An Irish Book of Living and Dying: A Migrant's Tale

By Donal Griffin

In this hilarious, charming and occasionally melancholy memoir, Donal Griffin teaches us how to live forever – or die trying. As a succession lawyer, he encourages clients to draft more than a sterile Will; he advises them to pass on their stories, in all their grit, graft and glory. In so doing, they can face their demons head-on, become better people in the process, and bequeath their lessons learned. 'An Irish Book of Living and Dying' is his crack at practising what he preaches.
From the gloaming streets of Dublin to the phosphorescent oceans of Australia, this is the irreverent tale of a migrant's always-hopeful search for meaning and mischief. Sprinkled liberally with Irish songs and the immortal words of Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, it's an unputdownable rollick that will slap you in the face with the Salmon of Knowledge and leave you hanging for a pint with the lads.
With any luck, when you arrive at the final full stop, you might just be inspired to share your story, too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922565532

Book preview

Stop the Lights, Bunny

With laughs he palliates the sense of doom that is the heritage of the Irish Catholic.

— Flann O’Brien on James Joyce

In the hospital where I was born, the burnt-porridge smell from the nearby Guinness Brewery was thicker than that of disinfectant. That was in 1970. In the previous year, man walked on the moon. The following year, the Condom Train arrived in Dublin laden with well-known women who caused a great scene with the ‘rubber johnnies’ they had legally bought over the border in Belfast. Ireland had largely missed out on the social change that swept the rest of the western world during the 1960s. These women were real freedom fighters, but just as with the crowds watching the biblical insurgent Barabbas or the Easter 1916 Irish revolutionaries, the support they received was equivocal. Mum said they were making eejits of themselves. Ireland was changing, but imperceptibly, like the growth of my bones.

Fast forward to seven-year-old asthmatic me. When I was anxious or had a cold, attacks tended to come on. This was fairly often. I was scared something bad was under the bed and, as a bed-wetter, God only knew what horrors were pooling under there. A boiling kettle was the Irish treatment for asthma that year. I had a sink and a kettle in my bedroom; the Irish version of an en suite. The kettle was plugged in where a lamp would normally be. It boiled and boiled until the water level dropped and the element was exposed. Then it hissed as if the jug itself was having trouble breathing. While this made the room uncomfortable for my parents, it made it bearable for me. I was gravely told not to take more than two puffs every four hours of the manual-spring Ventolin medication. Popping the kettle on and filling the room with steam was the only way for me to get relief. For once, Ireland’s damp was welcome. The instructions on medicine jars, some of which were still mixed in the local pharmacy, were adhered to like catechism. I remember my folks looking at the clock — itself synchronised to the old speaking clock on the landline phone. They were counting down the hours until I was given a nod to take my next recommended dose. It would have been nice to know then, as I am told now, that you can safely take much more of that medication. We were used to being told what to do and middle-class people complied.

My parents, Freda and Donal Senior, after many miscarriages, prayed to save their pale, skinny, sweaty first-born. I knew I would survive; I looked worse than I was. I didn’t mind being on the inside of this thing, and the sympathy didn’t hurt. When my son was born decades later in Australia, I immediately understood my parents better (at least during their happy period). They learned that life revolved around me alone, until my sister Deirdre and later my brother Brian were born — and now I understand that life does not revolve around me at all.

All that said, I can’t complain about my asthma too much. Dad claimed he was treated for tuberculosis at the age of 10 and locked up for several months in a Galway sanitarium on the Atlantic Ocean coast. Dad’s mother had died when he was young and his father was a school-teacher whom he called Sir, not out of fear but respect. Dad had an elder brother, Danny, who was my godfather. They were not close but there was no bad blood. I got the sense that Dad, from his perspective as a Catholic, felt he had to give his only brother that important role. Dad also had a younger sister, Connie, to whom he was close, and both his siblings lived out their lives where they were from, in Galway. Like a lot of young men, the Church convinced Dad he had a vocation, and he joined a seminary to train as a priest. When that didn’t work out, he moved to the big smoke in Dublin when he was 21. I wonder if he left Galway for Dublin the same way I left Dublin for Sydney.

