The Young Wan (2 page)

I left schooling at twelve years of age. My mother left me one morning when I was twenty-eight. She took my son Danny, then just ten months old, for a mid-morning nap. He fell asleep, and so did she. I cannot tell you in just this one page of how wonderful a woman she was, but I promise that one day I will. The only one of my three children that really knew her was my daughter, Fiona, who adored her, and in Fiona I see so much of my mother that it warms me.

My mother is not nor was not Agnes Browne. Yet they shared something in common that I believe to be a trait unique to women. And it is this—that even while their world is falling apart around their ears they truly can still believe that their dreams will come true.

One morning I questioned my mother’s promise to me. She said her usual “You can be anything you want to be . . .” line, and I asked her, “Mammy, can I fly?” She smiled and said, “Sure you can. Just put your arms out, work hard, and wait, and I promise you, someday you will fly.” When she died I was a waiter. Since her death I have written five novels, four stage plays, two screenplays, hosted my own television series, acted in eight movies, and performed live comedy to over one million people on three continents. She never got to see any of this. At the end of each live show, when the audience stand, cheer, and applaud, it is a wonderful feeling, and I love it. The audience smile and cheer and they cannot hear me say quietly to the uplifting air,
“Look, Mammy, I’m flying.”

Brendan O’Carroll Dublin, 2002

PROLOGUE

The Jarro, Dublin, Ireland

The parish of St. Jarlath occupies a northeastern portion of Dublin City Centre. Stretching from the banks of the river Liffey north to Summerhill, and from Fairview Park, on the east coast, westward to Gardiner Street, just short of the city’s premier thoroughfare, O’Connell Street. The main focus of the parish, however, is the eight square blocks of tenement buildings that surround St. Jarlath’s Church itself. This small area within the parish is known to all who live there as the Jarro.

If there were any single thing one could point to that would unite the memories of all of the thousands of people who had been born, reared, and starved in the Jarro, it would be the noise. The only change over the years has been the types and the sources, but the level has stayed the same.

The noise of the Jarro is built of three layers. The background noise is a symphony of transport. Once it had been only the
clip-clop
and rattle of horses’ carriages along with the low rumble of handcarts of every shape and size as they crisscrossed the cobbled streets. The middle-ground noise has
always
been children. Screaming, crying, playing, kicking, and laughing children. Within the Jarro children outnumber adults by four to one. The sound of children covers the area like a blanket. And yet, still, like a colony of sea lions, a Dublin mother could hear “one of her own” from two blocks away. It is this talent that gives us the foreground noise, the Dublin woman’s voice. It can pierce a steel door at twenty paces. Women of the Jarro would exchange the most intimate details of their lives, or better still someone else’s, in conversations across the street, from window to window, at a piercing level, and with no effort at all. These conversations or gossip would probably make no sense to an outsider listening in, but to these hardworking, tough women, they did, and that’s all that mattered. Over the noise of the streets and screaming kids, they can be heard.

“See that young wan O’Brien got the brush-off from her boyfriend,” one would call to another.

“I heard that all right, what happened there?” comes the reply.

“’E said he wouldn’t marry a girl what’s not a virgin,” is explained. A short silence follows this piece of news.

“And is she a virgin?” the question would come at a scream.

“No, not yet,” is delivered with authority. Amazingly, considering that this conversation is taking place at screaming level, across a street, should a third voice join in she would be told to mind her own business.

So these, then, are the sounds of the Jarro, a tenement area on Dublin’s Northside crammed with working-class and unemployed people and their large families. The four-story red brick buildings, once regal and grand, were now old and unkempt, damp and dreary. The streets dirty and dark, shrouded in a pall of smoke from the thousands of coal or peat fires burning in the buildings. And yet there is so much more to the Jarro than its streets and its buildings. For through the smoke there is music and song. Within these buildings there is genuine community. Sharing, caring community. Every day on these streets young boys dream of becoming millionaires and young girls dream of marrying handsome princes (not from the Jarro). Within this cramped, smoky, damp Jarro live the dreams of five thousand people. And laughter. At every chance there is laughter. There is magic here. It may not be the pixie-dust, float-on-a-cloud, fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden kind, but take my word, in the Jarro there
is
magic.

