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The Veritas Years.

A Narrative By John Ruth.

“Imagine there’s no Heaven,
It’s easy if you try,
No Hell below us,
Above us only sky”.

John Lennon (Imagine)

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Copyright © 2017 John Ruth

Publisher: tredition, Hamburg, Germany

ISBN

Paperback:978-3-7439-4124-3
Hardcover:978-3-7439-4121-2
eBook:978-3-7323-8985-8

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Eternal thanks to Mum and Dad for all of their love and best intentions.

To Brenda and Liam who shared so much of the journey with me.

To all the Ponsbourne boarders who shared the journey with us

You have all made this book possible.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

We arrive in England, goodbye U.S.A. It's a long, long way to Tipperary

Chapter 2 Ponsbourne Park.

The early days and a little bit of Tudor and modern history.

Chapter 3

Aloysius introduces herself. Where are my mother and father? A little touch of kindness. Let the lessons begin.

Chapter 4

Rude Awakenings. Ignorance is bliss. A left-handed Devil and dirty socks and underwear.

Chapter 5

Charges, eating disorders, bullies to bait and wheeling dealing

Chapter 6

The Dormitories. Slipper fights. A boy on a cold glass roof and a fight to remember.

Chapter 7

Running away, My big dilemma and the cruellest of consequences.

Chapter 8

Confession. Holy communion. How religion works and A very special gift.

Chapter 9

Scrounging. A Load of frozen Rubbish and the Kennedy Intercession

Chapter 10

Wet beds, a good hard slap on the back, The Marx Brothers and a set of flying teeth

Chapter 11

Ben Hur. A good hiding for all. The Beatles. A great big freeze-up and several new bumps and fads

Chapter 12

Drama-on and off the stage and Simon takes a Nicky laxative.

Chapter 13

Let there be light. A very sick cow. Good vibrations and a visit to the school infirmary

Chapter 14

School holidays. Lost in London. The paint incident and a barrel full of trouble.

Chapter 15

My Move to the senior Dorm and a bad dose of Mumps

Chapter 16

My Great escape. Anarchy in the classroom, the return of Aloysius and another fight to remember.

Chapter 17

The 11 Plus. A new head boy, Mr Whitton and a slightly sexual encounter

Chapter 18

Some Midnight Rambling. Ambrose Departs. A Final Reckoning, and Goodbye to all that

Prologue

1954 was an uneventful year in the town of Letterkenny, County Donegal in the North West of Ireland. Even by world news values, nothing of any great note or news value actually happened in that post-war year in Ireland. It is therefore very difficult to associate great happenings with the year of my birth unless we look further afield to the wider world.

Some of the worldwide events that did happen in 1954 were of little relevance to our own quiet existence at that moment in time, but these events would certainly play a larger role in our later lives and influences, and would pave the way for our later journeys and experiences of life away from the Emerald Isle.

In the United States at that time, Hollywood actress and ‘Sex Goddess’ Marilyn Monroe was married to American baseball hero Joe DiMaggio. The very first nuclear-powered submarine was launched. Food rationing had just ended in post-war England, and Burger King opened its first outlet in Miami Florida. Elsewhere, North Vietnam was overrun by the South Vietnamese and the new Boeing 707 Jet airliner was making its maiden flight.

Of course, none of these events were to influence my life in any big way, and my innocuous existence would certainly make no big contribution to world events either then or in the future. No famous people shared my birthday, and that was okay with me as I would never want anyone stealing my own little bit of thunder, if I was ever to possess some in the first place. The most boring day in history also occurred sometime in 1954, when newsmongers around the world struggled to find anything of interest to report. In short this was a pretty non-descript year for anyone to be born into.

Apart from all that, 1954 saw the birth of the Rock n Roll years with ‘Bill Hailey and the Comets’ releasing ‘Rock around the Clock’. A young unknown singer named Elvis Presley was also starting to build a career for himself, and what was to follow became the ‘stuff of legends’. This was an era of change, the war was behind us and the world was awakening to a new age of enlightenment. The baby boom was in its early years and I was to be a product of that. I was not destined to be famous or infamous. I was not going to be making a great impact of my own, or changing the world in any great way. I was however, about to embark on a life’s adventure that would ensure a lust for knowledge, a suspicion of authority, and a mischievous irreverence that even to the present day, has occasionally surprised or shocked the people around me. Someone once said that “the boy is father of the man” and it has taken me most of my life to make sense of this revelation. Indeed I now have no doubt that the influences and experiences that we are exposed to in our very young days certainly do shape and colour our future experiences and make us into the people we become. The person that I was to become was certainly not being shaped in my native Ireland, as any cultural development would take place across the Irish Sea in England. London would feature very large in my future, as would the rural back drop of Hertfordshire. England would give me a lot of opportunity and a lot of varied career paths, but most importantly, it would provide me with the ability, opportunity and stamina to change career directions almost as much as I changed my underwear.

