I left Galway in 1971. Marion stayed. I visit now from Colombia and we relive the past

I was born on Francis Street, just a few metres from the forgotten outlines of Galway’s medieval walls.

I was also born just a block away from the Savoy Cinema. Glamorous as the name Savoy may sound – its tentacles go way back to the French Kingdom of Burgundy in the 11th century – the reality was different.

We children had reduced admission, but we also had a reduced view of whatever film was being shown. We went up a long passageway to take our seats in the first three or so rows just below the screen.

My earliest film memories are distorted from being in those seats, looking up at an elongated screen. I did not see the same movie the adults did sitting further back in the cinema. I saw a semblance of a movie, with shadows and giant heads. Yet, it was enough; I was transported away from the world outside the Savoy doors.

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Actress Hayley Mills was Marion’s favourite in all the world of film when we were young. Marion and I are cousins. We were born not even a year apart to fathers who were brothers. People often thought we were twins when we were young. We have Galway in our bones.

I live in South America, but one of my joys, late in life, is visiting Galway and spending time with Marion.

Marion loved everything Hayley Mills back then. She had picture annuals of Hollywood stars in blue and sepia tones, as I remember.

Of course, Hayley Mills wasn’t the only one on our radar, especially as our teenage years began. The Beatles were coming, and they were going to hold our hands (as Bob Dylan reminded us in Murder Most Foul in 2020).

Marion and I reminisced over the phone not long ago about how one Sunday morning, perhaps in 1966, we both went rushing through the streets of Galway. The Beatles were supposedly staying at Ashford Castle, and rumour had it that at least one of them was on a morning excursion to our home town.

While other more devout Galwegians were attending Mass at the newly officiated Cathedral, Marion and I were running here and there, watching every car that passed by for anything that might indicate a Beatle in the west of Ireland.

Our search went unrewarded, as you might well imagine.

Marion’s and my shared memories go so far back that they can be magical. We threw flower petals over our shoulders in a Corpus Christi parade through Woodquay in 1957 or 1958. It was a summer evening that we still remember; the weather was warm, the mood happy, the embrace of Catholicism untroubled.

We also both remember a more severe religious procession of faith, with banners and hours of prayers, a procession that prolonged itself slowly through the streets of Galway and culminated on the grounds of St Mary’s College. There, I found myself surrounded by fervours of faith that frightened me.

I left Ireland in 1971 and spent the years that followed in New York, Florida and Colombia. Marion was more than happy to stay in Galway. Now, however, the availability of flights back to Ireland has meant that most of us are not truly gone forever as we might once have been.

Nobody would have recognised Marion and me some months ago as we went rushing along Galway’s streets once again. Most likely, nobody would have taken us for twins now.

We stopped in at O’Gorman’s, now Eason’s, a shop where Marion was once the book buyer. She was always at the ready to attend to anyone who might want to connect with anything Galway or Irish. It was a job that she did exceptionally well.

I spent almost every afternoon after school at Marion’s house on the Headford Road back when. At a certain point, her mother would send me across the street to Danny Griffins to buy something for our tea.

The best was then to come. Una, Marion’s mother, on lucky evenings, would make potato pancakes. Butter would sizzle in the pan, and then the most luxurious taste that you can imagine would melt into your mouth. I can’t make them, Marion confessed to me. They are mashed potatoes, butter, flour and a little salt. Nothing could be more simple. But they are not the same. We can’t go back to the past, any of us, as hard as we try. Nothing will melt in our mouths in the same way again as it did in Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s.

Butter was innocent of all sin in those days; the more the better.

When I am back in Ireland these days, Marion and I often eat in a hotel diningroom on Foster Street, just off Eyre Square and not far at all from the place where I was born. We have lunch there and ice-cream for dessert. At those moments, it can seem that there is nowhere else in all of this wide world where either one of us might feel as much at home. And do we have stories to tell.

Our shared memories contain an unknowable wealth that we are constantly repositioning, reviving, remembering in that oh so Irish way our parents did, night after night, when we were young. “Do you remember when?”, they used to say. If only all of Galway could be a fly on the wall, what memories they would hear of a city almost disappeared, listening to us now.

Christopher Burke is from Galway city. He left Ireland in 1971 and lives in Bogotá, Colombia.

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