All of These People: A Memoir

Thirty years later I met her at a party held in Dublin to celebrate the work of the poet Patrick Kavanagh. My father had come with me. It was a glorious summer’s evening and Siobhan looked radiant and every inch the great lady of the stage. My father approached her and introduced me: “This is Fergal. Your godson.’

Siobhan smiled and threw her arms around me, and the entire gathering of poets and playwrights seemed to stop in their tracks as she declaimed: ‘Sure it was a poor godmother I was to you.’ She stroked my cheek and then stepped back, looking me up and down: ‘But you turned out a decent boy all the same.’

My father laughed. I laughed.

‘That’s actors for you,’ he said.

Éamonn and Maura both loved books. Our home in Dublin was full of them. I remember so vividly the musk of old pages pressed together, books with titles like Tristram Shandy, The Master and Margarita and 1000 Years of Irish Poetry. I have that last one still, rescued from the past. My father liked the rebel ballads:

Oh we’re off to Dublin in the Green in the Green .. ., Where the rifles crash and the bayonets flash To the echo of a Thompson gun.

My mother would sing ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’. Her voice trembled on the high notes.

Down by the Sally Gardens, My love and I did meet, She passed the Sally Gardens, With little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy As the grass grows on the weir Ah but I was young and foolish And now am full of tears.

My parents were the first to foster in me the idea that I might someday be a writer. The first stories they read to me were Irish legends. As I got older they urged me to read more demanding works. I believe my first introduction to the literature of human rights came when my mother gave me a copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm when I was around ten.

My father wrote plays and poems, but it was his gift for interpreting the writings of others which made him one of the most celebrated Irish actors of his generation. Sometimes when my father was lying in bed at night rehearsing his lines I would creep in beside him. After a while he would switch out the light and place the radio on the bed between us. We would listen to a late-night satirical programme called Get An Earful of This which had just started broadcasting on RTE. Get an earful of this, it’s a show you can’t miss. The show challenged the official truths of Ireland and poked fun at its political leaders. My father delighted in this subversion. In my mind’s eye I can still see him beside me laughing, his face half reflected by the light shining from the control dials of the radio, the red tip of his cigarette glowing in the dark and me falling asleep against his shoulder.

Nothing in either of my parents’ natures fitted the grey republic in which they grew up. Sometimes my father’s outspokenness could get him into serious trouble. Once he was hired to perform at the annual dinner of the Donegalmen’s Association in Dublin. The usual form was for the President of the Association to speak, followed by a well-known politician, and then for my father to recite poems and pieces of prose.

On this particular night the politician was a narrow-minded Republican, Neil Blaney, who in 1957 was Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, the department which controlled RTE, my father’s place of employment. At the time the government of Éamonn de Valera was making strenuous efforts to bring RTE into line after some unexpected outburst of independence on the part of programme-makers. My father later claimed that Blaney had denounced the drama department at RTE in the course of his speech to the Donegalmen. The historian Professor Dermot Keogh went to the trouble of researching the old files on the incident. He published the official memorandum a dry account of what was surely an incendiary occasion:

Before the dinner started Mr Keane left his own place at the table and sat immediately opposite where the Minister would be seated. When the Minister arrived, and grace had been said, Keane began to hurl offensive epithets across the table at the Minister and had to be removed forcibly from the Hall. Mr Keane was suspended from duty on 22nd November.

Quoting a civil service inter-departmental memorandum, Professor Keogh wrote:

Described as ‘a substantive Clerical Officer’ who had been ‘seconded to actor work as the result of a competition held in 1953’, Keane submitted ‘an abject apology in writing for his behaviour.’ He said he had been feeling unwell before the dinner and had strong drink forced on him to settle his nerves, with the result that he lost control of himself and did not realise what he had been saying.

The memorandum added tartly:

The action did not appear to Mr Blaney to be that of a man not knowing what he was doing. Mr Blaney said that Keane came very deliberately to the place where he knew the minister would be and that when Keane arrived in the hall he did not appear to have much, if any, drink taken.

