Getting High (3 page)

Yet America wasn't within everyone's grasp. There were other havens nearer to home for those wishing to escape but who had neither the strength nor the financial means to cross the Atlantic. Much nearer to home there lay Great Britain.

The British, insular and suspicious of everyone but their own, didn't take too well to the Irish. As early as 1413 the Crown was drawing up deportation laws to remove ‘Irish vagrants' from their soil.

In the 16th and 17th centuries English troops were routinely sent over to campaign against the Irish. Many of the soldiers on these missions hailed from Manchester, although later on a more peaceful link between the Mancunians and the Irish would be established. Naturally, money would be the peacebroker.

Ireland's ability to provide raw wool and linen, and then livestock, dairy produce and fish to the English, set up a strong economic and cultural link between Ireland and Manchester which persists to this day.

Yet the image of the Irish person that was forged in the minds of the English, etched there by a media only too willing to act on behalf of the day's government, was not good, not good at all.

One potent source of derision was through humour; the major newspapers often carried anti-Irish cartoons. They depicted the Irish as yobs on the scrounge, uncivilised, stupid, incapable of anything but fraud and deceit. ‘Did you hear the one about the Irishman...' isn't a new phrase.

In 1780 the winds of ‘luck' changed. The Irish were suddenly in demand: to assist their rapidly expanding cotton industry, Manchester turned to Ireland's skilful hand-loom weavers, promising them significantly higher wages and better living conditions.

It wasn't a hard choice to make. In Ireland even the farmers have it tough. In many areas the soil isn't particularly fertile; in County Mayo, for example, the spartan land is too exposed to the elements, especially rain, and only grass, oats and potatoes will grow. And, like the land they tilled, the Irish culture was also conservative, based as it is around the restrictive teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

The first great wave of Irish migration to protestant Great Britain was in 1780. For those early travellers a huge culture-shock was awaiting them. They landed as the Industrial Revolution was starting to take shape.

It was bad timing on their behalf. New developments in machinery were about to cause the biggest upheaval that English society had ever known, and the Irish would bear the brunt of these turbulent times, pushed into extremes of poverty that would shock the world.

Manchester was about to become the first-ever modern industrial centre. And that kind of change doesn't come easy.

Paddy was the first born. Then came John, and Bridie. On 30 January 1943 Margaret Sweeney gave birth to her second daughter. She was christened Peggy and brought back to Margaret and her husband William's tiny house in Mayo. Over the next few years, there would be more brothers and sisters, namely Kathleen, Helen, Ann, Una, Pauline, Billy and Den.

The house the Sweeneys lived in stood on flat bog-land amid a beautiful but harsh landscape. It had been bequeathed to Margaret by John and Mary, her aunt and uncle. Margaret herself came from a family of eleven. As a little child, she had been sent to her aunt's to live. They had no family, so they :welcomed her arrival.

When they died, the house was bequeathed to her. Margaret then married William and settled down to do what all women of her area did, which was to bring life into the world, and then nurture it as best she could. William worked as a labourer but sadly he wouldn't always stand by his wife's side.

Margaret would endure her husband abandoning her, not once, but twice. The first time occurred after the birth of Una; the second time after the eleventh child, Den, was born. Like most of Mayo's inhabitants, the Sweeneys were poor, desperately poor. Life was a tough struggle, further exacerbated by the elements. When harsh winter came and the land refused to yield food, well, that was the worst of it. Not to mention the lack of heating.

Each day, Peggy and her family would rise early from the beds they had crammed into, bruised somewhat by their unconscious kicking of each other as they slept. With hours of disturbed sleep behind them, and violently shivering against the cold, they would put on yesterday's clothes and wonder if today, at least, there might be enough food for breakfast. On some mornings, there would be nothing to fill their stomachs for the walk to school.

Each child had his or her own job to do round the small house, although its cramped size meant there was little to do. Even so, the boys would be allotted the manual work while the girls would wash, sew, clean and cook. One of the first lessons that Peggy learnt was that women tended to the house and the men went out into the world to do the tough work.

It was a way of life that was enthusiastically backed up by the Catholic Church. God had put women on this earth to give birth and raise children. Catholic children. Good Catholic children. This tenet was so sternly ingrained in them, they never once dared question its wisdom.

With breakfast finished, they would pull on their coats and, as morning light started to break, walk the one and a half miles to their school. It was named Chorton. In Ireland, at the time, there was no separation between the ages, and no primary or secondary schools.

Chorton was a National School: you stayed there until your circumstances forced you to leave. Most left early. At school Peggy loved reading. She especially liked girl's comics with titles such as
Secrets
. When she was engrossed in these magazines or if she had her nose in a book, it was as if the world and all its hardships magically fell away.

Reading suited Peggy. She wasn't a boisterous girl and she never drew attention to herself. She was quiet, withdrawn, a little bit of a dreamer, but with a strong sense of responsibility.

The lessons that captivated her mind the most were the Gaelic class (although today she would be hard pressed to remember a sentence), and English where she could indulge her love of reading. She wasn't good at sports but loved knitting and needlework at which she excelled. Again, it was another activity which allowed her to slip free from herself.

At the end of school, she would walk home again. On a lot of these occasions her stomach would ache with the pain of not eating all day. When she arrived home there would be a meal, usually made of milk and potatoes, awaiting her.

If Peggy was deprived financially, the same couldn't be said of her emotionally. The Sweeney children belonged to a tight, loved family, never starved of love. For sure the sisters tended to band together against the boys, and that was only natural. But there was no cruelty, no violence. Their parents gave them love and discipline, fully preparing them for the world by not allowing them any illusions. William and Margaret knew how tough things were, and weren't about to fool their children.

