My father was a robust little Irishman from County Down. His family had lived in Newry until his parents separated when he was fourteen, with his father going his own way and his mother taking her two daughters elsewhere. My dad was on his own, forced to make his way in life. He’d strapped a few garden tools to his bicycle and cycled off across the Irish countryside, picking up whatever small jobs he could. Eventually, like so many before him, he left Ireland for a better chance at work to be found in Liverpool.
My mother’s people were Irish too, with a splash of Spanish, although she was born and raised in Liverpool, which was where she and my father met. Her parents had not approved of my father’s courtship, apparently considering him an unreliable provider. Harsh words were exchanged, including on their wedding day, and the rift was never healed. I didn’t really know any of my grand-parents and we had only fleeting contact with various aunties, uncles, and cousins. I remember no large family gatherings convened to celebrate or to mourn. We were not a clan in any sense. The adults we saw most of were Sister Anthony, a nun from the convent who was quite devoted to us, and my mum’s friend Mrs. Richter, a portly little lady who lived down the hill from us, on the lip of Woolton quarry, from which had come the sandstone blocks that composed our house and much of the village.
One thing is certain amid the misty half-remembering of those first few years of life: that I began in a green and pleasant place of trees and fields, barnyard animals and ancient stone buildings, infused by the whispering piety of nuns. There I absorbed a sense of the sacred and of sanctuary, from the Latin sanctus, meaning sacred. In the Christian tradition a sanctuary was a holy place or piece of consecrated ground set aside for the worship of God or of one or more divinities. But it also became a place in which, by the law of the medieval church, a fugitive from justice or a debtor was immune from arrest. Thus it was a place of refuge also, a retreat both sacred and safe.
There was no question that danger lurked all about us. Hitler’s war had only just ended and Luftwaffe bombs had flattened whole sections of Liverpool. I remember the city pocked with heaps of rubble where buildings once had stood. Even with Hitler dead in his bunker, we were not safe. Across Church Road from our home the high stone walls of an abandoned estate were said to enclose neglected woodlands in whose depths tramps occasionally took shelter. Tramps were men of despicable habits and appetites, and God only knew what vile and filthy acts they’d perform on little boys who disobeyed their parents and ventured into those forbidden woods.
Gypsies sometimes lurked nearby as well, devious characters known for snatching unsuspecting children and carrying them off so they never saw their parents again. Whenever there was an encampment of Gypsies on nearby common land, I tingled with a fearful fascination over these exotic and dangerous people, their odd habits of dress, their strange horse-drawn wagons. They were everything that we were not: itinerant, disreputable, irreligious, tribal, mockingly defiant of society. The men worked as tinkers coming door to door to repair leaking pots and pans and, it was thought, to reconnoiter for what might be pilfered. When the Gypsies broke camp and left, I felt a surcease of danger and simultaneously a sadness I didn’t understand because they were gone away.
That the outer world was a breeding ground of evildoers was a conviction that I absorbed, like oxygen, from as long ago as I can remember. An instinctive distrust of strangers became second nature to me, a conviction that people at large were greedy and selfish, eager to take advantage of honest folk like ourselves. More than half a century later I’m still extricating tendrils of that foul inheritance from unexplored recesses of consciousness. I no longer blame my parents for it, for they in their turn had inherited it, the narrow, secretive, gossip-ridden character of Irish peasantry. Neither they nor I had any conception that the real foe, the saboteur of the soul, lies within each of us, and from that dark truth there is no sanctuary.
But everything has two sides, and while there might well lurk the likelihood of catastrophe beyond our little plot of holy ground, I must have intuited that there was safety and loveliness to be savored within it. The instinctive distrust of the unknown, the other, was balanced by a love of my parents and brothers and something else as well—I think an incipient love of solitude and seclusion, a delight in the natural world, in plants and creatures, extremes of weather, starry nights, and landscapes of surpassing beauty. I believe a sense of wonderment was also planted in my soul back then, an intuition of the power and beauty that trembled in everything.
BUT THIS LOVELY sense of being shielded by chant and flower was not to last, for our family was driven out of Knowle Park when I was about five years old. My father had quarreled with the mother superior of the convent. Affable and gregarious most of the time, particularly with people outside the family, my dad was not by nature a quarrelsome person. But when he thought himself ill-treated or misused in some way, he dug in and wouldn’t budge.
He lacked all skill at compromise or conciliation, and his stubborn sense of outrage at some perceived injustice—perhaps an Irishman’s legacy born of six centuries under John Bull’s boots—is one of my own more troublesome inheritances.
I don’t know what the quarrel concerned but it resulted in his losing his job and our losing our home. A disaster in the land of the landless. A horse-drawn cart pulled up in front of our dwelling one morning. My parents piled our few meager household goods onto the cart and my two brothers and I climbed on as well. Because we didn’t own a car and I’d never ridden in one, to do so would have seemed far more remarkable than was riding on a horse-drawn cart.
The horse trudged down Church Road pulling the cart. In my mind’s eye the scene is reminiscent of something out of Catherine Cookson: the honest and hard-working farm bailiff and his young family unfairly driven from their home to face a cruel world. We clopped past Saint Peter’s Church, in whose graveyard the bones of the as-yet-uncelebrated Eleanor Rigby lay, and down into the village of Woolton. The cart creaked to a halt in front of a two-story brick house, the last of a strip of dismal row houses on Allerton Road in the heart of the village. The house fronted onto the road, staring at a matching row of houses opposite. Next door to us sat the Woolton Public Baths, a squat brick building that held a little swimming pool and washing facilities for those who lacked full bathrooms at home. Across the street from the baths, on the corner of Quarry Road, the Grapes pub and hotel catered to sinners, drunks, and adulterers. A huge stone church up on High Street loomed directly behind our house. We’d moved from the shadow of a nunnery to the shadow of a Congregational church. On Sunday mornings the village resonated with the ringing of bells from its four churches.
But there was not a blade of grass to be seen anywhere on our street, nor any flowers. Trees could be glimpsed only in the distance. Expelled from a green and pleasant place, we’d come to a crowded neighborhood of bricks and stone. Through our small domestic drama, my family was re-enacting the industrialization of Olde England, moving from pastoral to urban life, for Woolton had already by then been swallowed up as a part of greater Liverpool.
I think a sense of my father’s failure hung in the air after our move to the village. Surely it was his stubbornness and pride that had brought us down to this. I wonder now what he felt at the time, and what my mother felt. A more melancholy character, my mother endured life’s blows with a resignation that was equal parts stoic and ironic. “The exilic condition comes naturally to a certain kind of Irishman,” wrote Anthony Burgess in his preface to Modern Irish Short Stories, and I suspect that my father, having experienced exile at a young age, was less fazed by our changed circumstances. No doubt anxious to prove himself a more worthy provider than my mother’s family had judged him, he got a job working on the Liverpool buses, first as conductor and later as driver, and we settled into life as village folk. (Twenty years after our expulsion from Knowle Park I would suffer an uncannily similar experience when I was ejected from the monastic life I’d chosen. Like my father, I tangled with religious authority and paid a heavy price. I think of it now as a family specialty, getting up the snoot of religious tyrants and being pitched out onto the street for our efforts.)
But our familial piety wasn’t the least bit dampened