This Man's Wee Boy

by Doherty, Tony;

  Their next encounter was also somewhat unfortunate. Eileen and a group of her friends were making their way to the Crit – the Criterion Ballroom on Foyle Street – when they passed the hapless Patsy Doherty and Johnny McFadden tapping people for money to get into the dance hall. Eileen was mortified with embarrassment for, despite losing the luxury of the Milk Tray chocolates, she still considered the raven-haired Patsy her boyfriend.

  * * *

  The Doherty family of Paddy and Cassie lived in the prefabs in Anne Street in the Brandywell. The prefabs were houses made mostly of corrugated tin, probably with a high dose of asbestos, and erected in large prefabricated sections. They were like ovens in the summer and fridges in the winter, me da told us. Paddy and Cassie had three daughters: Maureen, Margaret and Kathleen (Kay), and two sons: Joe and Patsy, also called Paddy or ‘the Skelper’ by some of his friends. He was born in September 1939 at 281 Lecky Road in the Brandywell. His full name was Patrick Joseph Doherty, which is strange, because his brother was named Joseph too.

  In Ireland, especially the north, we tend to regard ourselves as being from one community of people or another and that was the way it’s always been – a form of pure-blood thinking. The reality is very different, as I was to find out later in life. My granny Cassie’s father was from a Presbyterian family, the McFredericks, from out the road in Killea, but he married a Catholic and turned Catholic himself. His name was Joseph McFrederick and he was killed in 1917 while serving with the Royal Irish Rifles during the First World War in Flanders Field in Belgium. While he left six daughters, including Kathleen (Cassie), and one son, sadly the McFrederick name in both Killea and Derry is no more.

  Given that my granny Doherty was, therefore, half-Protestant, that made my daddy, Patsy, a quarter Protestant and me an eighth Protestant at least, since it turns out my mother’s family also had Presbyterian blood in their veins. One day in the early 1990s, a Lollipop Man stopped me in a local café and told me the story of our families’ history. He knew me but I didn’t know him. We were distant cousins. The story goes that, after the famine in the 1840s, two sisters by the surname of Taggart walked from Ramelton, a small town on the Fanad Peninsula in County Donegal, to Derry in search of work. They settled in Derry, eventually marrying two brothers from St Columb’s Wells by the name of Quigley. My granda Connor Quigley was a grandson of one of the Taggart sisters. The Lollipop Man was a grandson of the other sister.

  My granny Sally Quigley’s maiden name was McLaughlin, as common as Doherty in Derry and neighbouring Inishowen. Her father was a trade union activist, an avowed communist who wasn’t fond, to put it mildly, of the Catholic Church that dominated most aspects of life and set the moral standards for the Catholic population in those days. In the late 1950s, after Sally and Connor had moved to the new Creggan Estate, she was mortified when the priest read the names of known communists from the altar, my great-granda’s name prominent among them, condemning them for their godless beliefs. Of course, he wasn’t there to hear for himself; Granny Sally told me that no one ever had the nerve to tell him of the public condemnation. ‘He would have went to the priest’s door and raised a row,’ she said with a laugh.

  In the 1950s my grandparents were part of the migration of largely Catholic families who moved from the area known nowadays as the Bogside, as well as from St Columb’s Wells, Springtown Camp and other rundown slum-type houses, to the brand new housing project of the Creggan Estate, up the hill and surrounding the city cemetery on three sides.

  At the top end of Central Drive, heading towards the Creggan Reservoir and Holywell Hill, was the ráth, known locally as ‘the Cropie’. It’s a large, circular site that probably was a place of some political importance before English came into use. It was said to have become a base for the French artillery under King James to fire cannon in the direction of the city walls during the siege of the city in 1690. I have no memory of the Cropie before we moved from Creggan, but it was later to become an important place for me when we were evacuated at the start of the Troubles.

  Sally’s mother, my great-granny, was involved with the Irish Volunteers in Derry between 1914 and 1922, a period of political and military tumult. There are stories of her marching with her comrades on the road between Derry and Carrigans in Donegal at that time. I didn’t get to know her very well. My memories of her are simply of an old woman dressed in black who walked with a slight limp. She died in 1976 and she was waked in me granny and granda’s new house in Mulroy Gardens, Creggan, one street up the hill from Central Drive, where I was born. By then most of their family had married and left and they needed a new house for a smaller family.

