T'ree Tins of Turpentine: Dirt Poor and Irish in Sixties Leicester - One Family's True Story

Part One

Chapter One

Tim Joseph Patrick O’Sullivan

My father was a giant of a man with hands big enough to dig the earth itself. For the first seventeen years of my life, though, I didn’t know him. My mother was born Kathleen O’Callaghan on 24 September 1928 at Skibbereen on the south-west coast of Ireland. Kathleen had thick auburn hair, which sported a natural curl. She had a strong constitution packed into a compact five-foot-two frame. Kathleen eventually found herself far from the shores of her home in the middle of Leicester.

The story goes that my father waltzed into the Black Lion one day looking like John Wayne, Kathleen’s heart-throb, and that’s what caught her eye. She poured him a pint and there it all started.

They got a bit carried away some time in November of 1952 and five months later they got married in St Joseph’s church, on Friday 13 March 1953. My father got drunk. He could drink alright – he once drank twenty-five pints. The twenty-sixth was poured over his head by my mother. He spent his wedding night in Charles Street police station.

‘Lock me up. I committed the worst crime,’ he said to the desk sergeant.

‘Why? What have you done?’

‘I’ve just got married.’

That was the start of my mother and father’s married life. What with Friday the thirteenth and the police, it was not the best of starts.

In the summer of 1957 I was three years old and was running about with next to nothing on in the front garden of our new house at Birstow Crescent, Mowmacre Hill. My pants full, I tried knocking on the front door. No answer. Mammy must have been out the back, gossiping with Marie or Mrs Hedley, our next-door neighbours. So I took my pants off and pushed them through the letter box. My good deed done – Mammy wanted my pants when they got like that – I ran back to play. Stark naked.

Mammy was happy. We’d just got our brand-new three-bedroomed council house with an inside toilet and a bath. We’d come from a one-up, one-down, six in a block, with one tap and one toilet for the whole block. That was 1 Knight’s Yard, Leaden Hall Street, Belgrave. I don’t remember it, but she talked about it plenty.

‘Jesus, Timmy, ye dirty thing,’ she said, swinging open the front door and scooping me off my feet. She took me inside, sat me down on the draining board, cleaned me up, dressed me and put something on my back to keep the sun off. I heard a baby crying and looked over; it was Mary Bridget, my eighteen-month-old sister, in her pram.

‘You go off and play and don’t get into any mischief. I’ve got to feed yer sister,’ Mammy said as she placed me back on my feet.

This was the first event that etched itself on my memory, and there it stayed. So there we were in this big house on Birstow Crescent, Mowmacre Hill – me, Mammy and Mary.

As the months rolled on, winter came. It was a different house in winter. It was a big house for a little fella like me. I remember climbing the stairs, eventually getting to the top, the toilet facing me. I thought I’d climbed Mount Everest. The house was freezing, semi-detached, up at the top looking down the rest of the street. Wind came from all angles. If I was crying in bed at night, Mammy would come up and say, ‘What’s the matter, Timmy? You cold?’ She would throw another coat over me by the light from the landing. It felt like I was nailed down in a lead coffin.

Sunday was always a big day, oh yes. We were up early on Sundays. Wash. Best clothes. Walk down to Abbey Park. Off to Mass and then off to Nora and Mack’s.

My Aunty Nora. If Aunty Nora was mentioned, we immediately thought of food. Good food. She used to cook for a duke in London. When we got to Nora’s there’d be a big welcome. She was a small, stocky woman with a broad Cork accent. Mack was a quiet man. We’d go in and Mack would make a fuss over us and sit us down.

I can’t stress it enough: the great thing about Nora’s was the food. She knew how to cook. She’d spend hours cooking the Sunday dinner, which was beautiful. And apple pie after. We would eat and eat. If you couldn’t manage your vegetables, you wouldn’t get any pudding. We’d sit down and sleep in the afternoon. Mack would go down the pub, then come back and we’d listen to the radio. Then we’d head home. We’d get the bus home; it was too far for us to walk – about four miles to Mowmacre Hill from Nora’s house on St George’s Street. The bus dropped us off at the terminus and we’d soon fall into the house, exhausted.

Chapter Two

Nora McCarthy

May O’Callaghan (my mother’s mother, my grandmother), met William O’Callaghan some time in the 1920s, probably as the Civil War went from raging to simmering. William O’Callaghan had been a police sergeant in the newly formed Gardai in the fledgling Republic of Ireland. He was born in Cavan, May was born in Skibbereen, so how they came to meet can only be surmised. William had made his way to England to work and perhaps it was there that they met, married, and in a few short years had three small children. William died in the 1930s in Burton-on-Trent, exactly how is not known, but he would have been only a young man.

May made her way back to her hometown of Skibbereen and spent the next few years there, where she met another man. He wanted to take her to London, but he didn’t want to take the children. A short while later she delivered her children in the middle of a rain-drenched night to the nuns.

