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Authors: Paul Burke,Prefers to remain anonymous

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BOOK: 2001 - Father Frank
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The house was a short walk from Camden Town tube where Eamonn and scores of others would gather at six thirty every morning when the building-site foremen or ‘gangers’ would come looking for casual labour. It was like the feeling they’d all experienced at school while waiting to be picked for the football team, but this was rather more important. If you didn’t get picked, you didn’t get paid, which meant that you couldn’t afford to eat. Or, more importantly, you couldn’t afford to drink.

That was the other route to gainful employment. You soon discovered which gangers drank where, and for quite a few, it was Kilburn High Road. The Cock, the Old Bell and the Cooper’s Arms were particularly fruitful. Fortunately for Eamonn, aged twenty-two and already built like the brick walls he would soon be erecting, he was never short of work, never left standing at Camden Town station and never needing to give too much of his green and folding to the publicans of London, NW6.

Mary Heneghan had also arrived in London courtesy of the Holyhead train. She, too, hauled her suitcase up to Camden Town and was given a tiny room in Arlington Road by her sister Eileen whose husband John was a leading hand (whatever that was) at the Black Cat cigarette factory in Mornington Crescent. She found work as an auxiliary nurse at the Whittington Hospital in Archway, and it was at a dance at the nearby Gresham Ballroom that she was swept off her feet by Eamonn Dempsey. Well, swung off them, really. They were dancing the Siege of Ennis, a complex Irish reel, involving dozens of participants, which had long served as an informal mating ritual. Eamonn had grabbed hold of Mary and had never, ever let go.

In those days Catholic courtships were fairly brief and to the point. If there was a solid attraction between you, it was usually deemed good enough for Holy Matrimony. A physical attraction could never be more than visual attraction since sex before marriage was strictly taboo. The proposal, when it came, was low-key. Eamonn did not fall to one knee (only Our Lord was worthy of genuflection). He did not produce a big diamond ring and beseech Mary to marry him or his heart would surely break and his life become worthless. “Mary,” he’d said, over a quiet drink in the Archway Tavern, “will we get married?”

And in response, Mary did not scream, “Yes, yes, yes,” and burst into tears of orgasmic delight. She just nodded, and within a matter of weeks they were in their first home together—a small flat in Kilburn. If, that is, the lower half of an unconverted house could be described as a flat. Mr and Mrs Dempsey lived at the bottom of the stairs, Mr and Mrs Ward at the top. Agnes Ward was from Leitrim, and every Sunday morning she would clip-clop around the bare floorboards of the upstairs ‘flat’ so that Eamonn and Mary, sleeping peacefully below, would be startled from their slumbers in time for the eight o’clock mass.

They’d lived there for just over a year when Mr Thompson, the landlord, gave them notice to leave. He was selling this and the various other dilapidated houses he owned around Kilburn and Kensal Rise and was retiring to the south coast. This was a pity. Despite Agnes Ward’s stiletto-heeled reveille, Eamonn and Mary were happy there. They didn’t want to move and seemed no nearer the summit of the London Borough of Willesden’s council-house waiting list. They asked Mr Thompson how much the house would cost to buy.

“Two thousand pounds,” he replied, almost embarrassed by the certain knowledge that this was far more than the charming young couple could afford. And he was right, but Eamonn and Mary asked him to give them a month before he placed their home in the hands of the estate agents on Salusbury Road. He agreed, and over the next four weeks they hardly ate, didn’t go out drinking or dancing and shelved their hitherto immediate plans to start a family. They scraped together every pound, shilling and penny they could find, plus many more borrowed from various members of their family to piece together the two hundred pounds required by the Allied Irish Bank as a deposit.

They only ever managed a hundred and ninety, which meant that, ultimately, they would be a hundred pounds short of Mr Thompson’s asking price.

When the month was up, he came to see them. “Will you accept nineteen hundred?” said Eamonn.

Mr Thompson pushed some Old Holborn into the bowl of his pipe, lit it, took a couple of puffs, gazed quietly into the middle distance and considered the offer. Or, at least, he pretended to. They were good tenants; they’d never damaged his property or been late with their rent. Such was his regard for them that he’d probably have let them have it for even less. “Okay,” he said, after what seemed like an eternity, “on one condition—that you can raise the money within, say, three weeks. I’ve got my eye on a nice little bungalow in Bournemouth, and if I’m not quick, I’m going to miss it.”

