Directions to My Mother’s House

Sat nav will get you to the postcode. It will get you to the postcode and then it will announce, with total confidence, that you have arrived, and you will be in a lay-by beside a field with no house in it.

Everybody does this once. My brother did it twice.

So here is the actual way.

From the main road

Come off at the sign for Ballycarn. Not the first sign — the first sign is for the industrial estate and takes you round the back of a chicken processing plant and adds twenty minutes and a smell you will think about later.

The second sign. Small, green, bent.

The bent sign

It has been bent since 1998. A lorry did it. There has been talk of straightening it, on and off, for twenty-seven years, and the talk has become more enjoyable than the straightening would be, so it stays bent.

If it is ever straight, you have gone somewhere else.

Down the hill

The road drops and narrows and there is a hedge on the left that you will feel is too close. It is too close. Everyone feels this. There is no alternative and the hedge has won every argument it has ever had with a wing mirror.

Take it at fifteen. My father took it at forty for thirty years and my mother mentioned this at his funeral and got a laugh she wasn't expecting.

The bridge

Single track. You cannot see the far end.

There is no system. There is no priority. What there is, is a convention: you flash once, you wait four seconds, you go. If someone comes the other way you both reverse, which is technically the worst possible outcome and is nevertheless what happens every time.

After the bridge

Now it gets difficult.

There are three turnings in about four hundred metres and none of them are signposted and two of them are farm tracks that look considerably more like roads than the actual road does.

You want the second.

The way to know is the gatepost. There is a gatepost on the corner with a hook in it. There has never been a gate. The hook was for a gate that came off in the seventies, and my mother uses it to hang a bag of runner beans on for the neighbours in August, and if it is August there will be beans on the hook and you cannot miss it.

If it is not August, look for the hook.

The last bit

Up, round, and the house is on the right and you will not see it until you are past it, so do not brake when you see it, brake before you see it.

Reverse into the space by the wall. Everyone tries to go in forwards. Nobody has ever got out again forwards.

When you arrive

The front door does not open. It has not opened since 2004 and there is no plan.

Go round the side, past the water butt, and in through the kitchen. Do not knock. Knocking is what the postman does and she will get up, and she is eighty-six and getting up is a project.

Just come in and say it's you.

—

I wrote this out in 2011 for my sister-in-law and it has been photocopied so many times that the current version has somebody else's handwriting on it, adding a note about the bridge that is more accurate than mine.

I read it again last week, for the first time in years, before the drive up.

The beans were on the hook.

I sat in the car for a minute before I went round the side, and then I went round the side, past the water butt, and I did not knock.