Remembering my mother

March 21st 2017

Mother and father at a young age.

Today is my mother’s birthday.  She is 85, or would be, if she were still alive.  We just don’t know.   She disappeared without a trace this week 40 years ago.  I’m not sure of the day, nor of the date at this stage, but it was late March 1977.

Her father died when she was young.  As a young girl she worked in Willy Watts’ Sack and Bag factory in Mary Street, alongside her mother.

When she married my father in June 1950, he moved into the rented home, in Sheep’s Lane, that she shared with her mother.  He was 25 at the time.  I was born just under a year later.   She eventually gave birth to 10 living children, with one still birth.
 There was 21 years between the oldest and the youngest.

We were very poor.  My father worked as a lorry driver for the Sullivan Brothers of Tramore who produced soft drinks and bottled Guinness.  The dole was so low in those days that when he was sick, he took holidays, to claim holiday pay.  On the plus side, we were always well provided with discounted (or possibly free) minerals at Christmas.

He also supplemented his wages by bottling stout in a number of pubs, mainly The Queen’s and Harney’s.  He also worked as a barman in the Olympia ballroom (the bar was run by the Sullivan brothers) and in a couple of hotel lounges in Tramore.   He was also a member of the Order of Malta and a soccer referee.

My mother worked occasionally as a barmaid in The Queen’s, as well as having a child most years and rearing the others.  She bottled stout, too.  In fact, from the age of seven, I was assigned as her helper.  We bottled in The Queen’s on Tuesdays and Harney’s on Thursdays, after school time.

When I went to secondary school (on a scholarship) we bottled in Harney’s only,  because Thursday was my half day from school. We processed approximately 2,000 large bottles of stout in an afternoon.  I did the bottling while my mother capped the bottles, all by hand. 

My father was a traditional male, who never did domestic chores, and he was rarely around, with all the jobs and hobbies he had.  He did bundle us all in to the car and bring us to Tramore and Woodstown regularly in the Summer.  His refereeing involved many car trips to Dublin.   In the early years, my mother would bring me and my next brother along and we’d go to a film in one of Dublin’s many fine cinemas.

The house in Sheep’s Lane had one room downstairs, with the stairs in it, and only two bedrooms; Nanny had one, where the girls, when they came along, slept too, while the rest of us shared the main bedroom with our parents.  The four oldest boys shared a double bed; two up, two down, our parents had a double bed, and there was always the cot with a baby in it beside their bed.

It had no running water, no toilet, no bathroom ,and just one electrical socket.  There was a flushing toilet in the tiny back yard with a cold water tap on the outside wall.   It had no kitchen either, but a neighbour helped my father build a crude back-kitchen that we couldn’t use in winter.

While we were poor, we were a happy family.  When had many cousins and we were always in each other’s houses. We didn’t go hungry, whatever about the quality and simplicity of the food available. We got toys at  Christmas, played games and had a lovely time, overall.

In 1964, we moved to a newly built, 3 bedroomed, corporation house in Rice Park, with a bathroom, a kitchen and even a separate sitting room.  My father had been hired by Guinness as a driver in their new Waterford depot, only a few months before, so our family was coming up a bit in the world.

One night, in Harney’s, my mother had a bad tooth ache and my father gave her a glass of brandy to help kill the pain.  That was the first time in her life that she’d had an alcoholic drink.  She was 36 years old and had had 9 of her 10 children. 

Pretty soon, she was being helped from pubs at the end of the night with a supporting hand at each elbow.  In no time at all, she was hooked on alcohol.  She told me herself, once, that when she went to for a blood test during her final pregnancy, on our youngest sister, the doctor said that her blood was fine once the “doctor blew the froth off it”. 

She went into rehab a couple of times in Belmont in Ferrybank, to no avail.  A sort of guerrilla warfare ensued between her and my father.  She bought bottles of whiskey and hid them around the house, and he went on seek and destroy missions when he got home from work.  He smashed any bottles he found against the wall in the back yard.  I was married and moved out by then; I learned of it from my siblings.

Her relationship with my father clearly broke down; he didn’t trust her and she was using all sorts of tricks to get money and, ultimately whiskey.  And as a teetotaller, he most likely found it very difficult to deal with her excessive drinking.   The tension must have been enormous for both of them.
 There were certainly many rows.

On New Year’s Eve 1975, our Nanny died.  My mother was devastated.   They had lived together all their lives.

One night, in late March 1977, my mother kissed her two youngest children goodbye and told them she “was going to the river”.  They were 4 and 10 years of age.  She had no money of her own, no bank account or bank card, and took nothing with her.  That was the last time anybody ever saw her alive. 

Her body was never found.

My mother was a lovely, cheerful, friendly, outgoing woman.  She was very pretty, too, dedicated to her family and worked very hard to provide for us.  As her first born, I think I was her favourite, and all those long afternoons bottling stout brought us even closer together.  The older ones, like me, were lucky, we got the best of her;  our younger siblings only remember the bad times, when the drink had taken hold of her.

I miss her, and I wrote this blog to make a record of some sort of record of her life 
She was born Ellen Moore, and became Eily Collins on her marriage.  She’d be 85 today.

Happy Birthday, Mammy.