We were living in a small housing estate called Mc Mahon Villas, but I don’t believe that my birth heralded many celebrations on that cold January morning within our humble household. I arrived at a time when my mother and father were facing real personal and financial difficulties. These difficulties were compounded by a later pregnancy which produced a ‘stillborn’ child who my parents had named Brendan. Severe post-natal depression followed, and resulted in protracted hospitalisations for my mother. All of this was to take its toll on our family and, under advice from our family doctor, an old chap named Mc Ginley, we would soon be emigrating from our native shores in search of a brighter and, hopefully, happier future.

My father’s hardware business had boomed during the war years; he, and his brother Patrick, had enjoyed great commercial success as they travelled the length and breadth of Ireland plying their trade. So successful was their business that they also traded with Northern Ireland and exchanged steel and iron with the British Government for allocations of aluminium which was fabricated into various household goods and exported abroad. Their bonded van would cross the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland several times a month and the profits of their labour were reinvested in the business of Ruth Brothers. Unfortunately the post-war years saw the economy of Ireland stagnate and my father’s business went slowly downhill to a point where it could not sustain itself any longer. This was exacerbated by a few inter-family disputes between the partners in the business which were never resolved.

Our family of five was in crisis and the only choice for survival was emigration to another country. My father had very little choice in the decision to emigrate and while he, at that time, described us as migrants, we would, today, be better described as ‘economic migrants’, the term now given to such things. The truth was that in the late 1950’s we were just another group of Irish immigrants seeking, not necessarily fame, but certainly a little fortune in another country. It had always been a sad part of Irish existence that most of its young people would emigrate; in fact, it was said in ‘jocular’ circles that “the reason the grass was greener in Ireland, was because we were all abroad walking on someone else’s”.

Ireland’s population had dwindled to less than four million, which had a massive influence on emigration, especially when you consider that prior to the famine of 1800’s it had possessed a population of over six million. A nationwide potato blight wiped out most of the crop which was the staple diet of the Irish people at that time, and any of the crop that had survived the blight was sent by the British overseers back home to England. Inevitably, starvation, poverty and a few pyromaniac landlords drove the Irish population away from their native land, with many of them ending up in America. Many of these perished on the long sea journey across the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean, but those who survived, became the building block of, what is now, the most powerful country on the planet. The population of Ireland has never recovered to its previous numbers, even up to the present day, and one wonders how differently Ireland may have fared had it retained its larger population moving into the twentieth century.

John James Marion Ruth entered this world on the 26th of January in that year of 1954, there are no photographs of either my arrival or my christening, so I can’t even lay claim to being a beautiful baby. My mother assures me that I was a beautiful baby, and that up until the age of three or four, I possessed a head of golden curls which all around me admired. For some obscure or unknown reason, my parents must not have possessed a camera at the time, although, I have pretty vivid memories of my father wielding a box brownie on various occasions since then. The same lack of photographs also applies to my brother, there is not one snap of either of us until the age of about five, we jokingly, claim to have been so ugly that my parents didn’t want pictures of us around the house, and mum would put a string of sausages around our necks so, at least, the neighbourhood cats and dogs would come and play with us. My brother was quite a poorly child having been born with some kind of vitamin deficiency, and while he enjoyed a fair deal of bad health, he also nurtured a habit of sticking knitting needles into electrical sockets for reasons best known to himself.

Needless to say even at that young age, I never made a habit of holding his hand while he was engaged in such activities.

The other strange thing that I can find to complain about in retrospect, is the fact that my chosen names were never used, and I inherited and answered to the name Seamus. This is not unusual for children born in Ireland – parents christen you with names derived from past relatives or grandparents, and then end up calling you something completely different. I have always wondered at this strange phenomenon which seemed to occur a lot on Erin’s Isle, but it can be ‘hellishly’ difficult later on in life, when teachers, doctors and other officials require an explanation for the non-use of your given name. My names were going to cause me just a few minor problems in my future life for that very reason.

