by Sean Mallen
This was the spirit that made Britain great.
The Brits have their own variant on the skating assist devices for kids. Whereas back home we have workmanlike triangular frames made out of PVC pipes, here they had plastic penguins that the little ones could hold onto as they worked their way around the ice. Julia, of course, insisted that I haul one over to her.
I do not love skating. My skills are too limited, the risks of injury too present. I go only to have a family activity with my wife and daughter. Canada most certainly has rinks and places to skate that are more natural and in settings that are in their own way glorious. The Rideau Canal in Ottawa comes to mind, or Lake Louise.
But for me, gliding around the artificial rink in the centre of a grand old public building in the heart of London is one of the finest ways to go.
Besides, after our hour on the ice and an overpriced hot chocolate, we were able to spend an inspirational hour looking at the Impressionist collection in the Courtauld Institute in the north wing of Somerset House.
This was our last full day in London before Isabella and Julia jetted home for Christmas. They would be going earlier and staying longer than me, who had to linger due to the demands of work. The packing job had to be carried out with military precision and secrecy, given the need to hide away a selection of birthday and Christmas presents for Julia that had to be transported to Canada for delivery.
We all rose well before dawn the next day so that they could get in a taxi to the airport. I was once again to be a bachelor for a few days. As in the summer months when I was solo in London, I dawdled in the bureau for a time after filing, not having anyone to go home to.
It was almost nine when I jiggled the key in the lock to the front door at Buckland and opened up to a hallway littered with bits of paper, old newspapers it seemed. The trail led up the stairs, all the way to the second-floor flat. Anetta, her kids, and the absent banker husband had moved out a couple of weekends before, the place having been sold and about to be redecorated.
Now I was thoroughly fed up. Already there was no cleaning, due apparently to the reluctance of the eccentric owner on the first floor and now there was this casual littering, no doubt a harbinger of what was to come with the renovation about to be carried out above our heads.
With more anger than hope, I fired off another email to the property managers, demanding they make another attempt at arranging a regular cleanup of the hallway or at least to replace the threadbare rug in the front lobby.
The answer was typical: nothing to be done because they were unable to force the landlords to do anything. Oh, and by the way, we should expect the renovations to begin sooner than expected. To add additional colour to the London renter’s experience: after months of scaffolding and banging outside as the finest of English craftsmen attempted to fix a dampness problem in the building, it seems the problem was not fixed at all. Which meant that the long-promised redecoration of the common area would have to be delayed again. It seemed the workmen were unable to trace the source due to the refusal of the ground-floor owner to let them into her flat to investigate.
“But we do wish you and your family a Happy Christmas,” the email ended.
I was copying the landlord on all the communications, with zero response from him. So now I wrote an email directly to our landlord advising that in view of all the many and varied quirks, mishaps, and madness at Fuckland Buckland, we might well need to move in the new year and could he please be prepared to offer a margin of flexibility on the required two months’ notice?
At length he responded: “I might not be able to be as flexible as I would like, given that it is hard to re-let a place at this time of year.” English for fuck off, you have a contract, but Happy Christmas.
In truth, he would have a challenge finding new suckers — uh, tenants — given the colourful character on the main floor (who had now taken to playing the same song directly below our bedroom at eleven every night), the pigsty in the common area, and the major renovation happening above.
As a result, I now resumed the soul-destroying enterprise of searching online for another flat. There in plain sight was the storied Upper Park Road apartment, now apparently listed with several estate agents. I wrote to the agent who had told us there was an offer on the property. Her answer: “There was still an offer ‘in progress,’ but the owner might be prepared to consider us if we offered something closer to his asking price of £640 per week.”
Did I mention that London estate agents are liars?
Julia and Isabella, meanwhile, were back in our spacious, renovated Toronto house. A few weeks earlier her friend Cameron (who designed our kitchen) moved in with his boyfriend, Jason — paying less than market rent, but at least caring for the place and giving us the option of staying there while we were in town. They would be there for a few months while they looked for a new house.
Isabella emailed that they were keeping the place spotless, but Julia, with all the creative energy a seven-year-old could muster, was rapidly making huge messes all over the house.
Having now lived for a few months in a London flat, she realized how little stuff we actually needed to live, and how much excess stuff we were jamming into our Toronto home. We were way overdue for a deep cleansing and downsizing.
With that, I left behind the greatest city on earth and my crappy little corner of it and flew home for Christmas. I had been away from Canada for six months, the longest period out of the country in my life.
Chapter Eighteen
Christmas was a disorienting whirl. I saw our new and spectacular kitchen for the first time. Cameron had created something like a French bistro feel, with a long, tall marble table that could double as a preparation space. The new appliances were stainless steel, elegant, and far beyond our modest cookery skills. We had fewer cabinets, but puzzlingly more storage space, including one ingenious drawer that contained garbage, recycling, and compost all in one.
I could find nothing, but felt strangely warm and comfortable there, even though we could no more afford it than we could our life in London.