  I was in my early teens by then. I came home from school for lunch and me great-granny’s remains were being waked in the small dining room beside the kitchen at the rear of the house. Her sallow face could be seen from the kitchen where me granny was making lunch. I looked into the room several times to see if there was any movement from great-granny’s hands or face. We went into the sitting room and ate our lunch with the TV on. Granny Sally drifted off to sleep after she smoked an Embassy Red. I was dying for a fag as well, but her handbag was closed and sitting at her feet on the floor. I’d remembered seeing two saucers full of fags sitting on a low wooden coffee table in the middle of the dining room where the coffin was. I got up quietly from the chair so as not to wake Sally up and went to the door of the dining room.

  I was about to walk in to lift a fag and a few more for later when my eyes were drawn to the face in the coffin. I instantly lost the nerve to steal the cigarettes with her able to watch me. So I got down on my hands and knees at the doorway and looked up to see what I could see of her face. All I could see was the tip of her sharp nose above the padded rim of the coffin. Reassured that I was now out of view, I slowly crept the short distance from the door to the coffee table and reached out to lift a handful of fags. Just then, a low voice said, ‘The Good Lord is watching you.’ My hand hung motionless over the fags and I swear my heart stopped altogether. Jesus Christ, she’s alive! I thought, my hand frozen in mid-steal. What the fuck am I goney do?

  There followed a few seconds of excruciating silence as I was effectively trapped by the voice of an old woman supposed to be dead in her coffin. My eyes were drawn back up towards it. There was no change. The sharp tip of her nose was still all there was to be seen of her. Maybe I’m hearing things, I thought, and contemplated having another go at a few free smokes. ‘The Good Lord is watching you, boy,’ said the voice again, this time louder and from behind me.

  I turned my head slowly to see who owned the voice, expecting to see my great-granny’s ghost bearing down on me. Instead, I saw my granny Sally standing in the kitchen with me in full view, my hand still hovering above the saucer of fags.

  Needless to say, my walk back to St Joseph’s Secondary School was all the lonelier without the smoke.

  Sally’s birth name was Sarah, but, once married, she was commonly known as Sally. Granda Connor’s real name, on the other hand, was Patrick. My mother, Eileen Teresa Quigley, was the eldest daughter of Connor and Sally Quigley, and was born in April 1942.

  Granny and Granda Quigley had a large enough family, as well as a few stillborns. Along with me ma there were Anna, Eugene, Seamus, Patsy, Celine, John, Mary, Michael, Gerard (known as Jerrit), Siobhán and Joseph, with Lorraine at the tail end. While Lorraine was officially my aunt, she was nearly three years younger than me; such were the times without either contraception or the Pope’s blessing.

  * * *

  Despite their disappointing first two encounters, Patsy Doherty and Eileen Quigley continued to date. Eileen was a very beautiful young woman and Patsy was considered to be a great catch. Word has it that they were the glamorous couple of the late 1950s in working-class Derry – a version of Posh and Becks without the money … or the legs: Eileen was five foot two, while Patsy towered over her at five foot four. Patsy and Granda Connor got on great together as Patsy was polite, charming and, of c
ourse, enjoyed the beer and the craic.

  While Patsy and Eileen were still dating, Eileen became ill. Granny Sally was suspicious and took her to the doctor, who confirmed that her daughter was expecting a baby, their first grandchild. Sally and Connor were heartbroken and despondent at first, because children conceived or born out of wedlock were considered shameful and socially embarrassing, and they had better expectations of Eileen, their eldest.

  However, as was the done thing at the time, Patsy Doherty and Eileen Quigley were quickly married in St Mary’s Chapel, Creggan, on 18 April 1960, an Easter Monday morning, just two days after Eileen had turned seventeen. After the 8 a.m. mass the eighty or so guests were treated to a wedding breakfast at 26 Central Drive. Food was served on borrowed trestle-tables covered with fresh white cloths. Eileen’s sister Anna was the bridesmaid, while her other sisters, Celine and Mary, helped to serve the breakfast. The newly-weds spent their honeymoon in Belfast, where they stayed in a guest house in the Ardoyne.

