THE hit BBC 3 drama Normal People, based on Sally Rooney’s bestseller of the same name, has several parallels with chapters of Monica Flanagan’s extraordinary life; a Sligo student at Trinity College, gift for the English language and an Italian summer.

Born in 1945, Monica grew up in County Sligo, while her parents were from further afield. “My mother, Mary Browne, was from Newtownforbes in Longford and her brother Fraser, known as Horsey Browne, played rugby for Ireland.

“My father [Major John Cleave] was from Cheltenham, although I never knew him because he died when I was nine months old. My parents met in India. Father was in the Rajput regiment and my mother had gone there in her early 20s to look after her uncle who ran a school, Col. Browne’s Cambridge School in Dehra Dun, for Indian boys. The school is still thriving.

“My mother loved horses. I loved them too so she bought my first pony, Pegeen, when I was 11. This pony would ride along the road perfectly until a car appeared, at which time she would swing round and take off.”

Fortunately there were few cars on the Sligo roads in 1956. “Which was a mercy. My mother said I had no courage and had no sympathy for me whatsoever.”

“I used to spend a lot of time on the beach with Pegeen. We lived on the edge of Ballisodare Bay, which is tidal, so when the tide was out I could ride out onto the sandbanks and discuss affairs with the seals who would be basking in the sun when they weren’t honking at me. It was paradise,” she said describing the Wild Atlantic Way scenery, the spectacular setting for Normal People’s beach scenes.

After Pegeen bolted home on one occasion too many, Monica’s mother took her out of school to drive to Longford to try a new pony. “Sadly I can’t remember the name of the man who sold us Barney but Barney changed my life for the better. He wasn’t fast but he was careful and would jump a clear round if I could get him across the first fence. He took me hunting with the Sligo Harriers and we even qualified for the RDS one August.

“Actually we were going rather well that year [1960] but sadly, first-fence-itis struck on our entry into the main arena. One stop and we were out. Mortification!” she said, next recalling the solo journey the intrepid pair made to reach Dublin.

“I rode Barney the five miles to Sligo station and my mother followed in the car bringing my case. We loaded into a horse carriage which took three horses, in stalls, with their heads poking out into a little seating area. We chugged to Dublin, which took many hours.”

The pair, plus suitcase, eventually arrived at the train station behind the former Tattersalls sales complex. “I hadn’t a clue where to go, but with help from willing people around me I walked Barney across the road to look for the stable. We had to climb up a ramp to get to it. Those stables are gone now,” she said, recalling the two-storey stable building where the Intercontinental Hotel now stands.

Trinity

Monica’s two sisters were both journalists and both have battled Alzeimher’s disease. “Maureen, who lives in Essex and was a Fleet Street journalist with the London Evening Standard, was the first person to write about the Beatles. ‘Norwegian Wood’ was written for her.

“Mavis died a couple of years ago. She was married to journalist Bruce Arnold and co-wrote The Children of the Poor Clares. She was a journalist, psychotherapist and fought tooth and nail all her adult life for women’s rights.”

At first, their younger sister looked set to follow their career path but she candidly admits that “Trinity was a bit of a disaster for me.

“I had a great time mostly, I was the secretary for TCD Miscellany for the three years my college life lasted, and also wrote a bit for the magazine,” she said, in her self-deprecating manner, about Ireland’s oldest student publication. Past contributors number Samuel Beckett, David Norris and Leo Varadakar.

Initially accepted at Trinity to read pure English, Monica “baulked at this first choice because I believed I wasn’t good enough to do it. Instead, and totally against the wishes of my sister Maureen, who had by this time graduated from Oxford, I chose to read English, Irish and Psychology. Having failed Irish and Psychology and with brilliant results in English, I left.”

Declining an offer to repeat exams, Monica left for Crabbet Park in Sussex. “The reason I went to England to ‘do’ horses with John Lassetter was quite simply because you couldn’t do any of that sort of thing or exams in Ireland.”

An American summer

During her second year at college, Monica underwent a rite of passage for many Irish students by going to America for the summer.