Julia treated my jet lag as a great game. My usual coping tactic was to try to force myself as quickly as possible into the Eastern Time hours — the result was that at a certain point in the evening I would become both heavy-lidded and incomprehensible. She would ask if I wanted to play a game and I would answer from dreamland that I wore a size eight shoe. As my eyes slowly closed, she would creep up beside me and scream in my ear: “DADDY!”
My first urgent task was to head to a government office to renew my expired driver’s licence so that I would be able to legally drive Isabella’s toy car. She and Julia both loved it, loved to roll down the top in summertime and play music at top volume. The Fiat was still one of the few on the road in Toronto and my wife revelled in all the admiring looks and questions. As for me, I felt that when I stopped at the beer store I was in danger of getting beaten up for driving such a girly car.
Once I was able to drive, I set out looking for a Christmas tree. I wondered how the hell we would be able to fit one in the car. Julia shared Isabella’s great solution. “Daddy, you just put down the top!”
And so it was that she and I drove home in sub-zero weather with the red top of the Fiat folded back and a seven-foot Christmas tree sticking out above, an Italian joke played on a Canadian hoser.
Julia got one birthday party with her friends at Chuck E. Cheese’s and another with her grandparents in London, Ontario. We somehow managed to squeeze all our presents and clothes into the tiny car for the two-hour drive — a real feat, given the need to hide certain gifts from our daughter.
But somehow it all worked. Santa satisfied Julia, family members were visited, and the holiday season played out more or less normally, even in this year of mass disruption of our lives. Our friends Jen and Gregor hosted us for New Year’s Eve at their house up the street. Their kids and ours had a ball staying up until after midnight, and Gregor, to my endless gratitude, enco
uraged Isabella to “embrace London.” It was a nice try.
On the day after New Year’s I had to head to the airport for an evening flight. Julia and Isabella would be coming a few days later, arriving in London when I would be in Ireland on a shoot. Not good. The stresses, never far away, bubbled up again as I packed.
“Why did you do this to us?” asked my wife.
Once again I had no answer. At least none that would satisfy her.
The once-exotic adventure of the Toronto–London flight was starting to get routine. When flying solo, I would always try for an aisle seat farther back in the plane. We were already so packed in that at least it gave a modicum of breathing room on one side and there was no need to wake up the seatmate when nature called.
The plan this time was to land, scoot into the flat to unpack the larger suitcase, load up the carry-on, and head right back to Heathrow for a short hop to Dublin, where I was to begin a shoot for Global’s current affairs program 16x9 the following day.
I loved this kind of whirlwind of travel — Toronto, London, Dublin, all in a day.
The romance was blunted by travel hell on this journey, even though Paris was added to the list of destinations. High winds over Heathrow were delaying landings. It runs close to capacity almost all the time, so it takes little to cause a traffic jam. Having already flown over the Atlantic, our jet did not have enough fuel to circle for long, so the pilot informed us that we were being diverted to Charles de Gaulle Airport.
Our view of Paris was from a tarmac far from the terminal, where we sat for an hour, refuelling and awaiting clearance to take off again for London.
My idea for a run into the flat was blown away. Instead, I shifted a few things around from the carry-on to the big suitcase, dropped the monster bag in a luggage storage place, and with a brisk walk across the terminal managed to make my Dublin flight.
At the Dublin Airport I met Kirk, the lead cameraman for 16x9, whose journey had been even more roundabout that mine. For cost-saving reasons, he had to fly via Frankfurt. We had last worked together in minus thirty-seven degree weather in the far northwest of Ontario for a memorable story on drug abuse in isolated Indigenous communities. He is both an award-winner, with astonishing creativity, and a blast to work with.
The Ireland journey was the fruit of a suggestion from Tom, my cousin Sheila’s Irish husband. The story of the Magdalene Laundries was the latest chapter in a depressing and outrageous run of revelations that have turned the Irish away from the Catholic Church.
For decades, thousands of young women, unjustly and often cruelly labelled as “fallen,” or prostitutes, were handed over to an order of nuns for rehabilitation. Their so-called crime might have been having a baby out of wedlock or perhaps resisting the advances of a stepfather or maybe just being unwanted.
Their punishment was hard labour in laundries run by the nuns, where the gentle ladies of God would often impart the wisdom of the Lord through daily humiliations. The women were effectively slaves and many spent large chunks of their lifetimes trapped in these shameful institutions.
The last of the laundries only closed in the nineties, right around the time when people started asking questions about what really went on. When the nuns sold off some Dublin property at a place called High Park, a mass grave was discovered — the last, undignified resting place for some of the women who had toiled in the laundries. When the grave was investigated, it was discovered that the nuns were about as negligent with tabulation as they were with human relations — there were twenty-two more bodies buried in the mass grave than they had recorded.
Those long lost “fallen” women now spoke from beyond the grave, forcing Irish society to probe old wounds. Former residents of the laundries, shamed into silence for so long, now started talking. I would be meeting two of them, with the luxury of all the extra time and higher production values of a current affairs program. Instead of two minutes to tell their story, I would get sixteen or eighteen.
