The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll

by Beacom, Brian

  The town planners, in their haste to build a brave new world, had ignored the fact that people needed more, such as shops, schools, swimming pools and community centres. There was at least an old cinema, The Casino, built in the 1940s in the old village, which hosted John Wayne and Audie Murphy movies, and Brendan would see films there until it closed in the early 1970s.

  ‘Mammy and I spent any night out we had at the pictures. If we really liked a film we would go see it again, but if it were an afternoon showing we’d sit through it two or three times, as you could in those days. We saw Mary Poppins twenty-eight times, which is still one of my favourites, Kelly’s Heroes twenty times, The Wrong Box fifteen times, and when I became a teenager I watched The Producers fifteen times.

  ‘I loved the fact you could go to the pictures and imagine you were the boy up there on the screen. I never thought that one day I’d ever be in a movie, that would have been crazy, but the films allowed you the chance to dream, to use your imagination. And I suppose what I also got from the movies was the sense of storytelling. I loved a good story. And Mary Poppins was a great story.

  ‘What I also realised at the time was I loved a story with a happy ending.’ Fundamentally, Finglas had next-to-nothing. But what it did have in abundance was kids. It was 99 per cent Catholic and most families had at least eight children. If a family unit had three or four kids they were regarded as a rarity; people often presumed the parents didn’t get on.

  Most of the kids who roamed happily in their hordes around Finglas wore regulation plastic shoes, and when the plastic wore out, the shoes were filled with linoleum inserts. Most young people, especially girls, stayed only until they were old enough to move abroad to find employment.

  The O’Carroll household in the early 1960s was a little different from every other in Finglas, however, in that it had a telephone; Maureen O’Carroll insisted on that.

  And it was a happy household – thanks, to a great extent, to the laughing, energetic youngest child. But it’s often the saddest memories that stick in the mind.

  ‘My earliest memory of Daddy was not a nice one. It’s of him half dragging, half trying to carry me as I screamed and cried, the tears streaming from my eyes like a waterfall. I had scarlet fever and he was taking me into hospital. I now know that I was just three years old.

  ‘We were driven to hospital in a friend’s – Ina’s – car. When I came out of hospital my dad had bought me a little puppy, which I called Tip. What I do know is I never got into Ina’s car again.

  ‘Other than that traumatic memory, I don’t remember much about my dad. I remember how he would balance his right heel on his left knee when sitting, and how he would lie me with my arse in the triangle it made and my head on his knee. He would then puff away, watching the Saturday afternoon wrestling, cheering on Mick McManus or Billy Two Rivers, all the while tapping his left foot to make a rocking motion, putting me asleep. That triangle felt like a very safe place to be.’

  Michael, Eilish and Brendan were the youngsters in the family, and the rest began to fly the coop, with the females all moving to England or Canada. Phil joined the RAF, aged 14.

  ‘I recall once coming upon my father and my mother embracing as she cried. It was the night before my sister Fiona, Finbar’s twin, then eighteen, was to emigrate to Canada. I entered the dim hallway from the toilet. Daddy was holding Mammy in a big hug and Mammy was sobbing.

  ‘“I don’t want her to go, Gerry,” she was pleading as he held her tightly and rubbed his hand on her back.

  ‘“I know, love, but you have to let them fly, you must.”

  ‘Then the weirdest thing happened. Daddy noticed me standing watching and he pushed Mammy away, as if I had caught him in some compromising position.

  ‘“Up to bed, you young man!” he bellowed. So I did. Young man? I had to have been maybe five.’

  Brendan continued to be Maureen’s Special One throughout her life. He possessed the ability to make his mammy laugh loudest. She’d take him to see films and Brendan would cry with infectious laughter, and she was delighted.

  Maureen adored this funny little boy with the amazing imagination, and she was the first to recognise his talent. He spent ages drawing, but he’d also attach a story to his drawings. ‘That man with the rifle, well, he’s got a friend who was shot . . .’

  And, being a teacher, she loved his ability to learn.

  ‘I can remember back when I was five, she would sit me on the dinner table, look me in the face, pinch my cheek and say, “You can be anything you want to be.” I grew up believing, “Oh yes, I can. I can fly.”’ As Michael McHugh had once said to his daughter.

