We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
I was born in 1942 in a rambling old house in rural County Down: one of the Irish Counties that remained in the United Kingdom. For a short time, my official name was Jean Rilchard Bealtie. When my father went to register my birth, the local Registrar of Births Deaths and Marriages was so drunk that he recorded my name as Jean Rilchard Bealtie . My father eventually got tired of trying to have this corrected and returned some days later when the Registrar had sobered up sufficiently to alter the records. Actually I think that Jean Rilchard Bealtie sounds quite dashing and distinctive; rather like a character from “Les Misérables!
During my early childhood years, post-war rationing made it difficult for my parents to put food on the table. However, as country dwellers we were fortunate in being able to access some locally produced vegetables and dairy produce. Clothes had to be mended and re-used and many people welcomed the opportunity to buy army surplus great coats to keep out the winter winds. Like most local families, we had sacrificed out car for the war efforts and our major means of transport were walking and cycling. As“Ignorance is bliss”, I didn’t feel at all deprived and spent many happy hours rambling through fields and along country
lanes to collect wildflowers and go fishing in a nearby lake. We didn’t have electricity, so in the evenings we would try to read by the light of a kerosene lamp or listen to the BBC on our battery radio.
Occasionally, there would be social evenings with neighbours. Tea and home baked treats would be prepared and the grown ups would engage in polite conversation. As this was quite a puritanical community, alcohol was never served and smokers wanting to light up, disappeared discretely behind the barn!
In those halcyon days, life moved slowly and I tended to live in the moment: not thinking much about what possibilities the future might hold. However my parents did have ambitions for me and imagined, that after obtaining some kind of professional qualification, I would settle down in one of the nearby country towns and become a pillar of the local community. In their wildest dreams, neither they or I could have believed how much my adult life would actually enfold. After completing a post-graduate qualification in Social Work, I worked in the relative calm of a small country town. After two years, I moved to Belfast; little
knowing that within months I would find myself working in the midst of a bitter and at times lethal sectarian conflict. I then moved to an executive position in the bitterly divided city of Derry, where the level of civil unrest was, if anything, worse than what I had experienced in Belfast. Eventually I began to explore options to live and work in a more peaceable environment and was offered a job in Brisbane, Australia where I and my family were to experience many very different opportunities and challenges. Fortunately the opportunities vastly exceeded the challenges which explains why we have lived here for some 45 years and are now enjoying retirement beside the sea.
Like a growing number of senior citizens I have written my memoirs; hoping that this would help me make sense of and perhaps come to terms with the my unexpected and eventful journey through life. As I wrote, I found myself revisiting and reassessing many of the joys, sorrows and the failures and successes that I experienced through the years. I’ve concluded that I have a lot to be grateful for. I have also been reminded of challenges that I have encountered: notably, the bitter sweet passage of adolescence, suffering from anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence and an encounters with cancer and sleep apnea.
I hope that my literary efforts prove interesting and entertaining for my family and friends and perhaps for some other curious readers. I’ve found that it has brought a sense of increased serenity to these final years of journey through life. Clearly life has brought me neither wealth or public acclaim and, to be honest, these were never things to which I aspired.
If you would like to learn more about my joys, sorrows and adventures, you can obtain a copy of my memoirs from Kindle, and several other online platforms.
Booze, Bullets and the Blues: An Irish Social Worker's Story
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