Heaps of Trouble (3 page)

Re-entering through the hall door into the darkness, I fumbled my way into the kitchen and opened the connecting door to the shop. The street lighting coming through the large shop windows bathed the room with a soft yellow glow and cast deep shadows everywhere.

Christ, I thought, as a moment of panic hit me. I mustn't forget to reclaim Gina's letters, carefully hidden under the floorboards. That was another problem I would have to address. But not right now. There were other issues that demanded my attention before I let in the heartache and the pain that had resulted from losing the only person I believed I could ever love.

As I settled myself down on the floor using the workmen's crate as my table and began to lay out my evening meal, a glint of red on the mantelpiece caught my eye. Heaving myself off the floor, I retrieved what turned out to be a cheap child's bracelet. I was amazed that the workmen had not disturbed it and, more significantly, that the parents not taken it with them. I turned it in my hands and cleaned off the builder's dust, realising that it had remained in that same position for the past seven years. The father had given it to my sister one day, but the mother had turned on him, claiming that he was spoiling her just as he had spoiled me. So she made Catherine take it off and leave it on the mantelpiece until such time as the mother felt Catherine deserved it. Well, she needn't have bothered, because a few weeks later Catherine was dead.

As I twirled it in my hands, my meal completely forgotten, back came the memories that I had tried to push away. My chest began to itch, a reaction that sometimes accompanied the remembered smells of burning flesh and hair, which were never too far away whenever the memories resurfaced. I strongly resisted the urge to scratch the scars that covered my chest, because if I opened them up they could become infected again.

For the first time in seven years I decided to let the past back in. Maybe it was a fitting time and place to confront my demons. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall of what had once been our kitchen. Dim shadows danced and flickered around the room, caused by pedestrians passing the shop windows and interrupting the yellow glow from the streetlights. I closed my eyes and let my thoughts go back to the very beginning.

Who was responsible for Catherine's death? The father, the mother, myself? Or a combination of all three?

So many questions to ask the dancing shadows and ghosts of the room. Was I the end result of the choices made by one, or both, of my parents? Was I my own individual person, capable of making a future for myself; or had I inherited the repercussions from their pasts?

Could I say that I had enjoyed my childhood in this house? Was I mentally capable of reaching back into the past and laying it out before me? I realised that if I could face these issues then maybe, on the morrow, I could leave what had once been my home and face the future with strength and determination.

My parents were married at some time during the month of December 1954. Now you may find it strange that I never knew their wedding date, but the simple explanation is that I have never witnessed them celebrating or talking about it. Or maybe they did at the beginning, but by the time I reached an age that I understood the words ‘wedding anniversary' they had scrapped any celebrations that reminded them of the event.

I am not suggesting that they were always unhappy with each other; it's just that I have great difficulty in remembering a time when they
were
happy. Perhaps they simply succumbed to the hardship that was survival during the 1950s and 1960s – hardship of which my mother continually reminded me.

In all of the photographs of them taken together before they were married they certainly made a handsome couple. The mother, elegant and slim, with long, blond hair cascading over her shoulders in the Garbo fashion of the post-war years. Highlighting an oval face set off with high cheekbones and a dazzling smile that portrayed an Irish country girl's innocence. The father displayed a stance that spoke of public school and a military career. His features strongly resembled those of the film idol Kirk Douglas, and more than once he used this similarity to its full potential with the ladies.

My mother was born of good Irish farming stock in county Cork in 1921, and was the second youngest of eleven children, of whom six were girls and five boys. I came to know their father as ‘D'auld Paddy' (although he was generally referred to as ‘Grand Pappy') and he seemed, to me, the epitome of the landed Irish farming gentry. Well over 6 feet tall, heavy-set, with a frame to match, dressed always in a dark suit complete with buttoned waistcoat and a fob watch. A black bowler hat perched on his thick mane of greying hair and set off a round face that was always close to smiling.

In typical Irish country fashion one son got shipped off to the priesthood and the two eldest sisters were deported to a local nunnery, ending up in a branch in Australia. This was probably D'auld Paddy's way of guaranteeing his place in heaven, while at the same time depleting some of his stock. Two brothers became insurance agents in the county, and the remainder of his children all married into local farming families. Together, they made up a sort of farmers' Mafia that owned a considerable whack of land in the area, with D'auld Paddy as the unofficial Don. All in all, D'auld Paddy must have been quite pleased with his lot; but, as with any large family, there was the usual bitterness between the brothers and sisters as to who got what, and who married whom. Especially on the part of the two brothers who became insurance agents and claimed that they should have got the home farm, or at least some part of it.

