Blood-Dark Track

by Joseph O'Neill

  Years after the Ardkitt incident, when he was dying, Jim O’Neill asked his son Terry if he could do him a favour. ‘Of course,’ Terry said. ‘Make sure,’ my grandfather said, ‘that Paddy is barred from my funeral. Will you promise me that?’ Terry was a little taken aback by the request – and surprised that he, and not Brendan, had been entrusted with the responsibility – but he resolved to carry out his father’s wishes.

  Jim O’Neill’s children believed that he took an inestimably heavy blow when Graunriagh slipped away from him, a hurt aggravated by the loss of his O’Driscoll inheritance to Paddy. Decades later, he would drive past houses in Catwell, a district in South Cork, and say, ‘Now one of them should be mine; they were going for £300 in the ’thirties.’ Displaced to the city, my grandfather was left with an inextinguishable yearning for West Cork and a haunting sense that he had been unfairly thwarted in his vocation to farm his own land. He never really reconciled himself to the diminished horizons that the city held out for him as an unskilled labourer, educated to primary level, working in the three bleakest economic decades of the century.

  Nevertheless, prior to his internment my grandfather was in amenable employment. He drove a lorry for the Roads Department of the Cork Corporation, transporting men and materials from place to place. Although not a patch on farming, it was a satisfactory job. He was popular with the men, the hours (eight to six, five and a half days a week) were tolerable and the pay was sound. He comfortably provided for his wife and his first three sons. In 1936, when young Jim was born, my grandparents moved from a flat in the Old Blackrock Road to Wellington Road, St Luke’s. Their next move was to a flat at Wesley Terrace, next door to the IRA man, Tomás MacCurtain Junior, and finally, in 1939, to Friars Road, Turner’s Cross. But on my grandfather’s return to Cork in November 1944, after nearly five years as a prisoner, things were very different. The Cork Corporation refused to give him his job back, and it took him six months to find work as a casual labourer in Distillery Field, in Cork – a fairly heroic feat, given his post-imprisonment depression and the widespread reluctance of employers to hire known political trouble-makers. (Phone calls would be placed by Special Branch officers to warn prospective employers against republican job applicants.) My grandfather mostly worked as a self-employed builder’s labourer, going from job to job with his spade and bicycle, desperately trying to minimize idle periods in between. Precisely whom he worked for, and when, was in retrospect unclear; it was thought that at one point he worked for Lingwood, a builder and decorator of shops, doing refurbishment work. About three years after his release, my grandfather was re-engaged by the Corporation as a driver of garbage trucks, works lorries and other vehicles. Jim became active in (possibly even the leader of) the Cork Corporation branch of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, and it may be that this fuelled the hostility of Philip Monaghan, the city manager. For whatever reason, Monaghan apparently had it in for my grandfather and fired him in about 1950 for accepting a bag of potatoes from a market gardener to whom Jim had delivered some goods as a favour. The hard times returned and Jim, by now in his forties, was forced back to intermittent labouring work. But during the course of the ’fifties, his technical flair, which ranged from knowing how to wire a house to understanding the workings of the combustion engine inside out, finally began to pay off. He worked for the South of Ireland Asphalt Company, maintaining plant and machinery on jobs that took him all over the country. He worked for McInerney’s, a company from Clare, and, doing a mechanical fitter’s job, in Foynes, Co. Limerick, for John Browne Engineering – the British company for whom, thirty years later, my father would work as the project manager of pharmaceutical construction projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In around 1958, he worked at Whitegate in East Cork, where a refinery had been built. It was around then that Jim, in his late forties, was paid to undergo a one-year apprenticeship as a pipefitter. A Dutch company, Verolme, was building ships at Rushbrook, near Cobh, and there was such a shortage of skilled labour that the government and the company invested in extensive training of the workforce. Not long afterwards came trade union recognition of single-year apprenticeships and my grandfather at last became an officially recognized skilled worker. From then on he easily found employment as a pipefitter on construction sites, and by the end of his working life, in the early seventies, his technical adeptness had led to work on weighbridge installation and calibration. In around 1968, Jim’s work took him abroad for the only time in his life. He went to Holland for Foster Wheeler – the company that had given my mother her first job in Mersin – and spent a few months in Rozenburg, near Rotterdam. In the only letter he ever sent to my father, my grandfather complained of the monotony of the experience, which was only broken, he wrote, when my grandmother visited him for a week.

