Against the Tide Read online

  During the British period of occupation there were many raids for arms and hostages were taken to clear the barricades or ambushed roads outside the town. Our houses were searched for men ‘on the run’. Armed soldiers took over total control. The fear was instant and freezing. ‘Please God, let them go away, and leave us alone.’ I’m afraid that there was always the emphasis on that ‘us’; let them torment someone else. The awful selfish self-preservation of the hunger camps affects us all.

  The child of a large family, such as ours was, is nearly inevitably deprived of the emotional nurturing found in the stable small family. In the large family neither the mother nor the father can make the time needed to socialise with the children. Children are deprived of the personality moulding, formative process of intensive or casual intelligently-directed conversation with the parents. It is not surprising that we understood little except the crude differences between pleasure and pain.

  There was one comforting feature in our family’s life. This happened at near five o’clock on a summer’s evening when our tea, bread and butter was ready. It was my mother’s practice, a strange one for the shy country girl she was, to stand outside at the front door of our house on the step. Then, no doubt to the neighbours’ surprise since no-one else did it, she proceeded to whistle us all home. This distinctive slow rising and falling whistle was the ‘exclusive’ Browne sound. Wherever we were playing, in Begley’s or Duffy’s yard, by the Shannon or in Kane’s field at the back of the house, playing hopscotch, rolling hoops, or smashing our champion chestnuts against our rivals’ we would all, like the sunflower turning to the sun, wend our way towards home, and our waiting mother, and tea. She would remain at the door and continue to whistle until she could count all of us safely home at last. Such was a child’s life in the town of Athlone in spite of the Civil War we played. We found that her fragmented love for us was sufficient.

  I became a pupil at the Marist Brothers’ school. I served Mass at St Mary’s throughout my life there and could be depended on to turn up in time in all weathers. (My mother was pleased to see me involved even at this remove in church services; she hoped that I would one day become a priest, like all Irish Catholic mothers of her time.) It was there that I was subjected to the torment of copper-plate handwriting. We were compelled to copy the headline copy books with our right hands, and I was naturally left-handed, a ‘citeóg’. In those times a person who wrote with their left hand was considered to be in some way in league with the devil. The Marist Brothers’ solution, of compelling me to write exclusively with my right hand, was intended to solve the problem of my becoming the devil’s child. It left me unable to write legibly to this day, with either hand.

  I have happy memories of a patient young lay teacher, Mr Handley, who spoke Irish and gave us plasticine to play with. There was also a harassed and unhappy-looking older man, Mr Roper, whose appearance was somewhat intimidating. He lived in a pretty rose-covered cottage outside the town. Small in size and figure, he wore grey knickerbockers with long grey stockings and brightly-polished black kid laced boots. He was nearly bald, with a few wisps of what had been red hair brushed carefully across his head, and had small eyes. His face was that of an impatient man with a short temper yet I do not recall his being unduly angry at any time.

  This was the time when the new native government, under Marcus O’Sullivan, the Minister for Education, was enthusiastically, and not very wisely, pressing forward with their insistence that we should all speak Gaelic, irrespective of whether the language of the home was Gaelic or English. This was just one example of the non-Irish speaking enthusiast’s impractical and bizarre belief that he could, irrespective of its results on others, achieve the impossible. Do what I say, but not what I do. I understood that Mr Roper, who appeared to be in his late forties, was submitted to a brief ‘crash’ course in the Irish language. Understandably, it was impossible for him to learn the language, in such a short time, and consequently to teach it to us. He himself neither knew nor spoke, and possibly did not even like the language. He certainly did not appear to share his Minister’s love of it.

  In the infant’s class I had the sole unhappy experience of my childhood with either of my parents. It was the custom in the school, following the First Communion ceremony, for the brothers to celebrate the day by giving the children a fine breakfast. Very few of us had any such breakfast at home. Somehow I happened to be at the school one morning on the boys’ return from their First Communion. They were dressed as was the custom in shiny black boots, short pants, spotlessly washed white shirts, and grey socks, knees pink with the cold, and carried with pride their red-ribboned Holy Communion medals. As they filed into the converted classroom for breakfast, Mr Handley told me to join the others at the breakfast table. I can still recall the large fried egg, placed on the centre of a piece of fried bread, tea, bread and butter unlimited. On the completion of the meal I returned home, and was astonished to find my gentle mother very angry with me. Alas, she was over-sensitive, and afraid that the breakfast I had been given by a kindly Mr Handley was intended as a charitable gesture to her ‘hungry poverty-stricken child’. She came from a proud village family home in Co Mayo and was deeply hurt by the implications of charity, a common false pride in such Irish homes then.

