All of These People: A Memoir

In those days when an Irish person was killed abroad it was usually a substantial item on the news. But Mike’s death was overshadowed by a national crisis. We were sitting by the fire in St Declan’s watching television when the main evening news came on. The headline said that thirteen people had been shot dead by the British army in Derry. There were black-and-white pictures on the screen of soldiers shooting and then a priest waving a white handkerchief leading some men down a laneway. The men were carrying a body. I’d never seen a real body before. There was a statement from the Irish government condemning what had happened.

I remember my grandmother saying ‘Mother of God, this is desperate.’ Even to a child living in the far south of Ireland, largely cut off from the politics of the day, I knew that these black-and-white images represented a moment of significance. If my gran was angry it meant something serious had happened. Then there was a knock on the front door. My mother went to answer. I heard my Uncle Barry’s voice. ‘Lads, I have some bad news for ye.’ And after that there were muffled sounds. Doors opened and closed. Then I heard a woman’s voice crying. My mother told me that Uncle Michael was dead. ‘Be good now because we have to mind Gran,’ she said. The rest of that night passed in a procession of grown-ups coming and going.

On the night of the fire Mike had been out with friends in Greenwich Village. He came home and fell asleep, possibly with a candle still lit. The firemen found him near the door where he’d crawled trying to escape. The New York Times carried a short paragraph:

Michael Hassett was killed in a fire in his apartment on Spring Street in Manhattan. Police are investigating the cause of the blaze.

There wasn’t really much to investigate. It was an accidental death a long way from home. The coffin came home a week or so after we got the news of his death. It was the first coffin I’d ever seen for real, a big steel coffin, and it scared me and made me sad, because until it arrived I thought that there might be a mistake and Mike might still walk through the door.

The day of the funeral the wind and rain belted in from the coast. I went with an uncle and stayed at the back of the church. Then we followed in the procession to Ballyphehane graveyard where Michael was buried next to his father and his younger brother Ben. I have no memories of my grandmother on that day. She was surrounded by people and I could not catch a glimpse of her. I remember my mother dressed in the black of mourning with a veil covering her face. Underneath she glistened with tears.

May Hassett’s house had been a place of ease and security. I was afraid now that grief would take her away from me. It was an inchoate fear, spurred by the utter change I was witnessing in somebody I had always known to be strong. She retreated, slept during the daytime, and wept when she did not think I could see her. But I was by then attuned to the secret strategies of adults. I could always tell.

Then, after several weeks my grandmother emerged from mourning. She struggled to take her place again at the centre of the family. It wasn’t a swift transformation. But May knew we were all watching her, and slowly she found a way to laugh again. It was only years later that I understood how much she fought to prevent grief from overwhelming her. By then I’d started work on a newspaper and bought my first car. I was taking my grandmother on a long drive through the countryside on a Sunday afternoon when she began to talk about Michael.

She talked about what he had been like as a child, mischiefloving and easygoing, how heartsick she’d been when he took the ship to America, and how the break-up of his marriage had been a relief to her: ‘They weren’t suited to each other at all, you know.’ May talked about the letters he’d sent describing his successes at Columbia and then off-Broadway. He’d sent her a book on the American theatre in which his production of a Strindberg play had been analysed and praised. Then my grandmother began to sob. I hadn’t seen her cry in years. ‘He was so young,’ she said. And she repeated this several times. We drove on in silence for several miles. Then she asked me if I believed in heaven.

‘What makes you ask that?’ I asked.

‘Because I wonder if I’ll see him again,’ she replied. ‘I would give anything to see him just once more.’

In those days I did not know what I believed in, if anything, but I told her I was sure there was a heaven. Then this devout woman told me that when Michael had been killed she wondered if there was any God. She said she’d kept on going to Mass but she struggled with faith, asking how her child could have been taken in such a way. When I asked her why she didn’t crack up, go under, become a heart-broken recluse, her explanation was that she hadn’t any choice but to keep going. ‘What else was I going to do?’

