At My Mother's Knee (8 page)

He was liked by everybody for his very kind disposition; he
was a most obliging neighbour, a good son and a kind husband.
He leaves a mother, a wife and two little children to mourn his
loss.

The funeral was by far the largest witnessed in this district
for years past.

The remains were borne to Kilbegnet burial ground, a distance
of over three miles, by twenty-four young men wearing
white sashes. To his sorrowing mother, wife and little children
we offer our deepest sympathy. May he rest in peace.

The United Irish League was a nationalist political party that
campaigned for the fair distribution of land to relieve the
plight of the peasant farmer. Its founder,
William O'Brien
,
fought for the right of the tenant farmer to purchase his own
land. The lads in white sashes who bore the coffin no doubt
belonged to the UIL.

My grandfather Patrick
Grady had married Bridget Brittain
,
better known as Biddy. They had two daughters and a son.
Mary
, nicknamed Mayo, was the first to arrive in November
1908, followed by
Sarah-Ann or Sadie
a year later. My grandfather
never saw his son Patrick. The widow Grady was two
months pregnant on that bitterly cold morning in January
when she stood by the graveside and buried her young
husband. She gave
birth
to Patrick seven months later, on 26
July 1912, with her mother-in-law acting as midwife.

After my grandfather died Biddy Brittain took stock. She was still young, an elegant woman who carried her height well,
with blue eyes, pale skin and a glossy mane of thick red hair
swept up into a bun on the top of her proud head. She had the
farm registered in her name and with the help of her late
husband's brother,
James Grady
, she managed to run it and
raise her family.

It was a time of political unrest for Ireland. The Easter
Rising had taken place in Dublin in 1916 and the cells of
Kilmainham Gaol were full of patriots, the walls in the
execution yard stained with their blood. By 1920 the first of
the hated
Black and Tans
had marched into Glinsk, their
orders to bring English law to the filthy peasants and to 'make
Ireland a hell for Rebels to live in'. There was a saying in
England's courtrooms at the time that you had two choices: go
to prison, or join the Black and Tans and go to Ireland. The
Tans were paid ten shillings a day with full board and lodging,
a good enough incentive for the scum of England's gaols and
the unemployed veterans of the First World War to head for
Ireland.

Any sign of Rebel activity and the Tans carried out brutal
reprisals, torturing and killing innocent civilians. House raids,
supposedly looking for arms, were frequent, and when a gang
of drunken Tans raided my grandmother's house, they dragged
my great-grandmother, a frail old lady, from her chair and hit
her with a rifle butt. During one house raid they rounded up
all the men, my great-uncle James included, and took them off
in the dead of night on the back of a lorry. They released James
three days later but the others weren't so lucky: they were
shot.

My father, running barefoot across the fields, was frequently
shot at. When I was a young boy spending my summers on the
farm in Ireland, I sometimes used to take my shoes off and run
across the fields pretending that the Black and Tans were using
me for target practice. I wanted to get a feel of what it might have been like. I didn't get very far, as the stubble from where
the corn had been cut was murder on the bare feet.

The Tans abused the local women in the street. They would
jeer at them, asking lewd and inappropriate questions when
they attempted to cross the border and get past the many roadblocks.
Biddy Brittain would clutch the basket of eggs that she
was taking to a sick friend closer to her side, pulling her shawl
around her and lowering her head as she passed through the
checkpoint, impervious to the lecherous stares and crude catcalls
of the Tans as she went about her real business. If the Tans
had bothered to search her, not only would they have discovered
a few dead chickens and geese hidden inside the folds
of her long woollen skirt, they just might have found a couple
of rifles as well, according to my dad that is.

When my father was thirteen, Biddy cashed in her life
insurance and emigrated to America with her two daughters.
My father, who didn't want to leave Ireland, was left behind in
the care of Uncle James. Biddy sailed for America from
Liverpool on the
Franconia
. She was a superb seamstress
and would have made sure that she and her daughters were
suitably dressed for the voyage. With fabric bought at
the draper's in Galway and inspiration provided by a ladies'
fashion magazine, she boarded the
Franconia
elegantly attired,
her daughters hurrying behind her, selfconscious in their new
matching dresses and with large velvet bows pinned to the
back of their hair.

