The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll (2 page)

I left the bar slightly baffled. But delighted. Not only was I going to write a book on a complex, fascinating character, I’d met someone I felt would be a major new presence in my life.

Prologue

THE CURTAIN had just come down on
Mrs Brown’s Last Wedding
at Hull’s New Theatre that wet and windy Saturday night on 25 November 2009, when Brendan called together the cast for a meeting.

Those who’d watched the show, a reprise of the very first Mrs Brown stage adventure featuring Agnes and her dysfunctional family, had laughed till they cried and applauded till their hands ached.

But only 150 people had turned out that night, in a theatre that held 1,159. And this wasn’t the first box-office disaster of the tour. Every theatre reported a major drop in ticket sales.

Brendan O’Carroll, aka Agnes Brown, knew the writing wasn’t only on the wall; it was on the invoices and final demands from sound crews, advertising agencies, car companies, and hotels – and all in red ink.

So he’d come to a decision. As the doors of the theatre were clattering shut and the slowest members of the audience shuffling home, Brendan asked the whole troupe to sit down on the stage. Tearfully he told them that it was all over, the end of Mrs Brown on tour – he simply couldn’t afford to keep the show on the road.

Struggling to hold his voice steady, he informed the cast, including his wife, his son, his daughter, his sister, his son-in-law, his daughter-in-law and friends he’d known for 20 years, that tonight was the last hurrah. The cast were stunned, if not entirely surprised. They offered each other consolatory hugs and sniffled against Mrs Brown’s beige cardie.

And at the end of the night, each shuffled off into the darkness, facing a future with little hope. The Mrs Brown dream, their lives together, the fun of touring, the very comfortable living they’d made, was over. How would bills be paid? These weren’t career actors; most had only ever worked on stage alongside Agnes Brown. The air hung heavy with the dark, unspoken reality. The fat lady was finally singing.

Or was she?

Brendan’s lucky leprechaun was waiting in the wings. Ready to find a way to silence her.

Automatic Womb

FROM that day we first met, ten years ago, Brendan and I established a pattern in our relationship. When Brendan arrived in Glasgow we’d meet up in his favourite café and talk right through the afternoon hours.

The chats would seldom pass uninterrupted, however. Aside from the waiters and waitresses coming over to say hello (he knew not only their first names, but little details of their lives), the members of the Mrs Brown circus would pop in: wife Jenny, son Danny or friend Bugsy. They’d all say hi and offer a quick hug. I was drawn into this close world. (I could see Brendan didn’t need to seek out the new. Everything and everybody he needed travelled with him.)

We were close, and it was all very relaxed when we got down to the matter of his life story.

‘I suppose I’d better start with my grandmother’s story,’ he says, taking a sip of cappuccino, as if to fuel the tale that was about to unfold.

‘Flashback to 17 September 1911, in Dublin City, Ireland. And seventeen-year-old Lizzie was set to marry Michael McHugh. The pair were madly in love and ready to head to America together to start a new life – but without telling Lizzie’s parents.

‘Why did they need to elope? Well, Ireland was a desperate place at the time; life was tough and young people were emigrating across the globe. But for them there was more than that. Lizzie’s father, you see, was deeply against them marrying. Michael was a Republican associated with Michael Collins’ “Brotherhood”, which Lizzie’s father detested, and Michael, in his mid-thirties, was almost the same age as Lizzie’s father himself.

‘So, when Lizzie’s father heard of the romance, he pummelled Michael with the poker, breaking his forearm and collarbone. Michael and Lizzie knew there and then that they had to escape Ireland. That’s why they had saved for a year to buy the tickets for the long sea voyage.

‘But Lizzie’s mother found out about the plan and convinced her husband he had to accept Michael, or he’d lose his daughter for ever.

‘And he did. Michael and Lizzie’s father shook hands and everyone hugged and, the next day, Michael McHugh put an advertisement in the Classified Section of the newspaper offering his boat tickets for sale.

