An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  THREE

  Go where glory waits thee

  10

  For kids like myself social life was represented by the shop-front and the gas-lamp. This was mainly because we could rarely bring other kids home in the evenings; the houses were too small, and after the fathers came home from work, children became a nuisance. Besides, most families had something to hide; if it wasn’t an old grandmother like mine or a father who drank, it was how little they had to eat. This was always a matter of extreme delicacy, and the ultimate of snobbery was expressed for us by the loud woman up the road who was supposed to call her son in from play with: ‘Tommy, come in to your tea, toast and two eggs!’

  But as well as that, there was a sort of fever in the blood that mounted towards evening. After tea, you would hear the children whistling and calling from every direction, on a falling note: ‘SU-sie! JOHNnie!’ at least those of them whose parents did not set them at once to their homework; and then by some immemorial instinct they would begin to converge like wild animals or savages from the jungle of the streets on the campfires of the shop-windows that glowed warmly in the cold evenings. The shopkeepers didn’t like these gatherings at all because they gave their shops a bad name, and now and then one would come out and clap her hands and cry: ‘Let ye be going home now, children! This is no place for ye at this hour of night.’ But the children would rarely go further than the nearest lamp-post and after a while they would drift back to the shop-front until their mothers’ voices began to fill the night with names uttered on a rising note: ‘SuSIE!’ or ‘JohnNIE!’

  The shop-fronts and gas-lamps were quite as exclusive as city clubs. The boys from our neighbourhood usually gathered outside Miss Murphy’s shop at the foot of the Square, while the respectable boys of the Ballyhooley Road – the children of policemen, minor officials and small shopkeepers – gathered outside Miss Long’s by the Quarry. I lived in a sort of social vacuum between the two, for though custom summoned me to Miss Murphy’s with boys of my own class who sometimes went without boots and had no ambition to be educated, my instinct summoned me to Miss Long’s and the boys who wore boots and got educated whether they liked it or not.

  As nothing would persuade Father but that he was a home-loving body, nothing would persuade me but that I belonged to a class to which boots and education came natural. I was always very sympathetic with children in the story-books I read who had been kidnapped by tramps and gipsies, and for a lot of the time I was inclined to think that something like that must have happened to myself. Apart from any natural liking I may have had for education, I knew it was the only way of escaping from the situation in which I found myself. Everyone admitted that. They said you could get nowhere without education. They blamed their own failure in life on the lack of it. They talked of it as Father talked of the valuable bits of machinery he had stored on top of the wardrobe, as something that would be bound to come in handy in seven years’ time.

  The difficulty was to get started. It seemed to be extremely hard to get an education, or even – at the level on which we lived – to discover what it was. There was a little woman up the road called Mrs Busteed whose elder son was supposed to be the most brilliant boy in Ireland, and I watched him enviously on his way to and from the North Monastery, but his mother had been a stewardess on the boats and it was always said that ‘they made great money on the boats’. Of course, education implied nice manners instead of coarse ones – I could see that for myself when I contrasted Mother’s manners with those of my father’s family – and I was a polite and considerate boy most of the time, except when the business of getting an education proved too much for me, and I had to go to Confession and admit that I had again been disobedient and disrespectful to my parents – about the only sin I ever got the chance of committing till I was fifteen.

  So I was drawn to the policemen’s sons and the others on the Ballyhooley road who produced all those signs of a proper education that I had learned to recognize from the boys’ weeklies I read. One boy might have a bicycle, another a stamp album; they had a real football instead of the raggy ball that I kicked around or a real cricket bat with wickets; and occasionally I saw one with a copy of the Boy’s Own Paper, which cost sixpence and had half-tone illustrations instead of the papers that I read, which cost a penny and had only line drawings.

  Between those two groups I felt very lonely and unwelcome. Those who frequented them must have thought me a freak – the poorer kids because I spoke in what probably sounded like an affected accent, and used strange words and phrases that I had picked up from my reading; the others because I was only an intruder from the shop-front where I belonged, trying to force his company on them. The only one of them I became really acquainted with was Willie Curtin, whose family kept a florist’s shop in which he did messages. He was a lame lad with a long, pale, handsome, desperate face and a loud, boisterous voice, who smoked cigarette butts by the score and broke in defiantly on any group, pushing people aside with his arms like a swimmer. Like myself, he read endlessly, and he ate whatever he was reading right down to the type – a habit I detested because I treasured everything I read. We carried on complicated swaps, which with Willie were always complicated further by considerations like a foreign coin or a magic-lantern slide. I envied him his warm welcome for himself, and it wasn’t until long after that I guessed he was really a lame, lonely, neglected boy who also did not belong anywhere.