The addition of Marion was an even more unusual choice of name to give to a boy child, but it was given to me anyway. The explanation for this was that the Vatican under the leadership of Pope Pius the 12th allocated 1954 as a year devoted to the worship of the Virgin Mary. As the first child born to our Roman Catholic family in our town in 1954, it was thought appropriate that I should have the name Marion added to my christening names. This was always a cause of consternation to me, especially as I already possessed a female surname. I felt much better, when in later years, my father advised me that the other person that shared the name Marion with me was a famous Hollywood actor named John Wayne; The subject of my name was also to be taken up by a distant aunt of ours, named Essie, who was living in Phoenix Arizona at the time. She wrote an article in a Phoenix newspaper explaining the origins of her most recent nephew’s chosen name, and we always joked in later years, that I was already enjoying my fifteen minutes of fame in the United States. In fact, this same aunt, was later sponsoring all of our family to go and live in the United States, and plans were already well advanced in this venture.

When Johnny Cash penned his famous song “A boy named Sue” he was blissfully unaware that the song applied equally to me and my brother, we became known as “two boys named Ruth”. We were to receive plenty of ‘stick’ about our surname in years to come, and many a playground brawl would result in the possession of the name Ruth and its female connection. They say that ‘whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger’, and I think we have proved this theory to be quite correct over a few decades now. The nickname ‘Ruthie’ was quickly applied to me, and I have carried that ‘tag’ right up until the present day. It has always been a talking point wherever I have travelled or interacted with people, and it has also been the cause of just the odd derogatory remark, when less tactful people have impinged or remarked unkindly about my two feminine given names. My attitude on all of these occasions was ‘bollocks’ to them!

I know nothing much about the day I was born, except that the weather was cold and my Mum was very ill. We lived in our grey-rendered semi-detached house in the town of Letterkenny, county Donegal. The house had 3 large steps leading up to the front garden, and I recall some very tall conifer trees that were fun to both climb and hide in. The importance of the three large steps in the front garden became clear on my second Christmas on this earth when my Mother and Father purchased two second-hand tricycles for my brother and me and placed them under the Christmas tree. I recall the smell of fresh paint emanating from these two cycles, evidence of the loving care that my father had taken in their restoration. When we discovered them on Christmas morning, we were elated and excited beyond measure. My Mother had saved her money over the preceding weeks and months, and I have no doubt that her labours were well rewarded by the excitement of two small boys waking up to their presents on that joyous Christmas morning.

One of the big problems with using my first tricycle was those three big steps leading from the front garden on to the pavement below. As a mere toddler, they seemed like a massive hurdle in being able to reach the pavement, they might as well have been the edge of a cliff. I realised that the only way for me and my tricycle to reach the pavement was to ‘tumble’ it down the steps, and this was the ‘modus operandi’ that I employed on every occasion thereafter. Needless to say, my new bike didn’t remain new for very long. Its shiny, bright paintwork would soon show the scars of several somersaults down the front steps and on just a few occasions I managed to accompany it on its way. I, nevertheless, spent many happy hours riding up and down the street at the front of our house on that special little tricycle, at least, that is, until it fell apart from all of the abuse.

As the fourth child of our family, I wasn’t exactly a new experience in childbirth for my mother, but her illness (presumed to be post-natal depression) was about to take her into a downward spiral of bad health that lasted for many months. She was eventually admitted to a mental institution for the treatment of this, then, common condition. She described, much later to me, how part of the treatment for this depression was electric shock treatment. This procedure was extremely painful and unpleasant for her as an electrode was applied to her head, and a large dose of electric current was passed into the brain. Today it is hard to imagine such barbaric and drastic treatment being administered to someone suffering from depression, but back in the 1950’s it was a common treatment for such illnesses. As a result of my Mother’s illness, part of my early nurturing was taken up by a maid that my parents had employed, her name was Mabel. Mabel made no great impact in my life at the time, and the only reference to her presence in the household was a little rhyme that we would recite to her, it went something like this: ‘Mabel, Mabel, set the table’.

It is thought my mother’s illness may in some way have affected the bonding process between her and I, but I can see no difference in my interaction with my mother when compared to my other three siblings, although in later life, I seemed to be the one that was always in trouble. My father claims that I was self-reared, that I only ever cried when I was hungry, and that he could sling a bottle in my direction and I would manoeuvre it on to the flat of my feet with my legs raised in the air, somewhat like a performing chimpanzee, and feed myself in this manner. Fortunately, I do not remember any of this time, and as my infancy has not been recorded in any other medium, I just have to accept the stories from other people around me at that time.

