An Irishman's Diary is pleased to bring you today the world exclusive serialisation of Cyril's Cinders, yet another best-selling autobiography about an abominable Irish childhood.
What do I remember about my childhood? The same, I guess, as any Irish adult remembers about that time in their lives. Alcoholism, of course. My mother was an alcoholic, and I know now why she was an alcoholic - why, all Irish mothers are alcoholics. It is to hide the pain of Irishness, the pain of life, the pain of existence on an island where every mother is an Irish mother, every mother is an alcoholic, and every mother has a child as miserable as I was. Miserable, forlorn, sad and lonely.
What do I remember about my childhood? I remember my father's cruelty. He was cruel because he was married to an alcoholic, who was alcoholic because she was married to him. He too became an alcoholic because of her great cruelty - and like any Irish mother, she could be very cruel indeed, especially any alcoholic Irish mother, and all Irish mothers are, as we know from the many memoirs selling around the world.
The Brothers and the Specials
But I was talking about my father, my cruel, cruel father, a heartless man, like all Irish fathers, and made that way, I think, by the cruelty of the Christian Brothers, who were that way because of their drunken mothers and their cruel and abusive fathers. In the few moments of sobriety that I remember from my father when I was a child, he would tell me how terrible his childhood had been. In fact it was just like mine. Every morning when I and my 18 brothers left home, with mother beside the sink drinking Domestos and lime, we would wonder whether it was worse being a Catholic because of the B Specials, or worse because of the Christian Brothers.
Each morning, the B Specials would line up outside St Colm's school and machine-gun the pupils. That's why Catholic families were so large, merely to make good the losses suffered in getting to school. Often we 19 brothers would set out for school, but only five of us or even fewer would return each evening, the rest having been slaughtered, slaughtered, by the Specials - and that was before the Troubles. It got much worse after the Troubles began.
And at school - well, when I say school, I mean an upturned rusty bucket, because that was school in those days - the Christian Brothers would wait for us to get through the Specials' ambush, and then when the survivors staggered in, they would take down our trousers and beat us with iron rods until it was time to go home again. That was our education, pretty much. The Brothers didn't always beat us right through the day - they would often take a break at noon for a lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, washed down with fine wines, while the boys would nibble on scutch-grass and rub docks on their bruises, until it was time to be beaten again.
The journey home was worse, because by this time the Specials were drunk again, and often I was the only survivor of 19 brothers who had set out for school that morning. It was terrible, terrible, and what made it worse was that we knew the Specials and the Christian Brothers would do the same to us the next day. And the next. And the next. Believe me, this daily slaughter was very dispiriting for me and my brothers.
Poor and oppressed
Perhaps that was why my mother drank. By the time I got home, accompanied occasionally by a surviving brother, she would have finished the Domestos and would be on the Vim, to which she was partial when mixed with some saddlesoap and a little dash of Brillo. My father would be drunk as well, possibly because it was so cold, for in those days Irish houses had no walls.
Why? Because we were so poor and oppressed. This obviously made us alcoholic as well, and everybody knows Irish alcoholism causes poverty, and Irish poverty intensifies alcoholism. And so it was, my mother, legless on the Vim, my cruel, cruel father, legless on the particular cocktail he fancied, Paddy and Parazone, and me, nursing my bullet wounds and my bruises and gnawing on the armchair for sustenance. On a good night, I could get through an entire Davenport. Other people have tears in their eyes because of piles. Not me. I've got splinters.
Christmas treats
Every Christmas, my father would come home with a treat for us all. For my mother, whom he loved in a hard, callous and unloving way so typical of hard, callous and unloving Irishmen, he would normally have a Brillo pad, and for us, he would have a brand new cane, and we would spend Christmas day singing carols while he flogged us.
We knew nothing about sex or nudity. My family did not wash often - it is a sine qua non of the deprived Irish childhood that hygiene was largely a greeting reserved for a unit of heredity - and when he did, we put on several layers of clothing to do so.
But those were the relatively happy days; darker times in our miserable Irish childhood lay ahead of us . . .
(Serialisation of Cyril's Cinders continues next week)