Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Read Online Free PDF Page A

soapy water. We didn’t have much furniture, there was one soft chair in the house which was my father’s chair. Because my mother died we had to take our turns at household work. One week it would be my turn to light the fire and make the dinner when my father was at work. The next week it was my turn to make the beds and someone else’s turn to light the fire and make the dinner … we had a rota system. We had two bedrooms, a sitting room downstairs and what we called the parlour, where my mother actually died. But we had the most basic of facilities, the most basic. I remember my father every Friday night, he would come in and put the wage packet on the mantelpiece and it was £11 and my job every Friday night was to go round and get what we called the ‘rations’. I remember it as well, three-quarter pound of tea, three pound of butter, a pound and a half of margarine, a bottle of HP sauce, six pound of sugar, and two shillings’ worth of broken biscuits, and that was my job every Friday. Every Friday we had our choice of what to eat for supper. In the summer we always got a bit of fruit, or fish out of Fusco’s, * but during the week, you took what was going. I remember one midweek, we had no money whatsoever; we hadn’t even a loaf of bread. We had an outside toilet with a lead pipe coming from the cistern and my father got a hacksaw and went out and sawed the lead pipe off the cistern in the toilet and sent me over to the scrap yard and we got enough money for two shillings’ worth of chips, a loaf and a block of margarine, and we had chips and bread for our tea that night. I had an uncle who worked in the slaughterhouse, and every Friday, he used to leave us meat from the butcher’s; there would be a liver, an oxtail, sometimes sweetbreads and bits and pieces of other meats, what you called ‘skirting’, which you made stew with. But even if you were starving on a Friday, you weren’t allowed to eat that meat, because my father was a practising Catholic and Friday was a fast day. No matter how hungry you were, you did not eat meat on a Friday! But, most of that meat my father would give away, and one of my chores on a Friday night was to bring some of this meat to other people in the street who were just as bad off as us. There was actually one family at the bottom of the street, it was a mixed family, the father was a Protestant and the mother a Catholic, and the kids were never practising Catholics. But there were twenty-one people in that house, a two-bedroom house – twenty-one people living in it at the one time, twenty-one people. Often the meat would have gone down to them. It was unbelievable, I mean, when I think back on it now … there were three of us in one bed, four of us sometimes. My father had his own room, and my young sister was in a cot. She was only a child, eighteen months old when my mother died. Initially she slept in my father’s room, in the cot. Looking back on it now, I mean, one soft chair! All the rest were bamboo chairs or just wooden chairs. But – now this is the major contradiction – my grandmother was pretty well off; she was one of the few people I knew on the Falls Road who had an indoor toilet, an indoor bathroom, with a bath. For us to get a bath we went to the Falls Road public baths, sometimes once a week, maybe once a fortnight, where we could have a bath. But my grandmother had all the facilities, she had a bath, a shower, everything indoors, and she owned the house that we lived in. As I say, we had the most basic of furniture. My grandmother decided one time that the outside of the house needed done up and she employed this builder to put in French doors and French windows. They were the ‘in thing’ at the time. We were the only house on the street with French doors and French windows! That was an image thing. It didn’t matter what was going on inside the house, it was the appearance from the outside that mattered. She’s putting French doors and