The Little Boy in the Glossy White Boots

By Tomás O'Bogáin

For most of his life, Tomás felt disconnected, lonely and fearful. He was overwhelmed by a deep sense of emptiness. At 27 years of age, he ran out of options because of his chronic addictions. He was just about to enter a residential six-week treatment centre that had recently come to Ireland. He had heard stories about this place: very confrontational staff in group therapy; they put toilet seats around patients’ necks (piece of shit); put soothers in their mouths (big baby); and hung signs around their necks (do not speak to him/her – silent treatment).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781398404984

Tomás O'Bogáin

Tomás O’Bogáin is from Dublin, Ireland. This is his first novel. Tomás has self-published a book of poetry, The Commons Road, and several short stories in magazines and art festivals in Ireland. He lives with his partner, Janice, in New Zealand. His two adult sons live in Ireland.

Book preview

Chapter 1

I was born from a box, a boxed womb of my mother that felt like a prison and familiar to me. I was entombed because I did not want to come out into this world. I have felt trapped by that image for most of my life. That image was part of the life script I had been given at birth. Yet, against all the odds, I have survived.

When I was an adult, my mother told me bits of a story about my father cycling his bike like a madman down Knockmeenagh Road, across the cobblestone church-yard, to Dr Griggins’ surgery, with my mother on the crossbar and me in her arms. I was a few weeks old and had stopped breathing again. It is old Clondalkin Village, Dublin, 1957. And I was then hospitalised for one and a half years in St. Vincent’s Hospital, at Stephen’s Green, Dublin.

Another time, when I was in my thirties, I had pressed my mother for some more information about my birth, she told me that I had had a very traumatic birth and had nearly died several times. I was placed into an incubator for a long period and during that time I spent in St. Vincent’s Hospital, my mother had to take two buses into the city to visit me on a Sunday. She emphasised that not once did my father come to see me in all that time.

Apparently, I had been born with an inverted breastbone that affected my breathing and heart. My mother would not allow the surgeons to operate on my chest as it would have killed me. What courage to stand up against the chauvinistic gods of the medical world of that era.

I was born into a working-class and underprivileged family about 7 miles from Dublin city, or ‘town’ as we Dubs call it. With farms all around our council estate, we experienced both rural and urban life, yet it was only a 45-minute bus ride into town. I had the best of both worlds in that respect. But I wasn’t so privileged in the family I grew up in, which was driven, by what in later years I saw was my father’s alcoholism. Back then I thought we were all just mad.

I was a very nervous, shy and fearful child, and was especially afraid of the adults in the world around me. And it was very much an adult world where children were to be seen and not heard, unlike today’s world where children are more centre stage.

I was born the second eldest of nine children, eight years after my older (half) sister. Discovering through a birth certificate that my parents did not marry until after I was born, I was illegitimate, therefore my older half-sister was also illegitimate. Based on guesswork, hunches and hearsay, I believe my half-sister and I did not have the same father, but to this day it remains an unspoken family secret that has never been discussed. Very early on in my childhood I learned that this was a family that did not hold with the asking of questions or talking about feelings. Nonetheless, this suspicion would seem to be confirmed by the fact that my half-sister used my mother’s maiden name.

While having a half-sister implies some sort of a relationship, this is far from the truth; we had no relationship at all, nor have we today. In the past twenty-five years, we have met only two times, each time at funerals: my father’s and my brother’s. I knew I had an older sister only from overhearing my drunken father roaring and fighting with my mother at night-time when drunk: ‘Yea whore, yea—I picked you off the street.’ Alcohol ruled our house. I would lie awake cowering in bed, listening for him in the distance, as he made his way home from the village pub. The house would instinctively go quiet. I would be wondering what kind of alcohol he would have been drinking, as this would dictate the type of night that lay ahead of us. If he came in from the pub after drinking stout, then more than likely we would be up half the night with him singing. If he had been drinking whiskey, he would be roaring at my mother, who would normally lock herself in the box-bedroom.

The auld fella’s normal line in rhetoric would be: ‘Yea fuckin’ whore, yea—I picked you off the fuckin’ street!’ His roar would seem to shake the house, along with the thunderous noise as he kicked and banged at her bedroom door. The echoes vibrated around the upstairs landing, and everyone hid like scared rabbits under the coats on the beds. But as I was the eldest (aged about six or seven), I had to look out for him and put him to bed, particularly when he would call my name repeatedly: ‘Tomo—Tomo, come here.’ (He was named big Tommy, so I was named Tomo). The next day I would be very tired going to school, from being up half the night with his shite-talk.

