John Creedon is posing for photos in a lane near the Shandon Tower in north Cork where he grew up. Every second person comments on his presence as they pass.
“I love you on the telly,” says one woman.
“Try living with me,” says John Creedon.
“There’s the legend,” says another man.
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“I wish,” says Creedon.
He turns to me and laughs: “It’s hard to be a prophet in your own town, boy.”
The Shandon bells ring out. “I’m like J Alfred Prufrock measuring out my life in quarter hours with those bells,” he says. He remembers bringing his four daughters up there to ring them when they were children and they were all living in Dublin. “I was trying to immerse them in their Corkness.”
It’s hard to imagine Creedon out of Cork but he lived for years in Dublin when his career required it. His new book, his third, This Boy’s Heart, is a touching memoir of his childhood in and around Cork’s inner city as well as the east Cork farm to which he was “farmed out”.
We end up drinking coffee beside the Lee at “a happy footpath” (Creedon’s words) near St Mary’s Church on Pope’s Quay. Creedon is much as you might imagine from listening to his RTÉ Radio 1 radio show. He ambles warmly from one observation to the next while dropping quotes and historical facts along the way. He stops his flow occasionally to point out the changing tide in the river or the head of a harbour seal. Another time he notices a man nearby who seems to be shouting at the river. “I hope he’s okay.”
He apologises at one point for “hopping around”. “I’m always racing,” he says. “I woke during the night and my head was like benign galloping horses – well-intentioned but it won’t shut up. Thomas Aquinas said, ‘The mind is a great troublemaker.’ I woke in great form but the head was buzzing.”
Creedon grew up living at the Inchigeelagh Dairy shop in the inner city with his parents, 11 siblings and assorted lodgers and aunts. His mother, Siobhán, ran the shop while his father, Con, drove for CIÉ. She grew up the daughter of a poor farmer. His father was “merchant class”. They were kind people, he says. “I was totally unaware of class growing up ... My mam and dad didn’t see the difference. They’d go out and put a chair outside the counter for a guy who was langers and needed to sit down as much as they would for Mrs Martel who wore furs.”
I suppose there was something exotic about men because I was surrounded by women. So I guess I was drawn to the company of older men
— John Creedon
A significant part of This Boy’s Heart is about being “farmed out” to live and work with a family friend and namesake, Johnny Creedon, in Glounthaune. He tells a story in the book about Johnny organising a fake donkey derby purely so the young John could win it. That’s partly why he wrote the book, says Creedon. “I said, ‘God, this guy needs to be remembered. That act of kindness.’ He really did care about me, and I didn’t even realise that back then. I did get a hint once in Midleton Mart when a man said, ‘Oh, you’ve the son with you today.’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah.’ And he didn’t say, ‘No, that’s Connie Creedon’s son.’”
Why was he “farmed out”? “I was always being sent away, not because they didn’t love me, but because they couldn’t cope with just having so many kids,” he says. “It wore them down completely ... I was always the kid who was saying, ‘Can I have a go? Can I have go?’ I just had huge curiosity. I had the freedom of the city. I used to amble all over. I used to collect wastepaper and sell it ... I was kicked out of this class and that class. It wasn’t badness. I would have been gentle. I’d never have been a tough kid, but I would be the one who pushed to the front to a look and get a belt of the car. As I’m getting older, I’m kind of saying, ‘You weren’t stupid. It’s just that you couldn’t keep up. You were too small, and there was no one to help you with your homework.’”
He would frequent pubs as a child and just sit there with the older men, he says. “Maybe I was looking for male role models. My mother was one of 10 girls, so I had loads of aunts and I had eight sisters and I’ve always found the company of women really easy ... I suppose there was something exotic about men because I was surrounded by women. So I guess I was drawn to the company of older men and my dad was away driving the buses.”
