Who be me
In my life I have been many people, done many things not all of them bad, although some people who believe they know me would tell you that I am a very bad man, and for a long time I believed I was. But in my life I have known lots of bad men, some quite evil, and I am nothing like them. I have never abused kids although I have been abused. Never beaten a woman although some woman have attacked me. Never murdered anyone, and yet some men have tried to murder me, nor have I ever put any of my friends in prison. These to me are some of the things that make a bad man. Neither am I a good man because you cannot live a life like mine and expect to enjoy that accolade, so I must be something in between, a good bad man perhaps. In my life I have been left for dead many times. I have been shot at, stabbed, and beaten so badly more than once the police asked the ambulance people to double check my body for signs of life. I have spent sixteen years of my life in prison, some of them so bad I have had dig deep just to get through.
I am writing this partially because friends I have known who know something of my life requested I do. Partially because most of my friends are dead, some long dead leaving no trace of their existence, and I don’t want that for me. I want to be remembered as a person of some worth. To do that, I have to be honest. To be honest I have to tell it like it was, large warts and all. I am also writing this in an effort to apologize to all the girls I have known and hurt emotionally. In particular my daughter Shani. I would like them to know that I am aware of the hurt I have caused. That I am aware I have not done the right thing by them. I could write reams of excuses for my behaviour but in the end I feel my only excuse if it is one is that I got the hand I was dealt and played it best I could. When I was fifteen I thought I knew it all. At thirty I thought well maybe I don’t know it all but I know most of it. Now approaching sixty I realize I knew nothing, not even a little bit
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I began my journey as an abused child, soon to be a runaway kid who became a gypsy, a gunman, a prisoner, a hippy, a hedonist, a nomad, a traverser of oceans and continents, a Buddhist, a cradle hand, an alcoholic, a father and a mother, a good friend, a terrible foe, and a somewhat bruised free spirit. I have been all these things and more. I have been victim and predator over and over, always searching never finding though sometimes getting quite close to understanding what my life was all about. What was the purpose of my existence or was there any purpose at all, and why am I not like other men and woman happy to be a Painter a Carpenter a Nurse a Secretary or if I ever finish this a Writer. Am I the only one destined to remain fulfilled and yet unfulfilled or is everyone like me. At times I have been very frightened very cowardly, and at other times quite brave
I believe one of the things that got me through is the belief that although I will never be amongst the best of men I am basically a good man. Never really disliking myself but always feeling a lesser person in the presence of good people. Maybe that’s why I choose if that’s the right word the life I lived. Maybe it’s easier to be a good person when you move amongst so many bad people. I realize that to those people who don’t know me my life must seem a litany of crime and prison. In reality I have spent far more time working, and travelling than I ever have committing crime or doing time, and have earned far more money working than from any other source. I have also realized having read Nietch that my suffering was necessary and that that which does not kill me will make me a better person. Suffering is an integral part of my nature and learning to deal with it has made me stronger.
I have never written anything in my life other then letters from prison, and the odd Christmas card for am I semi literate, my scribbling is indecipherable to most but myself, and I could not have written this without the aid of the spell check on my computer. I could always read and write to a fashion but spelling was always, and still is beyond me. I learned to read in prison, tutored by an elderly man of enormous intellect, my old cellmate Ben. A man of the Jewish faith. In prison for the first time for long arm “fraud.” He was an extraordinary man with a wealth of knowledge, humor, and wit. A man of kindness and patience, totally oblivious to the violence and ignorance that is ever part of prison life.

I don’t remember how or why he began teaching me but it all seemed to start with him composing legal letters for me, and this somehow turned into lessons. My reading material such as it was had always been Micky Spillane cops and robbers kind of stuff but he changed all that for me. He would bring large tomes from the prison library or borrow them from a visiting Rabbi, and would with enormous patience explain theories of various subjects to me, and like a sponge I soaked it all up, devouring everything so much so that it would strain my eyes trying to read in the semi darkness. I found myself getting annoyed with screws for taking me away from whatever I was reading. Sometimes in frustration with my inability to understand something I was reading I would throw the book on the floor, and Ben would pick it up, hand it back to me and say. “Someone put a lot of time and effort into this hoping that someone like you would read it, and gain, and you throw it on the floor “shame.”

