Against the Tide (5 page)

On the fair green on summer nights Toft’s roundabouts trumpeted out the distinctive hurdy-gurdy sounds of the steam organ into the normally silent night of Athlone’s residential
area. Round and around gyrated and galloped the wide-eyed hobby horses, with flaring blood red nostrils, and streaming and flying white tails behind, racing into nowhere. At that fair my mother, a
recluse by her avocation of housewife and mother, broke the rules to bring us to the roundabouts, and delighted us all and herself by winning a china teaset playing ‘hoopla’.

It was on the Ballymahon Road that I suffered an unexpected humiliation. Eileen, my eldest sister, had taught me to ride her heavy ladies’ iron bike. Still too small to reach the pedals
and sit in the saddle, except when freewheeling precariously down the hill, I’d ride the bike standing on the pedals with an up and down hobby-horse movement, elbows higher than the hands on
the handlebars, out to Molloys’ farm. I would leave it there while delivering the milk, and then ride it home again. This already precarious journey was further complicated by the can of
skimmed milk Mrs Molloy would give me for my mother.

On my way down a small incline under the bridge I mistimed the follow through up-hill on the other side and was sent sprawling across the middle of the road, covered with milk. A man passing by
came over to me, enquired how I was, helped me to pick up the bike and the empty can, and led me to the side of the road. My gentle soft-voiced friend murmured through my tears this information:
‘If you are patient, very patient, and take great care, the easiest way for you to catch a blackbird is to reach out with a pinch of salt in your fingers and carefully place the salt on his
tail’. For some years I continued to wonder how this could be true. I learnt from this man that a lie like this in a good cause is sometimes permissible. At the same time, he contributed to
my growing awareness about the fallibility of grownups.

Also on this road, I encountered for the first time the oppressor’s contempt for the oppressed. Myself and my sister Una were walking close to a high demesne wall. Seated on top of this
wall were a boy and a girl, belonging to the big house. They must have seen us from a long way off, but they remained dead silent and unmoving. Because of the height of the wall, as well as our own
tiny size, we did not see them until we were directly under where they sat. I looked up just in time to see a big outsize drop of spit spiralling down, impossible to avoid, onto my head and
shoulders. For its infinitesimal size, it was a disproportionally painful experience wiping the spit away. We knew the name of the family, and as is the way on our tiny island I was to meet the boy
years later when I was a medical student in Dublin’s Rotunda Maternity Hospital, where he had become an assistant master.

About a mile further along that Ballymahon Road, passing friends in a donkey cart gave me a lift home from Molloy’s one day. We meandered slowly home towards Athlone. On the pathway ahead
of us came into sight a child-sized man, striding clumsily along, with long arms, long legs, and the short ugly twisted body of a hunchback. It was my brother Jody. There were already three of us
on the narrow plank, stretched between the sides of the donkey cart. The ineradicable pain from which ever since I have suffered is my failure to leave my two friends and their donkey cart so that
I should walk home with Jody or, better still, give him my seat in that cart.

L
IFE in Athlone was orderly and uninterrupted until the dread day when, surprisingly, both of our parents took the train to
Dublin, leaving us in the care of our eldest sister, Eileen. An expression of total desolation on both their faces as we met them at the station made it clear to all of us that something dreadful
had happened. A Dublin medical specialist had confirmed that our father suffered from severe pulmonary tuberculosis. Although they did not know it at the time, my mother was also infected by the
same disease. They in turn could have infected their children. I recall an infant sister, Annie, leaving our house in a tiny white coffin. She had died of massive pneumonic miliary tuberculosis. My
eldest brother, Jody, in addition to a serious speech defect caused by an untreated cleft palate and a hare lip, developed a grossly deformed hunchbacked spine, infected by tuberculosis. He never
grew taller than between three and four feet in height. Though he was intelligent, he could never attend school. Schoolchildren then would harass and jeer at the crippled and the disabled.
Surprisingly my father, disappointed no doubt that his eldest son was deformed, was impatient with him. Jody was unwanted, crippled, and unable to fend for himself or communicate his simplest
needs, except to the family; he was unable to mix with his peers. It is impossible to imagine the awesome humiliation and desperation of his life. I have never understood its purpose.

