The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll (10 page)

He has an explanation for the hard work, other than the satisfaction you can achieve from doing a job well.

‘Somewhere in my mind, I’m convinced that I’m lazy, that I’d rather be on the couch watching television. And because I know that, I work doubly hard to prove I’m not lazy.

‘So when I was in Jeyes I wanted to run the factory. If I see something, in any business, I try and sort out a problem.’

Meanwhile his relationship with Doreen was moving forward. Brendan says it had its own momentum. ‘We grew to be great friends. And when I joined a football club, Doreen got on with the other players’ girlfriends. It was all cosy, and everyone we knew seemed to be getting married all of a sudden. And before we knew what was happening, we were getting married too.’

Brendan, heavily prompted by his mother, went to see a priest to make his confession, with the idea that his soul would be scrubbed clean for the start of his new married life.

‘But instead I ended up getting into an argument with the priest. He’d asked me to confess how much I drank, and I told him I didn’t really drink much at all, which was true. But he insisted I was lying and I should confess all. I was fuming. And that was me done with confessing.’

The wedding itself wasn’t the wondrous day he’d have hoped for.

‘I remember thinking it didn’t feel like magic. But then, I couldn’t picture life without Doreen either. And it wasn’t that there was someone else in my life. She was the business.

‘I also remember panicking a bit, thinking, “What if this isn’t real love, it’s more a brother/sister love? And what if someone bumps into me in the street in five years’ time, and I suddenly fall in love . . .?”

‘But I reconciled myself and reminded myself that I had made a promise.’

Brendan and Doreen, both aged 19, announced their wedding and, on 18 July 1975, they walked down the aisle of St Canice’s Church in Finglas.

Brendan had told his mother that the Archbishop of Dublin would be joining the couple in Holy Matrimony. She laughed. This was of course another of Brendan’s wind-ups. Except that it wasn’t. The Archbishop did indeed perform the ceremony.

Maureen O’Carroll was delighted. And she would drop it into every conversation for months to come. However, his mammy wasn’t convinced the relationship would work out.

‘She felt it could go either way. My mother wasn’t sure if we were going through life at the same speed. She’d say, “Opportunity is a train that goes in a circle. And it keeps coming round. But it never stops. And the only way you can get on that train is to jump on it. But you can’t jump with a weight on your back. Whoever is with you will have to jump by themselves. And someday, whoever is with you will have to jump on that train.

‘“That’s the way it will happen, Brendan. I hope that Doreen will jump with you.”’

Would Doreen jump?

He’s a Lucky God

THERE was no doubt that if Brendan could see a train going past headed towards opportunity, he’d leap onto it.

Now aged 21, he and Doreen were renting a house in Donaghmede, North Dublin.

‘I reckoned I would buy it when a mate who owned it emigrated. But at this time, you had to have a third of the price for a deposit and to have been saving it for four years with the bank.

‘However, a pal who worked for the Corporation said he could get me a Corporation loan. The house was nine thousand quid and he said he’d fix this up, no problem.’

But there
was
a problem.

‘The next week when we met up he said he couldn’t get me a loan. I asked why and he said, “Because you’ve already got a mortgage.”

‘“What?”

‘“Yes, you own a house in Finglas that you’re paying up.”

‘It was my mother’s house, of course. And I offered to pay off the loan on my mother’s but I was told that as a citizen you can only get a Corporation loan once, it was designed to give people a start on the ladder.

‘So I told me mammy the story and said, “What shall we do?”

‘And she came back, immediately, with, “Here’s what you do. You and Doreen move in here.” Of course, I had mixed feelings about this. So I said to me mam, “Look, I don’t want to stay here. I want to move up. And when I move up I want you to move up with us.”

‘She asked where I was planning to move to and I told her about the dream house in Ashbourne, seven miles up the road from Finglas, but a world away.

‘I said, “Look, Mam, I want us to live in a house with central heating. We’ve only got one fire in this house.”

‘“Well, Jaysus, I’m with you, Brendan.”

‘So we put the house up for sale and got twenty-one thousand pounds for it, putting the whole lot into the new house, at Ninety-Two Deer Park, with underfloor heating, the lot. And a very low mortgage.’

The mammy and son – and his new wife – in the same house? Well, it didn’t, as you would expect, run entirely smoothly.

‘My mam did her own thing but there were times when she and Doreen were at loggerheads.

‘In the early days it was tough because I would come home and me mam would say, “There’s your dinner.” And then Doreen would come in from work later, cook, and ask me, “Why are you not eating your dinner?” So I used to eat both.’

They all managed to coexist, the biggest downside being Brendan’s expanding girth.

‘And I got to talk to my mother more and more. We had great discussions.’

Brendan and his mammy would still argue ferociously. ‘But not about anything trivial. It was always about something major.’

The family triangle had moved up in the world, but the income had to support that. And Brendan, now 21, badly wanted a career beyond waiting tables.

‘One of the things I did shortly after I got married was to try and become a farmer. So I rented out some acreage in North County Dublin and began to grow things.

‘I knew from the hotel business that the most difficult part of being a chef was preparing the vegetables, so I bought myself a peeler and peeled the potatoes for the hotel. And I also did ready-prepared vegetables such as sprouts, chopped carrots and turnips, the sort of things you can buy in supermarkets now.

‘It was one of the nicest jobs I ever had, out in the field in the summer, delivering the produce to the hotels, and I loved watching everything grow, picking the celery or whatever at the right time.

‘But at the end of the year I did all the sums and broke even. Talk about naive. I didn’t realise that most businesses struggle to survive the first year and to break even was pretty good. I had the ideas, but not the wherewithal to make it all work.’

He had to make it all work. Doreen announced she was pregnant. Brendan was thrilled at the idea of becoming a father. But now the pressure was on him to provide.

