* * *
Saint Stephen’s Green in the centre of Dublin and the surrounding area is a combination of Ireland’s past, present and future rolled into one. Lord Iveagh, the man who had a hand in inventing the pint of Guinness, named after his family, founded the little green oasis. It’s also been said he insisted that the park be closed two hours before the pubs stopped serving the last mug of Guinness. His foresight in this instance may be the reason that the park is in such pristine condition and a jewel in Dublin’s tilted crown.
At least twice a week my father would walk to Stephen’s Green and sit on a bench near the Eblana monument and retreat into his reminiscences of his time as a soldier in the British Army. Sitting there, he would mumble out loud: “I didn’t give a shite what was said about me when I came back in the English army uniform. Who raised the British flag in every piss-hole place on the globe? Who? Me! Paddy Walsh and a lot of fellas like me! Wasn’t we the men who conquered the plains of India for England?”
The Royal Dublin Fusiliers’ arch at the entrance to Stephen’s Green was erected in 1907, a time when England and Ireland were less foreign to each other. The memorial was named ‘Eblana’ because some ancient scholar said it was Dublin’s first name before it was named Dublin. Many of the Anglo-Irish accepted the arch as an edifice of affection that reflected the historical bond between the two countries at an earlier time. Irishmen who had served in the British army held the arch in high esteem. As a tribute it memorialises those of the Dublin Fusiliers who fell in the Boer War. For the most part, few in Dublin stopped to read the inscriptions on the arch because the names of the dead were inscribed on the inside of the arch and you had to contort your head backward to read the dedications. More than a few Dubliners chose to walk around it rather than under it and there were many voices that called for its destruction and referred to it as the “Traitors’ Gate”.
If anyone in Stephen’s Green slowed down to listen to Paddy Walsh, he or she was likely to hear him continue with: “Did you know I was guarding the Jews in Palestine and nothin’ to drink but camel piss? A double-breasted brass-button glory I was! What did ya want of me? What did ya want me ta do? Wasn’t half of Ireland in the British army? Isn’t that what made the British army? Irishmen fighting for a shilling a day! Didn’t we beat Napoleon in the Peninsula and didn’t we beat him at Waterloo?” Depending on how many pints of Guinness he had consumed on the day of his dole payment, Paddy would also be inclined to break into song.
“Oh, when the war was on we had rashers in the pan!
Now that it’s all over, we’ve only bread and jam!
Oh right you are, right you are!
Right you are, me jolly good soldier, right you are!”
When pedestrians walked by Paddy he was unlikely to see or hear anyone. The world of his country, his city and his family were more like orbiting moons spinning about in the distant sky above and they were as detached from him as he was from them – except when he chose to look up which was rare indeed.
* * *
One day, after Paddy received his dole payment and while reminiscing in Stephen’s Green, he heard from a man sitting on a bench opposite him that there was a vacancy for a porter’s job in a big house on Ely Place. The position also provided living quarters in the large attic on the top floor. Ely Place was only a stone’s throw from Saint Stephen’s Green. With little hesitation Paddy Walsh went to the address and applied for the job. To his delight he became a house porter for the Knights of Columbanus.
The Knights of Columbanus, a conservative Catholic lay organisation founded in Belfast in 1915, advised and assisted Catholic institutions throughout the world. Their patron, Saint Columbanus, was a sixth-century Irish monk who founded many monasteries in Europe in his time. It was said by some and refuted by others that Columbanus preferred Easter to Christmas, the Resurrection to the Nativity, and besides that idiosyncrasy had trouble convincing the religious orders in France at the time that they had their calendars wrong. He was following the Celtic calendar which had a different date for Easter. When Columbanus informed the higher-ups in France about this he was thrown out of the country so he went to Italy where he got on better with the natives.
