The Dangerous Miles

By Sabine Mara O'Flynn

The Dangerous Miles is an autobiographical journey through the life of the ultimately Irish Sabine Mara O'Flynn. With her chequered childhood amongst her eccentric family, to her turbulent marriage,her ultimate descent into hellish reality, and desperate attempt to find salvation for herself and her girls.
The story leaps from humourous asides in North Dublin, charming bucolic strolls through Bavaria, and gritty retelling of the grinding reality of Italy. Sabine retains her humour and warmth throughout, and her humanity shines even in the darkest pages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sabine Mara O'Flynn
• Release date: Mar 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310484124

Sabine Mara O'Flynn

I grew up in Dublin, Ireland with a Bavarian mother and Irish father. My mother died when I was 17 in a tragic accident but my father is still alive and well. I moved to Italy when I was 21 for work and have lived there ever since. My book focusses on the many varieties found in diverse cultures and other dramatic events.

Book preview

The Dangerous Miles

Copyright 2014 Sabine Mara O’Flynn

Published by Sabine Mara O’Flynn at Smashwords

Cover Image by Katie Monton

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Contents

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

About The Author

Chapter I

This is not a short tale nor was it ever meant to be an easy one. Perhaps best forgotten yet destined to rise and be told at some point in the future. From the fraught, turbulent year of our childhood until we grew into cramped, awkward teens and still never were sure about our very existence or how we would ever fit into society at all. They were an unlikely match, our mum and dad. He with his impractical, genius and creative nature raised on good solid catholic values whose parents (Betty our granny and Dermot, granddad) made sure the tea maker sung for seven thirty every morning so they could run to mass, a ritual practised three times a day and with a devotion to the virgin Mary which not even the pope in Rome would surpass. In fact we would have been brought up reverently devoted to her cause at the drop of a hat and making supplications to various saints, depending on the individual case had it not been for our mum Helga. She came from Bavaria and I think had simply been flattered by dad's insistent intentions to woo her when they were both in their twenties though no doubt, his concerted efforts at doing so would leave him with much cause for regret. Helga had been the last of a family of four and what was considered in embarrassingly late circumstances, given that her mother was over forty! At the time in rural Germany, this fact alone was cause for much shame and disgrace. Her sister (Muschy) was eleven years her senior and being the oldest girl in the family, was left to burden the greatest part or I should say, all of the work. I don’t know how many of her memories fully reflect the reality of what she actually did but if you hear her talk about those days, it sounds as though she had done nothing but pulled up her sleeves to sweat like an ox from four in the morning until falling exhausted into bed at night. In fairness, I think there must have been a lot to do, there were chickens and rabbits to be attended to, the work in the fields, the vegetable garden, making homemade sauerkraut (which she has confesses was never worth the effort), jams, potting and pickling food, they packed in just about everything which could not be defined as modern technology.

After Muschy was born, our grandmother, Oma – Katherina Helga, gave birth to her two brothers (my uncles) and then to our mother, Helga. The two boys were killed in the WWII much to Oma's sadness though she had almost been expecting it because when she was younger, a lady who had never been wrong in her life read Oma`s palms and said that in her fifties, Oma would suffer two great blows of sorrow. I never met my two Bavarian uncles but large pictures of them in their Nazi outfits graced the walls of Muschy`s home. They were only seventeen and eighteen years of age when they died and the childish looks on their faces in the pictures held a stark contrast to the severity of the stern uniforms. Our grandparents were heartbroken at the news of their deaths, young Hans had died mysteriously in Belgium while shaving for Christmas Eve, (the day before he had declared he couldn’t stand what he was forced to do to innocent people and wanted to leave the SS) when a bomber plane passed overhead and Georg – pronounced gay org, in Russia a year later, from the cold. Our mother Helga's birth was warmly welcomed, there always seems to be an almost morbid attachment to the birth of an offspring when it succeeds a sudden or unexpected loss and in Helga's case, her birth followed a double loss. She happened to be a very pretty girl with seven blonde ringlets casing each side of her face and vivid blue eyes, traits which were greatly admired in the society she was born into. Naturally, she meant the world to her parents and as a result was completely and utterly spoiled. This meant it was left to Muschy to being assigned the task of being the permanent work horse and complained that Helga never did a thing, that as soon as a table had to cleared or washing needed putting away, Helga would say she needed the bathroom and disappear. Once when Helga was around eleven years of age and Muschy twenty-two, Helga asked her to fetch her shoes from upstairs but Muschy refused and said had to endure smacks from her father's belt as a result.