I told him reading made me feel stupid for I realized I knew nothing, and he replied, “Your uneducated Brendan not unintelligent and have a fine mind., and in time you will understand everything. Besides you have already improved so much it would be a shame to stop now. When I inquired as to how he could tell he replied, “Oh that’s easy, your lips don’t move anymore.” I continued reading and tried my best to digest and understand something of what I was reading. I read of history and wondered what had happened to those thousands of children who marched through Europe and embarked on ships to the holy land in what was known as the children’s crusade, never to be seen again, drowned or sold into slavery, and I wondered what forces shaped them. I read of Irish history and was rewarded to learn I came from a land with a rich and diverse culture with a history spanning thousands of years, and that we in fact originated in central Europe in 1200 B.C. and were then known as Gaels or Milesians, a nomadic people who first populated Ireland at the end of the ice age crossing land ice bridges which existed then and on learning I knew so little of my own ancestry I for the first time regretted not attending school

One day after a visit from his Rabbi Ben returned to our cell with some books, and that evening after the screw slammed our door shut for the night he said “Right Brendan, let me tell you something of Nietch.” From Spillane to Nietch, for someone like me a quantum leap. Yes, Ben was a man I shall ever be indebted to, for he helped me to escape my prison, into the pages of books, to places I had never been before, into the thoughts of men and woman I would never meet; but who would never the less have a profound influence on my thought processes .A love of books stayed with me for the rest of my life.

He had a small radio, and would spend hours listening to his classical , music program, even trying to get me interested in it, but I’m afraid that was a leap too far for me. And so I have read a lot, and am aware that many in an effort to fill the pages throw everything in including the kitchen sink, and I have no intention of following their lead for I follow no man, never have never will. All I have tried to do is give you a little of everything that is me. I am not a special person, a person of note, a celebrity, or anyone really. I’m just a kid from the streets with something to say who now feels old enough experienced enough, and audacious enough to say it.

My life has been a messy life but it was my life, and what I write are merely musings, memories, and nothing else. In the writing of it I have learned much, and am aware it is full of inconsistency, hate, and much else, and am also aware that many people not least the Roman Catholic Church will be upset and annoyed at my writing of it. But I am not so bent out of shape as to be unaware that there are many good, indeed excellent people amongst their numbers, not least my own family, and I salute them for being so. But their experiences were not mine, and so I apologize to nobody. My name is Brendan, and this is my tale
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I Remember.
I come from a city named Dublin, and though I have travelled extensively, passed through, and lived in many cities the world over I would not want to come from any other city. It is and always has been a city crammed to the brim with characters of humour unique. No other city comes close. I was born in Middle Abby St. in central Dublin to poor but decent hardworking parents. But we were poor, and I do remember the rats, but they were endemic to the area, and they became normal. Poor was normal, rats were normal, and besides they didn’t frighten me for I was very young, and kid’s don’t know about rat’s and stuff, they were just things that my Mother would frighten away.

I was never aware of our poverty as I was blessed with good parents, and always felt much loved and wanted, particularly by my Mother. Although long dead she remains by far the best person I have ever known. Speaking of my Mother still upsets me greatly for I have a always felt a sense of guilt for the worry I caused her. My Mother could walk on water, a veritable saint. A woman of enormous wisdom, compassion; and empathy with those less fortunate than us. A country girl, raised on a farm, possessing all the skills handed down to her by her Mother. She could relegate that loaf and fish’s tail to the bottom of the heap in her ability to make a feast out of a slice of bread. Bread, which she would make herself. Cakes she would make herself, all kinds, and varieties. When we visited our relatives farms, and some my best memories of those times, we would always return with chickens which we would pluck in the kitchen. On cleaning them out she would say “I hate this part Brendan can you do it for me. It wasn’t until much later I realized she had no problem at all cleaning out chickens or anything else she was simply trying to teach me. I remember one day on my Granny’s farm I asked “Do the chickens hurt when their killed,” and she replied “Not when I do it” “Let me show you something” She picked a hen up, and placing it’s head under it’s wing she spun round very fast three times, and then placed the hen on the ground saying “He’s asleep now, and knows nothing. I looked at the sleeping hen and was amazed. Years later I remarked to her. “That hen wasn’t sleeping, she was unconscious.” She smiled and said “I know, but I love to see the wonder in your face.”

