A Matter of Credit, and FFF XIII.

When I was a very young man, I walked into a bank and got a whopping overdraft with ease. Whether it is the times, or my age, or the struggling life that I have led bringing up a family of nine in the West of Ireland, deliberately turning my back on a privileged English background - whatever - the fact is in recent years it has been impossible for me. However, needs must try, if the old Anna M is to get back in the water; and blow me, I have after all found signs of life in the Bank of Ireland. Is it possible that we did get something of value in return from the Duckie's Commerce Secretary, Mr Wilbur Ross, as he doddled off with his Eur500million profit from his investment in our bank?* It still remains to be seen if the bank will come good with a piddling loan for me! 
       There is a presumption among the powers that be that our future depends on the big players, the kind of guys that the Duckie has in his Administration, with which of course our Irish Government coyly concurs, even as, like the English Tories, they pay lip service to equality and social justice. One might be tempted to consider that we need a new French Revolution, which would involve chopping a lot of heads off! But the weeds only spring up again, as we see now so clearly in the 'home of democracy'! 
       I think that no matter what system one has, its success or failure in real terms depends on listening to and empowering all those who stand outside of the magic circles of power, whether these circles consist of members of 'The Party' or simply those who have access to credit. In the end, an economy depends on those who actually rear families and both produce and consume goods or services, because they must, along indeed with those who facilitate them by trade or finance. Which way should the communication should 'face'! If you are interested in how this kind of thinking worked out in my life, read the despatches From the Fractal Frontier in the small print at the bottom of my posts.

*http://www.thejournal.ie/wilbur-ross-trump-bank-of-ireland-2-3103430-Nov2016/

Summer in Sherkin.

FFF XIII. I finished the degree in Cambridge, after a fashion. My cavalier attitude must have been frustrating for my teachers, and I must say they were kind. There had been moves to get me to see a psychiatrist, however, which I did not appreciate.  Meanwhile there was a kind of gathering going on in Liverpool, and Fiona and I headed back there. Sebastian was now the parish priest at St Mary’s, and as well as Christopher, there were Peter, Kevin and Anselm in the parochial house, while Rodney and Ken Thompson and John Stokes were living in a flat in Liverpool 8.

       As for what each of us expected to come of it all, it is impossible to speak for any but myself. Anyway Ken got a  job helping to tidy up the church-yard around the Anglican cathedral. There were some broken down graves in it that needed mending. Next thing, he had the bath-room of the flat he shared with Rodney and John covered in stone-dust, as he chipped away there at blocks of stone. He at least had found his vocation! Rodney was to become a hermit in a wild Connemara cottage, while John became a priest of the Westminster archdiocese. Meanwhile some of us were thinking of trying to establish some kind of sixth-form college, to give it possibly too grand a name. Perhaps it could be done at Downside, perhaps we could get some other house, where youngsters from all social backgrounds would be able to spend a year completely free of exam pressure, studying essentially on the basis of Dom Luke's course, with a view to figuring out what to do with their lives, and what life in general was all about.

       St Mary’s, Highfield St, near the Exchange Station and at the back of the docks, was a Downside parish and I suppose a testimony of the monks’ desire to break away from the ‘best gentlemen's’ club west of London’ aspect of the mother house. The first Catholic chapel thereabouts was built around 1726, but destroyed by an anti-Catholic mob 20 years later. The next chapel was disguised as a warehouse. Into this area, many refugees from the Irish famines were to pour, arriving packed into dodgy craft even as refugees elsewhere do today. A fine Pugin church was nonetheless built around that time, only to be destroyed by German bombs in WWII. The church where Fiona and I were married had been opened in 1953. By 1968 the rows of tenement houses had been replaced by soulless blocks of flats. N'ere a tree survived in that urban desert. The whole area was eventually flattened, mainly to make way for flyovers and whatnot as far as I have made out, while the church was closed in 2001 and demolished in 2003.

       The role of physical place in our lives is a mysterious business, and of course goes with the whole business of ‘roots’. It is hard to know how much credence to give to the notion that the Celtic side of the British Isles functions as a kind of foil to the Germanic, Anglo-Saxon side; a semi-suppressed underside wherein lurk subconscious and imaginative resources that the brittle, disciplined superstructure of the Sassenach ignores, to his own impoverishment and peril. The Mendip hills, upon which Downside stands, would constitute part of the frontier between them, if such a thing can be said to persist nowadays.

       The Anglo-Saxons are supposed to have barely penetrated the Somerset marshes beyond them, where stands the Celtic stronghold of Glastonbury. At the southern end of this border country was my mother's home country in the Isle of Purbeck and the marshy levels about the River Frome, at the back of Poole harbour in Dorset. Here was another Celtic outpost, and subsequently recusant refuge, until Corfe Castle was destroyed by Cromwell. Her family evidently attracted recruits from distant Celtic parts, for one of my mother's grannies was an Irish Catholic from Co. Monaghan, and the other a Highland Scottish one.

       But the beautiful West Country seemed very far away in the urban jungle behind the Liverpool docks, and indeed what the bashed-up Irish who lived there were to make of the priests with posh accents is anybody's guess. As one looked down from the heights of Everton, across a waste of chaos, remnants of old streets with their rows of grim back-to-back Victorian housing, swathes of empty spaces where they had been demolished but not as yet replaced by anything, corner pubs or other slightly distinguished buildings that had as yet been spared, tower blocks of new-grim flats, various industrial buildings down nearer the docks, some cranes and ships, the Mersey - only then, in the distance on a clear day, would the hills and mountains of North Wales remind one of that other world where Nature retains her dignity and beauty. And at night the odd ship’s hooter reminded me of the sea!  

       Was it possible for those hungry 19th century Irish eyes to glimpse those Welsh hills occasionally, above or between the slate roofs, through the smoke of many chimneys? Did they pause to wonder, like me,  whether the Mountains of Dublin or of Mourne might be spied from them? Did they think then of the grand and graceful places that they had been forced to abandon? And what of the gulf between their heritage and ours! Was it really possible that the Catholic Faith could transcend it? To be middle class might be defined as having a fair chunk of hope in terms of this life; to be poor is to have to face 'a vale of tears' in which you must locate your hope firmly elsewhere, in Heaven, (unless in some alternative, 'the Revolution', or whatnot); can they be reconciled? Going to Liverpool from Downside was certainly some kind of a statement, but of what?
Was it a matter of trying to reconcile beauty with ugliness, or our fine aspirations with the reality of post-industrial Britain, or Celt with Saxon, or rich and poor, or hope for this world and for the next? Or all of them and more? We were still working on it, but the fact that the situation remained unresolved in that lump of a place on the Mendip Hills, which is Downside, did not help us to find our way. Meanwhile I don't think our monks' sermons found many hearers in the tenements; suitable ears would have to belong to workers in the nearby city centre or to blow-ins like me. Fiona and I moved into the parish youth leader’s flat, over a chipper across the square from the church. I can still smell that horrible smell of rancid cooking oil that wafted up from below. The cops only ventured into that area on foot in threes, and were lucky if they were not hit by the odd bottle whistling down from the surrounding tenements. I found a job in the new ‘secondary modern’ school that was attached to the parish of St Mary’s, but that's a story for the next post.

       
See poor old St Mary's Church!