Ireland in the late forties and early fifties had all the deprivation of the post-war era without any of the jubilation of having won the war. In what was one of the most deadpan political understatements of the twentieth century, Éamon De Valera and the newly-minted, neutral, Irish Government had used the euphemism ‘The Emergency’ for what everyone else with eyes in their head knew was a catastrophic World War that would decide the fate of hundreds of millions, including the Irish. In his 2012 book, Returning Home, Bernard Kelly traces the response of the Dublin Government and the Irish people to the twelve thousand or so Irish veterans returning from the war. With the exception, and not always, of friends and relatives who were happy to see them back, they were vilified and shunned, and many kept their war service a secret. Such was the parochial hatred of the English oppressors that there was no acknowledgement that Irish men and women had risked their lives to fight a profoundly evil regime which, had it triumphed, would undoubtedly have swallowed Ireland whole, neutrality and all. Some five thousand of these troops who had been members of the Irish armed forces were classified as deserters and remained so for the next sixty-seven years until their official pardon in 2013. With his closeness to Piaras Béaslaí, who had fought in the Easter Rising in 1916 and was a member of the Dáil, I wonder what my grandfather made of his son? Was he a hero or a traitor? Was he to be welcomed back into the family, or had he made his bed and now must lie on it? I suspect it was not a hero’s welcome. There are no stories of warmth or joy at his return. The picture I have of the family at this time is of ever more straitened circumstances: more mouths to feed, same War Pension. I think of my mother preparing ten meals three times a day for seven days a week, washing, ironing, cleaning, mending, sewing, knitting. My God, what a life! I’m sure my siblings helped a lot. The older ones looked after the younger and I was told many years later that I called my sister Margaret ‘Little mummy’, as opposed to ‘Big mummy’, who had so many other things to do that delegation was necessary.

My father continued his life as an invalid and fathered a further three children, a testament to the increased libido of the consumptive, which is a tale more prettily told in La Bohème’s Parisian garret than in the realities of working-class life in Sallynoggin; the singing is certainly better. I don’t know that life was particularly happy for the family of ten in a small house, keeping quiet so as not to disturb the invalid. My sister Margaret, at the boisterous age of eight or nine, is reported to have declared to anyone who would listen: ‘There’s not enough singing in this house!’

Into this quiet house of little song and rationed food I was born on Sunday the 17th of August 1952. According to the popular rhyme, as ‘a child who is born on the Sabbath Day’ I was destined to grow up bonny and blithe and good and gay: I have managed one of those at least. As a small child, there were two things I remember my mother saying about me constantly to neighbours, friends, acquaintances, indeed to anyone who would listen. In addition to telling people that ‘He was two the day his father was buried’, she also cheerfully informed all and sundry that ‘He nearly killed me when he was born’. I don’t think she was attributing matricidal intent, as at first it might appear; more likely she was referring to the fact that I weighed ten and half pounds at birth and was proportionately large. I was also the eighth of eight children and so by the time my mother was forty-four she’d been through a deal of trouble and strife with my siblings that set her up for a parlous experience at my birth. There is no doubt I was a mummy’s boy, a burden I bore for many years. Well into my thirties my mother would introduce me as her ‘baby’ and it was vain for me to protest that rather than the ‘baby’, I was the ‘youngest in the family’. 

I begin my own part of the story with these two phrases because over the years I have realised how they have turned into deep, powerful, pervasive beliefs about my identity that have accompanied me through my life. The more I have thought and written about them, the more I understand how important they are. Through my stabs at my own therapy, I came to understand that I had grown up with a sense, a fantasy sense, that I could be destructive to those close to me, particularly women. The moment at which I understood this most clearly was the moment of separation from my wife. I vividly remember standing in the hallway of our house in Tunbridge Wells on Valentine’s Day 1991 and overcoming the panic that this woman would somehow collapse and wither away if I walked out the door. I am eternally grateful to my strong, resilient ex-wife for showing me that this did not in fact happen. She survived to tell me how very angry she was that I had abandoned her, and I in turn survived the knowledge that I was capable of causing such pain.

I also grew up with a hovering nostalgia for a dad. Other kids at school, talked about ‘my dad’, ‘me da’, ‘the aul’ fella’. They were able to answer questions like ‘What does your dad do?’ or ‘Is your dad coming to the match?’. The role was unclear, and the name didn’t matter, I just wanted someone to be there in the space in my life called Dad. The desire for this person wasn’t passionate. I heard my mother tell friends that she had to be ‘a mother and a father to the eight of them’, and sometimes I thought it would be rude to want more, as if wanting a dad would mean she wasn’t doing a good enough job.

