by Des Bishop
As an adult, married with three sons, it would break my heart to see my boys leave so much food on their plates. I would look at them and remember how hungry I always was at their ages.
The contrast with then and when that love and safety were violated is so strong when you read what happened when his mother came to visit Ireland to take the children back to England:
My mother came to Midleton to take my sister back to England, but I stayed another couple of years as my grandmother was very upset that I would have to leave. While my mother was staying for a few days, I ran out of the house and leaped in the air as if I was catching a ball and hit my head on the door jamb. My mother told me to go up into my room because I was punished. All those years in Ireland no one ever hit me, but my mother came into the room and gave me an unmerciful beating with a blackthorn stick and all hell broke loose in the house. My grandmother desperately tried to stop my mother, but she was a like a madman with superhuman strength. For the first time in my life I was absolutely terrified of my mother. My uncles came in and dragged my mother away from me and I was black and blue all over my body. My uncles said it was ‘the ole fella [their father] all over again’. My mother left with my sister and peace and serenity came back into my life and I loved my wild, free childhood. My uncles would take me to Ballycotton and let me go where I wanted while they went to the pub. I always went up to the fields above the cliffs looking for wild mushrooms. I would whistle to myself and look out at the lighthouse without a care in the world.
The day inevitably came when my grandfather came to take my father home. His uncles did not want him to go, as he had become part of the family. My father definitely did not want to go as he feared the worst. He tried to hide in the woods under leaves, hoping the boat would leave without him, but his buddy Mickey Lee knew where he was and they found his hiding place. He had no choice but to go.
Things could not have got worse for my father. Sometimes I still find it hard to believe that some of those things happened to him. He returned to England with hardly any education, as his uncles never made him go to school. As a result, when he returned to Bexhill-on-Sea he was ridiculed in the school, unable to read and now with an Irish accent. Then he was sexually abused by a priest who taught in the Catholic primary school there:
My mother had her mind set on me becoming a priest and every day she would say to me, ‘Many are called but few are chosen.’ When Father Honan came into the classrooms looking for altar boys I was ecstatic that he had chosen me and my mother was over the moon with happiness as my mother went to Mass every morning and was a devout Catholic. After I became an altar boy, Father Honan took me down into the crypt and explained that I had to join his secret society. He took me into an old confessional box and asked me to drop my trousers and made the sign of the cross on my buttocks. I was to tell no one. As time progressed Father Honan would take me into his private room where he had grapes, which I had never tasted. He would give me grapes, take down my trousers and masturbate all over the cheeks of my buttocks. He made me hold his penis and other grotesque indecencies. When he was finished he would remind me that I was a member of the secret society and I could not tell anyone.
I knew nothing about the ‘birds and the bees’, but every time I left his private room I would have a sinking feeling; the only way to describe it was it was thick and heavy. Eventually one of the other altar boys told his parents what Father Honan was doing to him. His parents came to my father and my father asked me if he had done anything to me. I denied it at first, out of fear of my mother because she would never believe that a priest could do such a thing. My father kept on asking me to tell the truth and eventually I did tell him the truth about Father Honan and everything he did to me. The parents of the other altar boys were extremely angry and the parish sent Father Honan away. My mother stayed in complete denial.
As time went on, if anything went wrong, his mother would give him terrible beatings and he developed a fear of grown-up men because of what had happened with the priest. In school he was distant and vacant and worried constantly about what would go on when he got home. His teachers could not understand why he could not learn, but he was too scared to tell them about the terrible violence that was being inflicted on him. His troubles in school only increased the excuses she had in order to beat him.
When she learned that I was backward in school and had not caught up with the other kids sufficiently every day I would take a beating and be locked into the coal hole which was pitch black and in order to take away the fear of the darkness I would compose tunes by whistling until I was let out.
My sister did not get the beatings that I received but she was very much affected by it because she would crouch into a corner and cry uncontrollably because she loved me so much and she could not bear to see me getting hit all the time. When she wouldn’t stop crying for me my mother would grab her by the pigtails and drag her around the floor until she stopped crying.
The most disorientating thing was that as quickly as the violence came on, after half an hour his mother would hold him and cuddle him and tell him how much she loved him. When she would let him out of the coal hole, she would be all warm and friendly and joke with him that he looked like a chimney sweep. As the years went on and his mother’s violence escalated, my father just tried to manage things.
Over the years I learned never to enter the house without standing by the door and listening for her footsteps. If her footsteps were heavy I knew that the violence would happen as soon as I entered the house, so I would go away and stay in the fields imitating the birds with my whistling and wait until darkness and come back to the house and stand outside and listen for the softer footsteps, then I would go in because I knew she would be happy and joke around. I stayed out of the house as much as I could and I joined the athletic club and in the club I joined the gymnastic team, the boxing team and I spent hours and hours playing soccer. Anything to stay away from her.
