My mother came from Sligo town, one of 13 children raised in a four-bedroom council house. I was her third child: there were two boys before me, Jerry and Paul. I was christened Patrick Bernard, taking the first name from my father and the second from my uncle. As soon as I could exercise any choice in the matter I stopped using my father's name. He came from Dungarvan in County Waterford, but never told me anything about his background. In fact he never told me anything about anything: there was no such thing as a normal conversation in our home. Over the years I have pieced together fragments of his story and, although I'll probably never stop hating him, I have come to understand better why he became such a vicious bastard. Things started going wrong for him at birth: he was born illegitimate at a time when, and in a place where, illegitimacy stamped you with the mark of the beast. Hate the sin, but love the sinner, Christians sometimes say, but at that time in Catholic Ireland I think they must have hated the sin, the sinner and the product of the sin. The experiences of his childhood killed any decency within him and convinced him that only by suppressing any normal human emotion could he hope to survive. That was what life had taught him and it was the only lesson he wanted to pass on to his children. He hated to see us showing emotion. Even as infants he expected us to behave like grown men, or, rather, like the man he had grown into - cold, hard and ruthless.
But still those first few years in Dunstable were relatively happy - at least compared to what came later. My mother has quite fond memories of the time: going for walks on the downs, visiting nearby Whipsnade Zoo and getting money regularly from my father, who worked on the production line at the nearby Vauxhall car factory. However, for some reason when I was four he decided he wanted to move to Bilbrook, near Wolverhampton. Almost as soon as we arrived things changed for the worse. My father, who had always drunk, began to drink excessively. He also became extremely violent towards all of us, my mother especially. He would come home barely able to stand, spitting obscenities at my mother before beating her senseless and slouching off to bed. Memories of my mother screaming as she was beaten still haunt me. She would be screaming for him to stop and we the children would be screaming with fear. Other nights, even without much drink taken, he would just turn off the television and sit there slandering her family, humiliating her, degrading her, even questioning the point of her existence. His most decent act would be to send us to bed. Then I would lie awake in the darkness listening to her sobbing downstairs, pleading with him to stop. As I got older I would sometimes overcome my fear and shout out: "Leave her alone, you bastard." And he would come running up the stairs to beat me.
My father had his drinking to finance, so for our upkeep he gave my mother either no money or very little money. I hid in the front room with her when creditors came knocking. My mother took on three jobs to feed us: cleaning in the very early morning, working on a factory production line during the day and cleaning again at night. Sometimes my father would even manage to take off her the little she earned. I grew very close to my mother and only felt secure when she was near. For this reason one of the most traumatic days in my life was my first day at school. I remember the pain and sadness I felt as I left her at the cast-iron railings of St Peter's and St Paul's in the centre of Wolverhampton. She was crying and I was crying. She told me to hang on to the red toy petrol-tanker she had given me. The next thing I remember is standing in a queue with the other boys. An older boy grabbed hold of my toy and said toys were not allowed. He tried to pull it off me; I pulled it back. A struggle developed and the other boys started shouting: "Fight! Fight!" A nun swooped down and separated us. She asked me my name.
"Bernard O'Mahoney," I said.
She said I had to call her "sister" whenever I spoke to her. "You're going to be trouble, aren't you, O'Mahoney?"
I said yes.
She screamed: "Yes, what?"
I said: "Yes, I am going to be trouble."
She put her hands on my shoulders and shook me: "What did I just tell you? You must call me 'sister'! You must always call me 'sister'! Do you understand?"
I can still smell the smells of that day, especially the lunchtime ones. I did not like liver, hated the smell and never ate it at home, so of course the first school meal had to be liver. I sat at the dinner table hardly able to touch anything: the smell of the liver had contaminated everything on the plate. Another nun spotted me. She came over, lectured me about the world's starving children, then force-fed me through my tears. Finally I swallowed the last revolting mouthful, then ran to the toilet and vomited up everything. When the final bell went that day I was a ball of emotion: I couldn't wait to get out of that hellish place. I ran to the gates where my mother was waiting and hurled myself into her arms. As we travelled home on the bus I felt secure once again. I prayed for the bus to keep on going and going, away and away from the school and on past the house of my bastard father.