His next venture was into the world of publishing.

‘I got a job selling advertising with a company called
Soccer Reporter
and they produced a football magazine. But we also had the contract with the Irish Football Association to sell advertising into their 15,000 programmes, which we’d make and give over for nothing, but we’d get all the advertising revenue.’

Brendan loved the challenge.

On 23 February 1979, Doreen gave birth to a son, whom the couple decided would be called Brendan. But the tiny little boy was born with hydrocephalus spina bifida.

‘The doctors said, “Your baby is in The Holy Angels’ Ward.” They had had to operate on him while he was still in the womb, to remove fluid from the brain. But every time they removed fluid, it would damage him. As a result, he was born blind. Then the next thing we discovered was that he was paralysed, and I remember kneeling and begging God to take him – for selfish reasons, because I didn’t think I could cope. I didn’t even want to see him because he had no longer become the baby I had pictured in my head. Then the doctors let me see him. I saw he was lying on his side with tape running down his back covering the spine, and his left foot was badly turned and his head swollen. God love him, he was a mess.

‘Then a voice behind me declared, “He’s a beautiful child, Brendan.” I said, “He doesn’t look so bad.” The doctor let me put my two hands into the incubator and hold Brendan, who had the biggest blue eyes I’d ever seen. And he
was
beautiful. Just beautiful. I held his little hands and of course bravado kicked in. And I said, “Well, when can I have him home?” And the doctor said, “Mr O’Carroll, you’ll never have him home. Brendan could live for three days, three weeks, three months. But I hope for your sake it’s three days. And if he ends up an angel in God’s garden, he’s a lucky God.”’

A day later, Brendan, who doesn’t believe in organised religion but does believe in a God, prayed. ‘I was in the Shamrock Lodge, went into a cubicle in the toilet and cried. I got on my knees and prayed God would take this child because I couldn’t cope with the baby and the fear that Doreen would never walk again.’

Doreen had had two epidurals, and still had no feeling in her legs. She was also having dreadful dreams about the Devil trying to pull her out of bed. Brendan feared his wife was going to die.

On the third day, the doctor announced, ‘Mr O’Carroll, I have bad news for you, your son died at three o’clock.’

He said it, but can see this may make him look callous. Yes, Brendan replied ‘You frightened the life out of me. I thought it was going to be something really serious.’

He was joking. It was his only way of coping. Brendan was absolutely devastated. He now shudders at the memory.

‘And when God did take him, it was my fault and I thought, “Oh, Jesus. What did I do to deserve that?” But you see I had prepared in my mind the white picket fence, swing in the garden, taking him to the zoo. I had all these things planned and all the plans went out the window. And I couldn’t find peace in myself.’

The doctor suggested Brendan told his wife the tragic news. But he couldn’t, at first.

‘But then I finally told her Brendan was dead. We had a mutual cry. A few days later, Doreen began to walk again.’

His world in turmoil, Brendan left the magazine. There was now an incredible strain on the marriage. Doreen was struggling with a deep depression that was to last six months.

‘We nearly had a major falling out. It was so hard. I was working my guts out and coming home to complete chaos, and I felt I couldn’t take it any more. I had to explain that I was feeling that way because I’d lost a son too, and I, finally, wanted the right to mourn, to focus on my grief.

‘One morning, Doreen woke up glowing, a changed woman. She’d had an incredible dream where this nun came around carrying in her arms what seemed like a bunch of flowers, or sometimes a baby. And Doreen said, “Brendan, everything’s going to be okay.” From that moment, she never looked back.’

The Mammy’s Final Bow

Brendan
had been trying a range of jobs. He’d returned to waiting, had a go at window-cleaning; he did whatever he could to earn money. Nothing lasted long. Then, on 14 September 1979, Doreen O’Carroll gave birth to a gorgeous brown-eyed little girl. The couple named her Fiona, after Brendan’s sister.

The new arrival stretched the family purse further.

‘I was sitting out in the back garden one afternoon, reading a newspaper and wondering what to do. I’d sold my car and bought a van, thinking it might be useful. Just then, Doreen came out and said, “We’ve no money.”

‘“But you’ve got the unemployment benefit. I gave it to you on Thursday.”

‘“It’s all gone.”

‘“Shit.”

‘So she went back inside and I had this idea. I picked up the phone and rang the
Irish Independent
newspaper and asked for the circulation section. A voice came on and I asked who the boss was while I could hear the machines going in the background. I got the answer “Tommy Curran”. So I asked for Tommy and this voice came on the line.

‘“Hello Tommy, it’s Brendan O’ Carroll.”

‘“Who?”

‘“Brendan. Brendan O’ Carroll. You asked me to give you a shout if you needed any labourers.”

‘“Oi did?”

‘“Sure, you did. But listen, if there’s nothing going don’t worry about it.”

‘“Oh well, I don’t want to let you down.”

‘“Don’t worry about it . . .”

‘“Look, I’m all right for tonight, but ring Bob Naylor in the
Sunday World
.”

‘So I did. And said, “Bob, it’s Brendan O’ Carroll. Tommy said to give you a ring about some work.”

‘“Can you operate a saddle-stitcher?”

‘Now, I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. “Sure I can.”

‘“Well, I’ll see you in here at seven o’clock.”

‘I turned up, and Bob explained there was work going on the collating machine already. Would I mind stacking pallets for the time being?

‘I said, “No, not at all.” Stacking pallets was easy. So I stacked and I was fast. I worked hard. And all the time I was watching the bloke work the saddle-stitcher, the machine that held the papers together. I realised it was all about how you fed the machine, fanned the paper, and so forth.

‘Later that night Bob said to me, “Right we’re puttin’ you on the saddle-stitcher.”