Flesh and Blood

by Stephen McGann

  Dad was sent to Troon in Ayrshire in late 1943 for training. The gruelling assault course seemed to energise him. He performed brilliantly, despite the undiagnosed damage to his heart. I suspect it was the happiest my dad ever was. We have a photograph of him taken with his unit. He’s sitting dead centre, grinning and muscular. He’d been acknowledged as special and not found wanting. He shared the intense camaraderie of warriors engaged in a fearsome endeavour. He had a role that spoke to the intense sense of duty that guided him – but he had yet to be thrown into the cauldron that this role entailed.

  By spring of 1944 they’d learned the full gravity of their task. My father’s unit was to take part in Operation Overlord – the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Their mission was to land near the village of Arromanches-les-Bains and set up a beach radio signal station that could coordinate the naval shelling of enemy positions on the shore before the main army arrived. It wasn’t a seaside stroll; the Germans had placed formidable obstructions on the sand and were dug in to repel any assault. They would have to fight to hold the beach at any cost. Dad’s commanding officer told them it was a suicide mission. Their lives were dispensable. I remember my father’s gallows grin and the shake of the head as he recalled this curious motivational speech.

  Was it here that it began? That sleepless knot of neurosis in his stomach that fed the officer’s words into a restless sense of injustice? I can’t imagine the courage it takes to continue with one’s duty in the knowledge of impending extinction. He had just turned twenty, and was a devout Catholic. Did he find solace in his sacrifice? A belief in a better life elsewhere? Or did that fear congeal to spite against the world he now inhabited; a world that rewarded intelligence, duty and enthusiasm with dispensable suffering? He’d served life with diligent obedience. Was life ever going to return the favour?

  He’d soon find out. In the final days before the invasion he was moved to a camp in Hampshire for embarkation at Southampton – the very port his uncle James had departed from on his Titanic trauma thirty-two years before. They embarked on 5 June to cross the Channel. The weather was filthy, and the poor soldiers on the ships had seasickness to contend with as well as nerves. Eventually it was time. They were lowered into the crowded landing craft and set out for the coast of France. My father described the shells from the huge naval guns screaming overhead to bombard the Normandy coast, which now loomed dark before them.

  Finally the ramp went down, and twenty-year-old Joe McGann was thrust into hell.

  My dad’s landing craft had beached too far out. The commandos jumped off the ramp into ten feet of bullet-pierced water with full packs on. Dad watched his friends drown. He scrambled to the shore and crouched for dear life behind a German beach obstacle. It was pandemonium. I once watched him recall the horror of the slaughter he witnessed. He paused. He breathed heavily. Then again. Eventually he said, ‘War is a terrible thing, son. A terrible, terrible thing.’

  He was just a boy. When I was the age he was then, I could hardly tie my shoelaces. Who would blame Joe McGann if he’d simply stayed there, crouching for dear life behind that obstacle? How could I say that I wouldn’t do just that in his position?

  Joe McGann didn’t. He took his courage in his hands, got to his feet and zigzagged his way up that beach – firing and dodging and doing his duty. He reached the safety of the sea wall. His radio was shot to pieces, so his primary task was redundant. He joined some other men who were clearing a German defensive position of enemy troops. Things progressed well. He even bagged a fine souvenir to show the folks back home – some German field binoculars.

  Then the stick grenade. Thrown over the wall by a defending German soldier. The troops scattered. My father saw it late. He instinctively turned his body away from the impending blast and the grenade exploded. Shrapnel pierced my father’s flesh in fifty places – left arm, left leg, right thigh, abdomen. He fell to the sand critically wounded. Physical trauma.

  The following hours were understandably hazy. He shivered on the sand with the shock and the loss of blood. Hours went by. He remembered lying semi-conscious on the famous Mulberry harbour, waiting to be evacuated – planes and bombs and bullets whizzing by.

  Then he woke in Leicester Infirmary in England. He was in a ward full of D-Day casualties. He was alive.