My mother was religious, my father pretended to be. My mother acted in a Christian spirit, my father acted out the Christian rituals. Like all God-fearing Irish-Catholic families, we had that picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus hanging above the fireplace in our front room. Even to this day I hate it. Before we went to bed my father would make us kneel before it and say our prayers out loud. He would shout and swear at us drunkenly if we had not prayed to his satisfaction. His God looked from the picture, arms open, bleeding nail wounds in his hands, a bleeding open heart and a pitiful look on his face. My brothers and I would gaze back, terrified and crying. If my father had known what my infant mind was asking of God, he might have stopped me praying, because I used to pray with all my heart that he would drop down dead. On Sundays we had to go to church, although my father rarely went himself. He would mess us about so much making sure our Sunday best looked right that we would always be running late. This would lead to violence. On the times he accompanied us he would usually stop us in the church porch, near the two bowls of holy water, and punch, prod or kick us for making him late. He would threaten to give us an even bigger beating at home if we misbehaved inside.
My father had another notion to move, this time to Codsall, a small town quite close to Wolverhampton. He had found us a three-bedroom terraced house there which backed onto the main railway line. At night I felt the house was going to fall in on us as coal trains thundered past at the end of the garden. In 1967 my youngest brother, Michael, was born prematurely and went into intensive care. Following the birth my mother became extremely ill and had to stay in hospital. Michael grew stronger, but my mother got weaker. One night my father -at my mother's insistence - took us to see her in hospital. She waved and smiled at us from behind a glass screen, but she looked so ill. I was terrified she would never come home. My father showed no concern either for my mother or for the new baby: he would not let anything interfere with his drinking. At one point we didn't see him for three days. There was no money and no food in the house. We survived on school dinners. Our local GP even called on my father and appealed to him to take better care of us, but my father ignored him. In the end my mother was so worried about us that she discharged herself from hospital.
As I grew older I didn't try to hide my hatred for my father. I forced myself to endure his violence stoically: I didn't want him to know he was hurting me. His dislike for me seemed to grow in response to my defiance. His physical violence only ended up hardening me, but his verbal violence had a more disturbing effect. He would grip me by the throat or hair, shouting obscenities in my face while prodding or punching me in the head or body. His favourite insult to me was a reference to the circumstances of my birth.
"You were born in the gutter," he would say, "and you'll die in the gutter." He would tell my brother Paul that our mother had tried to kill him by pushing him in front of a bus when he was in his pushchair: "She didn't want you, son," he would scream.
When we came in from school we had to go straight to the small utility room where the coal was kept and clean our shoes until they shone. Then we had to take the
m to my father in the front room for inspection. He would check the soles for dirt and if they were not to his liking — and they never were - he would throw them back at us. If he had to do this more than once he would follow us into the utility room and stand over us while we cleaned, slapping and punching us. But this was nothing compared to what he saved for our mother. She would never spend anything on herself: she never owned a coat and her other clothes tended to come from jumble sales. She never smoked, drank or even went out socially. Yet he treated her like a dog. In fact, if she had been a dog he would probably have been arrested for cruelty, but because she was his wife the police and others felt there was nothing they could do. It was, they said, a domestic.
There was only one neighbour, Peggy — by coincidence a woman we had known in Dunstable - who would stand up to my father. Peggy told him to his face that he was a pig. She could see through the charade of "good old Paddy" he would put on for his drinking buddies. He was wary of her and told my mother to keep away from her.
One Mother's Day I brought my mother home a card that I had made at school. She put it on the sill above the kitchen sink. I was still sitting at the table eating my dinner when my father came home smelling of drink. My mother was still at the sink. He saw the card and picked it up.
