Blood-Dark Track (14 page)

Driving, I said nothing. ‘As I started to succeed at hurling, things improved,’ my father continued. ‘When I reached around seventeen or eighteen years of age, his invincibility crumbled. I lost my fear of him. Years later, I came back to Ireland as a married man and I took him out for a drink. “There are some things I’d like to clear up,” I said, and I asked him why he’d behaved in the way he had. He said things like, “You’ve got to be cruel to be kind.” I said to him, “Everything you did in your life, I swear I’ll do the opposite.” And that’s how it has turned out. His intolerance, his failure to explain anything – they’ve acted as spurs for me.’ We sat for a little while in silence, travelling in rain. Then my father said – and here his ambivalence about Jim, whose name he gave to my younger brother, surfaced – ‘You know, having said all that, if he walked through the door today I’d be very comfortable with him. I’d have no problem having a beer and a chat. And if he hadn’t been my father, I’m sure I’d have liked and respected him as a friend. There was a lot about him that was admirable.’ My father examined his hands. ‘There came a point when I started going back to him; when I realized that he needed my help. Keep in mind that opportunities were very limited, Joe. Ireland in those days was a different world, you wouldn’t believe how narrow and bleak things were. Yet, in spite of it all, he managed to bring up a family of ten kids. It wasn’t perfect – we’d have to borrow schoolbooks and look over classmates’ shoulders – but the way he provided for us was a great achievement. He was a relentless worker,’ my father said. ‘He worked for us night and day.’

Jim O’Neill’s children were unanimous about this: their father was an unstinting provider. ‘He didn’t deny us one brown ha’penny,’ Jim Junior said. But the responsibility of doing well by his family – the responsibility, as uncle Jim put it, of having to go to every extreme to earn a shilling – incarcerated my grandfather: he never really felt free to rest. Aunt Marian said, ‘He looked on life as a chore; I don’t know if he ever really enjoyed himself.’ Even whist drives had to be taken very seriously as earning opportunities. A good player, Jim would often win a Christmas turkey and
sometimes pick up as much as £10. But more subtly dispiriting than his economic entrapment was the question of his social status. It gnawed at Jim O’Neill that he did not own his home – he, a farmer’s son. He felt, in his heart, that it was beneath him to live in a corporation house, amongst people who lived in corporation housing. He was a territorial man. Tradesmen – the breadman, the milkman – would not be allowed past the threshold: ‘These people’s place is at the door,’ he would say. When a neighbour, Mrs O’Sullivan, put up clothes to dry on the rail of the fence that divided her front garden from that of the O’Neills, my grandfather stormed over, knocked at her door and said in his abrupt way, ‘Mrs O’Sullivan, I want you to remove those clothes off the railing.’ ‘Why?’ ‘They’re unsightly.’ ‘The railing is as much mine as it is yours,’ Mrs O’Sullivan pointed out. ‘Well,’ my grandfather said, flushing, ‘would you please hang your clothes on your side of the railing, then.’

The O’Neills – which is to say, Grandma and four boys – only moved into corporation housing because with Jim interned they couldn’t afford the rent at 39 Friars Road, Turner’s Cross. Their first corporation house was at Mount Nebo Avenue, in north Cork.

North Cork, the old, tilting half of the city built on the elevations north of the Lee, reveals itself in sudden, often deceptive vistas: banked cottages appear airborne, a colourful row of parked cars rears up a hillside like a Ferris wheel, and, looking down treeless Mount Nebo Avenue, a distant rural landscape looms mirage-like at the bottom of the road. Mount Nebo Avenue forms part of a large housing estate built in Gurranabrahan in the ’twenties and ’thirties. Gurranabrahan (the Brothers’ Walk) is sometimes called the Red City after the red sprawl made by its tiled roofs when viewed from a distance; but red is not the dominant colour once you’re inside Gurranabrahan – grey is. The houses are grey, as are the pavements, the roads, the lamp-posts and the walls. Even other colours (brown, cream, umber) are grey versions of themselves. Still, the seventy-year-old neighbourhood – encapsulated for me in the spectacle of dishevelled, rained-on schoolboys trudging uphill beneath cables drooping from telegraph poles – has an old-fashioned communal
appeal. The streets are kept clean and the houses, their front gardens featuring stout palm trees, topiarized hedges and well-tended shrubs, are shipshape. The former O’Neill residence at Mount Nebo is not atypical. Part of a terrace of houses, the front door is reached by walking up some cement steps and then a few feet of pathway. A low hedge grows tidily around the garden’s perimeter railings. There are two storeys and three bedrooms. The frontage is covered in that familiar, rough, grey-brown pebbledash. Window and door trims are painted white. Patterned net curtains hang in the windows. All in all, the building looks well.

