Going back to my roots

When I was little, Ireland was a caravan site in Owenhincha, West Cork and nothing more. I first went to that place with my family, aged three, to the mobile home that my Mayo-born grandmother Madge had recently bought, and I was captivated by the place, with its playground and sweetshop and gaggles of kids playing outside late into the evening. A couple of years later, on our way to the caravan again, we stopped off in Dublin to stay with a family friend. “When are we going to Ireland?” I asked my mum in in the kitchen.

Those holidays were a regular feature of my childhood and for many years in my mind Ireland was all indulgence, freedom, fun and fresh air, though I eventually did get to understand that the country stretched beyond the boundaries of Owenahincha. When I was seven I was taken back to Dublin by my mum and on that trip I was introduced to the Dart and the big grey pillars of Trinity and the busy roads of the city centre. None of this stuff captured my imagination in the way that little coastal town had, though, and it wasn’t until I moved to Dublin myself, some fifteen years later that I really got to understand the city.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my Irishness recently, such as it is, watered down by two generations but bolstered over the years by those holidays, a Catholic education alongside many other second and third generation kids, a year studying Irish literature in Dublin in my early twenties, many boozy days and nights in the Irish pubs of London, and my current little corner in the north of the city, which is full of Irish pubs and accents and newsagents selling every local paper, from Donegal down to Kerry. I’ve been following the discussions and commemorations of the upcoming Easter Rising centenary, feeling some kind of stake in it all, while at the same time wondering what, if anything, gives me the right to have that feeling. You could say that I’m one of those annoying descendants of the diaspora, burrowing around looking for their connection to the old country, their narrative amidst all the bigger, more obvious ones. 

But it’s my nan, Margaret, or Madge, who is the thread running through all of this, the woman who bought that caravan back in the day so that her grandchildren, in her words “would grow to know Ireland and love it.”  She was from Ballina and in 1938, armed with her Leaving Cert, she left Ireland for London to look for work, as so many did; but she remained fierce about her Irishness and about the politics and history and culture of her country. She died last April aged 96 after a spell of dementia, a good innings if ever there was one, and I find myself talking and thinking about her a lot, wanting to explain her to people.

Of course I don’t quite have her fierceness about Ireland, though I certainly have something approaching it about London, and in a strange kind of way I think she played her part in putting it there. I say strange because my nan herself never quite “got” London, never felt as if she fitted in and Ballina was always very definitely home for her. In 2003 she was interviewed for a film made by the Irish Studies centre at London Metropolitan University. It’s called “I Only Came Over for a Couple of Years” and features her and people of her generation talking about their experiences of leaving Ireland and emigrating to Britain. Stories, words, talking, these were Madge’s thing, and her account is sharp, clear and full of vivid detail. She describes her loneliness when she first arrived in London, her bewilderment at the crowds and at the anonymity after coming from a town where you knew everyone. She talks about going to work in High Holborn and the tiny sliver of solace she found when she saw the sign for Mooney’s Irish House.

To some extent this bewilderment with London never went away and Ireland was always there in the background ready to surface in conversation. I studied Joyce and Yeats for my A-Levels and my English teacher was a Scottish-Irish woman whose lessons included long rambling monologues about Irish history, the fight for independence, the lives of Parnell and Michael Collins, the Celtic Revival. These speeches weren’t to everyone’s taste but I loved them and of course I would report all this back to Madge. This gave her an opportunity to press items from her book collection on me and to say things like “Ah, Joyce may have left Ireland, he may have criticised it, but he never wrote a word about anywhere else.” Debate and argument about Ireland had rumbled around me as I grew up, about the rights and wrongs of the actions of Michael Collins and de Valera, about the Troubles, about the north and what was to be done about it all. Madge had made it her duty to be armed with facts and arguments that would back her up in those discussions; she was a voracious reader of pretty much everything but her Irish history library was particularly impressive. And it was during this time as a sixth former that I got my own slightly dewy-eyed grasp on it all.

But despite all this some of my strongest memories of her are to do with London. She learned how to make the most of the city, its public transport, its museums, parks and libraries, its shops, its history. She often took us – me, my siblings, my cousins – up to town, on shopping trips, for wanders through museums or by the river. She loved travelling by bus, in particular on the top deck. One day when we were on a bus together she turned to me and said, “More people should travel on the top of a bus. That Maggie Thatcher should try it – she might see things differently.” (In case it needs spelling out,  she was very definitely not a fan of Maggie Thatcher.)

She turned 80 in March 1999 and as a belated birthday present during my university holidays I took her up to town and bought her lunch. We went to a restaurant on Charing Cross Road, then went for a wander around the National Portrait Gallery. I was meeting a friend in town that evening so she made her way back home on her own. It was of those exhilarating sunny London spring days, the kind of day when the sky spreads out above you, when the idea of going underground seems all wrong and you want to be out and about among it all. So as we walked out of the gallery, although it wasn’t the quickest route, Madge decided she would take the bus to Liverpool Street and then get the train to Highams Park, where she lived.

