In the first of a week-long series by 'Irish Times' writers, Kevin Myers recalls dark days as a lonely street sweeper in Leicester, until a holiday in Galway opened his eyes - and ears - and ended in a place at UCD
Up each morning at 6.45 a.m., the sense of failure - dark, inescapable - lying over my young life. Sleepily scurrying to Leicester Corporation cleansing depot, past the bus-queues of workers sucking on their first Woodbine of the day, hacking deeply, liquidly, to produce sticky little glue-puddles of phlegm at their feet.
Our street-sweeping shift began at 7.30 a.m., a trio of summer student-workers among the men who did it for a living: wizened ancients they seemed - perhaps the age I am now. Veterans of the hungry 1930s, they wore shirt and tie to work, and combined a deep pride that they had found lifetime jobs, when others hadn't, with a desperate sense of inferiority towards us. "Eh up, me duck," Frank the ganger would jest, shaking his head: "a right laff this - us'uns weerth nowt, sweeping causey [causeway: pavement] alongun you fancy college types an' all." No, Frank: no college lay ahead for me - of that, I was certain. I had already the year before feasted on a rich banquet of disaster at boarding school, failing all my A-levels. My final school report declared: "Kevin is a nice enough young man, but his limited intellect means he will never go far in life." I left school, and moved into my mother's modest new home, the old one on the far side of the city having been lost in the calamity of my father's intestate death, and the instant impoverishment which followed.
Leicester was now a foreign place to me. Its people were very low-church: a staid, incurious species, and slow to friendship: revelry a UFO. By 10 p.m., bedroom lights would click off round the city, and a ghastly lunar silence would settle on the dark of centre and suburb alike.
I had no idea what I wanted to do: none. No career beckoned, no ambition burned. Survival was the only option: but survival for what purpose in life? I had no idea. So, quite penniless, I started studying fresh A-levels at a local technical college, but without any sense of direction. The new milieu barely altered my life. My public school manners and accent separated me from other students. On Saturday nights, I would pretend to my mother that I was meeting friends, but they were all imaginary, and usually I would sit alone in folk-clubs, husbanding a single Coke, waiting for rescue, and waiting in vain.
A year went by, and I did my second set of A-levels, and I knew I'd done badly. Why was this? I wasn't stupid, merely a fairly typical, dysfunctional teenage male for whom the collision with the express-train of adolescence had coincided with my father's death. Aimless, troubled, I had no idea where I was going: my mother watched in silence, and in silence worried.
So to my summer job, sweeping streets, and as we students paused for breakfast at 9 a.m., we discussed the colleges that lay ahead: for them, Christ Church, Balliol or Kings, while I airily blathered about the alternatives ahead - as numerous and as real as my friends. Callow is the word: callow is the dismissive term which is used to describe the shallows of youth, swirling thinly over the steep depths of bafflement and terrible sadness within the teenage heart.
It was 1966, and England had just won the World Cup. My eldest brother Bill suggested to my younger brother Johnny, and to me, that we revisit the ancestral homeland. Ireland: a country which had annually irradiated my childhood with magic, and strange, wondrous foods - barm brack, Haffners' sausages and white pudding, and - too rarely - that handful of nutty brown trout, so mentally retarded that they managed to fall prey to poor Dad's hopeless angling skills.
My family was from Dublin: I was the first Myers to be born abroad, and Ireland was an ever-present in my childhood, regularly reinforced by visits - to and by - beloved aunts and uncles. But it had, in recent times, also acquired an even more captivating allure. Two summers before, when he was 16, a boy at my school, Ratcliffe, had visited Dublin with his father. One day he had gone to play a round of golf at Portmarnock where, at the fourth tee - he told us breathlessly, months later, still incredulous - he had met a girl. Somewhere around the 11th, not taking yes for an answer, she had ruthlessly taken his virginity.
What was it like? Incredible, he whispered. Incredible.
Mmm. An interesting place, this Ireland. (And the real reason Portmarnock bans women members).
So we departed on the rocky road to my Irish roots, to our first morning in a Dublin bus, shattered after the horrific overnight cattle-boat. "Where are you from?" asked the conductor. "Leicester," I mumbled. "They're from Leicester," he announced to the other passengers. A woman turned. "I have a sister in Leicester. Frances O'Connor. Do you know her?" A man two seats in front smiled over his shoulder. "Me brother was in the Commandoes during the war. Jack McNamara. He settled in Leicester. You must know him, surely." From the front of the bus: "Do you know Father Leahy at all, at all?" And, by God, we did: chewed tobacco and loved going to Granby Hall for the wrestling. For the rest of the journey, the entire lower deck was a babbling symphony of stranger-friends. Vanished days.
