My Dad Was Nearly James Bond

by Des Bishop

  The family in Midleton loved my grandfather Stanley Bishop too. They spoke about him in the nicest terms and remembered with fondness his trips to Midleton. Of course, there was the element that not only was he a nice guy but he was nice despite being English, so that alone was worth celebrating. And he was a big fan of the pub, which suited the Midleton crowd perfectly. They remembered that he got to know everyone in the area and would go off on his own to the pub and make friends every time. So after hearing all this anodyne stuff about the pair of them for so many years you can imagine the shock that it was all bullshit.

  The first time I ever saw my grandmother was at the funeral home when she was laid out. She died in spring 1997. My father had said his goodbyes to her while she was alive after getting the call from the nursing home. He had decided that was more important than being at the funeral. When he attempted to write his memoir he began it by writing about this memory:

  When I got to the nursing home she was in a very nice room with clean white sheets and a window overlooking manicured gardens. There was barely a bump in the bed as she was so thin and frail. I held her hand and, as she always said over the years, ‘Are you a detective that has come to poison my tea?’ I said, ‘No, Ma, I am your son, Michael.’ I sat there holding her hand, the matron came in and asked me where was I going to stay and I told her I did not know. She said to leave it to her and she would make arrangements for me to stay in a Bed and Breakfast that was not far from the nursing home. I went back to her room for the next three days and sat holding her hand. All she talked about was her childhood in Ireland. Her mind had stopped when she was a young girl and she talked as if her mother, her father, her husband, her brothers and sisters and her school friends were all still alive and young and vibrant.

  As I sat there staring at her face, I did not see the grey-haired shrivelled-up old woman, I saw her as my mother with jet-black hair, piercing blue eyes, high cheekbones and the image of Elizabeth Taylor. How I regretted her never being able to march up Fifth Avenue on St Patrick’s Day with my three sons in their Aran sweaters and, if her mind was right, she would have cherished those wonderful moments. The tears flowed down my face. She fell asleep and I sat there staring at her with so much love, thinking how I wished she could have been the mother I desperately needed all my life.

  My relatives from Midleton were going to the funeral in England and my dad had asked me if I would go to represent the family, so I jumped on board with them and they booked a ticket for me. I was still only twenty-one at the time and would not have been able to afford my own flight anyway.

  It was an odd thing, heading over to the funeral of a woman who was very closely related to me who I did not know at all. By this time I was fully aware of the story of my dad’s childhood. But I had not considered how much other people knew, or didn’t know. No one in Midleton had ever even hinted that they were aware that anything strange had gone on.

  I knew that they were not very fond of my Aunt Joan, who had been quite stern and unfriendly with them for many years while she was living in England when they would try to see my grandmother and particularly when they tried to bring her back to a nursing home in Ireland. I think it’s fair to say that she resented her Irish relations. I was very influenced by this tense relationship and, since I had only met my aunt once, I had quite a negative view of her for years. But after finding out the truth about her and my father’s childhood, I realized the story was more complicated than I had previously believed.

  On the train from Victoria Station to the funeral some of my relatives got on to talking about how my aunt had dealt with them and had looked after my grandmother over the years. Eventually I got uncomfortable. It was the first time for me to hear all this since I had found out the truth about my father and my aunt’s childhood.

  Despite years of thinking that I did not like my aunt either, I began to get angry on her behalf. I felt she had been misunderstood and they were not really grasping why she might have had legitimate grounds to be angry or upset by things that had happened in her childhood – essentially having been handed a life sentence, having to look after a woman who brought her nothing but pain.

  I was seething, and eventually I said, ‘Hold on a minute, that is my aunt you are talking about and I think it’s understandable that she might have found things difficult, considering the things my grandmother put those children through.’

  My intervention was badly received; some of my relatives tried to suggest that I had no business commenting on these matters. And then, as if I had been thrust back into an older version of Ireland I had been spared from due to my late arrival, one of my cousins (since deceased) turned to me and said, ‘Children should be seen and not heard.’ This was the rage of denial thrown in my face. I had seen what the truth could do to someone I thought was nice when faced with secrets she did not want to face.

  I was so upset I ran out of the compartment of the train because I was ready to explode. To this day I cannot tell this story without seething anger rising up in me. I was upset for my aunt and my dad that their relatives in Cork didn’t seem to grasp what they had been through. Indeed, my father had seen this himself and he wrote in his memoir:

  I believe in Ireland that my relatives had no idea how bad my childhood had been after leaving them some ten years previous. Although they knew she was institutionalized it was just never discussed as there was a fear of mental illness in Ireland.

