There are three graves in Milltown. My fathers family.
My grandfather died in April 1959. He had just bought my First Communion suit and did not live to see me wear it. He is buried in an unmarked grave, the last of three people (including his mother-in-law, my great granny) to be buried there. It is an odd story and I wish I knew all of it.
He was the son of a sergeant in the old Royal Irish Constabulary and based in Lurgan and in 1908, he disowned his son for marrying “beneath” him. My RIC great grandfather was simply an awful man. A few years later, he would disown another son who married a Protestant girl and more so for being a socialist and working with James Larkin in New York City and Dublin.
My grandparents were good people. Lovely people. They had taken in and informally adopted a young disabled relative and later agreed to keep an eye on a young orphaned family who lived in their street. The young relative is the other occupant of “Pops grave”.
So Pop and Granny are not buried together. As I understand it, Pops grave was considered full when Granny died in January 1961and could not be opened so soon after his burial. In an odd coincidence, Granny died a month before my Confirmation.
She was a quiet woman but formidable in her own way. She was the youngest of three girls to a widowed mother. And according to the 1901 census, she was the only person in her family who could read or write. She made hankerchiefs in a Lurgan factory.
In 1908, they married and went to live in West Bromwich in England where Pop drove a tram to the Cadbury chocolate factory at Bourneville.
Uncle Jackie and “Wee Bobby” were born in West Bromwich and the family came back to Belfast, Bobby died when he was a toddler and my father was born in 1918. They lived in a very mixed street…Burnaby Street…and were forced to leave during the Belfast pograms. My daddy was a babe in arms.
Later they had rooms at Peters Hill and Auntie Sheila was born there during a gun battle.
In 1922 the family went to live in Brighton Street and they lived there until 1959 and 1961 and in Auntie Sheila’s case 1984.
Daddy was never well as a child and had rheumatic fever thru which he developed heart trouble. My parents married in 1951 and I was born in 1952.
And I spent almost every day in Brighton Street. Early TV shows like Sgt Bilko, Charlie Drake, Boots and Saddles, The Lone Ranger and I Love Lucy.
When I was about six months old, Daddy nearly died and was in the Royal Victoria Hospital and was too scared to get the surgery he needed on his heart. According to family lore, Granny carried me into the Royal Victoria Hospital, placed me in the bed beside him and told my daddy to “do it for John”. And he got the (then experimental) surgery and he died in 1986 when I was 33 years old.
Granny and Auntie Sheila (a single woman) doted on me. Every Thursday, they took me into the city centre to Woolworths and next door to the Maple Leaf Cafe, where I was known as “Pancake John”.
So I had lost my (paternal) grandparents and widowed Granny Brady before I was 9 years old. I have memories, vague memories but at least I can put a face to names. But oddly, I have no photographs with any grandparent.
So in 1961, Granny died and is buried in a new grave which seems so unfair to be buried apart from her husband and soul mate. It was a real love story.
Auntie Sheila was desolate and almost destitute and married Uncle Charlie after almost a year.
Auntie Sheila and Uncle Charlie are buried with my Granny. Pointedly the headstone states it was erected by “her daughter Sheila”.
Uncle Jackie worked in Andrews Mill and married to Auntie Mary. They had no children. Lived in Waterford Street and later upmarket at the Giants Foot. They were relatively posh with a radiogram and opera records.
They were good to me. When I met them outside, they always had a half crown and in the 1960s, that was a big thing.
Increasingly, I think that Uncle Jackie might have doubled as a Secret Santa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I dont think my parents could not have afforded the red tricycle, the castle, the fort, the train set and one of the first Scalectrix sets.
Jackie, Daddy (Jim) and Sheila were three unlikely siblings. Uncle Charlie called them Pet Brother, Christian Brother and Crying Sister.
Uncle Jackie read every book in the library and could memorise entire chapters. But he could not understand anything he had read.
But his worst fault was his Racism. It became more relevant…more personal… after my sisters wedding. Looking at my own wedding in 1982, Uncle Jackie (and Auntie Mary), Auntie Sheila (and Uncle Charlie) , it was the last time they/we were all together.
It feels like a line in the sand…before 1982, I had one family and after 1982, I was making a new family.
Uncle Jackie died on the day that my wife went into hospital to have our second baby. I was his nearest male relative but did not go to the wake. I did go to the funeral but was not central. That was wrong. I could say that the priority was our new baby born on the night of the funeral or I could say that it was about growing tired of Racism…but really it was callous. My father died within eight weeks
I did see Auntie Sheila thru Uncle Charlies funeral and my wife and I did look after her until she went to a geriatric unit. She was in and out of a coma but we had a week booked in Wexford. She could have lived weeks but she died on the last day of our holiday.
Auntie Sheila, all 4ft 9 of her tackled the massive paratrooper outside her house. She told him she had every hair on my head counted.
And I wasn’t there for her.
And as for Auntie Mary, I did not not even know she had died until about several months later.
And there was a consequence to my callousness. A family heirloom, a gift to my granny from a disabled child in West Bromwich went missing.
It is really about my callousness and how priorities change when we have children. And what unites the four people from my pre-1982 life is that they were childless.
Keeping An Eye On the Czar of Russia 