My mother had Atlantic grey eyes and prematurely grey hair. She had nervous eczema across the temples, and a tendency to mottle instant crimson across her chest and neck when roused. She had large hips, strong hands, and an erect bearing. She had left school at fourteen and graduated through unskilled jobs in one reeking local factory after another: Tate & Lyle (sugar, syrup), Spiller’s (flour, dog food, fertiliser), and Knight’s Castille (soap, detergents). My mother’s people on her father’s side were descended from Egans and Sheehys, second-generation immigrants from County Kerry. Her mother was a Sweeney, a Catholic Scot from Leith, but originally from Donegal. Mum was the only daughter, with six brothers; there had been a second daughter who died aged five.
Granddad Thomas Egan’s people had come over from Ireland with nothing but their Faith and the family. Two of my Egan uncles would become involved in a minor way with the IRA: guns up the chimney, running ‘messages’. In truth, Granddad Egan’s children were by their generation belligerent cockneys with a vulgar sense of humour, albeit ghetto Roman Catholic to the core.
Granddad Egan worked in boiler maintenance; he knew precisely where to hit a cylinder to eradicate a dent. He met Grandma Catherine at a Catholic church social evening in Bow and they married in their teens. When Mum was a girl, her family, all nine of them, was squeezed into a two-bedroomed house on North Woolwich Road, Silvertown. Old Silvertown, before Hitler and the London County Council planners reshaped it, was isolated from metropolitan London and its suburbs by the geography of the river and the dock complexes. Rural Essex was a day’s walk away. Transport was minimal and there were few social amenities other than the pubs and churches. Eventually the Egans were joined by a tenth family member, Grandma’s destitute and ageing Sweeney uncle who had walked down from Scotland. Nobody in need was turned away.
Mum was an expert mimic, mocking the follies of pretty well everybody outside the Egan–Sweeney circle. She would hold herself tight as she dissolved into high-pitched, tearful laughter. But she was quick to anger when sensing an affront to her dignity. She thought class a matter of personal aspiration rather than accident of birth. She loathed socialists and the unions because they were ‘against bettering oneself’. She believed that a ‘real man’ is ‘clean’ and ‘truthful’, and ‘never raises his hand to a woman’. Raising her own hand to a misbe-having child was another matter.
She had an unqualified respect for the priesthood. Priests, she knew only too well, were hardly immune from individual lapses. Yet one never judged a priest; for one day, she would say, these men would come face to face with Almighty God to answer for their deeds. She had stories to tell about priests. As a girl, her route to school passed through a Protestant enclave. One morning there was a street fight. The Catholics inflicted a lot of pain and injury, and a delegation complained to Father Fitzgerald. The suspects, led by Mum (big for her age and sporting a broken front tooth and a terrible cast in her right eye), were summoned to the school hall. A cantankerous Father Fitzgerald picked on Mum first. Had she taken part? Even as she said: ‘No, Father,’ he punched her in the chest, sending her flying against the wall. ‘When that priest tumped you,’ she used to say, explosively imitating his brogue, ‘you stayed tumped.’
Despite a restricted education, Mum had a remarkable if occasionally shaky vocabulary ranging from surprising archaisms to odd vulgarisms. She had an outlandish way of undermining well-worn clichés: ‘It’s so quiet in here you could hear a bomb drop!’ And she routinely subverted key words as if striving for the caricature status of a malaprop cockney. Anything surprising was a ‘relevation’; while missing the point was always ‘irrevelant’. ‘An erring priest,’ she used to say, ‘will be judged more harshly than any other before the trinubal of God.’
Mum maintained that she acquired her religious piety from her own mother, whom she described as a ‘walking saint’. Grandma Catherine Egan was a lay member of the Franciscans. She venerated Saint Anthony of Padua and the Carmelite Thérèse of Lisieux (the French saint widely known as the Little Flower of Jesus). She attended a Franciscan church at Stratford East. Mum would relate how Grandma Egan would collect her as late as eight o’clock on Saturday evenings from her Saturday job at a grocer’s store to take her to confession at Stratford.
Mum was eighteen when her parents died in the same year, both aged fifty. The event cast a shadow of remorse across the whole of her life. It was as if her parents continued to reach out from their graves to clutch her by the ankles. Granddad Egan, the boiler man, a worrier by all accounts, died first of a perforated ulcer. Mum used to say that days before his sudden death she saw a figure in a black cloak leaning over her father as he lay sleeping on a daybed (my mother’s bed at night) in the living room. Her mother died a year later of breast cancer. Towards the end there was a lapse in Grandma Egan’s piety. As she lay in agony, Mum brought up from the yard a rose her father had planted a week before he died. She said: ‘Remember the Little Flower of Jesus, Mum.’ Grandma turned her face to the wall and said: ‘Don’t be stupid!’ Dressed in the Franciscan habit, she was buried in Leyton’s Catholic cemetery along with six strangers in a common grave, close to Granddad Egan’s common grave.
Mum, being the only girl, looked after three brothers who were still at home, and the aged and cantankerous Scottish uncle. She also became responsible for shopping, cooking, cleaning and laundry, as well as being the breadwinner – a factory worker on early morning shifts. Her brothers abused her verbally, and sometimes physically, although not without explosive retribution. She continued like this for three years until she met Dad at a dance in the Spiller’s factory social club. She found him handsome and funny. But she married him, she would say later, as a result of his determination and her pity for his handicap. She was twenty-one; he was twenty-four.
My father became a Catholic to satisfy the virtual ban on mixed marriages. Mum says he was an eager convert. Once married, however, he seldom went to church. We grew up thinking him a lost soul. His mother, Grandma Lillian, being a Jew, was deemed doubly a lost soul. The contempt of some East End Catholics for Jews was matched only by their hatred of Protestants. I once heard an Egan uncle referring to my genial Grandma Cornwell as ‘that Yid their father’s mother’.
MUM’S DISILLUSIONMENT with Dad began with a wartime episode. To escape the air raids in London, Mum and we three children went to stay in the market town of Bicester in Oxfordshire while Dad stayed on in East Ham. During our absence, Dad got involved with a girl he met in a public air-raid shelter. Mum discovered this when she returned to East Ham without warning and found an intimate letter written from an address on Canvey Island in the Thames estuary.
Mum set off on the train to pay the girl a visit. When she arrived at South Benfleet, the station for Canvey Island, she saw Dad on the opposite platform. He waved nonchalantly (‘As if to say: “Here we are again!’”) before nipping on to a train bound back to London. So she proceeded to the address where she found the girl, aged just nineteen, living with her mother. Mum discovered that Dad had constructed a web of fantasies about himself. He claimed to be a master carpenter and had offered to take on the girl’s younger brother as an apprentice. To Mum’s fury in the those times of wartime food shortages, he had turned over his ration book to the girl’s mother.
Retrieving the precious book, Mum set off for London determined to end the marriage. Back in East Ham she confronted him. He confessed all and begged forgiveness, but she was adamant, absolutely adamant, until she went round to see my devout godmother Aunt Nelly. After many tears and over many cups of tea Aunt Nelly persuaded Mum that Dad’s erring behaviour was a consequence of ‘this terrible, terrible war’ and that God would surely wish her to forgive him and stay with him. So Mum did what she believed her Faith expected of her. We all moved back to East Ham, to Dad, and the bombing.
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