It was a dark night when May O’Callaghan arrived at the orphanage with her three young children, Kathleen, Bridget and Billy. The rain smacked down as they approached the grand doors. The children were just five, four, and three years old. They had taken the bus from Skibbereen and arrived late at night. Whether the children were crying, too scared to speak, or unaware of what was to happen, was buried in the past. The nun opened the creaking door and ushered them inside.

‘I can’t cope,’ May said to the nuns. Three children, the rain still dripping off them, were taken from her and that was the last my mother ever saw of her own mother. That was 1934, and an Irish orphanage was not a good place to be in 1934.

Ten years later, enter Nora, Nora McCarthy. This is how the story goes: apparently Nora and Mack were on holiday back in Ireland on their annual return trip, visiting their usual haunts of Clonakilty and Skibbereen where Nora was from. For some reason, Nora found herself in the hospital, which stood high up on the hill in Clonakilty. Nora thought she recognised the young girl cleaning the ward.

‘What’s yer name?’ she said.

‘Bridget,’ the slight young girl replied.

‘Is it Bridget O’Callaghan? You haven’t got a sister by the name of Kathleen, have ye?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

Amazingly Nora had known the girls’ mother when she was living in Skibbereen years earlier and she knew that the young girls had been put into an orphanage. With thanks to God, for some reason Nora took charge and managed to arrange for Bridget and Kathleen to return to London with her and Mack, it is not clear what happened to their brother Billy but he didn’t go with them. Bridget was sixteen and Kathleen, my mother, would have been seventeen. Nora herself was twenty-nine and was living in London with her husband Mack, like so many other Irish people pushed out of Ireland by lack of work. It would have been a monumental act to take on two young, traumatised girls and try to set their lives straight. Nora was no saint, and had no great fortune to share, but she knew a bit about suffering. She’d had seven pregnancies over the early years of their marriage, and had delivered seven lifeless blue babies. When any hope of having a family had seemed impossible, a ready-made one found its way to her.

My Mother Kathleen would tell stories of that orphanage and its strictness. They had to bathe with their clothes on, so they couldn’t look at their own bodies. At Christmas they’d get one small present, an apple, an orange, or a doll if they were lucky – all things that had been donated.

One time she had been cleaning a room for one of the nuns. The table was laid with cakes and all sorts of treats for guests that they were expecting. Always hungry, Kathleen took one slice of cake. The nun found out. ‘You’ll pay for this dearly,’ she told her. When Christmas came, the meagre presents were handed out. There was nothing at all for Kathleen.

Nora brought the two girls to Kilburn with her and Mack, then helped to get them jobs. The orphanage had taken its toll on poor Bridget. She couldn’t hold down a job. Her experience of first losing her mother and then being placed under that strict regime had institutionalised her so that she couldn’t cope with normal life. Mack found her a place in a convent in Brentford, London, where they catered for people like Bridget. There were a lot of girls in there with mental-health issues.

The convent was called Saint Raphael’s; it was a great big Victorian building with high ceilings and cold, bare walls. It was run by nuns, who were very strict, and this suited Bridget down to the ground. She took up where she had left off in Clonakilty.

She was diagnosed with epilepsy, which wasn’t properly understood in those days. It was eventually recognised as a neurological disease that causes physical and mental-health problems. Nora, Mack and Kathleen went to visit her often when they lived in London, and then every year when they moved up to Leicester years later. We carried on the tradition until she died, aged sixty-three, from untreated burns. Bridget idolised me and she wanted me to be a priest. Poor Bridget. So that was how Nora became such a big part of our lives – by chance.

Mack was born in 1893 in the old Cork debtor’s prison. I took a tourist trip round it after it was turned into a museum. It was pretty grim, with a man’s wing and a smaller women’s wing. Women had to give birth in their cell, which was narrow and bleak. He was named Florence McCarthy (Florry). They must have run out of names, I guess. It would have been fairly memorable, and recorded, but a lot of records were destroyed in Dublin during the Easter Rising. Anyway, that was why we called him Mack.

Chapter Three

Ireland and John

I remember Mammy sitting me down one day. ‘Now listen to me. I’ve got to go to Ireland to pick up your brother, yer older brother.’

I thought, What do you mean, my older brother?

‘His name’s John. He’s been raised by yer grandparents, your dad’s mam and dad.’ I thought, Dad? What’s a dad?

Tim O’ Sullivan, my father, had left the farm where he grew up at the age of sixteen and headed for London, where he found work labouring in the building industry. One night, in Tottenham, he was attacked by six men, who gave him the beating of his life. He moved to Leicester and got a job as a miner. He worked round the pits in Desford, Nuneaton, and Coalville along with his mate, John O’Brien, who remained a long-standing friend. When the men came to enter the pit, the foreman used to do a breath test. If he smelled of drink, the foreman wouldn’t let him in, and he’d be sacked on the spot. This happened to Tim around 1956. The marriage to Kathleen was stormy and often ended up with her grabbing us kids and dragging us all down to Mick and Helen O’Grady’s on Kensington Street in town, long before we moved to Mowmacre Hill. Kathleen accused him of drinking too much. As a result of the arguments at home and after losing his job, Tim left town.

