CHAPTER 2

WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

AT THE BACK of my grandparents’ house in the village of Bennettsbridge, tucked in off the road, just a short walk from the River Nore, is a small yard about 20 metres wide. I turned that patch of concrete into my hurling arena. My Croke Park, a place where I hurled for hours upon hours, practising the game, loving the game, becoming obsessed by the game.

I would get home from school by 3.10 p.m., fire the bag of books into the corner of the kitchen, and would then be straight out the back door. I came alive there, staying out for hours pucking a ball. Often my brother Paddy was with me but if he wasn’t it wouldn’t deter my enthusiasm. All I needed was a hurl, a ball and a wall. There was no conversation, no laughter – just the constant thud of the ball being hit.

They have an old corporation bungalow with a large back garden. The garage has a door on either side and the wall in between is marked with a white line. It was perfect target practice. Hit the line from 10 yards, 15, 20. Strike, repeat, strike, repeat. I never got tired of it.

Across the yard was the oil tanker for heating the house. When I was nine, they changed it from the classic steel structure to a new plastic container, shaped like a figure of eight with two holes in it. I watched the workmen put it in one day and my mind lit up at the hurling possibilities. I began firing balls off left and right, aiming for the holes in the tanker.

That kept me occupied for hours.

The back of the container led on to the neighbours’ house. Mrs Kealy lived there: a lovely, kind old woman. During the summer days when school was out, Paddy, my cousin Denise and I would knock on her door and call in for a chat, knowing that we would each get a Penguin bar in exchange for our company. The odd stray sliotar would fly past a gap between the wall and partitioning leylandiis, travelling directly across her back yard. We would close our eyes in fear, hoping not to hear a yelp from the other side. Later, her daughter came back from England, moved into the house and built an extension out the back, meaning their external bedroom wall was now directly lined up behind the oil tank.

Soon hurling started to be squeezed in before school, often on freezing and wet mornings, although I felt immune to the cold and the rain. Saying that, if you’re asleep, that thud, thud, thud of the ball against the wall would quickly wake you up. So it wasn’t long before my grandmother got a polite suggestion. Maybe Richie could bang the ball off another wall?

So I started at the other side of yard, going for hours and hours.

The simple joy of striking a ball against a wall never left me. I loved getting into the rhythm of it, repeating that motion, getting my eye in.

When I went to college in St Pat’s in Dublin, I lived for two years at Number