Falling for London

by Sean Mallen

  But now she was proud to have survived the experience.

  Taylor shared with us her story of the abuse she had endured from an unnamed family member while living in England before her mother shipped her back to Ireland at age sixteen, supposedly to a school. But it turned out to be a laundry — the High Park place where the mass grave was later discovered. The nuns decreed that she would from that point be called Monica — all the young women had their own names removed upon arrival.

  She tried to run away several times but was always returned to the life of hard labour and abuse.

  “It’s a disgrace. Absolutely … the Church, a disgrace.”

  She agreed to drive out with us to Glasnevin Cemetery, the most famous in Ireland, the final resting place of many of the heroes of the struggle for independence. In 1993, the women exhumed from the mass grave at a Dublin laundry were reburied in Glasnevin with a measure of dignity that was denied them in life.

  The cemetery doubles as a tourist attraction, with a museum and tours that offer insight into the lives of some of the men and women who were key players in modern Irish history. The women of the laundries had now joined them; another heartbreaking chapter for a people who had seen much tragedy and injustice.

  Maureen Taylor had known of this place ever since the reburial, but until now had never visited.

  A cemetery worker at the front gate directed us to the gravesite. A simple, grey stone topped with a Celtic cross marked the spot, with a long list of names engraved — Margaret Corcoran, Rose Ann Maguire, Christina Butler, Mary Mulhall. Real names were engraved on the stones, which meant Taylor did not recognize any of them, even though the dates of their deaths indicated they likely worked shoulder to shoulder at the High Park laundry.

  “I don’t because they were all given religious names — you were never known as your own name, your birth name,” she said, voice cracking, eyes filling.

  “It breaks my heart to see that, to be quite honest with you.”

  She was generous with her time, allowing us to shoot her in all the many and varied angles required for our story. She made the sign of the cross as she stared at the gravestone of the lost girls, retaining enough belief in the Catholic faith to make a religious gesture, something our next survivor would never do.

  After dropping Taylor back in the centre of the city, Kirk and I loaded up the rental and drove just over an hour to the southwest of Dublin to the small town of Carlow. The next morning we rang at the door of Maureen Sullivan’s house. It took a few minutes for her to answer. We had awakened her.

  Sullivan told us that she often slept poorly, plagued by nightmares of the nuns.

  “Well, you wake up, maybe, sort of, three o’clock in the morning, screaming because the nuns used to come in and check on you at that time, always vision them around your bed, you know, in their dark clothes and not knowing what they’re going to do to you,” she said in our formal interview that we shot in her living room.

  Like the other Maureen, Sullivan told us that she had been abused by a family member and then her mother shipped her off at age twelve to what she was told was an “industrial school.” But there was no schooling, only hard labour in a laundry.

  She drove with us to the nearby village of New Ross, where the old laundry still stands behind a church — a disused, dingy, yellow stucco building, with the windows bricked up.

  “If you weren’t doing the sheets quick enough, they’d come over and hit you and box you in the side of the face. Or your hair would get pulled,” she said. “I often collapsed. Many a times, I collapsed.”

  We walked across the road to another cemetery, a picturesque spot with a panoramic view and a bleak undercurrent of past wrongs.

  “The horror always stays with you, it never leaves, your life is, part of your life that is destroyed,” she told us.

  Maureen Sullivan, a Catholic from birth, is a Catholic no more — not even Christian.

  “I’ve totally went against it.”

  The only high Irish churchman who would speak to us was a retired bishop named Willie Walsh, who was known as a relative progressive. It took some negotiating to get his agreement to an interview, given that he did not want to be portrayed as a spokesperson for the Church.

  To meet him we had to make a three-hour drive to the west, to Ennis, in picturesque County Clare — coincidentally, not far from the home of my cousin Sheila and her husband, Tom (Suzie’s parents).