  That was probably why we both read so much, but whereas Willie read indiscriminately, I had a strong preference for school stories and above all for the penny weeklies, the Gem and the Magnet. Their appeal for me was that the characters in them were getting a really good education, and that some of it was bound to brush off on me. All the same, a really good education like that demanded a great many things I did not have, like an old fellow who didn’t drink and an old one who didn’t work, an uncle with a racing car who would give me a tip of five pounds to blow on a feed in the dormitory after lights out, long trousers, a short jacket and a top hat, bicycles, footballs and cricket bats. For this I should need a rich relative in the States, and we were short of relatives in the States. The only one I could get certain tidings of was a patrolman in the Chicago Police known as ‘Big Tim’ Fahy. He was a cousin of Mother, and such a giant that even Father, who was a six-footer, said he felt like a small boy beside him. Tim’s only ambition was to join the Royal Irish Constabulary, where height was as well regarded as it had been in the court of Frederick the Great, but one day in the Western Star pub, six English soldiers had jeered him about his height, and he had thrown the whole six into the street. The police had been sent for, and he had thrown them after the soldiers. And that was the end of Tim’s ambition, for no one with a conviction against him would be accepted in the RIC. Murphy’s Brewery had offered him a handsome job as sandwichman to illustrate what Murphy’s stout did for you, but he was too proud for a job like that, so he emigrated. He was famous enough in Chicago, to judge by the newspaper clippings the Fahys showed us when we visited them, and we had a photograph of him on the sideboard, wearing a sword, but I didn’t know if even he could afford to send me to a school like those I read about.

  So I adored education from afar, and strove to be worthy of it, as later I adored beautiful girls and strove to be worthy of them, and with similar results. I played cricket with a raggy ball and an old board hacked into shape for a bat before a wicket chalked on some dead wall. I kept in training by shadow boxing before the mirror in the kitchen, and practised the deadly straight left with which the hero knocked out the bully of the school. I even adopted the public-school code for my own, and did not tell lies, or inform on other boys, or yell when I was beaten. It wasn’t easy, because the other fellows did tell lies, and told on one another in the most shameless way, and, when they were beaten, yelled that their wrists were broken and even boasted later of their own cleverness, and when I behaved in the simple, manly way recommended in the school stories, they said I was mad or that I wa
s ‘shaping’ (the Cork word for swanking), and even the teachers seemed to regard it as an impertinence.

  I was always very fond of heights, and afterwards it struck me that reading was only another form of height, and a more perilous one. It was a way of looking beyond your own back yard into the neighbours’. Our back yard had a high wall, and by early afternoon it made the whole kitchen dark, and when the evening was fine, I climbed the door of the outhouse and up the roof to the top of the wall. It was on a level with the respectable terrace behind ours, which had front gardens and a fine view, and I often sat there for hours on terms of relative equality with the policeman in the first house who dug close beside me and gave me ugly looks but could not think up a law to keep me from sitting on my own back wall. From this I could see Gardiner’s Hill falling headlong to the valley of the city, with its terraces of tall houses and its crest of dark trees. It was all lit up when our little house was already in darkness. In the mornings, the first thing I did when I got up was to mount a chair under the attic window and push up the windowframe to see the same hillside when it was still in shadow and its colours had the stiffness of early-morning light. I have a distinct recollection of climbing out the attic window and, after negotiating the peril of the raised windowframe, crawling up the roof to the ridge to enlarge my field of view, but Mother must have caught me at this, because I do not remember having done it often.

  Then there was the quarry that fell sheer from the neighbourhood of the barrack to the Ballyhooley Road. It was a noisome place where people dumped their rubbish and gangs of wild kids had stoning matches after school and poor people from the lanes poked among the rubbish for spoil, but I ignored them and picked my way through the discarded bully-beef tins and climbed to some ledge of rock or hollow in the quarry face, and sat there happily, surveying the whole neighbourhood from Mayfield Chapel, which crowned the hillside on the edge of the open country, to the spire of Saint Luke’s church below me, and below that again in the distance was the River Lee with its funnels and masts, and the blue hills over it. Immediately beneath me was the Ballyhooley Road, winding up the hill from St Luke’s Cross, with its little houses and their tiny front gardens, and (on the side nearest me) the back yards where the women came to peg up their washing; and all the time the shadow moved with a chill you could feel, and the isolated spots of sunlight contracted and their colour deepened. I felt like some sort of wild bird, secure from everything and observing everything – the horse and cart coming up the road, the little girl with her skipping rope on the pavement, or the old man staggering by on his stick – all of them unconscious of the eagle eye that watched them.

  But whatever the height, whether that of storybook or quarry, the eagle had to descend. Up there I was cold and hungry, and the loneliness and the longing for society made me feel even worse. Mother would soon be finished work. At some houses she did half a day, which ended about three o’clock and for which she was paid ninepence, and at others a whole day that did not end until six or later and for which she was paid one and sixpence. Depending on the humour of the mistress or maid she worked for, I might be allowed to call for her a little before she finished work, and in one house in Tivoli, beside the river, where the maid – Ellie Mahoney – was also an orphan from the Good Shepherd Orphanage, I was not only admitted to the big, warm area kitchen after school and given my tea, but, if the family was out, I was allowed to accompany Mother upstairs while she did the bedrooms, or go to the lumber room in the attic which was chock full of treasures – old pamphlets, guide books, phrase books in French and German, school books, including a French primer, old dance programmes from Vienna and Munich that contained musical illustrations of Schubert’s songs and – greatest prize of all – an illustrated book of the Oberammergau Passion Play with the text in German and English. It was junk that would have meant nothing to anyone else, but for me it was ‘the right twigs for an eagle’s nest’, and, seeing my passion for it, Ellie Mahoney soon cleared it out and let me have my pick. It filled my mind with images of how educated people lived; the places they saw, the things they did, and the lordly way they spoke to hotel managers and railway porters, disputing the bill, checking the two trunks and five bags that were to go on the express to Cologne, and tipping right, left and centre.

