IN 1960 I was not getting anywhere in the bakery. I was losing my girlfriends as fast as I could find them.
In the lodgings I shared with Mando I was spotlessly clean – always dusting, polishing, and tidying up things that were out of place, forever putting things back and hanging up coats. I was very domesticated!
Mando was now the foreman of the small bakery, and I was his deputy. But it was not doing at all well. I realised that to get on I’d have to go abroad. I was becoming ambitious and I was no longer prepared to remain on low wages for ever. I was working all sorts of hours, which were very unsociable, and I began to get a burning desire to travel.
Mando came up with a plan of action. He told me on so many occasions how he knew England well. He wanted me to travel to Liverpool with him – a giant step for me to take. He told me that if I didn’t like Liverpool he’d have me back without a bother. His plan was that he would take a week’s sick leave and that I was to take a week off to simply try it. If it didn’t work, he promised he’d have me home and back at work in a week.
On the boat journey to Holyhead, I listened to the playing of traditional music, as there were many fine young musicians and buskers on board that night. I watched many people with tears in their eyes seated uncomfortably on the floor or on suitcases. By the time I got on to the train I felt as though I had already been away for a week.
Mando knew all the ropes. I stood in the employment exchange with him. He had briefed me on how to answer their questions. As it worked out, I was given twice as much money as he was. We were sent to a big bakery outside the city; after a few days we were both given a sub – an advance on our wages. At last I had some real cash.
The house where we stayed was in a very run-down and dangerous area. Mando suddenly began to take a deeper interest in my wellbeing but, as always, with strings attached. He wanted my money for safe-keeping. Well, I knew my money was safer where it was – in my shoes.
One night Mando decided to retire to bed early. I was sitting up, listening to his advice and his new plans when suddenly the door burst open and two men stood in front of us. I froze. Mando jumped out of bed and realised that he was naked and his clothes were on a chair near the two intruders. The silence was broken when both of them roared with laughter, pointing at Mando. Mando shouted at me to give them something. Without even thinking I took Mando’s coat from a chair and offered it to them. ‘You want something? Please take it and leave us alone. We won’t rat on you.’ I was scared stiff, but decided to join them in their laughter. One of them came towards me and put out his hand. ‘Shake, Irish. You’re fun! You sure are some fun guy, I tell you.’ I never took my eyes from him. I shook his hand and watched as the other chap moved towards Mando, who seemed to be frozen to the floor in the nude. Mando was suddenly being hugged by the guy. While he did all he could to cover himself up, the men hurried away.
On another occasion, it must have been four or five in the morning when I jumped out of the old double bed I shared with him. I was burning with a dreadful itch. I turned on the light and was horrified to see my body covered with bites and awful-looking lumps. I watched as Mando woke up shouting, ‘Put off the fuckin’ bleedin’ light, for fuck’s sake, Paddy! You’re shagging blinding me.’
The next morning Mando got out of bed almost tearing at his flesh. ‘I’m flea-bitten, for Christ’s sake!’ He was swearing like a raving lunatic now, and then he noticed that I was in an even worse state than himself.
It was our fifth day in Liverpool. Mando had had enough of the filthy lodgings, and I had told him I would rather go back on the boat than remain there one more night. I arranged to meet him in Lime Street Station, as he gave me a story about a business matter he had to attend to. He advised me to get on the London train before it was due to pull out if he didn’t catch up with me. He would make the train, he assured me. And I, like a fool, believed him.
Well, I should have known Mando. I had a terrible experience on my first night in London – what I’d have given to have had Mando with me then!
Alone in a compartment on the way to London from Liverpool, I couldn’t help but wonder where I would sleep that night. As the train finally eased into the station, I realised that I was totally alone for the first time in my life. I felt naked and utterly scared.
As I put down my suitcase on the pavement outside the station, someone asked, ‘You waiting for someone?’ The man who spoke to me had a smooth, posh-sounding voice and wore a nice fancy suit. I told him that I was alone and the man said, sympathetically, ‘I’ll put you up for the night and see you’re okay in the morning.’
I thanked him at once and gladly got into his car. Within minutes I was in his flat. It was well appointed, and the lighting was soft and low, and very seductive. I was shown to a bedroom that had a large double bed in it and red curtains, which made the room feel very warm and luxurious. I had never seen such comforts before; comfort to me was sitting by the fire in Bridget Doyle’s house in Barnacullia or in Bridie Cashin’s place in Fairview, sitting by the open fire, listening to Songs our Fathers Loved on the gramophone.
The man introduced himself as Melvin, and asked me if I wanted a supper of tea and toast. I hadn’t eaten for eight hours, and was very grateful for all the kindnesses he was showing me. Melvin called to me to get into bed and he would serve me supper there. It was a measure of how naive I was that I didn’t think anything was unusual.