She was a dressmaker, and would often make dresses for the neighbours daughters on their birthday or if she felt they needed them. If a neighbour or friend were ill she would bring them soup or whatever and sit with them. My Mother was a warm gentle woman, never raising her voice never angry, and I am a very fortunate man to have had what was probably the best Mother in the whole world as mine.

When she died her funeral was huge. It was a long time ago but to me then it looked like hundreds of people. I remember being surprised that so many people should be there, many of them strangers to me, and I feel ashamed that I had been surprised for my Mother was a good woman in every sense of the word, and I should have known other people would recognize that. The procession was four deep, and it filled the whole street.
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When I die no one will be there. For unlike my Mother I am not good. I sometimes think I have some kind of rogue gene. For how can someone like me come from someone like her and be so bad. Some of my alcoholic friends may be there if only for the drink, and I don’t blame them for that for I have I been down that road too, and that is yet another reason I am writing this. For I want anyone who ever did care to know that I have had a full life. That I have experienced the full gamut of experiences; the full range of emotions. Whether I am sitting halfway up a mountain in some far off place watching the sun set whilst chanting to my inner self, hallucinating from local fauna, or laying naked in a punishment strip cell been eaten alive by insects, my cup has always been half full. For I always believed that tomorrow will probably be the best day of my life, and whether there is anyone there or not I will leave this place in the knowledge that I have faced life with all its vagaries, and was not found wanting.
My Mother never enjoyed good health, and would spend a lot of time in hospitals and sanatoriums At these time our family was split up, and at four years old I ended up in an orphanage run by nuns of which I have few memories either good or bad. Later I was placed in Dominic St. Orphanage of which I do have memories, all bad.
It was an old Dickensian building with a high wall topped by a wire mesh fence. My first night there someone urinated on my mattress and so I slept on the floor. They would march us through the city streets in formation to the local school, and it was like running a gauntlet with people staring and making comments, “Their all orphans” I would feel like running up to them and screaming “I’m not an orphan my Ma is sick. At the school we were outnumbered, and ostracized. ‘’Here come the bastards.” There was a guy there, a big redheaded kid “The school bully” who beat the crap out of me the first day. The next day on the way to school I picked up a piece of wood from the curb, and on meeting gave him my best shot, but he still beat the crap out of me, and when I returned to the orphanage, they beat the crap out of me for fighting and getting blood on my clothes. But the guy never came near me any more and so l learned something at school that day.

An annalist once wrote of me. Brendan removes himself from bad situations “literally,” and that’s what I done. At nine years old I removed myself, from Dominic St. Orphanage, by scaling the wall and wrenching a hole in the fence. I made my way to St. James’s Hospital where my ailing Mother lay and broke in knowing that because of my size, age, and time of night they would not allow me entry. A nurse found me roaming the corridors, and this good woman curtailed her anger on hearing my plea “I just want to want to see my Ma”. She took me to her saying, “Don’t wake her, she’s asleep”, and so I just looked at my Mothers sleeping face and the tears flowed.

I returned home, and told my Father I hated the place I was in, of the beatings, all of it, but he took me back saying he couldn’t work and look after us kids. I didn’t need to go to school for I was learning lessons every day. I broke out again the next night, and never went back but I didn’t go home. Instead I slept in friend’s houses often sleeping out in the woods in the Phoenix Park. My friends mothers fed me or if not my friends would bring me food. We would roast spuds, smoke cigarettes, “my first time” and most of the time someone would stay with me. It was an Irish thing called “going on gur,” but they could go home when it rained or got cold I could not for I had no home.

My Mother was out of Hospital and, well, we had moved to a building site years before. One of four families living in the middle of what was to become a huge sprawling estate called Ballyfermot later to be nicknamed little Korea not for it’s ethnic makeup but for the violence endemic to the area. I had changed. I used to love school, and now I hated it, and would not attend preferring to walk the streets of Dublin where I came to know every nook and Cranny. My local school expelled me, and though my Mother took me to several schools around the city the last one being White Friar St. nicknamed the “red brick slaughterhouse” and I don’t know why, as it was the best of all of them. I wouldn’t stay long, some a day, some half a day, some only moments. I became a street kid, seeking out other kids like me around the city; I was growing up fast.

