Walter Macken

by Ultan Macken

  The First Holy Communion is the climax of all the preparation that he has been doing with Sister Ursula. His whole class is in school on that Sunday morning before they go to mass and they are being inspected.

  The boy passes the inspection by Sister Ursula and the other nuns, as his mother has rubbed the face off him last night. The boy is dressed in a grey flannel suit, white socks and new shoes that creak like hinges on a door that needs oil, and he has a white rosette in his lapel and a Holy Communion medal hanging from it, and a little white prayer book and a pair of white rosary beads.

  The boy knows that he is going to receive God, which is an overwhelming thought; it makes you feel awed really. How is it to happen? He has to take the wafer on his tongue and on no account must he bite it. It mustn’t even touch his teeth while it dissolves and he then must swallow it. He will then have God inside him and he will be near the angels. It’s a mystical experience that he doesn’t really understand. But it’s awesome! What is the reality? The wafer is very big for his mouth.

  He goes back to his seat, hardly daring to breathe, his mouth open with his lips closed. It takes a long time for the wafer to soften. But then it does and he swallows it and he says the simple prayers that he has been taught. He says his prayers and he looks up and sees how the others are doing around him.

  My father wrote a very interesting description of his experiences of First Communion in the article in the Presentation Convent Annual in 1965:

  Then a day came when the classroom ceased to be a place of confinement and became instead a feasting hall. It was the day we made our First Communion and we came back afterwards to the classroom for the feast. The desks were transformed into tables holding sweets and fruits and biscuits, leaving you with the thought that if only the classroom was like this all the time, what a pleasant place school would be.

  In the same article he describes how he learned about girls as a primary school boy:

  Afterwards came the most testing of all times when you were made tragically aware that there were two races on earth, not just a lot of children, but Girls and Boys and you had to make your choice. This is the way it happened. Once a month, I think it was on a Saturday, all the children who had made their First Communion, had to march out to St Joseph’s Church from the school for Confession before the Children’s Sodality on the following Sunday.

  This was a terrible time for boys. At the time there were only two of us qualified for this, myself and Jo Jo Keenan. Listen to what we had to do. It was awful. We had to walk up the stairs, the two of us, to the big room upstairs, where the partitions were back, and sit on a long form in a place that contained hundreds of girls, and wait sweating, until they are ready and we would walk out with them to the Church. We had cause for sweating because as soon as the teacher’s back was turned, these girls pelted us with bits of blotting paper, paper arrows, or anything at all to hand. They would make catapults with their fingers and a piece of elastic and whing missiles at us from all sides. It was all rather degrading for two little boys, because we couldn’t hit back. The reason we couldn’t hit back was because they were about a hundred to one. We just had to suffer it patiently like gentlemen.

  That wasn’t the end of it. As we walked to the church, there were still only two of us against so many, and we got many a pinch, many a push, many a hair-pulling, but we suffered it all as patiently as possible, because we knew there were only a few more months to go and we would be going to a place where there would be all BOYS. Imagine that, we would say to one another, no GIRLS.

  All good things come to an end, like convent education, and time tempers even incipient misogyny. One felt a man going to a school where there was nothing but boys. But all the same those three rooms in the convent school left sort of tender trails of memory which one can always call up.

  It was only afterwards you realised that you left there with a most precious acquisition, one that you thought you would never acquire, that seemed almost miraculous – you could read and once you got your tongue between your teeth, you could write, and that after all is the foundation of education, and the world of literature and history, art and drama, was yours for the taking. So you left the convent with these two things in mind and also a strong and uneasy feeling that Girls were the Master Race.

  In Cockle and Mustard, my father describes the kind of house where he first lived – 18 St Joseph’s Avenue, the last house on the street. It now has a plaque on it telling people this was where Walter Macken lived. This is his description:

  The houses they lived in were what was called pre-war houses. The rent was two shillings and ten pence a week, later rising to three shillings and ten pence. The front doors of the houses opened on to the street. At the back of the houses there were concrete yards with high walls around them and these back yards had a wooden door. All these back doors lead out into waste spaces dark and unlit where people threw out cabbage stalks and such like things. These waste places were great for warfare and plotting and for disappearing when your parents wanted you to come in.

  As a child, my father lived through turbulent times. These working-class corporation estates were strong supporters of Sinn Féin and the independence movement, and the Royal Irish Constabulary walking through their streets were actively hated. The policemen were mainly Irishmen doing their job, yet in their black uniforms they were objects of hatred and scorn. This is reflected in a passage from Cockle and Mustard:

  At the end of the street, on this evening, the light is going out of the sky. The single electricity lamp dimly lights the street. Light from the houses also seeps out from the windows. At the far end of the street, a lot of boys are gathered. The big boys are separated from the small boys. The small boys look at the big boys in awe as the big boys are blowing smoke from their Woodbine butts through their noses. The big boys are Mungo, Christy and Mick. The small boys are listening to what the big boys are saying.

  ‘I’d shoot them,’ Mungo is saying, ‘I’d shoot the whole bloody lot of them.’

