All of These People: A Memoir. Fergal Keane

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       CHAPTER TWO Homeland

       Many young men of twenty said goodbye. On that long day, From the break of dawn until the sun was high Many young men of twenty said goodbye.

      ‘Many Young Men Of Twenty’, JOHN B. KEANE

      I had come back to Ireland with my parents in 1961, as thousands of their fellow countrymen were heading the other way. Our people clogged the mail boats to Holyhead with their cardboard suitcases and promises of jobs on the building sites. Éamonn and Maura lived in a succession of flats and boarding houses. They had little money. My father had acting work but if he started drinking there was no money. There were days of plenty and days of nothing. By now my mother was pregnant again. Two more children would follow in the next two years. Saving money for a deposit on a house was out of the question. Eventually they were given a house by the Dublin Corporation in one of the vast new council estates being built to the west of the city, in Finglas. In those days the tenements of inner-city Dublin were being cleared and the residents moved to vast new housing estates on the fringes of the city. One nineteenth-century writer described Finglas as a village where ‘the blue haze of smoke from its cottages softened the dark background of the trees’. But by the time we arrived there there were no cottages or trees. The green fields had been turned into avenue upon avenue of concrete.

      In keeping with the nationalist ethos of the Republic many of the streets on the new estates were named after heroes of rebellions against the British. Go onto any council estate in Ireland and you will find streets named after guerrilla leaders. My parents were given the keys to a two-bedroom terraced house on Casement Green, named after Sir Roger Casement.

      Éamonn and Maura would have stood out among the residents of Finglas. They were neither Dubliners nor working class. Both were well educated. Most of those they lived among had grown up on the hard streets of the inner city and left school at an early age to find work. It was said then of Finglas, and not quite jokingly, that it was so tough even the Alsatians walked around in pairs.

      Our next-door neighbour was Breda Thunder. At dinner time her house smelled of boiled bacon ribs and cabbage, and chips with salt and vinegar. Breda was a handsome woman with auburn hair and laughing eyes – a native Dubliner, from Charlemont Street near the Grand Canal. Her husband Liam was a thin and wiry redhead and came from Rathmines on the other side of the canal. Breda and Liam arrived on the estate a few weeks after my parents. Years later Breda told me: ‘The first time I saw you, you were standing on your own in the garden near our fence, a lovely little boy with blond hair, just standing there and smiling. That’s how I’ll always see you.’

      I loved her because she seemed so fearless. You felt safe around Breda. She was the first person I knew who showed no fear when my father was drunk. Breda had grown up in tenement Dublin, on some of the toughest streets in Europe, in an atmosphere where women learned early how to deal with men who drank, and where the only dependable wage for many was the ‘shilling a day’ earned in the service of the British military. Her own father, Jamesy Harris, had served in both world wars, and her grandfather fought in the Boer War. Breda had a good soldier’s courage.

      Breda and Liam had five boys and had fostered a girl – the daughter of Liam’s brother Paddy who had been killed serving with the Irish Guards in Aden. Her sons were my first playmates. They were boisterous and noisy and loyal. The neighbourhood bullies knew to give the Thunder boys a wide berth. Pick on a Thunder or on any of their friends, and you had the whole clan to deal with. Once, a young policeman collared Breda’s second youngest son, Sean, for cycling on the pavement outside her house. The child was about five, and quite obviously too young to head out onto the open road. Breda looked out the window and saw the very tall policeman haranguing her child. Seconds later she was bearing down on him:

      ‘Where are you from?’ she demanded.

      He replied that he came from County Mayo.

      This triggered an automatic resentment in Breda’s heart. She was a proud Dubliner, convinced that the city had no equal anywhere in the world and believing that visitors to the city owed a debt of respect to the natives. Any public official from County Mayo or any of the remoter rural areas would initially have been regarded with suspicion by Breda and her neighbours. Only after proving themselves as decent souls would they be welcomed. To have a culchie – a country person – even if he was a policeman, tell her son he couldn’t cycle on Dublin concrete was an appalling insult.

      ‘Well, fuck off back there, you big ignorant gobshite! This is my town and I won’t have some culchie in size twelve boots frightening my child.’

      The policeman departed soon after, followed by a hail of abuse.

      Breda’s was a house of relentless noise, a great deal of which was laughter. One of her daily trials was raising her sons from their beds and hunting them out to school. None of them liked the Christian Brothers School in Finglas; all waited for the day when they could quit and go to work, and each morning there was the same vaudeville: Breda would stand at the bottom of the stairs and roar at her sleeping boys above. When this failed to rouse them she would run upstairs and shake them out of bed. She would then go back downstairs to prepare the breakfast and school lunches. The boys merely continued to sleep where they had fallen, or crept into another bed.

      I have fragmented memories of that time. I remember walking with Breda to the shops on a misty morning in winter and seeing the horses of travellers grazing on the green, the owners camped nearby under plastic sheeting and their red-haired children running out to look at us. We called them ‘the tinkers’. My father said they lost their land when Cromwell drove the Irish into Connaught.

      There were other mornings, standing in the hallway of Breda’s house, when her husband Liam would stop by with a trayful of cakes from the bakery where he worked. ‘Pick any one you want,’ he would say. There were sugary doughnuts, chocolate éclairs, custard slices and thick wedges of dark cake called ‘Donkey’s Gur’. The back of Liam’s van smelled of warm bread: turnover and batch loaves, fresh from the baker in Cabra. As he drove away other kids would run after the van. ‘Mr Breadman. Mr Breadman. Gi’s a cake, will ya.’ And I remember Breda’s happiness on a weekend night, when the work of feeding and cleaning was done, and she would sit in the small front room and tell stories about her father fighting the Nazis, before switching into song: The Roses are Blooming in Picardy…

      My mother told me stories about our neighbours.

      Near to the shops lived a family I will call the Murphys. Joe worked in a factory and Mary cleaned offices in the city. Such work involved leaving home every morning shortly after six and rushing home in the late afternoon in time to make dinner for the family. Mary spent her life on her knees, polishing the long floors of the Royal College of Surgeons for pitiful wages. In Mary’s case, cooking was a problem. She was a devoted mother but her ignorance of all but the basic rudiments of cooking shocked Breda. There was much resort to tins and packets in Mary’s house. So Breda Thunder took it upon herself to teach Mary how to prepare roast chicken and potatoes for Sunday lunch.

      The following Monday, Mary knocked on Breda’s door. The chicken and spuds had been a triumph. Mary described in detail how the chicken had been divided: