The Good Room by David McWilliams

Author:David McWilliams [McWilliams, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141971827
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

11. The Good Room

Did your granny have a good room? My granny had a good room, which was so good that I wasn’t good enough to enter it. Come to think about it, none of our family was good enough to enter it, except when very important people came to visit.

To avoid temptation, Granny kept the key hidden. As a child who’d overdosed on scary films, I was sure Damien from The Omen was hiding inside, festering away behind the locked door.

These ‘very important people’ were obviously better than us. They ranged from the local doctor or priest to the strong Fine Gael farmer with the good land over in the next parish. Whoever they were outside, if they made it to the good room they were definitely better than us.

There were obvious signs in the parish as to the type of people who might be worthy of entry. A great indicator was the position of one’s pew at Mass. In suburban Dublin you grabbed any pew you could find. Not in Ovens, County Cork, though. A rigid pecking order existed there, and woe betide any who ignored it. The first three or four rows were reserved for the ‘decency’ of the village: the local doctors, the teacher or creamery owner, as well as a few big farmers and one or two others. My granny was well up the church. Given that she owned the local bar, her exalted status reveals something about local priorities.

As you moved away from the altar at half-eleven Mass, the social pecking order asserted itself ferociously, until you were left at the back with the poor labourers huddled around the Sunday World.

When the small-time dignitaries had been ushered in to the good room on a Sunday after Mass, china and cut glass were produced. My sisters and I and any cousins who may have been billeted to Granny’s for the holidays were lined up like scrubbed little soldiers, our hair matted down with spit and our cheeks rubbed off us with wet hankies. The inspection of the guard started and we stood to attention.

Granny looked down on us with a face poised between pride and mortification.

Then the whole charade kicked off. My family pretended that it was totally normal for us to eat from delicate delph and sip our tea from china cups like little birds. The good room was infested with crocheted doilies – under cups, plates and ornaments, or just lying strategically beside teapots, reminding us that this was a strange foreign land where tabletops bruised easily.

The minute the decency got up to leave, all the china and cut glass were whisked from the table, washed and covered reverentially in old copies of the Irish Independent. The good cutlery was returned to the press until the next time the good room might be opened. The doilies were corralled into a press, which was locked, and the key put in an ornamental antique teapot.

Looking back, it was like a domestic Monopoly board. The couch,

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