Maggie's Breakfast (3 page)

There was definitely something about my mother that prevented her from embracing comfort and happiness. She appeared to be even more disturbed if she witnessed her children and my father being
content and relaxed. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Molly practised being the image of Jesus on the cross. It was likely she saw herself as Christ and my father as the cross. With
the family war going on in the attic and with fewer and fewer peaceful intervals, the Knights of Columbanus might easily have thought that they were living in the Middle Ages and that the crusades
were being fought all over again. Nativity and resurrection was one thing for the Knights but they weren’t prepared to endure another crucifixion and in spite of their orthodox beliefs one
man on a cross was enough
.

* * *

On a rare sunny morning a voice from outside on the street yelled out, “There’s a scabby epidemic!” Then came a banging on the front door. The noise woke me
up. My father rushed to open the door and was immediately confronted by a woman who was dressed in white from head to toe.

“I’m a nurse and all the children in the vicinity are to be brought to the hospital dispensary.” The disturbance brought my mother and the rest of us downstairs.

When Molly saw the woman in white, she screamed out at the top of her voice. “Ah, Mother of Jesus, don’t tell me we’re all goin’ to die!”

A second or two later the door to where the Knights were conducting their meeting opened and two men stepped out. One man, fuming with anger, stepped forward and took hold of my father’s
elbow. “What is going on?” he asked.

Before my father had a chance to answer the woman in white repeated her call. “A scabby plague!” She then reached out and pulled me towards her. “Look at your children’s
skin for red sores!” She lifted up my shirt and looked at my body and sure enough I was covered with tiny little red spots. They were all over me.

“They’ll all have to be disinfected. Every last child!” the nurse said in a much calmer voice.

The two club members, who up to this point had stood mystified, rushed back to their meeting room and slammed the door fast and furious behind them.

My father then threw his duster against the wall and yelled out: “This won’t help me! It won’t help, I’m tellin’ ya that!”

Molly then grabbed me back from the nurse and inspected me even more closely. “Holy Mother of God, look! Spots! Spots! Spots!”

They were in my mouth, in my ears, and in my nose. Everywhere there was skin, the scabies were. My mother began to cry. I was so frightened I didn’t even notice my brothers and sisters
being examined.

At any rate, within a few minutes I was marched off alone to Hume Street dispensary where I joined a lot of other young boys. The girls must have been taken to a different location. Another
woman dressed in white instructed us to strip naked. Quickly all the young boys shed their clothes. After that we were marched into a big room. The room was crowded with even more naked boys
scratching the skin off their bodies. Half were crying, a few were laughing.

After we’d stood naked for half the morning another nurse came by. “When sprayed keep moving and go out into the other room and don’t touch yourselves or anything. You’ve
another treatment after that before you’re to go home!”

Then a man came by with a huge paintbrush and we were painted white. “Don’t touch this until it hardens on ya! It’ll become like plaster. Don’t touch it till it
does.”

My body burned as if the man had put a match to it.

Some of the boys were comparing the heat from the whitewash to the heat in Hell.

“In Hell it’s twenty million times hotter than this,” one boy said.

Another called out, “It’s a hundred million times hotter in Hell than this! If you have any mortal sins on your soul you’ll be burnt!”

After that we were told to move out to make room for the next batch of children with itchy skin. Outside in the hallway we stood in the long corridor and waited for the white powdery paint to
dry. A woman dressed in white came by carrying a small bucket and a paintbrush. She told us to line up against the wall and said she had to inspect us before we were released.

As she went from boy to boy she called out: “What’s this? Ya left this out? It’s not covered!” Some of our mickies hadn’t got splattered with the white paint. She
swiped at my groin area with the paintbrush.

One boy asked, “How am I goin’ to pee?”

“If it falls off ya, ya won’t be able to pee either, will ya now? Never mind whether ya can pee or not!” With that she slapped another gob of whitewash on him.

* * *

The seemingly constant noise of my sisters’ nocturnal behaviour as well as the rest of the family running up and down the stairs during the day soon impacted on the
peaceful order of the Knights of Columbanus. They felt under siege and were determined to do something about it.

Paddy was asked to explain the screams coming from the attic during the course of the day as well as the ructions between my mother and my sisters late at night. He could only offer the excuse
that it was my mother’s raised voice when saying the rosary. Among other complaints, the idea of the girls being courted in the hallway in the late evenings certainly wasn’t what the
Knights had bargained for when they hired my father. Having the Walsh family living in the building was akin to a replay of the Battle of Tours for the Knights. The intrusion and imposition of
children yelling in the hallway while they were praying just didn’t fit. The idea of conflict so close to home was a direct threat to their charitable instincts and agenda. Prayers and hymns
didn’t blend with screams and yells. Not to mention the odd profanity contributed by my sisters’ escorts.

The decision to defend themselves was made and my father was soon called before the tribunal. Paddy’s plea to keep his job only went so far and a Senior Knight informed him that his
position would be terminated. Being fired from the only job he was ever likely to find was the last straw for him.

Rather than offering sympathy or concern when informed of the situation, my mother retreated to praying again – but this time very silently. In some ways her prayers had been answered.
Paddy’s happiness was a threat and Molly’s proclivity for suffering was enhanced by the thought that she’d have to find a place to live and start all over, destitute again.

The next day my father was given two weeks’ notice to find other accommodation. A week later Molly filed for a new place to live with the city housing department. Shortly thereafter the
Walshes were relocated to Inchicore.

