Dear Maeve by Maeve Binchy

Author:Maeve Binchy [Binchy, Maeve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: poolbeg, fiction, Maeve Binchy, Binchy
ISBN: 9781781991428
Publisher: Poolbeg Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Treading on Dreams

“Of course it’s a dream. We can’t buy certain happiness”

This summer over 30,000 people will leave Ireland for Florida alone, many of them on family holidays. For two grown-ups and two children it can cost £1,300 for two weeks. That will include the fares, an apartment and a hired car. They pay for petrol and food and drink the same as they would at home.

This family has been saving since Christmas and they’ll be heading off in about three weeks’ time. Their neighbours shake their heads and say they are quite mad.

First, they say these are not wealthy people. They have very ordinary jobs, the mother and father. The house could do with a coat of paint, the children don’t have clothes or shoes that are up to standard. They don’t have a lawnmower and, in the summer, their garden has a straggly look about it.

This couple have a cheap and smelly oil heater in their hall, the kind of thing that you wouldn’t feel safe with at all. They might be better getting some kind of heating, cleaning up their act a bit, instead of filling two children’s heads with nonsense out in Florida, no less.

These are not just jealous, selfish neighbours, nor killjoys who are against the lower orders having a holiday as if they were people of property. They are not the house-proud, neighbourhood-conscious folk who would want to confiscate the air tickets and replace them with two cans of paint and a strimmer to keep up standards.

The neighbours really and truly think that the whole business of getting passports and visas, and studying maps of the east coast of the US, is only laying up a store of unhappiness in the long run. The word they use is unrealistic. They say it’s unrealistic for people, who live at the level that they do, to raise the expectations of the children who are, after all, only 12 and 10 and would be content with something a quarter the cost, and much nearer home.

I don’t think it’s ridiculous. I think it’s about the most realistic thing they could do. They have been earning around £45 extra a week between them, and the children have been encouraged to do baby-sitting in order to have some pocket-money to spend when they get there.

If you are going to work in a supermarket, sweep up in a hairdressing salon on late nights, do deliveries, or a couple of nights washing up in a restaurant, then surely the best thing is to have a nice near goal that you can actually see ahead of you.

I would prefer to work for a ticket from Shannon to Miami and to look at the picture of the car I was going to rent, the apartment where we would all stay, to imagine the faces of children brought to Disney World in Orlando, than to think in some vague terms of improvement of lifestyle. I don’t go along with the theory that because saving for a holiday is, in fact, buying a dream, we shouldn’t do it.

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