‘He sold the tickets for the journey to America to a young policeman and his newly married wife. There were four tickets. Two of them would take the couple by train down to Queenstown in Cork, and the other two were for their sea voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to America.

‘And the ship they would sail on? The SS
Titanic
. The policeman survived, but not his new wife.

‘Meanwhile, Lizzie and Michael became Mr and Mrs McHugh and, ten months later, a child was born, just skipping scandal by a week. A baby girl. She was christened Maureen. And she was my mammy.’

And she was the woman who provided most of the inspiration for Brendan’s sitcom heroine, Agnes Brown.

‘Agnes Brown is Che Guevara in a dress,’ he says, grinning.

Guevara was of course a bearded, cigar-puffing, sweat-stained Argentinian who died in a Bolivian ambush. But he fought unfairness in his world, to protect the unprotected. And so too did Maureen O’Carroll.

‘People used to ask me if Agnes Brown was based on my mother, and I’d say no. But in recent times, I’ve come to realise just how close they are.’

Indeed. Indeed. Both are battlers. Both could find a colourful adjective when roused, although Maureen was smarter, and way more ambitious than the havoc-creating, uneducated fruit-market worker. Maureen O’Carroll could definitely deliver a cutting one-liner, just as Agnes Brown does. Maureen could also take a simple tea towel and turn it into a weapon, as Agnes frequently does. Both Maureen and Agnes would lay down their lives for their kids, but loved to make fun of them.

Brendan’s mammy also had that ability to get what she wanted out of people, just as Agnes can, using the cleverest of psychology, becoming a little bit pathetic when required. And if that didn’t work, like Agnes, she would tell the world exactly where it was going wrong.

Maureen’s healthy disrespect for authority – life is to be challenged; rules are there to be broken – is evident in Agnes. As Agnes does, Maureen lived in crowded houses, and managed to create her own safe little world.

There are more similarities. Maureen wasn’t entirely comfortable with modern devices either. She had little time for small-minded people.

And Agnes Brown now, and Maureen O’Carroll then, would be ready and willing to smack the face of injustice with the back of their hands.

Maureen McHugh, as she was before marriage, certainly didn’t have to search far to find inequity in early 20th-century Ireland.

Born on 29 March 1913, her father Michael was an academic, a schoolteacher from Galway who was also a freedom fighter; not in the sense of taking to the streets of Dublin with a gun to fight the Black and Tans during the 1916 uprising, but working behind the scenes. And he was arrested and spent time in a British prison.

But Michael McHugh, who only ever spoke Gaelic, believed Irish Catholic equality could only come about through education. And he instilled in his four children – including his eldest, his daughter Maureen, to whom he was especially close – that they could be anything they wanted to be in life. Just so long as they learned.

When Michael McHugh died however, aged 48 (he’d contracted TB from his time in prison), his slim, dark-haired 12-year-old daughter’s future looked bleak. At the time, secondary education in Ireland had to be paid for, and Maureen could, at best, expect to become a seamstress or a waitress. But money was filtered down to the family from an organisation called The White Cross, a fund raised by the IRA to educate children of the men who’d given their lives to the cause.

As a result, young Maureen was sent to County Mayo, 250 kilometres away on the other side of the country (traditionally, Irish girls were sent away, to England, or abroad, in the hope of a better life), to a boarding school, to be taught by the nuns who would become her surrogate family.

Maureen was, at first, broken-hearted to be parted from her mammy Lizzie and her siblings, but the young girl was very clever, very religious, and realised the way ahead was to please the nuns. And so why not become one?

Maureen had incredible energy and studied hard, and her reward was to be sent on to University College Galway, a rare achievement for women at the time, as a novice nun.

It’s not clear what made Maureen McHugh rethink her life plan and decide to renounce her vows. Perhaps university opened a window on another world? Perhaps the huge personality and determination she would later reveal meant her life was not best suited to subservience and being married to Jesus. Or perhaps she realised she’d one day prefer to be married to an actual, living man.