As I was getting undressed, Melvin appeared with the tea and toast, and I jumped into bed, embarrassed that I was almost naked. He placed the tray in front of me: buttered toast, strawberry jam, a pot of tea and two cups, and a tub of Vaseline. It never dawned on me to ask what the Vaseline was for.
Melvin quickly undressed and got into bed. I started to feel worried. It struck me that no one in the world knew where I was. I froze as he started to rub Vaseline all over my bottom. When he tried to penetrate me, I started to scream, and he quickly backed off. He explained to me that he had assumed that I knew what he wanted when he picked me up at the train station. Thankfully for me, he now realised that I had very little experience of the world, and he backed off.
The next morning I woke up to the smells of coffee, bacon and eggs. After we ate, Melvin dropped me off in Piccadilly, and his car sped away as soon as I closed the door. Once again I was alone, and I swore at Mando for leaving me the way he did.
I soon found myself at a bakery, Lyon’s of Cadby Hall in Hammersmith, where I was hired on the spot to work six nights a week. They also recommended a boarding house for me. It was clean, had a nice view of London, and I found that I was settling in to work and my new life quite well. I even met Stewie at a dance in the Emerald Ballroom. He told me that he had found his parents and discovered that he had three fine sisters. I felt over the moon for him.
Stewie wasn’t the only ex-Artaner I met. In fact, I was even working with one: Oxo, the great escape artist.
The first real contact I had with Oxo was early in February 1952 when I went to work in the refectory. Oxo had tried to escape many times, and had been caught many times. For that he was stripped and whipped with a long, hard leather until his bottom was raw and bleeding, or beaten on the soles of the feet, and had his head shaved, but instead of stopping him from leaving, it just made him more determined to escape.
I liked Oxo a lot – he took me under his wing when I arrived in the refectory. I admired his determination to escape from Artane, even though I never would have had the courage myself.
The day that Oxo escaped Artane for good, Stewie, the Burner and Jamjar staged a diversion by pretending to fight at tea one night. The fight instantly brought all nineteen divisions to their feet, and the noise of 900 boys stamping their hobnail boots on the rustic red-tiled floor and beating the table was overpowering. I prayed that Oxo would make it to London, and that I would see him there someday. I knew that if I had only half of Oxo’s steely courage I also would have been scaling the walls to escape from Artane.
Oxo told me his story over many nights working in Lyon’s bakery in London. He told me he had made his way to London after his last escape from Artane. As we sat in the bakery canteen night after night I listened to him reliving Artane. I began having nightmares again as we talked about marching to Mass at twenty to seven every morning, through hail and rain, and on to breakfast which consisted of a quarter of a loaf of bread, an ounce of margarine and a mug of tea. I wondered if a time would ever come when I would be able to forget Artane.
Oxo told me how, before he fled for good, he had escaped from Artane and gone home, only to be brought back by his own mother. ‘Well, you see, after the first time I ran away, my Ma convinced me to go back, promising she would see to it that the Brothers would take it easy on me. She convinced me they would, so I went back with her. They promised her that they wouldn’t hurt me, but once me Ma was gone, the bastards dragged me by the hair across the parade ground and let dozens of boys beat me. Then, as before, I was shaved and this time the bastards stripped me naked and sadistically flogged me. I could feel the blood run down my buttocks, down my legs, across my toes – the pain I suffered! You know, Paddy, I couldn’t shit for a week after the beatings, my arse was so cut up. But I wasn’t going to be bested, and when I got the chance, I scarpered.’
There was a real sense of sadness about him as he continued, ‘The bastards never got me again. They taught us to hate England, but I got away, Paddy. I love England and what’s more, the people here are more Christian than the Christian Brothers could ever be. Sure, they don’t go to bloomin’ Mass every morning, but so what?’
Oxo paused, and I could see the tears well up in his eyes as he told me that he couldn’t forgive his mum for sending him to Artane in the first place, and sending him back after he escaped. ‘I never returned home to me Ma and, what’s more, I have not seen her since.’
In December I was feeling very homesick for Ireland, and working nights was starting to affect my health. One night I was at work when I felt peculiar. I was working on a huge travelling oven when I suddenly collapsed. I was taken to hospital, where I spent ten days. The doctors told me to give up the night work, and also the bakery trade. If only I could, I thought. While I was resting in hospital, I had plenty of time to think about what I needed to do next. London had been a hell of an experience, I was treated well at work and I was earning plenty of money. But I was longing to be in Dublin, in my own Ireland, in Bridie’s place – sitting by the embers, soaking in the craic – and to find someone like Noeleen or Isabelle to communicate with. ‘If only,’ I thought. Meeting a girl was all desperately part of what I wanted. Finding her was one thing: holding on to her would be a real problem for many years to come because of my overpowering total lack of experience of dealing with the opposite sex. Yet I had an overriding burning desire to learn. I was over-anxious to please the girls whom I dated. I assumed I was doing okay, while of course they left me without me ever knowing what I’d done wrong. I had done nothing – perhaps that was my problem.