“Three weeks. That’ll be fine,” said Eamonn. He’d get the money, even if it meant robbing the Allied Irish Bank to do so. He held out his hand for Mr Thompson to shake, but in his excitement he’d alarmed his soon-to-be-ex-landlord by spitting on it first.

Chapter 3

O
n a fine August morning in 1977 Francis, now eighteen—tall, dark and almost handsome—was sitting in the box room of that very house in Esmond Road. You could call it a box room for two reasons: first, because it was a little square bedroom, the smallest in the house; and second because it was filled with boxes—long wooden ones that had once contained little bottles of Britvic orange juice but now housed Frank’s huge and ever-increasing collection of seven-inch singles. He’d stopped answering to ‘Francis’ years ago. It was too reminiscent of St Francis of Assisi, open-toed sandals and sackcloth robes.

Old singles were his passion and his collection was now approaching four figures. He’d long ago made the sweeping generalisation that, with the noble exception of the Beatles, most tracks on most albums were crap. He couldn’t bear the overblown pomposity of even the most revered examples—tracks like ‘Supper’s Ready’ by Genesis or Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’. How could this pretentious drivel ever compare to Levi Stubbs pouring raw emotion into every line of ‘Baby I Need Your Loving’?

For Frank, the three-minute single best encapsulated what pop music was all about. He’d picked up most of his older ones for next to nothing in junk shops and jumble sales. For a few of the choicer items, he’d paid a little more at specialist outlets like Spinning Disc in Chiswick or Rocks Off just behind Tottenham Court Road. They resided alongside the shiny new punk stuff, often on brightly coloured vinyl with picture sleeves.

Recently, Frank had been putting his collection to good use. Since passing his driving test a few months earlier, he’d been allowed occasionally to borrow his dad’s old Corsair to embark upon a part-time career as a mobile DJ. He’d saved his Saturday-job money from Riordan’s butchers in Kilburn High Road and invested in a rudimentary disco unit, a pair of bass bins and a set of flashing lights. He’d been playing records at parties for years. At each one, he’d gravitate towards the music centre in the corner and have a quick flick through the host’s (or the host’s parents’) record collection. Then, almost like a good chef supplied with even the most unpromising ingredients, he could concoct a selection of tunes that would turn a bad party into a good one. He seemed to have the knack of finding the right track at the right time.

Today, he was looking for the appropriate track to clatter on to one of his twin BSR turntables. It was one of his oldest singles, released in 1957 on the purple HMV label, the label on which you’d also find the very early Elvis singles. Frank had them all—‘All Shook Up’, ‘Paralysed’, even the rarer than rare ‘Mystery Train’, all on purple HMV with the gold lettering. Now, in August 1977, with the King having recently joined the queue at the Great Hamburger Joint in the Sky, the value of these waxings had increased a hundredfold.

He found it—‘The Banana Boat Song’ by Harry Belafonte. He wanted to hear that famous chorus ‘Day-o, day-o, daylight come and she wanna go home’. The record had surely been made for this occasion. Frank had just received his A-level results—a D, an E and an O. “DEO, DEO, daylight come and she wanna go home.” Well, Frank thought it was funny. Though in reality, these grades were no laughing matter. Oh, they weren’t disastrous—nothing to be ashamed of, and considering how little effort had gone into them, they were remarkably good. They just weren’t going to be much use.

Harry Belafonte was faded out and replaced by a spinning blue Phillips label—Dusty Springfield singing the painfully apposite ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself. As he listened to Dusty’s peerless vocals, soaked in hopeless self-pity, Frank couldn’t help feeling the same emotions seeping through him. It dawned on him then that there was no point in leaving school at eighteen. No point at all. At sixteen, you could get started, as most of his Kilburn contemporaries already had, and begin your apprenticeship as brickie, chippie or sparks. Or perhaps put your foot on the bottom rung on any of a number of clerical ladders in the City or the West End. Alternatively, at twenty-one, in your cap and gown, you could take your pick from the world’s graduate appointments and set off on a sprint round life’s inside track where the chairmanship of ICI awaited you as you breasted the tape.