The Jarro, Dublin July 17, 1954

This morning, at 5:15 a.m., the blood-red sun began to peek over the copper dome of the Customs House building. Its beautiful July rising sent a streak of amber light through the window of Agnes Reddin’s bedroom. Morning. The day had arrived. Not just any day, but
the
day. This day, at 4 p.m., Agnes Reddin would make the short journey to St. Jarlath’s Church. She would enter the church a nineteen-year-old “young wan” and the next time she stood on its steps, which would hopefully be about thirty minutes later, she would be a woman. To be known to all from this day hence as

Mrs. Agnes Browne.

Slowly the sunlight crept along Agnes’ bed until it found her beautiful young, smiling face. Agnes had been awake for some time. She was sitting upright in the bed. Thinking, as you do on such auspicious days. Beside her this morning lay her best friend and maid of honor, Marion Monks, sleeping. Marion was neither a maid nor had she displayed any honor for the last hour or so. For Agnes’ thinking had been punctuated by a regular cycle of snoring, grunting, and farting from her sleeping friend. Agnes smiled at the crumpled, tiny figure of her friend, at the same time tucking the blankets, tightly sealing herself from the deadly
thrummmp
of the fart that Agnes knew was due any moment. It arrived. Marion smiled, rubbed her nose roughly, and with a grunt returned to a steady snore.

Agnes and Marion were as different as chalk and cheese. Agnes was blessed with her father’s dark looks and raven hair, and, along with the slim figure of her mother, she was a stunning-looking girl. Marion, on the other hand, was just four feet eight inches tall and shaped like a barrel. She had a round face, tiny gray dots for eyes, and on her chin sported three brown moles. Each of the three moles had a tuft of hair growing from it, and when Marion smiled, which she did often, the moles would merge to make a little goatee beard. The two girls had been friends since childhood. Their lives entwined like a fisherman’s rope and the bond between them just as strong.

Agnes slowly slid from the bed, trying not to waken Marion, for whom a sleep beyond 5 a.m. was a luxury. Most mornings at this time the two young women would be already up. They would be at the fruit-and-vegetable wholesale markets on Green Street, ordering their stock for the day. Not today. Agnes quietly left the room.

The other bedroom was occupied by Agnes’ mother, Connie, who at that moment was sitting in an identical pose to the one Agnes had just abandoned, upright in bed. She had not woken at 5 a.m., for she had not slept since returning to bed earlier. Instead she had sat in her pose and stayed awake. Thinking! As you do on such auspicious days as wedding days. However, where the daughter Agnes was thinking about the future, the mother’s thoughts were firmly rooted in the past, along with her mind. Although she was only fifty-seven years old, Agnes’ mother, Connie, looked more in her seventies. Her early dementia and illnesses had taken their toll, and in a role reversal Agnes had long ago become her mother’s mother. The dementia would come and go. On some occasions Agnes’ mother became quite clear and rational, allowing Agnes to revisit the intelligent woman that her mother once was. Mostly, though, Connie was in a different place, a little closer to God than the rest of us. Yet she would slip in and out, and so rapidly sometimes only Agnes would see the flashes. Agnes has always believed that this had been mostly caused by the trauma of the death of Agnes’ father. For, despite his faults, and there were many, Bosco Reddin had been so deeply loved by his wife, Connie.

As Agnes passed her mother’s bedroom door, she stopped and listened. Her mother was singing. Very quietly, but singing. Agnes recognized the song.
“I could show the world how to smile, make it seem happy, just for a while, I could turn the gray skies to blue, if I had you.”
It was her father’s song. He would sing it when he burst through the door, late home and drunk. When he knew he was in trouble. It was not very often her father got drunk. But when he did he would sing this song to his “three lovely lassies.” Agnes and her younger sister, Dolly, little girls then, would blush and titter with laughter. Mammy would call him a drunken fool and pretend to be angry. She probably was at first, but he would just keep singing the song until she smiled.

