Against the Tide Page 5

  Even more scandalous was the Christian Brothers’ behaviour to a young boy named Paddy Power, who lived with his mother, a widow since the first world war. They were a respected, quiet family, the eldest boy building up his own hairdressing business in the town. Perhaps because the father had fought and died for the British, the young son was chosen as a safe whipping boy, particularly by one of the senior brothers, a fearsome-looking redfaced bull of a man with a closecut convict haircut, who would take Power out to the garden shed at what appeared to be regular intervals. We could hear the screams of the helpless captive child, yells and cries for pity and release from his vicious tormentor.

  One winter’s day in the school yard, snowball fights began among the boys. This harmless fun suddenly changed with the appearance of one of the brothers, who normally made full use of the cane. An onlooker would have seen a gradual but concerted disintegration of the multiplicity of fights around the school yard. With a strange spontaneity, like a flight of starlings as they turn together, all the boys flew around the brother, cornering him against a school wall. The snowball fight took on a vicious intensity and seriousness as they sought to pound him with their snowball weapons, all of them against one. It was then that I acted independently of the mass of those around me. I went in beside the brother to help him fight back.

  This was a completely spontaneous action on my part, as I had no need to fear him myself, or to look for his favour. Instinctively I disliked the idea of the hopeless odds against him, and at the same time wondered and worried about the uncontrolled futile ferocity of the children. Clearly they hated the brother, whom they now believed they had cornered and helpless. Of course they were wrong. He was unhurt and would still bully them individually.

  A brother in one of the higher classes was even more intimidating. He was a powerfully built blond man, feared by all of us, who not only used the cane frequently and freely, but was a practising pederast as well. No young boy in his class was safe from his attentions. It was his practice to sit down at the desk and purport to be anxious to help whatever child he chose to sexually assault. What could the terrified child do, so young that he hardly knew what was happening to him? What mother or father in the Ballinrobe of those times would listen, or understand, or dare to take action, even if the child were to report the incident to them? Happily for myself, I left Ballinrobe before being admitted to that class.

  I had come across this sort of thing before. Once, in the school in Athlone, Brother John had asked me to guide a visiting member of the order who was inspecting classes in the school. I collected him from downstairs, where he had been talking to a class, and brought him upstairs to Brother John. The two of us had just arrived on the landing outside the classroom when he indicated that we should pause. The next thing I knew, the brother had convulsively thrown his arms around me and was kissing me passionately on the mouth. I was astonished and overwhelmed by a mixture of shame and shock that this assault should have been inflicted on me by a cleric. My mother had inculcated in all of us a sense of devout reverence for the ‘cloth’. We were taught to tip our forelock when we passed a priest in the street. It was my first experience of this kind with man or woman, since my mother never kissed or fondled me. The brother then moved away from me and with complete self-assurance and aplomb, opened the door to Brother John’s class, marched in with all the syrupy unction of his kind and proceeded to behave as if nothing had happened between us. My innocence was such that I simply accepted his behaviour as another adult aberration, surprising, peculiar and unpleasant.

  I stayed a time with my uncle Jack in Hollypark, near Craughwell, when I was about ten years of age. One day, my aunt Isabelle sent me with my young cousin to visit a curate friend of hers who lived some miles away from my uncle’s home. Shortly after our arrival at the curate’s residence I felt that there was something strange about him. Though I knew little of these things except what I had unexpectedly learned from the Marist Brother in Athlone, it was not long before I gathered that this middle-aged priest also had an affection for young boys. There was no bus until the following morning. Effectively, we were at the mercy of this middle-aged curate. I was deeply disturbed, and very upset at the prospect of having to stay the night. It was a small house with only two bedrooms, the curate sleeping in one and his housekeeper in the other.

  Bedtime arrived. While my cousin without demur agreed to stay the night with the curate and sleep in his bed, I blankly refused to join them. The night ended for me with a comic opera solution: I agreed that I would sleep in the bed of the priest’s house-keeper. I have distinct memories of some arrangement of a blanket partition between myself and the housekeeper. She need not have been worried, even if I had known of the possibilities and wished to avail myself of them. I fell asleep at once, totally exhausted by the struggle to keep away from the curate’s bed.

  Our home life in Ballinrobe was a mixture of happiness such as is found where the mother is especially gentle and loving, and of deadly fear. It had become apparent that our mother was very seriously ill. As the days went by, though she never complained to us, her discomfort and distress forced unavoidable cries from the intensity of her pain. She lay on the small sofa in the corner of our kitchen and moaned quietly between spasms. She never looked for medical care since she knew she could not afford it, or else, I suspect, she was unable to bring herself to take the charity of Poor Law medical services, even if she in fact knew of their existence. My mother may well have been the original source of the family infection; she had always suffered from an incessant, productive cough, and was a delicate woman.