I have never regarded myself a criminal. I know many people, the police, the courts parole, probation officers and indeed most of my friends would say, “That’s a ridiculous statement to make.” “The man has committed criminal offences for a large part of his life.” So if I’m not a criminal then what am I?

I used to believe I committed crime for money, until I realized I was committing crime when I had money, sometimes lots of money. So what drove me? Excitement, I simply loved the excitement of crime. When I committed my very first real crime I was twelve years old, and even then quite small for my age, and it was my smallness, which led to my first arrest. I was so small I was the one who could climb up to and enter a tiny window so I could open up a jewellers shop in Dublin. The other guys were older and bigger than I and probably aware of the monetary value of it all, but they were just objects to me. There were no alarms in those days and we just helped ourselves I sold all my watches for half a crown each outside the snooker hall only keeping a silver chain and cross which I knew my Mother because of her love for her fate might like. I gave it to her telling her I found it, and she loved it, really loved it and would ever be touching it. I don’t know how the police found out but we were all arrested and when I got bail my Mother handed me the cross and chain saying, “I can’t have this Brendan.
Sometimes in life a moment arrives, a definitive moment, almost like a take from a movie run in slow motion, the second hand stretches, time and space stand still, I remember that moment with such great clarity, I said “But Ma I found it.” She just shook her head and walked away with the welling of tears in her eyes. I called out to her saying ‘Ma I found it, the other stuff I robbed but I swear to you I found that cross in the street’ she turned and looked at me, a single rivulet running down her cheek, she just shook her head slowly to and fro then turned and walked away. It was my first and worse sense of real shame. I have never forgotten that moment, her son was not only a thief, but also a liar.

My Father was a quiet man, a man of few words, and to this day I know nothing of him, other than the fact he came from Cavan. I know nothing of his origins, of his family, if he had any, his past which he must have had, or anything else other than he was a very fortunate man for he alighted from a bus in a tiny village in Meath, and that bus ticket was the best few bob he ever spent for it was in Garristown he met my Mother who probably knew a great deal about him but if so she never told us. I suppose if I’m to be honest I feared him a little. Not that he ever beat me for he was not that kind of man, a look would usually be enough. I found him a bit too religious for my liking, and my mother hid much of my escapades from him. Had he known he may have beaten me, I don’t know, but he need not have worried for I would soon receive my fair share and more of beatings.

Sometimes he would wake me late at night, and we would creep downstairs to listen to the big fights on the radio from America. Patterson, Liston, and later Clay, and Cooper as they were my favourites. We would often wake the rest of our family up with our cheers as someone knocked someone over or out. And yet he never woke, that most good and gentle person, my elder Brother Tony. Perhaps he felt even then that I more than him should be aware of the advantages of indulging in the noble art.

I do know he loved me. My father worked for the Board of Works, a Government agency as a labourer gardener, sometimes a forester. One day he took me with him whilst he felled some trees in a remote location. While he was at work I climbed very high up a nearby tree, and fell very heavily onto a pointed stump. The stump broke but it pierced me, and I hurt badly. I couldn’t move or breathe properly, and though the road was a long way off he picked me up and carried me all the way over very difficult terrain, saying “Don’t worry son we’re nearly there. I was conscious, and aware of his struggle, and I think I loved him more that day than any other. He carried me all the way to the road where he flagged a car down and got me to the hospital where someone told him he saved my life, and I think that’s worth writing about. He was a good man. He must have been for my Mother loved him, and she was nobodies fool. I remember returning home one day to find him in the kitchen on bended knee, face covered in soap, arms outstretched, one hand holding a lathering brush the other an open razor, and singing to my Mother “I’ll take you home again Kathleen” an old Irish song bearing my Mothers name. They didn’t see me, and I felt embarrassed and left but it left me with a good feeling.

