystery in our town, in our world back then, could be exposed even partially by simply climbing up into the belfry of the church. And because everyone wanted to see inside the prison, everyone wanted to be an altar boy. The day the little puppet-frail parish priest came into our national school and made his tour of the classrooms, talking to himself in that whispery, sibi lant way he had, and playing with his hands in the manner of someone deli cately untying a knot, I forced to the back of my mind the image of myself dressed like something from a Christmas card, and instead concentrated hard on the possible view of the town, my town, that would spread out below me. And, like most of my friends in the classroom, I put up my hand. Somehow we managed to force to the back of our minds the thought of all the early mornings and late evenings that would lie ahead? all the hanging around outside and waiting, at funerals especially, among upset people, all the traipsing to and fro between the overheated vestry to the ice-cold church, as our brothers and fathers^ and fathers before them, had done. And the truth was, yes, there were cold evenings, and colder mornings. But the belfry of St. Peter's and Paul's was worth it. From the secondor third-floor windows of its concrete, red-brick-encrusted tower, you could see a town that was breathtaking, captivating; and, if you were like me and suffered a little from vertigo,dizzyingly so.