  I sat on my own in the other car for a while and I felt an acute awareness of the dark side of Ireland and the stories that remained hidden and suppressed. My father told me later that a psychiatrist told him that his mother had encountered horrific abuse, both physical and sexual, from her own father. Indeed, he had witnessed his grandfather’s violent alcoholism first hand:

  My grandfather was a vicious drinker he virtually drank around the clock. He was a Jekyll and Hyde and he drank all the profits from everything that the farm produced in the pubs. When he got vicious and cruel my grandmother would take me up to the barn and I would sleep with the greyhounds as he would brutalize anyone close to him including my grandmother. I remember my grandmother would hide money for food, but when he wanted money for drink nothing would stop him. I saw him smash all the vases and my grandmother’s crockery where she hid the money. He would be on his hands and knees picking up the pennies, the threepenny bits, shillings, half-crowns, etc. He would go over to the pub with a big smile on his face, giving the impression that he was Mr Wonderful, but he was cruel because he used to beat up my grandmother. In my manhood I went to the Odeon cinema in Kensington High Street to see The Days of Wine and Roses. There is a scene when Jack Lemmon goes into his father-in-law’s greenhouse and hides a bottle of booze in one of the pots. Later when he goes back to get the bottle to drink he can’t remember which pot it was in so he smashes every pot with these beautiful flowers, growling on his hands and knees. That scene was a flashback for me of my grandfather as he had done that kind of thing so many, many times. So consequently my trips to the barn sleeping with the greyhounds were quite frequent.

  Another relative came to me in the carriage and tried to explain why some of the others might have reacted to me as they did. She helped me then because I was feeling quite alone at that moment. Luckily my father had organized that I would stay with his best friend from Bexhill, Tony Dadd, and he was there to meet me at the station. I could not wait to get away from them.

  Tony Dadd could not have been a nicer man. I had such a lovely time staying with him and his wife. They had a beautiful house and an amazing garden. I thought it was so English. In fact, Bexhill was so English in every way. It amazed me how English this part of my dad’s life was. Bexhill was a small Victorian seaside town and it was incredibly quiet. It was definitely not an identity my father portrayed to us much while growing up. By the time we were born he was definitely an Irish man first and foremost.

  Tony told me they had been little
troublemakers, getting up to all sorts of messing. He talked about how good my father was at various sports throughout their lives in Bexhill. He mentioned too that my dad was a great man for the ladies. I could tell that they had been very close – which was strange, because I really had not been aware of him until this all happened.

  He told me too of his awareness of the horror of my dad’s childhood. Sometimes they would get back to my dad’s house and his mother would be throwing all his clothes into the front garden and telling him to stay away. I think this was during one of her attempts to live at home. It’s hard for me to piece it all together because the chronology is so confused. He remembered that after she had the lobotomy he had seen her walking around the town in just her underwear, completely oblivious to what she was doing. He said it used to embarrass my father so much.

  The following day I went to see my grandmother in the home. It was a weird thing because even though I did not know her I knew that I was looking at my grandmother. I loved my nan back in New York more than one could say, and here was my other granny, lying in front of me, lifeless. It was my first time to meet her.

  There she was, the villain who had only just been revealed to me. I walked around the coffin, not knowing what to feel. I stared at her face, wishing she could speak to me. I wanted to ask her questions. ‘Do you know who I am? How have we never met? What else are they not telling me?’

  I felt a few layers of sadness. One was for this poor woman who had her life stolen by mental illness; one was for me, for never having another granny to love; but most of all I felt for my dad. I felt so bad that he was not there and didn’t really have a need to be. I felt bad for the coldness of the whole affair. I felt bad that not many people in the world cared about this woman in the end.

  That feeling was strengthened at the crematorium, which was not very busy. I knew no one other than my cousins and Tony. I think I may have been introduced to a distant relation on my grandfather’s side. The names of those she had left behind were read out and I was one of them. I didn’t even know the woman, and now I was one of the chief mourners. My aunt and her children lived in Australia. I was only there because I lived in Ireland. But I was a kid from New York who had spent every holiday with his cousins and saw his grandmother all the time. We were all so close, and family meant so much to us. How could the other side of the family be so cold? It baffled me, but I was glad to be there for my dad.

  I spent that evening with Tony. He took me for a proper English seaside fish-and-chips supper and we chatted about anything that a twenty-one-year-old and an older man could relate to. The following day I went to London on my own and stayed there for the first time since I was three weeks old. Thank God they left when they did!

  When I finally got a chance to talk to my aunt about writing this book, among the many lovely things she expressed about it was her excitement that their story would be told. I had feared having a conversation with her because I thought she might feel exposed by the whole thing; but it was the opposite. I could tell from the minute I got her on the phone that she was delighted to be talking to me. She was not in the slightest bit withholding with information. The only thing she was surprised about was how much I knew. My dad had given her the impression that he had told us nothing.

  What happened is typical of my dad. He had some conversations with Joan in the months before his death. During one of those chats on the phone he said to her that I might ring her one day, looking for information about what happened to them. He told her that if I rang she should say nothing. She was under the impression then that he had kept everything a secret from us, whereas he had told us most of it years before.

  But I know why he told her to say nothing. He was paranoid about how she would react to the fact that I was writing a book about his life, and things in that book would involve her life, so he was covering his own ass in case she was pissed off. He was just more comfortable pretending it was just me and giving Joan permission not to say anything to me without feeling guilty. That was very much a Mike Bishop thing to do. He was trying to make her feel like he had nothing to do with it … even posthumously. However, it turns out she could not be happier and is more than ready to unleash the truth.