The primary purpose of A levels is to unlock the doors of universities but the key only turns if your grades are good. Frank had no real desire to go to university. He quite fancied Oxford or Cambridge but only in the same way that he quite fancied Farrah Fawcett-Majors. With his grades, he’d be lucky to loosen the locks of Doncaster Poly, and the thought of spending the next three years sharing grotty digs up north and having to put his name on his yoghurt was wrist-slittingly bad. With a D, an E and an O, he’d fallen between two stools with only a limited number of places to land.

The Metropolitan Police, for instance. Now as much as Frank occasionally fantasised about being in the Sweeney, tearing round London’s still derelict docklands before snapping the cuffs on a vicious team of armed robbers, he knew the reality would be rather more mundane: ordering hapless motorists to produce their documents or strip-searching innocent Rastafarians at the Notting Hill Carnival. No, a career in the Old Bill did not appeal. Neither did the thought of working all day on a building site and doing day-release at Kilburn Tech to become a quantity surveyor. Real progress for a lot of boys: one rung up from their bricklaying fathers.

The only career on which Frank had been vaguely keen was journalism, but this budding enthusiasm was strangled at birth by the arrival at his school of a dull old hack from the local paper. He had given a talk explaining how rewarding it had been to spend thirty-six years as part of the local community. ‘I’ve covered their weddings and I’ve covered their children’s weddings’ was the phrase that had Frank hanging the noose over the beam. He had imagined a life as a crusading reporter working for one of the broadsheets, but the idea of thirty-six years at the
Kilburn Gazette
covering stories of the ‘Man Drops Bag Of Sugar In Supermarket—We Have Pictures’ variety had turned him off for ever.

He thought of becoming a full-time DJ, but was forced to concede that this was not a ‘proper job’. It was a hobby, and once it became work, the fun would go out of it.

It was with heavy heart and dragging heels that he returned one last time to St Michael’s Roman Catholic Grammar School to see Mr Bracewell, who taught English and was head of the upper sixth. Bracewell was the sort of teacher who doesn’t exist any more: he had leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket, he smoked a pipe, he voted Conservative. He also had access to the understated brand of sarcasm that takes at least thirty years to perfect. Never was it more evident than today at his one-off ‘surgery’ when he would dispense advice to pupils whose only thought about a career was “Dunno, sir.”

“Come,” he drawled, in response to Frank’s tentative tap on the door. “Ah, Dempsey,” he said, through an expression that was neither smile nor frown. “A D, an E and an O.”

Bracewell’s expression said it all, and Frank sat down for a perfunctory trawl through all the dull careers for which they both knew he would be completely unsuitable. Having got those out of the way, Bracewell leaned back in his chair and made a ridiculous one-word suggestion: “Oxford.”

“Oxford Poly?”

“No, Dempsey, Oxford University.”

Frank tried to speak but no words came out. He tried again. Nothing.

Bracewell was either smiling benignly or sneering cruelly, Frank couldn’t work out which. The world had turned rather surreal.

“Well, Dempsey, you—lost for words. This is a sight I’d have paid good money to see.”

“But, well, sir…er…Oxford…You know…Peter Staunton,” was the best Frank could manage.

Peter Staunton was the class swot. Top every year, he gave the impression of having emerged from his mother’s womb already reciting the formula for solving quadratic equations.

“Yes, Dempsey, you’re quite right. Staunton has achieved three As and is going up to Balliol to read physics. He is a brilliant scholar who has earned his place on merit.” He paused, almost conspiratorially, and lowered his voice. “But there are other ways,” he winked, “of getting in.”

Frank was confused. Only two ‘ways of getting in’ sprang to mind. First, a sports scholarship but, like most of his mates, Frank had turned his back on any form of competitive sport at the age of fourteen when he had discovered cigarettes, alcohol and the girls from St Angela’s Convent across the road. The other way was a music scholarship, but unless you counted being able to play ‘Land of Hope And Glory’ or ‘We Hate Nottingham Forest’, as it was better known, on the paper and comb, the doors to the world’s most prestigious university seemed Banham-locked and bolted.

Bracewell enlightened him. “At all colleges, Dempsey, there are certain—how can I put it?—not so popular subjects, which can sometimes be under-subscribed. Those departments are naturally keen to keep themselves going and can therefore be rather more lenient with their entry requirements.”

“But even so, sir, a D, an E and an O?”

BOOK: 2001 - Father Frank
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