Blaney was vindictive. My father lost his post as an actor and was sent to work as a clerical officer in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. He didn’t last long and left to work as a freelance actor in Britain. Years later my father told me what he had said to Blaney. Drink was definitely involved but I think my father would have said what he had in any case. He told the minister that his only vision of culture was his ‘arse in a duckpond in County Donegal’. Keeping with the marshy metaphors he said that as a minister Blaney was as much use as ‘a lighthouse in the Bog of Allen’.

There was uproar. My father told me it was a price well worth paying. His verdict, nearly thirty years later, was: ‘That ignorant gobshite! What would he know about culture?’

Years later Blaney would achieve notoriety when he was sacked from the cabinet amid allegations that he had been involved in smuggling arms to nationalists in Northern Ireland.

My first memory of childhood is of clouds. They are big black clouds and they sit on the roofs of the houses in Finglas West. I see them because I have run out of the house. I cannot remember why. The garden gate is tied with string. I cannot go any further, so I stand with my face pressed against the bars and watch the clouds. The bars feel cold and I press my face even closer, loving that coldness. I keep watching the clouds, wondering if they will fall from the sky, what noise they will make when they hit the ground. But the clouds just sit there. Then I hear my name being called.

‘Fergal, Fergal.’

It is my mother’s voice.

After a while she comes out and leads me back into the house.

There is silence inside. My father is upstairs. At this age I know nothing. But I can sense things. There is something about this silence that is not like other silences, not like the silence of very early morning, or the silence of a house where people are sleeping. It is the silence after an argument, as if anger has changed the pressure of the air. I have already learned to live inside my head; in my head there are ways to keep the silence at bay. I stand in the room and feel the silence for a moment and then I go deep into my head and start to dream, back to the clouds and the noise of rain, loud enough to fill the world with sound. This is how things have been from the moment I can remember.

I go to bed and stay awake as late as I can, lying in my room, listening for the sound of his homecoming: footsteps outside the front door, shuffling, a key scratching at the lock, and a voice that sings sometimes, and other times shouts, and other times is muffled, a voice being urged to quietness by my mother.

Drinking. What do you know about drinking when you are six years of age? More than you should is the quick answer. Drinking is someone changing so that their eyes are staring out from some other world to yours, flashing from happy to angry to sad, sometimes all in the same sentence; eyes that are far from you, as if behind them was a man who had been kidnapped and held prisoner; drinking is a mouth with a voice you know but cannot recognise because it is stretched and squashed, like a record played backwards, or the words falling around like children on ice, banging up against each other, careening across the evening with no direction, nothing making sense except the sound of your own heart pounding so loud you are sure every house in the street can hear it. Boom, boom, boom.

You imagine the noise travelling out of your bed and knocking on all the doors, waking up those sane, clean-living Irish families and spilling your secret. You are ashamed. Of that one thing you are certain. Shame. It becomes your second skin. You are sure other people know. Someone will have seen him come home, or heard him making a noise. They can read it in your eyes, in your silences and evasions, in the way you twitch and fidget. After nights lying awake for hours you go to school half sick for want of sleep, your mind miles away. The teacher speaks your name in Irish:

‘Are you listening, O’Cathain? Are you paying attention? Come up here and explain to the class what you were thinking about.’

‘Nothing, Bean Ui Bhanseil. Nothing.’

‘Don’t mind your nothing. What was I teaching just now? What did I read?’

‘I can’t remember. I’m sorry.’

Tabhair dom do labh. Give me your hand.

There. Now go back to your seat and pay attention. Don’t be crying like a mammy’s boy.

Other kids say that too. Mammy’s boy. They know how to get me going. A boy called Grant, a big fellow, always in trouble with the teachers, shouts at me one day: ‘Your mammy’s a pig.’ I attack him. I have no idea where the strength comes from but I go for the bastard and hurt him, until he gets over the shock and starts to hurt me. Punch, kick, punch. I am left sitting on the ground crying. Grant is right. I am my mother’s boy. I cling to her. I am her confidant.