The following morning the row would continue, with my mother getting her revenge when he was dying of a hangover: ‘Yea alco, yea pig! Go-on, yea bastard!’ she would roar at him. Please stop, Ma, I would be begging inside me head, knowing this would mean he would only come back that night angry and looking for a fight. I don’t know which was worse, my father roaring at night-time, slagging off my mother or my mother’s retaliation the next morning, which was all played out through the open front window of the parlour, as she shouted out from behind closed curtains as he shuffled down the path with head hung low. We kids would be going to school at around the same time, with all of the neighbours and our friends hearing the row continuing from the night before—a never-ending cycle of terror, shame and embarrassment.

Still, my mother tried her best, she really did; unfortunately, her best wasn’t good enough. I believe she had forgotten that I was still a child, as she was emotionally dependant on me. Having said that, I believe we children could easily have ended up in an orphanage, if my mother hadn’t had an inner-strength to cope with the effects of my father’s drinking, and the consequences on us as a family, not least of which were the awful financial worries she was left to cope with on her own.

There was a price to pay, though, in coping with an alcoholic husband and rearing nine children. My mother was a very anxious and angry woman who had terrible black moods. And her plight was worsened by the fact she was illiterate, although that, too, was an unspoken secret in our family.

They say love conquers all. But one had to feel loved, to be able to give, show and receive love. If I had felt loved, then most of the above wouldn’t have had such an effect on me, but I didn’t feel loved, safe or protected. I wouldn’t have noticed the physical poverty had I felt loved; it was poverty of the soul that was really missing and the most damaging of all was the emotional poverty. An empty stomach you can live with, but emptiness of love and life itself as a child, you can’t. Of course, at first I couldn’t know this; I could only go by my experience, and if that was the way your parents are, then you didn’t really know any different. It was a cycle. And I believe that the dysfunctional behaviour of both of my parents as adults came from their having been extremely wounded in their own childhood.

However, by the time I reached eight years of age, I could see that other families and homes were indeed different. My parents were passing on, in turn, inter-generational wounds of grief and loss, shame and rejection, trauma. And I believe that manifested in the alcoholism present in our family tree.

After I was born, I was brought home to The Ranch Cottages at Old Naas Road, Clondalkin, Dublin. There, my parents rented a room in the tiny cottage from Mrs O’Donoghue. I later went to St. Joseph’s Primary School with her son Páschal. We both played football for the local GAA club (Gaelic Athletic Association): The Round Towers. My parents married a few months after I was born, and years later I was told that my older sister was with us there at the Ranch, as I recall being told that when I was around two or three years of age my sister gave me away to the gypsies. They had me on the back of their wagon!

We moved to the Commons Road when I was about four years old. My sister would have been about 12 years of age by then, but I only recall her living with us later when she was an older teenager. By that time, she was working in the local bag factory at the paper-mills in the village. I recall when she got paid her weekly wage; she would drag me along by the arm to the village shops, growling at me to hurry up. She always seemed angry, and I felt she didn’t like me. That was all I could recall about her from my childhood memories; I never felt any connection with her.

My suspicion is that she was angry at me because she was displaced in my mother’s affections when I was born, although I think (a hunch) that she had lived with my mother’s parents in Bluebell, Dublin, since she was born. All of this is only speculation and guesswork, though, put together from what I noticed and saw and heard. Nothing was ever talked about, which was part of the overall problem. Unspoken words hold huge energy within a family of origin and become secrets with the unwritten code that they are never to be talked about outside the family.

It would have been lovely to feel the safety of having an older sibling, but unfortunately it was never to be. This meant I always felt the burden of being the eldest and all that goes with it—particularly in a dysfunctional family such as ours.

When I was a child, I was poorly sick and frail, and small for my age. From as far back as I can remember, I have suffered from anxiety with panic attacks, night terrors and sleep apnoea. No doubt a fair part of this can be traced back to my mother ranting and raving about my father in my ear, all during my childhood, as if she were talking with an adult. In all that time, though, she never talked about her own vulnerabilities.

Bloody Red Fox

Christmas 1967

On a country road

Bordered by hedgerows

Heavy snow falls,

And silence.

An auld drunkard

Is singing

Somewhere in the distance,

About the ‘Black and Tans,’

And ‘freeing auld Ireland,’

As dogs bark,

Echoing into stillness,

Where sheets of snow

Blankets the earth,

Stars light the sky,

A full moon dances shadows,

Cross the path to Clarke’s Field,

And silence.

I follow

O’er briars and ditch,

Lose his track

Behind Tom Brown’s shed,

And silence.