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In the book much of what he’s just described is presented in the form of funny childhood stories. The tone is upbeat, but it’s hard not to feel the melancholy underneath. In a section about being beaten and humiliated by priests at school he says his anxiety became a “knot” in his stomach that never went away. “That’s true, I guess,” he says. “I would say I have a slightly fast-forward streak in me anyway. I’m always thinking of the next thing ... There is a kind of a propulsion in me. There have been moments when immersed in nature when around the 40-minute mark, my head shuts up and I stop naming the birds and the plants and I just start to become part of the cosmos. And it’s a fantastic feeling. But I’m always busy. I’m always running. I heard somebody describe low-level anxiety as being like a fridge that has been humming all your life. It’s only when you plug it out that you realise, ‘Oh, I didn’t even notice that hum.’”
After school he studied English and philosophy in University College Cork but he dropped out. “I was a bit of a rake,” he says. “And my parents weren’t well. I was trying to pay my way and things were bad economically. So I quit and got a job.”
He went back to college later but soon after he did so, his first daughter was born. He was the breadwinner. “Before I knew it I had four girls. That was a lot of responsibility for a young fella ... I ended up on the dole, working in factories, working in nightclubs, trying to put on gigs, trying to promote gigs. Someone tweeted at me last week, a picture of myself with someone and it said, ‘middle-class prat’. Firstly, I didn’t know ‘middle-class’ was an insult. [But] I’m not sure I’m middle-class at all. I spent my 20s pulling furniture out of skips to keep the house warm.”
He calls RTÉ his “university”. After some years on pirate radio, he got into RTÉ Radio 1 in 1987 after an open call for applications. At different points, he filled in for the likes of Gay Byrne and Pat Kenny and Derek Davis. He spent 13 years doing a morning show. He worked with Gerry Ryan in his comedic guise as “Terence” the Cork hairdresser. “That was just Cork camp,” he says. “Probably being myself in ways – mad about my mam. But Gerry was pure stream of consciousness and I guess I was, too. It was just manic wrestling, with the two of us acting the gowl. Gerry was mad for the curveball. He would say the wildest things to me, ‘Terence, how’s your mother?’ ‘She’s grand’. ‘But after the accident you were telling me about before during the ad break’ ... And I’d have to go with it. Some people believed it was real, I think.”
In recent years with the radio show, his books on placenames (That Place We Call Home) and folklore (An Irish Folklore Treasury) and TV series like Creedon’s Atlas of Ireland and Creedon’s Musical Atlas of Ireland, he feels like he’s “ended up doing what I probably should be doing” But he never had a masterplan. Life is unpredictable, he says. He tells a folkloric story about a sparrow who gets pooed on by a cow only to find it quite cosy, until he’s yanked out and eaten by a fox. The moral of the story? “The person who puts you in this shit isn’t necessarily your enemy, and the person who takes you all of it isn’t always your friend.”
When was he in the shit? “There were a few disappointments along the way,” he says. “There’d be a few times where you’d find yourself between contracts ... And over the years, I suppose, I did things that weren’t really me.”
The reason I’m standing here in the full of my health, talking to you is because of all the shitty things that happened to me as well as the good things
— John Creedon
Like what? “Like Winning Streak. I didn’t really want to do that. I didn’t even understand the rules! I did several episodes not knowing what the rules were.”
He finds it hard to say no to people, he says. “A friend of mine says, ‘No is a sentence’. But [saying no] actually pains me. I feel I’m letting people down. My assistant cameraman says, ‘You need to tell people to f**k off. You’re too accessible.’” He laughs. “Yerra, but it’s a small country and I’m not that important. I’ve been struggling with that forever. Trying to find my own space. I’m getting a little bit better. I’ve a sense of urgency about doing the things I want to do.”
As we talk we are frequently approached by people. A man stops to talk to us.
“You look handsome in real life,” he says to Creedon.
“On a good day,” says Creedon.
“I like your storying. It’s great the way you deliver it. A lot of memorisation in it, is there?”
“I’m an enthusiastic amateur,” says Creedon.
Another man stops. “I’ll make your day now,” he says.
“You have that money you owe me?” says Creedon.