  My grandfather (right), walking with a brother and nephew, in the late ’forties

  Jim was born on 16 October 1909, ‘in Libra, the sign of balance,’ my aunt Ann said with a little laugh, because in fact her father was an agitated, moody man prone to explosions of temper. He was rarely at ease. Sitting about, relaxing, was out of the question: there was always a chore to finish, always something to be done. Punctual, he was intolerant of tardiness in others: if you were late for an appointment, he wouldn’t wait for you. He followed a strict morning routine: get up, turn the potatoes, eat breakfast, get to work early. When he returned home in the evening he went straight to the bathroom, washed, changed, and then came down for his dinner. He never ate in his work clothes and on Sundays he wore a three-piece suit and a hat. He sometimes smoked a pipe. He took great care of his appearance: he was a very handsome man with a fine physique – slim hips, broad shoulders – and not without vanity. He liked his children to look the part, too, insisting that they were always dressed well: he would tell Grandma (who made pretty skirts that the girls loved to wear) that they couldn’t afford to buy cheap clothes. He changed the soles of the children’s shoes himself: he’d buy the leather from O’Callaghan’s, cut it rough, let it soak overnight, and stitch it on the next day surrounded by the aromas of hemp and wax. Strips of bicycle tyres would be glued on to the soles for extra protection. Jim could fix just about anything, and his skills extended to woodwork and making furniture: my grandmother’s oak and glass china cabinet, still in use, was his handiwork. He was a disciplinarian, stern and domineering with his family, which (in Jim Junior’s phrase) he ran like an army. He was very authoritarian: his children said that fumes would come out of his ears if you tried to discuss something with him. ‘Don’t answer back!’ he’d snap, even though they might not be contradicting him. His daughters, growing up as teenagers in the ’sixties, sometimes felt he was anti-everything unless it was Irish. He’d yell if he caught them listening to Radio Luxembourg. If he heard a band playing It’s a Long Way to Tipperary he’d aggressively go up and tell it to stop, intentionally causing a rumpus. He was a hard case.

  That was the word that everybody used in connection with Jim O’Neill: hard. It applied to practically everything about him: his work, his times, his life, his luck.

  My elder sister Ann remembered a soft moment: when her grandfather devoted an entire Christmas day to teaching her how to ride a bicycle; and my younger brother David remembered that he made him a catapult. ‘Those things would make sense to him,’ my father said. ‘He was physical man. He believed in physical things.’

  He believed, for example, in using physical force on his sons. If, driving his car, you braked going into a curve, he’d whack your ear from the passenger seat. ‘Whack you? He’d murder you,’ was my uncle Terry’s laughing refinement. Terry recalled an occasion when my father was behind the wheel and exclaimed, ‘Look at the meadows!’ My grandfather swung and connected with the back of his hand. ‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ he barked. Kevin did not get on with his father. Terry told me with a smile, ‘Your dad was kind of lackadaisical. We all seemed to have specific jobs, specific roles – I’d be in charge of this, J
im might be in charge of the other – but I don’t remember how Kevin fitted into that scheme.’ Kevin wouldn’t kow-tow to his father (an aunt said) and this independence of spirit was regarded as an infuriating form of insubordination: Jim, with his limited education, was not one to view argument as a vehicle of enlightenment. Even allowing for this, my father still couldn’t exactly fathom what my grandfather’s problem was. ‘Joe, he was so irrational; I couldn’t rationalize the violence at all.’ My father told me this one morning in 1996. We were driving to Oxford, where later that day the university would confer a degree on my younger sister, Elizabeth. He spoke in a straightforward, open way, even though what he was saying was difficult and cathartic. ‘I used to dread him coming home at night. I was petrified he’d find some reason to punch or kick me. Your mother said to me, Maybe you had misconceptions. Well, those right hooks and left crochets were not misconceptions.’ It was raining, and my father, a tassel of thick silver hair falling over his brow, leaned forward to wipe mist off the windscreen to help my driving vision. He sat back in his seat and added, ‘We didn’t really see eye to eye on many things. Take the poaching. It makes a great story now – how we went “mushroom picking” along the river when the net was to be collected, how, with the Hillman stinking of fish, my father gave a lift to Inishannon to a guard who said he going to raise the alarm about poachers – but I saw no justification for it. I thought it was wrong. When the bailiffs and the police came to the house that time they found the scales in the net – and by the way, I was blamed for that, I got a real walloping – I should have slammed the door in their faces; but I didn’t. I had this sense of respect for authority, a sensitivity about wrongdoing. That was the thing about my dad,’ my father said. ‘I felt he was always trying to get me to do things I thought were wrong.’