As I get older I often sit up late with her. I have learned to make calculations. I know that if teatime passes, and homework time, and there is still no sign of him, there is a chance that my father is drinking. And if the evening news comes and goes without him I know it is a certainty. My mother corrects school homework. I watch the television. We wait. After the national anthem has played on RTE my mother switches off the television.

I have grown used to this tension and fear. It is my homeland. And here is the hardest thing to admit: I love being this boy who stays up late, this child who imagines himself as his mother’s protector, the boy who can listen to confidences, who is praised for being so mature. That’s me: Little Mr Mature. You could tell him anything.

My father always smiles when he sees me. He pulls me towards him, always gently, and I smell the smell that is half sweet and half stale, fumes of hot whiskey breath surround me and fill the room. He tells me that he loves me and he hugs me, again and again. If he is in a happy drunk state he tells stories about people he met on the way home – impossibly sentimental stories of kindnesses given and received; but if he’s angry he will curse some enemy of his at work, some actor who is conniving against him, some producer who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. He can rage bitterly. I don’t know why sometimes he is happy and other times angry. My father has never raised his hand to me. Nor can I remember him ever being consciously cruel to me. It is his anger that scares me, the violence that takes over his voice. Through it all I keep an eye on my mother, until she signals that I should go to bed, and reluctantly I climb the stairs.

Sometimes from upstairs I hear a louder voice. It echoes up the hallway. This voice is beyond control. I keep my eyes on the lights of cars flashing their beams across the ceiling. I put my hands to my ears. Downstairs I hear the sound of my childhood splintering. Only when it is quiet, long after it is quiet, do I sleep.

It is still a few years to their separation. At this point nothing is determined. I do not sense that a sundering is close. I am not afraid that they will break up. In this Ireland families do not break up because of drink. Families like us stay together. Instead I have this fear that they will both die. It comes to me in dreams. I dream that they are killed in a car crash and I wake up crying.

CHAPTER TWO Homeland

Many young men of twenty said goodbye. On that long day, From the break of dawn until the sun was high Many young men of twenty said goodbye.

‘Many Young Men Of Twenty’, JOHN B. KEANE

I had come back to Ireland with my parents in 1961, as thousands of their fellow countrymen were heading the other way. Our people clogged the mail boats to Holyhead with their cardboard suitcases and promises of jobs on the building sites. Éamonn and Maura lived in a succession of flats and boarding houses. They had little money. My father had acting work but if he started drinking there was no money. There were days of plenty and days of nothing. By now my mother was pregnant again. Two more children would follow in the next two years. Saving money for a deposit on a house was out of the question. Eventually they were given a house by the Dublin Corporation in one of the vast new council estates being built to the west of the city, in Finglas. In those days the tenements of inner-city Dublin were being cleared and the residents moved to vast new housing estates on the fringes of the city. One nineteenth-century writer described Finglas as a village where ‘the blue haze of smoke from its cottages softened the dark background of the trees’. But by the time we arrived there there were no cottages or trees. The green fields had been turned into avenue upon avenue of concrete.

In keeping with the nationalist ethos of the Republic many of the streets on the new estates were named after heroes of rebellions against the British. Go onto any council estate in Ireland and you will find streets named after guerrilla leaders. My parents were given the keys to a two-bedroom terraced house on Casement Green, named after Sir Roger Casement.

Éamonn and Maura would have stood out among the residents of Finglas. They were neither Dubliners nor working class. Both were well educated. Most of those they lived among had grown up on the hard streets of the inner city and left school at an early age to find work. It was said then of Finglas, and not quite jokingly, that it was so tough even the Alsatians walked around in pairs.

Our next-door neighbour was Breda Thunder. At dinner time her house smelled of boiled bacon ribs and cabbage, and chips with salt and vinegar. Breda was a handsome woman with auburn hair and laughing eyes – a native Dubliner, from Charlemont Street near the Grand Canal. Her husband Liam was a thin and wiry redhead and came from Rathmines on the other side of the canal. Breda and Liam arrived on the estate a few weeks after my parents. Years later Breda told me: ‘The first time I saw you, you were standing on your own in the garden near our fence, a lovely little boy with blond hair, just standing there and smiling. That’s how I’ll always see you.’

I loved her because she seemed so fearless. You felt safe around Breda. She was the first person I knew who showed no fear when my father was drunk. Breda had grown up in tenement Dublin, on some of the toughest streets in Europe, in an atmosphere where women learned early how to deal with men who drank, and where the only dependable wage for many was the ‘shilling a day’ earned in the service of the British military. Her own father, Jamesy Harris, had served in both world wars, and her grandfather fought in the Boer War. Breda had a good soldier’s courage.

Breda and Liam had five boys and had fostered a girl – the daughter of Liam’s brother Paddy who had been killed serving with the Irish Guards in Aden. Her sons were my first playmates. They were boisterous and noisy and loyal. The neighbourhood bullies knew to give the Thunder boys a wide berth. Pick on a Thunder or on any of their friends, and you had the whole clan to deal with. Once, a young policeman collared Breda’s second youngest son, Sean, for cycling on the pavement outside her house. The child was about five, and quite obviously too young to head out onto the open road. Breda looked out the window and saw the very tall policeman haranguing her child. Seconds later she was bearing down on him:

‘Where are you from?’ she demanded.

He replied that he came from County Mayo.

This triggered an automatic resentment in Breda’s heart. She was a proud Dubliner, convinced that the city had no equal anywhere in the world and believing that visitors to the city owed a debt of respect to the natives. Any public official from County Mayo or any of the remoter rural areas would initially have been regarded with suspicion by Breda and her neighbours. Only after proving themselves as decent souls would they be welcomed. To have a culchie – a country person – even if he was a policeman, tell her son he couldn’t cycle on Dublin concrete was an appalling insult.

‘Well, fuck off back there, you big ignorant gobshite! This is my town and I won’t have some culchie in size twelve boots frightening my child.’

The policeman departed soon after, followed by a hail of abuse.

Breda’s was a house of relentless noise, a great deal of which was laughter. One of her daily trials was raising her sons from their beds and hunting them out to school. None of them liked the Christian Brothers School in Finglas; all waited for the day when they could quit and go to work, and each morning there was the same vaudeville: Breda would stand at the bottom of the stairs and roar at her sleeping boys above. When this failed to rouse them she would run upstairs and shake them out of bed. She would then go back downstairs to prepare the breakfast and school lunches. The boys merely continued to sleep where they had fallen, or crept into another bed.

I have fragmented memories of that time. I remember walking with Breda to the shops on a misty morning in winter and seeing the horses of travellers grazing on the green, the owners camped nearby under plastic sheeting and their red-haired children running out to look at us. We called them ‘the tinkers’. My father said they lost their land when Cromwell drove the Irish into Connaught.

There were other mornings, standing in the hallway of Breda’s house, when her husband Liam would stop by with a trayful of cakes from the bakery where he worked. ‘Pick any one you want,’ he would say. There were sugary doughnuts, chocolate éclairs, custard slices and thick wedges of dark cake called ‘Donkey’s Gur’. The back of Liam’s van smelled of warm bread: turnover and batch loaves, fresh from the baker in Cabra. As he drove away other kids would run after the van. ‘Mr Breadman. Mr Breadman. Gi’s a cake, will ya.’ And I remember Breda’s happiness on a weekend night, when the work of feeding and cleaning was done, and she would sit in the small front room and tell stories about her father fighting the Nazis, before switching into song: The Roses are Blooming in Picardy…

My mother told me stories about our neighbours.