  To give Kirk a break, I made my debut driving on the wrong side of the road, the experience made all the more thrilling by the misty weather that made keeping on the road on a dark night an exercise in guesswork. We arrived alive, although I was gripping the wheel so tightly I virtually had to pry my fingers off.

  In a neat bit of irony, we were booked into the Temple Gate Hotel, a former Convent of Mercy — and also, in the view of some locals, the site of a laundry. For our interview we were able to rent a room that was a former chapel in the convent.

  I contacted Bishop Walsh because he was already on record as one of the few high officials in the Irish Church to speak out with regret about the priestly abuse of children. Although he was never involved with a laundry, he seemed genuinely regretful of the abuses.

  “I think certainly a recognition, a recognition that wrong, serious wrong, has been done, but, and I think that must come, not just from Church, I think society as a whole, I think we have a society being in serious denial,” he said.

  The Irish government had at least launched an inquiry into the affair, but the organization that represented the order of nuns that ran the laundries would not talk to us, only offering an anodyne statement: “This is a sad, complex and dark story of Irish society that extends over one hundred and fifty years. We are willing to participate in any initiative that will bring greater clarity, understanding, and justice for all the women involved.”

  The words “we’re sorry” were omitted.

  I asked Maureen Taylor in our Dublin interview whether she ever expected an apology.

  “It’s not going to happen … not from the nuns, no.”*

  Interviews in Ennis completed, we made the long drive across the island to Dublin. Once again Kirk trusted me to take the wheel for the final leg. I only managed to have one outraged Irishman lean on his horn on the outskirts of the capital as I innocently cut him off. When the blaring hit the ten-second mark, Kirk shouted an encouraging, “All right … that’s enough.”

  Aside from a few pickup shots the following morning, we were essentially done, free to have a traditional Irish Saturday night out on the town. An online search revealed that the Merchants Arch Bar was the “most authentic pub in Dublin.” Good enough for us.

  Their traditional Irish stew, washed down with a pint of Guinness, and then another pint was truly fine — so was the singing, a mixture of Top 40 hits and old Irish tunes. The warmth of the food, the stout, and the atmosphere made it one of the best nights ever in the land of my great-great-grandfather. I wonder if old Mike Mallen ever went on a pub-crawl in the capital, and ate so well, before he got on the boat to Canada.

  I was thoroughly satisfied, but Kirk wanted more. Another pint was ordered, then a jaunt over to the nearby Temple Bar, which we had been told was the place to be.

  It was standing room only, but we wedged our way inside. My award-winning cameraman colleague continued ordering round after round and they kept disappearing down my throat, even as my eyes grew heavy and the room began to spin. There were conversations with Brazilians and then two young Canadians — all very innocent and largely unintelligible, given that all the participants by this time were completely shit-faced.

  It was an old-fashioned bender, the likes of which I had not experienced since university days. At 3:00 a.m. we hailed a cab, which brought us back to the hotel where we stumbled up to our rooms and into bed, regretting that we had already planned to start shooting again at 9:30 a.m.

  At least I had the foresight to pre-write the stand-ups I needed to d
eliver on Sunday morning — although my puffy eyes may well have betrayed how much my head was throbbing. Kirk was a trouper, although his hands seemed to shake a bit more than normal, and he seemed to have difficulty finding the right focus — probably because his eyes were not exactly working properly.

  Dublin left its mark on us, and not just because of drink.

  The story of the Magdalene Laundries made me look at the land of my ancestors in a more nuanced way.

  When I returned to London that afternoon, Isabella was already frantically cleaning because we were about to mark a milestone in our time in the U.K. — our first guests.

  Iris was a Dutchwoman Isabella had met and befriended years before when they were both dancers in Montreal. Mario was a Quebecois who had fallen in love with Iris and moved with her back to her hometown in the Netherlands, where they now ran the gasoline station that had been founded by her father.

  Isabella had not seen them in decades, but had always kept in touch. This would be my first meeting with the glamorous, gorgeous performers who were now small business people in an unheralded Dutch town an hour’s train ride north of Amsterdam.

