From Bray to Eternity Read online

I went straight over to my mother and told her the good news. She already knew as she had been over to the hospital before me. I left David with my parents and went straight back to the Rotunda where I was allowed to see Annette and the baby for a short time. Even though it was so soon after giving birth, I remember thinking how great Annette looked. She was feeding Gina without any bother and was completely relaxed. She had wanted to feed all our children, but when she started with David she’d found it difficult at first. She’d persisted and succeeded and now she looked expert at the task. Annette was delighted to see me and told me later that she could not wait to tell me we had a new baby daughter.

  Later that day I went and told Annette’s family the good news. During Annette’s stay in hospital my mother helped me with David and I visited Annette every day, collecting David in the evening and returning to the North Strand. After David was asleep, I cleaned and decorated the house in the hope and anticipation that Annette would be home for Christmas. We had to plead with the doctors to let Annette out on Christmas Eve. If she did not get out then she would be in the hospital all over Christmas. It was only at the last minute that Annette was released and after equipping the new baby with presents for her big brother, a banana and a car, I collected Annette by taxi.

  We went home on the afternoon of Christmas Eve to a house over-decorated with trees, lights, tinsel and a plastic crib. This time we did not stop at a church for a Christening but made plans to have a family get-together and Christening early in the New Year.

  It was the first year that we stayed in our own house on Christmas Day, and, as Annette had been in hospital and I had no time to shop and cook, my mother had cooked a piece of ham and a small turkey for us. I was to collect them on Christmas Eve night, after we’d got settled in with the children and put them to bed. Every thing was going great: Annette was overjoyed with the house and the decorations, the two babies could not have been better and they went down without a bother. I then went to Dominick Street to collect the meat for Christmas Day.

  Everyone was in great mood when I got there, all delighted that everything had gone so well with the birth and that Annette had got out for Christmas. The mood was intoxicating and very soon I’d agreed to go over to the Seven Stars Bar with my father and brother for one drink. That one drink turned out to be more like four or five, with the result that I was not home until after midnight. Some people never learn from their mistakes. Again I had let Annette down at a very vulnerable time for her. Once more Annette found the grace to forgive me with dignity. But I was running out of rope.

  Christmas Day as I remember it went exceptionally well. In the afternoon our neighbours, Sally, Johnny and Dolores, dropped in to see the new arrival and brought presents. We just relaxed in front of the TV with a glass or two of wine, looking in every now and then on David in his cot and Gina in her Moses’ basket, just recently vacated by David. We went to bed early, both of us exhausted as Annette was still recuperating after the birth. We did not go visiting on Stephen’s Day, but Annette’s mother came down to us for a while. She was delighted with her new granddaughter.

  I had had a few days off from work for Christmas but soon it was time to return and leave Annette alone with the two babies. My new job was further away from home so it was not possible for me to come home at lunch hour as I had done when I was with Trux just across the road. Without knowing it at the time, this situation proved to be a turning point in the relationship between Annette and my mother.

  I related earlier the somewhat shaky start to the relationship between my mother and Annette. It had improved considerably since then, but now that relationship really blossomed. Annette said to me years later, after my mother had died, that over the years she’d felt more like a daughter than a daughter-in-law. I believe it was during this time that those feelings began to develop.

  Annette’s mother had gone back to work in O’Dea’s since Bill’s death, as she still had a young family to support. This meant she was not free to help Annette with the babies as much as she would have liked to. But my mother was free as she did not work outside the home. She was able to help whenever Annette wanted her to. After an initial hesitancy to ask, Annette got more comfortable with my mother, with the result, my mother used come down to the North Strand two or three times a week to help Annette and give her a break from the children. When we wanted to go out in the evening, which was not very often, my mother would also baby-sit for us. And all the while during this time Annette and my mother were bonding like mother and daughter.

