Page 66 of The Reboot
‘Loretta will be here shortly, and then we’ll eat,’ she said, turning back to the stove. There was a sizzle of fat as she bent to open the oven door, the delicious smell of roast chicken filling the air as she lifted out a perfectly bronzed bird. When she’d covered it in foil and left it to rest, she took off her apron and tossed it on the worktop.
‘Ella, what will you have to drink?’ she asked. The little kitchen was hot and steamy, and she was flushed and a little out of breath from her exertions, her face glistening with sweat. ‘There’s red wine open, and there’s a bottle of white in the fridge. Or would you rather something else? Gin? Vodka?’
‘Wine would be lovely, thanks. Red, please.’
‘It’s on the table,’ she said to Roly. ‘I’ll just finish up in here and I’ll be with you in a minute.’
The living room was bright and cosy, furnished with an eclectic mix of old and modern pieces, with just the right amount of clutter to feel homely but not overwhelming. But mostly it was a shrine to Roly. Ella looked around in awe at the framed tour posters, magazine covers and publicity photos that lined the walls, alongside the usual childhood pictures that crowded the sideboard and mantelpiece.
‘Nan’s my number-one fan,’ Roly said with a grin as he poured her a glass of wine.
‘No kidding!’
When she said she needed the loo and Roly directed her upstairs, she passed a gallery of Oh Boy! photos lining the staircase – on stage at concerts, holding up gongs at awards ceremonies, lined up on colourful sofas in TV studios. Even as she sat on the loo, she found herself eyeballing a photo of the band, waving and grinning as they looked out over a packed auditorium of cheering fans.
Roly’s mum had arrived when she went back to the living room, and Roly introduced them. Loretta was a very pretty woman and looked young for her age, despite the tell-tale lines around her mouth and soft blue eyes. She could hardly have been more different to her mother. Where Christine had the unkempt look of someone who wasn’t much bothered about her appearance, Loretta was well put together, her clothes stylish and tastefully accessorised, her face subtly made up. She had the kind of effortless style that Ella admired and envied.
‘You were in Roly’s class at school?’ she asked as they shook hands. ‘I don’t remember you.’
‘We weren’t really friends back then.’
‘Yeah, we only got to know each other in the final term,’ Roly said.
‘Well, it’s lovely to meet you, Ella.’
While Loretta and Christine disappeared into the kitchen to do the last-minute things like making gravy and carving the meat, Ella picked up her glass of wine from the table and walked over to the sideboard, studying the photos of Roly.
‘I was a cute baby, wasn’t I?’ he said, looking over her shoulder.
‘All babies are cute,’ Ella said, picking up a framed photo of him as a toddler in a yellow babygro. But then another photo, pushed to the back, caught her eye – an iconic image that Ella recognised at once. ‘Oh, is that—’ She picked it up and studied it, though she’d seen it many times before. It was 1971 and a group of women were marching down the platform of Connolly Train Station behind a large Irish Women’s Liberation Movement banner.
‘The Contraceptive Train,’ Christine said, coming into the room behind her and glancing across at the photo in Ella’s hand. ‘That was a great day.’
‘You were there?’ Ella turned to her. She and Loretta were setting dishes on the table.
‘I sure was.’ She grinned, coming over to stand beside Ella. ‘You can just see the side of my face there.’ She pointed at a woman towards the back of the group with a mop of curly hair, her face half turned from the camera, one arm punching the air.
‘Oh god, don’t get Nan started on her glory days in the Women’s Lib movement,’ Roly said.
‘No, I’d love to hear about it,’ Ella told Christine.
‘Mum was quite the activist in her day,’ Loretta said with a smile as they all sat around the table. ‘She used to hijack my school art projects and get me to paint placards. She was always marching about something or other.’
‘What do you mean, in my day?’ Christine said indignantly. ‘I’m still fighting the good fight.’
‘True.’ Loretta smiled fondly at her. ‘You can’t keep a bolshie woman down.’
‘I should say not.’
As they helped themselves to chicken, stuffing, vegetables, and the most perfect crunchy roast potatoes Ella had ever seen, Christine told Ella more about the trip on The Contraceptive Train. It was an infamous event in the history of Irish feminism, when a group of women had taken the train to Belfast to buy contraceptives, which were illegal in Ireland at the time. When they returned to Dublin with their purchases, they faced up to the customs officials who confronted them, defiantly refusing to hand over their contraband – mainly condoms and spermicidal jelly as they’d failed in their mission to buy the contraceptive pill.
‘It never occurred to us that you’d need a prescription for it,’ Christine said now, laughing. ‘So instead we bought loads of aspirin, took them out of their packets and pretended they were the pill. We relied on the customs officers not knowing the difference. And, sure enough, they didn’t.’
Ella was familiar with the story, but she’d never met someone who’d actually been there before; never heard a first-hand account.
‘I’ll never forget walking down that platform when we got back to Dublin,’ Christine said, ‘all of us afraid we were going to be arrested. And then suddenly we heard all this chanting – people outside in the station shouting, ‘Let them through, let them through!’ and we knew they were on our side.’ Christine’s eyes shone as she reminisced. ‘It was glorious! One of the best days of my life.’
‘It makes me so angry how women were treated in this country,’ Ella said. She’d been listening, rapt.
