We made our way back to the car as my Dad stood with his gun on Jessop and Brandon. It was another five minutes before my father joined us. What he might have said to Jessop I didn’t know, I still don’t. Needless to say, it was enough to leave them frozen where they stood, their hands in the air, their faces frozen with fear. In a fury of screeching tyres and flying gravel my father pulled the car out of the layby and we headed out along the Furlough Road toward Dublin. And just like that, my life in Crannstonbarrow was over.
24
I was away for almost two years. Well, a year and seven months if you want to split hairs about it. England in the 1970’s wasn’t a particularly welcoming place, especially for an Irishman. Over there, we were Paddy’s, Micks, The Blacks of Europe. They called us all sorts. Good for nothing but sweeping the streets or laying cavity blocks in the council estates that were springing up all over the country. Try as I might, I could never bring myself to settle over there. I was always on edge, I lived on my wits and I always expected something bad to come my way. What I was expecting I couldn’t tell you. There was always a sense of being draped by a cloak of anxiety, fear, pressure, from under which I could never escape. Something bad would get me over there alright, but I wasn’t to know a thing about it for forty years.
I can’t rightly tell you what had me so much on edge, perhaps it was the growing resentment of the Irish in general as the Provo’s upped the ante in the 70’s. There were assassinations and bombings on an almost monthly basis and to be Irish was to be a target. I kept myself to myself, never going out of my way to socialise or even try to blend in. What was the point in that anyway? Trying to blend in hadn’t ended so well for me the last time I had tried it down in Carneydonnagh. That had brought me nothing but heartache and hurt. Besides, they weren’t my people and I certainly wasn’t one of them. We may look alike, sound alike, Jesus, we even speak the same language but the difference between us Irish and the Brits is a chasm so wide that it will never be bridged. There’s too much water under the bridge now for any peace agreement or truce to hold back the weight of history. It was even worse back then, so, I kept my head down and got on with it.
Through his contacts in the building trade my Father had arranged a job for me as a labourer on a crew in a small town outside of Leicester. Blaby wasn’t the hub of a bustling metropolitan area, far from it, but it was quiet and safe and it was far enough from Crannstonbarrow to help me move on from that terrible week in May. I worked Monday to Friday, from nine in the morning until six o’clock in the evening. In the summers when the weather was fine and the days longer you might put in five twelve hour shifts on the trot. Back breaking, soul destroying work but the pay was good, and when those summer shifts kicked in there was serious money to be made.
I boarded in a pub in a small town up the road a bit from Blaby. If Blaby was a backwater, Wigston was nothing more than a tiny tributary of said backwater. I lived in a room above a pub called The Yardarm, right on the main road. Bushloe End was the name of the street if my memory serves me. I liked it there, I really did. The pub wasn’t that big of a deal so I was never kept up nights by drunken louts singing or fighting, or both.
The landlady was Camille Denby, a spinster in her fifties who lived to serve her punters and her patrons. She’d been born, raised and denied any semblance of a normal life in that pub. Her parents had taken a lease on it from the brewery in the early twenties and it was their be-all and end-all. Everything was for the pub. Camille was pulling pints of bitter by age nine. She was turfing drunken louts out on their ear by age twelve. She was fifteen when Mr Hitler invaded Poland and her father was called up for service. An ill-fated tango with a Messerschmitt over the Channel saw to it that he never again graced The Yardarm. Her fate was sealed. She and her mother kept the pub going, through the war, through the recession that followed. Through the rockabilly of the fifties and the rock and roll of the sixties. She never left. Never dated, never married. Her mother died in 1969 and knowing nothing else in the world, Camille just carried on with it.
She was a darling of a woman who took me and my Irish brogue to her heart. I wanted for nothing while I lived there. Camille took a shine to me, and there was many the morning that I set off to work with the thickest cheddar cheese and roast beef sandwiches while some of the other labourers who boarded with her had to make do with processed cheese slices on supermarket own brand bread. As though by magic my dirty work duds would find their way to the laundry and back, they would be left neatly folded on my bed and smelling heavenly. The other lads had to trek down to the launderette in Oadby while mine looked after themselves, apparently. An evening might even find me sitting in the chair by my window sipping on the bottles of Guinness dear old Camille had left for me in my room, cooling by my bedside in a washing up basin filled with ice and water. Yeah, life was good in The Yardarm and who was I to turn my nose up at such welcome hospitality.