  How had the filthy shrapnel wounds not poisoned him? He looked for his precious binoculars beside his bed but they were gone. Damn. Someone had pinched them. Yet he’d been given a gift far more rare and valuable. Every few hours a nurse was injecting him with a new drug. Fleming’s miracle, fresh from Brooklyn. Penicillin. In the ward, amazed servicemen gathered around each other’s beds to show off their rapidly healing wounds. Their generation had never seen its like before. A medical wonder. An antibiotic. They were the first warriors in history to have their wounded bodies cleansed of internal infection by this new medicine. He never forgot the gift. He’d later scoff at the complacency of his children, who’d pop antibiotics for every tiny cough or cut. ‘You don’t know you’re born,’ he’d say. He was right. Dad was born in an age when a cut from a rose thorn could grow septic and kill – or when a simple streptococcal infection could silently eat the heart. Now physical trauma had a new foe, and it attended to my father’s needs like his mother had tended to the men in her life – with unquestioning service.

  After the euphoria of survival my father’s duty was done. He went back to his base and was demobbed on 5 July 1946. But something had happened during that time at base or in the hospital that made the medical staff take note. I don’t know if it was one inciting moment of stress, or the gradual awareness of an older distemper that had been given wings in the heat of battle. Whatever it was, the military doctors wrote a two-word diagnosis on his medical record that my father regarded as a hidden badge of shame. Something that he felt had tarnished the brave service he gave and the medals he received. Something he could never talk about with his family. Something that his wife would stumble upon years later.

  ‘Anxiety Neurosis.’

  Trauma had lodged in my father’s mind, eating away at his peace. A terrible cloud gathered over his emotional outlook. He’d survived, but remained wounded. Had the world he now inhabited been worth all the courage and the horror? His childhood sense of injustice began to reassert itself – and so Dad did what he always did when humiliated by unjust wounds that his mind couldn’t wash clean. He hid them deep beneath the rigid Victorian codes of the men who’d reared him. He buried his anxiety in an unmarked grave and moved on.

  After being demobbed, Joe returned to his life in Liverpool. His family had moved from the bomb-shattered privations of Upper Frederick Street and were now housed in a tenement flat in Sydney Gardens – part of a bright new vision for Liverpool’s working classes: internal bathrooms, gas, electricity, hot and cold running water. These estates would later become synonymous with urban decay, but at the time they were built, and for the McGanns, they represented true progress.

  Dad’s siblings were all still living together with their mother – no one yet married. It was an insular atmosphere that my father found increasingly claustrophobic. The knot in the stomach that haunted him made him ever more anxious about the imagined taunts of neighbours who might scoff at his eccentric home life. Joe became desperate to move out. Start his own family. But where to – and with whom? As the austerity of the forties gave way to the fifties, Dad saw his twenties turn into his thirties. He was still a bachelor – still without a wife and family who might provide him with the public esteem and private service his hidden vulnerability craved.

  Joe was drawn like a moth to those families who radiated the demonstrative love and warmth that his own home life lacked. One of those families was the Greens. In the smoke-filled parlour of the local public house, the Bay Horse Hotel, Dad struck up a warm friendship with Abraham Green, a devout pillar of the community who was the loving father of a family of seven in the next tenement estate. One of these was Abraham’s pretty and extrovert dau
ghter Rose Green, who immediately caught my dad’s eye. Sitting next to Rose, eleven years younger than Joe and easy to overlook, was Rose’s quiet, clever, but introverted younger sister, Clare Green.

  My mother.

  *

  The Greens hailed from Lamport Street, just a mile south of Upper Frederick Street in Liverpool’s densely packed Toxteth district. In the infinite gradations of urban working-class respectability, the Greens belonged firmly to the upper tier. The family was of West Midlands Protestant stock. Abraham, my granddad, had even spent his young life as a lay preacher. Yet despite his Protestant roots, Abe fell in love with and married a local Catholic woman called Mary Barratt, a move that caused raised eyebrows in his family. It was a love match that lasted until their deaths in the early 1980s. Abraham eventually converted to Catholicism, and the Greens went on to have eight children: Mary, Billy, Rose, my mum Clare, Winnie, Betty, Tony and John. Sadly, only seven would survive to adulthood. Little Betty was lost as an infant; the impact of seeing her laid out provided my four-year-old mother with her earliest memory.