  Yet, Maureen hadn’t morphed into an Earth Mother after his arrival. Even though she had lost her seat in the Dáil (and suffered reduced status and income), she still had great fights to win, battling for women’s rights such as having the word ‘illegitimate’ removed from birth certificates.

  Fiona O’Carroll recalls being at school, listening to other girls talk about their mammies doing regular household chores on certain days of the week, and she’d be wishing hers was the type who did the usual things, like the laundry on a Monday.

  Not Maureen O’Carroll.

  ‘Her attitude was, the only thing you can give your children is individuality and the confidence to accept the responsibility that goes with that,’ says Brendan.

  Sound advice, or a convenient truth? Perhaps both. And while Maureen taught her kids that anything was possible, she wasn’t averse to sharing what she believed to be home truths.

  When Eilish made her First Holy Communion, aged seven, Maureen displayed an Agnes Brown-like insensitivity.

  ‘Ah, darling!’ she said to her little girl. ‘God didn’t make you very beautiful, but he made you ever so lovable.’

  More than likely, Agnes would have then smiled and added, ‘Sure, I was just joking with yer.’

  Whatever the other kids might have endured, Brendan’s confidence was continually boosted.

  And so it was, believing everything was possible, that Brendan set off for the run-down St. Gabriel’s School in O’Devaney Gardens in Stoneybatter.

  ‘I had to go to school ten miles away. Stoneybatter had been my mother’s constituency and I had been born there. But to get to school required two bus journeys: the number forty bus from our home in Casement Grove to Heart’s Corner, and then I would then walk a mile or so to Doyle’s Corner and catch either a ten, nine, or a four up to Oxmantown Road.

  ‘The journey took about an hour, but when you are just five years old it felt like crossing Africa, every day. The cost was threepence.

  ‘But at the time I didn’t realise the school was a dump. Teachers did not apply to work there, they ended up there.

  ‘I recall so much of that first day in school. There were two teachers of the same name, Heydon. One was a big stout woman and the other a tiny, wiry thing. I have no idea if they were related. They introduced themselves as Big Miss Heydon and Little Miss Heydon. They both looked scary, and they were. I prayed that I would not be with one of them. My prayers were answered. I got a lovely woman, Miss Nealon. The place seemed huge and the boys from senior school upstairs looked like giants. There was a gigantic picture of Jesus in the hallway, His heart exposed and a red light burning in front of Him. The weird thing about this picture was that not only did His eyes follow you wherever you went, but if you came into the hallway late for school, His face seemed to frown at you.’

  He adds, grinning, ‘You know I thought I’d left a lot of this religious stuff behind, but I’ve realised when I’m speaking I’m capitalising “Him” and “His”. I guess you never lose the habit.

  ‘But overall, I hated school. What I know now that I didn’t know then is that I am dyslexic. The teachers didn’t know it either.’

  Brendan wasn’t diagnosed until many years later, when his son, Eric, revealed symptoms.

  ‘I realised very early that I couldn’t learn the way the others learned, so I
developed my own way of absorbing information, “perspective thinking”. It worked, and I was able to keep up without anybody noticing. Little did I know that what I was doing would many years later be described as “thinking outside the box”.’

  But he believes such problems can often come with a silver lining.

  ‘Eighty per cent of the prison population are dyslexic. And we don’t realise the potential of these people. When you get twelve-year-olds who can open a car with a coat hanger in ten seconds flat and drive it off, we don’t recognise that talent and utilise it, we make him a prisoner. Now, just think. There’s a lot to be said for using a thief to catch a thief. Look how the insurance company used the thief in the true-life movie, Catch Me If You Can. We need to consider how people think.’

  The classrooms of St Gabriel’s School, packed tight with 40-odd kids, were the scene of many painful memories. Literally. ‘I came to detest the place. The teachers were dreadful. Alcoholics and child-beaters. I can remember being beaten by one Christian Brother who had a belt with “The Wrath of God” written across it. It was terrifying to be in a classroom with him.