January, I believe, is not a good time of year to be born anyway, especially in this hemisphere where the weather is always freezing, and money is always a bit short. Birthdays are largely ignored because of their close proximity to Christmas, and people have an annoying habit of combining your Christmas and birthday presents into one. As a baby born in these winter times, you tend to spend the first few months of your life trussed up like an oven-ready turkey in order to keep warm. I have no vivid recollection of my own childhood at that early juncture, but I recall that my elder brother had, as a result of his previously-mentioned ilness, been required to receive regular injections into his hip. Thankfully I was not required to take the same treatment, as I have always had a healthy fear of needles. He on the other hand seemed to have needles permanently included in his daily routines.

At one stage during my mother’s illness, my brother and I were sent to stay with an aunt, living not too far away on a farm in the little village of Glenties. We travelled there in a bread van, and the driver was a kind and funny individual whose mood was quickly changed when he found that on our arrival at Glenties, his two young charges had sucked the cream and icing off nearly every cake in his possession. We had also vandalised several loaves of bread, and anything else we could lay our hands on. I believe that money changed hands very rapidly upon our arrival, and the bread man was placated by my aunt Mamie who was not best pleased by her first experience of caring for two small boys. Life in Glenties was quite a lot of fun for both of us, as we raised havoc in every direction around the farmyard. Every morning I would pack up my little red suitcase and trundle down to the front gate of the farm, my Aunt would hurry after me enquiring where I thought I was going, “I’m off home to see me Ma” was the quick reply I would always give. Auntie Mamie would always talk me out of this with the offer of a treat, and for yet another day I was temporarily distracted from my purpose. The following morning would find me back down by the gate again, awaiting the arrival of the bread man. He never came. Perhaps he had remembered the little ‘bastards’ who had completely destroyed his stock on the journey from Letterkenny and decided that one experience of that kind was plenty for him.

We did eventually return home to Letterkenny, and all of the talk in our household at that time, was around our forthcoming emigration to the United States of America. Several visits to the American embassy in Dublin ensued, and, as previously mentioned, my father had been sponsored by his elder sister, Essie who was living in Arizona. We had all received medicals and inoculations for the trip, and our personal effects were being packed into tea chests for transportation across the Atlantic.

My early life in Donegal, was one of reasonable contentment and nothing of any great significance occurred during my early days on the planet. There were however, a couple of very serious incidents which were to threaten my existence in a very serious way. Both of these incidents occurred on the same beach known as Rathmullen. The first incident, as related by my mother was one which occurred while I was still crawling around on all fours. The whole family were spending a normal day at the beach, everyone was enjoying the warm weather, and a picnic was being spread out on the warm sand. They were all suddenly aware that I was missing from the family group, and the alarm was raised that a child was missing. No one had noticed my crawling away across the white sand and heading straight for the ocean. By the time the alarm was raised I was bobbing about in the waves about seventy yards from the shore and they could clearly see my golden curls as the current carried me gently out to sea in the general direction of America. Fortunately for me, my rescue was quickly and efficiently effected by a strong and very competent swimmer, who, after a great deal of effort to reach me, returned me safely to the beach.

On another occasion, and on the same beach, I was sleeping contentedly in the back seat of the car, and it was decided that I could be left there until I woke up. Nowadays, they always warn people about leaving kids and dogs shut up in the car on very warm days, as the outcome is often very tragic. For some reason, I was left in the car for a lot longer than planned, and by the time anyone had noticed, I had become very sunburnt and certainly dehydrated; it was kind of touch and go, and I was very ill as a result. I suppose I could be forgiven for thinking that given both of these incidents, my family were not exactly careful in the care of their youngest child, or is that just slight ‘paranoia’ on my part? I certainly wasn’t suffering from a lack of neglect, but maybe a little from a lack of attention.

It has taken a very long time to get around to sitting down and writing about my experiences as a young Irish immigrant to England. In fact 50 years have rushed by in a swirl of madness, mayhem and self-enlightenment, and these are probably the reasons that I had never thought to sit down and describe my life and times for others to share. I have just been too busy enjoying the things that I do, and making the mistakes that I have made along the way. I am fortunate that I am renowned for absolutely nothing, and this gives me the advantage of being judged by others merely for what they see and know about me. Fame, fortune and made-up reputations can easily distort the true image of a person.

Having spent, not a little of my life in the Newspaper and magazine industry, I am used to seeing my articles published. I have also watched as inconsiderate editors have spiked my writings and stories for their own ‘fiendish’ ends, or for the requirements of more space within a given publication. My ego, vanity and pride have all taken their fair share of big knocks during my varied careers, and I no longer bother to look back in either pride or anger at any of my accomplishments. I merely regard them as a disjointed group of jobs or careers that occurred during my search for my true forte or purpose. On further and deeper reflection, I realise that I am still seeking this particular grail. I hope I never find it, for I know that one has always got to have a goal to achieve, and the day I stop setting myself goals will be the day that I have finally tired of life.