  They booked into a hotel a couple of blocks from our Buckland flat, and we were to meet them for dinner at the Belsize Kitchen, a cozy bistro in the neighbourhood. Naturally, I was delayed at the bureau by logistical complications with my story. When it was finally put to bed, I hopped a taxi to the restaurant and rushed in the door, starved, just as they were paying the bill.

  I ordered a beer, inhaled the half-eaten plate of pasta that Julia had left behind, and started to learn the story of Iris and Mario.

  She was tall, blond, long-legged, and during her Montreal dancing days attracted the attention of Pierre Trudeau, who asked her on a date even though he was old enough to be her grandfather. She went, but nothing happened.

  Filial duty drew her back to Holland, to take over the gas station from her aging parents. There, she drew on her rare combination of creativity and practicality to run a small business in a provincial town.

  Mario was lean and ripped, still in incredible shape at age fifty-nine. He also drew famous eyes in his youth back home — Rudolf Nureyev once expressed an amorous interest, to no effect.

  Mario was also a joker. He told us that upon arrival at Heathrow a humourless border agent was giving an unnecessarily hard time to a black man ahead of them in line. After a pointed interrogation, the agent ordered the man to step aside and waved Mario ahead. To which the smartassed Canadian cracked, “YES, SIR!”

  Border agents as a breed are not known for their appreciation of irony. Mario had already been waiting for an hour in the lineup for non-EU passport holders. He was now treated to a further, steely-eyed interrogation to make his welcome to the U.K. all the more pleasant.

  He cared not at all, more pleased with his act of defiance than upset at the ensuing delay.

  Iris and Mario were beautiful, charismatic, and utterly in love. Our table was full of laughter. I had never met them before, but we were friends immediately.

  The warm glow of the evening dissipated when we arrived back at the flat. Just outside our door, the ceiling was cracking. The renovation had begun on the floor above, with incessant banging, and the old plaster was starting to show the effect.

  “I’m scared,” whimpered Julia. “I don’t want it to fall on my head.”

  I told her it would never happen, but resolved to complain to the property managers and the landlord.

  Isabella continued her frantic cleaning the next day, knowing that we would be having Iris and Mario for dinner that night. She did her best, but there would be no disguising that we were living in an overpriced dump, with plaster on the verge of a cave-in.

  We noted that our hosting skills, never the best even at home in Toronto, had atrophied into complete incompetence in London. We would be serving our guests pasta with sauce from a jar.

  Luckily for us, Iris and Mario were completely unpretentious and just happy to have our company — as we were with them. They arrived with a bottle of fizzy, sweet, and undrinkable wine as a gift. They were non-drinkers and asked only for water. The bottle sat in our fridge for months before I threw it out.

  We sat down at our new Ikea table only to discover that I had neglected to set out cutlery. No matter — Mario hopped up and grabbed utensils for us all. The mundane food, the crappy wine, the poor service — none of it mattered. Once again, we laughed all night long.

  We learned that Mario had a bit part in a movie from the eighties, Jesus of Montreal. Out came the laptop — we searched out a video clip, and there he was: a smouldering, bare-chested dancer doing a hot number with a lithe partner dressed only in a bikini and pumps. No wonder Nureyev was eyeing him.

  Isabella and Iris were constantly reminiscing about their Montreal days. The giggling was constant. Julia was utterly smitten. After they left, she was still so excited she took forever to fall asleep.

  On Friday I managed to finish at a reasonable hour for a change so that Isabella could join them to see the musical version of Ghost. Mario was soon to be auditioning for a Dutch production of the show and they wanted to check it out.

  On Saturday we hosted them again, this time for brunch. Once again, we were bumbling hosts. We did not even own a coffee maker, only the tiny macchinetta del caffè stovetop gadget that we had inherited from Isabella’s Uncle Giorgio and which I had yet to figure out how to use.