The other lads teased me about it quite a lot, but I think it was owing more to jealousy than anything else. That didn’t stop them from hazing me though. They even had a pool going, betting on how long it would be before Camille was to take me into her bed. I assure you now, none of those bets were ever paid out. I can honestly say that she was nothing more than a lonely woman who took a liking to something in me. Perhaps it was my politeness, or my quietness, I never knew, I never asked. I was happy that she liked me and more than happy to reap the rewards of her fondness for me. Life in Bushloe End was nice. Nice and quiet. Safe and secure.
Every now and again I had to put up with a ribbing from the other Irish lads boarding there because I never joined them for a few drinks downstairs or in one of the clubs in Leicester city centre. I never had a mind to it. I was happy in my room with my four bottles of stout. As in Carneydonnagh, the highlight of my week were the phone calls home. Given how things had ended between myself and Granddad I never called the house. It was always to Saoirse’s friend’s house, every Friday night at half eight. We’d speak to each other, but we never really talked. Well, not about the things that mattered in any case. We skirted around them, like kids tip-toeing up to the edge of a deep well, peeping in, tossing exploratory stones over the rim, but never committing to climbing down into it and having a good look around.
There were so many things I wanted to ask her, so many things that I needed to know, but I could never bring myself to speak of them. Did the Brandon’s still blame me for Ellie’s death? Had there been any more attacks on the house? Was Granddad still insisting that he had only the one grandson? And what about Jessop? Was he still spilling his bile about me? So many things that I couldn’t ask. So it was always pleasantries. How was my father doing? Was the business bouncing back? Had Rob finally gone off to New York? After only a few months these calls home became a torment. Whether by design or circumstance, they gradually tapered off. Eventually I lost all contact with home and to be honest with you, that suited me right down to the ground. It was too hard with that umbilical in place. I could never fully break free unless I cut it. And that’s what I did. When the phone calls were no more than a monthly occurrence I just stopped calling. It was better for everyone if I were to just fade from the picture altogether. I made the decision to stay in England for good. There was nothing for me at home. The business was gone, I’d never get a crack of that whip. Granddad had made sure of that when he robbed it from under my father’s nose. Besides, I couldn’t have gone home to take up the reins, even if it had been an option. Joe Brandon would have certainly put a match to it as soon as word got round that I was back. Rob was gone off to New York, Saoirse was spending the week up in college in Meath. Granddad hated me, and my father, well, he was just getting on with normal life as best he could, his head buried in the business just like it always had been.
I’d stay in Leicester as long as there was work for me. When it dried up I’d move north to Edinburgh or Glasgow. I’d follow the work wherever it took me, but it was Scotland which held the appeal for me. Back then
I thought that it might be the closest to home I could get. The Scots weren’t like the English, they might take to me a little easier than the Brits had. We weren’t bombing their cities nor murdering their politicians either and I had the ridiculously romantic notion that I would be welcomed with open arms by my fellow Celts. I was never to know. I never got to Scotland.
As one job finished up, we’d move to another. Houses were going up like sandcastles on a summers day back then and the work was constant. So I moved with the crew. Wigston, Blaby, Oadby. Wherever a council estate went up, a tribe of Paddies was sure to be found on site, with our trowels and our muddy boots. Our coarse brogue and coarse language, check shirts and dirty jeans. It was over there, while doing that grunt work and getting well paid, that I got it. Well, the start of it in any case. This bastard that’s eating me from the inside out as I speak to you now was planted in me over there. The thing is, the building trade in the seventies wasn’t subject to the stringent health and safety regulations that govern it today, it was very much a hap-hazard enterprise where you took your chances. No harnesses, no steel capped boots, no hard hats. Brickies, labourers, grunts, carpenters, plumbers, sparkies, we were all exposed to it and no one in the higher ups bothered to check as to whether the materials we were working with were safe for us to be around let alone safe enough to be put into houses where little kids and babies were going to live.
