JANUARY 2009

Hazel McIntyre Interview
By Simon McGeady
Inishowen Independent Tuesday 13th January 2009

Culdaff author Hazel McIntyre is working on her 7th novel at the moment, but it is works past, not future that are her most pressing concern. For her latest project, Hazel is going back in time to her earliest novels - Iron Wheels On Rocky Lanes and Echoes Of Another Time - and further still, to her own youth, for an upcoming documentary on childhood play in the last century.

Produced by Testimony Films, the company behind a series of documentaries on the September 11th attacks in New York which include Ground Zero and Hotel 9/11, the film will focus on how children's play and games have changed over the decades. The Inishowen Community Radio regular is a consultant on the project, the subject matter of which is close to her heart.

"Most people don't record their childhood experiences," said Hazel, who grew up in the 50s, on a small farm two miles from Culdaff, "I did keep a diary and write short stories and by accident of good fortune my mother kept them."

Hazel's youthful scribblings helped inform the writing in her first two novels and it is these books she will mine for the upcoming documentary. "The film makers want to use my recollections of childhood play and games, how we entertained ourselves," she added.

Hazel says she lived through a period of transition, from the old way that children played to the arrival of 'the box in the corner,' as she puts it. "Our first television arrived in the late 50s when I was about 10," said the nurse-turned-novelist.

In just two generations - from Hazels youth in the 1950s, to her grandchildren growing up today - the way children play has changed beyond recognition, as she explains. Children of the past were free to roam the countryside for hours, unaccompanied by adults. They would meet other children pass through neighbours houses, form friendships, fall out and make up. In short, learned valuable lessons for the future. Our play-world was the world outside. We played our own games and entertained ourselves. We knew our own territory intimately, that information was in part handed on from those older kids that went before us but also through our own exploration.

Hazel says it's unfortunate that today's children are not free to play unsupervised. Somewhere in the late eighties there was a sea of change in the attitudes of Irish parent. Now a link to the past generations has been lost. "Today's children, they don't know how to entertain themselves. When at a loose end they are used to playing a computer game or watching a DVD, but both of these activities really only involve themselves. "I believe kids are missing out on knowledge that has been handed down through the ages. We leaned to communicate with our own peer group, but adults as well and that was good training for adult life. I remember wandering into other children's houses and have a conversation with their parents, I doubt if today's ten year olds could do that. Today's families live in isolation from one another, whereas in a way the wider community was my extended family." Not that 1950s Ireland was a blissful utopia. "I'm not saying that there wasn't any danger, there was a hidden Ireland that our parents were not aware of, but from my own point of view, I think the benefits outweigh the dangers. You have to make children aware of the dangers, but nonetheless, today's parents should give their children as much freedom as they can."

Broadly speaking, this change in the pattern of play from unsupervised outdoor activity to structured indoor activity is negative in Hazel's view. "The games we played, we played outside. We knew that we could eat from nature's bounty along the hedgerows, red haws, wild sloes, blackberries and blueberries. Today's children wouldn't know one berry from another."

The youngest of five children growing up in the townland of Meenawar, Hazel recalls skipping, hopscotch, horseshoe throwing as her main activities. "Toys were thin on the ground. We would get clockwork toys at Christmas, which were very interesting watching them spin around the floor, for the first few goes anyway." The title of her first novel was inspired by a toy - her brother Robert's cart. "The iron wheel didn't come from a trike, but it was a toy. We were a family of five. Bob and I were the two youngest. For his 9th or 10th birthday he wanted a donkey and a cart for the donkey to play with. My father made him a cart and took wheels off an old iron reaper lying in our field."

Hazel is occasionally asked into local schools, such as St. Boden's Culdaff, to talk about her books. Time and again, she finds children captivated by 'other worldly tales of a distant time' like the story from Iron Wheels On Rocky Roads about her brother and the donkey cart. The fascination comes because the world of Hazel's youth is so far removed from their own.

When Hazel's own children were growing up in the late seventies and early eighties, the slide toward modern parental attitudes had already begun. "My children had more freedom than today's children, but looking back, not as much as I had. As a mother, I was wary of dangers. There was more traffic on the roads, more outsiders had discovered Inishowen and were passing through here. When I was young there was one car that would go past every five or six hours, if that, and we knew all the people in the parish who owned cars, because there weren't that many of them. Now with my children's children it's changed dramatically. Even the sort of freedom my children had is gone."

Hazel blames the media for fueling people's fears, extremes of abduction and paedophilia. Now the prevailing parent mindset is to keep a close watch on your children. The 50s was important, As I said it was a period of transition. There have been more changes in my lifetime than at any time in history. I believe the old ways are gone for good. This new notion of parenting will persist, that is the way society will go into the future."

In those days families were fairly big and houses small and now it's the opposite. It's changed universally, you don't see children playing on the street. True, money has played a big part, now parents can afford to drive their children to school and give them much more toys. Increased wealth, she says, shouldn't mean parents raise a nation of 'little emperors.' "Any games that we played indoors, like Ludo, Snakes and Ladders or Checkers, we did with other people. "I watch my grandson playing the (Nintendo) Wii. He's totally engrossed, but there's something inside that tells me that's not good for him. He could sit there for two hours and if I went in to talk to him he wouldn't hear what I'm saying."

But that said I wouldn't dream of telling parents how to raise their children, not even my own children. Kids today are far more sophisticated with their mobile phones. They are much more into being cool than we ever were.

Back on the subject of the documentary, Hazel says the makers will use 3 - 4 stories picked out from her self-narrated audiobooks. "I will probably have to do a bit more research, but I'm looking forward to working with them. I would hope that when it comes to shooting the documentary, they would do a bit of filming here in Inishowen.

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