I have never ever taken life very seriously, and this has earned me the sometimes undeserved reputation of being happy-go-lucky, self-indulgent and annoyingly outspoken. I can be highly-opinionated even on topics that I know very little about, and I am certainly no shrinking violet when it comes to a good argument or debate. Badges including ‘stubborn’, ‘self-centred’, ‘chauvinistic’, ‘head strong’ and ‘slightly outrageous’ have all been pinned to my lapel, and I willingly accept these labels without complaint, as I know that some, or most, of these analogies are, at times, perfectly true. I am often misunderstood in many of my motivations, because I always try to apply a nonchalant spin and happy-go-lucky tint to them, I would like to think however, that I also possess a sympathetic and understanding nature as well. These traits often manifest themselves in a more comical and light-hearted way. If, however, I feel that I am being impinged or undermined in any way, my ego and sense of outrage can sometimes result in a tirade of verbal abuse that given enough of it, would put the fear of God into anyone around me. I am not a nice person when such rare incidents occur. With stories and jokes alike, I have always tended to embellish, in order to make them more interesting to anyone who can be bothered to listen. In this rendering, and the fact that it is a written version of a true story, I am going to attempt to keep these embellishments to a minimum

I have written this account of my early years, to give an indication and snapshot of what life was like for, not only, a young Irish immigrant, but also, for a child experiencing the difficulties of settling into a new country and culture at the age of four or five. I want to share the experience of my becoming in later life the embodiment and product of the strict Catholic boarding school system as it existed in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Some of my unhappy or sad memories have been diminished and understated, many of them have been coloured by my ability to turn serious situations into laughter or comedy. I know that things were a lot worse than this because of the recollections of my elder sister and brother, who also experienced those same times and events in their own lives.

My elder brother and sister both look back in anger and disgust at the treatment we all received at the hands of what they are quite willing to describe as tyrants, bigots, and hypocrites. Our collective experiences of boarding school life, have always been tinged with an ability to colour the most serious situations with comical undertones, and to take the relentless ‘piss’ out of all of the players within them. I know that my brother carries anger and bitterness within him, that even to the present day fuels a rage that has not diminished with the passage of time. He feels that every achievement in his life was fuelled by a need to prove himself against the negative predictions that were made of his future abilities at the tender age of six or seven.

He has proved every one of their predictions wrong, by working extremely hard at achieving goals that they had unequivocally stated he never would. His achievement of these goals has given him the pleasure and ability to stick two fingers vertical at them, but, of course, many of them are no longer around to witness his climb to achievement. His own self-belief and past endeavours will have to provide the catharsis that he has searched for, for over half a century. In complete contrast to my brother's experiences, my elder Sister has literally forgotten most of what occurred to her during her boarding school years, perhaps because those times were so traumatic for her, that she has literally buried them somewhere in her deep sub-conscious. The mere fact that she has no memory of her time in either Ireland or later at boarding school, may also be an indication of times that she would prefer to forget.

I, for my part, take a different view of those days, perhaps because I was so much younger than my siblings. I do, however, share in the anger of my sister and brother, because I have seen the effect that those experiences have had on them both throughout their own lives. In many ways, their experiences are more valid than my own because I have managed to put a more light-hearted and positive spin on these happenings. Being the youngest of our family, I guess that I had more opportunity to adapt to the new situation that we all found ourselves in the late 1950’s. My memories of the time have not left me with the great regrets experienced by my siblings, but they have certainly influenced my trust in authority and my interaction with certain kinds of people. My experiences have carried me on a totally different journey from my brother and sister and have not affected me in the same way. They, however, continue to live with a regret that may never go away, and I can only begin to imagine how hard that must be for both of them to live with. On behalf of my brother and sister I would like to shout a big ‘Shame on you’ to all of the people who contributed to any of the misery in their young lives.

This account does not intend to be judgmental, nor does it seek some big retribution from either the characters or places involved. It is merely a narrative of events and happenings, and the incidents that influenced my personal actions and opinions as a result. It is certainly fair to say that we were not unique in these experiences, although school children and teachers of the present day would probably shrink in horror at the mere thought of any of these incidents happening in the politically correct and more liberal institutions that now exist. The dictum in those not so far off times was “children should be seen and not heard” and it was this that drove much of the misery into some of the lives of children growing up at that time. Here is an account of my own personal experiences, seen through the eyes of the immigrant schoolboy. All of the places and incidents are actual, but many of the names have been changed to avoid individual embarrasment and for legal expediency. Enjoy the read.