  The Greens soon had other things to think about. Within a month of Betty’s death the Second World War was declared. The family moved to the bottom-floor flat of an old Victorian tenement in nearby Northumberland Street and went on as best they could. Shy little Clare started school in 1940, complete with gas mask and regular adjournments to the air-raid shelter. She immediately showed promise: ‘I always loved learning. But I was just so introverted. Quiet. That’s what Dad called me. Rose was the one with the sunny disposition.’

  Things soon became decidedly less sunny for the Greens. One morning, during Liverpool’s infamous May Blitz, six-year-old Clare woke to a bed covered in window glass and brick dust. The door lay on its side. ‘We’ve been bombed,’ said her brother Bill. ‘We’d better get up.’ The children scrambled through the rubble of the flat until they were rescued by the police and taken to the station. Being on the ground floor had saved their lives; above them several neighbours had been killed. One by one, a desperate Abraham Green recovered his pregnant wife and children – miraculously all alive, but now without worldly goods. The family had to walk through the city to catch a bus to a relative’s house in the suburbs, wearing the same dust-caked nightclothes they’d been bombed in. Sympathetic strangers in the queue moved aside, seeing their misfortune. It was an age before the phrase ‘all in it together’ wore an ironic smirk.

  Mum was sent to live with an aunt for three months, which she hated – shrinking further into herself and longing for the safety of her family: ‘I just wasn’t outgoing enough – I missed them too much.’ After what seemed like an age, the family were rehoused in Myrtle Gardens, a large tenement estate that they’d remain in till the sixties, and which would bring them into eventual contact with the McGann family. My mum was finally able to resume school – and she thrived. The teachers moved her up two classes because of her abilities. While my father was enduring his physical trauma on a beach in France, my young mother was nurturing dreams of study in one of Liverpool’s great Catholic grammar schools. But, unlike Dad, it was a dream my mother would fulfil. After the war was over, Mum passed her scholarship to Notre Dame Grammar School – a genteel centre of learning for the daughters of the burgeoning Liverpool Catholic middle class.

  Since my dad’s schooldays, the provision of selective education for working-class pupils of ability had begun to improve. The proportion of free places at grammar schools had increased to almost half. Yet when poorer children were offered these places, many parents still had to turn them down owing to the extra costs of clothing and equipment.

  Mum’s fees were paid for her, and her parents received a small grant towards the uniform, but that only stretched to the price of her coat. The rest of her uniform would later have to be cobbled together from meagre savings. My mother started school inadequately clothed, and sticking out like a sore thumb.

  Despite these sartorial shortcomings, Clare was thrilled to enter a world of higher learning for the first time. There were new subjects – German, French, Latin, English literature – and Mum thrived on them. My mother was to stay at Notre Dame Grammar School for four years. Yet as she grew older, she began to feel increasingly isolated in her class – the target of an incipient social condescension from pupils and staff: ‘Some of the teachers were a bit snobbish towards me. Back then they hadn’t started taking a lot of working-class kids. Most of the girls who went there were daughters of doctors or businessmen. My dad was a docker! At ten, you don’t really see the problem. At fourteen, you do.’

  By the fourth year she’d had enough of it. She asked her father if she could leave, as education law still permitted pupils to leave school at fifteen. He was reluctant, but she insisted. She walked out of Notre Dame school without any of the qualifications another year would have given her. Yet she never forgot her time there. The condescension shown towards her academic ambitions, and her determination to carry the lessons of it forward, would later be the driving force behind the grammar school education of her children and her own subsequent education as a schoolteacher.

  Clare’s first job on leaving Notre Dame in the late forties didn’t exactly tax her bright mind. It was in a factory making nylon stockings, and she absolutely hated it. Luckily she’d heard of a vacancy at Littlewoods Football Pools – an office environment that valued intelligence, numeracy and literacy, paid well, and gave a young unmarried woman like Clare a little independence before she was expected to marry. My mum got the job, and was quickly promoted. She spent eight happy years there.

