You don’t expect to find profundity at the bottom of a tube of sour cream and onion Pringles, nor in a bottle of Heineken. As Proustian headrushes go, it’s not exactly Charles Swann dipping his madeleine, “a little scallop-shell of pastry,” into his mother’s cup of tea early on in the much-referenced, if rarely read, In Search of Lost Time. I imagine that’s why it’s called involuntary memory: You don’t get to choose the medium by which your brain coughs up flashbacks from down the back of your subconscious.
We’d decided to escape across the border on our annual extended weekend in Dutch Limburg to a slightly grubby, late-20th-century camping village of repetitively low-slung cement holiday bunkers. The campsite tuck shop had exactly two variants of industrial Dutch Lager when I dropped by, and I plumped for the one with the red star. The tube of Pringles was almost an afterthought.
But it was this combination—parabolic arc of extruded potato starch, coated in sundry dextrins and glutamates, alongside skunky Dutch Lager—that transported me down the rabbit hole.
One minute I was sitting in the tired beige surrounds of our temporary living room, the early evening gloaming encroached on our toy-strewn patio, congratulating myself on successfully putting the children to bed. The next, as sour cream and onion dust comingled with beer and crept into the expectant papillae on my tongue, I had left the Netherlands entirely. Instead, I found myself somewhere I hadn’t been in years—a place to which I’d never expected to return.
In the memory, I’m sitting in the front room of my family home in Cork, my forearm resting stickily on the lumpy pleather arm of our sofa. The big light has been turned off in favor of a lamp in the corner, and the Laura Ashley curtains are closed against the prying eyes of our little cul-de-sac. The TV throws shadows around the darkened room, as the dum dum dums herald the start of the London-set soap opera “EastEnders.”
Next to me on the little wicker footstool is a triumvirate of Pringle tube, bottle of gas station pinot noir, and a hefty can of Heineken. Next to them is my mother, sitting in her customary chair in the corner of the room, glass cradled in her hand, feet tucked up underneath her and eyes focused on the latest drama in Albert Square.
I don’t know to which specific moment I’d been transported, but all signs point to a Friday evening, probably in winter, and certainly some time before 2007, because my mother is sitting next to me and still very much alive.
“I’m not a nostalgist. More accurately, I am not nostalgic for my childhood. I have no romantic illusions about my formative years growing up in early 1990s Ireland; it is not an era to which I return to luxuriate, but one I did well to survive.”
Other involuntary memories followed. Now I’m 10 years old in the back of our three-door Ford Fiesta, feet resting on a cooler, straining to listen to Alanis Morissette on the cassette player over the sound of stubby Kronenbourg bottles tinkling in the trunk. Now I’m 13 and we’re on a campsite somewhere south of Perpignan, observing—part-proud, part-embarrassed—my mother drunk on one too many Blue Lagoons as she celebrates graduating from university. Now it’s Christmas Day in the early 1990s, and crowded around our beat-up, yellow, circular dinner table there’s a dangerous whiff of brandy as the steamed pudding is set alight.
The flood continued. I’m eight, maybe nine, and we’re parking the Fiesta below the steel grain silos of Cork’s Beamish and Crawford. The air is suffused with the scent of boiling wort. I cower past the brewery’s mock-Tudor Counting House, which someone had convinced me was the site of grisly executions, as I’m dragged to another therapy session. Now I’m 20 and loitering outside of a pub near Olomouc’s Old Town Square, one Czech Pilsner deep and girding myself for the experience of introducing my girlfriend to my mother, her partner, and my brother. I’m 17 and it’s me and my mother on the corkboard bathroom floor, she holding back my hair as I gawk up the contents of my stomach into the avocado toilet bowl.
Eventually the bottle of Heineken emptied. My palate grew tired of confected onion flavoring, and my focus returned to the drab mundanity of a utilitarian, off-season holiday village in Dutch Limburg. But my mind was shaken by its unwilling journey.
From which dark corner did these memories arise? The first, and simplest, answer comes from neurobiology. I know that these disparate flashbacks were prompted by my olfactory bulb, where smells are processed, located at the front of the brain. It’s connected to the brain’s emotional processors—the hippocampus and amygdala, parts of the wider limbic system, which is responsible for emotion and memory.
