In High Germany
Page 2
“And remember if you feel like singing, do sing an Irish song.”
In school O’Brien was marching us up and down the yard behind a 1798 pike. He made us try on shirts to take part in the 1916 show in Croke Park. RTÉ took off The Fugitive to show us a film about the Easter Rising. We almost died, Shane and Mick and me, watching the GPO burn. The actor who played Dinny Byrne in Glenroe sang “God Save Ireland”, riddled with bullets while he shot his last few Brits.
We knelt down at night, like Patrick Pearse at his trial said that he had done as a child, and pledged our lives’ blood for Ireland. It was all that we lived for. To grow up and die for Ireland. But meanwhile we played soccer in the back field where O’Brien couldn’t find us and shout at how ungrateful we were:
“The chosen generation. Free at last to live in your own land. Yet turning your backs on Irish things. Living only for that English game.”
The same game played by the children of my uncles and aunts who had been forced to leave Ireland before Westland Row became Pearse Street Station.
Where was the first foreign station for Shane, Mick and me? Liverpool Street Station, London, in ’81. That time we lost in Wembley. It was the first time we had been outside Ireland. We wound up in The Windmill Theatre. In the red-light land of Soho, of course.
We felt it was wild, never even dreaming of what somewhere like the Reeperbahn would be like, just a few miles from this Hamburg flat. Thankfully, I have a year or two left, Son, before you start wanting to explore the back lanes of that place.
But back then, in 1981, it was all new to us. Down below, in the seats of the Windmill Theatre, were five-hundred Japanese tourists. Up to the balcony were two-hundred Irish fans on our best behaviour.
“Get them off you!”
A geezer in a suit kept walking on stage to say:
“Gentlemen, if all noise does not cease the girls will not resume.”
We all shut up for a while, until this girl came out dressed as a Roman slave and started off with the whip. Shane stood up.
“Jaysus, you wouldn’t see the like of that in Garda Patrol!”
After that it was Holland in the ’82 World Cup group campaign. That Two-All draw. We hit Amsterdam. Hippies with cobwebs growing out of their beards busking outside the station where our train stopped. The Flying Dutchman and The Bulldog pubs to our right. The red-light area and Chinatown to our left. We turned right for drugs and went left to smoke them.
Those were the flatland years. Shane finished off his time with the ESB. Mick up in the factory in Finglas. Me thinking I was set up for life working in that new Japanese plant. We seemed to spend every night in Dublin being kicked out of pubs at closing time.
But that night in Amsterdam the pub was so jammed with Irish fans that we spilled out onto the street with our drinks. Next thing we knew, at two in the morning, all these police cars arrived.
“It feels just like home, lads,” Shane said.
The police got out and – I am not joking – they pushed us back into the pub.
“I could get to like this country,” Shane said. I wonder if he has, in the fifteen years that he has had to work there?
After that there were trips to see games in Belgium and Malta in ’83. They became the only holidays we took. Saving money from our wages so that we never missed an away game. Never mind that Eoin Hand was the Irish manager back then and we never won a single thing. They were great years, great times to be young and alive.
No more trips to tiny stations in the bog now. It was about being out here in Europe, following the Irish team. Coming home like heroes to tell our workmates all about the places we had seen.
Then, in late 1984, when we played the Danes, Mick got his first taste of getting old. We hit Amsterdam again first and found the only snooker hall in the town. Mick sank a long red.
“It must be my birthday,” he said. It was, too. He was twenty-six that day. He didn’t mind losing his hair. It was losing the cheap travel rates that killed him. He did not have enough money for the full fare. Shane and myself went on to Denmark with a spare match ticket, leaving Mick to roll his own way to happiness in Amsterdam.
That trip to Denmark was when I saw the change in the Irish fans first. Three Kerry lads were trying to buy a ticket outside the ground, looking like they had just finished cutting hay back home. We gave them Mick’s ticket for nothing. They told us about the time they had hitch-hiked to Malta from Kerry, when they were on the dole, to see Frank Stapleton get the winner. Their accents were so thick we found it hard to know what they were saying.