Chrysotile. That’s asbestos to you and me. We were jamming that stuff into every nook and cranny of the houses we built with nary a care or a worry for our own personal safety. How were we to know? No one ever told us. Nobody ever walked up to me and said, ‘Hey, that’s a time bomb you’re handling there. It won’t go off just yet, but give it thirty years or so and it’ll damn well eat you alive.’
Peritoneal Mesothelioma. Yeah, it’s as scary as it sounds and it’s gonna wipe me out any day now. Cancer in the lining of my abdomen. How’s that for a kick in the face? I breathed that crap in every working day for a year and a half and all the while it was the cigarette smoke I was pumping into me that I was worrying about and not the invisible asbestos fibres that Her Majesty’s Government had signed off as safe for use in the hundreds and thousands of houses that went up over there in the seventies. Jesus, they didn’t even bother to ban it until 1999. Too little, too late if you ask me. How many more men like me are out there now? Rattling off their last days in agony, trying to put to rights all of the wrongs, all of the bad things they did in their lives? It doesn’t bear thinking about if you were to ask me.
So here I am, talking to you and wanting to put my wrongs to right. That’s what we’re here for isn’t it? Me and you? Cozied up as we are in this little room with me rambling on at you. Well then, let’s get on and be done with it.
I lived in Bushloe End for all of my time over there. Myself and Camille grew quite close as time drew on. It was our love of books which bound us, especially the classics. Many was the night, after service downstairs had finished that we would sit in her living room and talk about books and authors. Dumas, Dostoyevsky, Wilde, Flaubert, Elliot, Cervantes. We read them all, sometimes to each other. I loved nothing more than to sit with her and talk about our stories. What she liked about a particular story, how it made her feel, how did she relate to the characters? We could spend hours and hours talking about nothing more than the books. I’d be lying if I told you that I never once entertained the thought of being with her, but such was the vast gulf in age between us that I would dismiss the thought as soon as it reared its head. Nothing but nonsense and I knew it. Then there were other times, a look in her eyes, a smile, an intended, yet delicate brush of her hand on mine that I thought she might have a notion to the same thoughts. Then I would think of Ellie and with a hurried goodnight and a forced yawn I would take my leave of her and go to my room, there to chastise myself for the sheer audacity of entertaining such a notion. To be with another woman, older, younger, it didn’t matter, to be with anyone would be to betray Ellie, and that, I wouldn’t stand for. That day by her graveside I had sworn an oath to her… ‘No one but you. Not now, not ever.’
My initial confusion as to how I felt about Camille came to pass in time and we developed a very close and intimate friendship. I would spend the Christmas of 1974 alone with her in The Yardarm. With the call of the old sod ringing in their ears, the three other lads rooming there took the train over to Holyhead and from there the ferry to Dún Laoghaire. With no regard to the English convention, Camille closed the pub on Christmas Day and we had dinner together in her parlour while the dulcet tones of Perry Como and Bing Crosby spinning on the Dolby three-in-one filled to room. With more wine in me than I would have liked, I told her my story as we sat by the fire after dinner. Not all of it, for obvious reasons I omitted the incident with Dan Maguire, but enough of it to answer the string of questions which I had previously side-stepped. I can’t tell you how much of a release it was to speak of it. I mentioned nothing of Earl Jessop, nor Peter Donnelly. I made no reference as to what Ellie and I had argued about that last night in The Stoop, keeping to the story which I had told the police, we had argued about our intimate relations and the guilt Ellie had felt. It was as much of a confession as I could bring myself to confer, but there was to be no absolution. For the remainder of my time over there it slowly ate away at me, killing one tiny piece of my heart and my mind at a time.
If anything, my story only increased my esteem in Camille’s eyes. I was a broken young Irish man suffering through tragedy, aching for the loss of his love. After that, her attentions were at times smothering, but on the other hand, there were occasions when there was nothing more I could have wished for than to sit in her living room and talk. Talk about anything and everything, just not my story. Following that evening by the fire, I never spoke of Ellie to her again and try as she might I would not allow her to push the subject and I batted away all of her inquiries with a polite but firm protest.