That physiological rationale might account for the initial spasm of involuntary memory—and the scent trigger that unspooled it all—but what about the rest? Why these memories?
I’m not a nostalgist. More accurately, I am not nostalgic for my childhood. I have no romantic illusions about my formative years growing up in early 1990s Ireland; it is not an era to which I return to luxuriate, but one I did well to survive.
Proust would have appreciated the connective tissues binding these disparate memories together. He was a great man for the gargle, complaining in his early years of the deleterious effects of the “oceans of beer” he drank, and famously (or apocryphally) demanded a couple of bottles of his favorite beer be delivered from the Ritz while on his deathbed.
Maybe the answer to my question lies with Marcel and the scalloped-shell pastries of his youth. In the same passage of Swann’s Way where his narrator recalls his own brush with involuntary memory, Proust writes about the “Celtic” idea that the “souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison … they have overcome death and return to share our life.”
Ursula Walsh, though her civil service pension payments referred to her by her maiden name of Bishop until the very end, died on September 5, 2008 of late-stage metastatic cervical cancer. There were many reasons for me to be skeptical that her soul—if such a thing existed—was held captive in a bottle of industrial Dutch Lager with a side order of potato chips. While she was a voracious consumer of the latter, she was not a great beer drinker. The kind of revelry that might come with a pint at the dinner table or a trip to the pub did not much feature in the house of my childhood.
My mother was a recovering nonconformist. She hid her youthful radicalism well but still she was raising her children as atheist and anti-clerical in an Ireland just shaking off Catholic doctrine. She was a single mother going through a separation in a country in which divorce was still illegal, a parent for whom parenting sometimes seemed like a constant, inescapable reminder of some catastrophic mistake she had made in a previous life.
Ursula was, intentionally and explicitly, not the stereotypical Irish mother, who is well-meaning if emotionally stifling; who wants nothing more than to welcome her children (and their laundry) home, if she ever let them leave in the first place; and is always ready with a cure-all cup of tea.
My mother exhibited few of these traits. She was a terrible cook but a brilliant baker. She swore. She occasionally went on strike against the working conditions imposed on her by her ungrateful children. She threw glasses across the room, she raged, she wept, she disappeared into lengthy depressive episodes. She didn’t dote on us, and hated doing our laundry. Instead, she instilled in us a durable streak of independence (which rebounded on her more than once), as she put herself through college while we were in school. She loved us—of course she did—and she tried as best she could to build a safe and happy home for us.
But motherhood always seemed an ill fit. Life had ground her down by the time I came to know her, and by that point all she was looking for was a quiet existence in suburbia. Building that life was hard. It meant early barren years with her out of work and then in school, us using second-hand school books, treated to sugar-dusted jam doughnuts on children’s allowance day, and annual foreign holidays paid for by my grandfather’s sizable state pension.
There are no extant photographs of a toddler-sized me supping illicitly from a pint, and we weren’t the type of family to spend much time in the pub, save for the occasional Sunday carvery roast when my grandfather came down from Dublin to visit. Were we poor? Probably. But in an Ireland emerging from the catastrophic 1980s and only starting to feel its way towards the exuberant excesses of the era of the Celtic Tiger, the line between poor and well-off was not a very thick one, and properly rich people didn’t really exist.
“That was the definitive goodbye, but when a loved one dies of a terminal illness they don’t die just once. They are, instead, dying over and over again, as grim milestones accumulate with you powerless to arrest the dawning inevitability of the final, conclusive death.”
By the time I was a teenager, this ascetic life had transitioned into something more loose, and more frivolous. First came John—a small man who lived in a small house in Cork, and had a small moustache. Then John left for America, and Robert arrived in his stead, and for good. The can of Heineken perched next to the bottle of wine? That was Robert’s. The Ford Fiesta was traded in for a burgundy Renault Megane, doughnuts were replaced by sweet-and-sour chicken balls from the Chinese takeaway, and camping holidays in the South of France were succeeded by all-inclusive (if off-season) jaunts to Tenerife. By the early 2000s, life’s burdens were lifting, and my mother could afford to settle in with a bottle of good-value wine to an uneventful mid-life.