I grew up in poverty, although I didn’t know it at the time, and when I began to realise it as a teenager, it didn’t really bother me. The house I was born and brought up in was number 16 O’Rourke Park, Sallynoggin, an area a couple of miles inland from the pretty seaside town of Dún Laoghaire in County Dublin. Some years ago, in a colleague’s office in Sydney, I came across a book about architectural trends in post-war Europe. Flicking idly through its pages as I waited for her, I was astonished to find a picture of the Sallynoggin council housing estate with an enthusiastic description of the new model post-war architecture it represented. Who would have guessed we were making urban architectural history with gardens back and front, and indoor privvies! The house was part of a terrace of perhaps twenty houses, double-fronted, two-storied, with three bedrooms. The gardens were about twenty feet square front and back, a pocket handkerchief lawn with some flower beds, hydrangeas in ours, and simple iron railings with Buxus hedges. In front of our house was a park with beautiful old chestnut trees, from which we collected nuts that we peeled and seasoned and threaded with string to play ‘conkers’. Not that we were encouraged to play out there: we might meet undesirables from the estate: ‘You can’t touch pitch without getting dirty’.

Three bedrooms sounds commodious but not if you have ten people living there. The three boys shared one room with one double bed. The girls shared another room with a combination of single and double beds and my parents had the third. Downstairs was an entrance hall, a tiny sitting room, for guests only, and a living room and kitchen.

My first memory is standing in the kitchen one day when my mother was doing the washing. We had an old-fashioned wicker cane laundry basket, a rich warm brown colour with sharp ends of wicker that caught inattentive fingers, and I can clearly remember that I couldn’t see into it because it was taller than me. I think I must have been two or three and my father had already died. The kitchen was a little room, they were all little rooms, about eight feet square, and I can see myself standing in the middle, beside the laundry basket. On my left, along the outside wall below the window, there is a large, square, deep ceramic sink with a cold tap over it and sloping wooden draining boards each side. Behind me to the left is the pantry cupboard with a latched door and three concrete slabs for shelves. On my right is the square kitchen table, with the wooden grain deeply furrowed from scrubbing and wear, a daily hazard for splinters under the fingernails. Behind me on the right is the range, set into an alcove and carefully blacked with stove black. I don’t recall my mother using this although I’m sure she must have. By the time I came along we had acquired a cast iron gas stove on pedestal feet that stood in the ‘back porch’, a tiny room off the kitchen that had initially been just that - the porch or hallway inside the back door, giving access to the ‘coal house’, a sort of inside shed for coal, Wellington boots, brooms, the shoe polishing bag, and spiders. Under the stairs was the cupboard where the gas meter lived, and I loved the day when the gas man came to collect the single shillings that we fed into the slot. He bent down into the cramped space and unlocked the little metal drawer into which the shillings fell, and then he turned and tipped the whole lot noisily out onto the table. Then came the magic part. With the index and middle fingers of his right hand he flicked pairs of shillings into his left hand at lightning speed and piled them up in lots of ten. In no time at all the piles were counted and my mother paid him the part of the balance owing in notes and other coins, keeping some of the single shillings to use again.

My next memory is of my first day at school when I was four years old. I started out, as did all my brothers and sisters, at St. Joseph’s Orphanage on Tivoli Road in Dún Laoghaire. St Joseph’s had been built in 1860 as an orphanage offering permanent and temporary residential care, including education, for children in need.  The school later opened its doors to day pupils but was still called ‘St Joseph’s Orphanage’. At the age of four I went to the Infants’ School. It was a school rather than a ‘kindergarten’, and we sat in rows of tiny double desks and had lessons from day one. Our first class was called ‘Low Babies’ from which one graduated to ‘High Babies’ and then on into the Primary School. I went on my first day with my brother Gerard, almost an adult figure, at seven or eight years older than I was. The classrooms were off to the left of a long corridor, on the wall of which, at about the right height for little arms to reach, was a row of double coat hooks, a small hook for the coat and a big one for the scarf or hat. My enduring memory of the day is standing in the corridor, my back to the wall, arms spread-eagled, my little fists clenched around the hooks and my feet firmly planted against the wall, crying disconsolately not to be made go into the classroom. I don’t know who prised my hands off the hooks, it may have been Gerard, but I soon came to realise that those nuns had strong hands too.

The religious who guided my first academic steps were an interesting lot. They were a French order of nuns, which was exotic (not to say incomprehensible) for a four-year-old, and they were called Daughters of the Heart of Mary. They wore plain clothes, which was somewhat confusing in a time of long black or brown habits and wimples. They wore no habit because they had been persecuted in revolutionary France and had discarded their habit to save their lives. They were also called ‘Miss’ rather than ‘Sister’ and my recollection of Miss Keating, the head honcho, is of her wearing an elegant, well-cut dress and jacket with a discreet string of beads. In my imagination they are pearls, but I don’t know whether the vow of poverty would have stretched to that.

