Review
Charming and beautifully written, says Sean McMahon of this memoir.
- Over My Shoulder
- The Columbia Press
Over My Shoulder
The triptych illustration on the cover of Norma MacMaster’s memoir neatly summarises its contents. It shows an Orange ‘walk’, a Corpus Christi procession with religious banners and little girls in white First Communion frocks and veils, and a main street crowded with market day wagons.
All of these were part of the childhood of the author, a gilded time, unimaginable to anyone under twenty.
She was born in Bailieborough, County Cavan, to parents both of whom eventually qualified as pharmacists and they reared a family frugally, aware of their differences from the majority Catholics but with no sense of fear or real alienation. Born in 1936 she felt as a child none of the seepage of the bad blood of the northern troubles. Her narrative style is deceptively simple, whether describing the excitements of Christmas or the different but equally strong pleasure of summer holidays on Laytown’s six-mile beach.
She writes so pleasingly that there is much more we want to know: her life in Canada, barely adumbrated here, her call - though Presbyterian - to be a priest of the Church of Ireland. Perhaps another charming book is on the way.