  Annette had her hands full and as we had two babies under two, we had to be careful she did not become pregnant quite so soon again, so when our love life resumed, we decided we would practice birth control, but with Annette’s moral values, the pill or condoms were excluded. We had to read up on “the safe period” and other methods approved by his Holiness. After trying to cope with these “approved” ways of making love for a while we were both frustrated. We gradually went back to being spontaneous, and we got away with it for a while. But then, in early 1973, Annette learned she was pregnant again. Despite the fact it would mean three babies under four we were delighted.

  The one problem a new baby presented was space. We only had one bedroom in the North Strand and it was already a little crowded with the double-bed and the cot, which David and Gina were still small enough to sleep in together. We knew we now had a decision to make. We could open the attic space in the roof or we could move. We loved living in the North Strand and were reluctant to move at first, but after talking it over and taking everything into consideration, including the lack of a safe play area when the children got a bit older as we were in a narrow lane with an increasing amount of traffic coming through it, we very reluctantly decided to look for a new house.

  When we eventually told our neighbours we were going to move because Annette was pregnant again, Sally was very sorry to hear it. She regaled us with stories about how her mother and father had brought up ten children in her house, which was the same size as ours and she could see no reason why we could not raise three in the same space. When we told our families that Annette was pregnant again, and we’d waited a while to do so, the reaction, especially from my mother, while not disapproval was laced with a concern that I should have given Annette a bit more time before making her pregnant again.

  We started looking at the adverts in the papers for new houses in the many estates beginning to mushroom all around the city. We spent many a weekend taking bus trips to the various building sites to view a wide range of houses, at a wide range of prices, most of them out of our reach. Not only had we to buy a new house, but we had to sell No. 7 Clinches Court as well. After the trouble we had in buying it we knew that would not be easy.

  But a solution was at hand. Annette’s brother Liam had worked in the print shop at Guinness brewery from 1965 until the end of 1971 when he took advantage of a redundancy offer to pursue his first love, music, and to travel. Towards the end of 1972, having spent some time in Greece, Liam returned home and resumed his relationship with his girlfriend, Mary Wall. Mary and Liam married in April 1973. Knowing we wanted to sell Clinches Court and as they were now married and renting a house, Liam and Mary offered to buy it. One reason being, Mary was from Clontarf and she wanted to stay near her family.

  Their offer presented us with a dilemma. At the time Liam approached us about buying the house we had seen a house in Tallaght we wanted to buy, but we needed a deposit of £1500 which we did not have. We had put our house up for sale, with an asking price of enough to pay off the mortgage and have £1500 to cover the deposit but so far we had no takers.

  As Annette’s pregnancy progressed and with no sign of a buyer, it looked like we would be staying in Clinches Court. Liam and Mary continued to ask about buying it. But while we had no difficulty in asking the high price for the house on the open market we felt that if we were selling to family we should lower it, which if we wanted to buy in Tallaght we could not do. There would also
be a problem with Liam and Mary getting a loan as Liam was not working in a normal job though he was making some money as a musician. How it came about I do not know, but as they wanted us to sell to them and we all knew the loan would be a problem, a somewhat unorthodox solution was reached – Liam and Mary would give us £1500 pounds, we would pay the deposit on the house in Tallaght and when we moved out of Clinches Court they would move in and continue to pay the mortgage. Unorthodox in the extreme and only workable if we trusted each other implicitly. We drew up an agreement between us which years later was “legalised” by a solicitor. When he was drafting the “proper” document he remarked that he had never come across anything like our little arrangement before. It worked for us and when Liam and Mary moved in they opened up the attic making a large new bedroom with a New York style studio apartment look about it. I would now venture to suggest Clinches Court is worth more than our house in Tallaght.

  Our time in Clinches Court had been very happy and we left with many happy memories of the start of our marriage and young family. We hoped that this would continue in our new home.

  When all the details had been worked out between us, we made plans to move to Tallaght before the baby was born. So on the evening of 3rd of September, 1973, with the aid of an open lorry hired through an ad in the Evening Herald, we loaded our belongings and headed out to Tallaght, to begin our life in the suburbs.