One of the more embarrassing events of my young boyhood happened in that first classroom which, interestingly, didn’t at all scar me for life. I think the name of my first teacher was Miss Egan and I must have felt a bit intimidated by her. As a result, I was afraid to ask to go to the toilet when I needed to. This may also have been because of the custom of asking for permission in Irish. Strange though it may seem, there are likely to be millions of Irish men and women around the world whose knowledge of their native Irish tongue extends to the recitation of the Our Father, (most of) the words of the National Anthem, The Soldiers’ Song, and ‘Can I please go to the toilet’. I can still remember it: ‘An bhuil cead agam dul go di an leithreas, ma sé do thuil e?’ Which sounds something like: ‘On will cad a gum dull goodee on leh’ras maw shay dehull eh’. In any event, although I can say it now, I couldn’t say it then and I sat nervously wriggling in my seat while my need grew ever more pressing. Eventually the pressing paid off and a trickle of golden liquid appeared from under my desk to wend its way slowly across the polished floorboards. To this day I can see it and remember the shame and consternation. What should I do? Deny? ‘No Miss Egan, it was Jerry, not me’. ‘Well, how come it’s your pants that are wet then mister?’ 

As it transpired, this was clearly not an uncommon experience for Miss Egan as she whisked me away, got me to wash and dry myself and provided me with a cute little pair of blue shorts from the spare shorts drawer; I can see them now. Clearly, a supply was kept for these occasions. Mercifully, I don’t recall being made fun of by the other kids and I think she just used the event to encourage us to tell her when we wanted to go - my first tiny lesson in assertiveness. For the rest, the first two years passed uneventfully. Mostly I remember coloured chalks on slate boards, plasticene that we called by its Irish name of ‘mála’ (rhyming with ‘bawla’), and lonely lunches in a cold playground with sandwiches wrapped in grease-proof paper, cheddar cheese, or fish paste, or my favourite, bread and dripping.

My memories of those childhood years are mostly photographic stills, there is almost no video, no sequences of events. At home I remember my father’s monochrome gros point work hanging on the walls, unbleached linen stretched in thin black frames. The living room sofa with a bright orange loose cover stood against the background of the dark wood-effect wallpaper. For a while there was a gleaming old piano with brass candle holders that my mother played well; Percy Grainger’s English Country Gardens and Drink to me Only with Thine Eyes were favourites. I was fascinated by the inlaid brass name in cursive script above the keyboard: Rudolf Ibach Sohn. Later on, there was a glass display cabinet with sundry pieces of Waterford crystal, some sherry glasses salvaged from the Red Lion, a majolica bell that my mother said had come from Cassino after the Allied bombardment of the monastery on Monte Cassino, and two small crystal swans that my father had brought home from the war wrapped up in thick woollen socks.  On the wall near the table my mother’s Spode plates took pride of place in their coil sprung hanging frames. 

The four blue plates had hung on the wall in their clasps for as long as I could remember, all of my six or seven years. Italian Spode. Special. There were two large serving dishes and two dinner plates with scalloped corners. They had a hallowed aura, as if they were holy icons, unlike anything else in the room. They came from another world, another time, hoarded treasures that pointed to an easier past, a prosperous past, a past connected to things that were loved and stable, and solid, and respectable. Now, they’re out of fashion, you can buy them for not very much on eBay. Then, they were treasures, relics to be venerated, not touched. We kids knew all that in our bones; we couldn’t have said it in words, but the burden of the scant legacy sat heavily on each of us, small children that we were. Or perhaps it was just me; I don’t know. I was a child sensitive to my mother’s needs and to her sorrow and loss, and to her bereavement, which I had witnessed, unknowing, at first hand. 

I don’t know what the game was, but I was playing indoors in the living room with my sister Nora. You can imagine us kids whirling around, arms extended, maybe just seeing who could last the longest before falling over. Alas, it wasn’t me that fell but one of the plates, with a flash of blue and a crack as it struck the wooden arm of the sofa, then shiny fragments on the dark grey lino. My tiny conscience, already well-schooled in never paining my mother, was aghast at what I had done. These four plates were among the last of the things she had salvaged from her home before making the wartime journey into exile. My fear was not of any punishment to come, but of witnessing her hurt and knowing that I had caused it. 

How could I deal with her distress? What better way than to join in? I began to cry, at first out of duty and perhaps strategy, hoping that by seeing me sad she would be less upset and feel sorry for me. Then the tears acquired a life of their own and ran freely. I felt the sadness I had imagined. Attracted by my sobs, my mother came into the room, and I told her between gulps and sniffles what had happened. My tears had the desired effect; she cuddled me and said: ‘Don’t worry, worse things happen at sea’. She should know; her husband had been a sailor.