At Mount Nebo, the children went to primary school in Strawberry Hill and Sunday’s Well, and to secondary school at North Monastery. They played Gaelic games at St Vincent’s GAA Club and worshipped with their parents at St Vincent’s Church. My grandfather had a nearby plot of corporation land, on which he grew vegetables. In 1953, the family left Gurranabrahan and moved into 22 Churchfield Terrace East, a three-bedroomed corporation house in a newer estate in nearby Churchfield. The Churchfield house had a parking-space for one car and a passage leading directly from the front to the back garden, where there was a shed. There was a downstairs bedroom (for the parents), a living room at the back, and two bedrooms upstairs. The five eldest boys shared two double beds, with the youngest of them, Terry, squeezed contentedly between two of his brothers. The young girls (Ann and Angela) shared the other bedroom with little Declan; and in due course baby Marian joined them. In the loft, accessible through a ceiling hatch, my grandfather removed bricks in the party wall so as to create an emergency getaway tunnel into the Twomeys’ house, where a further breach in the brickwork created a further secret exit to the Sutton place. The escape route was never used.

These days, the O’Neill house is occupied by Mary O’Sullivan. Now in her late fifties, she grew up next door with her nine siblings (and, she told me angrily when I called on her, her mother had five miscarriages). ‘The O’Neills were a fabulous crowd,’ she said. ‘If we didn’t have butter, the O’Neills had it; if there was no milk, the O’Neills had it. At night we’d hear the door closing and my mother
would say, “There he goes, we’ll have a few bob tomorrow.” ’ Mary’s words for Jim were ‘hard-working, good-looking, hunky, and cranky.’ ‘He was short with you, kind of dominating,’ she said. ‘If he was home before Mrs O’Neill, he’d come round and snap, “Where are the children?” “Mr O’Neill, they’ve had their bread and butter,” my mother would say. He’d say, “That’s not enough.” ’ Another neighbour, Rita Twomey – like Mary, still in Churchfield Terrace after forty years – chipped in and said that Mr O’Neill was very strict: ‘You’d have to duck.’ ‘Mrs O’Neill was marvellous,’ Rita said. ‘She never missed a day of washing the floor of the hall and kitchen.’ Rita and Mary said that Mrs O’Neill had her own mind but she did everything that Mr O’Neill said. ‘Things like that were different in those days.’ Mary O’Sullivan said, ‘He wasn’t one to do any painting or washing. He might do the gardening.’

The escape hatch at Churchfield Terrace

Gardening, in this context, meant the cultivation of vegetables. Jim grew potatoes, onions, lettuce, rhubarb, beetroot and cabbage, and enjoyed it. Another pleasure was his greyhound, Cora, who occupied a luxurious kennel equipped with a raised, straw-covered timber bed, and who was treated (uncle Terry said) like a princess.
He tried to breed pups from Cora, but they died of distemper. On Sundays, Cora would be taken harecoursing, and my grandfather, surrounded by the ranges of West Cork, would be happy. He also became very involved with St Vincent’s Gaelic games club and was on a steering committee for fund-raising. My grandfather took great pleasure in watching his boys play. He would run along the touch-line urgently declaring, ‘That’s my son! That’s my son!’