  She now became the child, to be nursed, protected and cared for. It was our delight to be permitted to look after her. We would ‘gladly put our hands under her feet’. There were five of us at home all under twelve years of age. We did all the work in the house, washing dishes and making the fire. (I was severely burnt on the face with the explosion of the paraffin oil which I had unwisely used to light it — there was no call to the doctor on that occasion either). I carried in the turf, went down to the River Robe with a small home-made four-wheeled contraption for the water, and dug the garden to plant potatoes as I had seen my father do in Athlone. We kept the house bright, clean and shiny.

  My eldest brother, crippled Jody, got a job as a messenger boy in a local grocery shop. It was a truly shaming sight to watch this pitifully small hunchbacked figure, with his heavily laden messenger-boy’s bicycle, pushing through the hilly streets of Ballinrobe delivering groceries to the big houses. He was paid a pittance each week-end, together with a white paper bag full of the torn bacon slices which had fallen beneath the bacon-slicing machine.

  Neither in Athlone nor in Ballinrobe were we at any time visited by any public official or person of substance other than the rent collector. No member of a religious order, nun, priest, or brother, came near the house to see if we needed help. Life in Ireland then was completely unconcerned with and uncaring for the poor. It was in Ballinrobe that a very hurtful remark was made to me by one of the children with whom I was playing. My young friend had simply repeated what he had heard at home from his parents. Angry about something I had said or done to him, he jeered, ‘you had to come to Ballinrobe to be fed’. When I told my mother, she cried.

  My mother had found that she was unwelcome in Ballinrobe. She must also have concluded that she was suffering from an illness from which she would shortly die. As orphans and paupers we could be sent to a workhouse or an industrial school. As a boy, I would be sent to either Artane in Dublin or Letterfrack in Co. Galway, each of which had a justifiably grim reputation. In desperation, she decided to take us to our eldest sister, Eileen, who had emigrated to London in 1926, aged sixteen. Unable to pay for medical treatment or care, she would not leave us to go to a sanatorium. Because she had no money with which she could pay our fares to London, she must first sell all that she had.

  In the way of children, I did not know of the impending tragedy. School was tolerable, th
e pleasures of boys in rural Ireland were enjoyable: football, fishing, street games, and the competitive Sunday sports in nearby villages. One day I was shocked to see the blank walls of the town covered with the local auctioneer’s small yellow posters, telling those who cared to read them that everything the Brownes had in their small terraced house was up for sale by auction. My mother was forced to sell everything, the few personal possessions which she had chosen and bought with my father for use in their hoped-for years of married life together.

  On auction day she sat through the ordeal, watching the people of the town where she was brought up and had worked as a young woman bidding for her possessions. The people knew that ‘everything had to be sold’, regardless of its price. She must have wondered about these strange creatures, now on their first and only visit to her home, who were prepared to strip her and her orphan children of all they had.

  Having gathered our few clothes, we made our way to Ballinrobe railway station. There we took the train for Dublin, Kingstown, and finally London. My mother had had no experience whatever in arranging such matters as travel, even inside Ireland. She now faced her via dolorosa, the long, tiring, journey to London into an unknown future with all her children, one of whom was a cripple.

  Before leaving Ballinrobe she was compelled to take one more cruel decision. She had to part with her young daughter Una, nine years of age, whom she loved as much as she did the rest of us. Our aunt, Martha Jennings, a sister who had emigrated to New York when young, had offered to take Una to live with her. My mother believed that it would be a wonderful opportunity for Una to be free from the threat of an Irish workhouse; there was hope for a life in America, away from the hard-faced society in which she lived. Unaccompanied, Una was sent to the States in an emigrant ship which sailed from Galway. To the end of her life, Una was embittered by this apparent rejection by her mother. Inexplicably, for she was too young to understand, she had been sent on that long fearful journey to America to live with someone whom she did not know. Worse still, the aunt exploited her as cheap domestic labour. In spite of this, Una finally managed to complete her training as a state registered nurse. Married, she knew much happiness for a few years, and made a life for herself and her family, who loved her dearly. In the end she was afflicted with a rare form of tuberculosis, Addison’s disease, from which she died at an early age, having previously suffered the loss of her eldest son, Paddy, in a car accident.

  There is reason to believe that a subordinate cause of death arose from the shock of Paddy’s death. He had completed his military service with the US Navy, and with his discharge bounty had bought himself a sports car, popular with the ‘young bloods’ in the United States. He had taken it onto a busy highway while still unused to it. Shortly after midnight Una heard the telephone ring to give the message most feared by all mothers— ‘There’s been an accident’. Paddy was dead. Una worshipped her Paddy, a red-blooded Irish-American, full of a sardonic wit and charm inherited from his mother.

  After Una had left the house with my mother in a car, I can recall myself, my brother Jody and my sister Martha sitting on the top of the stairs with our arms around one another, crying our eyes out. Because my mother had had to leave us to travel with Una to Galway, we wrongly believed that we too had been abandoned by her. Between self-pity and the loss of Una we endured our own ‘American wake’ for our tiny emigrant sister. I was not to meet her again for forty years.

  But what of the agony of my mother? Una had simply become one of the many hundreds of thousands of rejected Irish unwanted by their own society. In the words spoken for all of them by my young school friend in Ballinrobe, ‘It’s no use coming to us to be fed’; this would be an apt epithet for our Irish ethos.