Muschy still has lots of stories about those days, how the American soldiers would give them chocolate and how the neighbour's daughter Anita, obviously regarded as the village floosy would get into their army truck and disappear with them for days at a time. Naturally Anita ended up in disgrace and had to be shipped to some quiet part of the country for her confinement though nobody knew what became of her. Helga`s taste for hard work never seemed to develop, ever really. After she finished minimum schooling, she started to travel the world only returning home when she needed more money and to dump her suitcase of dirty clothes on the table which would be lovingly and dutifully washed by her mother (though I have only Muschys testimony to rely on as proof of this fact). When she was too restless to stay in the quiet, country house with its constant, ticking grandfather clock, Helga decided to do a finishing school course for three years in the black forest. It was basically a home economics course where young ladies learnt to decorate cakes, knot threads for needles using only their thumb and forefinger and learn which type of cake tin you should use depending on the kind of cake you were making like the marble cake which needed to be baked in a circular tin with a round hole in the middle. The school was more or less considered the ideal preparation for marriage but despite the well meant preparations, there could not have been few young ladies in the world less prepared for marriage than Helga.

Fate would have it that as the girls from the Black Forest Guschenheim school were out at a local university dance, enjoying the blustering heights of youth and showing off their dirndls, our dad Dermot spotted Helga in the hall at the very moment Strangers in the Night by Frank Sinatra was being played. He was instantly smitten by this beautiful woman with her dazzling looks (and not a sight he would have encountered very often in his native Dublin) and from that moment on for the next months, pursued her relentlessly until she said she became tired of the whole chase and gave in to him. Nobody explained to us in so many words what actually happened but Helga became pregnant with our brother Sven and needed to be rushed to the altar so as not to put the whole family to shame. Dad took her back to Cambridge where he was finishing his scholarship and families from both sides travelled to attend the vacuous, glamorous occasion. In the wedding photos, Helga looks very pale and dazed almost but she said it was because she hadn’t slept all night and the only which crossed her mind in those small, waking hours was How could she marry a man who was already bald at twenty-five? In retrospect, perhaps, she should have been having other concerns at such a time but she told me this when I was a small child and I didn’t question what considerations adults should have been having. Sometimes in later years, she told me about the time in Cambridge and how she had spent all night trying on shoes because dad had gone to some university event and there was a shoe shop under their apartment or how dad had tried to get her work as a part time librarian there but she had no interest in it whatsoever. There were a few photos in the family albums depicting her working as a secretary with her hair was tied up perfectly and always wearing an expensive looking two piece suit and smiling profusely into the camera and silently hoped her looks compensated for any other requirements the job might have entailed.

Dad was working as a Eurocrat in Luxembourg and had a very good job but mum was always trying to run away. Dad would run after her down the street and carry her back in his arms. Doctors got mum hooked on Valium which was commonly prescribed to housewives at the time. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic they told me later and dad was with bipolar depression, I don’t suppose anyone can inherit a much grimmer mental legacy than the one Sven, Tini and I did. One of my earliest memories, I must only have been about three or four years old was when I woke up to the whole house being covered in broken crockery and pots and pictures and bits of furniture on the floor after one of my parents rows where mum had taken to hurling at him anything she could get her hands on. I remember seeing dad with a cut on his head and wailing sadly and pathetically saying that his glasses were broken. Then the doorbell rang because a neighbour had heard all the commotion and called in to see if everything was ok. I will never forget my sense of shame at the fact the neighbour had heard everything and called in especially and witnessed the mess all over our floor. Another time in Luxembourg, my brother and sister and I went to the ice-cream van which stopped once a week on our street, instead of buying three ice-creams and bringing back the change, my brother (who should have known better at the savvy age of six) had allowed himself to be convinced by the man selling the ice-cream that it would be far better value to buy a box with the money and which is what he did but when we got home, dad went berserk and took the box right back to the van, yet more shame to boast of.