Paddy’s first serious bit of employment since he left the British army and located to Dublin transformed him. He, my mother and a family of nine moved into the attic at Number 7, Ely Place. By any standard it was a posh part of Dublin. Paddy’s job required him to polish doorknobs and keep the front steps of the club free and clear of debris. Inside he swept the carpets and cleaned the windows. After a few months on the job he appeared to be the happiest man in the world. It was as if he had returned to his youth. He was so content with his work as a hall porter he went out of his way to boastfully tell anyone who would listen about his time as a seventeen-year-old soldier in the British Army. Paddy Walsh was a bit of entertainment for the strictly orthodox Knights of Columbanus. When he opened the door for the club members he was greeted with a smile and encouraged to talk about his past, which he did unhesitatingly.
The job afforded my father a comfort he’d probably never had. Comfort, on the other hand, seemed to frighten my mother Molly. She believed, with just about everyone else in Ireland at the time, that pleasure and happiness didn’t get one into Heaven. And the more she witnessed Paddy basking in the joy of his employment the more she withdrew from him and the rest of the family. Almost every day she’d call to my father and demand he do something about his children running wild about the place. At the time my two oldest sisters Mary and Rita were frequenting the local dance halls and were being escorted home by young men they met during the course of the evening. Their loitering in the hallway late at night and making audible romantic sounds would send Molly into a frenzy. What she was hearing might as well have been the Devil screaming. Such was the effect on her, she’d stop praying and run down the stairway and chase my sisters’ escorts out into the street in dismay and shock. In an effort to avoid any future occurrences, Molly did her best to prevent my sisters from wearing lipstick or nylon stockings. To her, these accoutrements were an invitation to commit sin. In order to avoid my mother’s wrath, my sisters hid their make-up and nylon stockings anywhere they could. Sometimes they were stashed away in cooking pots and in the oven. On at least one occasion we had cooked nylon stocking and melted lipstick for dinner. Added to my mother’s crusade and woes was my oldest brother Nicholas. He was about twelve at the time and was constantly stealing apples and pears from the orchard in the back of the large house. This didn’t go down well with the Knights when their cook wanted to make stewed pear and apples for dessert.
When Paddy was outside the building polishing the brass doorknobs, Molly would approach him and complain that the family was out of control and he was too busy to do anything about it – or worse, didn’t care what they did. When he did his best to ignore her or retreat into silence Molly would yell at him. She purposely did this, hoping to disturb the club members who were conducting their religious rituals or playing cards in the main meeting room. Paddy didn’t like Molly yelling at him whether it was inside or outside the building and might have even wished he hadn’t taken the job in the first place. When it was in the attic he’d lower his voice so as not to disturb the members of the club who were conducting their meetings downstairs in the main hall. When Molly accosted him outside the premises he’d tell her to go upstairs and mind her own business.
There was definitely something about my mother that prevented her from embracing comfort and happiness. She appeared to be even more disturbed if she witnessed her children and my father being content and relaxed. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Molly practised being the image of Jesus on the cross. It was likely she saw herself as Christ and my father as the cross. With the family war going on in the attic and with fewer and fewer peaceful intervals, the Knights of Columbanus might easily have thought that they were living in the Middle Ages and that the crusades were being fought all over again. Nat
ivity and resurrection was one thing for the Knights but they weren’t prepared to endure another crucifixion and in spite of their orthodox beliefs one man on a cross was enough.
* * *
On a rare sunny morning a voice from outside on the street yelled out, “There’s a scabby epidemic!” Then came a banging on the front door. The noise woke me up. My father rushed to open the door and was immediately confronted by a woman who was dressed in white from head to toe.
“I’m a nurse and all the children in the vicinity are to be brought to the hospital dispensary.” The disturbance brought my mother and the rest of us downstairs.
When Molly saw the woman in white, she screamed out at the top of her voice. “Ah, Mother of Jesus, don’t tell me we’re all goin’ to die!”
A second or two later the door to where the Knights were conducting their meeting opened and two men stepped out. One man, fuming with anger, stepped forward and took hold of my father’s elbow. “What is going on?” he asked.