It’s no coincidence that most of these mother-son beer-stained memories date from this more comfortable second half of her life. Our brains’ neural pathways help us avoid dangerous foods and eat beneficial ones. But evolution has failed in helping us distinguish positive emotional sense memories from negative.
Soon gentler flashbacks were followed by more bitter memories hauled up from the dregs of my subconscious. Here’s one: Us sitting at a terrace on Leuven’s Oude Markt on a warm weekend afternoon in July 2007, surrounded by the square’s ornate baroque townhouses and drinking Hoegaarden as my partner and I cajole our respective mothers to stand back to back in order to determine once and for all who really has the shortest parent. Just two months later and I’m back in Limerick preparing for my final year at university when my mother rings to inform me her father, my grandfather, has died following a heart attack.
During our July weekend in Belgium, my mother had complained of some unspecified discomfort. She dismissed it as some or other recurrent irritation but in the days after she buried her father, aged 46, that discomfort was diagnosed as an anomalous growth on her cervix. And it was malignant.
It was in October of that year when I received a second call. I have no distinct recollection of how that conversation went—I mainly remember my mother saying she had not wanted to disturb my first weeks at college, and she presumably mentioned at which stage the doctor thought the cancer was. I do remember the grotty student kitchen in which I received the news, strewn with unwashed dishes and crushed empty cans of Dutch Gold leaking warm Pils onto the countertops.
In fact, most of my memories from that period are cloaked in a self-protecting fog. I was at a distance from her physically and psychically, too focused on coursework and too unwilling to fully process the consequences of the events unfolding at home. There were sporadic weekend visits back, and a hushed phone conversation in a darkened hallway on Christmas Day, she in Cork and fatigued by rounds of chemotherapy and concentrated radioisotopes, me in Belgium and a little too addled from lunchtime Duvels.
Winter turned to spring turned to summer, and the violence of the modern medical interventions inflicted on my mother’s body continued. My memories of this time are more focused, even if the chronology is not always linear. Over the road from her hospice was a hotel, which had a bar and a terrace looking out over Cork city. We were never going to visit the city together again, and we’d never park near the now-demolished Beamish brewery silos.
That much was clear. We could at least enjoy the view, alongside a cup of tea for her and an ice-chilled Bulmers pint bottle for me. This is our last normal memory. I don’t remember what, if anything, we talked about as we sat in the warmth of the sun’s dying rays as it sank to the other side of Maryborough Hill. From there, less comforting recollections fasten themselves to me like leeches: A brief discussion of wills in the orange room at the end of the hall as she recovered from another surgery. A final, diminished goodbye hug, her arms whittled to thin sticks by the cancer, surgeries, and the chemo. I was leaving for Maastricht to start a master’s degree, and we were both lucid enough to know it was likely our final conversation.
Was it before or after this last meeting that a kind-faced nurse and grave doctor ushered us into the blue-upholstered family room? My timeline blurs, but I do remember the words “kidney” and “failure” and knowing immediately what that meant. I remember the late-night call, the early-morning scramble from Maastricht on a train and a bus to the airport, the turbulent flight from Dublin down to Cork. I remember the weeknights spent keeping vigil in the sterile hospice corridor. My mother rasped, gurgled, and hacked her way through those nights, the desperate, grasping struggle by her body to claw air into her lungs echoing through the hallways as her alveoli and bronchioles were slowly and inexorably overcome by fluid her body could no longer expel.
I remember the gray Friday afternoon, sitting with her in that quiet room when it was done, and me mumbling inane banalities about the important life events she would never see and the ones I was so grateful that she had, her face slack and relaxed and impassive.
That was the definitive goodbye, but when a loved one dies of a terminal illness they don’t die just once. They are, instead, dying over and over again, as grim milestones accumulate with you powerless to arrest the dawning inevitability of the final, conclusive death. It started with the original diagnosis. Then there was the call informing me that, despite the best work of radiologists, oncologists, and surgeons, the cancer had returned and the iniquitous metastatic growth was encroaching beyond her cervix and into her abdomen. Of course the conversation about her failing kidneys. And after she had sucked her final difficult breath, at the removal, she died again as we closed the coffin on her pallid face for the last time and I crumpled finally and uninhibited into the arms of my friend Rob. And the following day, at the crematorium out on the island, where we said our goodbyes and we cried to the Rolling Stones, and departed for the wake.