One would think a farmer's widow would've travelled
steerage like the rest of the immigrants. Biddy opted for a stateroom
and travelled to America in firstclass luxury. Mary, the
elder daughter, rarely ventured on deck as she suffered from
violent seasickness but Biddy and Sadie had a wonderful time.

The
Franconia
had been at sea for less than two years. She
was the pride of Cunard's fleet. The opulent interior of this
beautiful single-stacker boasted elegant garden lounges, a health spa, a smoking room decorated in the fifteenth-century
Venetian style and tastefully furnished cabins. Each evening
Biddy and her daughter would descend the staircase into the
firstclass dining room and feast like empresses amid the
crystal chandeliers and snowy white linen. They docked at
New York
at the ship's pier and, as befitted their status as firstclass
passengers, they were spared the indignities of Ellis
Island. When, years later, she was teased about her humble
Irish roots, Biddy's daughter, my aunty Mary, would answer
grandly, 'I didn't arrive in this country via Ellis Island, you
know. I arrived first class.'

New York in 1925 was a vast construction site, a place of
prohibition, bath-tub gin, organized crime and jazz babes. The
Empire State Building had yet to be built,
No, No, Nanette
was
packing them in at the Globe Theater and President
Calvin Coolidge
was in office. The Americans were still recovering
from the abominations of the First World War. It was also an
era of disenchantment.

Biddy was certainly disillusioned with America. She lived in
the Bronx with a relative of Uncle James's, a woman named
Annie Duane
. Annie was a jolly character of prodigious proportions,
who had one eye and a fondness for a drop of 'the
holy water' – whisky. She added the words 'Christ on
the Cross' to everything she said. 'Would you like a drop of
tea, Christ on the Cross?' she would ask cheerily, proffering a
cup of black, sickly sweet liquid to her disdainful houseguest.
Biddy would survey the claustrophobic, overcrowded,
cockroach-infested kitchen adorned with religious icons and
inhabited by this Cyclops and her blasphemous tongue,
and regret ever leaving Ballincurry.

'Would you not ever consider remarrying, Biddy, Christ on
the Cross?' Annie enquired, lowering her voice so the girls
wouldn't overhear such a delicate topic of conversation.

Biddy's eyebrows shot up to her hairline. 'Not at all, especially to one of these Americans. Why, there isn't a good
man amongst them. New York is nothing but a city of heathens
and whores.' Only yesterday, hadn't she taken the girls to the
Picture Palace to see Ramon Novarro in
Ben-Hur
and an
animated short called
Felix the Cat
and been called a 'snooty
broad' by a 'big, uncouth pig' of a man who had approached
her in the street? And hadn't she had to walk past a theatre
with pictures of naked women outside, and run, her hands
over the eyes of her two impressionable daughters in case they
saw these trollops parading in little more than their underwear
for everyone to see? Jesus, this country was no place for a
decent God-fearing woman.

After living in America for less than a year Biddy booked her
passage home to Ireland, sailing once again on the
Franconia
.
She took Sadie with her, while Mary elected to stay and eventually
married an Italian,
Joe Schillaci
. (That set the cat among
the pigeons – but that's another story.)

Biddy died from cancer on 16 November 1932. The house
that this independent woman had reared her family in is still
there. The upper floors have long collapsed and the building
stands empty, providing shelter still but only for the animal
feed and farm machinery that's stored there. The family who
own the property built themselves a bigger, more comfortable
home next door.

My dad took me to see his birthplace on one of our many
trips 'home'. An animated old lady with wild hair and an
apron that she kept taking on and off made a great fuss of us.
She rushed around, chattering excitedly, making strong black
tea and carving huge slabs of fruit cake, while an old man sat
smoking a pipe and spitting contentedly into a great open turf
fire. To my young eyes it was a dirty, primitive hovel. To my
dad it was home. 'I was born up there,' he said sadly, pointing
up the stairs to a bedroom.

