Helen describes encountering negative attitudes to her sexuality in rural Ireland in the early to mid 1970…
“I was still going to Ireland every summer and yeah, I talked about it before didn't I, how kind of I met— what I met there was a completely different kind of view on young— on women's appropriate behaviour particularly around their sexuality. And how they kind of behaved really. So I would go to dances, you know, I loved it but the local kids— Were they— you know they were very kind of— they weren't that welcoming really of me, especially when I got to sort of fourteen, fifteen and started wearing really fashionable clothes and going to dances and getting loads of— lots of local boys wanting to dance with me and snogging a few and then that was it. Then I got a reputation as a slag basically and I guess the local boys had said that I'd had sex with them or done particularly sort of sexual things which I hadn't. And that was really crushing. And then I was kind of ostracised quite quickly by the local girls and boys. Yeah, so that was tough. So I didn't really have a relationship with the local kids after I was probably sixteen. That was it, yeah, they didn't really want to know me.
I mean, also, I must say that I probably thought about and talked about sex much more than I did it in London even. There was much more thinking about it and discussing it and thinking about it than there was actually doing it so it's not like I had loads of boyfriends but yeah. But so very interesting that that was completely not allowed in Ireland really as far as— And I guess, I was this— how they viewed me as this girl coming over who the boys were interested in because I was more exotic and maybe they already had fantasies that I was more sexually available than the local girls because I wasn't from round there and I was from London, you know, there was all sorts of things.”
Helen was one of eight children born in London. Although her parents left Ireland in the forties, Ireland was always described as home. Helen's parents brought her eldest brother back to Ireland when he was six months old to be looked after by his grandmother until he was two which had a lifelong effect on him. Helen describes her teens and twenties in London and in Ireland where she spent every summer from age ten to eighteen staying with her aunt and uncle near Bantry in Cork. She describes her explorations with sex and sexuality which she said were unremarkable in London but led to her feeling shunned in the small community in Ireland as a 'slut'. Although she once thought about moving to her aunt and uncle's farm in Bantry as a possible future, this dream was gone by the time she was eighteen. Helen touches on her father's alcoholism and the violence between the male members of her family. She and one of her brothers wanted to expand their horizons and have careers. She ends by talking about her special role in the family as the daughter who kept the connection to Ireland alive for her parents in a way that her other siblings did not.
For more information on accessing Helen’s full interview or transcript please email faisneis@unaganaguna.org