One day when I was a toddler, mum said she left me in the house for a few hours with the painter and decorator while she went out, she said on her return he told her I had screamed constantly and called for my mother and although I have no conscious recollection of the event I have no doubt this actually happened and probably contributed to issues related to my future fears of abandonment. When I was about four years old, it was decided we should move back to Ireland as the strain on Helga living abroad with three small children was too much (the au pair girls never lasted more than a few weeks) and in Dublin they concluded she would have the help of our Irish grandparents. In keeping with Bavarian family tradition, we always had a dog at home. Helga only liked two types of dogs, long haired daschunds or cocker spaniels, the aesthetic value of the dog being what counted most. We had a daschund called Waldi and he was a very patient little thing letting us tug him and pull his hair and tail and treat him like a toy in general. To bring him to Ireland would have been a long and complicated procedure so mum and dad decided we would smuggle him over. Going through customs to get on the ship, they told us all to sit on Waldi in the back of the car so no one would see him. For some reason, Waldi understood he needed to be completely silent (telepathically I was willing him to be) and there wasn’t as much as a sniff out of him. As soon as we got on board, dad handed him to a man who took him into hiding and handed him back to us the next day. We followed the same tactic by sitting on him for going through the Irish customs and that was how Waldi came to live in Ireland. He followed Helga everywhere and down to the tennis club where he would sit at the side of the court and watch the ball being swung back and forth until the game was over. He tended to love chasing cars and inevitably this ingrained habit led to his death. We buried him in the back garden and Helga cried a lot. She soon decided she needed another dog and we got a golden cocker spaniel that she called Schpazi, unfortunately he was very highly strung and only two weeks after arriving in our home was put down for barking too much and was labelled as being responsible for having frazzled Helga's nerves.

Granddad and Betty had searched out and bought a house for us in a quiet suburb in the south of Dublin and one for themselves in a middle class northern suburb but mum decided she didn’t like the house on the south-side and opted that we should move into the one by the sea in Sutton. It was a very scenic, windy place and we had many adventures as children on the rocks and the cliffs discovering new hideouts. The only problem was going home. There were endless arguments and shouting matches and incidences of mum violently lashing out at dad. He would always leave and go out to mass on such occasions. He was not a man who would escape to the pub, alcohol was highly frowned on by the O'Flynn family proven by the fact that granddad had proudly sported his pioneer badge on his suit lapel for a lifetime. Mind you, Betty, having grown up in a pub, swore she would never have married a drinking man and that granddad not drinking was her prime reason for marrying him. His conditions for marrying her included that she would go away for three years first and learn how to cook well which she obligingly did. The years of hard toil and sacrifice must have somehow all paid off because on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, granddad treated Betty to a dishwasher. I suppose they didn’t have a bad marriage, she had to do everything in the home (he wouldn’t dream of getting up to change a dirty fork) but she confessed to me she would much rather have done all that than entertain the kids which he was very talented at. To her dying day, he called Betty his good girl. I think she was quite happy in her latter years; one thing they said at her funeral was that she was never seen alone in the car and always gave away every single thing she could. The family said that was why none of her mother`s great fortune was destined to be left to her because she had known that Betty would only give everything away.

Mum would spend all day sitting in an armchair and looking out the window, she smoked Dunhill reds and drank milk (the quality of which she said was one of was one of the few acceptable things about living in Ireland) and ate chocolate or bananas. She told me that as I got older, I would realize that life was all scheisse (shit in English) but I was just a child and didn’t want to hear this so for the next few weeks, I pretended to myself she had never said it. Helga sorely missed her mother and family and homeland and we travelled to Bavaria three or four times a year and always for two months every summer. The times in Germany were happy, it was summer and we would eat tonnes of plums from the fruit trees in the garden and I would help Muschy in the kitchen and follow her around. Days were interspersed with visits to relatives for coffee and cake (later to be replaced by beer and schnapps) which seemed to be a tradition that would never die. Muschy always had two or three cakes on the go and the smell from her pantry was tantalizing, we all had voracious appetites and having never known real food to be a proper routine, were quite overwhelmed by the fact someone would go to all this effort to feed their family and I can see how the German housewives would be a hard act to follow for any hard working lady. The only experiment which failed miserably was when mum and dad decided to drive to Bavaria instead of fly. In the centre of Paris and on a busy roundabout, dad at one point decided to step out of the car to read a sign about the history of a monument and our car blocked the whole flow of traffic, quickly followed by the sounds of Helga screaming and throwing Valium down her neck and the three of us cowering in the back of the car while French drivers hooted and shouted and cursed. He did the same once on a busy Dublin street one day, deciding to abandon his car to help an old lady cross the road and I discovered Irish drivers were no more polite than their French contemporaries.