The children’s memories of their North Cork days were of pleasant, impecunious, rough and tumble times: of riding and falling off a box-cart shooting down the hill at Mount Nebo; of getting it in the neck for tearing holes in precious jackets and taking heels off shoes; of horses straying into gardens; of neighbours treating other people’s children as a social resource, pressing them into errands (shopping, minding prams, looking after youngsters) and even, if necessary, clipping them across the ear; of near-misses with eviction (one time my grandmother’s brother Tadhg cleared the rent arrears just as the furniture was being put out into Mount Nebo Avenue); of Terry getting into a fight with Jackie Buckley, and Mrs Buckley grabbing her son by the collar, saying, ‘Come in, there’s an army of them.’

22 Churchfield Terrace East

In Churchfield, as in Mount Nebo, everybody knew everybody, and my uncle Terry could still name the people who lived on the street – the Wisemans, Coghlans, McCarthys, Dennehys, Mrs Conch, the O’Learys, McGraths, O’Connells, O’Donovans, Linehans, Drummonds, Nations. The O’Neills nearly always had a car, starting with a second-hand Hillman 1946. The cars were mostly Hillmans because Jim Junior got a job as a Hillman agent and would see a bargain coming in. My grandfather had a functional, unsentimental approach to any vehicle he owned. He would taxi men to work for a fee, transport salmon, and use the car as an ambulance or hearse for neighbours. Except for the Sweeneys, the O’Neills were the only car-owners in the neighbourhood. The family stood out in another respect: at Easter, theirs was the only house in Churchfield with a tricolour flying out of the window. On Easter Sunday all O’Neills wore an Easter lily (‘Whether we liked it or not,’ said my aunt Ann) and marched from the Grand Parade to the republican plot in St Fintan’s cemetery. At the cemetery a volley of shots would be fired by men wearing green fatigues, Sam Browne belts, and hats with one side of the brim fastened up.

‘Republican politics was the boys’ domain,’ Ann and Marian remembered. ‘Dad never really engaged in any proper discussion with Mum about politics. They were in it together, and that was that. If he hadn’t been so headstrong he would have appreciated how supportive she was of him. Mum should have been a politician. She was the most fantastic housekeeper, mother, cook, all-round manager, and diplomat. She’d be the calming force, and he the one to blow up over things.’

Sometimes explosions were caused by my grandfather’s jealousy. One day he stopped the car to talk to Jimmy MacDonagh. Jimmy MacDonagh had a soft voice and, leaning into the car, he said to my grandmother, who was all made up, ‘Eileen, you’re blooming.’ Jim drove away in a rage and there was a flaming row. And if Grandma went into town she’d be cross-examined: ‘Where did you go? Who did you meet?’

In truth, my grandfather never had a jot of a cause to be jealous; and neither, for that matter, had my grandmother, although I’d
heard her gently teased about Pat Buckley, the landlady of Jim’s favourite bar in Shandon. When I mentioned Jim O’Neill to Pat Buckley – a lively, attractive woman in her sixties – she had trouble placing the name, but once she’d called him to mind she remembered my grandfather clearly. ‘He was a lovely man to speak to,’ Pat Buckley said, pouring me a complimentary pint of my grandfather’s drink, which she remembered was Guinness. ‘He was very sincere. He was a hard worker, supposed to be fantastic at his job. The first time he was ever here was with Dinny Kelleher, who came with him here many times. Jim O’Neill asked for two pints and put his hand in his pocket. “I have no money,” says he. “Don’t worry,” says I, and gave him a fiver. He had an honest face, and I knew he was genuine by his eyes. He had beautiful eyebrows, like you do. From that day on he always came here. He normally wouldn’t drink during the week – he didn’t drink much, he couldn’t afford to. He was an interesting man and would speak about current affairs; he’d have opinions on things. He never mentioned his own political activities. Often he’d meet his brother-in-law Jack Lynch,’ Pat Buckley said, ‘and I heard his wife was lovely. I met her two years ago, at a funeral. He always drank here,’ Pat Buckley said, patting the bar where I stood. ‘He was not a lounge person. They weren’t lounge people,’ she said.