It had been almost twenty years since my previous visit to Dublin. The last time I was there, it was still a dumpy, grey place, the Celtic Tiger only just awakening. The boom of the nineties and early twenty-first century transformed it. It had now gone bust again, but the years when the money flowed left behind a Dublin that was now a much handsomer city, with elegant buildings and tony restaurants and bars — not to mention some fine residences lining the Liffey, owned by Dubliners who were deep in debt, stuck with places not worth anywhere near the price paid for them.
Kirk and I were both severely jet-lagged, but thankfully we had time to go to the hotel and rest before starting the shoot the next day. In the morning we met Steve O’Riordan, a young director of a documentary called The Forgotten Maggies, in which he convinced many of the laundry survivors to tell their stories for the first time.
He had already graciously put us in touch with our two subjects and over coffee at the hotel gave us directions to places to shoot around Dublin.
It was Kirk’s first time driving on the wrong side of the road, but he seemed confident, so we agreed that he would take the wheel most of the time. With the help of a handy GPS, we managed to avoid getting lost.
Donnybrook is the only place I can think of that is known better as a synonym for a drunken brawl. The rowdy, boozy fairs that gave rise to the nickname are long gone and now it is just another part of southeast Dublin. There, Steve pointed us to a convent that was the site of a former laundry and a graveyard where both nuns and the deceased penitents were sent to their final rest.
It was a simple, neatly tended cemetery, with rows of stark, black crosses. On an overcast day, the greyness of the scene matched the subject matter. Kirk, always a perfectionist, searched for the unexpected framing that would give the story more visual eloquence. We lingered for an hour as he shot every possible angle. Then a groundskeeper noticed us.
I spotted him before Kirk, who was engrossed in a shot. I grabbed one of Kirk’s cameras, which was on a tripod next to me and hustled over to the car, muttering to him as I passed that it appeared we were busted and should get ready to leave.
Kirk seemed unconcerned and finished his shot before walking over to join me. As he approached, his eyes suddenly opened wide and he warned me, “Watch out!”
In the rush, I had not properly opened the legs of the tripod and now it gently tipped over as I vainly tried to grab it. His lovely Nikon smashed face first into the pavement, his expensive lens shattering.
“Oh, buddy, buddy,” Kirk moaned as he surveyed the damage.
As it turned out, the groundskeeper did not even come close to us, but did warn from twenty metres away, in a manner that managed to be both blandly casual and threatening, that if we did not have permission, we would be asked to leave. We carried on, figuring we would get as much as we could before being kicked out — all while I apologized profusely to Kirk for destroying his lens.
Within minutes of our meeting with the groundskeeper, a trim and tiny woman in her sixties approached us. Although not wearing a habit, her conservative dress marked her as a nun. Suddenly I was transported back to Grade 5, with boyhood fears of sisterly disciplinary action.
She asked what we were doing and I explained with a cordial smile that we were a Canadian television crew preparing a story on the Magdalene Laundries.
There was what seemed to be a long pause as she fixed me with an icy stare and a thin smile.
“Well, I’ll be taking your tape then,” she said.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Sister,” I responded, with a veneer of bravery that barely concealed the memories of being traumatized as a nine-year-old by a mean, cruel so-called woman of God.
Another long, cold glare. “What is your name?”
I handed over a business card.
“I’ll be informing the Mother’s office of this. And we will be watching.” Such menace from such a tiny person. No wonder the girls in the laundries were intimidated and fearful.
As we drove away, Kirk
and I were able to laugh a bit about it. But this was a heartbreaking story.
We interviewed Patsy McGarry, the long-time Religious Affairs correspondent for the Irish Times, who had been covering this and other Church scandals for years and who was generous in sharing his encyclopedic knowledge.
As a kid who grew up proud to call myself Irish, even though it was my great-great-grandfather who was actually born there, one phrase of Pasty’s cut through all the rose-coloured views of the old country.
“Ireland was a very poor and cruel country.”
It had to be, to tolerate such abuses. And now the nation was turning against the Church. Only twenty years earlier, upward of 90 percent of Catholics attended Mass on Sundays. Now, after so many cases of priestly misdeeds, attendance had plummeted into the teens. And the full story of the Magdalene Laundries was only now being probed.
“It’s well known that these women were just effectively in prison for life, for uncertain offences,” said Patsy.
“There’s a widespread sense that [they] were badly treated, that they have real grounds for grievance and whatever should be done for them ought to be done.”
But by that time, there had been nothing. As Patsy pointed out, the Irish government had already paid out huge settlements to victims of abuse by priests. With a collapsing economy, there was little more money available.
Maureen Taylor was the first of the laundry survivors we met. A round-faced woman with neatly styled auburn hair and thin glasses, Taylor, now in her sixties, told us that she had not spoken about her experience for decades. “I was ashamed. I’d never told anybody I was in the Magdalene Laundries because I felt that you were a bad person,” she told us in an interview we taped at our hotel.