  ‘I can recall being caned by a teacher with a bamboo stick, and when he gave me the three on each hand I wasn’t crying. So he went again and again until my hands bled. I won. I still didn’t cry, but believe me it was a pyrrhic victory, long before I knew what a pyrrhic victory was.’

  School might not have been Brendan’s favourite place, but he wasn’t unintelligent. (He’s now a member of Mensa, with an IQ of 156, which takes him into the top 2 per cent of the population.) And his dyslexia has never been a barrier to achieving anything he set out to do, nor did it hamper his thirst for knowledge – or his popularity. He became an altar boy, soon allowed to serve Mass, which was a great honour. He played football, and became a star player. In fact, mistaken as he might have been, he believed there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do.

  ‘I’d be out with my best pals John Breen and Jimmy Matthews, and they’d dare each other to jump across ditches, or drop from trees. Some of them would sometimes have a go but I’d always have a go, even if I didn’t make it across the ditch and I ended up on my arse covered in muck. They called me the Can-Do Kid.’

  There wasn’t a lot of organised activity for young boys.

  ‘Me and my pals would go and camp out at the power station in our little two-man tent, and we’d spend the night listening to the electricity generator crackle and hum and marvel at the blue light all around. It was magical to us little boys, a wonderland.’ (Of course, the connection with exposure to power lines and cancer hadn’t yet been made in the early 1960s.)

  Brendan has always believed he has a sixth sense. ‘As a youngster I was known as St Anthony, because of my knack of finding anything that was lost. I would imagine the lost item in my mind’s eye and simply walk over and find it. It’s a fantastic ability. I can still do it today.

  ‘The first time I remember it happening was when I was six. I was at the beach in County Cork with Mammy, an aunt and a load of my cousins. My aunt was paddling with a couple of her kids and she was grabbing big wet handfuls of sand, but when she came back to our rug where the rest of us were, she noticed she had lost her wedding ring.

  ‘It was one of the only bits of jewellery she had and she was devastated at losing it. But Mammy told her not to worry because I would find it. It seemed a daft idea that I could find a ring that was lost on a huge beach, but Mammy was convinced. So we walked to where my aunt thought she had been. I put my hands into the wet sand and as I pulled them up, her wedding ring was dangling off my little finger.

  ‘She couldn’t believe it, but I didn’t think it was any big deal.’

  Special powers or not, Brendan’s imagination was, it seems, unlimited. For his First Holy Communion he was bought new grey trousers, a red sash, a First Holy Communion book and a shirt as white as the stairway to heaven. Two days later, Brendan wore the shirt outside when playing cowboys with his friend John Breen. Later, when he went indoors, half of one shirtsleeve was missing.

  ‘Johnny Breen cut himself,’ he explained to his mammy. ‘I had to stop the bleeding.’

  Clearly, he’d been watching too many episodes of Laramie or Rawhide. (And clearly he wasn’t overly concerned about the cost of a replacement shirt.)

  And he could certainly tell a good tale.

  ‘Once, I set fire to a hedgerow at the back of the house and blamed it on my brother, Michael. My dad was very proud of that hedgerow and he went mad when he saw it go up in flames. My brother was trying to put the fire out with a blanket and I ran away. Michael got the hiding of his life and then my mammy battered him for using a good blanket to put out the fire. I didn’t own up until my twenty-first birthday.’ He was a rogue, but always a lovable rogue.

  His imagination, or perhaps his dyslexia, made Brendan look at the world differently from other children. Once, he took the time to write Fiona a two-page letter. But he wrote it backwards. Not back to front, but every word a mirror image. Fiona had to hold it up to a mirror to read it.

  Outside of the family, Brendan’s fun time was spent with John Breen and Jimmy Matthews. The trio were inseparable.

  ‘We all went to different schools, and mine was the worst of the three. Jimmy went to St Vincent’s, a semi-private school, and John went to St Peter’s, near to his dad’s garage, and his father took him there on the back of a Honda Fifty every day.’

  Back in Problem Primary, Brendan’s thinking outside the box could only take him so far. He needed help, particularly with his reading. And encouragement. Strange as it may seem, former teacher Maureen O’Carroll didn’t coach her son; instead she was content to let him forge his own destiny, while she attacked soup-making multinationals and corrupt council officials.