Chapter 1
We arrive in England, goodbye U.S.A. It's a long, long way to Tipperary

In 1959 there was a very long, hot summer in England, and in July there was a heat wave in London. Flying ants were crawling out of every pavement and the capital and suburbs sweltered in a mini tropical micro-climate. In that year, the Americans had put 2 monkeys into space, Fidel Castro became president of Cuba, and the Russians had crash landed a rocket on to the dark side of the moon. My family were arriving in the London heat for the very first time. We had sailed by boat from Dublin to Heysham in Liverpool, and then followed a long, tedious and smoky train journey that found us standing outside Kings Cross Station waiting for my father to come and meet us. My father had emigrated some ten months earlier from County Donegal in order to arrange ‘digs’ and schools in readiness for the arrival of the rest of his family. I had just turned five years old at the time and had been educated to a small degree for about 15 months in a couple of Irish convent schools. I could count up to twenty in Gaelic Irish, and had learned a few polite phrases in that language. I had also learned a few too many expletives as well, and these would manifest themselves, mainly when I was annoyed. I was annoyed quite a lot in those early days.

There were a lot of new experiences for this five year old boy to take in. London was a ‘shocking’ place to experience, for someone who had never seen a tall building before. The skyline was obliterated by these grey monstrosities, and the noise and pollution of traffic echoed around the walls and windows of this massive metropolis. People didn’t talk to each other like they had in Ireland, in fact, it seemed to me that they made a point of totally ignoring one another. On the tube trains, a whole carriage full of people would sit on top of each other in utter silence, save the rustle of their newspapers as they turned the pages in quiet reserve. This strange silence was almost deafening in an ironic kind of way, because it amplified the sound of the creaking train as it clacked across the joints in the railway lines. There was a mixture of strange odours permeating the whole railway carriage, hints of perfume mixed with perspiration and a strange ‘carbony’ odour which was generated by the electric current flowing from the live rail to the train itself.

One of the biggest shocks, that had me spellbound, was my first sight of a black person, which held my attention for a long, long time. I remember being entranced by this experience to the point of blurting out to my mum. ‘Ma look at the Blackie’. I still recall the highly shocked look on my mother’s face. I remember even more, the stinging pain, and feeling of shock as her large hand made contact with the back of my leg. I couldn’t possibly have realised that I had inadvertently created a great deal of embarrassment to both the coloured gentleman in question and of course, my mother, but I was certainly aware that the back of my leg was beginning to sting from the afore-mentioned wallop. My mother explained to the man that we were newly arrived from Ireland and that the ‘wains’ had a lot of adapting to do. He replied, “Don’t worry my dear, I am an immigrant myself, and I am also getting used to these strange faces in this very strange place.” I suppose I could have been described as a ‘mini racist’ by today’s standards. I was yet to find out that as well as the African and West Indian immigrants, the Irish were not exactly welcomed with open arms in the London of the 1950’s either.

After what seemed hours of travelling on the tube train and walking for miles, we arrived at a house in Neasden, North london, in which my father had previously rented a room. I remember him telling my mother that the Irish were not really welcome around London and he would often see flats and rooms ‘to let’ that specifically excluded Blacks, Irish and pets. Signs would be placed in windows stating “Room to let, No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.” Notwithstanding all of this, my father had found a good job in the glazing industry, and the local priest had found a good Catholic boarding school which would take his three children. The place that we had come to live was clearly far too small for our whole family, and the landlady, although Irish herself, was a bit of a tyrant to say the least. It’s strange how some people treat their own country folk so badly, and this landlady certainly treated us badly. She was one of the most miserable people I have ever experienced meeting, and her interaction with both my parents was evidence of a situation that would not endear us to her in any possible way. We had to be very quiet at all times, and this was certainly not easy for three children that liked to let off steam occasionally. We were confined to just one bedroom between all five of us, and we had the use of one small living room until bedtime came around.

Within a few weeks, my mother had found another house to share in Neasden which was owned by a war widow named Mrs. Carless. Her son worked in the same hospital as my mother, and he thought it would be a nice idea for his mum to have some company after living alone for some considerable time. Mrs. Carless was a lovely elderly lady who had lost her husband in the First World War and then tragically, another son in the Second World War. She was very good to my parents and very kind to us, and she allowed us to play in her large garden and loved to sit and watch us. It was quite a struggle for me to tune into the new accents and the new places, but I guess, kids adapt very quickly, and within a few days I was settling in nicely to this strange new world. Mrs. Carless had a real hand grenade that had been hollowed out and disarmed by her son on one of his home leaves, and I loved to play with it at every opportunity. I had become so attached to this grenade that it would be in my small hand from dawn until dusk, and I was thrilled to bits when Mrs. Carless made a permanent gift of it to me.

