A boy who dreams of going to the moon

The year is 1903. Eleven-year-old Finnigan O’Malley lived not among rolling green hills, but in the grimy embrace of Dublin’s tenements. His world was a symphony of coal smoke, cobbled streets slick with rain, and the ever-present murmur of his neighbours’ anxieties. But Finnigan’s mind soared far beyond the soot-stained brick walls. It soared to the moon.

He’d discovered it in a battered copy of “The Man in the Moon” – a children’s book passed down through generations of his family, its pages yellowed and brittle. The moon, depicted as a whimsical land of cheese and giggling moon-men, had ignited a fire in his soul. It wasn’t cheese and moon-men he dreamt of, though. Finnigan dreamt of reaching the moon.

His classmates scoffed. “Moon-struck Finnigan,” they’d call him, their laughter echoing off the damp brick buildings. They dreamt of escaping the tenements, maybe, becoming blacksmiths or dockworkers, but the moon? It was a fanciful notion, as far removed from their reality as the stars themselves.

But Finnigan was undeterred. He spent his days collecting scraps – discarded metal, glass, bits of wood – meticulously constructing fantastical contraptions in the cramped attic space he shared with his younger sister, Aisling. These were not mere toys; they were prototypes, rockets and lunar modules born from his feverish imagination and fueled by the pages of the tattered book and whispered stories from his grandfather about the wonders of the night sky.

His grandfather, a wizened old sailor with eyes that had seen the far reaches of the Earth, was his only confidante. He wouldn’t dismiss Finnigan’s dreams. He’d sit with him in the attic, listening patiently to his boy’s explanations of thrusters and trajectories, his weathered hands tracing the lines of Finnigan’s sketches.

One day, a travelling salesman arrived in their neighbourhood, showcasing his wares – a marvel of modern technology: a phonograph. The salesman spoke of “talking machines” and “Edison’s light,” concepts that sounded almost as fantastical as Finnigan’s moon journey. But it was the images on the phonograph’s cylinder label that captivated Finnigan – a grainy picture of a balloon, ascending into a cloudless sky.

An idea sparked in his mind, brighter than any Edison bulb. If a balloon could lift a man, maybe, just maybe…

The following months were a blur of activity. Finnigan, with his grandfather’s quiet assistance, began constructing a hot air balloon, not out of silk and canvas, but out of scavenged materials – oiled cloth, repurposed barrels, even a discarded umbrella for a makeshift gondola. It was a precarious, ramshackle contraption, but it held the weight of Finnigan’s dreams.

His launch day dawned overcast and blustery. Aisling stood beside him, her face a mixture of worry and wonder. His grandfather, leaning heavily on his cane, gave him a silent nod of encouragement. As the balloon ascended, carrying Finnigan towards the grey Dublin sky, he didn’t reach the moon that day. But he soared above his tenement, above his doubts, above the limitations of his reality. He was, for a brief moment, closer to his dream than ever before. And in that moment, he knew his journey to the moon had just begun.