Joseph O'Neill - Blood-Dark Track

The O’Neills — which is to say, Grandma and four boys — only moved into corporation housing because with Jim interned they couldn’t afford the rent at 39 Friars Road, Turner’s Cross. Their first corporation house was at Mount Nebo Avenue, in north Cork.

North Cork, the old, tilting half of the city built on the elevations north of the Lee, reveals itself in sudden, often deceptive vistas: banked cottages appear airborne, a colourful row of parked cars rears up a hillside like a Ferris wheel, and, looking down treeless Mount Nebo Avenue, a distant rural landscape looms mirage-like at the bottom of the road. Mount Nebo Avenue forms part of a large housing estate built in Gurranabrahan in the ’twenties and ’thirties. Gurranabrahan (the Brothers’ Walk) is sometimes called the Red City after the red sprawl made by its tiled roofs when viewed from a distance; but red is not the dominant colour once you’re inside Gurranabrahan — grey is. The houses are grey, as are the pavements, the roads, the lamp-posts and the walls. Even other colours (brown, cream, umber) are grey versions of themselves. Still, the seventy-year-old neighbourhood — encapsulated for me in the spectacle of dishevelled, rained-on schoolboys trudging uphill beneath cables drooping from telegraph poles — has an old-fashioned communal appeal. The streets are kept clean and the houses, their front gardens featuring stout palm trees, topiarized hedges and well-tended shrubs, are shipshape. The former O’Neill residence at Mount Nebo is not atypical. Part of a terrace of houses, the front door is reached by walking up some cement steps and then a few feet of pathway. A low hedge grows tidily around the garden’s perimeter railings. There are two storeys and three bedrooms. The frontage is covered in that familiar, rough, grey-brown pebbledash. Window and door trims are painted white. Patterned net curtains hang in the windows. All in all, the building looks well.

At Mount Nebo, the children went to primary school in Strawberry Hill and Sunday’s Well, and to secondary school at North Monastery. They played Gaelic games at St Vincent’s GAA Club and worshipped with their parents at St Vincent’s Church. My grandfather had a nearby plot of corporation land, on which he grew vegetables. In 1953, the family left Gurranabrahan and moved into 22 Churchfield Terrace East, a three-bedroomed corporation house in a newer estate in nearby Churchfield. The Churchfield house had a parking-space for one car and a passage leading directly from the front to the back garden, where there was a shed. There was a downstairs bedroom (for the parents), a living room at the back, and two bedrooms upstairs. The five eldest boys shared two double beds, with the youngest of them, Terry, squeezed contentedly between two of his brothers. The young girls (Ann and Angela) shared the other bedroom with little Declan; and in due course baby Marian joined them. In the loft, accessible through a ceiling hatch, my grandfather removed bricks in the party wall so as to create an emergency getaway tunnel into the Twomeys’ house, where a further breach in the brickwork created a further secret exit to the Sutton place. The escape route was never used.

These days, the O’Neill house is occupied by Mary O’Sullivan. Now in her late fifties, she grew up next door with her nine siblings (and, she told me angrily when I called on her, her mother had five miscarriages). ‘The O’Neills were a fabulous crowd,’ she said. ‘If we didn’t have butter, the O’Neills had it; if there was no milk, the O’Neills had it. At night we’d hear the door closing and my mother would say, “There he goes, we’ll have a few bob tomorrow.” ’ Mary’s words for Jim were ‘hard-working, good-looking, hunky, and cranky.’ ‘He was short with you, kind of dominating,’ she said. ‘If he was home before Mrs O’Neill, he’d come round and snap, “Where are the children?” “Mr O’Neill, they’ve had their bread and butter,” my mother would say. He’d say, “That’s not enough.” ’ Another neighbour, Rita Twomey — like Mary, still in Churchfield Terrace after forty years — chipped in and said that Mr O’Neill was very strict: ‘You’d have to duck.’ ‘Mrs O’Neill was marvellous,’ Rita said. ‘She never missed a day of washing the floor of the hall and kitchen.’ Rita and Mary said that Mrs O’Neill had her own mind but she did everything that Mr O’Neill said. ‘Things like that were different in those days.’ Mary O’Sullivan said, ‘He wasn’t one to do any painting or washing. He might do the gardening.’

The escape hatch at Churchfield Terrace

Gardening, in this context, meant the cultivation of vegetables. Jim grew potatoes, onions, lettuce, rhubarb, beetroot and cabbage, and enjoyed it. Another pleasure was his greyhound, Cora, who occupied a luxurious kennel equipped with a raised, straw-covered timber bed, and who was treated (uncle Terry said) like a princess. He tried to breed pups from Cora, but they died of distemper. On Sundays, Cora would be taken harecoursing, and my grandfather, surrounded by the ranges of West Cork, would be happy. He also became very involved with St Vincent’s Gaelic games club and was on a steering committee for fund-raising. My grandfather took great pleasure in watching his boys play. He would run along the touch-line urgently declaring, ‘That’s my son! That’s my son!’

The children’s memories of their North Cork days were of pleasant, impecunious, rough and tumble times: of riding and falling off a box-cart shooting down the hill at Mount Nebo; of getting it in the neck for tearing holes in precious jackets and taking heels off shoes; of horses straying into gardens; of neighbours treating other people’s children as a social resource, pressing them into errands (shopping, minding prams, looking after youngsters) and even, if necessary, clipping them across the ear; of near-misses with eviction (one time my grandmother’s brother Tadhg cleared the rent arrears just as the furniture was being put out into Mount Nebo Avenue); of Terry getting into a fight with Jackie Buckley, and Mrs Buckley grabbing her son by the collar, saying, ‘Come in, there’s an army of them.’

22 Churchfield Terrace East

In Churchfield, as in Mount Nebo, everybody knew everybody, and my uncle Terry could still name the people who lived on the street — the Wisemans, Coghlans, McCarthys, Dennehys, Mrs Conch, the O’Learys, McGraths, O’Connells, O’Donovans, Linehans, Drummonds, Nations. The O’Neills nearly always had a car, starting with a second-hand Hillman 1946. The cars were mostly Hillmans because Jim Junior got a job as a Hillman agent and would see a bargain coming in. My grandfather had a functional, unsentimental approach to any vehicle he owned. He would taxi men to work for a fee, transport salmon, and use the car as an ambulance or hearse for neighbours. Except for the Sweeneys, the O’Neills were the only car-owners in the neighbourhood. The family stood out in another respect: at Easter, theirs was the only house in Churchfield with a tricolour flying out of the window. On Easter Sunday all O’Neills wore an Easter lily (‘Whether we liked it or not,’ said my aunt Ann) and marched from the Grand Parade to the republican plot in St Fintan’s cemetery. At the cemetery a volley of shots would be fired by men wearing green fatigues, Sam Browne belts, and hats with one side of the brim fastened up.

‘Republican politics was the boys’ domain,’ Ann and Marian remembered. ‘Dad never really engaged in any proper discussion with Mum about politics. They were in it together, and that was that. If he hadn’t been so headstrong he would have appreciated how supportive she was of him. Mum should have been a politician. She was the most fantastic housekeeper, mother, cook, all-round manager, and diplomat. She’d be the calming force, and he the one to blow up over things.’