We landed in Moscow just as it started to snow. (Debbie has a super-efficient Russian right-hand man called Igor. Rumor has it he can fix anything. Debbie had mentioned that the first impressions the Irish people got of Russia would be enhanced if there was snow. Apparently Igor had a word . . .)
At the baggage carousel there was a moment of panic when it looked like "Santy's" red rig-out hadn't made the trip, but just before we all started sewing our red hats together, it turned up and off we went. A long journey southwest to Bryansk followed and at four A.M. we checked into our (surprisingly nice) hotel.
The following morning, at eleven, the orphanage bus arrived to collect us, bearing a ten-year-old emissary: Polina, our first orphan. She was a chirpy, chatty sweetheart with the look of a young, far less surly Kate Moss. She was thrilled to be the one allowed to escort us and when Santy clambered onto the bus, she nearly lost her life. Later on she told me, quite matter-of-factly, that her mother had abandoned her when she was two months old; apparently her mother has now gone on to have a new family with someone else "far, far away" and never contacts Polina. She arrived at Hortolova when her dad was sent to prison: many of the "orphans" aren't orphans in the traditional sense; instead they're "social orphans" in that one or maybe both of their parents are still alive but have been deprived of parental rights for various reasons—usually neglect due to alcoholism. However, her father has since been killed and Polina went to heartbreaking pains to let me know that her dad had been "a good man."
Then we arrived and on the face of it, the orphanage didn't look grim. It wasn't one big gloomy Dickensian-looking institution, but a collection of single-story cottage-type buildings, set in a fir forest sprinkled with snow. Even the dogs—silver-haired, blue-eyed wolf look-alikes—added to the whole fairy-tale-with-an-edge effect.
Lots of the children were waiting, in Santy hats, as excited as if . . . well, as if it was Christmas morning . . .
When we got off the bus I was shocked to see that there was also a Russian Santy—in orange velvet, a faceful of makeup and a much more impressive beard than our fella. I feared a Santy-off; the two Santys circled each other warily, eyeing each other's sacks, then made peace and we all went inside for the present giving.
Debbie had told me that the children were very affectionate and would keep hugging me; but hearing that kind of creeped me out. I thought it sounded really sad—that they were so starved of affection that they'd fling themselves at any passing stranger like a sackful of needy puppies. But, as it happened, it was nothing like that. In the gift-giving melee, I bumped into Polina, the chipper little girl I'd met on the bus, and we had a moment where we grinned at each other and had a spontaneous squeeze. And as the days passed, I clicked better with some of the children than others (which is exactly as it should be) and when we met we hugged like old friends. Meanwhile Himself had "his" children.
What really depressed me was how alcoholism featured in so many children's stories. I met Tatiana; beautiful, blue-eyed, fairhaired. She 's only fourteen, but looks much older, at least eighteen, and has an unusual serenity about her, probably a consequence of surviving so much so young. She has an eleven-year-old sister Luba, a bit of a handful, whom she evidently frets about. Their mother had died "from drinking" but their father is still alive, liv ing in a flat in the town, and Tatiana visits him once a month. She told me she worries a lot about him. He has sold all his furniture to buy alcohol and there is never any food in the flat. "He needs to eat," she told me. "I worry because he doesn't eat." I sat there, looked at her mutely and thought: you're fourteen. I thought I'd choke from grief.
Oddly enough, the children who moved me the most weren't children at all, but the teenage boys. And that 's kind of strange because I'm vaguely terrified of teenagers. I remember myself at that age—confused, angry, scornful of adults—and I so live in dread of saying something inane or stupid to make them roll their eyes and whisper, "Christ!" that I tend to give them a wide berth. But the lads here were very pally—and astute. They noticed that Himself was wearing a Watford hat (his football team) and by a really strange coincidence, while we were actually at the orphanage, Watford was playing Chelsea on the telly—since they've been managed by Abramovich, Chelski seems to have become Russia's second national team. A battalion of lads came to ferry Himself off to watch the match with them, but I insisted he remain on photo-taking duty (I'm so mean). They exchanged a mano-a-mano "Women!" look with Himself and every time someone scored, a scout was dispatched to keep him informed. It was all so normal and that 's what made it so sad.
Maybe it 's wrong to have favorites, but anyway I did. He was Andrei, aged seventeen, and like Tatiana, another "caretaker" child. He too has a younger sibling, a brother called Dima, who's fifteen and has had a series of breakdowns. Their mother was deprived of parental rights because of her drinking and their dad was beaten to death after being released from prison—for a long time Andrei was afraid to break the news to Dima and, although he took it badly, he now knows. Andrei is a natural peacemaker and his ambition is to work as a car mechanic because he loves cars. His favorite car is a BMW and Debbie had to take me aside and warn me sternly that I was NOT to buy one for him. I mean, as if . . . okay, the thought had crossed my mind, but I wouldn't really have . . .