We were blessed with wonderful Irish kinfolk, the finest, most generous people I have ever known: my Uncle Martin and Aunt Pat, and Aunt Ellie on my father's side: Uncle Tom and Aunt Gertie, Uncle Jim and Aunt Gracie and Aunt Joe on my mother's. In their turn, they welcomed us with a dam-burst of generosity, and tiny Uncle Jim - the Ulster Bank manager in Naas - even insisted that we three young males (imagine this today) borrow his car to visit the west. Having been his passengers, his trilby jauntily on his head and his nose peering just beneath above the steering wheel of his Cortina as he gestured happily in every direction, we readily accepted his offer. The less this lovely man drove Aunt Gracie around - or so we told ourselves - the greater their chances of reaching retirement age.
So, though I argued strongly for spending our holiday near the fourth tee at Portmarnock, instead we headed west, to a strange new world. Hearing our English accents, everyone congratulated us on England's victory in the World Cup. The delight at English success was authentic, unfeigned, exuberant: distant days indeed.
In Oranmore, our B&B hostess clearly knew all about the fourth tee: she had about 10 children under 10, though her husband was a mere morsel of a man, his baldness concealed by a thin lock of red hair crossing from one ear to the next like a rope-bridge. On discovering that the only local restaurant was closed, she whipped out the magic Irish frying pan, now alas extinct, and gave us our evening meal. (Next morning, red-faced and flustered, she had to be arm-locked into accepting payment for it: a shilling - eight cents - each).
That night, the entire house echoed to her throaty Portmarnock din, all 18 shrieking holes of it, finished off - or so it seemed - with a prolonged and hearty nightcap at the 19th. At breakfast, we ate en famille, festooned with red-haired infants sticking their fingers up our noses, the Myerses gazing in silent awe at the balding, tiny scrap of a man, toying with his rashers.
At a ballad session in Galway, the lead singer asked: "Is anyone here from England?" Bill, being born in Ireland and always happy to parade his superiority in matters of nativity, bellowed, pointing (to my incredulous indignation): "He is." "That's grand," replied the singer. "We've got a few ballads about the IRA next, but that doesn't mean we hate the English, because we don't, for English visitors are more than welcome here." The club erupted with applause, and a strange chemistry, a molecular - though, as I now know, profoundly naïve - realignment occurred inside my body.
Yet Ireland had been a beating heart of identity from my infancy. Listening to records by Delia Murphy, the Clancys and John McCormack, and to my father lying in bed on Saturday mornings crooning "The Kerry Dances". Now a young adult, I was captivated by the social energy and the ease of acquaintance - even by the guileless naïvety of the lady at the Oranmore B&B. She literally gibbered with excitement at the imminent arrival in the town of Dickie Rock - if only she knew how thoroughly acquainted we were with her vocal repertoire - and was quite perplexed that we too were not gibbering in unison. Portmarnock, now, that might have got me gibbering, but not Dickie Rock. Sorry, Dickie.
Dazzled by the visit, I (and my brothers) returned to Leicester, and to my street-sweeping.
Photographs were developed: there was one of me near Ennis: a round-faced bog paddy in a Clare bog. In Leicester, dawns were turning chilly and the leaves on the ground were singed and crisp at the edges when my A-Level results finally arrived: two mere passes, not enough to get me even into a card-school, never mind a university.
Utter despair. For what future has a failure from a minor English public school with no absolutely qualifications, contacts, friends or money? As for my future, Irish options never even entered my head.
My mother wrote to an old family associate in Dublin, Prof Jeremiah Hogan, wondering if UCD provided an escape. As it happened - he replied diffidently - there was a still unfilled quota for "foreign" students, which by definition I was. My "A-Levels", contemptible though they clearly were, might possibly suffice for entry - only, however, if they had no competing applications. Would I care to come over for an interview?
So, I returned to Ireland - and having sedulously searched for, yet not found the bus for Portmarnock, never mind its voluptuous fourth tee - once again I walked through St Stephen's Green. It was early autumn, and languid young men were playing croquet upon the neatly-ironed, green-linen lawns. I wandered the great Georgian squares glowing in the slanting sunlight, and once again my heart was captured.
A fortnight later in Leicester, two days before term began, and solely because absolutely nobody else had applied, an offer of a place came from UCD (ah, the indignity of having to offer a place to a dolt like me). Thus I began those first, uncertain steps to all this: to the man that I am, to the life that I live, the wife that I love and the land that is mine.