Flesh and Blood

by Stephen McGann

  The age in which my mother and father lived was a time of unprecedented progress and modernity. An age of miracles. Not simply an advance in medicine and science, but a wider transformation in social welfare and mass education. The contribution of these changes to the subsequent fortunes of the McGann family was crucial. The end of the Second World War heralded a new social contract that led to the National Health Service in 1948. New weapons like penicillin were vanquishing many of the ancient medical maladies. And it wasn’t just the returning soldiers who benefited. Medical prospects were also improved for the women who’d stayed at home. When my family stalked the slums of north Liverpool in 1900, mothers were losing seventeen babies in childbirth for every one hundred born. By the start of the NHS, the figure had dropped to under four in a hundred.

  Yet progress was still too slow for some mothers. Polyhydramnios is a condition where a pregnant woman’s body produces too much amniotic fluid surrounding the foetus. It occurs in about 1 per cent of pregnancies, and can have various causes – foetal malformation, diabetes or perhaps an undetected twin. If polyhydramnios remained undetected it might lead to early separation of the placenta, premature labour and subsequent foetal death. Nowadays, however, polyhydramnios is rarely dangerous. Mothers are carefully monitored with ultrasound and, if severe, the fluid can be reduced. Yet back in the fifties, ultrasound in all maternity units was a distant dream.

  So we have two contrasting traumas. One an assault of the body in the terror of battle. The other the loss of children to an unseen obstetric enemy. Interestingly, both of these traumas can ultimately be defined by their psychological, rather than their physical, dimensions. Scars on the mind; not simply wounds on the body.

  Trauma as a psychological malady occurs when the effects of an emotionally severe or life-threatening experience damage the normal functioning of our minds. The traumatic experience can change the emotional assumptions on which we’ve built our world and personalities. It leaves us in a state of great confusion, stress or depression. We may relive the pain of it either consciously or through repressed thoughts and emotions. If untreated this can induce personality and behaviour change; depression, anxiety, emotional detachment. A well-known manifestation is post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD is estimated to affect one in every three people who experience severe physical trauma.

  Trauma can also exacerbate latent psychological conditions that were present before the incident occurred. Undiagnosed anxiety disorders may be brought to the surface by events, producing a crisis of confusion and stress that persists long after the ordeal. One such condition is anxiety neurosis – now referred to as generalised anxiety disorder. GAD is a constant state of distress or anxiety that overtakes a person’s normal functioning. It can be genetically inherited, and has been linked to disrupted functioning in an area of our brain called the amygdala, which governs primal fear and panic responses. GAD can make us disproportionately anxious about everyday situations such as money, work, relationship or health issues. We may also manifest physical symptoms such as stomach trouble, insomnia or heart palpitations. When someone with a genetic predisposition to GAD experiences the profound stress of battle, then long-term anxieties may take root. If hidden or untreated, these anxieties may persist throughout life, blighting the sufferer’s happiness, behaviour and relationships.

  Similarly, a mother who experiences neonatal death can feel a catastrophic destruction of her hopes, as well as guilt, confusion and profound depression. In our enlightened age we recognise this as a form of grief: the complex human reaction to loss that manifests in complex behaviours and symptoms. Central to the healing of grief is an acknowledgement of the bereavement leading to emotional catharsis. If this is denied, then a condition known as unresolved grief can occur. An unrelated event years later may trigger the full force of the original trauma, leaving the bereaved mother deeply distressed, guilty or angry.

  Great progress has been made in the treatment of psychological trauma in recent years, both therapeutically and pharmacologically. Sadly, this remained well beyond the reach of my parents in the years following the Second World War. Social taboos surrounding issues of mental health were still widespread. Post-war Britain was a society of stiff upper lips and problems brushed under carpets. As a result, both my parents would endure psychological malady following physical trauma, and their lives and relationship would be shaped by their separate responses to it.

  HISTORY

  War & Peace: My parents Joseph McGann & Clare Green, 1925–1960

  As the McGanns progressed into the twentieth century things were slowly improving. No longer were they confined to the grim hovels of north Liverpool as illiterate labourers and court-dwelling paupers; they were now steeped in the experience of global travel, and soon to be the beneficiaries of social welfare and education.

  James and Owen Joseph McGann had experienced momentous changes, both personal and in their wider world. A world war had rocked the old order and a maritime disaster had sunk all their comfortable assumptions. Yet as the empire in which they laboured started to fade, my family began its unassuming rise. It’s a truth of my family’s history that our social progress had an inverse relationship with the global aspirations and self-image of the nation we inhabited. When Britain ruled the waves, we slaved away in its grim belly or subsisted in its filthy slums. Yet as Britain’s pomp slowly seeped away, social equity was increased, and windows of opportunity presented themselves to us. A free NHS saved our lives, our children were educated to new standards, our families were housed in council dwellings with requisite hygiene and adequate space. Britain’s decline was in global power, not in social cohesion. In the latter respect the golden age was yet to come – and the McGanns would be its grateful beneficiaries.