Although London was a very odd place to us, we were growing accustomed to many of the strange things that we had discovered, like the giant two decked trolley buses that trundled up and down the main roads. The volume of traffic seemed relentless, and people scurried about always in a hurry, it was a far cry from our green and quiet past. The London underground was an adventure, in spite of its tendency to overcrowd, and I loved to travel around London on the tube. London buses were another brand new experience to me and I had never ever sat on the top of a double decker before. I was also fascinated that the trolley buses had these giant arms stretching upwards to the double overhead cables. Often these arms would become dislodged and the conductor would deploy a giant hooked stick with which to re-connect the offending pole to its electrical supply. All these new surroundings reminded me of how far I had come from the quiet and simple existence of the Irish countryside. I certainly missed our old home and the uncomplicated way of life that we had previously experienced, and I was also reminded of how much I had to learn in this strange new world.

My sister and brother soon got to know the areas around our house, and they would take me on long walks during the day. We always had a small bag of sandwiches with us and we would spend a lot of our time in a large park called Gladstone. This park had an outdoor swimming pool and a very a big hill that ran down to the railway lines. We would sit for hours watching long trains trundling up and down the lines with so many carriages that the front of the train had all but disappeared while the rest of it was still passing by. These trains were like huge snakes, and seemed never-ending as they passed by us on their journey to who knows where. All of us struggled to comprehend these new experiences and surroundings; it was certainly a far cry from our temporary accommodation in Thurles, Tipperary, where we had spent the best part of a year, while daddy was saving the money to bring us over to England.

Living in a town like Thurles had been a complete accident and diversion, as our original destination had been Phoenix, Arizona, where we had been sponsored by an aunt. We had been inoculated and visa-ed at the American embassy in Dublin just one short year earlier, and our furniture and personal effects were already sitting in a goods wagon in a Donegal siding awaiting shipment to the United States. The whole thing had been eventually cancelled as a result of a single half dollar that I had held in my small fist on the train journey back from Dublin. I was just three years old at the time. I recall that train journey so vividly, it was my first experience of a steam locomotive and I remember that before boarding for the journey home, my father had taken us to see the front of the locomotive with all its hissing and puffing as it sat ready for its journey. I remember the engine driver and his assistant winking at me as I enquired of my father “how come those men were so filthy?” On board, my mother shared a Toblerone with us, while my father dressed in his trademark brown twill overcoat was buried in his newspaper. The Irish countryside flew past us outside, as I made my way out of our compartment and along the train in search of some new excitement.

God only knows why my parents hadn’t noticed that I had gone missing, I guess there was no risk of child-napping in those days in Ireland, and anyway I was on a train-what could possibly go wrong? There was this nice lady however, and I must have impressed her enough to entice her to part with a shiny new half dollar coin because I clutched it in my tiny fist as I made my way back to the compartment where my parents and two elder siblings were seated. The coin twinkled in my small hand, and there was no way that I was going to hand it up to anyone without an argument. My father had assumed that I had taken this half dollar from a tourist on the train and he went off in search of that person in order to return the money. That person happened to be an elderly American lady who had been touring Ireland in search of her ancestry, which every American pursues in their need to be Irish, or, at least, of Irish descent.

When she had confirmed that she had indeed given the money to this beautiful child, she invited him to sit with her for a while for a chat. Whatever adverse information she passed on to my father about the ‘American Dream’ must certainly have been compelling, because by the end of the train journey she had talked dad out of taking us all to the United States.

She had convinced him that he would be financially pushed to provide a good standard of living for his wife and three children, and as a newly arrived immigrant in the country, he would be hard-pressed to obtain a well-paid job. “Don’t take these little angels to the States” she had said, “you will struggle financially from day one and always regret it.” Dad listened carefully to all that the American lady was telling him, and so convincing and profound were her comments and opinions, that he experienced a kind of ‘epiphany’ that was to change his mind and alter the direction of our future lives forever. By the end of that train journey back to Donegal he had decided there and then to alter his plans about emigrating to the United States and that a new alternative would have to be found for the future security of the family. That was to be the end of our American adventure, and I have often wondered what kind of life we might have experienced, had I not accepted that big silver coin. My brother claims that we might have become a couple of California ‘hippies’ in the ‘Summer of Love’ but as our destination was Phoenix, Arizona, my imagination is hard-pressed to decipher how that would have come about. Suffice to say that fate moved us in a completely different direction.