Near to the shops lived a family I will call the Murphys. Joe worked in a factory and Mary cleaned offices in the city. Such work involved leaving home every morning shortly after six and rushing home in the late afternoon in time to make dinner for the family. Mary spent her life on her knees, polishing the long floors of the Royal College of Surgeons for pitiful wages. In Mary’s case, cooking was a problem. She was a devoted mother but her ignorance of all but the basic rudiments of cooking shocked Breda. There was much resort to tins and packets in Mary’s house. So Breda Thunder took it upon herself to teach Mary how to prepare roast chicken and potatoes for Sunday lunch.

The following Monday, Mary knocked on Breda’s door. The chicken and spuds had been a triumph. Mary described in detail how the chicken had been divided:

‘You know, I had a leg for Joe, a leg for Peter and a leg for myself and for Martina, there was a leg for Mick too when he came in from work, and there was even one left over to give the dog in his bowl.’

Astonished at the profusion of legs on one chicken Breda declared: ‘Are you sure it was a chicken and not a fuckin’ centipede you cooked!’

As I grew older other neighbours and their children entered my field of vision. There was a woman called Sadie Doyle who lived on the opposite side of the street. Sadie wore a fur coat and her blonde hair in a beehive. She had a family of seven crammed into a tiny council house. When she came into Breda’s house the boys would start singing a Beatles song: Sexy Sadie, what have you done? You made a fool of everyone… Sadie would make to clip them on the ear and then burst out laughing.

Like Mary and Joe and Breda and Liam, Sadie worked all hours to keep her family fed and clothed. Sadie and Breda were much less romantic in their ideas about men than my mother. Both were immensely protective of Maura. They saw her as a lost innocent who had blundered into the world of marginal choices and needed protection if she was going to survive. My mother spoke with a different accent and was clearly a child of the Irish middle classes. But Breda and Sadie were immune to resentment or class bitterness. When she came to them Maura was thin and haggard, strained with the effort of caring for the man she married and her growing family. They saw a young woman in trouble and responded in the only way they knew.

With Breda acting as childminder my mother was able to go to work. She found a job on the other side of the city at a placed called Clontarf, an old, established suburb on the shores of Dublin Bay. ‘Clontarf is where Brian Boru was killed by the Danes when the Vikings invaded Ireland,’ she told me. A big Dane called Broder came into the King’s tent and murdered him.

My mother taught English and French to boys who had no interest in either. But she was alive in a way that these boys had never known a teacher to be. She told them stories and helped them to find something they did not know they had: their better nature. The headmaster was a strict man, a man of his time and place. I met him once and he surprised me, after what I had heard about him, by taking me to the basement and opening the door onto a room where he kept a huge train set. The room was dusty, smelled of chalk and ink, and the train sped around and around, through tunnels and past mountains, like the train to my grandmother’s house in Cork. I imagined him standing there after the school had emptied watching the endless journey of his tiny locomotives, a hard lonely prisoner of Ireland in the 1960s.

Now that my mother had a job there was regular money. She was saving every month, putting by a little into a special account because she dreamed of owning a house of her own. For my mother, coming from the comfortable world she did, it was not unusual to aspire to ownership. But for her neighbours, Breda and Liam, the money they were busy saving represented an unimaginable social change. In the old Ireland people like them didn’t get to own houses. They went from generation to generation in crumbling tenements or lived in hope of a flat in one of the new tower blocks. Liam Thunder had other ideas.

Finglas was getting tougher all the time. If he kept his sons there, there was a good chance at least one of them would get into trouble. Squad cars already called at other houses in the area. The police were becoming the enemy. In the years to come parts of Finglas would become notorious for drug dealing, as cheap heroin flooded into Dublin and boys from the area would become addicts, pushers and gangsters.

My mother kept saving. I think there may also have been part of her which believed that a move might somehow change my father. Once she had saved the deposit she started hunting for houses, far away in Terenure on the south side of the city. She found a handsome redbrick on a quiet street named Ashfield Park and we moved there in the middle of the 1960s.