Read Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir for Free Online Page B

of me looked back and, based on no evidence whatsoever, fantasised that Mrs Blosse-Lynch and Pat were lesbian lovers; pioneering, no-nonsense, tweed-skirted, wellington-wearing lesbians, who’d make each other boiled eggsand listen to the wireless together on their arse-worn sofas while shaggy Labradors snored on their faded lesbian rugs. I thought this was a wonderful idea, but when I mentioned it to my mother she rolled her eyes and did that ‘Rory!’ thing she does when she thinks I’m being ridiculous. And when I mentioned to her that I was writing about Mrs Blosse-Lynch, she said, ‘Oh, please don’t put in about you wanting them to be lesbians! You’ll upset someone.’ But it shouldn’t. I wanted them to be lesbians for me. I wanted to come from a town where lesbians lived in ramshackle houses with dozy old dogs, because that town would have felt more like home to an older me.
    There was a dilapidated boathouse at the bottom of the garden on the lake shore, and we would push out the big old row-boat and row through the reeds, then swim in the clear water and dive down to push our hands into the soft sandy bottom (all the other lakes around had dark bog water and rocky bottoms – even Protestant lakes were better!). We’d dry off in the sun, asking Sandra about America and giggling because we found out that Mrs Blosse-Lynch’s name was actually Lois, which my sister Edel would repeat in a posh accent. My red-haired and Irish-freckled brother Fergal fancied Sandra, with her American hair and tanned American skin, and he kissed her. They had a summer romance and we all wished she would come back every year sowe could play croquet and eat cucumber sandwiches and hold boxes from India.
    We were only a couple of miles from our own house, yet we were in another world. A world that reminded me of the worlds I had already discovered between the pages of books or on Saturday-afternoon TV with the curtains drawn. In Partry House I was one of
The Famous Five
or
Little Lord Fauntleroy
or Mary in
The Secret Garden
. And I was already beginning to realise that I liked other worlds, because other worlds didn’t care if I liked football and other worlds didn’t care if I went to mass. Mrs Blosse-Lynch didn’t care if I went to mass – she didn’t care if the whole town was sitting in their cars waiting for her to pick up her groceries!

5. Finding Homo
    I HAD NO IDEA WHAT I wanted to do with my life when I finished school. I didn’t yet know who I was so how could I possibly know who I wanted to be? I knew what I
didn’t
want to be: I didn’t want to be boring. And at sixteen, as far as I was concerned, everything was boring. Ballinrobe was boring, school was boring, exams were boring, football was boring, mass was boring … Everything was just so
boring
. I would lie in bed refusing to get up in a vain attempt to stave off the inevitable onset of another day of inevitable boringness. I had taken to my bed like a Victorian lady with the malaise, and the only thing that got me out of it was Pierce Brosnan and Stephanie Zimbalist in
Remington Steele
.
    I, of course, was the smart and sassy Stephanie, my jacket sleeves pushed up to three-quarter length, exasperated by, and secretly in love with, the suave and handsome Pierce, whom I hired to be the face of my detective agencybecause the sexist 1980s wouldn’t take seriously a cute, sassy lady private detective. I would have put down ‘Smart and Sassy Lady Private Detective Teamed Up with Pierce Brosnan’ on my CAO form if it had been an option but unfortunately, and ridiculously, it was not a course offered by any of the recognised colleges.
    I did know a couple of things, though.
    I knew I was interested in art – or, at least, I knew it didn’t bore me and that was roughly the same thing. I spent most of my waking hours doodling on everything within reach, much to the exasperation of everyone who owned anything within reach. Books, desks, newspapers, magazines,