  Joan confirmed that my father exaggerated the amount of time he spent in Ireland. It was about three years, and he was back in Bexhill by 1944. My father never really shared much about anything resembling normal life in Bexhill before he was taken from his parents, but Joan has many memories of being my dad’s sister. She said music was a big part of their lives, which did not surprise me because it always seemed to be what my father turned to when he wanted to console himself. She remembers how they slept in rooms next to each other and used to tap out songs on the wall for each other to guess and how my dad used to clean the floor by strapping dusters to his feet and trying to skate on the floor.

  While my father was truly happy in Midleton, sadly Joan’s experience was anything but and, unlike him, she does not have fond memories of her time there. On so many levels, finding this out filled me with emotion: sadness for the dead generations of my relations who had been victims of alcoholism and abuse; anger, too – I was angered again by my memory of what happened with my relatives on the train to my grandmother’s funeral all those years ago.

  Then I just felt sick about the whole damn island of Ireland and all the toxic mess that remains unspoken. I just wondered how such a small island could house so much abuse. I hated the Church even more and the continuing atmosphere of silence. I loved the fact that my aunt and I were going to shout right through this toxic silence.

  Most of all, I felt so proud of the two of them. My dad survived the darkest secrets there could be. The fact that they went on to have the lives that they did is nothing short of miraculous. They broke free of generations of shame and silence and did not pass it on to us. Two wonderful parents, who brought their children up free of abuse. That is some achievement.

  24

  Sometime in the 1980s my dad had decided to begin writing songs with a view to having them recorded. He also decided to take up the guitar during this time. I remember my mother buying him a plastic-backed Ovation acoustic guitar with electric feed for Christmas. It was a big deal for him as it was a dream of his to be able to play the guitar. It was a very expensive guitar at the time and a lot of discussion was had about the best one to get. I think the whole plastic-backed-guitar thing was a bit of a fad, but we bought that guitar in the middle of the 1980s fad.

  As I have mentioned already, he wrote a song called ‘Run Children, Run’ about kids in Northern Ireland living in violence. Nowadays I think it’s quite cheesy, but I know I was not embarrassed by it back then. I actually went with my dad to record that song and the B-side to the single, ‘My Brother John’. My dad wrote that one about a brother lamenting the loss of his brother to drug addiction. It was poignant for us at the time because a cousin of ours had developed a serious problem with cocaine and we had all become aware of it.

  I thought the whole thing was pretty cool. He worked on it with a guy called Russ Seeger. Their relationship lasted no longer than that, but I always think of him when my car gets really messy. We had to take his car to the recording studio somewhere in Long Island because my dad did not drive. He drove a crappy yellow Datsun: it was tiny, and even as a boy it was hard to get into the back seat, it was so full of crap. There was garbage all over the floor, which didn’t really bother me, but I remember thinking it was really strange to have to rest my feet on top of old cigarette packets and soda cans. Nowadays, when I am on tour and I toss another empty Diet Coke bottle or Red Bull can into the back while driving, I think of the great tradition of sloppy artists I have joined. He was the only one of my dad’s friends who was not married, so it was my little glimpse into the bachelor life which I have now perfected myself.

  It was a long day in the studio and in the end I went to sleep on the floor underneath the smoke that had built up, b
ut I always thought it was really cool to be there amidst all the equipment and musicians. There was a woman with a beautiful voice who did the female vocals and it usually took her one take to get things down. It took my dad quite a few takes, and I could tell he was driving everybody crazy. He was terrible at remembering lines all his life. I think that is why he was so great off the cuff. (Aidan thinks he was undiagnosed dyslexic.) But these people were all session musicians and my dad was just a chancer with a lot of heart who had singlehandedly got this thing off the ground. In the end they got it down.

  As a result of the success of ‘Run Children, Run’, my father was determined to write more songs, and eventually it led him to write a musical. He wanted to write a musical about Irish immigration to the United States and he called it In the Footsteps of Annie Moore. Annie Moore was the first woman to be processed through Ellis Island and she had left from Cobh.

  My father became obsessed with this musical, and it began to drive us all crazy. I won’t dwell on the annoying schemes and scams he tried to pull to get somebody to fund it; and I won’t dwell on the weird get-togethers my dad would have at home with various people who were helping him write the dialogue. The songs were never that bad. Ed Torres was the fella who used to write the songs with him. They were an unlikely pair, though. Ed was a Puerto Rican from the projects of the Lower East Side known as Alphabet City. He seemed a strange partner to write songs like ‘I’m in the land where my roots are from’ about a girl who goes back to Ireland to trace her roots. ‘When you trace back your roots it’s like being reborn’ was one of the lines. I know how much Irish people hate all that stuff; but their partnership worked and they wrote a hell of a lot of songs together. Though I was never crazy about the song ‘Land of my Roots’, Ed sang it at my dad’s funeral and it was the highlight of the day for me because my dad loved his music.