My mother was the exception. At the age of twenty she got on so well with her father that he brought her to the local train station, shoved a twenty-pound note into her hand (together with a one-way train ticket) and told her never to return. That, as far as I know, is how she ended up in London around the end of the Second World War, by then a trained nurse. Where, as she said herself, ‘I wore the map of Ireland on my face and ran straight into the clutches of your father.'

About my father's family background I am a bit more knowledgeable – or perhaps they were a bit more open in the telling. My grandfather was born Claus, and at the age of thirteen he fled Liverpool (where he had been born) and ran off to join the merchant navy. His voyage of the seven seas ended in a bad accident, which necessitated the replacement of part of his skull with a metal plate. After spending a year in hospital recuperating, he was tossed out of the merchant navy. Now penniless, Claus met up by chance with his brother George in Liverpool at the outbreak of the First World War, during September 1914.

One day shortly after their fond reunion the brothers were sitting around discussing the ‘war to end all wars', and contemplating the propaganda that the government was broadcasting. It was being stated that the war would be over by Christmas, which they both agreed was a load of rubbish. They deliberated how to make some money from this bit of world conflict – and the idea they came up with was quite simple.

Regardless of how long the war lasted, the army would need something for the soldiers to sleep on. Why not forget the killing objectives…and just give the soldiers mattresses? So they hopped on a train and travelled to London where they met a bemused junior procurement clerk at the War Office. After explaining their idea, they were able to sign a short contract. Short, since (as
everybody
knew) ‘the war will be over by Christmas. What, what, old boy'. By the time they had set up and delivered their first consignment, some bright spark at the War Office decided that perhaps the war just
might
drag on a little bit longer than anticipated. Therefore a repeat order was issued – however this time it was substantially larger than the first.

George and Claus were now convinced that the war was going to continue for several more years. Therefore, they also surmised, the supply of their main ingredient (feathers) would soon start to dry up; particularly since theirs was not the only business supplying mattresses to the army. They decided to source their own feathers elsewhere, to insure that their little enterprise could continue to flourish. And that is how the Irish connection came into being.

During their first trip to Ireland they succeeded in filling their quota of feathers for the new contract and arranged for direct shipment to their factory in Liverpool, where work was accelerating to meet the heavy demands of the War Office. It was on one of their subsequent visits to Carrick-on-Suir, in southern Ireland, that my grandfather met my grandmother and (after a suitable courting period) they married. That is how my father came on the scene, along with his two other brothers, Stan and Tom.

By the end of the Great War in 1918 George and Claus had become multi-millionaires. On the day my father was born Claus enrolled him at Stonyhurst, an English public school. At the age of seven he was deposited at the school doors for what he later described as the worst days of his life. It was a period that he rarely talked about and it was only from the odd snippet that I was able to piece together the family's progression into the hotel business, which happened in the late 1920s. Sometimes my father would talk about spending summer holidays in one or more of the many hotels that Claus had bought around England. If the telling of these tales was within my mother's earshot, she would quickly put paid to them by shouting at him to ‘stop showing off to the child and stop trying to act the big fellow'. The mother's reaction halted further stories and gave him an excuse (not that he ever needed any) to head off to the local pub or the Workman's Club across the street.

After he left Stonyhurst my father immediately went on to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and was just in time to join up as a captain at the outbreak of the Second World War. By 1946, when he was demobbed, he had somewhere along the line been elevated to the rank of major. Once again, the seven years that he served in the British army (described by himself as the period during which he ‘assisted Hitler in losing the war') were never spoken about at home. It was after the war, and in England, that my parents met and then returned to Dublin, coinciding with the downfall of the Heaps family empire – an empire that by this time centred on gambling and booze, in that particular order.

During the Second World War Claus sold up all of his hotels in England and invested a lot of his money in war bonds. At war's end he moved to Ireland (allegedly with the intention of trying to set up his three sons in business) and purchased a string of betting shops across the country. At one stage he had eleven in Dublin alone. The development of the betting-shop empire coincided with Claus hitting the bottle. To this day I know absolutely nothing about betting shops, bookies or gambling – and, from what I can gather, neither did Claus or his three sons. If they did, they only learnt the business after all of the betting shops had gone bankrupt.

Afterwards my uncle Stan continued as a track bookie and eventually made a successful livelihood from that profession, in spite of a shaky start. Sometimes my father would clerk for him, but these times were few and far between, for whenever the pair of them headed off to the dog track together, inevitably they ended up at a poker game. They would stay out until they had managed to fleece the unlucky sods that had suggested the game in the first place. Add darts, rings and snooker to their list of talents (always played within reach of a bar counter) and you can see why their two wives tried to keep them apart as much as they could.

