Against the Tide (7 page)

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.

U
NDER 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 republicanism, 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.

The contrast inevitably muted my other personal deprivations. The shock of my transition from Athlone and Ballinrobe, with conventions, beliefs, and practices so different from those now around
me; the trauma of my splintered family life; the loss of my father and my mother; all these experiences brought about an inevitable continuous emotional conflict, with all that that implied for a
child of my age. Yet the contrast of life patterns was greatly mitigated by the fact that there were a large number of boys who, for quite other reasons, were feeling just as isolated as I was. It
appeared to me that we foreigners dominated the school. We recognised our common links of alienation from English life, and this created in us a spontaneous camaraderie. The school had this
remarkable distinction: there was absolutely no bullying of anyone by anyone else, either by teachers or boys.

One of the teachers I remember best was Mr Tibetts. He had carroty untidy hair, a very red face and a bulbous nose, through which he spoke in short, nasal, and for a long time to me
unintelligible bursts of sentences, spattered with spittle. The end of his nose was constricted by his enormous hornrimmed spectacles, which appeared to rest permanently there. Even with the
thick-lensed spectacles he was still nearly blind. He was both gentle and patient; rarely exasperated, he would call out a boy, ask him for one of his house shoes and, then having told him to bend
over, inexpertly try to find the target and beat it ineffectually. Mr Tibetts gave the impression of hating his job of Latin teacher.

The French master, M. Talibart, disliked both us and his teaching. He would read the newspaper throughout the class, taking the precaution to prod a hole through the centre with his fat index
finger to give us the impression that he was watching us. He tended when exasperated to cuff a boy on the right ear, then on the left, and kick him on the shins, muttering to himself, ‘take
dis, and dat, and dose’, ‘those’ being the kicks given under the desk. I also remember Mr Harding, a blindingly handsome black-eyed crinkly-haired teacher who, I suspect, was
illiterate. He was an awe-inspiring person, as it was said that he had at one time played cricket for Sussex. Like Brother John in Athlone, his educational concern was limited to just one subject:
sport.

Although we were aged only between ten and fourteen years, Mr Harding took our training with extraordinary enthusiasm and seriousness. All our classes were illustrated with drawings on the
blackboard and taken up with discussions about tactical formations in the game of soccer, which he expected us to absorb and practise for the coming Saturday’s football game. We took part in
a lot of inter-school games, as there were many other preparatory schools in and around Eastbourne. Luckily I enjoyed games. From Gaelic football I now turned to cricket and soccer. Mr Harding for
some reason called me ‘Tishy’, perhaps after the Strube cartoon horse with the funny legs. Being a good athlete is a magic passport to popularity in any English public school.

Mr Lowndes had grey hair, cropped close, was obsessionally clean and lived with his mother in a fine red-brick house opposite the school. He seemed to be the only serious teacher we had. His
manner was somewhat brusque and impatient. He wore a grey Norfolk jacket with peeping white shirt cuffs. His pink hands were carefully manicured, his shoes always shining black, and clever blue
eyes shone from his scrubbed face. He always seemed to be at his happiest leaving through the front door of the school; to him, I suspect, we were simply a tiresome collection of morons whose
wealthy social origins presaged a life of never-ending decadent entertainment and recreation. There was no purpose in casting any cultural or intellectual pearls before us. I remember him taking
the trouble on one occasion to show us how to brush our nails; he did not aspire to anything more testing for our pampered lives.

There was also Mr Robinson, a big, jolly ex-Naval man with blazing blue eyes. He wore enormous ill-fitting plus-four suits of light grey, and shiny brown leather shoes with great finger-shaped
leather flaps to them. We liked to listen when he played rollicking music-hall songs and sea shanties at the piano for us. Because of his ill-fitting false teeth, he spat a lot as he sang, but he
must once have given great pleasure to his shipmates, for his voice was soft, pleasant and musical. He made no attempt to teach us anything.

The wife of the proprietor, known as ‘Maw P’ because her husband’s name was Patton, was a particularly well cared-for, dumpy, knock-kneed lady always dressed as befitted her
position, complete with a shining necklace of pearls and a gold wrist watch. She was the sole person of whom all of us went in some fear, though she did not harass or try to interfere with us. She
had a strait-laced severe appearance which we found intimidating, but it was said that she was a compulsive gambler on the horses. Her husband, ‘Paw P’, was a charming, self-effacing,
equally knock-kneed tubby little man, who appeared to enjoy life uninhibited by his managerial cares. He took his pleasures where he found them; even we young children could see that. I understand
that the school no longer exists. Whether this is in any way related to the gambling proclivities of his wife or not, I do not know.