Sometimes it’s only decades after a person has passed away that you begin to gain perspective on them and their life. One member of our writers’ group, in Northern Ireland, was an 87-year-old English lady called Winnie. She was from Yorkshire and spoke of wearing clogs with metal soles as a child, making sparks fly as she and the other children ran down the road.
Her poetry was about simple things like fish suppers, fuel poverty or just living on her estate. It was one of the rougher estates, and whenever I visited her in Coleraine, I remembered my own time living in such challenging places.
We had so much laughter in that particular writing group, and I remember the warmth of their voices and their openness. I suspect it was the desperation in all our lives that made honesty necessary. Those who live in relative affluence probably have just as many problems, but seem to cloak themselves from others and hide their indiscretions better. Winnie has since passed away, and I miss her smile and her jokey sense of humour.
There was a retired local policeman who was also in the group. He was like a breath of fresh air, causing everyone to erupt in laughter over the simplest things. I remember he once ended up spending a night in custody through no fault of his own.
He’d been awakened in the early hours of the morning in his block of flats by the sound of a woman screaming for help. When he came out of his apartment, he could see two figures, a woman and a man, having an altercation on the walkway outside the third-floor flats.
Climbing the stairs, he joined them on the walkway and discovered that the man was beating the woman severely. He intervened and brought the man down in a rugby tackle. When the police were called, it turned out to be a domestic violence incident, but both the man and the woman blamed him for instigating all the violence, and he ended up spending the night in custody.
Poor guy! He swore he wouldn’t help anyone ever again: the risk was too great. But he made us all laugh with his tale of the evening and the confusion—thinking he was doing his good deed for the day, only to end up in a jail cell.
Winnie had her own issues. She and her husband had been unable to have children, so they had adopted two brothers, aged seven and nine. Unfortunately, the boys caused no end of trouble during childhood and went on to commit worse offences as they grew older. As adults, they seemed to gravitate towards trouble, and trouble seemed to gravitate towards them.
When her husband died, things seemed to get worse, and the two men seemed to take ridiculous pleasure in upsetting Winnie. I remember her telling us about one occasion when she was walking with her younger son Paul walking on the pavement in front of the shops in Coleraine. As they walked, he was saying the most offensive and hurtful things to her. He was cursing and shouting so loudly, and gesticulating with his fists so aggressively, that two middle-aged women walking behind them challenged him about his behaviour and intervened.
Pulling him aside, away from Winnie, they called the police and gave him a good scolding as they stood on the pavement waiting for the police to arrive. Middle-aged ladies working in tandem can give a powerful ticking-off, and these two were well built and very well intentioned. I think her son was more afraid of these two well-built and thoroughly outraged middle-aged women than of the small policeman who eventually appeared to take down the details.
Winnie said her son was completely shocked by how they spoke to him and by their fearlessness. The small policeman gave him a warning not to behave in such a manner, but apparently the two middle-aged women needed to be restrained by the policeman from giving a more physical response to his misbehaviour.
The police had been called on many occasions to deal with her son, and he had no fear of them. But Winnie said that, over the policeman’s shoulder, one of the women pointed two fingers at her own eyes and then at her son—a warning that had him scared indeed. Who knew when he would encounter them again? And without police intervention, would he be safe?
I remember calling Winnie once and hearing her son shouting furiously at her in the background. I was so angry at his tone that I told Winnie to give him the phone so I could give him a piece of my mind. She told him I wanted to talk to him and offered him the phone. There was silence, and then she told me he’d run out of the door and onto the street rather than talk to me.
I visited Winnie several times and was so upset to see her in her big armchair, wrapped in blankets. She told me that was where she slept now. Apparently, the upper floor, where her bedroom was, was far too cold. It upset me to think of her life being restricted to this one tiny room and the armchair. I wish the world were more aware of what age and poverty do to so many people.
During one of my visits, her son was there. I was pretty annoyed with him but tried not to show it. I didn’t want to make things worse for Winnie, but I couldn’t stop myself glaring at him. He was in a placating mood, all smiles and very subservient in the way he greeted me. That made me want to slap him really hard.
Then my son suddenly appeared, helping to carry in some things from my car for Winnie. He is six foot two, and Paul, thought I’d come to get some justice and had brought a heavy along for that purpose. He practically fell to his knees before us. However, my son greeted him warmly and shook his hand, and I could see that Paul was beyond relieved.
I had to stop myself copying the middle-aged lady’s two-finger warning, pointing to my eyes and then at Paul over my son’s shoulder, just to freak him out.
Paul continued to plague Winnie’s life with his violence, his moods and his anger. It seemed so unfair. One of Winnie’s stories was about Paul’s neighbour down the street, who had attacked and frightened him. I enjoyed her story, but I’m afraid I knew exactly how that neighbour felt, as I’d really wanted to give him a good thrashing myself. Winnie was a lovely lady and didn’t deserve any of this.
Sometimes you have to ask what lessons are learned in life. I think Winnie had a wonderful married life with her husband, and when they decided to adopt two children, they did it for all the right reasons. It’s just a shame that some children are so scarred by what they’ve been through that they seem never to find their feet or make a better life, despite all the help and love they receive.
Addiction played a big role in much of the harm I saw in those lives. Alcoholism blights many Irish lives and causes so much distress and heartache. I wonder whether those who make so much money out of this dirty business ever think about the anguish and violence so often associated with their product.