  The carriage doors slammed, with no-one to wave us farewell. Surrounded by her young family, my mother finally broke down, and wept quietly. The train steamed out, on its way to the emigrant boat, and London.

  Eileen found a temporary home for us with an English family in Herne Hill near London. My mother had saved us just in time; within days of our arrival, she lay in a coma. My final memory of this unique woman is when we children were each called into the hallway where she lay on a stretcher to bid her ‘good-bye’. I was twelve years old. I recall leaning down across the stretcher to kiss her on the forehead. It was moist and sallow in colour, a single bead of sweat on it. Her eyes were closed, as if in a sleep of deep exhaustion. She did not acknowledge our farewells. Shortly afterwards she was moved to the waiting ambulance outside, and brought to a public ward in a London hospital. Within a few days she was dead. The final humiliation of this proud, brave Mayo country girl still awaited her; she was buried in an unknown pauper’s grave in London because Eileen could not afford anything better for the mother she so dearly loved.

  Recently I made a visit to Ballinrobe with my wife. I walked through the streets for the first time since I had been there as a child. It had changed little. On our way home I was surprised to find myself being overcome by a sudden overwhelming black depression. I was compelled to stop the car and get out, in an attempt to conceal my emotions from my wife. Somewhat to my embarrassment and surprise I was overcome by waves of uncontrollable tears. I leant on the car roof until these had passed, a bit ashamed of myself at this unusual happening; I then got back into the car and we continued on our journey. The contrast between my two lives in Athlone and then Ballinrobe, and the memories of my family, had left their own mark.

  Eileen’s agony was now about to begin. In her early twenties, she was to endure a succession of crushing ordeals that led to her lonely death in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Italy.

  Eileen was cast in the mould of my mother. I could not pay her a higher tribute. She had a quality which led people to admire her courage and, if at all possible, to help her. She was good-humoured, charming and highly intelligent, and much admired for her classic black-haired blue-eyed Celtic colouring. So that she could take care of us all, she chose to remain unmarried, never even to enjoy the fleeting happiness experienced by my mother and father during their tragic years together.

  Before our arrival Eileen, a first-class administrator, had found work in a holiday home, owned by a Miss Salter, in Worthing. It was one of those institutions found in England during its colonial period, the only homes known by the children of the colonial administrators. For reasons of health or education, the children could not join their parents in the colonies, so children and parents were deprived of each other’s company and of any family life together; the children went from the unloving life of the public school to the equally uncaring life of the holiday home. Miss Salter’s generosity made it possible for all of our family to live in this home, where Eileen acted as manager, administrator and housekeeper.

  By a fortunate coincidence Miss Salter had a sister who was joint proprietor of St Anthony’s school in Eastbourne, a small Catholic preparatory school, and she had me admitted to this exclusive school, free of charge. Once again I was to be rescued from my frighteningly insecure future. In spite of the harrowing experiences through which we had just lived, with the resilience of a child I became occupied with my next new experience and in October 1929 I set out for St. Anthony’s from London in the buggy seat of an open sports car driven by an actress friend of Eileen’s named Eve.

  3

  Education in England

  UNDER the teaching of the Christian Brothers in Ballinrobe I had come to believe that the English were a race to be hated, the nation which had tormented and persecuted our people for many centuries. I had become a militant Irish republican, waiting for the day when I could join those others now in jail or ‘on the run’ and, if need be, die for Ireland. I was also deeply committed to a particularly paranoid, militant brand of Catholicism, which condemned the Protestant faith of the British people.

  On my arrival in Britain, the discovery that the grass grew green, the sun shone and the swallows flew freely above was a real surprise to me. But this phase of my aggressive republi
canism, and certainly my anti-British convictions, obstinately survived my stay in St Anthony’s. Other misconceptions about the British could not survive against their astonishing hospitality and generosity and their acceptance and care for many of our family, and for tens of thousands of strangers from Ireland such as us, rejected by their own.

  St Anthony’s was a preparatory school intended exclusively for the education of the sons of wealthy Catholic families. However, since there were not sufficient English Catholics to keep it filled, it had become pleasantly cosmopolitan, with a high proportion of Central and South American pupils, as well as French, Central European, and American. French and Spanish were spoken nearly as widely as English.

  Though I had passed through a distressing family tragedy, I appeared to have developed a tough emotional patina with a growing imperviousness to personal distress. I was a healthy young boy who had astonishingly been transmuted, from an emotionally painful and physically impoverished home, into being a member of the pampered class. It was impossible to remain unmoved or unchanged. At St Anthony’s we had small classes, with university graduates to teach all subjects; we had a fine gymnasium, spacious playing fields and, in summer, access to a full-sized heated swimming pool. Our food seemed, to my impoverished tastes, like a series of state banquets. The dormitories were large, clean, and served by sumptuous bath and washroom facilities. In Ballinrobe we had carried water by the bucket from the River Robe.