"Is this what your little pet got you, is it? Mother's little fucking pet." My mother asked him to stop, but that only made him worse. He turned to her and said: "Shall I give you something for Mother's Day, shall I?" He picked up a plate off the draining board and went to smash it over her head. She raised her arm to protect herself and the plate broke across it, cutting it wide open. She spent the rest of Mother's Day in casualty getting it stitched. Another evening he came home and complained that his dinner was not freshly cooked, just heated up. Presumably he expected my mother to guess what time he would stagger back from the pub. He threw the dinner and the plate against the wall, grabbed my mother by the hair and started punching her. She was bleeding from the nose and mouth but he kept punching her until she collapsed on the floor. He stood over her, big fucking man, as she lay on the floor, his hands and shirt smeared with her blood. My mother raised her head slightly, coughed up some blood and asked me to get her some water. My father said he would get it. He walked out of the room and I helped my mother to sit up. He came back holding a mug of water: "Here Anna. You wanted fucking water - take it." And with that he dashed the mug into her face.
I used to go to school in the mornings like a bomb waiting to explode. I loathed the other children's happiness: "Daddy did this for me, daddy did that for me." I needed to shut them up. I used to fight them with a ferocity fuelled by a hatred of their normality and happiness. Even at that young age I was developing a fearsome reputation for violence. I must have spent more time in front of the headmaster than in lessons. When those in authority were standing there shouting at me I would take myself to another place in my mind, re-living a favourite film or a great football moment. My apparently cold and detached manner would infuriate them more and I would usually end up being physically shaken out of my daydreams. I was not invited to another child's house until I was ten, when I went to the birthday party of my next-door neighbour,
Nicky. There were about 12 children there, as well as adults, and everyone was laughing and joking. Their joy made me feel angry and down. One of Nicky's presents was a model of an American Flying Fortress bomber. When all the other children went out to play football, I stayed behind and smashed the plane to pieces, dropping the remains behind the television.
In 1971, when I was eleven, my father decided to show me how to do up a tie. He made me stand still with my hands by my side. This meant I could only see his hands and not what he was doing with the tie. Then he undid the tie and told me to do it. I got it wrong. He grabbed the tie which was round my neck and began pulling me about with it, slapping me round the head and saying I was fucking stupid. Finally I could take no more. I shouted at him: "I wish you were fucking dead," then I punched him on the side of the head before running out of the room and up the stairs. He ran out and caught me halfway up. He laid into me with a vicious fury. I ended up at the foot of the stairs curled into a ball to protect myself from his kicks which were aimed at the small of my back. I thought he was going to kill me. My mother was screaming at him to stop. Suddenly I felt a sharp pain and my legs went numb. I began shouting: "I can't feel my legs! I can't feel my legs!" Only then did he stop. He tried to get me to my feet, but I kept collapsing. My mother ran out to call an ambulance.
As I lay on the floor waiting for the ambulance my father knelt down beside me. He pulled my head up by the hair and said: "Say you were playing and you fell down the stairs on your own or I'll fuckin' kill ye." And that is what I told anyone who asked. Fortunately, nothing was broken, but the discs in my spine were damaged in a way that even today causes me pain.
I started going to Codsall Comprehensive, a school of around 1,500 pupils. I would have fights with other boys almost every day of the week. If I came home with a black eye or another mark on me my father would beat me and offer me the only bit of fatherly advice he ever gave any of us: "Don't let people get away with hitting you. If they're bigger than you, hit them with something." We all started following his advice. My brother Paul got into a fight on a pub car park with a gang from another part of town. He ran at them with two screwdrivers, one in each hand. He stabbed three people before being beaten to a mess. He served two years in borstal. The eldest, Jerry, took on a group of men in a pub. He had armed himself with a pair of large mechanic's spanners and started clubbing all round him. The police arrived and he clubbed one of them too before being overpowered. He had given one of the men a fractured skull; a policeman had a shattered knee. Jerry was sent to prison. All of us, under my father's tutoring, had developed a capacity for extreme and awful violence. It set us apart - and set us against the world, especially the world of authority. I hardly needed to consult a fortune-teller to know where I was heading.