My mother was heart-broken at the cancellation of our trip to America, all of the arrangements had been made, and she knew that as a qualified nurse, she would have no problem in securing a good post in one of the many modern hospitals in Arizona. She also knew that there was no turning back, and that our leaving Ireland was the only hope of our economic survival. She later told us that she had given my Father an ultimatum which he had no choice but to accept, If America was out of the question, then our only other alternative was to make a new life in England. They would find new schools for their children and they would both find jobs to support a complete new way of life. Ireland was certainly out of the equation and so now was America. No matter, the decision was made and my father reluctantly agreed to take us to England, but not before we had travelled to Thurles in Tipperary on route for the ‘Big Smoke’. He had decided to go to England ahead of the rest of the family in order to save some money and, more importantly, sort out a home for us all to live in. Within a few weeks we had left Donegal forever and we were now living with my Uncle Dick, in a town called Thurles in County Tipperary. Uncle Dick shared a beautiful house with my three cousins Jim, Fintan and Margaret Ruth. Uncle Dick’s wife had been institutionalised with a nervous disorder quite a few years earlier and he had been left to bring up this young family by himself. As a welder by trade, uncle Dick was in a steady job which in the Ireland of the 1950’s was a rare thing indeed, and so in December 1957 we settled in Thurles. As a three year old in these new surroundings, I was fascinated by my elder cousins. Their accents were so different from our own northern Irish ones, and I had great difficulty in understanding what they said.

My cousins were a lot older than me, with the exception of the youngest child, Margaret, who was a year younger. The two boys, Finton and Jim, were probably about nine and ten respectively and my first sight of them presented two independent lads about to attend their local scout meeting. They were dressed in fantastic green and beige uniforms with impressive orange neck scarves held in place by the famous woggle of scouting troops. Impressive dagger looking knives were straddled to their belts, and their green woollen socks were held up with tasselled garters of yellow silk, I was so impressed with these smart clothes that at any opportunity in the future, I could be spotted running round the house in a mixture of scout attire and any other toys or accessories that could be pilfered from my long-suffering cousins. I vividly remember a row of plastic indians that spun on a frame when you hit them with an arrow from a plastic bow, and on the top of one of my Uncle Dick’s cabinets was a beautiful hand-built Spanish galleon that he had made himself. This galleon had beautiful material sails and rigging, and was also wired inside with tiny lights that twinkled on every deck of the boat.

Cousin Margaret was a very quiet girl, always lost in deep thoughts and saying very little. Despite this, she was a real ‘tomboy’ and could mix it with both of her elder brothers without any difficulty. A mere ‘runt’ like me was no threat to this independent and headstrong individual, and I felt the full force of her short temper on many occasions. She was also very generous, and always shared her sweets and belongings with her visiting cousins without complaint.

Although I was just three years old, I had already been in kindergarten school in Donegal and it was no shock or surprise that I had been duly entered into the local Presentation convent school along with my brother and sister and, of course, my three cousins. The school was situated about half a mile from uncle Dick’s house and the journey to school was completed every morning by a cross-bar ride on our cousin’s bikes. Needless to say there was the usual falling offs and scuffed knees, but I loved the excitement of weaving through the Thurles traffic (such as it was) on our journey to school. My cousins were like super heroes to us, as they not only provided our main entertainment, but were also very protective of their young charges. We soon became as street-wise as them, and my mother claims that on my return home from school one day I launched into a tirade of obscenities that shocked both her and my uncle Dick. Words like “fecking gobshite” and “fecking eedjit” were just a small portion of the new vocabulary that I had mastered in those early days, and I was certainly whacked about the legs for every utterance that may have been heard by my mother.

It was at this time that I caught sight of my first real nun, and the ones at the presentation convent were as tyrannical as nuns could possibly be. I learned very quickly to avoid as much as possible these strange looking women in their even stranger attire, but I was lucky in that my class teacher was a secular young woman. I recall my elder sister, dropping our packed lunches one morning in the corridor on the way to the classrooms. Milk cascaded out of the small red case that housed our lunches, and spread out across the highly-polished floor of the convent. Before we knew it, my sister was being berated by one of the incumbent nuns, and my last vision of her was wielding an enormous mop. I doubt if we had any lunch that day.

At about this time I discovered the F. W. Woolworths store in the centre of Thurles, and on our way home from school we would regularly walk into the store to look at the toys displayed there. Being totally unaware of money values and the rules of retailing or buying and selling, I would cheekily put my small fist into a pile of sweets and walk away with my ill-gotten gains. Strangely I was never spotted by any of the staff, and so I became a regular visitor to the store on most afternoons.