Unfortunately the beatings intensified and she progressed into beating me with a solid brass triangular stair rod. The rod had very sharp edges and I would try to protect myself with my elbows. The stair rod was the most painful beating of all. Sometimes my father would come home from work where he had a job off the books for a building company and try to protect me, but the more he tried to protect me, the worse my mother got. In her rage there were times when she would grab a saucepan full of boiling water and throw it at him. He would tell me to run and I would run out of the house and go back up into the fields and listen to the birds and imitate them with my whistling.
My father was a very simple man and just had no idea how to control her. In her rages she had superhuman strength and she was impossible to reason with, just completely out of control. I often wondered why my father didn’t try to stop her more but then I would think that I was the reason why she was like she was. It was my fault that she went into these rages.
There was no respite. He suffered the indignity of failing all his entrance exams for secondary school and ended up in the class for children with learning disabilities, and even in that class he was at the bottom. The only positive thing in his life was that he excelled in all the sports he played. This was partly down to the talent he was born with and partly down to his dedication to training, motivated by his desire to do anything to stay away from the house. At the age of eleven he won the 440-yard and 880-yard races in the school championships and he played for the South of England against the North of England; he was a centre forward and his goal-scoring prowess kept him in good graces with the schoolmasters, which made up for his total inability to progress academically.
And then the day came when he discovered his secret was not so secret after all. He had come home from school and, as he had always done, he listened for the sound of her footsteps.
The footsteps were quiet, but I had miscalculated. She had no shoes on. I walked in and sat down in the kitchen and she flew i
nto one of her rages, went to the drawer and took out a carving knife. She started to slash me with the carving knife, I raised my arms to protect my face, the blood was all over my body and at that moment the front door flew open and two cruelty inspectors, two policemen and a nurse stormed into the house. Unknown to us the neighbours had made complaints and the inspectors and police were watching the house.
I remember the nurse wiping me down and bandaging my knife cuts. My mother was sitting in a chair, chain-smoking, just watching everything that was going on. My father walked in on all this. The cruelty inspectors asked me how the cuts happened and I told them that they happened while I was crawling through some barbed wire. My father realized that something had to be done, and whatever he said to the cruelty inspector, it ended up in my mother being immediately arrested.
My grandmother was refused bail and was held on remand in Holloway Prison until trial. My father was ordered to be taken to Dr Barnardo’s Home for boys while a suitable foster home was found. My father watched as his mother was escorted to prison.
I stood outside the courthouse waiting to be taken to Dr Barnardo’s and I watched my mother being brought out handcuffed and put in the Black Maria with prison bars on the windows. She had her face to the windows holding onto the bars and as she was being driven away tears were streaming down her eyes and she mimed the words to me, ‘I love you.’ It was the worst feeling I ever had in my entire life.
Three weeks later she pleaded guilty to charges of child cruelty and was sentenced to two years’ probation; she was committed to a mental hospital. Probation was on the condition that she go for treatment.
Local newspaper articles told the story of the years of abuse my father had had to endure. It was an awful thing to have everyone in Bexhill knowing what had happened. Of course the tragedy of it all is that my grandmother’s illness would now be treatable. The shame was too much for my grandfather to handle and he took off for London and stayed away for over a year.
For my grandmother it was worse. She was sent to Hellingly Mental Asylum and there she was diagnosed with what my aunt called ‘epilepsy of the brain’ – paranoid schizophrenia. My father may have been the victim of her horrific abuse, but she was the victim of the way they treated people as violent as her in the mental health system of the 1950s. They decided to give her a lobotomy. When my father told me the story I thought it was really weird that my grandmother had had a lobotomy. Up until then, all I knew about lobotomies was that it was the thing that made McMurphy completely dumb and docile at the end of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
My father claimed it was in the paper, so I found this in the Bexhill Observer from 30 August 1952.
That is more or less what my father told me when he first shared the story of his childhood with me. For some reason I had it in my head that the knife attack happened when he was about twelve, but checking things out for this book I’ve discovered he was fifteen. Not only do the records confirm everything he told me, but my Aunt Joan remembers it being just as bad as he said. She has very distinct memories of the day the police came to the house and arrested her mother. Hearing her talk about it was the first time I had heard the story of that day from another angle. It hit me hard because it confirmed that there was no dramatization in my dad’s version of the tale. She also recalls the trauma of the whole story coming out in public after the court case. She recalls the embarrassment of walking into her art class in school and one of the girls in the class screaming out that she was the girl from the story in the paper.