As times tends to do, it rolled by. Days into weeks, weeks into months. I settled into a comfortable routine. Work by day, spend time with Camille in the evenings. Silent hours of contemplation in the small wooded park down the road. My grief for the loss of Ellie began to dissipate. It was a slow and gradual process which I didn’t really notice until one day in a small corner shop of all places. I was buying cigarettes for myself and a newspaper for Camille. The radio was playing and a song I hadn’t heard in quite a spell suddenly poured into my ears. ‘Young Love’ by Donny Osmond. It wasn’t the type of thing which I would have normally gone in for, but it had hit number one back home just as Ellie and I were beginning to realise that we were a thing and that we were falling hard for each other. I left the shop with the song still ringing in my ears and tears stinging my eyes.
I had bought the single for Ellie and she had laughed when I had told her how embarrassed I had been asking for it in the record shop. She had jeered and teased me over that and for months afterwards whenever an embarrassing or awkward situation arose between us. Ellie would break the silence by breaking into that song. Walking through the bleak and fog cloaked streets of Wigston that evening I was frozen in my pace by the terrible realisation that I could no longer remember her face. Oh, I could play the memories over and over in my mind. Our walks, our talks, kisses, hugs, holding hands. I could see it all, but in each and every memory, in every scene rendered in my mind, Ellie’s face was obscured. I couldn’t bring her features into focus. I had begun to forget what she had looked like. I was distraught. I had no pictures of her. I had left Crannstonbarrow in such a hurry that there hadn’t been time. Standing there on a deserted street in England with the fog seeping into my bones I had lost her all over again. As I walked home I saw her ghost in every shadow, every figure emerging towards me out of the fog was Ellie, her face hidden in a haze. My heart was broken all over again. It was November 27th 1975, over a year had passed since she had died and all of the progress I had made in getting over her came crashing down around me on hearing that song. I wa
s stunned, disgusted and stunned by how well I had managed to push her from my thoughts, I had done such a good job of trying to get over her loss, that try as I might, I could not remember her face. I had never wanted to go home so much. To hell with what Joe Brandon or Earl Jessop, my Grandfather or anyone else in Crannstonbarrow might do to me, I wanted to go back home, if for nothing else than to visit her grave, collect the few photographs which I had of her and then I’d be gone once more. I would be home soon enough. However, it would not be by my design. Very soon, the position of every Irish man and woman in England would become untenable owing to the increasing anti-Irish sentiment which the IRA’s campaign was fomenting in the English people.
Since October 1973 the Provo’s had carried out a string of bombings all around England. In the two years since Halloween ’73, forty-five people had been killed in eleven bombings, more than three hundred injured in the same campaign. Bombs in Guilford, Birmingham, Surrey. A coach bomb on the M62 which had killed 6 British soldiers and four civilians. Twenty-one dead in the Birmingham bomb, five dead in Guilford. The frustration of the British people at their inability to prevent such acts saw their patience wear thin. With the Government powerless to stop the carnage, the people took to the streets in mass protests, demonstrations which became increasingly anti-Irish in sentiment. The frustration and anger of the British people was only held in check by the massive police presence at the rallies. The anger had seeped into the culture however and as 1975 wore on, life became increasingly difficult for many of the Irish who now called England their home.
Chief among those calling for action on the problem of IRA terror was a Conservative Party activist, whose name I can no longer recall. He had offered a fifty thousand pound reward for the capture of the men who had perpetrated the recent string of bombings. He had also advocated for changes in the law which would compel every Irish citizen living in the United Kingdom to register at their local Police Station in addition to having to provide signed and verified photographs of themselves when renting a flat or registering for a room in a hotel, hostel or Bed and Breakfast. In offering that bounty he had essentially signed his own death warrant. At a quarter to seven on the evening of November 27th 1975, as I sauntered my way through the foggy streets of Wigston distraught at losing the memory of Ellie’s face, he was assassinated by two IRA gunmen as he left his house for the theatre. It was the straw which broke the camel’s back. The British public were in uproar over the killing and every Irish citizen living in Britain was, overnight, persona non gratia.
In These Dark Places Page 17
