Heaps of Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page A

the age of seven he was deposited at the school doors for what he later described as the worst days of his life. It was a period that he rarely talked about and it was only from the odd snippet that I was able to piece together the family’s progression into the hotel business, which happened in the late 1920s. Sometimes my father would talk about spending summer holidays in one or more of the many hotels that Claus had bought around England. If the telling of these tales was within my mother’s earshot, she would quickly put paid to them by shouting at him to ‘stop showing off to the child and stop trying to act the big fellow’. The mother’s reaction halted further stories and gave him an excuse (not that he ever needed any) to head off to the local pub or the Workman’s Club across the street.
    After he left Stonyhurst my father immediately went on to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and was just in time to join up as a captain at the outbreak of the Second World War. By 1946, when he was demobbed, he had somewhere along the line been elevated to the rank of major. Once again, the seven years that he served in the British army (described by himself as the period during which he ‘assisted Hitler in losing the war’) were never spoken about at home. It was after the war, and in England, that my parents met and then returned to Dublin, coinciding with the downfall of the Heaps family empire – an empire that by this time centred on gambling and booze, in that particular order.
    During the Second World War Claus sold up all of his hotels in England and invested a lot of his money in war bonds. At war’s end he moved to Ireland (allegedly with the intention of trying to set up his three sons in business) and purchased a string of betting shops across the country. At one stage he had eleven in Dublin alone. The development of the betting-shop empire coincided with Claus hitting the bottle. To this day I know absolutely nothing about betting shops, bookies or gambling – and, from what I can gather, neither did Claus or his three sons. If they did, they only learnt the business after all of the betting shops had gone bankrupt.
    Afterwards my uncle Stan continued as a track bookie and eventually made a successful livelihood from that profession, in spite of a shaky start. Sometimes my father would clerk for him, but these times were few and far between, for whenever the pair of them headed off to the dog track together, inevitably they ended up at a poker game. They would stay out until they had managed to fleece the unlucky sods that had suggested the game in the first place. Add darts, rings and snooker to their list of talents (always played within reach of a bar counter) and you can see why their two wives tried to keep them apart as much as they could.
    Alcoholism was one of the main contributing factors that led to the downfall of Claus’ empire and the day after he went broke, for some very strange reason, he decided to quit drinking and smoking. The end result was that he and my grandmother moved in to live with us, which put the mother on tablets for a week and sparked off one of the many rows my parents would have on the subject. Years later the mother still brought it up in arguments, declaring, ‘Didn’t I tell you Ron, that mother of yours would be the ruination of us?’
    Having the grandparents living with us placed the household under a cloud of gloom and a permanent stress level that affected the mother more than the rest of us. The grandparents moved into one of the two upstairs bedrooms, which they converted into a self-contained flatlet, and then proceeded to contaminate the upper level with strong cooking smells. My mother would scream at my grandmother if she so much as ventured into our kitchen – something that she liked to do on a daily basis, to check on her son’s child and to ensure that my mother was feeding me properly. The