We stopped for the night shortly after Paris at a hotel called Novotel. We had been warned in the car to be on our best behaviour in the hotel but after a long day sitting in the car, we were giddy and excited and it was refreshing to dip in the outdoor pool where the cold air touched your face and while you were immerged in hot water so that steam was coming up around your ears. After the swim, dad said we wouldn’t be eating in the hotel as he liked the idea of supporting local restaurants. I suspected it had a lot to do with his skinflint qualities and obsession about saving money too but didn’t voice this as it would only have given mum ammunition with which to criticise dad with and I wasn’t in the mood for negativity. We ended up having a massive feast for the equivalent of two pounds each in a small, local café restaurant and returned to the hotel. Unfortunately, we were all sleeping in the same room (I was at the bottom of mum and dads double bed on a pull-out mattress and Tini and Sven over at the window) and as soon as we got into bed, mum told us to go to sleep and naturally expected to be obeyed at once. About thirty seconds later, mum spoke to dad accusingly saying that if he were anything like an example of what a real man should be, he would want her after the end of a long day in the car. I could hear him sigh and roll over to satisfy her but I really didn’t want to hear this so I pulled the duvet up over my head until they had finished. As soon as I could tell they had finished, I emerged from under the covers and alone with my thoughts, eventually fell asleep.

Sometimes mum would show me how to draw a star of David twice (das ist ein achtiger Stern, wer das nicht kann kriegt keinen Mann) and said if I didn’t learn this technique, I would never find a man or get married so with the fear of God in me, I soon acquired this very vital life coping skill. She told me she had always been psychic and when she was pregnant, knew that I would be a girl and had bought everything in pink for her hospital stay. She said when I was only six months old, I didn’t pee as the pee went back into my body (but only her parents noticed this, she admitted and that dad and herself would never have picked up on it in a million years). I had to go to hospital for a serious operation which Opa, my Bavarian granddad paid for and after which they placed me in a cot by the window. Mum said everyone passing by the hospital window thought I was a doll in the baby`s cot so from then on, she always called me Dolly. In the early days, she would find the will to get dressed most days and would even have relatives over for lunch and play German folk songs on the piano. The coffee and cake tradition was also occasionally maintained in those days. Her friend Colmar ran a German restaurant in Howth and made black forest gateaux cakes, the real McCoy and not the Irish version of it which consisted of a chocolate cake with a few cherries stuck inside. If anyone was coming to visit, a Colmar gateaux cake was ordered to highlight the importance of the occasion. Apart from that she didn’t see much of Colmar, I think because his wife was Irish and catholic and therefore the assumption was made that she was insincere and so to be regarded with the appropriate suspicion attached to this condition. Helga was very much shunned though for not being catholic and could not fit into the community or with the tennis playing wives or coffee mornings as a whole, she hated gossip and a lot of these activities were based on just that.

Helga prided herself on her elegance and was always dressed beautifully. She particularly enjoyed wearing certain outfits like a pale green silk blouse with a dark green skirt or a black dress and paisley jacket with a purple belt accompanied of course by the long seventies boots which were always a favourite accessory. Naturally she was horrified at how some of the Irish women could dress and told me it would be better if they threw a blanket over themselves than what they actually ventured out in. She kept makeup to a minimum but always used lipstick and mascara, she didn’t need much more as she was out in the garden topping up her tan every time the sun was out which wasn’t in any way often enough for Helga`s taste and the dark, wintry Irish weather depressed her along with the boiled cabbage tradition and hypocritical religion and many other things. One day in the shop, she asked for eggs but pronounced it ex and the poor guy honestly didn’t understand what she was saying until I volunteered the pronunciation with the softer g, mum was so frustrated by the time we walked out of the shop that she threw the box in the bin. I think some of the Nazi ideas of perfection must have rubbed off on Helga as she was not very gracious when it came to physical defects, she very often referred to the Irish as ugly and one of the first things in my life she ever told me about was how in Munich when she was just a teenager, they had bumped into a group of disabled children. She said there was a girl amongst them who had two heads and it was the most horrific sight she had ever seen in her life and how she couldn’t sleep for nights afterwards. I was left with childhood nightmares of a girl who walked around like a ventriloquist but with another head on her shoulders that was constantly bobbing up and down and turning to face her to ask questions. Helga was a big lover of her treasured pieces of furniture

Reviews for The Dangerous Miles

[Christina Psalmist · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Masterpiece. ?? Story of an overcomer. And I should know as her sister..... Remarkable, harrowing and yet beautiful in its pain... Whispering hope despite the truly dangerous miles... Divine protection present throughout