Agnes felt the teardrop on the back of her hand. She moved on to the living room. Although it was July and sunny outside, the sitting room was chilly, so Agnes decided to light a fire, just to warm the room a bit. She put on her dressing gown and left the flat with the scuttle bucket to fetch coal from the coal hole in the basement.

Soon the fire was lighting and the room was warm. Agnes ran the tap and dragged out the three large pots she would use to boil the water for her bath. As the first one was filling slowly, Agnes went back to the bedroom.

“Marion,” she called gently as she woke her maid of honor. “Move it, come on, we have a lot to do today.”

“I’m up, I’m up!” answered Marion.

“You’re not up, now come on, Marion.” Agnes was at the bottom of the bed and tickled Marion’s foot as she said this. Marion jumped.

“Fuck off or I’ll kill you, Agnes.”

“Get up, then, come on!” Agnes was getting annoyed, just a little.

“I am. Go on, put the kettle on or something.” Marion sat up. She looked like the wreck of the
Hesperus.

Agnes heaved the last of the three large pots of water up onto the gas stove. She wiped her hands in the tea towel and lit a match. Turning the gas knobs in turn, she poked a lighted match beneath each pot, and as she did the jets popped into life.

“What the fuck are you cooking at this hour of the morning?” asked a groggy Marion. Agnes jumped.

“Jesus, Marion, you frightened the life out of me.”

“What time is it?” Marion asked, as she sat and began pulling on a canvas slipper.

“Half past eight,” Agnes answered as she carried on with her business.

“
What?
Half past eight, I didn’t get up this early for me own fucking wedding!” Marion was dismayed, realizing she’d not been to bed until 3:45 a.m. Agnes laughed.

“Shut up, you, and mind your language. Me mammy’s awake,” Agnes scolded.

“Like your mammy’d know? She’s probably in there raping Napoleon.” Marion pulled on the other slipper.

“Ah, Marion, shush, that’s not nice,” Agnes admonished Marion, but she giggled as she did so. As Agnes took a sip from her tea, Marion called out toward the mammy’s bedroom door.

“Go on, Mrs. Reddin, pull the knob off’a him!” They roared with laughter.

Agnes began to choke with the laughter. She put the tea mug down awkwardly and was spluttering and laughing so much that tea was dripping from her nostrils. Marion began to laugh even harder now and threw herself on the floor and began writhing and moaning.

“Come on, Boneypart, ya good thing—show me your cannon-balls.”

Agnes was bent double laughing. She flung herself on top of Marion, trying to cover Marion’s mouth with her hand. In a repeat of the previous night’s playing, the two girls wrestled around on the floor for a full three minutes. When they stopped, they again lay on the floor beside each other, breathless and exhausted. They lay on their backs. Agnes held on to Marion’s hand.

“Jesus, I’m getting married,” Agnes softly said.

“Yeh,” her friend answered.

Both their heads turned to the wedding dress hanging there.

“Do you remember the last time you wore a white dress?” Marion asked. They both smiled a knowing smile and spoke simultaneously.

“Holy Communion class.” Now they cried with laughter again.

“Do you remember?” Marion asked.

“Will I ever forget . . .”

It was the day they had become friends, forever friends.

CHAPTER ONE

Blessed Heart Girls National School The Jarro, February 1940

It is the line that all Catholics get to say just once in their lifetime. Conducted in their rhythm by Sister Concepta Pius, the forty-four young little girls in the Communion class sang out the line in unison, like a tiny girls’ choir.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my
first
confession,” they sang. Although the little girls were still three years from having to say this in a real confessional, in the Blessed Heart School, the nuns believed it was never too early to prepare for communion with God.