He showed me where he'd carved his name in the back of a barn door when he was a boy. As he ran his finger over the old
letters that spelt out the word 'Pakie', a tear rolled down his
cheek. He hadn't been a rural hoodie in his youth, carving out
racial abuse on farm outhouses – the name was an abbreviation
of Patrick. It was what my dad was called by his family
in Ireland: 'Cousin Pakie'. My mum called him Paddy. I was
used to seeing my dad cry in Ireland. As soon as he stepped off
the boat he turned into a maudlin romantic, as did everyone
else he ran into while he was over there.

He loved Ireland with a passion. He loved the people. He
had always hoped that one day he would go back there, but my
mother didn't share his sentiments. She'd felt that some of my
father's family had objected to him marrying an English girl (as
indeed they had when his sister Mary married an Italian) so she
had been more than a little apprehensive about meeting them.

At the end of the war my dad took his bride and two
children home to meet the folks. It must have been a culture
shock for my mother. She felt as if she'd stepped back in time.
They stayed with my
uncle James
and
aunty Bridget Grady
and their numerous offspring in their two-bedroomed farmhouse.
She'd been to Ireland before to stay with her father's family in
Dundalk, County Louth, but it was nothing like this. This was
rural Ireland or, as she put it, 'the bogs'.

The plumbing, or rather the lack of it, horrified her. Not
only was there no toilet inside the house but there wasn't one
outside either. You simply went over to a patch of ground just
beyond the apple trees and did what you had to do, using a
collection of dock leaves and a handful of grass to wipe up
afterwards.

I think my mum was constipated for the entire time she was
in Ireland. It wasn't until the sixties that the house had a bathroom
and toilet built. The tap in the scullery supplied
rainwater collected in a big tank outside the house and this
water was used for washing. Drinking water was collected each day in a bucket from a natural spring in one of the fields
and kept cool in the tiny dairy alongside the big bowls of
yellow milk. My mum liked the countryside; she liked it from
the top of a bus though. She found the silence eerie, the cows
and other farm animals unnerving. I can just hear her moaning
to my dad in the bedroom with the sloping roof and tiny
window that they shared with my brother and sister.

'Let's go home, Paddy,' she'd plead, sat perched on the end
of the bed staring out of the window in her best Blanche
DuBois manner. 'I can't stand it, all this mud and cowshit,
chickens running in and out of the house and, worst of all, no
toilet! I can't get over it,' she'd say, getting up and making herself
busy tidying the room and combing my brother's hair. 'No
toilet! At least we had a lav down the back yard in Lowther
Street. I've never known anything like it, it's like the Dark
Ages.'

My dad, trying to pacify her, wouldn't have stood a chance.
She was warming to her theme.

'And they don't like me. I can tell. It's because I'm English,'
she'd moan and the tears would fill her eyes. 'Let's go home,
please! I hate it here.'

My brother Brendan, who was four at the time, went
straight downstairs and repeated most of what he'd just heard
to Aunty Bridget, who was in the kitchen making soda bread.

'Did she now?' she said, waving a floury hand at my brother.
'Well, you can tell ya mammy that if she doesn't like it then she
knows where the road is.'

They didn't exactly get off to a good start.

Aunty Bridget was a sensible, no-nonsense countrywoman.
She could be quite a formidable lady and extremely brusque
when dealing with fools, but she was also sensitive enough to
realize that this young woman who had lived through some of
the worst air raids during the war was like a fish out of water
in rural Ireland. My mother was uncomfortable in these strange new surroundings and suddenly shy among the many
unfamiliar faces, and she'd got it into her head that they didn't
approve of her. She felt excluded at the big family gatherings.

Bridget, who had an endless supply of fresh eggs, milk,
cream and butter at her disposal, discovered that my mum
liked to cook. Apples and pears hung from the trees in
abundance. On the land grew potatoes, onions, beans and
enormous green cabbages. There was pork, beef and chicken,
as much as you could want. My mum, who hadn't seen an egg
in years and was still under the parsimonious yoke of rationing
back home in Birkenhead, set about demolishing this food
mountain.