Irish wakes have a mawkish reputation for joviality, a cathartic piss-up to honor the dear departed. It’s a cute idea, but one more suitable for a well-lived octogenarian than a 47-year-old mother of three. Nevertheless, we attempted to do justice to the tradition, putting pints away in the conference room of the local hotel and keeping the palpable grief at bay to the whoops and cheers of the All-Ireland hurling final playing out on the TV in the background.
My mother, a big sports fan in her time, might have enjoyed the scene. And playing it through in my mind now, maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me an obvious truth: I miss her. Not every day, but enough to entertain the odd melancholic notion of how her life and mine might have turned out had she survived the intervening decade, and what parenting advice she might be able to impart—were I in a mood to listen—over a glass of wine and a pint on a quiet Friday night.
It’s something they tell you before you have children: Impending parenthood makes you reconsider the context of your own upbringing, and puts the work your parents did into a new light. That, having reviewed your own formative experiences, you take what you think worked, and try and discard what didn’t.
I have my own views on this, and I sometimes wonder if mine and hers would align. For one, the beer-suffused memories provoked by that sensory encounter in the Dutch campsite stand out so starkly because they were rare flickers of joy or irreverence in an otherwise unhappy childhood. Whether I have been successful or not in my attempts to break with my past in my six years as a father, I have tried to will into existence an environment for my children that is more carefree, warmer, and more predictable than the one I endured. It is also a childhood in which beer is much more present.
Just as the resonant image I have of my mother was formed in those early, difficult years, the image my own children are currently forming of me has coincided with beer—writing about it, traveling for it, and drinking it—and has become an important part of my own self-image. What was so absent from my childhood is virtually ever-present in theirs.
They know that I have two jobs—“office work” and “beer work”—even if they’re unsure of the difference. They know what malt is thanks to the Weyermann malt display sitting alongside their picture books on the bookshelf. We’ve sniffed the jars of hops I keep for workshops, and they already think all beers smell the same. They know what a brewery is, sort of, and shout ecstatically if I suggest we visit one. They’re used to their father disappearing for afternoons, evenings, and whole weekends on said “beer work.” And they’re probably able to tell when I am drunk, given they’ve already seen it more than once.
“Maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me an obvious truth: I miss her. Not every day, but enough to entertain the odd melancholic notion of how her life and mine might have turned out had she survived the intervening decade, and what parenting advice she might be able to impart—were I in a mood to listen—over a glass of wine and a pint on a quiet Friday night.”
Until prompted by those involuntary memories, I’d not really stopped to consider how my experiences of parenting and my work around beer were so closely connected. I started writing about beer partly as an effort to carve out a distinct identity at a time when I worried my individual self might be lost within the family unit. And I hope in the future the children see what a cathartic, fulfilling experience it is to be able to write and talk—and be paid to write and talk—about something you are passionate about, beer or otherwise.
I say otherwise, but may have been too successful in introducing beer as something normal and exciting into their lives. I’m back in Brussels, sitting in our kitchen and trying to work out exactly how to wrap this up, when I hear an insistent voice calling from the living room, in a sing-song confluence of Dutch and English. “Papa, how many beers have you drunk since yesterday?” None, I answer (truthfully). None since the cider I had with dinner. Wondering why she’s checking up on my alcohol intake, I peek through the kitchen door.
There they are, coloring markers in hand and sketching a still life—of glasses with black liquid, glasses with yellow liquid and brown liquid, and of the gaggle of different-shaped bottles on the dinner table I’d forgotten to tidy away.
“But maybe I should have a beer for dinner, what do you think?” I ask them, eyeing up the high-strength, barrel-aged special being given a portrait by my eldest. As I watch them, I allow myself to wonder what their madeleine—what their Pringle-and-Heineken trigger—might be. I wish I could know what will one day bring them back here.
Words by Eoghan WalshIllustrations by Colette Holston