  ‘Me, too,’ says Mick, ‘they’re a proper shower of bastards.’

  ‘Hey look,’ says Christy, ‘here’s a couple of them coming up the street.’

  ‘Let’s give them a buzz,’ says Mungo.

  He puts his lips together and makes a rude noise. Then all the big boys look up at the sky as if nothing has happened and all the small ones feel fear in their hearts as the two policemen with holstered guns appear in the light of the lamp. They stop there looking towards the group of boys. It’s impossible to convey in words the fear engendered in a small boy’s heart by the sight of the black uniform of the Royal Irish Constabulary.

  Next minute, Mungo shouts: ‘Up Dev.’

  Great God, you can hear the night holding its breath. The policemen turn and move towards the boys. In an instant they are gone. The small ones, are off running, first around the houses and then down the back alleys, even before the big boys have thrown away their cigarette butts. There is a scattering of running feet in the darkness. The young boys look back and see the policemen standing at the entrance to our alley. The boys sang ‘Kevin Barry’ and then had to stop as the policemen chased after them.

  As well as meeting with the RIC on a daily basis, my father went through the trauma of seeing the infamous Black and Tans come to Galway. They were all veterans of the First World War and were deliberately sent to Ireland to terrify the nationalist population. My father witnessed them coming into his street and told me how they used to jeer at the Black and Tans when they saw them passing by in daylight, they would even sing republican songs, but at night it was different, as Cockle and Mustard illustrates:

  The young boys hid until they knew that the two policemen had given up their search. Then the young boys came out of their hiding place. They heard their names being called by their mothers. They knew they should be in bed now … But they felt they weren’t babies anymore, why should they have to go to bed at 6.30? So they walked back through the alley and reached the stree
t and ignored the calls of their mothers, that was until they heard the sound of the Lancia lorry. It was a special sound, a hard grating sound that you recognised immediately as being that of the Black and Tans. They had often seen it in daylight with its big high bonnet, its high sides and the fellows in it, insolent with their rifles and the black tails of their bonnets laid out in the breeze.

  At the sound of the approaching lorry, every front door in the street opens and the mothers call out the names of their children. They ran home with their hearts in their mouths. The mother is at the door waiting for the boy.

  ‘Come in, come in for the love of God! I told you not to be out so late in these times.’

  Now he was inside, sitting by the light of the paraffin lamp, it seems almost worse to be inside the house with the lorry driving up the street. The lorry stops in the middle of the street. They hear rough voices shouting: ‘Put out those lights.’

  Their mother turns down the wick of the lamp. They can picture all the lamps in the street going out. They hear a shot, they run upstairs, groping about in the dark.

  ‘Get into bed,’ they hear their mother telling them. They are in the big bedroom.

  There are lodgers in the small bedroom. Packey and his wife live there. His wife is in hospital at the moment so Packey isn’t in the house either. Their bedroom has two windows. There is a double bed in the corner near a small iron fireplace. The boy sleeps in that bed with his mother and his two sisters sleep in the double bed in the other side of the room.

  The bedroom is a big room and it’s a nice room when they are not afraid. They don’t talk and the boy’s mouth is dry. The girls put on nightdresses. The boy gets into bed in his shirt. He is very frightened and even though he pulls the bedclothes over his head, it doesn’t help, He just feels worse.

  ‘Can I get into your bed?’ he begs his sisters. They agree and in moments he’s snuggling up in their bed.

  ‘What has them out tonight?’ he asks his sisters.

  ‘It’s the funerals,’ they tell him.

  There were a lot of tragic funerals in the town at that time. There was Mr Walsh. They took him away in front of his children and they shot him down near the Spanish Arch, people said that they kicked him into the river. Mr Walsh’s was a big funeral.

  Everybody went to his funeral and then followed the funeral cortege. The RIC and the Black and Tans lined the route watching the crowds closely. Then there was Fr Griffin, who had been taken out of his house on Sea Road and brought up to the Barna Road where they killed him and buried him in a bog.

  Fr Griffin’s funeral was a very big one too. There was a long queue in St Joseph’s church and the boy was there holding his mother’s hand. It seemed to take a long time to reach the top of the queue. He was afraid because he had never seen a dead person before. People said that if you were afraid of the dead, all you had to do was put your hand on their cold flesh and your fear would go away. His mother lifted him up to see the dead priest in the coffin. The boy was terrified. He held on tightly to her. Fr Griffin had fair hair, the boy saw, a sort of long nose and his hands were joined and he looked awfully peaceful. But the terrible stillness in him made him afraid. It was very sad. People were weeping. The boy was just afraid because this was the first dead person, he had seen.

  As he lay in the bed, they talked about all these things. It was a pity, they agreed that they had no father. Somehow if you had a father, you wouldn’t be as afraid. All the other fellows with fathers had amazing tales to tell.

  They told you how their fathers would face up to the police and how if they weren’t family men, they would be out in the hills with the IRA. It was sort of frightening to think of their mother down there on her own in the kitchen with only the light from the fire, as she listened to the sounds coming from the street.