Alcoholism was one of the main contributing factors that led to the downfall of Claus' empire and the day after he went broke, for some very strange reason, he decided to quit drinking and smoking. The end result was that he and my grandmother moved in to live with us, which put the mother on tablets for a week and sparked off one of the many rows my parents would have on the subject. Years later the mother still brought it up in arguments, declaring, ‘Didn't I tell you Ron, that mother of yours would be the ruination of us?'

Having the grandparents living with us placed the household under a cloud of gloom and a permanent stress level that affected the mother more than the rest of us. The grandparents moved into one of the two upstairs bedrooms, which they converted into a self-contained flatlet, and then proceeded to contaminate the upper level with strong cooking smells. My mother would scream at my grandmother if she so much as ventured into our kitchen – something that she liked to do on a daily basis, to check on her son's child and to ensure that my mother was feeding me properly. The strain of living with what she described as ‘an interfering bitch of a mother-in-law, watching her every step' tended to stretch the mother's nerves to breaking point. Not to mention the fact that my father was spending most of his time in the Workman's Club, boozing and playing snooker. On one occasion, when having a row with the mother, he even announced that he had tuberculosis, to add to her woes.

Being an active child, I decided one fine morning to dismantle the gas stove with an adjustable spanner I had found. This, for my mother, was the final straw in a world that must have appeared to be falling down around her ears.
The next day I was marched around the corner, up past Keogh Square, and deposited into Golden Bridge School to enjoy Sister Charlotte's ‘low babies' class. Every day we could hear Sister Ann (through the partition that separated the classrooms) screaming at the kids, with the interruption of slapping noises followed by crying. This struck terror into us all and we thanked God that we were not in her class.

Golden Bridge Convent (as it was officially known) also had an orphanage, situated at the rear of the convent and hidden behind railings and gates that the day pupils were never allowed to venture beyond. This only contributed to the horror stories that we told each other about the goings-on inside the place. I believe my father knew that things were not right at the convent. First of all he hated the nuns with a passion. Secondly, since he held the position of Home Assistance Officer for the area, he was also in charge of the dispensary centre at Keogh Square, which had two doctors and several nurses working from it. It stood to reason that the doctors closest to the orphanage had to come from the Keogh Square centre, which was only about five hundred yards away from the school.

One particular evening the father came straight home from work in a foul temper, without first having visited the Workman's Club (definitely a deviation from his usual habit). I was sitting, unnoticed, on the floor in a corner of the kitchen and so I overheard their conversation, which frightened me so much I did not dare mention it again to anybody.

‘Those bloody nuns, the lot of them should be placed against a wall and shot.'

‘Shush Ron, somebody will hear you.'

‘I don't care if the whole street hears me,' said the father, his voice rising, causing the mother to rush over and close the connecting door between the kitchen and the shop, so that the assistant couldn't overhear.

‘Two of the sanctimonious bitches came into my dispensary today, practically hauling a little girl between them, and without so much as a “by your leave” they barged into my office and demanded to see Doctor Dillon.'

‘Ron, calm down, what was wrong with that?'

‘I felt sorry for the poor little girl, who was as skinny as a lath, so I called Dillon into my office and he carried out a preliminary examination on her.'

The father was shaking with temper and, noticing this, the mother went over to one of the kitchen cupboards, extracted a bottle of whiskey, poured out a liberal amount and handed the glass to him. He continued, after taking a healthy swig from the glass.

‘The bloody nuns refused to leave my office as Dillon carried out the examination. One of the bitches even had the gall to turn around and, in a sweet, singsong voice as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, announce that poor little Mary must have had a bad fall. Bad fall? The lying twisters, I could see that the little girl had been beaten black and blue by one of them. Her little face was swollen, she had two black eyes and her legs and arms were black and blue with bruises. Dillon was furious, he told them that the girl would have to be hospitalised for X-rays, which gave them such a shock I thought they were going to faint. “Oh no, no, Doctor,” said one of the nuns, “we couldn't possibly allow that, the Reverend Mother would not be at all happy. All we want you to do is to give us some medication and we will look after her back at the orphanage.” “This little girl is going to St Vincent's hospital,” Dillon told them in no uncertain terms as he called an ambulance.'

The mother just sat there staring up at him as he finished the whiskey and refilled his glass.

‘Of course they refused point-blank to leave her alone at any time in my office, in case the little girl said anything to us, and as soon as the ambulance arrived the two of them climbed into the back with her. And do you know what? They had the cheek to say to me when they were leaving,' and his voice began to rise again, ‘“We'll say a prayer for you and the good doctor.” Can you imagine that? The bloody murdering twisters were going to say a prayer for us, while the two-faced feckers are killing little children behind closed doors and, what's more, being paid by the government to do so. Well, first thing in the morning, I'm going to report the lot of them to the RSPCC.