There are four provinces in Ireland: Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connaught. Galway is the biggest town in Connaught. Dad insisted it was a city, because it has a cathedral. Connaught was considered to have the poorest soil in the country. Oliver Cromwell had famously given a choice to the Irish he was pushing off their land in the 17th century, To Hell or to Connaught. I was named after Dad but only confused with him on one occasion. Mum used to make us all sandwiches for school or work. One day, I got a note in my lunch, intended for Dad. I was aware that these were adult things and honourably did not read it. Thinking back, it might have said, You have ruined my fuggen life!

Dad introduced me to classic whodunits, like The Big Sleep, Rear Window, The Maltese Falcon and other late-night movies on BBC2, preceded by preambles whispered by a northern Irish film buff. When Dad saw the name of that night’s film, he would gasp, Ah, this is a classic. You will love it! I invariably did, and was astonished that there were so many great films I had not heard of. I particularly loved film noir. Dad would attempt to speak the really famous lines alongside Bogie, but inevitably got them just a bit wrong. Our whole family enjoyed the slapstick of Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, but the grown-up films were a Dad and Donie (as I was called then) thing.

Dad also taught me how to play the guitar. ‘Play’ is a strong word, as he preferred the single-finger versions of the C, G and F chords, and you could make a cup of tea (coffee was a political and social statement, best to be avoided unless on the continent) while he was assembling the three fingers of a D chord. He was a bit punk that way and showed me how attitude and a bit of rhythm could cover up for lack of technique.

Dad had a baby-blue Lambretta scooter which I got to sit on when it was parked. One late summer Sunday, he asked, Come on, are ye ready? I thought we could spin into town and soak up the atmosphere of the match. Dublin was playing the county next to us, Meath, in the Leinster final of the Gaelic Football competition at Croke Park on the north side of the city.

Who else is coming? I wondered.

Just us, so let’s go on the scooter.

I hoped everyone would be out on the road to see us. They weren’t, but that didn’t matter. I held on to the metal grid behind me as we drove down the avenue, but Dad told me to put my arms around his waist once we were on the main road into town. It was loud, I felt cool in my blue nylon tracksuit and, for once, it wasn’t raining. Town was packed with people going to the match, or people selling flags or chocolate and fizzy drinks to people going to the match.

Wait here, said Dad.

Next thing I know, he’s talking out of the side of his mouth to the kind of person I had never seen him talking to before. A tout, as it turns out. He was buying a ticket for the match. The mystery as to who the ticket was for was solved when Dad handed his ticket to the steward in a long white butcher’s coat at the stadium and hoisted me up over the turnstile. Are you sure this is okay? I asked, before seeing kids my own age and hairier being thrown over the turnstiles to the left and right of me. I remember the deep roar of the crowd as the game swung one way and then the other and Dad’s relief that his scooter was not stolen.

Me as a baby with the folks

Off to the match

The next time I was on a motorbike was when my cousin Greg, Aunty Emily’s son, took me for a spin on his bigger motorbike weeks before he was thrown from it and died. Greg was a few years older than me and it did not really sink in. Dad later yielded to the teenaged Brian Cleary from next door, and gave him his scooter. For years, it had sat in our grass like an Aztec ruin. The lawn was as uneven as the national football stadium at Lansdowne Road if the groundskeeper was expecting foreign players who could actually play but Dad liked it mown in lines like a cricket pitch on TV.

Dad was a fun, loving and sensitive father when we were young. There were a few years when each of us got taken on a Dad day out for an adventure. My oldest friend, Ger Maher, told me that my birthday parties were great fun, and Dad would always speak to us as if we were young men. I can picture Dad rowing us around Lough Corrib in Galway and running away like a mad man trying to get a kite to take off, just as the wind had died for once. I remember the effort he would go to in coming up with puns for Halloween competitions. Deirdre was dressed as a native American with a wig and a hot water bottle, so of course had a sign that said, I want to keep my wig wam! You could get a prize for that in the 1970s. The ‘wig’ is the only thing I can now get away with in Australia.