  It was only another aspect of the vision I caught in the master bedrooms that overlooked the railway line and the river. There were triptych mirrors, silver-handled brushes with engraved designs, and curiously shaped bottles that contained oils and scents and with which I experimented recklessly when Mother’s back was turned. Sometimes, since then, whenever I stay in such a house, I wonder what really goes on when I am not looking; what small black face has studied itself in the mirror of the dressing table, or what grubby little paw has plied the silver-handled brushes and poured on the bay rum, and I turn round expecting to see a tiny figure dash recklessly down the stairs to the safety of the kitchen. For these were dangerous heights, and sometimes I became so fascinated by a passing boat or a lighted train on its way down to Queenstown between the roadway and the house that I failed to notice someone crossing the railway bridge from the river road till I heard the bell jangle below in the kitchen, and took the stairs three or four at a time, almost knocking down Ellie as she trotted up, nervously arranging her starched cap.

  Ellie was typical of the orphan children – a thin, desiccated, anxious old maid with tiny, red-rimmed eyes, a little scrap of grey hair screwed up under her old-fashioned cap, and a tinny, tormented voice. But her heart was full of girlish passion, and she loved to discuss with Mother whether or not she should accept the proposal of the milkman, who was now becoming pressing. Ellie’s wages, as I remember distinctly over all the years, were five shillings a week, but I fancy that in her forty-odd years of service she had managed to put by a few pounds, and with her little dowry and her blameless character, considered herself an eligible partner for a settled man like the milkman. At least, as she said, she would have someone to look after her in her old age. I think this must have been something of a dream to the orphan girls, because Mother caused me fierce pangs of jealousy when she told me that she had prayed for a girl – someone who would look after her in her old age. But, instead of marrying the milkman, Ellie contracted lupus, and while her poor little face was being eaten away, Mother (and, of course, I) visited her regularly in the Incurable Hospital on the Wellington, Road and until the end she continued to congratulate herself on having had employers who did not throw her into the workhouse to die. I was sorry when she did die and I saw her laid out for burial with a white linen cloth covering her demolished face, because I had planned everything differently, and had arranged with Mother (and I suspect with Ellie herself) that when I made a fortune she would come as maid to us, and be paid a really substantial wage – I think I had fixed it at seven shillings a week.

  So I scampered down the quarry face to the snug, suburban road with its gas-lamps and smooth pavements, and waited by the tram stop at Saint Luke’s Cross where I could be sure Mother would not escape me. I would feel guilty because I knew I should have stayed at home and lit the fire so that she would not have to re-light it after a hard day’s work, but I hated to be in the house alone. I sat in the dusk on the high wall overlooking the church, afraid to look back for fear I might grow dizzy and fall, and when a tram came wheezing up the hill from town I followed the men who got off it in quest of cigarette pictures. Sometimes she would have only her wages, but occasionally a maid would give her a bit of cold meat or a slice of apple pie for my supper. Sometimes, too, we would have the house to ourselves, and we would light the fire and sit beside it in the darkness, and she would tell me stories or sing songs with me. These were almost always Moore’s Melodies. A whole generation has grown up that has what seems to me an idiotic attitude to ‘Tommy’ Moore, as it calls him in its supercilious way – mainly, because it has never learned to sing him. His songs were the only real education that the vast majority of Irish people got during the
nineteenth century and after, even if it was an education of the heart, of which we all had too much, rather than an education of the intelligence, of which we had too little. My own favourites were ‘Farewell, but Whenever You Welcome the Hour’ and ‘How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies’. I took the songs I sang with a deadly literalness that sometimes reduced me to sobs, and with the paternal melancholia I loved songs of twilight like ‘Those Evening Bells’ (a choice which, I subsequently learned, I shared with the great actor Edmund Kean). But Mother was very fond of ‘I Saw from the Beach’, and I can still remember the feeling of slight jealousy and mortification that possessed me when she sang:

  Ne’er tell me of glories, serenely adorning

  The close of our day, the calm eve of our nights;–

  Give me back, give me back the wild freshness of Morning.

  Her clouds and her tears are worth Evening’s best light.

  As I say, I took things literally, and it seemed to me as if she were appealing to some happiness she had known in youth of which I was not a part, but she made it up to me by singing her own favourite, ‘Go Where Glory Waits Thee’, and I put up with the dull tune for the sake of the words that seemed to be addressed to myself.