I imagine you

Curse the snow this night,

As the farmer

Catches in his sights,

Your friend—the moon,

Betrays red coat,

Against snow-white backdrop,

And silence.

Warm blood melts snow,

Drips and drops,

His tracks have stopped,

Comes a dead end,

And silence.

I imagine your thoughts, as

You lie on a pillow of snow,

With bloodshot eyes:

’If only I had lived in Antarctica,

My skin whiter than white

I wouldn’t have lost my life

Because of my bloody

Red coat this night,’

And silence.

As his final breath froze

On this Christmas Eve night,

The chickens lived to tell the tale

Of the full moon that shone

An earth splashed in white,

So that bloody red fox

Got his comeuppance this night,

And silence.

Chapter 2

‘I’ll fuckin’ kill youse if youse don’t keep fuckin’ quiet!’ Ma roared. The rain lashed off the window-panes, as we all jumped up and down on the beds upstairs, which was now a trampoline on the bare floorboards.

Ma pounded up the red-and-green linoleum staircase. She took a firm grip on the handle of the sweeping brush and in a savage attack cornered us kids under the beds in the big bedroom. Because of her short-sightedness, she would have swiped and poked with ferocious blows and tenacity as if swatting flies. I imagined bones splintering and breaking across and under the beds. We all screamed: ‘No, Ma! No, Ma! Ma! Please, Ma! Don’t! No! Ma!’

What followed—as usual—was an earth-shattering silence after her storm had subsided. But her tongue was just as savage.

‘I’m sorry, Ma! I’m sorry.’

‘Fuck off, yea bastard.’

She emptied the last of her rage onto me as I tried to comfort her, as she cried softly into the right palm of her hand covering her face, whilst sat in her usual place of refuge, on her chair in the corner of the kitchen. I stood on the bare ox-blood-painted concrete floor. I don’t know why I am saying sorry. I did nothing wrong. I felt responsible for the onslaught. She would then simmer like the pot of tea, expressing not one shred of remorse. She withdrew into her shell until the next time, and there was no doubt there would be a next time.

On other occasions, Ma would kick the dog as a dog could be kicked; she would pull him by the hair on his head, as his legs locked cross-legged, and drag him along the bare concrete kitchen floor. She pulled him headfirst and kicked him in the head, under the steel-legged table. He whimpered, terrified, as she screamed like a lunatic: ‘Wha’ did I fuckin’ tell yea? Wha’ did I fuckin’ tell yea?’

His gaunt face and sunken eyes showed his terror. I looked on. She kicked him in the head and all over his poor wretch of a body until she had exhausted all of her lunatic raging. Then he would lie still from shock and fear, cowering under the cold steel-leg table. And we would get ready for school as if nothing had happened, as if we had had another big bad nightmare, and, just like the after-effects of a bad nightmare, everything would be okay in a while. All would be happy again. I’d try to comfort the dog. I loved my dog and couldn’t understand why she’d do that.

I feared my mother with her dark, depressive moods and her horrific outbursts of violent rage. Surely when the rage subsided, she must have known that what she was doing wasn’t right? Inside of me, a burning rage grew. I was appalled by this black-dark mother, but also careful not to annoy her, for fear of her wrath. I learned to be a good boy and please Ma. But her darkness was always simmering in the background, like the blackened tea-pot on the open fire, always present, threatening and waiting to boil over, to sizzle the life out of the little embers beneath. The trigger could be something as trivial as a note from school. Worse still, it could be getting meat from the local butcher with too much fat.

Along with those frightening and painful times were very funny times, too. Six boys and two girls must have been a handful for my mother to cope with, and we certainly played tricks on her, taking advantage of her short-sightedness. Ma could only see a few feet ahead of her and was like that for most of her life, until she had an operation to get the cataracts removed when she was in her sixties.

Before then, when we were children, we had learned to use her short-sightedness to our advantage, especially when she was mad at us for one thing or another and chased after us through the alleyway between our house and Dunnes next-door. One day, a couple of the brothers and me had gotten out the top window onto the concrete ledge over the front door (it measured about 2 feet by 4 feet). We had tied a piece of string onto the door-knocker/letterbox, pulled the string over to the side and thrown the other end up to one of the brothers waiting above. We would then sit on the ledge, trying to hold in the sniggering. She would come to the door, maybe for the third time at this stage, as we kept pulling on the piece of string, making the knocker bang loudly. Into the alley she’d go, muttering under her breath: ‘I’ll kill youse when I get my hands on youse.’ Sometimes we’d hear her laughing as she made her way back to the front door from the alleyway.