“The friend of an aunt of mine died and left me a couple of hundred quid which was more than enough to pay for the ticket to New York. I got my friend Bernard McMullen to look after my horse in my absence and off I went to teach riding for a couple of months in one of those famous American summer camps.

“It was 1967 and the time of ‘flower power.’ I slept in a tent, got eaten by mosquitoes and taught at the stables which were up in the hills in Massachusetts. The woman in charge of the stables was super and most of the children who rode were a pain. It was an interesting few months!

“The most exciting thing I did was swim on a horse in a lake. When I got home I took my horse out into the sea and swam him. Jimmy Devaney, who looked after our place for years, was standing out on the road watching me and a crowd gathered. They thought I was going to drown. Jimmy said ‘Not at all. That’s an aul thing she learnt beyond in America’.”

Monica made the most of her American summer, first travelling to Indianapolis with a friend she’d made at camp and then setting off on her own to San Francisco by Greyhound bus.

From that bohemian metropolis, “I loved San Francisco”, she crossed over the Canadian border to visit Bella Coola, the glacier-topped region in Indian Territory.

“My friend Ruth from Trinity was staying there with her brother and his wife. Post came up a fjord by boat once a week. Most roads were dirt tracks. The local baker was also the local cowboy and he took us to his ranch where we rode in western saddles for the first time.

“He loaded the ponies up onto flat-bodied trucks and took them over switchback roads that terrified me. Imagine, one false move and the horses would have been emptied into kingdom come.

“Our cowboy always carried a gun. We were riding down towards the ranch one evening and he asked ‘Do you like chicken, Irish?’ He always called me Irish. I said I did and he immediately unhitched his gun and shot the head off one of his wife’s laying hens for dinner.

“We also had over-proof rum to drink and I thought, for the only time in my life, that I was falling off the face of the earth.”

Monica left Bella Coola behind, hitching a lift with a salesman to Calgary. “I think my driver had lost his courage with the deadly switchback roads for he held a bottle of beer which fizzed up and spilled each time we hit a bump. Which was often. He drank his way through most of the journey and when he needed to get out to pee, fell out the door and sprained his ankle. I had to drive the rest of the way to Calgary.”

She made her way home by more sedate means, first catching a bus across the US border, followed by flights to Washington D.C and Dublin.

Kingdom conversion

After Monica passed her BHS exams, she returned home to her first Irish job; a season working with hunter hirelings in Dunboyne. “The circuit we trotted to get the horses fit was about nine miles, with me riding one and leading two. Once I was trotting merrily along when a pig arrived trotting towards us.

“The horse I was riding stopped dead while the two that were being led trotted on with gusto sweeping me clean out of the saddle. Hilarious for those watching!”

Her next job took her to Kerry. “I was interviewed and got a job with the late Ernie Evans, owner of Towers Hotel and trekking centre in Glenbeigh. The job was to begin in May so I had a few months to fill in.

“The late Father Niall Molloy, who was a very good friend of mine, offered me a day’s hunting with the Galway Blazers. He hired a horse for me from Willie Leahy and off I went. Hounds gave tongue and all was magic until I jumped a wall with a deep, large circular dip behind it. The horse didn’t make it to the far side, stumbled and stood all over me on his way back onto his feet. He then galloped away with my new saddle.

“He had put the full of his hoof on the right side of my face, pawed a bit of my cheekbone and broken my leg. Henry Gordon and Bryony Perceval were the only ones who stopped to help but then hounds were running, people’s hearts were pounding and my fall was a damned nuisance!

“Henry legged me up onto his horse by my injured leg and got me to the road where Father Molloy was waiting to take me to hospital.”

Years later while working in Italy and after having the same leg X-rayed after a “toss from a horse” Monica discovered that she had broken it out hunting that day.

Upon her doctor’s advice, she took up the Kerry job. “He said I had less chance of becoming depressed if I took the new job. I had a black eye, a touch of facial paralysis (which lasted for two years) and a limp. One of the chef trainees at the hotel asked the manager, on the night I arrived, if he had seen the new riding instructress. He answered no and the trainee said, “Well, it’s kinder not to look at her.”