  With money in her pocket and the school books put away, it was a time for shy young Clare to go dancing. Her sister Rose would accompany her to the dance palaces of Liverpool – the Rialto, the Grafton, the Locarno – and Clare would watch as men gravitated towards her attractive and outgoing sister. She and Rose were lifelong friends and companions; sisters who shared a deep love and understanding. In those days, the introverted Clare was happy to hide in Rose’s shadow. Beneath her newfound independence lay a timidity about life, a hidden terror of the world of men and their needs, and what these needs led to: ‘I was afraid of the world back then. Afraid of sex. Terrified of having babies! I had no preparation for it. Mam never told me anything about that side of life.’

  ‘That side of life’. Knowledge of sex was something that women of her faith and upbringing were expected to absorb by osmosis. There was no provision in school, church or home for Clare to acquire the knowledge about sexual desire that she might soon need. A shy girl was left alone to negotiate the confusion of her own desires, and the fears of where they might lead her. Not that there weren’t plenty of men willing to help my mum negotiate them. She enjoyed many suitors in those teenage years – along with all the trips to the movies, the flowers and the many gifts – yet there was always a limit to how far Mum was willing to commit: ‘The minute guys got too serious, I stopped it. I had a fear of getting too … intimate.’

  It was at this time that my fifteen-year-old mum first met my father, Joe McGann, her sister Rose’s new boyfriend. She immediately liked him. He was much older than her – part of the war generation. He was fatherly, respectable and a worldly presence in their home. Every weekend he’d come to the house to do the football pools with her dad, and they’d chat together. Clare found that Joe shared her love of learning – and when he found out that she’d gone to a grammar school, he was very keen to hear all about it. Clare felt comfortable in Joe’s company – safe. When Rose announced her engagement to him, Clare was delighted. ‘I started calling him “brother-in-law” straight away!’

  Then, suddenly, things changed. Rose announced that she was going into the army. Their father, mindful of Rose’s engagement, refused to allow it, but Rose, now eighteen and wilful as ever, defied him. Off she went, leaving Joe McGann stranded at home, and her sister Clare without her closest friend and protector. My mother was bereft.

  In the months that followed, Mum, now sixteen,
withdrew into her shell, while Joe – in romantic limbo – still visited the house to see her father. One night Joe called to find Clare alone. They chatted for a while, then my dad asked if she’d like to go to the pictures. Mum can still remember the film: Rita Hayworth in Tonight and Every Night. They had a great time. ‘He was very easy for me to talk to – I never felt threatened by him.’ At the end of their platonic evening he walked her back to the pub, and as they reached the top of the hill, young Clare challenged the fatherly Joe to a silly dare: ‘I said to him, “I bet you wouldn’t skip all the way down that hill.” ’ To her absolute astonishment, he did! All the way down. It was totally out of character. They both ended up laughing breathlessly at the bottom. Mum never forgot that moment, and would often relate it to her children as evidence of an internal lightness that their father could so rarely display: ‘I saw him differently from then on. He wasn’t the “fuddy-duddy” I thought he was. Of course, I didn’t really know anything about him … about his war.’

  Life carried on. Rose eventually wrote to Joe from her base in Germany to announce that their engagement was off. Yet my father continued to visit their house.

  Two years passed. Rose had left the army and married someone else. Clare had entered her twenties, still employed at Littlewoods, and content with the sheltered life she had. Then one night, out of the blue, Joe McGann asked her out. Rose, now pregnant, had no objections. Clare accepted. ‘I wasn’t looking for anything. I was twenty. He was a man I knew, someone I liked and respected. I felt there was a lot of good in him.’

  Yet Joe clearly was looking for something. There was a new urgency to him – an anxiety that began to insist itself on Clare from the moment they started seeing each other. He was now thirty-one, and he wanted desperately to get married. Although Clare was not yet twenty-one and keen to wait, Joe kept insisting. In the end she gave in and accepted his proposal.