In addition to Jody and the infant who died, my mother, myself and two sisters became infected with tuberculosis and, with the exception of myself, all have since died. There was at that time no
known worthwhile treatment. My father’s hardworking conditions had led to the infection in the first place, and with no light work available there was little prospect for his survival. It was
simply a matter of months. He was sent away to Newcastle Sanatorium in Co. Wicklow where, as medical officer many years later, I read of the hopelessness of his case in his clinical notes.

Because there was no free tuberculosis service then, hospital care had to be paid for. Since there was no hope that the out-of-work patient could pay as his income had stopped with his work, or
was simply inadequate, he would be sent home to die. In the process he would infect one or more of his loved ones. Discharge home from a sanatorium was, in effect, a sentence of death for the
patient, and possibly for many members of his family. There were frequent examples of families, in desperate hope of saving the life of a loved husband, wife or child, being compelled to sell off
their small farm or business in order to pay for medical expenses or hospital care. Consultants would agree to treat patients only so long as they had money; as soon as the money stopped, the
treatment also stopped.

There is a tombstone in a graveyard by Newcastle Hospital, on which the names of nine young children of the same family are inscribed. Not one of the children was more than three years of age at
death. Each name is recorded — Michael, Patrick, Mary, etc. It is of interest to note that the last name on this tombstone is the father’s name; he died at the age of eighty years. It
is more than probable that this man, unwittingly, was responsible for the deaths of all his children.

From the day on which the consultant gave his diagnosis on my father, life for the Browne family followed a pattern which was a prototype for tens of thousands of families in our class in many
countries. There was only the most rudimentary concept of what became known as welfare socialism throughout Europe. There was little or none in Ireland, where influential religious teaching
rejected the ‘creeping socialism’ of state intervention in time of family need. I recall a curate in Newtownmountkennedy informing his flock from the pulpit on one occasion, when he had
thundered ‘communism’ because of the local people’s attempt to feed the school children a hot mid-day meal in winter: ‘They can come to my back door and ask for it, if they
need it’.

At times of impending disaster, young people appear to be preserved from understanding and appreciating the facts of what lies ahead for them. I continued to go to school and to deliver milk on
my wonderful donkey-drawn equipage. My father had to stop work. Later still he was no longer seen around the house and was compelled to stay in bed. He was visited once by a doctor, and by a
Franciscan priest on a number of occasions. Our aunt Bridie, a nurse, appeared more frequently at the house, and I began to notice a sad subdued mood within the family. I still had no idea that my
father was dying.

Late one summer evening, in August, 1925, I was called to his bedroom. There was a crowd of people whom I did not know outside the room and around his bed. Though a son of the house I was unable
to get to him, being crushed on the landing outside, too timid or unwilling to push my way in. There was an air of great solemnity among the grownups who, in the dark of my father’s room,
murmured prayers in the awful rhythmic singsong ritual for those about to die. Someone had made him hold a lighted candle, and called for prayers for his soul and his happy death.

My father raised himself and, in a falsely strong voice, claimed ‘Joe Browne is not going to die’; then he sank back. Sometime during that night he must have died. It was possible
that I was sent off to bed and had gone to sleep. I recited the Hail Marys with the others, not knowing why; I had not been conscious that he was dying or about to die. I did not know or understand
about death. Later, in a dark corner in our big outhouse, I studied the oblong yellow pine coffin lid with its brass plate bearing the words, in black print, ‘Joseph Browne, aged fifty-four,
R.I.P.’ The inexorable breaking up of the family had begun.