From that inauspicious start, Monica blossomed in her new job, saying: “Kerry did wonderful things for me. Three of the best years of my life I spent there. Growing up as a member of the Church of Ireland in Sligo taught me to believe that everything that was good was on the far side of the Irish Sea.

“I was quickly brought to my senses in The Kingdom. It was just so new to me. It was like being laid bare of my old skin and gaining a new, really Irish one.

“I adored all of my 20 horses and ponies, although it took me some time to learn their pecking order out trekking. In the early days my co-worker was Liz Vaughan Buckley from Mallow and then we were joined by Noel Riordan, a local Glenbeigh boy and one of my very best friends to this day. His way with clients was wonderful and he also had a really kind and understanding way with horses.”

Their trekking route took them around Caragh Lake, up mountain tracks “and down onto Rossbeigh Beach, which is nothing compared to what it was then. Storms have destroyed it.

“I met loads of super people from all parts of the world. Journalists would come regularly and we took loads of fishermen’s spouses out to amuse them while their men were tossing hooks into the waters of lakes and rivers around us.”

Adventures with Mr Drew

Another in this ‘super’ league was Ronnie Drew, who she first met when he came to Rossbeigh in 1969 with his wife Deirdre and daughter Cliodhna. In his appreciation, penned by her for the Irish Independent in August 2008, Monica wrote about the first time she met the late Dubliners legend.

“Ernie told me I was to take Ronnie for a spin down the beach. Having never met any class of a star before, I was on my best behaviour.

“I also snobbishly thought he would be quite unable to ride and would probably upset the horse, Cinzano, by wanting to gallop. Anyway, my pomposity and anger were at their respective full heights when I got to Rossbeigh and saw him waiting for me. I called him Mr Drew and he called me a Horse Protestant and after that he was Ronnie and I was Mono.

“He rode very well and in perfect balance. He told me he wasn’t all that impressed with the saddle I had put on the horse. I told him it was the best I had and what was his own like. Ronnie said it was a Stübben. I was envious.”

A past entertainer at the hotel, Ronnie would play and sing in the pub in the evenings. “Sometimes he would come with [fellow Dubliners band members] Ciarán [Bourke] and Barney [McKenna] and sometimes Luke [Kelly] would be there too. Ciarán, Barney and he were in Glenbeigh shortly after a tourist bus got burned out in Cahirciveen.

“I remember everyone being quite drunk in the hotel at about 11 at night when there was a telephone call to reception. Ronnie took the call and the minute he lifted the receiver we went silent.

“He too was silent for a second or two and then he said, ‘Now listen here head, ya can’t have put a bomb in this hotel. Me and Barney and Ciarán are here’, and then he hung up and we went on drinking,” she said, describing how an unperturbed Drew dealt with a hoax bomb call.

One idea hatched over a drink was for Ronnie to ride in a race at the flapper meeting on Rossbeigh Beach. “Ronnie got to the beach just in time and quite drunk. Noel explained to him just where he was to gallop. He said ‘you gallop down to that stake in the sand on the sea side, around it and back up on the dunes side. It’s simple.’

“‘Could be simple for you, head’ said Ronnie, ‘but I can’t see the stake.’ So we legged him up on his horse and he straightway fell off on the other side. It was like a Marx Brothers film. We got him down onto the beach by putting him and his horse between our two horses – and we were off!

“He did get to the stake but unfortunately fell off going around it. Noel pulled up to see if he was all right and angered Ernie greatly because he had put his money on Noel’s horse to win.

“Ronnie was witty, smart and charming. He was probably the best person I have known for cutting stupidity down to size,” added Monica.

The hotel also attracted artists, poets and John B Keane. “He was having lunch one day in the hotel when Ernie’s brother Tom said, ‘You’re a fan of John B, aren’t you? Well, he’s in there now having lunch so come and meet him.’

“I protested strongly because a fellow should be left to have lunch with his wife in peace but he persisted and I ended up going with him. I stank of horse too, by the way. Well, he stood up and shook my hand. I, being overcome, said, ‘I’m a great fan of yours!’ to which he replied, ‘Dat makes two of us!’… and dat was dat.”

Next week - Part II: “Me without a word of Italian.”