  And when they walked in the door, I realized we had almost no food. No problem, they said, tea and toast would be fine. Before we knew it, they were both in our crappy little kitchen making mounds of toast.

  Iris finally admitted, almost apologetically, that Mario would probably like some eggs. This I could handle and I demanded that they stay seated while I scrambled some.

  They had to catch a midafternoon flight, but Iris had her heart set on seeing the Crabtree & Evelyn shop on Regent Street, so we all schlepped onto the Tube and headed down. As Mario and I had not much interest in fragrance and fancy soaps, we had a quick look around, then stepped outside while the three ladies indulged themselves.

  We must have looked like locals because a middle-aged couple approached asking for directions in broken English. Their accent was clearly Quebecois. Mario of course understood them perfectly, but had no idea how to direct them. I took advantage of my imperfect understanding of French to assist, and immediately started running out of words. As I struggled, Iris emerged to take over and translate into perfect French. It seemed that the Dutch gas station owner spoke both English and French better than her husband.

  With departure time approaching, we power-walked over to Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant at Claridge’s — not that any of us wanted to drop a month’s rent for a meal at the (soon to be closed) outlet of a celebrity chef, but Iris just wanted a picture. We hustled back to the flat to pick up their bags, called them a taxi, and got them on their way to the airport, all of us resolving that we needed to go to the Netherlands to visit sooner rather than later.

  As I sat down on the sofa to catch my breath, I unlocked my iPhone for the first time that day to see what was happening in the world. At the top of the Twitter feed was a picture of a cruise ship lying on its side off the coast of Tuscany. Hmmm.

  The Costa Concordia struck a rock off the Isola del Giglio, ripping a hole in its hull. It then grounded itself as frantic passengers scrambled ashore.

  Within seconds, an email arrived from Vancouver, where they were just waking up on a Saturday morning: we needed to get to Italy ASAP. I took a breath and told Isabella.

  “Do what you have to do,” she said.

  A quick check of flights found one to Rome at 8:00 p.m., and another early the following morning.

  “Sunday, Sunday, Sunday,” urged my wife.

  Sunday it was, mainly because it would take time for Dan to get into the bureau to pack his gear.

  Isabella was remarkably calm, given that I had been back in London barely a week since the Ireland tri
p.

  “Well … at least it’s just Italy, not a war.”

  In an attempt to be a dutiful husband and father, I ran out to the grocer’s to stock up for my wife and daughter before abandoning them again.

  _______________

  * Just over a year after we did our story, the Irish taoiseach (prime minister) Enda Kenny stood in the Parliament, the Dáil, and said, “This is a national shame, for which I say again I am deeply sorry.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  With only a couple of hours sleep, we caught a flight that left Heathrow before dawn.

  The sun rose as the west coast of Italy came into sight. Dan, one seat ahead of me, said, “Look, you can see it.”

  Sure enough, down beneath some wispy clouds we could make out a white strip just beside the island of Giglio. As we learned later, you could actually see the Costa Concordia aground from space.

  Our first priority was to find survivors of the shipwreck, Canadian survivors preferably, and once we recorded their interviews, get on the road to the site of the accident. Conveniently, everyone was being temporarily housed at Rome’s Airport Hilton, so we did not have far to go after getting off the plane.

  Passengers were not hard to find. They were wandering around the front of the Hilton, many wearing hotel slippers and borrowed robes, carrying their few belongings in plastic laundry bags. TV cameras were already pointed at some of them.

  We asked everyone in sight if they were Canadian, with no luck. Every time we heard someone speaking English, they turned out to be American. We interviewed a Romanian man named Daniel, a merchant seaman by trade, who had some training in maritime safety.

  “All the staff on deck was terrible,” he told us, one of our first indications of how poorly the crew handled the disaster.

  A personable American couple from Washington, D.C., Jeannette and Tom, told us a horror story. They had hopped into a lifeboat, only to have it stuck, high above the water, tilting precariously as a crewman tried to figure out how to lower it.