“How did you get here this time?” I asked them.
“We got the old bus, boy.”
“The bus from Kerry?” I asked, in surprise.
“No. The bus from Berlin, boy. Sure, half of the factor is here.”
And so they were too. Buses from Germany and Paris. Three buses from London. Irish lads who were working all over Europe mixing together with lads who had come from Dublin and Cork. A green army taking over the steps of the town hall.
I never knew until that night just how many Irish people were starting to have to leave Ireland to find work again. But that night – after the Danes beat us Three-Nil – listening to all the Irish workers telling their tales in the pubs scared the hell out of me. I don’t know why, but it felt like the ground was starting to slide from under me. Yet I never knew just how soon Shane and Mick and me would also lose our jobs in Dublin. Just how soon we too would be forced to join them.
It was the same feeling I had that day in the 1970s when they brought Frank Stagg, the lone hunger striker, home to Mayo from the English jail where he died. I remember lines of Irish soldiers and tanks crossing the country. Taking his coffin to be buried under concrete like nuclear waste. Armed soldiers guarding his grave so that the IRA could not dig him back up and give him the funeral he had wanted.
Sitting in school that day, the three of us had listened to reports on the radio. We were remembering O’Brien’s 1798 pike. His talk about us growing up and fighting for a United Ireland. Dinny Byrne dying in black and white on TV just a few years before. The whole classroom could feel it. All of us walked home from school in silence. Nobody needed to say it. Some bastard somewhere along the line had been lying through their teeth to us. Someone somewhere.
You see, Son, we were meant to be the chosen ones. The generation who made sense of the last seven hundred years. Irishmen and Irishwomen, in the name of God and the dead generations. Living in our own land. With our own jobs. Our own homes that our fathers had worked to build for us. Can you understand me? All this having to leave Ireland for work was meant to have stopped before our time. Growing up in the 1970s, we were not raised to leave. We felt that we had a choice. But in the end we were wrong.
I knew things were going to be different when I moved over here in 1986. I could even learn to cope with having to tell the police about any change in my address. But it was the main train station in Hamburg that still freaked me out. I remember in my first week in this city asking some man working there if I could get a train to Rome.
“No,” he said, holding up one finger. “Not for one hour.”
I used to come here in my first weeks in Hamburg just to read the timetables on the wall. Paris. Berlin. Bonn. Madrid. Every city across Europe could be reached by just crossing the platforms. I would remember those Irish town names laid out in painted stones in the flower beds beside the platforms and suddenly feel so cold. Like I had stepped outside of my old life.
Back in 1988 it was in the main Hamburg train station that I met Shane who had arrived from Holland, on the Saturday before the first match against England. Mick had flown in from Dublin the night before, as silent as ever. He handed me a bottle of duty-free whiskey and his holiday visa for the USA.
“Are you going to stay over there on the black?” I asked him.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Do I have a choice?”
He was right. I mean what else was there for him to do at home? He h
ad held out on the dole in Dublin longer than either Shane or I had, since the factory he had worked in closed down.
Drinking with Mick on the Friday night we had been quiet. But Shane was his usual self. Jumping down off the train from Holland, slagging us. Ready for action:
“And it’s hello to the German Bastard and The Quiet Man. Fingers on your buzzers, please. Here is your starter question in the quiz for ten points. Are we about to:
Collect and press wild flowers?
Add to our collection of odd barbed wire?
Beat the Brits, the Godless Russians and the Dutch So-and-Sos I have to work with? While suffering brain death due to a large intake of drink and drugs.”
“Stop the lights,” we both said.
“Shag off,” Shane said. “You got the right answer in C and you have won yourself a free trip to Hamburg’s Reeperbahn red light area. Lead the way.”
