Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha Before reading Looking at style – comparing two texts The extracts that follow are from Anita and Me and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. They are both about the relationship between the narrators and their mothers. • Read and annotate the texts with anything which strikes you as important or interesting. Concentrate particularly on the way they are written. • In pairs, compare your annotations and talk about what struck you about them. Tell each other as much as you can about the characters and their relationship. Are you in agreement about your impressions of the characters? • Now look back at the passages. Talk about how you formed your opinion of the characters. • Share your ideas as a whole class and make a note of anything you notice about Roddy Doyle’s style in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Anita and Me Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha Mama rarely raised her voice but when she did get I ran all the way, up Barrytown Road, all the way, angry, she looked like one of the ornamental statues past the cottages where there was a ghost and an I had seen on my Auntie Shaila’s shrine. The old woman with a smell and no teeth, past the goddess she resembled most when in a strop, the shops; I started to cry when I was three gates away one that both terrified and fascinated me, was Kali, from our house; around the back, in the kitchen a black-faced snarling woman with alarming door. canines and six waving arms. Every hand contained Ma was feeding the baby. a bloody weapon and she wore a bracelet of skulls – What’s wrong with you, Patrick? around her powerful naked thighs. And her eyes, She looked down for a cut on my leg. I got my T- sooty O’s of disbelief and also amusement that shirt out to show her. I was really crying now. I someone insignificant had dared to step on her wanted a hug and ointment and a bandage. shadow. – A jelly – a Portuguese man of war got me, I told Mama could look at me like that sometimes, when her. she had caught me tearing carefully sewn ribbons She touched my side. off my dresses, cutting up earthworms in our back – There? yard with her favourite vegetable knife and most – Ouch! No, look; the mark across. It’s highly usually, when I was lying ... She was always furious poisonous. at the pointlessness of it all; stealing was – I can’t see –. Oh, now I do. understandable if distressing, violence anti-social I pulled my T-shirt down. I tucked it into my pants. yet sometimes unavoidable, but lying? ‘Why do you – What should we do? she asked me. – Will I go do this, Meena?’ she would wail, wringing her hands next door and phone for an ambulance? unconvincingly, a parody of a Hindi movie mama. – No; ointment – ‘You are only four/seven/nine ... Isn’t your life – Okay, so. That’ll mend it. Have I time for me to exciting enough without all these stories?’ finish feeding Deirdre and Cathy before we put it Well naturally the answer was no, but I did not want on? to make mama feel this was her fault. Besides, I – Yeah. enjoyed her anger, the snapping eyes, the shrieking – Great. voice, the glimpse of monster beneath the mother; I pressed my hand hard into my side to keep the it was one of the times I felt we understood each mark there. other perfectly. Of course, no one else outside our small family ever saw this dark side of mama; to everyone else, she was the epitome of grace, dignity and unthreatening charm. She attracted admirers effortlessly, maybe because her soft round face, large limpid eyes and 39 © English & Media Centre 2000 Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha Anita and Me Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha fragile, feminine frame brought out their protective instincts. Tragedy, amusement and bewilderment would wash across her face like sea changes, flowing to suit the story of whoever she was listening to, giving them the illusion that they could control the tides. She was as constant as the moon and just as remote, so the admiration of the villagers was always tempered with a deferential respect, as if in the company of minor royalty. About the novel and the writer Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha takes us into the world of a ten year old boy growing up in the late 1960s in the fictional Irish town of Barrytown. Like Anita and Me, the novel is written in the first person. However, unlike in Anita and Me, there is no adult voice commenting on and setting in context the experiences of the child. In this novel we are inside the mind of the child, seeing the world through his eyes. This perspective is reflected in both the stories and themes of the novel and also in the style, for example, word choices, images and structure. Connections between sentences and different episodes in the novel can seem surprising. The structure is determined by the way Paddy thinks, his logic and the associations he makes. Once tuned into the way he thinks, the novel is an engaging and addictive read, and Paddy a very sympathetic character. As well as writing novels (for example, The Barrytown Trilogy) Roddy Doyle has also written for television and the cinema: – a television film called The Family – the screen play for the film of his own novel, The Commitments. © English & Media Centre 2000 40 Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha The beginning Extract 1 The association game • In pairs play the association game, following the instructions below. – Everyone in the class writes down the same word at the top of their own piece of paper (for example, football, school, holidays). – Once you are told to begin, look at your start word and write down the first thing that comes into your head, for example, ‘homework’. – Continue in the same way for one minute. Do not stop to think; do not cross anything out. – After one minute stop writing and, with your partner, talk about the connections and stories behind your association chain. Are your associations the result of your experiences or memories? Are they shared by other people? Do they reveal something about the type of person you are? • Share your conclusions with another pair or with the whole class. Talking about how children see the world In the autobiographical novel, Cider with Rosie, by Laurie Lee, there is a lovely moment when five year old Laurie starts school. The teacher tells him to ‘sit down for the present’. He waits and waits and in the end goes home bitterly disappointed because he hasn’t been given a present. This kind of childhood misunderstanding has happened to all of us. • Before you read the opening to this story talk about what’s special or different about the way small children see the world. Try to recall a moment from your own childhood which suggests this different perspective. You could think of: – a moment of confusion or misunderstanding – a time when you did something and didn’t realise you would be punished for it – a time when something important happened that you only really understand properly now, when you think about it from a more grown up point of view. Roddy Doyle reading the opening – Video Clip 2.1 2:00 • Listen to extract 1 being read out loud. It is taken from the very opening of the novel. The first part of the passage is read by Roddy Doyle in video clip 2.1. We were coming down our road. Kevin stopped at a gate and bashed it with his stick. It was Missis 1 Quigley’s gate; she was always looking out the window but she never did anything. – Quigley! – Quigley! – Quigley Quigley Quigley! Liam and Aidan turned down their cul-de-sac. We said nothing; they said nothing. Liam and Aidan had a dead mother. Missis O’Connell was her name. –It’d be brilliant, wouldn’t it? I said. – Yeah, said Kevin. – Cool. We were talking about having a dead ma. Sinbad, my little brother, started crying. Liam was in my class in school. He dirtied his trousers one day – the smell of it rushed at us like the blast of heat when an oven door was opened – and the master did nothing. He didn’t shout or slam his desk with his leather or anything. He told us to fold our arms and go asleep and when we did he carried Liam out of the class. He didn’t come back for ages and Liam didn’t come back at all. James O’Keefe whispered, – If I did a gick in me pants he’d kill me! 41 © English & Media Centre 2000 Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – Yeah. – It’s not fair, said James O’Keefe. – So it’s not. The master, Mister Hennessey, hated James O’Keefe. He’d be writing something on the board with his back to us and he’d say, – O’Keefe, I know you’re up to something down there. Don’t let me catch you. He said it one morning and James O’Keefe wasn’t even in. He was at home with the mumps. Henno brought Liam to the teachers’ toilet and cleaned him up and then he brought him to the headmaster’s office and the headmaster brought him to his auntie’s in his car because there was no one at home in his own house.