The thing is, though, you'd give these children anything, you'd cut your heart out for them. I'd expected they might be difficult, bratty, withdrawn—who could blame them considering what they've already endured in their short lives? But they were variously charming, polite, mischievous, earnest, sweet, thoughtful, affectionate and above all—and most moving—dignified. I couldn't get over it. And it 's entirely down to Debbie and her team; even though there are 150 children in Hortolova, they're all treated like individuals, just as they would be in a family. I was very moved by the myriad humane little touches, the thoughtfulness, the treats— like taking a load of the lads to Moscow for the Russia v. Ireland match. Or like giving children choices—most orphans have no say in what they eat, what they wear, where they sleep: they get what they get and they can like it or lump it. But Hortolova children are brought to the market and allowed to pick out their own clothes. Mind you, when this first started, the children were completely unable to do it, they were so paralyzed by lack of practice that the market visits took forever.
Unlike other orphanages, the Hortolova children get to visit their siblings. Russian orphanages are—er, why?—run by the Department of Education, so children are "sorted" according to their academic ability. The brighter ones are sent to one orphanage, the middling ones to another, etc., and it makes no difference if two children are from the same family. If one is smarter than another, they're sent to different places and that 's that. A staggering 60 percent of children in orphanages have siblings in other orphanages, and to ameliorate the brutality, Debbie introduced the sibling program: every Sunday the bus goes off, bringing Hortolova children to see their brothers and sisters.
And every child has an Irish sponsor family, who give 150 euro a year to cover things like new clothes, glasses, any emergency extras. More importantly, they exchange letters, birthday cards and photos to give them a sense of belonging, of mattering to someone, somewhere.
A hairdresser comes regularly, so does a dentist and a pyschologist, and in the life skills center the children are taught everything from how to put petrol in a car (they practice on half a Lada that someone found somewhere) to how to cook—on our final day, all the eight-year-olds cooked and served us our tea with heartbreaking earnestness.
Paradoxically the more that gets done at Hortolova, the more that needs to get done; the bar is constantly being raised. Some Hortolova children are very, very bright—three girls and one boy are being given extra tuition in an attempt to get them into university— if it happens it will be the first time any of the orphans has gone to university. Some of the older boys are preparing to leave (they're legally obliged to when they're eighteen) so the Challenger Program has been introduced t
o build their self-esteem, to deinstitutionalize them (until recently no such concept existed in Russia, it was literally impossible to translate) and to prepare them for the outside world.
Meanwhile TRWL is also spreading its nets in other directions. They're matching up children in other orphanages with Irish sponsor families. And Debbie has just taken on the mammoth task of Bryansk orphanage, a Dickensian place housing 350 children where many of the teenagers are already showing problems with alcohol. Lots done, more to do, as someone once said . . .
My visit to Hortolova was life-changing, a trip I feel profoundly privileged to have made. The funny thing is, I'm not a crier, not even when I'm very sad—Himself (a man) usually cries much more than me. But I shed more tears in five days in Russia than I have in the rest of my life put together. It got to the point where it was actually embarrassing, I was making such a show of myself. It wasn't just the children's stories, heartbreaking and all as they were. What moved me most was their innate dignity. Despite all that had happened to them, they were such sweet, hopeful little human beings. Like a cluster of clean, bright flowers in a burnt-out land.
See www.torussiawithlove.ie for more information
First published in The Sunday Independent, March 2004
The "F" Word
The "F" word. The bad "F" word. I don't mean "feck." I don't even mean "fuck." I mean "feminism."
I came of age just after the so-called sexual revolution, and the message I picked up was that all the hard work had been done and that now everyone was lovely and equal. The world belonged to women. Men would be our lackeys and provide zipless fucks on demand and we would stalk through the boardrooms of the land in our sheer tights and red lipstick. (Well, actually I never thought I could, but I thought other women could if they wanted.)
But funnily enough, the last thing I wanted to be called was a feminist: feminists were shrill, hairy-legged harridans who couldn't get a boyfriend. And they were buzz-wreckers. I felt guilty for wearing high shoes—a tiny invisible feminist sat on my shoulder, mocking, "Look at you, pandering to men, see how your high heels makes you walk with a wiggle," when actually it was only because I was five foot one and wanted to see the number of my bus, over people 's heads.
My relationship with men, fraught at the best of times, was fur ther complicated because I half expected to be investigated by the Boyfriend Police, in order to check I was treating myself with enough respect. Whenever I was heartbroken over a man, I was braced against the Wicked Feminist Witch of the West bursting into my tear-sodden bedroom, in her dungarees and Doc Martens and saying, "Hah! That's what you get for hanging around with men. You should have joined the women's collective and none of this would have happened. No more than you deserve, girlie."
The enemy had been reconfigured—no longer men, but the women who'd fought for us. Obviously, a certain amount of revisionism happens after every revolution, but how could I have been so naïve? The only thing that stops me from dying of shame is that I wasn't the only woman who ever said, "Of course I believe in equality for women, but like, I wouldn't call myself a feminist."