The man laughs and tells us that he’s from Inchigeelagh and knows a lot of people Creedon knows. Then he adds that he’s homeless. “I spent the last few months sleeping in a car. I’m now in a hostel. There’s an RTB case with the landlord ... And I’ve some work coming in.”
“If you can scratch a toehold and some sort of bob coming in, you can plan a way forward,” says Creedon.
“Don’t worry about me I’m a hardy f**ker,” says the man and he walks away with a smile on his face.
A little later a younger man stops. He says, “I was watching you on TV last night, thinking ...”
“How does he get away with it?” says Creedon.
“No, that you love the same things I love, and that’s messed up because my mam walked me into that building years ago.” He doesn’t specify what building. “I never kept up the hurling. I never kept up the music.”
“You’re still a young man though,” says Creedon.
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The man thinks for a moment. “I could pass some toxicity over but I’m not going to. I’ll see you again. I’ll have a coffee with you. I can’t go into it now. Seeing you means I’m not meant to go back to Australia.”
He walks away leaving us with this mysterious thought. Creedon has conversations like this all the time. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” he says. “I guess we’re all homeless at a certain level. We’re all trying to get home ... I was asked by some newspaper about my new year’s resolutions ... One of the things I thought was, I’m going to encourage people more often, because people are constantly telling me I’m good but it’s [that man] really needs to be told, ‘You’re good.’”
There’s a feeling of warm encouragement embodied in his radio presence. Does he imagine a listener? Initially, he tells me that “Imagine the listener” is just the sort of thing people say on presenting courses. But later he says: “If I had to distil it down to a person, it would be a woman in her late 30s or 40s, single, coming into an apartment after a day’s work and pushing the door closed with her foot and it clicks closed and she’s put on the radio and I’m there to hold the space for her to iron the blouse or whatever.”
He walks me part of the way back to Kent station. We pass St Mary’s Church. He talks about loving the hymns and candles there as a child and how religious ritual shouldn’t be owned by the church hierarchy. “Lau Tsu who wrote the Tau Te Ching never wanted it written down. He said, ‘As soon as it becomes written down, it’ll be corrupted. Someone will own the copyright to it and someone will start laying down the law.’”
He’s thrilled to be writing books. He always wanted to write. “I used to send lovesick poetry to the Echo when I was 14,” he says. “Hopefully they will never be found. I wrote one called The Early Summer Blues. It was about the Inter Cert and about the Pharisees and about the acoustics in the classroom and double maths and just about life being the pits when you’re 15.”
He doesn’t think he’ll write a follow-up memoir about his teenage years and young adulthood. Why? “The family fortunes economically and my parents’ health went downhill. Those years, the ‘70s and ‘80s, were tough.” He was also, he says, “desperately lonely in boarding school”.
We walk through some of the “higgledy piggledy” streets of north Cork. He shows me the place on St Patrick’s Hill where he was hoisted up on a roof to look at John F Kennedy passing. He talks about how Cork developed out in rings over the years, about how after the famine the hills of north Cork were filled with “O’Driscolls and O’Sheas” escaping the country. He talks about how, in the middle of the 20th century, the poor were given a chance with council houses but how now, they “have no buy-in to the game at all”.
He’s grateful for how his career has turned out – the books, the documentary series, his radio show. “My essence is probably coming out more,” he says. He tells a Cambodian folk tale about a wise man to whom a series of fortunes and misfortunes occur. To each event the man says: “Good fortune, bad fortune. Who knows, really?” Creedon thinks there’s truth in that. “I realise the reason I’m standing here in the full of my health, talking to you is because of all the shitty things that happened to me as well as the good things that happened to me. It’s hard to live by that in the moment, I know, but I am aware of that lately.”
Before he turns to go home another man says: “John Creedon. I was watching you last night.”
“I’m still at it,” says Creedon. “Still getting away with it.”
“Bluffing!” says the man.
Creedon laughs. “You bluffer, you,” he says to himself and then walks off into north Cork.
This Boy’s Heart is published by Gill on October 31st. John Creedon will be in conversation with Billy Keane at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, on October 30th. Tickets available from tht.ie.