  ‘My older brothers and sisters would later complain that they heard their mother on the radio railing about how many kids in Ireland were illiterate, yet they couldn’t get her to help with their homework.’

  Brendan spent lots of one-on-one time with his mum, though.

  ‘I remember bus journeys with Mammy into the City. Finglas was a very working-class area, and yet to go to town my mother would dress up. I sat there beside her upstairs on the bus, her wearing an emerald green mohair coat, her mink stole – there were three full minks stitched together arse-to-nose – around her neck, a peacock-feather hat, diamanté glasses and her cigarette holder. This was about eight inches long, and her Consulate menthol cigarette was firmly held in place.

  ‘I didn’t realise how well known she was, but I do recall that no bus conductor ever asked for her fare, and there was always someone ready to light her Consulate once it had been inserted into the holder.

  ‘I wasn’t dressed up. I sat there with the arse out of my trousers, but just loving being in her company. And it was on one of these journeys I had my first piece of what I would call “Little Mo’s Wisdoms”. As the bus trundled along towards town, we were chatting and Mammy was trying to make the point to me, a six-year-old, that how you feel about yourself is more important than how others feel about you. She believed that the correct state of mind could move mountains.

  ‘“Let me tell you, Brendan, if you have only enough money for two cups of coffee in a café, go into the best hotel and spend it on one. From the first you will leave full of coffee, from the second you will leave like a king.”’

  Gerry O’Carroll helped with the kids as much as he could. But he seemed to be cursed by continual illness.

  ‘When I was still seven, but only just, I remember standing in a corridor of the Richmond Hospital in Dublin with Mammy. We were waiting to be joined by my father. The hospital was a creepy old place. I expected to see Florence Nightingale scamper across the corridor, lamp held in front of her.

  ‘There were moans and groans coming from somewhere and I was very, very scared. I squeezed a little tighter on my mammy’s kid-gloved hand. Not for the first time in my life, nor the last, Mammy calmly said to me, “Relax Bre
ndan. There is nothing to fear here.”

  ‘So I did. Then a figure arrived from a doorway. A skeleton of a man. It was my daddy. He was wearing his tartan dressing gown, but it was wrapped around him in such a way that the side pocket was at the front. I looked at Mammy and she smiled at me, her loosening grip signalling to me to go to him. So I did. He stooped, and instead of picking me up as he would usually do, he hugged me as I stood on tiptoe.

  ‘“My God, you are getting so big,” he said, smiling.

  ‘He had no teeth. Daddy never had teeth. He had had them all taken out, as was the fashion in those days, and had replaced them with a set of dentures. He wore the dentures for a few days but abandoned them. He was also lying. I was not getting big. I was the smallest boy in my class, in the school; probably the smallest seven-year-old in the world.

  ‘I don’t remember too much more about my dad. I think it’s because the memories I have of him are of seeing him looking ill. And it’s not hard to see why I would have blocked them out.’

  The smallest seven-year-old still needed space to grow.

  ‘Mum and Dad slept in separate rooms. How they had ten kids is beyond me. They must have had an extension cord.’

  Brendan recalls his dad used to sleep with the door of the coal shed under his mattress. Gerry O’Carroll reckoned his bad back needed support. But the back pain was the result of something more sinister, which would be discovered two years down the line.

  What’s confusing about Maureen O’Carroll is why a woman who had so much political ambition would burden herself with so many children.

  Yes, Irish Catholics traditionally bred like rabbits. But why choose to have so many? Was Maureen out to create Walton’s Mountain in Stoneybatter?

  Some years later, Maureen answered that question when put delicately to her by youngest daughter, Eilish.

  ‘What woman in her right mind chooses to have ten kids, Eilish?’

  ‘So why have them?’

  ‘Well, for all my education, I was very ignorant. I wanted my first child, the rest of you were mistakes. Not that I would send any of you back. No! Every child brings its own welcome. You see, I just didn’t know I had a choice. We didn’t have access to contraception other than rubber johnnies, and whilst we tried them occasionally, we felt so guilty. Besides, it wasn’t worth the bollocking we got from the priest at confession. The only form of contraception open to us was the rhythm method, or practise self-denial.