Love carried her through. The love for her children, the love she gave in taking care of myself and my siblings. The light of my grandmother’s life was my younger sister, Niamh. Barely two years my junior she was born with coeliac disease and was seriously ill as a baby. Given the troubled state of things in our home May H offered to look after Niamh in Cork. Niamh was effectively reared by my grandmother and her presence helped May H greatly as she fought to emerge from her grief over Michael.

Though she would have abjured such a notion herself, I believe my grandmother was the first heroic person I knew.

CHAPTER SIX ‘Pres’ Boy (#ulink_abe0147c-9a00-5f41-9f78-ca30f586793d)

…Yet he was kind; or if severe in aught, The love he bore to learning was in fault.

The Village Schoolmaster’,

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

I didn’t like the look of the place. St Joseph’s National School was a grim, grey edifice built in 1913 on the banks of the River Lee about a mile from Cork city centre. Directly opposite, on the far bank of the river, were the suburbs of Sundays Well and Shanakiel, terraced and grand with the mansions of the merchant princes. But St Joseph’s drew the bulk of its pupils from an area known as the Marsh. Poor and neglected, it was a mix of old tenements and new council flats. Other boys travelled down from estates on the city’s north side or from farming areas to the west. I arrived at St Joseph’s fresh from a private school in Dublin, a place which had its own swimming pool and rugby pitches and where we wore uniforms and caps in the manner of English public schoolboys.

My school career had been troubled. I’d started out in an all-Irish speaking ‘scoil’ and had been moved on because my teacher was an old viper; after that I went to a prep school called Miss Carr’s, run by a genial old lady and filled with the children of the Dublin middle class. I thrived there but on reaching the age of seven I had to move up to a senior school. This was St Mary’s in Rathmines, another citadel of the middle classes, where I struggled to settle. By now things at home were becoming more fraught and every raised voice from a teacher had me jumping.

I was taken out of St Mary’s and sent to the more easygoing Terenure College where I was a happy pupil until my parents’ separation forced another move. By the time my primary education was complete I had been to five different schools. A child who was not so frightened and troubled might have fared better, been more resilient in the face of aggressive teachers. I was simply scared.

Yet until I reached Cork my education had been exceptionally privileged. All private schools and middle-class children. At St Joseph’s I was immersed in the reality of Irish primary education for the majority. On my first day at St Joseph’s we were lined up in the yard and marched up a steel staircase into the school building. Ahead of us was a long, dark corridor that smelt of polish and chalk, and at the very end of that, on the left-hand side, was the Brother’s class.

The Brother belonged to the ‘hard-but-fair’ variety of headmaster. In his younger days he’d been a promising Gaelic footballer, and he was still fitter and tougher than the largest of his pupils. His school was not one of the hell-holes, similar to some run by the Christian Brothers and other religious orders, where the leather strap ruled. This was also the early 1970s and the nationalistic element of our education was receding. Ireland joined the EU in 1973, a year after I started school at St Joseph’s. The word was out that we needed to be more European, if we were going to benefit from all the jobs and money on offer from Brussels. The Brother belonged to the Presentation Brothers, who were always seen as one of the more politically moderate outfits, certainly by comparison with the ardent nationalism of the Christian Brothers.

To a little Dublin boy fresh from a broken home and with a strange accent, St Joseph’s was a mighty challenge. My first encounter was with a farmer’s son whom I will call Lonergan. The boy looked like a mountain man with broad shoulders and big shovels of hands. Lonergan came to school each day with his hair standing on end as if he had only that moment rolled out of bed; he had buck teeth which advanced with each month and he smelled of fried food. On my first day in class Lonergan turned around and asked if I was ‘handy’. Not knowing what the word meant, I said yes. Yes. Yes, always anxious to please. Whatever you want me to be, I will say ‘Yes’.