Before my father had a chance to answer the woman in white repeated her call. “A scabby plague!” She then reached out and pulled me towards her. “Look at your children’s skin for red sores!” She lifted up my shirt and looked at my body and sure enough I was covered with tiny little red spots. They were all over me.
“They’ll all have to be disinfected. Every last child!” the nurse said in a much calmer voice.
The two club members, who up to this point had stood mystified, rushed back to their meeting room and slammed the door fast and furious behind them.
My father then threw his duster against the wall and yelled out: “This won’t help me! It won’t help, I’m tellin’ ya that!”
Molly then grabbed me back from the nurse and inspected me even more closely. “Holy Mother of God, look! Spots! Spots! Spots!”
They were in my mouth, in my ears, and in my nose. Everywhere there was skin, the scabies were. My mother began to cry. I was so frightened I didn’t even notice my brothers and sisters being examined.
At any rate, within a few minutes I was marched off alone to Hume Street dispensary where I joined a lot of other young boys. The girls must have been taken to a different location. Another woman dressed in white instructed us to strip naked. Quickly all the young boys shed their clothes. After that we were marched into a big room. The room was crowded with even more naked boys scratching the skin off their bodies. Half were crying, a few were laughing.
After we’d stood naked for half the morning another nurse came by. “When sprayed keep moving and go out into the other room and don’t touch yourselves or anything. You’ve another treatment after that before you’re to go home!”
Then a man came by with a huge paintbrush and we were painted white. “Don’t touch this until it hardens on ya! It’ll become like plaster. Don’t touch it till it does.”
My body burned as if the man had put a match to it.
Some of the boys were comparing the heat from the whitewash to the heat in Hell.
“In Hell it’s twenty million times hotter than this,” one boy said.
Another called out, “It’s a hundred million times hotter in Hell than this! If you have any mortal sins on your soul you’ll be burnt!”
After that we were told to move out to make room for the next batch of children with itchy skin. Outside in the hallway we stood in the long corridor and waited for the white powdery paint to dry. A woman dressed in white came by carrying a small bucket and a paintbrush. She told us to line up against the wall and said she had to inspect us before we were released.
As she went from boy to boy she called out: “What’s this? Ya left this out? It’s not covered!” Some of our mickies hadn’t got splattered with the white paint. She swiped at my groin area with the paintbrush.
One boy asked, “How am I goin’ to pee?”
“If it falls off ya, ya won’t be able to pee either, will ya now? Never mind whether ya can pee or not!” With that she slapped another gob of whitewash on him.
* * *
The seemingly constant noise of my sisters’ nocturnal behaviour as well as the rest of the family running up and down the stairs during the day soon impacted on the peaceful order of the Knights of Columbanus. They felt under siege and were determined to do something about it.
Paddy was asked to explain the screams coming from the attic during the course of the day as well as the ructions between my mother and my sisters late at night. He could only offer the excuse that it was my mother’s raised voice when saying the rosary. Among other complaints, the idea of the girls being courted in the hallway in the late evenings certainly wasn’t what the Knights had bargained for when they hired my father. Having the Walsh family living in the building was akin to a replay of the Battle of Tours for the Knights. The intrusion and imposition of children yelling in the hallway while they were praying just didn’t fit. The idea of conflict so close to home was a direct threat to their charitable instincts and agenda. Prayers and hymns didn’t blend with screams and yells. Not to mention the odd profanity contributed by my sisters’ escorts.
The decision to defend themselves was made and my father was soon called before the tribunal. Paddy’s plea to keep his job only went so far and a Senior Knight informed him that his position would be terminated. Being fired from the only job he was ever likely to find was the last straw for him.
Rather than offering sympathy or concern when informed of the situation, my mother retreated to praying again – but this time very silently. In some ways her prayers had been answered. Paddy’s happiness was a threat and Molly’s proclivity for suffering was enhanced by the thought that she’d have to find a place to live and start all over, destitute again.