  Driving, I said nothing. ‘As I started to succeed at hurling, things improved,’ my father continued. ‘When I reached around seventeen or eighteen years of age, his invincibility crumbled. I lost my fear of him. Years later, I came back to Ireland as a married man and I took him out for a drink. “There are some things I’d like to clear up,” I said, and I asked him why he’d behaved in the way he had. He said things like, “You’ve got to be cruel to be kind.” I said to him, “Everything you did in your life, I swear I’ll do the opposite.” And that’s how it has turned out. His intolerance, his failure to explain anything – they’ve acted as spurs for me.’ We sat for a little while in silence, travelling in rain. Then my father said – and here his ambivalence about Jim, whose name he gave to my younger brother, surfaced – ‘You know, having said all that, if he walked through the door today I’d be very comfortable with him. I’d have no problem having a beer and a chat. And if he hadn’t been my father, I’m sure I’d have liked and respected him as a friend. There was a lot about him that was admirable.’ My father examined his hands. ‘There came a point when I started going back to him; when I realized that he needed my help. Keep in mind that opportunities were very limited, Joe. Ireland in those days was a different world, you wouldn’t believe how narrow and bleak things were. Yet, in spite of it all, he managed to bring up a family of ten kids. It wasn’t perfect – we’d have to borrow schoolbooks and look over classmates’ shoulders – but the way he provided for us was a great achievement. He was a relentless worker,’ my father said. ‘He worked for us night and day.’

  Jim O’Neill’s children were unanimous about this: their father was an unstinting provider. ‘He didn’t deny us one brown ha’penny,’ Jim Junior said. But the responsibility of doing well by his family – the responsibility, as uncle Jim put it, of having to go to every extreme to earn a shilling – incarcerated my grandfather: he never really felt free to rest. Aunt Marian said, ‘He looked on life as a chore; I don’t know if he ever really enjoyed himself.’ Even whist drives had to be taken very seriously as earning opportunities. A good player, Jim would often win a Christmas turkey and sometimes pick up as much as £10. But more subtly dispiriting than his economic entrapment was the question of his social status. It gnawed at Jim O’Neill that he did not own his home – he, a farmer’s son. He felt, in his heart, that it was beneath him to live in a corporation house, amongst people who lived in corporation housing. He was a territorial man. Tradesmen – the breadman, the milkman – would not be allowed past the threshold: ‘These people’s place is at the door,’ he would say. When a neighbour, Mrs O’Sullivan, put up clothes to dry on the rail of the fence that divided her front garden from that of the O’Neills, my grandfather stormed over, knocked at her door and said in his abrupt way, ‘Mrs O’Sullivan, I want you to remove those clothes off the railing.’ ‘Why?’ ‘They’re unsightly.’ ‘The railing is as much mine as it is yours,’ Mrs O’Sullivan pointed out. ‘Well,’ my grandfather said, flushing, ‘would you please hang your clothes on your side of the railing, then.’

  The O’Neills – which is to say, Grandma and four boys – only moved into corporation housing because with Jim interned they couldn’t afford the rent at 39 Friars Road, Turner’s Cross. Their first corporation house was at Mount Nebo Avenue, in north Cork.