No sooner had the teacher left the room to get some books than Lonergan turned around and punched me hard in the chest. I was thrown backwards. There was laughter around the class. The others waited to see what I would do. Tears came to my eyes. I did nothing. There was more laughter. ‘Handy my hole,’said Lonergan.

In this way I discovered that ‘handy’ meant hard, tough, able to fight your corner, and I was about as tough as butter. The atmosphere was feral. Every weakness was noted. Our teachers were good men and women. But physical violence was often the preferred method of control and chastisement. Hardly a day went by when somebody wasn’t given a few lashes of the cane. You stood at the top of the class, watched by eyes that were both fearful and relieved that it wasn’t happening to them.

The Brother would produce his bamboo cane and tell you to hold out your hand. Sometimes boys were so frightened they pulled their hand back at the last minute. He waited until their hands were steady and then brought the cane thrashing down on the open palm. All at once you were assaulted by sharp stinging agony. Your hands were hot as if someone had poured molten metal on them. Blood rushed to your cheeks and you blushed with shame. After the first couple of strokes your hand started to go numb from the pain. You tried hard not to cry. But I saw some of the hardest boys in the class with tears in their eyes after being beaten.

When it was done you clasped your hands under your armpits and went back to your seat. It was impossible to write after that. I remember that there were always a few minutes of strange quiet after a beating. Everybody felt the shame and the shock of that sudden eruption of violence. We were beaten for not doing our homework. We were beaten for mitching. We were beaten for making a nuisance in the class (i.e. talking or trying to attract attention).

Yet the Brother was a moderate. His violence was never gratuitous and never tinged with sadism. He genuinely liked us and did his best for every kid in the class. In beating us he was simply exerting control in a manner that was widely accepted by society, and sanctioned by the state.

On that first day in school I was introduced to a daily ritual. The Brother instructed us to walk quietly across the corridor to a tiny room. ‘No messing or there’ll be hell to pay,’ he warned. I asked the boy sitting next to me what was happening. ‘We’re gettin’ soup,’ he said. After a few minutes the Brother returned with a huge steaming vat and several loaves of bread. The smell of soup filled the little room. Boys pushed against each other, elbowing to get to the front of the line. Plastic cups were handed around, and then one by one we dipped them into the vat of soup. An older boy handed out a chunk of bread. In my previous school, boys were packed off by their parents with nice lunches. There was a tuck shop that sold buns and soft drinks. There was none of that at St Joseph’s. I suspect that for quite a few boys in that room the Brother’s soup was the only guaranteed hot meal of the day. It was devoured rapidly, and the leftovers mopped up from the pot with bread.

The class was fairly evenly split between those who were studying to go on to secondary school and those counting the days to when they could escape and get work. Of the latter nearly all came from poor families with no history of educational achievement. The bright kids would pass the entrance exams for secondary and probably go on to university. Those who were designated as ‘thick’, or who could not be bothered working, would either leave for a factory job, or idle away another few years in a technical college, where you could learn a trade or at least convince your parents you were learning a trade.

After a few more hidings from the likes of Lonergan I began to develop my own way of dealing with bullies. I wouldn’t run away. Since I couldn’t beat them I would talk my way out of trouble. Make a joke; use my brain, relishing it when they were trapped in their English comprehension and came to me for help. It worked for the most part. To most of those boys I must have seemed very strange. I was scared of them. I kept myself apart from them. I did not seek to make friends. At break times I asked permission to stay inside and read. When forced to go outside I would wander around the edge of the schoolyard, ignoring the scrum of football-playing, fighting boys, and dream of escape. After a while the bullies ignored me. I made my own world. I kept filling my head with stories and lived there among the characters. In these stories I was always a hero.

