BECOMING AN IRISHMAN

I was born in Ireland but brought over to England at the tender age of approximately two-and-a-half (2½). Thus I grew up in England and began to regard myself as English, since I possessed no memories of Ireland. I went to a Catholic school in Aldershot until my tenth year, but when at about that time my maternal grandmother died ... I was transferred to a Protestant Children's Home in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey. With her strictly Catholic mother out of the way (the woman responsible for dragging her over to Ireland when she decided to return home, following the death of her Aldershot-based husband), my mother evidently felt entitled to do with me as she thought best, irrespective of the change of denomination. So, with no other relative around to protect me from such a fate, I was obliged to endure Protestant teaching and schooling for the next seven years, at the end of which time I left high school, in July 1970, with an assortment of CSE's and GCE's (this was before the advent of GCSE's) and was obliged to move to London - first to a hostel in Clapham and then, shortly afterwards, because I loathed the place so much, to my mother's rented accommodation in Finsbury Park, where she was then living with her second husband, a West Indian from St Vincent, whom she had originally met in Aldershot and who didn't take too kindly to my being there, partly, no doubt, because he was one of the reasons which led my mother to dispatch me to a Children's Home in Carshalton Beeches all those years before.

Be that as it may, I hated Finsbury Park, however, and in the New Year moved back to Surrey where, thanks to the provision of a Croydon newspaper by a clerical colleague at the office, I found myself a comfortable little bedsitter in Sutton, not far from Carshalton. Thus I renewed contact with some of my old school friends, and when, eventually, one of them suggested I move in with him at his parent's nearby Wallington address, I gladly accepted the invitation, since, despite its advantages, the seven months of my stay in Sutton from January-July 1971 had been rather lonely and depressing. I suspected that part of his motive for inviting me to live with him was a desire to have regular access to my stereo, since his own record player, being a small mono, was of distinctly inferior quality and he couldn't, at that time, afford a new one. Nonetheless, I felt glad of the opportunity to live-in with a family and have regular company.

I grew to like his family, which included two younger brothers and a younger sister by his father's second marriage, and they evidently grew to like me. For when they moved to a more rural part of Surrey, the following year, I went with them and subsequently settled down to a couple of years in the country, comparatively speaking. Christopher was partly of French descent on his father's side and had more of an aesthetic French temperament than a pragmatic English one. We got on relatively well together, although I was always conscious of a sort of class or cultural divide between us, he being a good deal less well-spoken and well-educated than myself. Nonetheless the paradoxes of our respective fates were such that he was now the eldest son of a private householder in a better part of Surrey, whereas I had never seen my unfortunate father, who died back in Galway of pneumonia in or around his thirty-eighth year sometime after I had been taken to England (although he had made one or two futile efforts to fetch me back from Aldershot, even visiting my mother in person on at least one occasion prior to her mother's death), and was accustomed to dependence on other people for shelter - first at a Children's Home, then at a hostel, then at lodging houses, including my mother's flat, and now with his family.

But my dependence on his family wasn't to last beyond 1973. For just before Christmas of that year I was told that there wasn't enough room in the house for everyone and that, as Christopher's two younger brothers and sister were growing up, I would have to seek alternative accommodation. Thus, with scant prospects of suitable accommodation in Merstham or surrounding areas, I had no option, once again, but to return to my mother's slummy lodgings in Finsbury Park, reluctantly moving in to them early in the New Year. In all, I had been away exactly three years, and it seems to me, in retrospect, that she herself was part of the reason why I had to leave my lodgings in Merstham, since on the one occasion, during 1973, when she paid me a visit she did her best to ingratiate herself with Christopher's father via his children, and this must have caused his stepmother some alarm and contributed towards my being asked to leave shortly afterwards.

Be that as it may, if my previous dislike of Finsbury Park had been strong, my subsequent dislike of it, following a spell in rural Surrey, bordered on deep disgust and loathing, and it wasn't long before I began to feel the first needles in my scalp of the tension depression to which, with my high-strung ascetic nature, I have since grown so painfully accustomed! I wanted desperately to return to Surrey but, unfortunately, such contacts as I once had in the Sutton-Carshalton-Wallington areas had gradually been eroded during my stay in remote Merstham, and I accordingly knew that there was no-one I could now depend on to sound-out the accommodation situation in my absence. Even the office colleague who had previously supplied me with the 'Croydon Advertiser' had in the meantime left the office, and I felt that travelling down to Surrey myself would prove both costly and futile, since the chances were that any vacant rooms I could afford would have been snapped up long before I got there and sounded-out the local papers, or that I would have had to wait in line to view a room on a different day from when I originally phoned about it, thereby necessitating a repeat trip, and so on. Thus I felt I had no option but to look for alternative accommodation in north London, and after a few desperate months at my mother's flat, which overlooked one of the busiest and noisiest roads in the area, the ever-busy Stroud Green Road, I moved into a relatively cheap bedsitter in nearby Crouch End - the first of several such bedsitters I was destined to inhabit there.

All this time I was growing conscious of a change coming over me. For I was not now simply an English youth with an Irish name, as I had previously somewhat foolishly and even naively considered myself to be, but an impersonal outsider or stranger in north London with an Irish name, and this was already a step in the direction of altering the psychology of my ethnic allegiance. There were tens of thousands of Irish people in the Borough of Haringey and consequently no reason for anyone of English descent who was familiar with my name, from letters, parcels, election cards, library tickets, etc., to regard me as an Englishman. Overnight I was just one more Irishman and, as such, a 'paddy', an outsider, an immigrant, and, paradoxically, a 'catholic' all over again.

But this didn't dawn on me all at once, nor alter my writings to any appreciable extent. For I still wrote more as an Englishman than as an Irishman for several years - certainly up until 1981. The solitude imposed on me by an intense dislike of the urban environment in which I was trapped gradually led me to feel increasingly isolated from the past, however, and thus to identify more with the solitary Irishmen I saw about me than with the English, who were usually in company. I even began to see myself as an immigrant, though I had spent most of my life in England, having been brought across the Irish Sea while still an infant, and was in no way responsible for having brought myself to England. Still, I did not feel that English people would regard me as one of them, nor that they would want to befriend me, especially with constant news of Provisional IRA bombings, shootings, and the like, whether in Northern Ireland or elsewhere, which did nothing to improve one's image but only served, on the contrary, to further isolate and alienate one!

Another factor besides isolation from my past which contributed to the change in my psychology was the fairly frequent letters I was now receiving from one of my Galway aunts, a lifelong spinster, who wrote about family affairs and also put me in touch with a certain Mrs Connolly, an old friend of hers, who lived in nearby Palmers Green. Although I didn't visit Mrs Connolly more than three or four times a year, the fact that she was the only person I ever visited doubtless contributed to my becoming an Irishman, since she would generally speak to me of Irish affairs, both personal and public, and thereby slightly condition my psychology. Add to this the fact that, for a number of years, some of my immediate neighbours have been Irish and that I have lived in fairly close proximity to Irish people ever since moving to Crouch End, and the gradual shift of ethnic or national allegiance on my part becomes more understandable.