When Peggy was seven years old she received her first Communion. From then on the weekend belonged• to her church: confession on Saturdays, Mass on Sundays. This small church, Bushfield was its name, lay to the West of the village and it was here, as well as school that Peggy was indoctrinated into the ways of a religion obsessed with sexual purity and strict moral behaviour.

In Catholicism priests do not marry, and boys born illegitimate can never enter the priesthood. To lose your virginity before marriage was a sin and, to this day, the use of contraception is strictly forbidden. Homosexuality was viewed as absolute proof of the Devil's work.

The Catholic Church instilled everlasting sexual and moral guilt in all its children, and Peggy was no different. She learnt about good and bad, heaven and hell. She was taught that one of the worst things that could ever happen to her was to be excommunicated from the Church. It would mean eternal damnation.

When Peggy thought about her God she imagined a vengeful and wrathful God, precisely what the Church wanted. Complete social control. The Church took the young and stole their minds. It taught that all people are born in sin and must spend their lives in penance. It said no one is without evil.

When Peggy went out into the world and married, she had to bear children and she must never, never, ever divorce; to part from your husband would mean severance from the Church. The Vatican would never sanction divorce, and therefore it was considered a terrible sin for which there could be no forgiveness. Such powerful ideas invade an impressionable young mind. At an early age Peggy vowed she would stick by her eventual husband, good or bad.

No one missed Mass in Mayo. It was unthinkable. Everyone went. In rain, sleet, snow and cold winds that howled across the bleak landscape in winter, Peggy and her family walked up their
bordeen
(country lane) and through the fields to church every weekend.

And still the babies kept arriving, one every year. Eventually there were too many children to house. Peggy, along with Kathleen, Una, Helen, Ann and Bridie were placed in the hands of a convent school in Ballaghaderren where they stayed for the next six and a half years and were further exposed to the scriptures and strictures of Catholicism. Yet Margaret knew that out of all her brood Peggy was the most reliable and the hardest worker. More than that, Peggy had a natural affinity for child rearing. Many times, with her baby sister Pauline in her hands, she would dream of the day when it would be her child that she would be tending to. It was the only dream that she would ever be encouraged to follow.

It was the twin forces of human invention and rugged determination that lay at the core of Manchester's dramatic rise.

Water power, the first steam-engines, the spinning jenny, the mule and the power loom, all of these revolutionised Manchester's cotton industry; made it, in fact, the first British industry to be fully mechanised.

To achieve such a vision, the people behind these changes had to be a dynamic breed. They had to be strong-willed and utterly single-minded in their pursuit of the new world that they had visualised, a new age which they, and only they, could define and make their own.

The architects of this vision were young, powerful Mancunian businessmen, determined to build Jerusalem on England's green and pleasant land, and so be acknowledged as the saviours of the country.

Their first move was to sweep away the old feudal system. Under this arrangement a Lord would give his workers land to farm, dwellings to live in and a wage, which was swiftly returned to him through rent charges.

In Manchester's case, the ruling power was the Moseley family. Their power was supposedly absolute, but to the new Mancunian it was spurious. The Moseleys were perceived as weak masters, ditherers who had no firm grip or vision. Manchester had no municipal infrastructure and very little in the way of administrative organisation. It laid the way open for change. In other words, if you wanted to build a factory and you had the money, power and vision, then it was yours to build. No one could stand in your way.

Unfettered by local laws or government, the new Mancunians zealously went to work, building huge factories and filling them with all the new machinery. They deliberately began a campaign to create a climate of enterprises, an ‘every man for himself' ethos which rivalled Thatcherism in its brazen fanaticism.

As a speaker put it at the Manchester Mechanics organisation, ‘Man must be the architect of his own fame.' The message was clear: it was everyone for themselves.

For many of the newly arrived Irish hand-loom weavers this was an unexpected development. By the time they had settled in, they literally had been displaced by machines and forced into factories. For these country dwellers who had fought and loved nature all their lives, it was hell on earth.

First of all, their rural lifestyle hadn't prepared them for city life. It was noted that many of them walked the streets barefooted, while their obvious Catholic fervour did little to impress their new Protestant neighbours. Furthermore, their willingness to accept such small wages (yet double their paypacket back home) intensely annoyed those organisations that had sprung up in an attempt to reform the city's work conditions. For these concerned cabals, run by middle-class liberals, the factories symbolised all that was evil in this brave new world. It wasn't hard to see why.

Ugly, filthy and dangerous, these factories had no ventilation, no heat in the winter. The workers were forced to work nineteen hour shifts for wages of just four shillings a week. And most of that went on rent and food.

Furthermore, their accommodation provided no respite from these conditions. The Irish squeezed into minute cottages, most of which had walls which were only one brick thick. In wintertime they huddled together against the biting winds that would howl through their small rooms and extinguish their fires. There was no ventilation and few sanitary amenities.

The Irish and their children were being crushed and, by severe poverty and disease, sacrificed to the new Mancunian's greed and inhumanity. Many children, some as young as seven years old, worked in factories; often they died before their years reached double figures. Many babies died through the administration of sleeping medicines, given to them by desperate mothers who simply didn't have the time to tend to them. These mothers were forced into the factories and away from their babies' side; the alternative meant they would all starve to death.

Cholera festered in the water and indiscriminately struck down whole families. So too did the cyclical nature of capitalism, where a boom-time is always followed by a slump.

As Manchester expanded, so it became a schizophrenic city with two strikingly different realities. The first was the one the businessmen were keen to promote: that is, Manchester as the world's first industrialised city. Its fame was worldwide, and observers came from many continents to study this civic success. Unfortunately, often they returned home depressed and shocked by the second reality, the atrocious living conditions from which they couldn't avert their eyes.