I joined Cork children’s library and read book after book about history. There were books on my old hero Napoleon, but also Bismarck, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great. My mind ranged back over centuries, following Alexander over the wind-blasted plains of the Oxus, crossing into Gaul with Caesar’s legions, turning back the invaders at the gates of Rome, dying gloriously at Waterloo. Around this time, my twelfth birthday, my mother gave me a copy of a book about South Africa. She knew I still dreamed of Africa as my place of escape. But Cork library had only a limited selection of books about explorers. This new book was different. It wasn’t about the white men bringing civilisation to the natives. It was about the natives themselves. It would help to set me on a path to Africa.

The book was Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. It told the story of a rural preacher from a place called Zululand and his quest for his son in the distant city of Johannesburg. The preacher was a different kind of hero to those I had wanted to emulate before. He was a humble man and confronted violent injustice in a peaceful way. The book introduced me to a concept called ‘apartheid’ where people were separated from each other on the basis of their skin colour. We did not see many black or coloured people in Cork. Perhaps one or two in the entire course of my childhood. Through Alan Paton I learned about the cruelties of segregation and the struggle of those who were voiceless. There were lines towards the end of the book which I read and re-read, lines I would commit to memory and cherish: But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.

On the last day at St Joseph’s, the Brother let us out early. It was June 1974, and the sky was a rare, perfect blue. We galloped cheering down the wrought-iron stairs to the playground. The Brother told me to take care of myself and to stop in and see him any time I wanted. He was a decent man and had done his best for me but the experience at St Joseph’s had felt like a long grey winter. The experience did, however, make me streetwise. I had gone there as a timorous middle-class boy and emerged with enough cunning to negotiate my way around the bullies. In later life, in distant places I would use the skills I’d developed in the playground to deal with characters far more threatening than Lonergan. I learned the important rules: talk them down. Outwit them. But don’t ever run away from them.

On my last day I could relish the fact that I had survived. And I had three months of the summer ahead before starting secondary school at Presentation College, a hundred yards or so away on the other side of the street. ‘Pres’ drew its pupils from a different social world to that of St Joseph’s. Only a handful of boys in my year at St Joseph’s would cross the road to Pres. It was a private school and most of the parents could never have afforded the fees. Besides, there was a first-class academic education on offer in other schools around the city. What Pres or its rival, Christians, offered was social cachet, the promise that boys would be turned out as young gentlemen ready to take their place among the city’s business elite. In the old days Pres had taken a less voluble line than other schools on the national question. This probably reflected the class origins of many of the pupils whose parents formed the Cork establishment and who would have shivered nervously had the teachers in Pres begun to denounce imperial Britain, though this didn’t stop the writer Sean O’Faolain from leaving school and joining the ranks of the IRA.

There was also a strong hereditary element to Pres. Like many of the other boys who entered Pres that year, I had had uncles and cousins who went to the school. Although my grandfather, Paddy Hassett, had been a revolutionary gunman, he sent his sons to a school that was modelled in many respects on the elitism of the English public school. Unlike in most of the other Cork schools, in Pres they played rugby and cricket. The Gaelic games of hurling and football, which my grandfather loved, were banned. Paddy wanted to give his boys every advantage and his decision to send them to Pres reflected the prestige of the school among the newly emergent Irish middle classes. Heading for a job interview on the South Mall, home to the main banks and insurance companies, there was always the likelihood that the candidate would be facing an old Pres boy on the other side of the desk. If the candidate happened to have played rugby for the Pres first XV his path was virtually assured. And to those who won a Munster Schools Senior Cup medal there was no end of employment possibilities. In this way some less than bright sparks found their passage eased into bountiful jobs.

In the rest of Ireland, Cork city had a reputation for being cliquey and snobbish, a place where your family background and the jobs your parents held were critical markers of social status. Those wearing the Pres school uniform occasionally attracted hostility because of its reputation as a bastion of privilege. One man fought to change that.

The following September I started at Pres and met a man who would change my life. Brother Jerome Kelly terrified the life out of me the first time I saw him. He was stout, balding and wore severe dark-rimmed glasses, of a kind that had gone out of fashion in the late 1960s, but which was still de rigueur among the Irish religious orders. Jerome looked a great deal more frightening than the Brother at St Joseph’s; his black robes flapped as he strode across the playground past the waiting lines of boys, like an immense bird of prey marshalling its victims.