Performers had catchphrases and the more incongruous their use, the better, especially if delivered with a straight face. You could say, Ah, would ye stop the lights, Bunny, instead of just, Stop, and everyone knew you were referencing a time limit in the quiz show Quicksilver, hosted by Bunny Carr. Dad would say it to himself as he walked into empty rooms around the house, turning off the lights.

Dad was the first person I ever saw walking around a house in headphones and might be responsible for the invention of the Sony Walkman. He knew we noticed it when we had to skip over the extension cord he needed to maintain good reception for the radio. It was a masterclass in passive aggression.

On weekdays after school, Mum drove me to Booterstown train station. When Dad got off the train after his day as a salaryman at an insurance company in the city, I would run up the steps to spot him among the suits on the other side of the barrier and then follow him down. As if for a prison visit, the bridge was divided so that the station master could catch people trying to use the train without buying a ticket. I was always thrilled to see Dad, and he was pleased to see me. On getting home, he’d retire to his bedroom to get changed. This could take an hour. Mum said he was doing his thing. When I put this in my ‘news’ at school, my teacher put red circles around it with a please explain request. Mum later told me he was practising transcendental meditation to unwind. He had learned the technique in the 1960s. I remembered this when I too sought solace in meditation after a long day in court two decades later. When I practise it now, the thought of Dad doing the same thing 50 years earlier is one I have to regularly acknowledge and try to let go.

Around the same time, Dad was identified as a formidable union representative, so his employer promoted him to a management role. As the personnel manager, he then had to battle his former union colleagues. While no doubt this was part of the management’s master plan, as we were to later find out, it was stressful for Dad and would ultimately prove detrimental for our whole family.

Mum

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

— Oscar Wilde, The Importance Of Being Earnest

Mums were usually the backbone of an Irish household. My mum, Freda, certainly was. She also had a part-time job managing the local church centre, so she was the spine of the entire community. Dad did not seem to encourage her role and did not like the independence her wages gave her. I don’t know whether the tension between them started before or after she took on the job.

She was one of 10 children born to my grandparents, Sheila and Paul Kelly. In descending order, they were: Frank, Marie, Paul, Emily, Jim, Hubert, Sheila, Mum, Petra, and Brian in Australia. Brian had emigrated but, even though he was older than Petra, his name would always come at the end of the list. This breaking of the natural order of things was not done lightly. It indicated there was a difference between people who stayed and those who didn’t. In the Dubliners story, Eveline, James Joyce has Mr Hill reflect with a sense of loss on a figure in a yellowing photograph: He is in Melbourne now. I didn’t know why he felt that way but I always knew which of the players I wanted to be.

Mum and her siblings were raised in a three-bedroom house in Drimnagh (‘Drimmers’ to us), which was a working-class area on the Southside of Dublin. Mum had her social climbing boots on. Any story about her home included the clarification that it was one of the utility houses, not social housing. When she would play her opera records in the house, Mum’s brothers would scream, Shut the fuck up! Mum told me, I would turn it up.

Irish people are well aware of the dangers of moving social strata — it can give you the bends — but if Mum wanted something, she would put on her posh voice. I would like to speak to the monoger, was one of her catchphrases. When engaged in conversation, Irish people don’t care to yield their position on the social ladder. Later, I learned that James Joyce wrote in Exiles: But if he had to meet a grand high-up person he’d be twice as grand himself.

On the street where they lived, their neighbour, Mrs Purcell, would call the kids over to give them oranges if they played Gaelic sports, but if they played soccer, which she considered to be a game inherited from the English, she called the police.

The Kellys had enough relations to fill their social life. There were infinite stories of their exploits, all of which were told on rotation. If anyone missed a detail or rushed a punchline, someone would correct the record or retell the story ‘properly’. You could not get away with anything inside the house, but outside you got what you negotiated. Mum was a chancer in a way that Dad disliked. Their differences did not complement each other. She used to say, If you never chance your arm, you will never break your neck. While neck-breaking was not desired by either of them, recklessness was always viewed as a negative by Dad but for Mum it could be the opposite.