But we didn’t go there at first. We spent most of the afternoon hanging around the station. Watching the crowds get off the trains. The crew-cut Yanks with bags the size of a small estate in Finglas. Tourists from Canada always in red jackets with a maple leaf on the back. The little French girls that would blow your mind away.
At last we took a train to the Reeperbahn. Slagging, driving each other crazy with football quiz questions. Mick had one that nearly killed us. To name the last three sets of brothers to play for Ireland at any level from youth up.
“Give us a break,” I said. “I’m not a professor of history.”
“No, they are all in the Irish squad, or should be,” Mick told us.
That gave us the first one, it was easy enough.
“The O’Learys – Dave and Pearse,” I said. “Then … hang on, the Bradys, Liam and what’s his name – his brother Ray, who played Under-21. But who else?” We were still racking our heads when the train reached the red light area.
“Hughton from Spurs,” I said. “Chris Hughton had a brother who played Under-21. He broke his leg after, or was it somebody else’s? For God’s sake, Chris Hughton, of all the Irishmen …”
We stopped laughing. No one said it but we all knew why I skipped him over. He was black and from London. I had fallen into the trap of the knockers. His mother had been from Limerick. She was forced to leave just the same as my own aunts and uncles. And just the same as the three of us now. Chris Hughton could have been a first cousin to any one of us.
Yet it had seemed so odd, back in the 1970s. When John Giles took over for his first game in charge, against Poland. I think Peter Thomas was the first English-born player. But he had played for Waterford since before the Vikings. Steve Highway followed. But it was a guy called Terry Mancaini who brought it home. That day in 1974 when Don Givens scored three goals against Russia. The odd moment when this bald man from London, playing his first game for Ireland, turned round during the playing of the Irish anthem, to whisper:
“Hey, this Russian anthem doesn’t half go on, does it?”
It did not seem right back then. Like a party ruined by gate-crashers. Our own little club. Our local heroes from the same streets as us. More and more English-born players followed. New faces and accents to be suspicious of.
That was back then, when I still believed in that sense of what being Irish was. When they did not fit into my vision of Ireland. This was around the time my father came home with something extra in his wage packet. Uncle Sam was going home. The tax breaks and IDA grants wrung dry. The workers had a sit-in at the factory. I saw Da on the Nine O’Clock News. Awkward in his Sunday suit. In a row of men behind the union official.
There was something chilling in that for me. My da suddenly becoming a moment of history. On the TV screen, like Dinny Byrne shot to bits. Maybe I had always seen him too close up. But his face on the TV was like a map without name-places. After all that coming and going from Westland Row. All the years of his face growing old from chemical dust in that factory.
When he looked past the union man into the TV camera it was like he had at last reached his station to find it closed. Tumble-weed blowing down the platform. The signal box rusted. The very train tracks torn up.
Two months later, after the cars had returned from his grave, Shane and Mick and me sat up all night. Among the vast plates of sandwiches, drinking Guinness by the neck. I didn’t weep. It was like cold water had entered my bloodstream. I doubted if I would ever be able to feel anything again.
We set out for the England match on the Saturday night. Mick had got an An Óige IrishYouth Hostel card before he left. Mine was from the German Youth Hostel people. Shane’s was from the Dutch one. We felt we were being clever in finding somewhere cheap to stay. But when we got to the game half the Irish fans were trying the same trick. Old lads who could claim the free travel. Women who would only see forty again on the front of a Finglas bus. They had all suddenly become International Youth Hostel members.
I have told you all about the England match before now. John Aldridge flicking it on to Ray Houghton’s head. Packy Bonner’s saves. My nerves in bits. After Ireland won the game One-Nil and the Irish team had finally left the pitch, we walked singing from the ground. To face rows of riot police with dogs. Shane turned to us.
“Time to leave this town, boys.”
We found a small bar above the city. Down below us the fag end of the British Empire, fed on white bread and the News of the World, could run riot. All we wanted to do was sit there and enjoy it. A coming of age.