  At the end of October 1960, Karen Doherty was born at 26 Central Drive (Granny Sally was also pregnant at the time with my uncle Joe). In late February 1961, Patrick Joseph Doherty came into the world, and almost two years later, on 1 January 1963, I was born: Anthony Christopher, the second-last of the Doherty wains to be born at Central Drive. Me ma tells me that the name Anthony came to me da after he saw the face of St Anthony at a window of a house he was walking past on Lecky Road. After going back again to check, the face was still at the window and he considered this as a sign from God. The name Christopher, another saint, was thrown in for good measure.

  In the early 1960s me da worked for long periods as a labourer in England because work was scarce in Derry. He came back for a long period when me ma had a threatened miscarriage with Paul in November 1963. He wrote and sent money to me ma and phoned her once a week at the red phone box on the Foyle Road. His letters, written in blue ink on the broad-lined pages of a small, pale-blue writing pad, which survived in a Quality Street tin until the 1980s, spoke of his longing to see his three children soon. ‘How’s wee curly Tony doing?’ he asked in one of them.

  The first four of the Doherty children were born into the Quigley household of 26 Central Drive, Creggan. Central Drive, by the standards of housing in the 1960s, was as close to luxury as you could get. The house had four bedrooms, an indoor toilet and bathroom, a large scullery kitchen and a sizeable living room. It also had a steep, sloping garden at the front with a picket fence and a large, long rectangle of a garden at the rear that backed onto Dunree Gardens.

  However, by the time my younger brother, Paul, arrived on 1 February 1964, ‘premature and looking like a Christmas turkey on the corridor floor of Altnagelvin Hospital’ my mother said, space in the luxury house was becoming a problem. Granny Sally had twelve children of her own (though some had left home by 1964), and her house was bursting at the seams with wains, teenagers and young adults. It’s not hard to work out the maths and the square footage per head. Something had to give.

  In the spring of 1964 we moved to 6 Moore Street in the Brandywell, in the south of the city near the river. The house in Moore Street had been in the family’s possession in some form or other since the 1940s. It wasn’t just a physical move; it was also a move back in time out of the modern, spacious house in Central Drive into a nineteenth-century two-up-two-down terraced house with an outside toilet in a white-painted stone and mortar back yard. Where Central Drive had been bedecked with the furniture, fixtures, gadgetry and trappings of the fifties and sixties, 6 Moore Street was straight out of the sepia-toned twenties and thirties with its coal or block-fired range cooker, a chaise longue, which became an entertainment centre for us children, and the blue-and-white china dogs sitting in watch on either side of the ancient clock.

  At one end of the street was Foyle Road, which led on to Letterkenny Road out to the Killea border with Donegal. Beyond Foyle Road was the wide river bank and the ‘Line’, the route of the old railway that used to shuttle passengers to and from the western seaboard of Donegal. The railway track was long gone by my childhood days, but it was still referred to as ‘out the Line’. The only buildings out the Line were three air-raid shelters left over from the Second World War.

  As it turned out, an old relative of me granny Sally’s, Paddy Stewart, came with the house. We called him Uncle Paddy, but we knew he wasn’t an uncle. Paddy was a lovable old man, rotund, red-nosed and always wore a suit, black shiny shoes, a greatcoat, or Walyee coat as it was called then, and, of course, his flat cap. It was said that he used to play for Derry City FC in the 1930s along with his brother Gerry – an idea that enthralled us, given that we lived near the Brandywell Football Stadium. It was also said that the two brothers worked in the pottery factories of Stoke-on-Trent for most of their lives between bouts of unemployment in Derry.

  Paddy Stewart (we always gave him his full title) drank his stout in the Silver Dog and Mailey’s Bar, and was even more lovable and red-nosed when he came home half-cut or drunk. He was very independent – he cooked and cleaned, and lodged in one room at the back of No. 6. When both me ma and da were working, Paddy would have our dinner ready on the range when we came in from school.

  While Paddy Stewart occupied the small back bedroom, the six of us Dohertys slept in the larger front bedroom overlooking the street. Four children slept in one bed, head to toe, and me ma and da were in the other, though Paul spent his first year or two in a drawer up on two chairs beside their bed, as was the custom.