  Their father was only a picture on the wall. A fair-haired, young man, who people said, looked very like the boy’s younger sister, looking down at them, calmly from the wall. The picture was only a head and shoulders, but it was big enough to see he was wearing a British army uniform. He knew that about him.

  He knew he had joined the British army when the boy was two months old and that he had died at St Eloi when he was nine months old. He was twenty-six when he died, their mother told him.

  He had been a carpenter, the boy knew that, because there was still a table he had made in the yard. There was also an oval sort of basket thing, made of thick straw with two handles that held all kinds of intriguing things such as saws, bit braces, squares, levels and hammers.

  The children had asked their mother why their father had joined the British army and she told them it was because he needed a job. But they found it hard to take that he didn’t stay at home and fight for Ireland.

  It was hard to boast to your friends and tell them that their father died for England. It was a pity that mother had to be alone. It was hard on her. She had to bring them all up on a British army pension of only £2–6–8d a week. The children must have fallen asleep, for the next thing they heard was a thunderous knocking on the front door. They heard Packey going down the stairs, ‘All right, I’m coming, can’t you hold on a minute?’

  In the story, one of the sisters opens the bedroom door, so they can hear what is going on downstairs. They hear the big bolts on the front door being opened and hear voices talking, but they cannot hear what they are saying. Then they hear Packey:

  ‘A fine thing,’ Packey is talking to them, ‘to be rooting around in the house of a widow of a dead soldier. Was that why the man was sent out to fight for the rest of ye? So that you would be coming into his house and rooting the decent woman out of her bed in the dark of night?’ The children waited for Packey to be shot, but there was no shot, just more mumbling and then the sound of heavy boots on their red tiled kitchen floor.

  ‘Yes,’ shouts Packey, ‘there, he is on the wall.’

  They hear them going away after this. They cannot believe it but it’s true as they hear the front door being closed again and they are gone.

  This is the kind of incident experienced by many in Ireland, including a young Walter Macken, throughout the War of Independence and later the Civil War.

  3

  WALTER MACKEN – SECONDARY SCHOOL

  From records in the Presentation Convent National School, my father probably spent four years there, and when he completed First Class under the watchful eye of Sister Ursula, he transferred to the Patrician Brothers National School (The Bish) in 1922. He went to school there until 1927.

  His experiences in the Bish were difficult: corporal punishment was the norm then and the Patrician Brothers practised it widely. The following are some of the descriptions he gives of corporal punishment in Cockle and Mustard:

  Noseen was his nickname and the boy would have been surprised to hear him called by his real name. He was a small-sized man with a big nose that got very red when he was angry. He usually lost his temper several times a day. When he didn’t lose his temper, he could be quite nice and you could even get to like him. He was dressed like all the brothers were dressed. He wore a big black soutane from neck to heel with a black four-cornered biretta and around his waist there was a green belly band that was fastened in the middle and hung down towards the floor. The bellyband was a handy thing to hold the cane.

  The boy thought you get to hate canes. When you get a few slaps with canes across the palm of your hand, it raises up purple welts, which stay on your hands for a few hours. It’s not too bad if they hit you with the cane straight across the palm of your hand but sometimes the blow will fall on the first knuckle of your thumb and it hurts like hell. The only thing you can do when you are about to get beaten with a cane is to hold your hand as straight as possible, spreading your fingers and let them hit you. If you are tentative about putting out your hand, you might get the blow from the cane on your fingernails and if you haven’t cut them properly, the pain from that is pretty bad too. And if you hesitate, the Brother will get mad at you
and hold your hand over the edge of the desk so that he can give you a really good wallop.

  Whatever happens, you mustn’t cry. Crying always infuriates the person who is giving you the beating. It seems to drive them into paroxysms of anger. You must show a nice balanced sense of fortitude. This is hurting me, but I deserve it and therefore I will put up with it.

  He paints a frightening picture of one brother who terrified the Sixth Class and he also writes about how when this particular brother was about to flog someone, the whole school went quiet to listen to the flogging. The brothers ruled by terror, but my father also experienced a different side of this particular brother – each morning, as an altar boy, he saw him at 6.30 mass. My father could not figure out how the brother could attend mass and Holy Communion, then go into a classroom and terrify a class of twelve-year-old boys.

  It was not a good time for him, not only because of the constant corporal punishment, but also because he found very little of interest in the subjects he was taught. He wrote two articles about his school-day experiences, and the following, written in the form of a letter, provides a real insight into how he remembered school:

  Dear Brother,

  You are taking an awesome chance when you ask one of your past boys to write about his memories of the Patrician Brothers and their schools in Galway. Boys spend a lot of time at school, and at that period of their lives when they are most impressionable; when they judge the world by what the world does and says and think about them personally. In those years boys, however tough they may appear on the surface, are sensitive. They are like blank pages on which you set out to inscribe the story of a life and as you ponder over it more than twenty years later, it is still the selfish and self-centred incidents that remain in your memory, not the fact that somehow, and despite your resistance and against your will, you were educated, your mind was trained and you were launched reluctantly on the world, better prepared for the battle than you yourself knew at the time.