“I wonder what Dublin is like?” Shane said. “All car horns hooting and pubs packed I suppose.”
Toners Bar in Baggot Street. The Hill pub. The Hut pub near Dalymount. I could imagine them all and yet … You know when you dream of something which is so real that when you awaken you still want to believe it was there. Even when you know it is gone.
Shane went silent. We would never know now what Dublin was like that night. Because even if we went back and those pubs had not changed, we would have found that we had changed. And I knew and I think Shane knew, that now when we said “us”, we were no longer thinking about the people in those Dublin pubs. But of the army of Irish fans from all over Europe singing in every bar and hotel in the city below us that night.
We drank now in stunned silence. I knew that we were remembering the same things. Winter evenings in the shed in Dalymount Park with people climbing up onto the roof for a better view of the game. Lansdowne Road in the years after. Liam Brady’s goal against France, that little jinking run. Frank Stapleton’s two against Spain in 1982. All the flats with cheap televisions where we would gather to scream our heads off at the TV set for away games we could not get to. The killer blow of that Belgium goal minutes away from the final whistle. Just when Eoin Hand was about to make the impossible dream of getting us into the World Cup finals a reality.
But it wasn’t really football we were thinking about any more. It was something else. Something we had lost, that we had hardly even been aware we’d had. That dream of finally getting into some big finals and of coming home to Dublin with stories to tell people. There is no greater feeling than the feeling of going home, of having a home to go back to.
“Shag it,” Shane said, quietly to himself. “Shag it.”
You see, there would be no one for Shane to tell when he got back to Holland. No one in Hamburg for me. Oh, German people in work you could talk to about the game. But not the feel of it. Not the sense of being part of that event.
Late in the evening, two English fans came into the bar. Harmless, sad-looking wasters, with skinhead haircuts and Union Jack tattoos. Terrified to be out alone. They looked at us in fear, wondering if they would be served. Shane called them over.
“Two beers for our friends. The poor wee pets. Sit down here, good surs.”
Sur is an Irish word for lice, Pet is the Spanish word for fart. They looked down on us, while being slagged in three languages. We brought them beer and waited. We knew they could not hold out long. It was the third beer before they got started.
“Yeah, I believe Ray Houghton went through Dublin on a bus once.”
“What do you call five men from England, three Blacks, a Scot, an ape and a frog? The Irish soccer team.”
We let them talk away, getting more cocky and loud with each drink. Not aware that even the barman was breaking up laughing at the way we were secretly making fun of them. They left after a while. Shuffling out into the night. Hanging on to the rock of Gibraltar by their fingertips.
“I don’t mind those fools mocking the team,” Shane said after a while. “It’s the ones at home that piss me off.”
Home? Where the hell was home for us any more?
After crossing Germany again for the draw with Russia, we went on to the town of Gelsenkirchen to play the Dutch. There was no hostel there. The only one we could find was far out in the country. There was only one other Irish fan staying there, so they put us in with him. He was seventeen, just after doing his leaving cert.
“I am staying over here,” he said. “After the games are over. I’ll try and find some work.”
The hostel was full of young Germans. Happy, loud and shrill. Rising at six o’clock to play games outside our window. Mick sat on the step, nursing his hangover, looking at them.
“Have them little bastards no traffic to play in?” he asked.
But being back among Germans sobered me up. That afternoon I went down to use the public phone. Lots of young Germans crowded around the Coke machine, screaming. I phoned your mother in Hamburg. The click on the line. Her German voice bringing my new life back to me. I could not believe her news.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Yes, I know. What can I say? Of course I’m happy. Just surprised. You said it might take months after you coming off the pill … Yes, I will be back in Hamburg tomorrow night. Alone if we lose. Or with the lads for the semi-final if we draw. Yes, with the lads. You will like them. It is great news … I love you too.”