  Following release from infants’ class, I made my First Communion, and the now famous breakfast was rightly earned and eaten. I passed into Brother John’s class: he was known to his colleagues as ‘Snowball’. He was a small, neatly-dressed man, with well cared-for white crinkly hair, and the most delicately-shaped hands and fingers I have ever seen on man or woman. He had clever blue eyes and a finely-formed nose; his mouth was small, firm and mean. When his clever eyes became brighter, and his face cherry-coloured, we knew he was angry, and that we would soon see the brisk swinging action of his springy yellow cane. He had only one serious interest in life, Gregorian chant. The miscellaneous nondescript room, full of boys poorly but cleanly dressed, with no vestige of culture, inexplicably presented to Brother John a collection of potential songbirds. From these he found it possible, in time, to extract beautiful musical sounds. He would simply persist and pray, and maybe cane a few of us if need be, in order to relieve his frustration and improve our singing. He appeared to me to look over us, to look through us, to look around us, but never at us. Were we there at all for him? I cannot recall having any formal classes about academic subjects during his classes. The cane, with the traditional incongruous tiny handle, protruded like a ‘shooter’ in a Western cowboy picture from his cassock pocket, always at the ready.

  Because I was punctual, predictable, and never missed school, Brother John chose to rely on me to run messages. I was given the money needed to fetch jotters and school books from the shop opposite the Prince of Wales Hotel in the centre of the town. I knew how to count and bring back the correct change. The most important message, for which I was dispatched early in the morning, was a large roll of shiny black paper, about the size of a roll of wallpaper. On my return with this black roll and a large box of drawing pins, Brother John would tell us all to be silent. It was then I would notice his thin, nimble, wax-like fingers. He would unroll the shiny black paper and attach it with fine precision to the left-hand side of the blackboard, then unroll the paper and pin it to the board until it crossed to the outer edge, where he pinned it again. This transformed the school blackboard into a shiny rectangle, like black glass. We watched in silence, not a word from anyone. Brother John had that effect on all of us: he rarely, if ever, spoke to us.

  Having provided himself with this enormous sheet of black glass, he would then bring out a manual and begin to write musical notes, his fingers as controlled as precision instruments. We would then be told to climb up on our seats, for all the world like clumsy blackbirds on the branches of a tree, and singing lessons would begin. We sang and sang all day long. The odd thing is that I do not recollect that we ever acted as a choir in St Mary’s church, which would have justified the ti
me spent on the lessons.

  Brother Maher, my teacher when I passed into the higher class, was a tall powerfully-built, curly-haired, bright-eyed young man, who took his teaching very seriously and was good at it. Unfortunately, he also liked to support his methods with the free use of the cane. To us he was a giant and although he never beat me — indeed I was not beaten by anyone during my time in Athlone or Ballinrobe — being beaten by these men must have been a truly shocking experience for a child.

  During school breaks from the classroom we played in the stony playground. Few of us escaped a visit to the local District Hospital with torn knees and hands, results of our falls. With three other boys I was once caught taking apples from the Marist Brothers’ orchard. I can remember the threat of the Brother, ‘I should take you down to the station’, but he did not carry it out.

  The most enjoyable part of my life in Athlone was when, aged about seven, I was taken on as helper by the (to me) enormous Mr Molloy, our milkman, who delivered milk in his donkey cart to his customers at a decidedly leisurely pace every morning. The poor donkey, heavily laden, could not be blamed for taking its time. The warm milk, straight from the newly-milked cow in the cowshed, was contained in a truly grand brassbound steel churn about four feet high. A brass tap delivered the milk into a classic triangular pint measure. The donkey cart was the regulation Reckitt’s blue, with red shafts and red wheels. Even though I was small, there were just about nine inches for me beside Mr Molloy on the seat, a long flat plank placed across the sides of the cart.

  We meandered along upper and lower Irishtown, delivering the milk. Then, in the pub near the bridge over the Shannon, Mr Molloy, who was a quiet, redfaced moustached man — he had been a rowing man in his youth but had badly ‘gone to seed’ — would take a ritual mid-morning pint. I minded the donkey. After I had ‘served my time’ and learned how to drive, to regulate the tap and to fill the measure (once or twice according to the customer’s needs with always the small extra drop for luck or for the cat) it became Mr Molloy’s practice to dismount slowly and solemnly outside the pub, enter a sweet shop, and bring me out a small twist of brown paper, filled with a pennyworth of sweets. We never said anything to one another. I knew real happiness for the first time in my life when he would hand me the reins of the donkey. I had absolute freedom and responsibility to drive the cart back to Molloy’s farm at Ballymahon. I was a Roman charioteer in full flight with my fine, intelligent, speedy donkey and we trotted home just this side of a gallop. I learnt the well-known truth that the sprightly willing horse or donkey, on the way home, is an entirely different animal from the same perpetually exhausted creature on its way into town, to the market. They lose years, and develop a new spring, power and speed in their legs and feet, on their way back to the stable and a feed of hay in the manger. Mrs Molloy, a kind and gentle English lady, hearing us thundering down the hill on our way to the farm would caution me of the danger of a fall and the consequence of injury to myself. But I enjoyed standing up in the centre of the cart, aflame with the excitement, the clinking noise of the harness, and the iron clatter of the wheels on the road.

  Mrs Molloy probably rendered all of us in the family a very special service, for she always insisted that I take a can of milk home to my mother to make rice puddings and porridge and use for the tea. It became the only worthwhile feature of the otherwise bread-and-rhubarb jam diet of our class.