Other than being about three miles north-west from the centre of Dublin, Inchicore had almost nothing to be said for it. Few people seemed to know or care if it was north or
south of anything. The place had no statues of English generals on horses or memorials to soldiers who fought in far-off military campaigns. What it did have was smokestacks and an ironworks
foundry belonging to C.I.E. where practically the entire male population of the neighbourhood worked. Whenever a bus or a train broke down in Dublin, or in any other part of Ireland for that
matter, it was hauled to the foundry, repaired and put back in use.

Every morning and evening in Inchicore the factory horn assaulted people’s ears and reminded just about every family in the area where their bread and butter was coming from.

At half seven in the morning the horn would bellow out, shake the windows of the small red-brick houses and wake everybody up. Wives and mothers would leap out of bed, rush down the small wooden
stairs to their cold sculleries and heat up water for tea. They’d also slap gobs of margarine on slices of stale bread. A basin of cold water, set out the night before with a bar of
industrial soap would be on a small table next to the fireplace. The little remaining heat from the ashes of the previous night’s fire would help expel the chill from the small room. Before
the water boiled on the stove the women would run back up to the bedrooms to shake husbands and sons out of their slumber. Groggy and still half-asleep, the men would roll out of bed and place
their feet on the cold wooden floor and piss in the chamber-pots that were strategically placed near the bed. Years of practice had perfected their aim and rarely did any pee land on the floor.
After a few minutes the women would return to the bedrooms, pick up the overflowing chamber-pots and retreat back down the stairs to empty the contents in an outhouse in the back yard. At the same
time the men would pick up their shirts and overalls from the floor and get dressed for work at the foundry. They’d come down the creaking staircase buttoning their overalls and without
stopping would scoop up a handful of cold water from the basin and splash their faces with it. Fathers and sons then sat down for a cup of tea with bread and margarine. Two bites into the bread
they’d moan and grimace because the margarine on the bread tasted like foundry grease. Within ten minutes or so the men would get up from the small kitchen tables and place worn and greasy
caps on their heads. They’d then wrap shredded scarves around their necks, the scarves smelling of a combination of hair oil and foundry grease. A man’s neck was a good indicator of how
often he’d avoided taking a bath. If it was a mixture of green and black it had been at least a week since he washed. If it reflected a combination of green, yellow and black it had likely
been two weeks since he stepped into the tub.

The front doors of the small houses would open and the men would march towards the big gates of the foundry where they’d be greeted by the smell of smoke and oil. Minutes later as the
banging of hammers and the sputtering noise of train engines coalesced, mothers would retreat to the bedrooms of their children where they lifted up the bed-sheets and threw cold water on the warm
half-naked bodies to ready them for school. Dressed in tattered clothes, boys and girls would enter the street and head to school and for the time being avoid the lane that led to the foundry.

Shortly thereafter, on clotheslines in back yards, bed-sheets were hung out to dry while prayers were said to encourage the absent sun to show up. With men at work and children at school some
housewives, wearing dresses that were as clean as their husbands’ overalls were dirty, would begin to polish their front-door brass knobs. The women would call back and forth to each other,
exchanging gossip and rumour. Often the talk was about who owed who a cup of sugar or a bottle of milk. Or whose son or daughter wouldn’t get up to go to school or Mass. More often than not
the chattering was about which young girl was “up the pole” and whose son was responsible for it. At the same time the street vendor Biddy Sonics, who’d got her odd surname from a
marriage to some kind of East European, would be calling out the price of bad apples and wilted cabbage. Biddy’s raspy voice was almost as loud as the foundry horn as she sold her damaged
fruit and vegetables from her horse and cart. To keep the nag content Biddy would sprinkle its oats with whiskey from a flask she carried in her apron pocket.

Biddy’s throaty voice was also the alarm for Mrs. Mack. Mrs. Mack spent her entire day if not her entire life looking out of her upraised window. The woman couldn’t travel or go
anywhere because she had only one leg. It was rumoured she kept her severed leg in the back yard and that was the reason for the peculiar smell on the street. On Saturday mornings when the priest
came to hear Mrs. Mack’s confession he had to listen and bless her through the front window because of the whiff. He often told neighbours on his way back to the church that his time as a
missionary in Africa was an easier task than having to stand outside Mrs. Mack’s window while she confessed to nothing. After about two or three years of being Mrs. Mack’s spiritual
adviser he requested a transfer to the Australian outback.

Friday evening, the end of the work week . . .

Men with their wages in their pockets would rush from the foundry like a stampede of cows fleeing the slaughterhouse and hasten to the nearby pub. Once inside, the ritual of drinking and singing
would begin. Sons covered with engine oil joined fathers at the bar and displayed their youthful and inherited prowess for the consumption of Guinness. When the pub closed the men would stagger
out, drunk and incoherent. Some got up on their bicycles and began the risky wobble home. A few would tumble and end up on the street, feeling their sore arses. At the same time women would hurry
in the direction of the pub only to find their men sprawled on the street. The women would frantically search their husbands’ pockets, hoping their men hadn’t spent every penny on the
drink. With the shock of finding empty pockets the women would unleash a painful lament, their screams greeted with rambling and incoherent apologies from the men.

* * *

My mother looked through the curtains, saw who was at the door and without looking back at me said “Hide!”

I was sitting in front of the fireplace counting the sparks that were floating up the chimney. As the front door was opened, I ran and hid under the small table.

The priest entered the house and my mother greeted him with a reverential bow.