LONDON LIVES: Fulfilling a dream home-coming

“I’ve lots of very fine neighbours out where I live. It’s where I grew up and it’s always been home to me. Even when I lived over in London I always kept in contact with people from here. That’s it, I’m here now and I’m here to stay.”

From Loughduff to North London, where he lived for over 50-years, Charles Brady is content as he sits in the Celt offices, recounting his time living in the English capital. Following the death of his wife Elizabeth, a Limerick woman who also shared his affection for the locality, he had a choice to make.
“Elizabeth died in 2006, but it had always been an ambition of ours to come back to Ireland. She liked my part of the country, we’d come home every year, maybe twice a year. The family home was there. “The choice I was left with was to either think of staying in London for good and get rid of the homeplace or to come home to it. I chose home,” Charles says with some satisfaction.
It was a reversal of the decision facing Charles back in the early 1950s, when a lifelong friend of his, Kevin Dowd “took the plunge” and ventured across the Irish sea in search of work.
Charles, an only child, still remembers attending, what is now the “old school beside the graveyard”. At that time hard work was plentiful, and the pay was little.
“I was about 21 or 22, Kevin had gone about four years before I did. He wanted me to go at the time he did, but I stayed on. Even still, he used to keep writing, and on one time he came home and asked again if I was going to go back with him. So I decided to take the plunge too.” Leading into the English August Bank Holiday in 1956, Charles wrote to his pal informing him: “I was going there Friday, he was to meet me at Euston Station. I went over on the ferry, but he must have misunderstood my letter and thought I’d be leaving here Friday and maybe then arriving on Sunday. When I arrived, there was no one there. Luckily enough he’d given me an address and I got a taxi to where he lived, down by Harringey Arena.”

Pulled together
The pair eventually met. Kevin had organised a place for Charles to stay down by Turnpike Lane, an area next to Wood Green and only sparsely populated by the Irish community at the time.
“Number 23 Willoughby Road” Charles still vividly recalls, and where he met his fellow housemates for the first time, “two brothers from Galway, a chap from Mayo, and an English fellow.”
It was the Mayo man who would assist Charles in getting his first job, although as it was the Bank Holiday Weekend he’d have to wait until the following Tuesday.
“On Tuesday morning we headed on the bus for Wanstead. I hadn’t a clue where I was going. Where we got out, the Mayo man had a word with the foreman on the site, a Galway man named Joe Fitzpatrick and I got started that day. That was my first experience of the Irish community over there, and how the Irish community over there pulled together.
“Actually I met another Cavan chap who started that same day, he and his friend, a Mayo man had been up in Preston and came down that day.”

Make their mark
1956, Charles explained, was only shortly after the stories of posters were pasted by racist landlords on walls boldly stating: ‘No Blacks No Dogs No Irish’. “That was beginning to phase out, there were a lot more Irish there now, so I was told and they were beginning to make their mark.”
That mark was not only made on worksites across England where the Irish developed a reputation as being hard workers, but also on the London social scene where hundreds of Irish bars and dancehall nights began sprouting up all across the city.
“There was not much happening in Turnpike Lane so we use to go to Camden Town or to Holloway Road to The Roundtower which was run by Sligoman John Muldoon.”
Between Camden Town or The Blarney on Tottenham Court Road, The Shamrock in Elephant and Castle or St Olive’s in Manor House, the Irish had any number of familiar haunts, often packed with familiar faces, to venture too. Charles remembers he did his first dancing at The Galteemore on the Saturday night after his first week’s work. Paid on the Thursday, he and Kevin picked up another two friends and headed on down to Camden Town.
“But that’s what it was about at the time. You were young and living in London. You worked, were paid on the Thursday, maybe did a few hours, double-time on a Saturday, and at the weekends you met your friends and went out dancing.”

Ambition
It was at one such dance, at St Olive’s at Manor House that Charles met his future wife Elizabeth. The couple married soon after in St Mellitus’ Church in Finsbury Park, with the reception held above a pub in Wood Green. “We got married on a Saturday and I was back to work on the Monday”.
The couple lived happily together until Elizabeth’s death in 2006. It was in the following year that he resolved to come home to Ireland.
“It had always been an ambition. I contacted Safe Home who I’d heard had been very good at helping others move back. “I didn’t find it too difficult coming home, maybe that’s because I’d always kept in touch with here. But a lot of people did say it to me, even in London, and I know a lot of people who have come home and found it very difficult. They didn’t really settle, the change was too much going back having been away for so long. It’s not everybody who will settle.” Charles understands that fear, and the uncertainty that comes with it, the dream of coming home not quite materialising when finally back on local terra firma, only then to try and return to what once was.
“Even a lot of people I spoke to, they come home, but to think about home and staying here, that wouldn’t happen. They couldn’t. Maybe it’s that fear. It’s a terrible thing to have that uncertainty. In all those years over there you don’t forget you’re Irish.
“I enjoyed my time in England, living in London with work and that. I made a lot of friends and I won’t forget them. I go back occasionally.”

Blend in
Charles thinks the young Irish now leaving the shores in droves to escape recession and in search of work “blend in better” to what’s there now.
“London has changed a lot over the years. When I do go over I meet my friends in The Quays on Holloway Road. There’s not a lot of my generation left, they’ve either moved out, come back here or passed on. ‘We’re finished here’ - so they say over there. The young people going over now, it’s not like the old Irish. Back then there were certain places you went to meet. That’s not there anymore, or not as much. The young Irish blend in better.”
As for The Gathering in the country’s attempt to bring people home, Charles remembers a similar initiative in the form of An Tóstal. The original purpose of the festival was a celebration of Irish culture, with an emphasis upon drawing tourists into the country during the Easter off-season. He sees similarities in The Gathering, and while he does not condemn it as an opportunity to boost tourism, and perhaps even employment in some sectors, Charles feels the true message of bringing family home has been “lost”. “The Gathering from what I can gather is about community, but it’s missing the point a bit. It’s nice to get people home and get the revenue and all that, but the message of coming home in all of that is being missed. What does The Gathering mean to all the people who aren’t going to be here for it? Home is a place people should want to come back to, not a place they feel like they have to.”