The next day my father was given two weeks’ notice to find other accommodation. A week later Molly filed for a new place to live with the city housing department. Shortly thereafter the Walshes were relocated to Inchicore.
Other than being about three miles north-west from the centre of Dublin, Inchicore had almost nothing to be said for it. Few people seemed to know or care if it was north or south of anything. The place had no statues of English generals on horses or memorials to soldiers who fought in far-off military campaigns. What it did have was smokestacks and an ironworks foundry belonging to C.I.E. where practically the entire male population of the neighbourhood worked. Whenever a bus or a train broke down in Dublin, or in any other part of Ireland for that matter, it was hauled to the foundry, repaired and put back in use.
Every morning and evening in Inchicore the factory horn assaulted people’s ears and reminded just about every family in the area where their bread and butter was coming from.
At half seven in the morning the horn would bellow out, shake the windows of the small red-brick houses and wake everybody up. Wives and mothers would leap out of bed, rush down the small wooden stairs to their cold sculleries and heat up water for tea. They’d also slap gobs of margarine on slices of stale bread. A basin of cold water, set out the night before with a bar of industrial soap would be on a small table next to the fireplace. The little remaining heat from the ashes of the previous night’s fire would help expel the chill from the small room. Before the water boiled on the stove the women would run back up to the bedrooms to shake husbands and sons out of their slumber. Groggy and still half-asleep, the men would roll out of bed and place their feet on the cold wooden floor and piss in the chamber-pots that were strategically placed near the bed. Years of practice had perfected their aim and rarely did any pee land on the floor. After a few minutes the women would return to the bedrooms, pick up the overflowing chamber-pots and retreat back down the stairs to empty the contents in an outhouse in the back yard. At the same time the men would pick up their shirts and overalls from the floor and get dressed for work at the foundry. They’d come down the creaking staircase buttoning their overalls and without stopping would scoop up a handful of cold water from the basin and splash their faces with it. Fathers and sons then sat down f
or a cup of tea with bread and margarine. Two bites into the bread they’d moan and grimace because the margarine on the bread tasted like foundry grease. Within ten minutes or so the men would get up from the small kitchen tables and place worn and greasy caps on their heads. They’d then wrap shredded scarves around their necks, the scarves smelling of a combination of hair oil and foundry grease. A man’s neck was a good indicator of how often he’d avoided taking a bath. If it was a mixture of green and black it had been at least a week since he washed. If it reflected a combination of green, yellow and black it had likely been two weeks since he stepped into the tub.
The front doors of the small houses would open and the men would march towards the big gates of the foundry where they’d be greeted by the smell of smoke and oil. Minutes later as the banging of hammers and the sputtering noise of train engines coalesced, mothers would retreat to the bedrooms of their children where they lifted up the bed-sheets and threw cold water on the warm half-naked bodies to ready them for school. Dressed in tattered clothes, boys and girls would enter the street and head to school and for the time being avoid the lane that led to the foundry.
Shortly thereafter, on clotheslines in back yards, bed-sheets were hung out to dry while prayers were said to encourage the absent sun to show up. With men at work and children at school some housewives, wearing dresses that were as clean as their husbands’ overalls were dirty, would begin to polish their front-door brass knobs. The women would call back and forth to each other, exchanging gossip and rumour. Often the talk was about who owed who a cup of sugar or a bottle of milk. Or whose son or daughter wouldn’t get up to go to school or Mass. More often than not the chattering was about which young girl was “up the pole” and whose son was responsible for it. At the same time the street vendor Biddy Sonics, who’d got her odd surname from a marriage to some kind of East European, would be calling out the price of bad apples and wilted cabbage. Biddy’s raspy voice was almost as loud as the foundry horn as she sold her damaged fruit and vegetables from her horse and cart. To keep the nag content Biddy would sprinkle its oats with whiskey from a flask she carried in her apron pocket.
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