I should be the wrong age to ‘get’ Derry Girls.
When the Derry Girls were growing up, I was already just beginning my teaching career- only just, but still: I wasn’t a teenager in the 1990s. And neither was I one of ‘the Mammies’. I was just starting out on the adventurous first steps of my career, mildly astounded to be earning a salary at last, and desperately trying not to mess up. I was learning to teach, learning to drive, learning to be a grown-up.
And yet: Derry Girls gets me every time.
From the very first episodes, it encapsulated, for me, growing up in Northern Ireland- albeit I’d done so in Belfast, rather earlier and with very different experiences. Somehow those differences didn’t matter: watching the experiences of the Derry Girls at school, I lived it with them. I didn’t quite know whether to identify with the girls, who reminded me a bit of some of the characters in the first classes I taught, or with the teachers. I’d like to think that there was something of me in Miss De Brún, the ‘too cool for school’ English teacher. My mother would probably like to think I could identify with Sister Michael, the astoundingly brilliant school Headmistress- a Cork woman like my Mum herself. I’m not a parent, but I often found myself identifying with the girls’ parents, with their preoccupations about laundry, housework and their near despair at their children’s ever-more-ludicrous ideas.
Like so many people watching the series in Northern Ireland, I adored hearing the local idiom, often wondering what those watching it further afield might make of some of the dialogue. I also loved seeing the local landmarks, perhaps never more than when the girls and their families took a day trip to my nowadays adopted hometown of Portrush. Would the appeal travel, I often wondered, when I recommended it to friends who aren’t familiar with the landscapes or the language. And yet, the humour seems to have travelled, to the extent of the show getting a reference on The Simpsons – what greater proof of success? – and finding fans among the ‘Fab Five’ of Queer Eye.
And you know what? It’s because dialect and landmarks may be local, but they’re universal too. There’s a line by George Eliot, from her novel Middlemarch, which has always appealed to me: ‘Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.’ In writing books with a limited regional scope, Eliot was attempting to make the point that her themes could still be universal. And the same is true of Derry Girls.
The same is true of Derry Girls because we follow the girls through the world of growing up, even if it’s against the backdrop of the final years of the Northern Irish troubles. We follow their progress through school... study… finding your place among the other students… school exchanges and school discos… cross-community experiments… the school prom… not being able to afford a place on the school trip… going to those first, amazing concerts… family holidays… first crushes… first jobs… a family wedding, a wake and a funeral… bus journeys, train journeys and a rollercoaster that stalled. We see the bonds between the girls grow stronger, and stronger, and stronger. The Wee English Fella, initially an interloper, ends up shouting, ‘I am a Derry Girl!’ at the crucial point of the visit to Derry of US President Clinton, perhaps echoing the famous J.F. Kennedy line, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’. We see James become one of the gang, even though he’s never spared the ‘slagging’ merited by being (a) English and (b) a boy.
We’re all defined by our own limits. We’re all from somewhere. We all have our quirks of regional language: I know I have that habit of saying ‘wee’, which Wee English Fella James found so frustrating in the people of Derry. Limits and regionalisms and almost indecipherable dialect: they’re universal. They link us to a place, but everyone has ties to somewhere. Maybe ‘being a Derry Girl is a state of mind’, but so is being from anywhere.
But all of this is very well. Nothing could have prepared me for the final two episodes of Season 3. With the ‘one year later’ 1998 special still to come, as I write this… I feel that all the increasingly ridiculous antics and plot twists of Season 3, which I grumbled about as unrealistic… have suddenly made sense.
There was the penultimate episode, focusing on the Derry Girls’ mothers (and fathers, and Granda Joe). I know I’m not the only person to have been moved to tears by the dedication at the end of that episode: ‘For all the Mammies’: the episode showed how the characters we’d known as Mammies were once Derry Girls in their own right, getting up to mischief, hoping to be asked to dance at the school disco and with daydreams and illusions of their own.
And then there was the finale. It was Derry, so it had to be Halloween: the girls (and James) were dressed as angels (not swans!) and attending a Fat Boy Slim concert in St Columb’s Hall; a chapter of accidents survived, their moment of glory topping only their appearance as the Spice Girls a few weeks ago; Clare getting her first kiss; Orla wide-eyed at the free buffet; Erin and Michelle determined not to ‘be dicks’ when they meet Fatboy Slim… Meanwhile Ma Mary and Aunt Sarah are dressed as nuns, in authentic costumes hired out by Sister Michael and ‘the girls’ at extortionate prices (for a foreign holiday), with Ma Mary delivering the line of the series: ‘I think those Sisters of Mercy saw us coming…’ and then… suddenly…
Suddenly the unthinkable happens.
While the Mammies, Da and Granda Joe are sitting at home, the phone rings… Da says just one word. ‘When?’
Following the usual series of catastrophes, the girls and James get thrown out of the concert and find Da standing outside. You know it- they know it- by his face. He says one word. ‘Clare…’
And just like that, the Derry Girls grow up. In an instant. Sitting in a hospital waiting room, in their costumes, waiting for Clare to emerge. And the hug at the end… encircling one another in their angel-wing costumes, Fat Boy Slim’s Praise You playing slowly, in a minor key… the subsequent funeral sequence as you remember Clare’s Da driving them all to the concert, standing, triumphantly, in a trailer behind his new Mini, Clare exchanging a thumbs up and a grin with him…
It all led up to this. It all led up to innocence being lost and it all led up to childhood being over. Whether it was the stalled rollercoaster in Portrush, the moment at the end of Season 1, when the parents and teachers are reacting to news of another atrocity of the troubles as the girls, blissfully unaware, enjoy the chaos of a group step-aerobics routine in the school talent show; whether it’s the inspirational Miss De Brún moving to a better job because she has to pay her mortgage, Ma Mary abandoning her dreams of studying because she needs to be a good mother, or the moments when Granda Joe abandons his acerbic insults to his son-in-law to remember his late wife… Derry Girls transcends the ridiculous plot twist, the regional expression or the ‘it could only happen in Derry’ moments to state truths- delicately and authentically- which are true everywhere. For everyone. In any era.
So as the Derry Girls learn the only lesson that’s really been truly harsh for them- as James takes Orla’s hand as she tries to convince herself, ‘He’s going to be ok…’ the innocence ends. Reality hits home. It’s a devastating ending, but it’s beautiful as well, because those final frames make it clear that the bond of shared experience will carry the girls through everything. Just like it’s carried their parents. Just like it’s carried so many of us in Northern Ireland, who have experience of the troubles, and just like it carries people everywhere, through troubles of all kinds.
Derry Girls, then, with the final ‘one year later’ episode still to come. It gets me every time. Even though I’m too old to be one of the girls, too young to be one of the Mammies, not cool enough to be Miss De Brún, and not funny enough to be Sister Michael.
Because in Derry, Belfast, Portrush and just about everywhere I can think of, we grow up, we learn things, we mess up, and there will always be a plot twist to knock us off our stride. The rollercoaster might stall, but it’s got to move again eventually, with all those sickening ups and downs.
And knowing that that can happen everywhere, to everyone- and that it's our friendships and our bonds that will carry us through it all? That’s a universal state of mind.
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