With so many large personalities in their house, there was the need for a strong ringmaster. It was never going to be my grandfather; he died when I was two. That left Nanny Kelly, aka The Boss. Mum tells the story that there were few jobs in the 1950s for school leavers, so in her final year she decided to study for an exam to get into the Civil Service. When she confessed she took the day off school to sit the exam, the nuns summoned Nanny Kelly to explain Mum’s absence. The nuns were annoyed. Why should Mum get this opportunity over the other girls? Nanny said it would be stupid to throw away an advantage and, anyway, half the country was sitting the exam. Neither force of nature was inclined to be told what to do. As a result of this power struggle, Mum, previously an excellent student, was expelled and not allowed to ‘do her Leaving Certificate [the final school exam]’. Nanny fought, but for once, lost. It was a formative experience for Mum to lose to the nuns and she was careful what she told people from then on. She remained a believer and went on to have a good career in the Civil Service until the law required her to resign when she got married.

Unlike other grannies, Nanny was a wheezy Darth Vader, not Yoda. She did not ordinarily like kids, but Mum swore we were an exception. And neither of them was bothered with being housewife of the year. If we asked for anything to eat when visiting Nanny, Mum would jump in with, Yer in your granny’s. The unspoken warning was, Check the best-before date first.

Information was always drip fed. To blurt something out was to not savour some of its key ingredients — wasteful. We lived in the moment but it was a past moment. Much later, Mum told me that Nanny had a breakdown when going through the menopause and momentarily lost her confidence. It was the exception to the rule. The only time Nanny met Dad’s father was on their wedding day, and apparently, she hated him on sight. She ran up the aisle so they would not have to talk to each other. There is a whole book on Nanny for one of my cousins to write.

I asked Mum about my Uncle Brian-in-Australia. She introduced him to his future wife Nuala when they were girls together in school and Nuala would come to her house to play. Brian finished uni and applied from Dublin for a job as an economist with the Australian government in Canberra. Their honeymoon was the paid-for boat journey to Australia; they were ten-pound Poms. Emigration was not always a sad statistic. To me, they seemed exotic and I wondered what kind of life they had there.

Mum taught me about literature, local geography and snobbery in one sentence, Whatsisname the Proddie writer, Sam Beckett, lived around here. We lived near Foxrock but, in social terms, we felt a million miles away. It was posh; we were not. The parish boundaries were there to keep everyone in their place. What school do ye go to? we’d ask each other at community games competitions. I had even seen my parents try to figure out where other adults lived. What’s your local place of worship? was one of Mum’s ways of weaselling out this important information. If the target adult named a saint without revealing a place (such as, Oh, St Andrews), Mum would assume their reticence to share more was a cover-up for a non-Catholic set of beliefs. This was important, we were told.

Everyone I knew was Catholic but one day Mum told me that the people who lived five houses away were Protestants.

The Cramptons are Prods? Serious? How do you know? I asked.

Well, there are only four of them for a start and then, if you need more proof, their names are Ronald, Phil, Sharon and Lynn, explained Mum. And they don’t go to Mass. QE-feckin-D.

I realised I did not know anyone else with those names. The secret language of names was foreign to me. I knew ‘Mac’ meant ‘son of’ and that ‘O’ meant ‘grandson’ but now I was told that ‘Fitz’ meant that person had a link to the Norman invaders. They didn’t just slay people, they settled in and started families. Is this where our reputation for hospitality started? Then there were odd names that were probably just Protestant. I wondered if Lex Luther from Superman was related to Martin Luther. The Cramptons seemed normal and had the same biscuits as us. Were they really bound for Hell? Probably. Mum explained that Prods were different and only believed what was in the Bible; they didn’t think Mary was a virgin and she was the nicest of them all. Some Catholics converted to Protestantism in order to get soup offered by their ministers and live a little longer during The Famine. This cast a shadow over all of them. We would wonder if a new Prod we came across ‘took the soup’.