So why did I do it if my parents were so good, and I had no appreciation of the monetary value of things. I honestly believe it was the excitement of it all. The courts decided to curtail my budding criminality by putting me in a place where I would be with other criminals, but the other criminals were all adults, and they all wore black dresses. They sentenced me to two years in an Industrial school called Upton

Criminal.
An Irish Industrial school in the fifties was I suppose on paper the equivalent to an American Reform School. There the similarity ended. In reality they had more in common with Solgeniegan”s Gulag, a kid’s gulag nothing more. I had never experienced hunger, constant hunger, or brutality. A brutality beyond description in my young life. Where to escape, which I did twice, meant been stripped naked in drizzling rain in front of my friends. To have my hair shaved off with scissors and clippers which cut my scalp, to be held down over a wooden chair by two adult men in order that I be whipped with a thick leather strap by a third adult man using both hands, causing me a scar, which I still bear almost fifty years on. The following day I couldn’t walk. My skin turned purple and yellow with blistering indents from the braiding.
Yes I learned early about the brutality of authority. I remember all of it. I see a little kid sitting on a chair in the rain in absolute agony with blood dripping from his shaven head, and no one, either because they were not allowed or were too afraid to talk to me. I remember being dragged from my bed in the middle of the night. Punched and kicked down to the office then stripped and beaten so badly it has never left me, and for what, for stealing a crust of bread

I remember being held down, my mouth pried open, and rotting food I had refused to eat being stuffed down my throat, followed by beatings, which lasted for days. I remember a little English kid, my friend, born and raised in Paddington London. I can’t remember why he was
there but he was there, a happy funny kid full of jokes, and I liked him a lot. I knew they hated him from day one, continually mimicking his accent, making disparaging remarks. I warned him to keep his head down, and he said, “What can I do Brendan I can’t help how I speak.” One day they surrounded him in the yard and beat him so badly even today it makes me angry to remember. During the beating his eyes caught mine, and I have never forgotten the plea for help they spoke. But I ignored his plea for I was thirteen years old and afraid, and have always regretted my fear that day. I should have done or said something for the shame remained longer than any pain of the beating they would have given me, besides they were beating me anyway and what was one more beating. He stopped being happy and funny and I sometimes wonder if he regained those admirable qualities I liked in him.
I remember working in fields like an American slave been beaten mostly on my head with blackthorn sticks, expected to clean up my own blood as there was never any medical attention in weather so inclement the cold would make me cry. But most of all I remember the hunger. A hunger so intense I would eat the raw beet in the fields. I would eat the raw potatoes in the fields, and if there were nothing else I would eat the grass like the animals that were treated better than us. I remember all this, and much more, all of it inflicted on me by real criminals. There were kids there younger than I, far too young to have committed any offence. Institutionalized since babies. What they needed was a hug and the assurance that their lives would improve, but they didn’t get that, none of us did, what we got was something quite different.

To my abusers I would say this. We were no angels, but because of our suffering we have every right to accuse you. For even if you were not individually responsible for acts of brutality and abuse, by your silence you bear collective responsibility for taking the natural exuberance and happiness of kids, and replacing these feelings with feelings of fear worry, and pain, and if anything at all comes out of the ongoing investigation into your activities it should be that never again should kids be placed in the care of groups of men whatever their credentials. Especially in remote places like the hellhole you put me in. Because when you take the religion out of it what you are left with are groups of men who appear to have no need for woman yet have no problem at all being in close proximity to kids, and that spells disaster.

Most of them are probably dead now, sitting round the fire with the Devil, and those who are not better hope they don’t run into me one dark night for I have always regretted not keeping a sincere promise I made to myself; to return and burn the place to the ground. I have read that they are now expressing their regrets. Well I would like them to know for myself, and for all the kids there, especially those who went on to commit suicide, and I understand there were many, or whom became nervous wrecks and have no voice. We don’t want your expressions of regret. We simply ask that you glance in the mirror, and honestly, and truthfully ask yourself what you see. I have also read that they are whining about having to forfeit prime plots of land to meet their contribution to the Irish Governments one billion Euro compensation bill. I ask why not take all their land, all their ill gotten gains, all their wealth, you do from other criminals, why not them, but of course I have always known the answer to that question. They still have a huge stranglehold on my country, and like all tyrants, refuse to relinquish the power they used to destroy so many lives. There are those still alive today who would say “We knew nothing of what was going on in these places”. Well I don’t accept that. Far too many Irish kids related the horror of their experiences on release for it not to be public knowledge. There was a lot of poverty around in those days, most people were more concerned about putting food on their own table than worrying about the plight of kid like us, kids - whom they regarded as bad kids anyway. “The Christian Brothers will knock some sense into them, give them an education, besides they’re all criminals.” Not caring that many were Orphans left on doorsteps or given to the church at birth, because of the stigma of illegitimacy. A stigma which they “ the church” fostered with their ranting in their pulpits castigating innocent young Irish girls, guilty of nothing other than to them that most terrible of crimes, falling in love.