It took a mortifyingly long time for it to dawn on me that actually all the hard work had not been done and that now everyone was not lovely and equal. Not even slightly. It happened one afternoon when I was fighting through a throng of gray suits in the business class section of a plane. Suddenly I wondered: where are all the women in their red lipstick and sheer tights? Nowhere to be seen. (Because they were stuck in the office, providing secretarial backup, drinking Cup-A-Soup, painting the run in their sheer tights with nail varnish because they couldn't afford to buy new ones.)
In the meantime a new word had been invented for women like me—"post-feminists." I wasn't really sure what it meant but when I looked around I saw that we went to the gym a lot, we bought plenty of shoes and most of us still had crappy, badly paid jobs— but apparently it was our fault now, not the system's.
Not true of course: the glass ceiling really exists. And as well as equality in the workplace, we 're still waiting for affordable child care, recognition of the value of work done by homemakers, humane treatment by the courts of rape victims (why are so many judges such senile old misogynists?), a focus on domestic violence . . . the list goes on.
But most of us haven't the energy to be active feminists: we 're knackered, holding down demanding jobs, getting our roots done, fighting low-level depression, trying to do Pilates, doing school runs if we have children or agonizing about when the best time to have a baby would be, if we haven't. We don't have it all. We 're too busy doing it all to have it all.
Meanwhile, on the feminist frontlines, not only has the war not been won, but our gains are at risk. For example, that godbotherer George Bush is committed to working towards making abortion illegal again in the U.S. And where "Dubya" leads (actually I shouldn't even call him that, calling him by his nickname is only encouraging him), his mate, Holy Tone, mightn't be far behind.
What feminism needs is a makeover, along the lines of the New Labour one (but without losing the core ideology, of course).
For example, did you know you can be a feminist and
a) wear pink
b) have sex with men
c) enjoy a good laugh
Amazing, no? As long as you believe you're entitled to the same rights as everyone else (i.e., men) you're a feminist. See, that's not so bad, is it? In the words of that bard and visionary, Adam Ant: There 's nothing to be scared of.
First published in Marie Claire, April 2005
Stories
A Moment of Grace Chapter One
Iam an angel. Go on, have a good laugh, but really I am. An angel. A proper, fully paid-up heavenly one with wings, halo, the whole lot.
And I'm in Los Angeles on a mission. A mission from God, since you ask.
Which all sounds very important, but to be honest the reason I'm here isn't such a great one. Some angels just have a natural aptitude for the job. I, unfortunately, am not one of them so I've been sent to Earth on a training course. In order that I can help humans I need to understand them. So while I'm here I have to commit—but not too enthusiastically, of course—each of the seven deadly sins. I've got seven days to do it in.
"Envy, Sloth, Greed," Ibrox, my superior, listed off. "Gluttony, Anger, Envy—no, I said Envy already, didn't I? I can never remember the seven. It 's the same with the seven dwarfs, I can usually do five, then I just draw a blank. You try."
"Grumpy, Dopey, Snee—"
"No! The seven deadlies."
"Sorry. Okay, Greed, Envy, Sloth, Anger, Gluttony . . ." I looked at him helplessly.
"Pride," he supplied. "And you'll remember the seventh."
So off I went. And here I am in Silverlake, Los Angeles, standing outside the apartment which is going to be home for the next week. Apparently I've been recommended by a friend of a friend of a friend and I will have two flatmates—Nick, an actor who plays a lot of pyschopaths, and Tandy, an actress who gets offered sluttygirl roles a lot.
I rang the bell. No one came. I rang again and heard some muffled shouting from inside. Then a man wrenched open the door. "What?!" He was a mess—wild hair, wild eyes, horrible smell. Looks like this Nick is a method actor.
I stuck out my hand and stapled on a smile. "I'm Grace and you must be Nick!"
"And you must be out of your mind," he growled. "Nick lives next door."
"Ah . . . right . . . sorry." See what I mean about me being crap at my job? Imagine if I was the Archangel Gabriel? I'd probably call to the wrong house and tell the wrong woman that she was the mother of God. I'll never make the big time, not if I carry on like this.
I moved one apartment along and a woman I assumed must be Tandy answered the door. She gave me a speedy but thorough once-over and when she saw that she was thinner than me, she visibly relaxed, then smiled. "Come on in."
She was really, really pretty, but I could see why she kept getting the hooker-type roles. Her lips were so pneuma
tic they looked as if they were about to burst and she was X-ray skinny, apart from a very large pair of breasts which clearly belonged on a different body.
"Nick, come and say hey to your new roommate," she called.
In came Nick. I took one look at him and remembered the elusive seventh sin. Lust!
"Hey," he said vaguely.
Hey, indeed!
Dark-haired, gangly and loose-limbed, with eyes that had a notknown-at-this-address distance to them. Just out of curiosity, I wondered if I was his type. I look a bit like those Renaissance paintings of angels, except without the halo, the wings and the nakedness—no need to freak people out, I always say. But I've all the other stuff—blond curly hair, a round, rosy-cheeked face and I'm a little plumper than they generally seem to like them in Los Angeles.