I sought to avoid walking behind the black horse-drawn hearse on its way to St. Mary’s Church, although Jody did. I have no idea why I felt this reluctance. Possibly I wished to deny his
death or to recall him from the dead. He was buried the next day, as he had requested, in his family plot in Craughwell, Co. Galway. This was the first occasion on which I had met his brothers and
sisters; I stayed with them for about a week and then returned home to Athlone.

The families of my parents had disapproved of their marriage and each of them had given up their own in order to be together and live out what came to be a tragically short life of mixed
happiness and tragedy with each other. There was never to be a reconciliation. My father’s devoutly religious family would accept no responsibility for helping his young widow and her seven
young children. My mother, who had absolutely no experience whatever to help her cope with the immense financial difficulties facing her, was compelled to try to make a home for her young family on
a total of £100 insurance. There were no widow’s or orphan’s pensions, or children’s allowances. Our house belonged to the NSPCC, and the next inspector would need it when
he took over.

My mother applied with no success for a local authority house in Athlone. For all her faith in God and his blessed Mother, she would send one of us children nearly every night with a drained
teacup inside which the tea leaves lay, wrapped in a brown paper bag, to a local woman in Irishtown who would ‘read the cups’. She hoped that this woman would one day see a house for us
in the tealeaves. Such a house never materialised, and she realised that she would have to take her family away.

She decided to return to Ballinrobe, under the commonly-held illusion that she could live out her life where she had happy memories of her young days. She had been born in Hollymount, just
outside Ballinrobe, and moved into the town after her schooldays to work as a seamstress with a Mrs. Murphy, who owned a newspaper shop and dressmaker business. It was here that she, an
exceptionally attractive country girl, met and fell in love with my father, a ‘comer-in’ from Athenry.

My mother was to find, on her return to Ballinrobe in her time of great need and deep distress, that she had not yet been forgiven. Other than the rent collector, I do not believe that anyone
ever called or crossed the threshold of that newly-built small house except our childhood friends. They came, it is true, to the final auction sale some two years later, in order to bid for the
remnants of her furniture and family possessions which were for sale. So, they divided up her few belongings between them.

The auction signalled the end of an Irish widow’s hopeless two-year struggle with her orphans, after my father’s death, in the new and pitiless Irish Free State. But that
disillusionment was yet to come. Meanwhile, we packed up our possessions, and prepared to leave Athlone.

My memory of moving is of being seated beside Jody on the front cab seat of a lorry driven by a small Athlone man, whose face remains with me — black bushy eyebrows, sallow
healthily-tanned skin, intelligent sturdy face, jet-black kindly eyes and a head of black curly hair on which he wore a cap. My particularly detailed memory of this man stems from the fact that he
lost the way on our journey to Ballinrobe. It was a wintry night and we became very frightened. We had been sent on with the lorry driver to save train fares, and had travelled through the day with
all our worldly possessions behind us in the lorry. It started to snow and the whole countryside was soon covered in snow. The worried look of the driver’s face is my last memory of that
journey; through weariness I must have gone to sleep in spite of my fears. This journey was a momentous occasion, since it was the first time we had been separated from our mother in our lives.

Finally we reached Church Lane, Ballinrobe and helped one another to settle into our new home. The lack of welcoming visits from neighbours should have had its own ominous warning for my mother
that she had seriously misjudged her people. All the members of her immediate family, the Cooneys, had long since left Hollymount for America on the emigrant ship, part of the great diaspora in the
1920s and 1930s. In her hopes for compassion, forgiveness or sympathy, my mother could have more usefully chosen the Sahara Desert for her last refuge.

I went to school, to the local Christian Brothers. They certainly taught us with great diligence, and with some effect, but for the most part they were enthusiastic religious zealots, whose sole
purpose was to win young Irish boys and girls to Roman Catholicism in a united Ireland. They did not see any contradiction in fighting fiercely and winning partial sovereignty from the English
while still proclaiming total subservience on all issues of serious social or political importance to a different faraway foreign ruler in Rome. ‘We will be true to thee ’til
death’, they’d bellow at Croke Park.