The Church would say, “What were we to do, there was no else.” Of course there was one else for they had cornered the market in child slavery. They were getting paid to “care” for us by that excuse for a government that existed in those days. No one In Ireland, in those days were in any doubt they, “The Church” was the real government, some would say still are, and I for one am glad that their hypocrisy has at last been exposed. I don’t know nor do I believe that anyone could know if my life would have been any different had I not encountered my abusers, perhaps not, for I was sent there for robbing a jewellers shop in central Dublin. I was twelve years old, no, if they impacted on me at all it is that I cannot bear to see children maltreated. So I suppose in a way they never intended they gave me that. In writing this it has been a strange experience for me. On looking back with such intensity It feels like I am two people. I like the kid I see in my memory, and for that reason alone it has been worth writing this. I feel like I should give him a thumbs up and say“ Don’t worry kid you’ll make it” for I never thought I would.

Today, I regard myself as a good man, a decent man, and a caring person, and I believe I get this from my genes, for my parents led a blameless life. I was just a kid, introduced harshly at an early age to a world teeming with criminals, and I am nothing like those men. I am told I was defiant, well I don’t remember being defiant but if I was defiant then good, and wish I had been more so. My late childhood was forged in hell, and when I came out of there I held a deep and long lasting hatred for the church, the police, the courts, adult males, the world.
On my release I told my Mother, “I hate Ireland Ma, I don’t want to live here anymore” She replied “You don’t hate Ireland Brendan, you hate those bad men, and they are not Ireland, besides your home now, it’s over.” But it wasn’t over, for I remember, I have always remembered.

The Sixpenny Kid.
I used to spend a lot of time down the Docks for I loved watching the big ships wondering what far off place they came from. I would sometimes sneak aboard following someone up the gangplank pretending I was with them. I would arm wrestle with the sailors and they would give me coffee and sandwiches, and tell me of their adventures, and of the wondrous places they had seen. I was hooked, I was young, I was brave, I would go, and nothing would stop me. The fact I had no money was irrelevant for I was full of excitement.

I wanted to go to America, and was told I could not get a ship from Dublin but could probably stow away on one leaving from Liverpool or Southampton in England. And so I saved my pennies. One day after I had saved five pounds I put two shirts on donned my jacket and left home. I went down to the docks, and boarded a ship known then as, “The cattle boat.”

Today it is quite common for young people to travel alone but in those days it was unheard of, It was so uncommon the national radio station, Radio Eirein, put out a missing persons alert, brown hair blue eyes etc. but the alert was too late for I was already gone, and had told no one of my intentions. On board two Detectives questioned me as to why I was travelling alone so young with no luggage, and I told them my big Brother was meeting me at Liverpool docks.
It was a very strange experience for me. I loved my family, and knew I would miss them, and knew my Mother would worry when I did not come home for my tea, but I also wanted to see those fabulous places the sailors had told me of. I was torn between the two, and as it got nearer the time to leave I decided to go home. I made my way up to the deck, and found I was too late. T hey had removed the ropes and the ship was pulling out. I wanted to jump overboard but I could not swim instead I began to cry, I missed my family already.

The ship sailed overnight in very inclement weather, very stormy seas,, perhaps a portent of my stormy life to come. I had never travelled on the open seas or any seas before and it was not a very pleasant introduction with people getting sick everywhere, men drunk everywhere, for there was a bar on board. Huge waves breaking causing a very loud bang, and the ship would shudder, and move on. Those still standing were hanging on to tables or whatever as the ship rolled, and I knew there and then whatever else I became a life on the ocean waves was for others. The ship docked at Liverpool docks next morning and when I got off I didn’t bother counting my money for I already knew what I had. The princely sum of sixpence.