If my maternal grandparents left a trail of belongings that revealed their journey from the poverty of the Highlands to the rich, hilly expanses of New Zealand, there is little of my Irish grandmother to be found, except a handful of letters and the photograph my father kept, the one in which he likened my eyes to hers. I’m sure there is some truth in that. Hers are large and direct beneath the straight dark brim of her hat, and my optician has remarked more than once on the expanse of my eyes, a problem for those who suffer, as I do, from dry eyes. So much more blinking to be done. These are my grandmother’s eyes, the imprint she has left on me and, as I have got older, I feel the Irish in me in an astonishing way. It seems that what Ann O’Hara of Bandon, County Cork, bequeathed me was her gene pool. Her husband, Henry Eakin, was born in County Leitrim, but I know even less of him.
Ann died years before I was born. She is buried in a cemetery off Tees Road in Middlesbrough, the Yorkshire town where my father was born. In her death notice, the text read: ‘And they shall be mine saith the Lord of Hostes, in that day when I make up my Jewels.’ Writing to my father, her sister described her as ‘that most unselfish of women’. Probably true. She had given her childless sisters her eldest boy, my father’s brother, to raise in Ireland.
I have nothing of hers but there is a letter that she wrote to my father in 1934, from Granville Road in Middlesbrough where she and my grandfather were then living. Calling my father Lofty, and further on Nip, she asks whether he received the suit and a cash draft she had sent. In a sense he was her only child. His sister had died shortly after birth. His brother had been frail when he was relinquished to his aunts. There is longing in her tone: ‘This has to be a short letter till I know what or where you are likely to be, you see at present I do not know.’
A month or two later my grandmother died of bowel cancer. My grandfather had gone for a walk in the afternoon. While he was away she was overtaken with dreadful pain and knocked on the wall of her terraced house to alert her neighbour, but by the time she reached hospital, it was too late. She had had some discomfort, my grandfather wrote in another letter, but she had been treating it with a bottle of stuff from Pedlow, the doctor – a tablespoonful three times a day. During the autumn she had got two or three bottles of something else from the chemist and thought that suited her better. Just before Christmas she complained of indigestion and decided not to have a roast fowl, but managed some lamb and plum pudding instead.
After she died, my grandfather took up with a widow called Mrs Murphy, who had nine children. She was supposed to be taking care of him but there are a number of photos of the pair of them at Redcar, where they had gone to live. I suppose that my grandfather must have had a late, last love. He left her what money he had.
My knowledge of his early life is scanty, except that he was born in County Leitrim, near the ruins of fifteenth-century Fenagh Abbey, once a place of worship for the Church of Ireland, and a place my father would recall from time to time. My grandfather was Protestant; his family was connected with the Royal Irish Constabulary and, for someone seeking their Irish roots, that’s not a good look. But if I don’t tell that truth, sooner or later, somebody may well do it for me. Our history is never as shiny as we would want, our folklore often clouded.
Despite that deep conservatism in my father’s background, my Scots grandparents disapproved of my mother’s marriage simply because he was Irish.