Free At My Mother's Knee by Paul O'Grady Page A

secretly
basked in the praise heaped upon her by the Grady family and
she slowly thawed and began to blossom. Whatever my mother
said about Ireland – and she had a lot to say on the matter, all
of it contradictory – she and Aunty Bridget shared a lifelong
affection for each other.
    My dad was born into good farming stock. Hadn't his father
fought for the right of the working man to farm his own land?
But my dad had no aptitude for tilling the land. His heart
wasn't in it. Years later he would reminisce about growing up
in Ireland, telling of how they would take the donkey and cart
down to the bogs and bring home the turf to provide fuel. He
would paint dreamy pictures of cutting the hay on balmy
summer afternoons and building golden haystacks until,
exhausted, they would collapse on top of the haycart and enjoy a supper of freshly baked bread with great hunks of cheese and
onion washed down with a bottle of porter. These were very
sociable occasions, armies of family and neighbours turning
out en masse. That was what he really missed about Ireland.
What he enjoyed was the craic, the good company and all that
goes with it. The physical labour was a necessary evil, tolerated
if it meant good times with family and friends.
    In his teens he was a drummer in an Irish show group, playing
popular standards such as 'The Black Velvet Band' at
dances and carnivals in villages and towns. I remember seeing
a photograph of him many years ago; the photo has long since
vanished but the image of him sat behind a drum kit, his hair
and shirt soaking wet with sweat, eyeing up the line of drinks
on top of the piano, is imprinted on my memory. Playing in the
band broke the monotony of farming.
    One morning he woke to find a note from his sister Sadie.
She'd packed her bags and emigrated to England. That was
probably the final straw for my dad, alone in the house, with
the daunting task of running a farm on his own before him. He
could see no future for himself in Ballincurry. He felt he was a
burden to his uncle James, who had his own family and farm
to look after, and so, like his sisters before him, he decided to
take the boat to Liverpool.
    He put the farm up for sale, though it wasn't until July 1946
that it was finally auctioned off for the grand sum of £885. My
dad got £432 1s 9d, Sadie £50 and Mary £10, with the rest
going on legal fees. Hopefully Uncle James benefited from the
sale; that good man certainly deserved it as without his
sensibility and guiding hand over the years the farm would
have gone under long before.
    The year after my dad received his share of the farm my
mum inherited £104 14s on the death of her father. This meant
that between them they had £536 15s 9d, nothing by today's
standards but a small fortune back in the forties. They blew every penny. When you've been used to a life of poverty,
common sense can go out the window when an unexpected
windfall comes your way. I'm surprised that they didn't invest
in some property – they had the perfect opportunity to buy a
house – but they didn't, preferring instead to continue to rent
Holly Grove. They ended up doing so for the rest of their lives,
something my mum deeply regretted in later years.
    'That money just slipped through our fingers like fairy gold,'
she said reflectively. 'But we were young and stupid and we'd
had enough of scrimping and saving and wearing the same dress , so we went mad and enjoyed ourselves.' They certainly
did that. They celebrated on a grand scale, sharing their good
fortune with family and friends. My brother and sister were
kitted out with a complete set of new clothes; Mum and Aunty
Chris, able to indulge their fantasies for once, spent a fortune
on the New Look, a style introduced by Christian Dior in the
spring of 1947, adding a couple of fox furs for a touch of film
star glamour and, in Aunty Chris's case, a pillbox hat with a
veil that she would blow smoke through à la Marlene Dietrich . My dad, always a snappy dresser and