  Me da drank stout too, but he was also partial to a Carling Black Label on occasion. Whiskey was like firewater to him, after which a nark or a row would be likely. Luckily for his friends and family he didn’t drink it often. He was prone to spending a fair bit of time in the Silver Dog and me ma would dispatch me to the bar to tell him he had a family living up the street! Initially, I felt a bit odd being sent to deliver this message, but the financial rewards from me da’s friends in the bar soon helped me to get over any awkwardness.

  3

  Moore Street Downfall

  At school we were learning to do sums and read books. I loved reading, writing and spelling. I was good at them but I wasn’t fussed on the sums. Mrs Radcliffe held a competition to see who was the best speller in the class. There was a special prize for the winner but nobody knew what it was. She called out a word and you wrote it down with your pencil at the top of a new page on your jotter so she could see it spelt right or wrong as she walked up and down between the rows of wooden desks.

  ‘All right, children. Are you ready?’ she called out to start after we came in from the yard when dinnertime was over.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Radcliffe!’ we called back, more or less simultaneously.

  ‘Write down at the top of your clean pages the word “chair”,’ she said.

  The room fell silent except for the sound of thirty boys thinking and scribbling with their sharpened pencils. I wrote down CHAIR on my jotter, checked it again and sat watching Mrs Radcliffe, who stood beside the blackboard at the top of the class. ‘Everybody finished writing the word “chair”?’ she asked and the class responded with a ‘Yes, Mrs Radcliffe.’ Mrs Radcliffe took off on her journey in her flat, black slip-on shoes, walking between the rows of desks, checking each jotter as she passed, turning over the jotter of each word ‘chair’ spelt wrongly as she went, and leaving the correctly spelt ones as they were.

  ‘Those who got it wrong, put your pencils down,’ she instructed and about half the class put their pencils down. She then proceeded to write the word ‘chair’ on the blackboard. Mrs Radcliffe always used really squeaky chalk and the word ‘chair’ squeaked loudly in the quiet classroom as she wrote each letter down. The squeaking chalk hurt your teeth.

  ‘Right, the rest of you write down the word “knife”,’ and again there was silence except for fewer pencils scribbling on the jotters. I wrote down the word KNIFE in my jotter.

  After a few seconds, Mrs Radcliffe said, ‘All finished writing
the word “knife”?’ and we all said, ‘Yes, Mrs Radcliffe.’ She took off again, this time only checking the desks with open jotters and turning the wrong spellings over as before. Back she went to the top of the class and squeaked out the word ‘knife’ under the word ‘chair’. About eight of the class, me included, had their jotters facing up the right way in front of them.

  ‘All right now, please write down the word “apple”,’ and the eight or so boys still in the competition began to write the word down. I wrote down the word APPLE in my jotter.

  ‘All finished?’ she asked, and again took off on her journey and by the time she returned to the blackboard, only me and Ciarán McLaughlin had our jotters facing up the right way on our desks. Ciarán wore glasses and was from Abercorn Road. Two others in the class wore glasses as well: Damien Healey and Damien Harkin, both from the Bog. Mrs Radcliffe squeakily wrote down the word ‘apple’ under the other two words on the blackboard.

  ‘Tony Doherty and Ciarán McLaughlin,’ said Mrs Radcliffe, ‘well done the both of you!’ She paused, thinking. ‘And now we’ll see who the best speller in the class is. Write down the word “blackboard”.’ That’s easy, I thought, sure it’s only two words, black and board put together. I wrote down the word BLACKBOARD in my jotter and so did Ciarán McLaughlin. Mrs Radcliffe came round, looked at the two words written down in the jotters and said ‘Well done’ again as she went back to the blackboard and proceeded to write the word ‘blackboard’ in squeaky white letters below the word ‘apple’ and the others.

  ‘Right,’ she said turning round again, ‘write down the word aer-o-plane,’ pronouncing the O to break up the word. I had never written the word aeroplane before, but I had seen it written down somewhere and knew that it didn’t start with AIR, but AER. I wrote down the word AEROPLANE in my jotter, the way I thought correct from memory.