  This chapter concerns my parents, Joseph – Joe – and Clare. Two quiet, bright, bookish children constrained by their social circumstances and rocked by personal trauma. One would cling to old certainties. The other would seek new solutions for old wrongs. Their separate paths came to define their lives and characters, and expressed the conflicted values of the progressive century in which they lived. The century that changed everything for us.

  *

  Upper Frederick Street lies to the south of central Liverpool. It is a long, narrow thoroughfare that runs down from the great Anglican cathedral towards Liverpool’s oldest docks. In the early part of the twentieth century it was a street of tight, soot-black houses interspersed with drinking dens and Victorian tenement dwellings. This was the street that brothers James and Owen Joseph McGann would call home after abandoning their north-end Irish ghetto, and where their children would begin their lives.

  It was love that brought the boys south. When James married Kate McMeal in 1914, he followed her home to Frederick Street, and it was there that his brother Owen Joseph met his future spouse, Elizabeth Walls, living next door with her family.

  Lizzie was one of thirteen children. Her father Edward Walls was a man of inflexible Victorian attitudes and fearsome moral rectitude. He’d once banged on the door of the local cinema and publicly berated the cinema’s manager for daring to screen a film of the scantily clad Ziegfeld Follies. His demands of the women in his own life were no less exacting. Lizzie was the eldest girl, and so when her mother died in 1906 she was ordered to keep house for her father and any brothers who’d not yet found suitably pliant wives. Lizzie did so until her father’s death. This antiquated exemplar of a woman’s servile place in the world of men would have a formative influence on Lizzie’s children – most significantly on my father Joe.

  By the time Lizzie met Owen Joseph in 1917 she was already in her early thirties – an age by which a woman was considered condemned to spinsterhood. The arrival of the erstwhile Aussie infantryman must have felt like a burst of sunlight breaking through the clouds. Lizzie married Owen Joseph on 13 July 1918, after which they both moved into her father’s house so that Lizzie could continue her servile duty to the other men in her life. Their
first son, Jimmy, was born just nine months later – by which time Owen Joseph had scarpered off to Melbourne and had to be persuaded to return to his new family. He did so, and by 1924, between Owen Joseph’s maritime absences, Lizzie also managed to have my auntie Mary and then my father Joe. The Walls house in Upper Frederick Street was now home to a new generation of McGanns.

  My dad’s first five years of life were poor, cramped, but filled with bustle and familiar faces. Their rented house was on three narrow storeys that included attic rooms, parlour, front room and two damp cellars. Outside, the back yard contained the privy, and was permanently draped with billowing washing. There was no electricity or gas – a kettle of hot water was a permanent fixture on the fire – and there was a large tin bath for ablutions. The house was shared by the three children, Lizzie, her father Edward, brothers Charlie and Frank, and her husband Owen Joseph. Lizzie worked as a laundress in nearby Dexter Street washhouse – a Victorian civic innovation to encourage godly cleanliness amongst the city’s deserving poor. When times were tough, Lizzie would also take in washing from the neighbours. As Lizzie slaved away, it fell to her daughter Mary to assume the woman’s duties at home – serve the men, run the messages and ensure that little Joe was attended to. My father witnessed the lowly assumption of a woman’s place passed from mother to daughter before he’d even learned to speak.

  The return of their dad from a long sea voyage was a highlight of the children’s year. Owen Joseph would appear, freshly paid off from a ship and bearing gifts – Turkish delight for his ‘little girl’ and a pair of boxing gloves for his eldest son. Uncle Jim recalled the subsequent sparring sessions with his dad between the hanging bedsheets in the back yard: ‘One time I hit him a right belter – must have been too hard, because he hit me back with a real clout, and I ended up sliding down the back yard door onto my bum!’

  The tough love wasn’t to last. In October 1929, when my dad was just five years old, Owen Joseph arrived home sick from a voyage. He took to his bed with pneumonia. As Christmas approached, the kids prepared for the festive season at school, and Jimmy was delighted to receive a prize for his good attendance: a live goose for their Christmas table. The family were thrilled. When Lizzie told her bed-bound husband the good news, Owen Joseph remarked, ‘You’ll have a live goose and a dead man.’

  He was right. Owen Joseph McGann died on Christmas Day.

  Jimmy remembered his uncles chasing the goose around the yard to wring its neck as the curtains were being drawn in mourning. The funeral was four days later. The ice was so thick on the ground that the horse-drawn funeral carriage skittered on the cobbles as it made its slow way up the hill. The ground was so hard the gravediggers were still complaining when they arrived. Four fellow seamen from the Pacific Steam Navigation Company carried the coffin to the grave, slipping and sliding as they went. Then it was done. Lizzie was now a widow with three young mouths to feed, in an age before the welfare state offered any kind of safety net for plummeting fortunes. It was 1929. Wall Street had just crashed. The world had spun into depression. Dad’s family were thrust into straitened times without a father’s hand to guide them or the financial means to ride out the trouble.