My father ended up with a family called the Wallaces, and Joan went to the Mitchells. She remembers horrible trips to the mental hospital in Hellingly and walking by all the padded cells to go and visit her mother with her father when he came back on the scene. My father also had vivid memories of those visits:
I became very depressed when I finally walked in to the ward that my mother was in. The only way they knew how to calm the patients down was with shock treatment and it seemed they gave my mother very high dosages. All the women in that ward had straight hair and they would shuffle around. They thought that the war was still on and the curtains must be drawn otherwise the Germans would see the light coming through the curtains and they would be bombed. That was the first time my mother said to me that I was a detective trying to poison her tea and she would continue to say that for years and years and years.
My grandfather drank his way through much of this whole ordeal. He disappeared for a while, but when he returned and my grandmother got out of hospital for a spell, there was an attempt to return to normal life. However, she quickly returned to the way she had been – one night she was found in the nearby village of Sidley, walking around in her nightdress, and she was returned to Hellingly – and the children went back into foster care. She spent seven years in Hellingly altogether. My grandparents lived together again after she got out of hospital and they stayed together until he died in 1976. She was in and out of institutions the entire time. Despite that, for much of that time they visited Ireland every September, and most of my relations were kept in the dark about the severity of what had happened.
Aunt Joan realized quite late in life that in fact her dad had been an alcoholic. When I reread my dad’s writings, following our conversation, for the first time I could see that he was aware of it too:
My dad and his dad in Bexhill in 1975, when I was on the way.
I realize now that my father was a very weak man and just could not help us, he didn’t know what to do so he always just ran from us and from trouble. He never faced what was going on, he just ran from it all. I did love my father but there was always that barrier in my mind of why he let what happened to me happen. I always thought that perhaps it was because he lost his father at Battle of the Somme in the First World War. I always just tried to make that as an excuse for his weakness.
I have since asked my mother, and she remembered that when my grandfather visited New York in 1976, a short time before he died, most days he went to the pub for a few drinks on his own. I get the impression he was a very gentle and lovable drunk, though, and never really fell out with anyone through drunkenness. My mother remembered that he made friends very quickly during his time in Queens. I know that it meant a lot to my dad that his father got to see me before he died. I don’t think they ever had any real resolution though.
14
There were a few parts of my dad’s story from his memoir that I found hard to make sense of. He wrote about a time when he was a bit lost and living in London with criminals and alcoholics. But this didn’t seem to fit his timeline; he seemed to be suggesting that he ran away from the foster home at the age of sixteen and went to London. From Joan I now know that this period in his life was much later, actually in his twenties, after he got out of the hospital after hurting his back.
Joan lost contact with my father after he got out of the hospital, and it took her a while to track him down to London. When she went to see him, he was quite down and out, heavily alcoholic and living in squalid conditions. This was before he had begun modelling. She credits a man called Roy for saving him because he got him into modelling. From what she saw in London when she visited him, she is convinced that without Roy’s intervention my dad would have been lost forever.
The stories my dad wrote about his early years in London are very confusing. It is my belief that his account here is a combination of how he joined the army and his time in London. I don’t think he was in London between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, because that was when he joined the Sussex Regiment, his local regiment, to do his National Service:
After I would pay my foster parents for my keep, I managed to save a few pounds for myself. One afternoon I finished work earlier than usual and walked in on a conversation that my foster mother was having with a group of her friends. They never heard me coming because I walked very silently, a habit I got into so that my mother would not h
ear me coming home. She was telling them that I was eating too much peanut butter from the jar and that her husband Bert was extremely cross with me. I crept up to my room, packed a small suitcase, shimmied down the drainpipe and boarded a train to London and found my way to the steps of the Chelsea Town Hall in the King’s Road. For two nights I slept on the park benches in the King’s Road. At night there was always a bunch of teenagers sitting on the steps, and from there they would go into the snooker halls. I followed them in one night and struck up a conversation with a boy called Jimmy Keane, whose mother was Irish. He knew I had nowhere to stay so he took me home to his mother and I stayed a few nights. She was very kind to me. I walked around the building sites in Kensington where a lot of demolition was going on. I lied about my age and got a job wheeling barrowloads of rubble into lorries. Finally, I found a room in Putney, sharing it with a fellow two years older than me called Sean Brady, who was also a labourer on the construction sites and was from Dublin.
Brady was a very heavy drinker and by Monday morning he would be flat broke. He would get a sub from the foreman till his next paycheck on Thursday. I would go off to the pubs with Brady and I used to drink, hoping that I could hold my beer like Brady could. We always went to pubs where there was a piano player and a singer. One night I jumped up to the microphone. In those days there was a very popular artist by the name of Ronnie Ronalde who used to whistle ‘In a Monastery Garden’. The piano player would ripple through the chords, and Ronalde would imitate bird sounds. I used to do a very good impersonation of him.