One dirty little secret about Ireland is that some of the middle classes clandestinely aspire to an imaginary English class system. Irish people with a desire to be considered British are known as ‘West Brits’. They tend to live on the Southside or in posher suburbs on the Northside, like Howth, Castleknock and Malahide. I would have included Beckett in this group by virtue of his northern schooling, but I would have been wrong; like the Normans that invaded centuries before, he was more Irish than the Irish themselves.

I suspect that Mum snipped off the ‘dry clean only’ labels on new clothes so that we did not ask her awkward questions like, Shouldn’t this be dry cleaned? Without going all Angela’s Ashes on it, no one I knew had a tumble dryer and the ability to pay for its use without asking, Is that the sound of the dryer? Is it still on? Mum taught us not to be clean-freaks or worried by best-before dates (except, of course, at Nanny’s). House-keeping is just moving the dirt around, she said. Dad’s family had employed a cleaner in the house where he grew up in Galway, but he did not want us to get one as he thought that was Mum’s job.

Our house had the comforting smell of clean clothes drying to their death on oil-fuelled radiators. Bold or Daz detergent smoked like crystal meth around the houses of our estate. If the doorbell rang, before it was answered, there was a sweep done of the radiators in the rooms which visitors might traverse before settling in the kitchen or, if they had studied theology, the ‘good room’. Underwear that could not be dried outside because of the elements or in the tumble dryer due to the size of the electric bill would be harvested into a plastic clothes basket. Mum, who always made an effort to get on with my friends, would tell them if they loitered on their way in or out of the house, Come in or go out. I can’t afford to heat the road like your mother. The death penalty was threatened for children who turned on the hot-water immersion heater and then forgot to turn it off, or worse, if it was on ‘bath’ not ‘shower’. Radiators were such a big part of life that there was even a band called ‘The Radiators from Outer Space’. We developed the ability to size up a room for the least draughty spot to sit.

You never had a shower in the morning. If we had to have one, Mum said, Hurry up in there. Wash up as far as possible, down as far as possible and sure give possible a wipe too. There was no shame in using spit to flatten a cowlick or bed-head. When it was very cold, Mum told us to wear our pyjamas under our school uniform. I told myself these were just like the long johns the cowboys wore in the movies. We all did it, but still delighted in noticing the fallen hem of a pyjama pant under the rising trouser of another student. Aged 12, I was in Dunnes Stores in our local shopping centre, which doubled as a place to walk around if you had nothing else to do. Here, try on those jeans, Mum said, the queue for the changing rooms is only massive. Quick. Do it here while no one is looking. But people will see my willy, I resisted. "I wouldn’t worry about a little thing like that," she said, nodding at my privates. Mortified, I did as I was told, but when I later met people who grew up in that area, I always looked for a glimpse of recognition that they had seen me in my undies in 1982.

Boundaries were there to be tested. Everyone who put foot on the main Dublin thoroughfare of O’Connell Street, regardless of class, age or reading ability, spent at least an hour in Eason’s bookshop reading magazines and books as if it were a library. Mum encouraged us to find open packets of sweets on display in shops and gorge on them. It was made clear that to open the packets would be wrong but, if they are open, the shop would have to throw them out anyway. If Mum ran a red light, she said, Ah, they are symbols of British oppression. A speed limit was just a guide.

Mum told us life was a confidence trick but that confidence tricksters were bad. Genuine confidence was good it seemed, even if based on a falsehood. This was confusing and did not build my faith in the way the world worked. Mum taught us to be selective about what we said and to never say anything negative about ourselves: Why do others’ jobs for them? She would defend us vigorously, even when we were wrong. If there was something borderline negative in our school reports, she did not say, What are you going to do about it? to us, but to our teachers. I came top of my class in my first year of high school. In the comments section of my report, Brother Amady wrote, Social development may need to be watched, which was fair enough, as I was positioning myself to be jeered at by the cool kids as a ‘swot’. Mum was outraged and demanded an audience with him to please explain. I did not relish the attention but Mum and Dad’s loyalty made me realise that I no longer wanted just the validation of others; I also wanted it of myself. This took some time. When I told her later that, as a kid, I had felt anxious, she replied, No you weren’t!