We had a lovely time that day, chatting, eating, wandering, looking at art, but when she talked about our trip in the following weeks, what kept on cropping up was how much she’d enjoyed that bus journey. I can understand now that it would have been one of those surprising little delights London can offer up, and I can picture the route of the bus: she would have gone up the Strand and along Fleet Street. She would have passed by St Paul’s, normally seen as a flat, faraway feature of the skyline and always somehow more thrilling and technicolour up close. She would have gone through the City, past the big hulking monolith of the Bank of England, before arriving at Liverpool Street and getting her train home.

That story sums up something quite specific about Madge and her relationship with London I think; while she never quite felt that it was her home, she was never afraid of it, at least she never appeared so to me, and was always interested in it. There’s a line I read in The Green Road by Anne Enright recently and it reminded me of her: “Beauty in glimpses and flashes, that is what the soul required. That is the drop of water on the tongue.”  The phrasing is of a kind I can well imagine her using, and she was always very good at finding those glimpses and flashes, even in among the ugly bits and pieces of a city she claimed never to have loved.

When I moved to Dublin in 2003 i certainly felt no great love for London. Growing up in the suburbs, the city proper had offered itself to me only in fragmented bits and pieces, like those trips up to town with my nan. I’d spent four years studying then working in Brighton, a place that felt like a gigantic playground, but in Dublin I got to know the excitement of living in a real city centre, on Capel Street and then North Great George Street. I wandered the streets that I’d read about in Joyce and Yeats and my way home from college took me across the Liffey, where I would often catch a lovely shimmering sunset out to the west. I had a year of writing, thinking, drinking and arguing the toss about books and it was all terribly romantic.

When I came back to London again, I was twenty three and a little lost and directionless. I spent a lot of time in Irish pubs during this period, watching football with my Celtic-supporting friends. I would get involved in pool games and lock-ins and try and impress the punters by knowing all the words to rebel songs and plucking anecdotes from my time in Ireland that I thought proved some kind of gritty authenticity: living on the northside of Dublin, visiting friends in West Belfast, watching the hurling at Casement Park, my heritage in Ballina. Obviously, this stuff makes me cringe now and I doubt I impressed anyone. But I suppose it was a way for me to somehow hang on to that time in Dublin, as I hadn’t really yet figured out a way of being in London, beyond bumming around in temp jobs and getting drunk.

I sort of figured it out in the end though –  got something resembling a proper job, found my niches in Kilburn, then Stoke Newington and now Archway – and these days I love London in a way that can be hard to describe. For me one of the great pleasures of this city is finding beauty in unexpected places – those glimpses and flashes again – the line of a concrete tower block against a blue sky, the flash of a railway bridge across a road, the light catching a building in a certain way in the evening. And now I “get” London, while feeling strangely connected to Ireland up in my little bit of it. The North London Irish presence here jostles pretty amicably with the other immigrant communities in the area and on St Patrick’s day you can feel a kind of manic festivity in the air, with people on the streets, drunk by noon, spilling in and out of the pubs on Holloway Road.  Businesses deck their windows with tricolours and green banners and food shops put out displays of Kimberley biscuits, red lemonade and Barry’s Tea. These are the kind of things that my nan enjoyed hearing about and I miss being able to tell her about them. It has begun to panic me, the thought that the Irish connection in my family is getting weaker, and I’ve started to think crazy things. “We need to move to Ireland and have Irish babies!” I said to my partner a while back, even though in other contexts I’m perfectly happy with my baby-free London existence. It amuses me how these primal instincts around family and roots can surface even when you think you’ve got a perfect handle on it all.  

But I content myself with the Irish boozers of Holloway for now, with their pool tables, jukeboxes, end of the night singsongs. I love these places – they’re sociable, fuss-free, low-key – and I feel very at home in them. In one way, my attachment to the Irish pub is something I certainly did not inherit from Madge – she was not a great drinker and her Irishness away from home was a scholarly and civic-minded business. When she first married my granddad, it was about getting involved in the local parish and local politics; later on in life, when she retrained as a teacher, it was about a belief in education and a sense of responsibility.  It became about getting to grips with her origins – after her retirement she dedicated herself to genealogy, going through the archives, and traced some strands of the family tree back to the 16th century. It was also about studying and understanding the history and culture of her country and sharing it with us through the lend of a James Joyce or Tim Pat Coogan book or an outburst about Sinn Fein at a family gathering. (I’m sad she’s not around for the Easter Rising centenary, to throw herself into all these questions of memory, ownership, power and storytelling being raised by the commemorations.)

But in other ways, my fondness for these big public-spirited spaces does come from her. Though she had no great love for The Pub, she was very good at being out there in the world, at chatting to people at bus stops, in the market or at church. She liked talking and wasn’t scared of an argument or debate. She would always intervene if she thought that people were behaving badly, scolding people for selfishness or casual prejudice. She taught us all many things about getting along in London – how to get about, not be scared, how to look and notice, think about and learn from what you see, how to get angry about it if necessary and do something and how to be kind. And she also taught us how to be excited and thrilled by London, not just by museums and galleries and big grand buildings, but by the ordinary every-day things like sitting on the top of a bus.