  Our kitchen had a single cold tap, and an open Stanley range on which was a giant iron black kettle. My mother continually organised our spotlessly clean and ironed clothes. The iron was a flat, solid contraption, heated on the red coals of the fire; she would spit on it to judge the heat by the sizzle. She boiled the black kettle endlessly on the range, making tea, washing dishes, or laundering the family’s clothes. She made our bread, cooked puddings and porridge and, thanks to Mrs Molloy’s kind gift of milk, occasionally baked a raisin-filled rice pudding in the oven. She sweated and scorched herself over the old bastable pot oven making the large cartwheels of soda bread needed to keep her growing family nourished. One persistent memory I have of my mother is her hands, her thin hands, stoking the coals with the tongs on to the top of the lid and under the pot itself in order to raise the heat enough for cooking bread well into the night. Her face and forehead would be wet with sweat, the lines of her black hair clinging to her harassed face, pink with heat. Always it was ‘for the will of God and His Holy Mother’, as she would tell us to the end of her life.

  From my mother I learned an assortment of semi-religious secular sayings for every disaster, every dilemma: ‘age is honourable’, ‘show me your friends, and I’ll tell you what you are’, ‘the mills of God grind slow but sure’. Most things were ‘a sign from God’. Throughout the many disasters which affected herself and the rest of us until her lonely death in a London workhouse, she kept this unquestioning childlike faith, trusting in a kindly God. Progressively, slowly, but in her memory regretfully, I ceased to share it.

  Long after our homework was completed under the yellow light of the oil lamp and our rosary had been said, lying in bed upstairs we were lulled to sleep by the rhythmic swish and stop and swish again of my mother’s foot treadle Singer sewing machine. A dressmaker before her marriage, she made all our clothes as well as knitting our pullovers and socks. My father, in spite of his own exhaustion, still managed to mend our boots on the oldtime last, inseparable from any workingclass home.

  A member of the Murphy family, a Republican, with whom my mother had worked in Ballinrobe before her marriage, stayed with us on his release from Custume Barracks. He had been imprisoned by the Free State forces.

  My recollections of my father are slight. He was out virtually all day and home later, dead tired with little to say to us. When I could I stood beside him, watching and following him like a tail on a high-flying kite. With the exception of the incident of the ambush outside our home, I cannot recall him showing anger or displeasure with anyone. My mother and my father appeared to find peace and tranquillity in their loving relationship. I recall on one occasion seeing him sitting by the evening lamplight in a great galvanised iron bath by the fireside, his back being washed by my mother, following a truly horrendous day in mid-winter in which he had had to cycle through many miles of rain and cold. His income of £5 a week remained static as he slowly destroyed himself working long and late hours.

  On Sundays my father derived much pleasure from singing and accompanying himself on the piano in the parlour, surrounded by all his prizes for athletic success. His songs were old Victorian ballads, such as ‘The snowy-breasted pearl’ and ‘I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls’. He had a pleasant light tenor voice and we children greatly enjoyed listening to him. He took us for walks in the surrounding country-side, but they were largely silent, though pleasant, excursions.

  Being from a rural family, he used to cultivate our garden. He’d slice the potatoes and show me the ‘eyes’, which he then placed at regular distances, pointing upwards, in the straight neat ridges of rich black clay. There was no babble of information. We planted a seed pip from an apple which became the fine apple tree that still grew in that garden the last time I looked for it.

  My father’s work was concerned with the protection of children in the surrounding counties, who were at risk from deliberate cruelty. On an old-fashioned high-framed bicycle he cycled virtually everywhere, covering great distances in all weathers. The usual causes for cruelty to children were widespread poverty and the fact that most families were too large to manage. Because of his somewhat distasteful job, taking children from their homes on court orders in cases where, in his view, they were enduring needless suffering, my father’s activities were frequently greatly resented. He was assaulted on one occasion outside the courts and on another was shot at on his way home towards Athlone. But the most awesome demonstration of hostility happened one afternoon in mid-summer. We children were playing with our tops outside our house when we heard the sounds of wailing women, cryi
ng and shouting. They came from the direction of Lower Irishtown and were heading our way.

  Amongst the crowd there was a distinctive lady, the centre of the cursing, jeering and shouting crowd which continued to gather outside our house. She was a distinctly frightening, powerfully-built, very old woman. We children scattered up the lane and into the house by the back door to watch her and the crowd from a safe distance, behind the curtains of the parlour windows. This old lady had long, tangled, rusty-grey, curly hair, which reached down to her shoulders and around her neck. Her loose wrinkled skin had the awful yellow dirty colour which is sometimes seen on the aged who have lived their lives indoors, in semi-darkness. Her clothes were simply an old skirt, green with age, and her once black shawl. Her eyes were of a watery blue, washed with tears of anger or distress. Her mouth had long since lost all its teeth.

  Like a great Diva playing a sequence in grand opera, she sank slowly to her knees. She then opened her powerful lungs and in a mighty voice, and with great feeling, called on God, his angels, and his saints, to curse and damn for ever my father, with all ‘his breed and seed’. She then turned to each of us children, and wished us unending disasters and unhappiness to all our children, and to their children throughout their lives, with a death in the end for all of us of great agony and pain, to be followed by never-ending torment by the devils in a deepest hell.