  North Cork, the old, tilting half of the city built on the elevations north of the Lee, reveals itself in sudden, often deceptive vistas: banked cottages appear airborne, a colourful row of parked cars rears up a hillside like a Ferris wheel, and, looking down treeless Mount Nebo Avenue, a distant rural landscape looms mirage-like at the bottom of the road. Mount Nebo Avenue forms part of a large housing estate built in Gurranabrahan in the ’twenties and ’thirties. Gurranabrahan (the Brothers’ Walk) is sometimes called the Red City after the red sprawl made by its tiled roofs when viewed from a distance; but red is not the dominant colour once you’re inside Gurranabrahan – grey is. The houses are grey, as are the pavements, the roads, the lamp-posts and the walls. Even other colours (brown, cream, umber) are grey versions of themselves. Still, the seventy-year-old neighbourhood – encapsulated for me in the spectacle of dishevelled, rained-on schoolboys trudging uphill beneath cables drooping from telegraph poles – has an old-fashioned communal appeal. The streets are kept clean and the houses, their front gardens featuring stout palm trees, topiarized hedges and well-tended shrubs, are shipshape. The former O’Neill residence at Mount Nebo is not atypical. Part of a terrace of houses, the front door is reached by walking up some cement steps and then a few feet of pathway. A low hedge grows tidily around the garden’s perimeter railings. There are two storeys and three bedrooms. The frontage is covered in that familiar, rough, grey-brown pebbledash. Window and door trims are painted white. Patterned net curtains hang in the windows. All in all, the building looks well.

  At Mount Nebo, the children went to primary school in Strawberry Hill and Sunday’s Well, and to secondary school at North Monastery. They played Gaelic games at St Vincent’s GAA Club and worshipped with their parents at St Vincent’s Church. My grandfather had a nearby plot of corporation land, on which he grew vegetables. In 1953, the family left Gurranabrahan and moved into 22 Churchfield Terrace East, a three-bedroomed corporation house in a newer estate in nearby Churchfield. The Churchfield house had a parking-space for one car and a passage leading directly from the front to the back garden, where there was a shed. There was a downstairs bedroom (for the parents), a living room at the back, and two bedrooms upstairs. The five eldest boys shared two double beds, with the youngest of them, Terry, squeezed contentedly between two of his brothers. The young girls (Ann and Angela) shared the other bedroom with little Declan; and in due course baby Marian joined them. In the loft, accessible through a ceiling hatch, my grandfather removed bricks in the party wall so as to create an emergency getaway tunnel into the Twomeys’ house, where a further breach in the brickwork created a further secret exit to the Sutton place. The escape route was never used.

  These days, the O’Neill house is occupied by Mary O’Sullivan. Now in her late fifties, she grew up next door with her nine siblings (and, she told me angrily when I called on her, her m
other had five miscarriages). ‘The O’Neills were a fabulous crowd,’ she said. ‘If we didn’t have butter, the O’Neills had it; if there was no milk, the O’Neills had it. At night we’d hear the door closing and my mother would say, “There he goes, we’ll have a few bob tomorrow.” ’ Mary’s words for Jim were ‘hard-working, good-looking, hunky, and cranky.’ ‘He was short with you, kind of dominating,’ she said. ‘If he was home before Mrs O’Neill, he’d come round and snap, “Where are the children?” “Mr O’Neill, they’ve had their bread and butter,” my mother would say. He’d say, “That’s not enough.” ’ Another neighbour, Rita Twomey – like Mary, still in Churchfield Terrace after forty years – chipped in and said that Mr O’Neill was very strict: ‘You’d have to duck.’ ‘Mrs O’Neill was marvellous,’ Rita said. ‘She never missed a day of washing the floor of the hall and kitchen.’ Rita and Mary said that Mrs O’Neill had her own mind but she did everything that Mr O’Neill said. ‘Things like that were different in those days.’ Mary O’Sullivan said, ‘He wasn’t one to do any painting or washing. He might do the gardening.’

  The escape hatch at Churchfield Terrace

  Gardening, in this context, meant the cultivation of vegetables. Jim grew potatoes, onions, lettuce, rhubarb, beetroot and cabbage, and enjoyed it. Another pleasure was his greyhound, Cora, who occupied a luxurious kennel equipped with a raised, straw-covered timber bed, and who was treated (uncle Terry said) like a princess. He tried to breed pups from Cora, but they died of distemper. On Sundays, Cora would be taken harecoursing, and my grandfather, surrounded by the ranges of West Cork, would be happy. He also became very involved with St Vincent’s Gaelic games club and was on a steering committee for fund-raising. My grandfather took great pleasure in watching his boys play. He would run along the touch-line urgently declaring, ‘That’s my son! That’s my son!’