  After unloading the lorry we began to put the few bits and pieces into the various rooms of what to us seemed a huge house. As darkness began to fall, I switched on the light only to discover that there was not a light bulb in the house. We were left with no option but to put the mattress on the floor of the front room and go to bed, which was not an easy task for Annette now eight months pregnant. The following morning after breakfast I went down to Tallaght Village to the only shop there then, H. Williams, for a supply of bulbs.

  Life was different in Tallaght, different and lonely, but at least David and Gina had somewhere to play. At that stage David was gone three and Gina was almost two. Both of them took delight in living on a building site which Raheen Green then was. Right outside our front door was an area known as the muck hills, now the green. But back then it was where the builders kept all their machinery and building materials. It was a paradise for young children who liked to play with muck and dirty water. I was still working in Grand Canal Street so I had to be up very early each morning to get one of the few 65 buses that were servicing the route, leaving Annette and the children in the wilderness that was Tallaght in those early years.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Although deceased almost three months now, Annette is credited with co-authorship of however this book turns out because I told her what I was trying to do and asked for her help. Annette has had great influence on events since her passing, but now I want to record the fact that as I began to try to write this section on our first years in Tallaght I was having great difficulty in getting a start, in getting a handle on how to start. I reminded Annette that she was co-author and asked her to help me, to be with me and to refresh my memory about the time we moved to Tallaght.

  On the 7th of July, 2009, a friend of Annette’s, Ann Garvey, who to the best of my recollection never visited before phoned me at about 1.30 p.m. as I was struggling with this section. She asked if she could come and visit with me as she had been away when Annette passed away. She arrived at three o’clock and during the course of our conversation mentioned an essay Annette had written many years before, in 1991 to be exact. It had been re-published in a book, Since Adam was a boy to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Tallaght Welfare Society in 1999. Ann, who works as a community development worker, said that she used that essay in her classes all the time, to illustrate to her students what life was like in Tallaght in the beginning, before all the amenities we now have existed. When Ann mentioned this I immediately remembered the essay. She asked if I had a copy of the book and after a short search I found it where it had lain unopened and indeed forgotten by me. In the essay Annette records the early years of our time in Tallaght. It was just what I wanted and needed at that very time. I believe Annette guided me to it through her friend, sending Ann to tell me that what I was looking for was on the cluttered book shelves, justifying her credit as co-author of this memoir. To quote a statement Annette wrote in that essay: ‘There are certain things in life we can never fully understand until we have experienced them ourselves.’

  I have experienced Annette’s help and guidance more than once since starting to write this memoir. As I have said to Annette often since her passing, it will take more than death to keep us apart and it’s death that will bring us together again. I will now let Annette tell you what it was like for her when we first moved out to Tallaght:

  ‘We moved to Tallaght in the Autumn of 1973, a month before my third baby was born. There are certain things in life we can never fully understand until we experience them ourselves. Moving out to Tallaght was one of these things for me. I could never have imagined what it was like to feel so isolated, abandoned and lonely. To find myself confined without transport, without phones, without shops, without anywhere to go, not knowing anyone, alone.

  My hardship really began the morning after I arrived; although eight months pregnant, I had to walk two miles to the nearest shop and two miles back. As it came near the time of my delivery I would begin to panic each night after the last bus had gone, because, without a phone or transport, I didn’t know how I would get to the Rotunda Hospital which was ten miles away. The roads had no lights and you’d never see a taxi. But we were hopeful, a new town would be built in two years and the scenery was beautiful.’

  After I left each morning that’s all Annette had to help her pass the day, the expectation of a new town and the scenery. But two years after our third child Robert was born, Annette became involved in voluntary community work and for the rest of her life this was a huge part of who Annette was.