Brother Jerome had grown up on a small farm in the bleak fastnesses of the Beara Peninsula, one of the poorest areas of the country, and he had joined the Brothers immediately after leaving school. The religious life was a traditional route of escape for many boys in the poorer parts of the country. There was a large amount of snobbery attached to urban impressions of religious brothers. The popular belief was that they were all reared in smoky, dark cottages, gorged on bacon and potatoes, regularly beaten senseless by their mountain-man fathers, until such time as they could escape to the city and get good jobs beating the daylights out of us.

Jerome was different. He wasn’t escaping anything, so much as racing to embrace the world. After teacher training he left Ireland to become a missionary in the West Indies. The ignorant chatter among schoolboys was that the brothers were free to beat as much as they wanted on the missions, so that when they came back home they were half savage. In fact mission service had a radicalising effect on the Irish religious orders. Men like Jerome arrived in the West Indies and Africa as the colonial era was coming to an end and nationalist movements were on the rise. Those who came home often found themselves at odds with the stifling conservatism of Ireland. Jerome’s response to the country he found on his return was to try and change the children who entered his school: fill them up with ideas about justice; make them want to change their world.

The initial impression created by his formidable appearance was unfounded. When we filed into the big hall to be welcomed by Jerome he asked rather than told us to sit down, and when he spoke it wasn’t with the declamatory bellow of the staffroom autocrat but with calm assurance. He started to use words like ‘responsibility’ and ‘potential’. I remember being a little shocked. I’d expected nothing more than a list of do’s and don’ts. School was about rules and punishments. Jerome did list the rules – neat uniform, hair an inch above the collar, expulsion for bullying – but most of the talk was about how we should use school to get the best out of ourselves.

I did not immediately distinguish myself. Within a couple of weeks I was in trouble for talking repeatedly in class. In Pres you weren’t beaten by the headmaster for breaking the rules. Jerome did not approve of corporal punishment. He had his own sliding scale of punishments. You might be given detention or extra homework. If the offence was sufficiently serious, parents would be called in or you could be suspended. At the end of the line there was expulsion which good middle-class boys dreaded, for in Cork it was the kind of stain which might tarnish a reputation for ever.

A fortnight after arriving I found myself arraigned before Jerome. My co-accused was the future Ireland and British Lions rugby star, Michael Kiernan. We were thrown out of class and sent to Jerome’s office for talking despite repeated warnings. Jerome was sitting with his arms folded, shaking his head and looking at us as if we’d committed murder. After a few seconds of that baleful glare you not only believed that you’d killed someone but would’ve willingly signed a confession attesting to the fact. Jerome had big presence.

‘Right, gentlemen,’ said Jerome, ‘what have you got to say for yourselves?’

We snivelled something about being sorry and not getting into trouble again.

‘I am sure that’s true,’ he said, ‘but first I have a job for you both.’

It was dark by the time we’d finished cleaning a long section of the Mardyke Walk. Immortalised by Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Sean O’Faolain as the haunt of lovers in his story The Talking Trees, the mile-long thoroughfare ran from the school gates towards the west of the city and parallel to the River Lee, the rugby pitches of Pres and the grounds of the Cork Cricket Club, forming a green band between the river and the road.

With a faint rain falling we stood under the yellow street lights waiting for Jerome. So intimidated were we by his presence that by the time we’d finished, the Mardyke was, in the words of my grandmother, clean enough to eat your dinner from. Jerome smiled at us when he arrived: ‘Now, lads, you’ve made a very useful contribution to society. Off home with ye!’

The clean-up operation was tedious and exhausting but it did not seek to humiliate. And to anybody who’d been on the receiving end of a cane or a leather strap that was a revolutionary concept.