Growing Up, Irish Style

I remember my mother, she’d hit you with anything she had in her hand!

— Margaret Kelly, Ireland’s oldest living woman in 2010 until she passed away that year

In primary school, we were taught about the disciplining of Spartan kids in ancient Greece, and the starving black babies in Africa. The curriculum was all catastrophic death (dinosaurs, volcanos and the mortal carnage that inevitably occurred at the end of the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age), washed down nicely with a dose of corporal punishment. I remember being slapped but not beaten. Dad asked me more than once if I was sure I didn’t remember one particular punishment meted out; he seemed relieved that I didn’t. I wondered if the kids in prosperous countries were taught about us?

Even though physical violence was newly banned, Irish educators seemed intent on making sure we knew growing up was going to hurt. The words of literary giants, like John Donne, Emily Dickinson and a panoply of Irish writers, were regurgitated from our cracking voice boxes, but the main focus of our education was death. Death was an Irish national obsession. I thought it was all Yeats’ fault. In a poem we learned by heart in primary school, Yeats cried, Consume my heart away, sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal. We were drownded in this stuff, even at home. If Dad was happy with a photograph he was in, he would announce, A contender for the obituary card. Death was a daily yardstick by which things were measured in our household. He taught me to drive as if in a funeral procession. He believed that being able to drive slowly showed that you had total control over the car. Dad would quickly put the car into fifth gear thinking his work was done and everyone could wait until the revs caught up and the car moved at the pace of other traffic. Mum thought the mirrors were only for checking your hair. I used to think the things that would do me in, in exact order, were my dad’s driving, my mum’s driving, viral meningitis (which had killed a red-headed kid with freckles in our school called ‘Cornflakes’), catching a conger eel while fishing and being dragged into the water, or being bitten by the snake that surely lived in the toilet just below the start of the S bend.

Everyone watched The Late Late Show. It finished before midnight and was hosted by Gay Byrne (aka Gaybo), the most popular TV broadcaster at the time. Gaybo was as polarising as Donald Trump. Mum liked him; Dad would sneer.

Jaysus Gay, stop being so self-satisfied. Do us a favour, said Dad.

Ah leave him alone, he’s fine. You’re just jealous, Mum would offer for the defence.

The women of Ireland; it’s you who’ve created this monster.

Whisht and stop with your aul carrying on.

Watching a cloying YouTube clip of Gaybo interviewing Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan in 1981, I see Dad’s point:

Gaybo: You bring relaxation to a fine art. You don’t go in very much for production … you just sit down and get on with it.

Tom: Well, you do the same here on your program, I guess.

Gay: Not exactly.

Gay suggested that Tom’s world was seedy and unusual. I thought it was great when Tom sang:

So what becomes of all the little boys

Who never comb their hair?

They’re lined up all around the block

On The Nickel over there.

* * *

The disappearance of Philip Cairns a few years later in October 1986 — a teenage schoolboy like me from a nearby suburb — confirmed that the world was a dangerous place. Philip has never been found and I hope he just ran away to somewhere like Australia. I doubt it. When I was seven, I was separated from Mum when we were shopping in Dun Laoghaire. Someone brought me into the police station, where Mum soon found me. I was not traumatised but I could sense it was a big deal and I had dodged a bullet somehow. We were all scared of the Yorkshire Ripper, who was at large at this time and on the TV news. Sure, he could catch the ferry here in a few hours, we reminded each other in school. There were many examples of home-grown murderers, like Brendan O’Donnell. A favourite song of mine as a teenager was Suffer Little Children by The Smiths, about the murder of children by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady on the Moors outside Manchester.

It was not safe in the Irish countryside, either. I remember Mum and Aunty Sheila cheerfully belting out Weile Waila by The Dubliners on long walks in the hills:

There was an old woman and she lived in the woods

Weile weile waila

Well she had a baby