  Here’s Annette again: ‘As there was no community centres or halls built within the housing estates it left women in very vulnerable positions, especially in winter time. There was nowhere people could meet each other, except knock on someone’s door, but as people were strangers it was hard to know who you could trust. Most of the women felt isolated and alone, some more than others, but because we were young and had no one to talk to about it, we thought there must be something wrong with us, and put a brave face on it and covered it up. I remember speaking to a woman one day who was smiling and looked the picture of happiness. The next day I heard she had been taken into St. Loman’s suffering from an overdose. This happened a lot. Most women survived the overdose. Unfortunately some didn’t, and sadly this is still a fact of life in Tallaght today, so unbearable is the isolation and lack of facilities for women.’

  This is what motivated Annette to get involved in community activities, to improve the lot of women in the concrete jungle Tallaght then was. Annette worked ceaselessly to improve the conditions of women in particular, but she could also see that men needed help as well. She never discriminated between men and women in her advocacy when seeking funds and facilities for Tallaght. This is the world we had moved into in 1973, a world that Annette was determined to change for the betterment of all. When Robert was about two years old, Annette got involved with Tallaght Welfare Society which was the start of over 30 years of working tirelessly for the community. During that time she was instrumental in setting up Tallaght Women’s Contact Centre and the Women’s Awareness Group and she pushed hard for the formation of Tallaght partnership which brought badly needed funds to Tallaght. She also at this time composed a song, A Song for Tallaght, which was included on a promotional video for the “Get Tallaght Working” organisation and later another song promoting investment in Tallaght Tallaght stand up. In recognition of her work for the community Annette was named Tallaght Person of the year in 1991. It was the year she outlined her definition of what to her defined community and community living and what she a
spired to and was working for.

  Annette again: ‘If I were to write an account of my seventeen years in Tallaght it would take a book not an essay, and maybe some day I will write a book. I believe the future of Tallaght lies with its people. Community for me now means living in common with the people around me. Sharing the same transport, breathing the same air, not always agreeing, feeling the same classism and oppression, hating the same inequalities and injustices, sharing the laughter, the joy, the humour, seeing the good and the bad days. Living in common, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year. Physically, socially, recreationally, emotionally, feeling the heartache at seeing the kids emigrate when you know they have the potential but have to leave the shagging country to realise it. Feeling anger at seeing them exploited at part-time employment at low wages. Feeling the despair at seeing them sign on the labour. Feeling the hopelessness and powerlessness at seeing the cycle repeated. Wondering sometimes if the years of words and action have made one bit of difference. Knowing that they have.’

  Annette did make a difference. She made life better for so many people, Annette made so many women aware of their potential, their value and the skills they had, but above all, made them feel like women, proud of their femininity and unafraid to be strong enough to step forward to take their place as equals in the community. I can best sum up her contribution to the community, and to women in particular by repeating what one woman said of her after her passing: “She was a woman who spoke for every woman.”

  I hope by now I have given you an idea of the magnitude of my loss, the huge gap that has been left in my life, in the lives of David, Gina, Robert and the incalculable loss our grandchildren have suffered by not having the love, wisdom and guidance of their Nana as they grow to maturity in a very harsh and hostile world.

  Back in 1973, Annette was still waiting to give birth to our third child Robert. I can’t remember too much about Robert’s birth, I vaguely remember waiting at the bus stop on the Old Blessington Road, on a sunny afternoon in October with Annette and the other two in a double pram. We went into town, leaving David and Gina with my mother and I brought Annette over to the Rotunda. In 1973 the system still was no husbands allowed at the birth, so I would have done what I did with the other two and handed Annette over to a nurse to be taken up to the ward, in the old lift with the sliding gate. I do know that Robert was born in the early hours of the following morning, Tuesday October 16th. What I remember most vividly about Robert’s birth is the following night, Wednesday, 17th October. Having come back to Tallaght after visiting Annette in the Rotunda I fed David and put him to bed. I then sat in the kitchen where we had the black and white TV and, with Gina in my arms screaming crying, I tried to watch the England v Poland World Cup soccer match. It was the famous game in which the Polish goalkeeper Thomashanskie, described by Brian Clough as a “clown” knocked England out of the World Cup, I enjoyed the circus as Gina screamed all night.