Whatever, Maureen, like her father, believed Ireland’s future was dependent upon educating people out of poverty. And so she became a teacher of languages, and loved her career. But perhaps what she taught best were human values.

Once, she invited an artistically gifted pupil to camouflage a crack in the classroom window by painting a version of
The Last Supper
on it. The result was so impressive that she invited the child’s parents to the school to see their daughter’s work. However, paying no attention to the painting, they presumed that the youngster had broken the window. In later years, Mrs O’Carroll would remind Brendan to always look at the picture, not the crack.

Meantime, the earthly man she did fall in love with had appeared on the scene, Gerard O’Carroll. The O’Carrolls were said to descend from one of the kings of Ireland, who fought with the 11th-century Irish king, Brian Boru. Gerry, however, wasn’t a fighter. He was a soft-spoken, gentle cabinet-maker (the basis for Mr Wiseman, the cabinet-maker in Brendan’s early books), with an easy-going personality. But, like most Dubliners, he hadn’t managed to avoid the collateral damage of the freedom-fighting movement.

‘Aged nine, he was almost killed by Black and Tan gunmen who came to the house looking for his IRA-serving older brothers,’ says Brendan. ‘The Black and Tans didn’t find them, but they left my grandfather bleeding and my dad’s grandfather lying dead beside him.’

Gerry O’Carroll didn’t hold onto his anger. He didn’t preach politics to his kids, although he would argue party politics with his future wife, Maureen. Gerry supported Fianna Fáil (the party opposed to the treaty with England), while Maureen backed the Irish Labour movement.

Yet, the pair were soulmates. They were opposites in terms of personality (which had to be the case, given Maureen’s was so large), but there was a connection that made them inseparable.

The couple planned their life together in an area called Cowstown, which once formed Dublin’s city centre before the city swelled. Comprising several streets of tiny little red-brick terraced houses, it was so called because cattle were once herded through the streets on their way to market.

‘The walls of the little houses around Cowper Street and Stoneybatter still have the foot-scrapers near the front doors, used for cleaning off the cow dung,’ says Brendan, taking me on a tour of the neighbourhood.

‘This is the very same street in which I drive a hearse when I play the undertaker in
Angela’s Ashes
. Moore Street is not far away from here, where Agnes Brown has a market stall.

‘And the women who work there
are
Mrs Brown. As you go along the street, past the flower and fruit stalls, the women get madder and madder, but they’re absolute sweethearts. I love them. When I was at school, I would run down to Moore Street after the bell rang, stash my schoolbag and run errands for the old wans.

‘You know, they still give me a bunch of flowers and say, “That’s for your mammy.” Now, my mother has been dead for thirty years, but it still reveals their innate kindness.’

We strolled over to look closely at his two-bedroomed house, which once had an outside toilet.

‘It’s been done up now. In fact, this area is now gentrified, home to starter families and young professionals who work close by in the city.’

North Dublin was, and is, the poorer part of the city. The river Liffey separates north from south, rich from the poorer. The largest cathedral is on the south side, while the largest dole office is on the north. The Houses of Parliament are on the south, the Sanitary Department on the north. Even the Liffey segregates, dumping the litter and effluent on its northern bank.

The O’Carrolls lived on the north side. And so too did struggle and adversity. It’s ironic that fruit-market trader Agnes Browne (as her surname was spelt originally), of Brendan’s novels, works in Moore Street from daybreak; this was a place surrounded by food – yet food was often unaffordable.

But as well as facing the endemic poverty that Ireland suffered in the 1940s, newly-weds Maureen and Gerry faced an immediate crisis. On the day she was married in 1936, Maureen O’Carroll was fired from her job. It was illegal for female teachers in Ireland (indeed all female civil servants) to be married.

Did Maureen O’Carroll take this lying down? In a scene from Brendan’s first book,
The Mammy
, Agnes, hearing her daughter Cathy has had her hair cut forcibly by nuns, approaches the convent sister ‘and somehow finds herself skelping the head nun in the face with a cucumber.’