3
Out Of Control
I never felt English growing up, although I suppose I never felt properly Irish either. To be honest, with everything else that was going on, I didn't spend much time agonising about that aspect of my identity.
I knew my roots were in Ireland and I felt comfortable around Irish people. In a sense I lived in an Irish world, although there was no flag-waving Paddiness. I spent every summer holiday in Ireland, and I loved being there, especially with my mother's family in Sligo. My maternal grandfather, Tom, held republican views. He used to find my English Midlands accent comical and was always saying jokingly: "Oh, you Englishman." My older cousins seemed to spend a lot of their time playing cards in people's back gardens and by a weighbridge in the middle of the town. I remember the police turning up once to raid a game, having hidden themselves in the back of a removal van. I could not understand why they had gone to so much trouble over a group of men playing cards. I got on very well with everyone and liked the town and their way of life.
My stays in my father's hometown of Dungarvan were less enjoyable. People behaved as if a black cloud had descended on the place when my father arrived. He was well known, but not well liked. From his early years he had earned a reputation for violence and you could watch people steering clear of him. When there I would try to find out more about my father, but even the relations with whom we stayed didn't seem too sure about him. Or perhaps they were just not willing to tell me anything: he was not a subject that anyone liked talking about. All I knew for sure was that he didn't go to his mother's funeral. On that side of the family was a cousin who served a prison sentence for rioting in Belfast in the early seventies. On his release he came to live with us in Codsall for six months.
I was eleven when Bloody Sunday took place in Derry, but I can't remember the event having much of an impact on my life. My one clear memory comes from watching television and seeing a priest crouching over one of the victims, waving a blood-stained handkerchief. However, I didn't re
ally understand what was going on. In fact the first time the Troubles registered with me was when the soldier son of a family that lived in our street got shot in Derry. IRA gunmen used a church porch to launch an attack on a Royal Horse Artillery checkpoint in March 1974. They killed one soldier and wounded two others, including my one-time neighbour, David Nuttall, whose brother Robert went to my school. The news caused great shock and excitement in our street and I remember a ripple of anti-Irish feeling. Around this time I had a slanging match in the street with some of the Nuttalls. During this confrontation I started shouting, "Up the IRA!", presumably to wind them up, because I can't remember being especially supportive of the Provos or even very aware of what they stood for. However, I met David Nuttall in a pub recently and he remembered me as being far more pro-IRA than I remember myself. He told me that, apart from the slanging match, I had also thrown stones at him while he was recovering from his injuries and shouted, "You British Army bastard!" I suppose my gut instincts were certainly pro-republican, although I can't say I had any real political consciousness. I tended to sympathise with anyone who fought authority, so people who threw petrol bombs at the police and army seemed like my sort of people.
I gradually became more aware of what has happening in Northern Ireland, although events there still remained on the margins of my mind. Once when I was 14 my father found me a job in a Waterford glass factory. He was going to leave me there as he thought a job was of more use to me than days wasted at school. Fortunately, my mother did not approve of the idea and she managed eventually to persuade him to take me back to England. It was during that holiday that someone at a Dungarvan disco reminded me forcefully of my perceived Englishness. One of the local teenagers must have assumed I was an ordinary English holidaymaker. Unburdened by notions of Irish hospitality, he ambushed me in the toilets, punching me on the nose and calling me an English bastard. He hadn't realised I was at the disco with a mob of my Irish cousins. We gave him and his mates a good beating outside, although my own nose was broken. This attack did not destabilise my sense of identity: I didn't feel more English and less Irish as a result. If anything - and perhaps this indicates my essentially pro-republican feelings at the time — I sympathised with his attitude. I didn't take his attack personally: I thought it was natural for an Irishman to want to punch an Englishman.
Soldier Of The Queen Page 2