All the families in the council houses on the Commons Road where I grew up seemed to have lots of children. It was a small enough area of about 40 houses. The houses were terraced in blocks of four or five, three up and two down, with a tiny bathroom. And it was rough, very rough indeed. You had to be street-wise and have a lot of common sense to survive, which most people from working-class families had back then.

My passion was football. And in the early days I liked Gaelic football more than soccer. You were only allowed to play Gaelic in the schools anyway, and even then, you had to play Hurley (Irish game played with a stick and ball) to be allowed to play Gaelic football at St. Joseph’s Boys’ School, our primary school in Clondalkin village.

Most of the children who grew-up in Clondalkin hated Hurley, especially when playing a match on the freezing-cold pitches of Phoenix Park. Your fingers and toes would go numb, never mind your mickey nearly falling off from the cold! You’d stand there shivering and shaking, on the wide-open plains of the park, the wind and the rain howling in from the sea.

Soccer wasn’t played at St. Joseph’s—that was the Englishman’s game. Like everyone else there, I hated the English, even though I had never met one personally. But there were stories from old folklore told about the English oppressors and about the Black and Tans, who murdered our fellow countrymen by pulling them out of their beds in the middle of the night, never to be seen again. So, the stories went.

Dropping Raindrops

I hate that bloody rain;

Cold kitchen floor she polishes

With that oxblood stuff,

Wet from sixteen little feet,

Coming in from school,

I hate that bloody rain;

It ruined everything: dampened

The haycocks up Johno’s Field,

Fights would no doubt break out in

The house and she’d have to light

Tomorrow’s ration’s today.

I hate that bloody rain;

For making me feel the same as

Those heavy dropping raindrops

Against my windowpane,

I hate that bloody rain;

Because she would go insane

Waiting apprehensively for:

‘Last call now please,’

Then the storm would come inside.

Chapter 3

There wasn’t a lot of money around in those days for the working classes and mainly underprivileged families. We had even less due to my father’s drinking. I recall going on weekly, sometimes daily, excursions into Dublin town. My mother and I would go shopping for clothes and food, which she could afford. It was around 1964 and I was seven years of age.

We used to get the dilapidated number 51 bus from Clondalkin village. The bus would start and splutter at every stop along the Old Naas Road. Those were the old buses, which had the silver bar at the back-end for grabbing onto when you got on or off the bus. There was only one lane into town and another lane out of town. One long, winding road that took an eternity to get to your destination, passing by places named the Fox and Geese, and Bluebell, where my mother was born and had lived her youth. Next, we passed by Inchicore, where Ma’s twin-sister, Angela, lived in Keogh’s Square (a housing estate), which was situated on the right side of the main road going into town.

The bumpety bus-ride headed on towards Kilmainham, the old Gaol, where the Irish freedom-fighters of the 1916 rising were executed. We changed buses at Kilmainham for the number 21, which brought us up Mount Brown Hill, from where we then journeyed onto James Street, passing the enormous Guinness factory with its stench of hops and barley, which made the porter. I hated that fuckin’ place that made the stuff that poisoned my father and poisoned our family.

The 51-bus continued up into the Liberties, Thomas Street, with its branch streets of Meath Street and Francis Street. All the traders lined their wares alongside the main road of Thomas Street, with their breadboards on top of their prams—more than likely the same prams they had reared their kids in. Their pram-stalls were full of different produce: fruit, vegetables, fish, or bits and pieces of household goods to sell—the likes of seasonal stuff, tinsel and decorations, for Christmas time. And finally, intoxicated with excitement and tiredness, we would arrive at our destination: Frawley’s on Thomas Street, which sold cheap clothes and ‘going back to school’ stuff.

Frawley’s was where all the working-class mothers from all over Dublin went for cheap clothing and shoes. But they wouldn’t let on that they were poor. There was snobbery and shame in equal measures about it all, so they would always ‘put up a front’ and even some of the auld wans spoke with a rather posh tone, but you couldn’t hide that rough Dublin accent anywhere.

I knew my mother felt shame about our poverty and, just as other families in similar situations did, my mother pretended, in public anyway, that everything was fine on the financial front, even though it wasn’t. I recall as a child being sent by my mother to the back-side entrance of the church, where the kitchens were in Clondalkin village and getting left-overs of the food that had been cooked for the priests by their housekeepers. That was how desperate my mother was at times; she was able to put her shame to one side, but she couldn’t face the accusing eyes herself—I was her errand boy. On other occasions I recall going into town to see the ‘Providence Men’ (money-lenders). Although the money-lenders looked respectable, they were just glorified loan sharks and they had the same kind of accusing eyes as the priest’s housekeepers had.

I am standing beside Ma in a queue, all women