Kathleen had written to Tim’s parents back in Gortahig, the farm in West Cork where my father was born and where all his brothers and sisters were born. Two of them died in infancy. Allihies was the closest village to the farm, which was in a wild, remote spot looking out towards Kerry, just twelve miles away over the water at the mouth of the Kenmare River.

I came across an O’Sullivan family history a few years ago and the genealogical research suggests that this branch of the family moved to Gortahig at the end of the Famine. My great-grandfather was Mike O’Sullivan, and he married Mary Harrington. They had fifteen children between 1883 and 1902. My grandfather, John, was the eldest son. Of the fifteen, nine chose to emigrate to the States. Most of them settled in Butte, Montana, because there were already cousins out there. Only one, Peter, chose to go to England. Grandfather John inherited the farm and married Mary Casey.

John and Mary had seven children who survived into adulthood. They were not as adventurous as their aunts and uncles. Six of the seven decided that England was a safer bet than the US. The four eldest, John, Mary Brigid, Margaret, and Kathleen, went to London. Tim, my father, followed, but had to be different; he ended up finding work in Leicester. His younger sister, Teresa, later joined her siblings in London. The youngest, Anthony, settled at home, married Eileen Lehane, and had two children, Mary and John.

With my father’s older brother and four sisters married and settled in London, one wonders why my mother did not seek help from them first. Perhaps she had no way of contacting them, or knew they were not in a position to offer any help, just scraping by themselves and working all the hours God sent. With nowhere else to turn, my mother was determined that none of her children would feel abandoned and put into care as she had been.

In no uncertain terms, Kathleen let her in-laws know she couldn’t cope with three babies on her own without their good-for-nothing son around. Out of guilt, perhaps, they agreed to take John until she got herself sorted out. That had to be better than leaving him with the nuns, and there’d be no fear about not being allowed to take him back. John stayed with them for four years and they grew attached – four years is a long time in a small child’s life. He had learned to speak Irish, like them, and they began to think of leaving the farm to him.

My mother said she’d be in Ireland for two weeks and I was to stay with Aunty Nora and Mack. I thought, What’s Ireland?

‘I’ll ring you every night.’ She handed me a plastic toy phone and said I could talk to her on that. She kissed me and left. She must have taken Mary with her; I don’t remember.

It was fun being at Nora and Mack’s. They’d clear their throats and spit into the fire. If it was a nice day, there’d be no fire. There would be a newspaper at the side of the settee and they’d spit on that instead. They’d read and listen to the wireless.

Then, ‘Yer mammy’s coming home.’ I’m not sure how Nora knew; she might have rung the local pub and got a message to Mack. Then we got ready for the arrival.

I was playing in the front garden; there were no fences – it was all open plan. Nora had taken me back to Mowmacre Hill. I saw Mam coming up the street with this lad, with John. I thought, Jesus, look at the sight of that!

He was ten months older than me. Mam had told me that at the old house in Leaden Hall Street, he’d slept in the top drawer, and I’d slept in the bottom drawer. I thought, How’d you get that lump into a top drawer?

Anyway, he walked down the path. I was playing with a World War II ambulance pedal car.

‘This is yer brother Tim, yer sister Mary, and Aunty Nora,’ Mam said by way of introduction.

‘Jesus, that looks like a grand car. Can I have a go at it?’

That was the first thing he ever said to me, then he wrenched me out of it by my arm and got in himself. After that scuffle, we went in. Nora made some tea and got some pie for John. Then she went off down the street to get back on the bus and go home. We waved her off. So there we were – me, Mammy, Mary and John.

Soon it was time for bed. He had to share with me, but John didn’t like the dark.

John had a West Cork accent, like Mammy and Aunty Nora. He had spent his life back in Ireland on the farm with Grandad, fishing, and with thousands of sheep. And Grandmother idolised him. After breakfast she’d send him off, up into the mountains with just the sheep for company. He’d sleep with a candle in the room with Grandma.

When Mam went to the old farm to fetch him, John was riding bareback on a bull. And he didn’t want to know. To him, Grandma was his mother. They reckoned there were terrible screams when the day came to leave. Mam had stopped there a week to try to get to know him again. I suppose, after three or four years, it had been too long. Grandma and Grandad were desperate by all accounts and pleaded with her.

‘Please, please, please let him stay with us! You’ll rue this one day.’

When it came time to go, he pulled away, throwing stones at her, and ran up the mountain. They waited until he came back. Bet he was hungry.

John was heading for England. He cried and cried, even when they got to the boat. It must have been a terrible journey. They had to travel from the further reaches of the area they call Beara of West Cork to the peninsula of Kerry, then Dublin to Liverpool. It would have taken twenty-four hours in a car; without one, it would have taken a couple of days. And there was John, screaming and yelling for his life all the way.

My, how my life changed after the arrival of John. That first night he cried and cried his eyes out. He had to sleep with the light on. It was a terrible shock for him – he’d never seen electric light. Never seen running water. That night was horrendous – he howled like a banshee for our grandmother. He would not go to sleep and Mam was in and out. I was trying my best