  Lizzie did what she could, and what she had to. She took on a crippling amount of laundry work and used the pawnbroker for short-term loans when the money ran low. The trick was to pawn any items of value in the lean days before being paid, and then reclaim them afterwards. Her brothers would discover their best suits missing, only to reappear like magic the next week. Or not. Lizzie lost many items to the pawn shop, including her own wedding ring.

  She had other tricks, though. One was to dress her children in the oldest shoes she could find, and then send them to play on the floor of the room where her father always sat. The normally thrifty Edward, seeing the holes in his grandchildren’s soles and concerned for his family’s reputation, would provide Lizzie with the money to purchase new footwear. Lizzie would then pocket the much-needed cash, and recover her children’s real shoes from the hidden box under her bed.

  At some point in those years my dad contracted rheumatic fever following a streptococcal throat infection. This condition causes fever, rash and painful inflammation. If left untreated it can develop into rheumatic heart disease, where the inflammation attacks the heart valves. The damaged valves may eventually fail many years later. Nowadays, we treat this with antibiotics. Yet the penicillin that could treat my father’s rheumatic fever had yet to be developed. He would meet it later in life-saving circumstances, but too late to prevent this childhood malady from damaging his heart. A time bomb in my father’s chest had begun ticking.

  Dad began school, and proved to be diligent and bright. His siblings remembered him as a studious and intense child.

  ‘He always seemed to have a book in his hands,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘You’d always find our Joe in a corner of the cellar reading,’ agreed Mary.

  At eleven years old my dad won a scholarship to St Francis Xavier, a prestigious Catholic grammar school. Yet his joy was short-lived. Attendance was out of the question. Lizzie wanted her kids out of school and bringing in a wage. The Education Act of 1918 allowed children to leave school at fourteen to work, while attendance at grammar school, even with a scholarship, would require the purchase of books, uniform, kit and bus fare – things the widowed Lizzie could never afford. Uncle Charlie offered to help with the expense, but Lizzie refused. The reason was cultural as well as practical. In the days before the welfare state, the working classes of those streets expected their children to make a direct financial contribution to the wealth of the household, and provide financial security for the older generation. To have one’s children survive to working adulthood was considered a reward for years of backbreaking struggle.

  My father was therefore denied his chance of further education. It was a sore point for the rest of his life – a source of deep frustration that fostered feelings of inferiority and coloured all of his later virtues and achievements. It helped to turn the optimistic intensity of that bright child’s mind into an inflexible adult neurosis.

  Uncle Charlie found him a job as a porter on the railway. His sister was already working, while his brother Jimmy had signed up as a regular in the Royal Air Force – sending a portion of his wages home to their mother. It was now 1938. Across the continent, armies of annexation were on the move. Within another year, Dad’s constrained world would be shaken by the trauma of war.

  *

  The city of Liverpool represented a key strategic asset for the Allies during the Second World War. Its vast docks provided a vital gateway for essential supplies from America and the empire. As a result, its citizens endured the terror of the Blitz as well as the losses of its sailors in torpedoed ships. My dad was underage when war broke out, and so he volunteered to help the ARP wardens who patrolled the city during air raids. In spite of life’s frustrations, my father always possessed an enormous sense of personal duty and service. When he was finally called up, he chose the navy. He was posted to the North Sea in 1943, and worked on the convoys that sent vital supplies to Stalin in the Arctic Circle. He became a talented telegraphist, or ‘sparks’, beating out encrypted Morse code messages to friendly ships in rapid-fire staccato bursts. One of my favourite games as a child was to throw a random sentence at him, and watch as he tapped out my words on the tabletop with his betting-slip pencil in a furious flurry of dots and dashes.

  Back home, Liverpool was taking a pounding. Being close to the docks, the area where the McGanns lived bore the brunt of bombing raids, including an unexploded bomb that led to the family’s temporary evacuation. Yet the McGanns managed to do their bit and keep their heads down. Jimmy, a hard-bitten regular, knew how best to ensure that you didn’t end up in the firing line. There was one golden rule that he repeatedly impressed upon his conscripted younger brother: ‘For God’s sake don’t volunteer for anything!’ If you volunteered, the services took it as a generalised enthusiasm for danger
, so you might end up somewhere you later regretted. Jim knew his little brother’s keen nature, and so didn’t want him doing anything stupid. With a bit of luck, Joe would see out the war in the radio room of a destroyer in safe waters.

  Dad laughed drily at the memory – and his brother’s furious reaction when Dad finally told him what he’d done. ‘I fancied being a submariner,’ Dad had said. ‘So I went to my commanding officer to ask about a transfer. Before I knew where I was, I was drafted into the RN Commandos and sent to Scotland.’

  My father was recruited into the signal section of the Royal Naval ‘Beachhead’ Commandos, a specialised amphibious assault unit that formed part of Britain’s multi-service Combined Operations force. This elite unit had the job of landing on an enemy beach at the start of a battle and securing the beachhead to ensure that the main forces and equipment which followed could land and move off quickly without becoming bogged down. They were the first in. The front line. They’d performed with distinction at the landings in Sicily and Anzio, and were now focused on the biggest task of them all: the forthcoming invasion of France.