I am just back from Ireland and the funeral of my father, Seamus Goan, aged 86. I am still rather dumbfounded that the Catholic priest who led his short funeral (not a mass) at the funeral home refused permission to allow anyone else to contribute to the service in the form of reading a eulogy or even a poem. I contemplated ignoring him and speaking anyway but this seemed like an agressive act that was not the way to send anyone off. I decided in the end that I would tell the story my way, via this blog. I am very tired after yesterday’s ten hour journey, but as ever, I process best by writing so here I am once more looking at a white screen, fingers poised.
Where to begin? How do you tell the story of a life – particularly when I only know most of it through snatched stories and second-hand memories?
The first death of my father happened before I was old enough to form memories. His marriage to my mother was always problematic and at some point he disappeared, leaving a well of bitterness for my mother to swim in. She raised two children on benefits, struggling with her own mental health, and I grew up with a constant diet of stories about my father that could not have been less flattering. Some of the grim and uncomfortable facts of this early part of his life were without dispute, but I aways knew that my mother was not a reliable witness. My late sister was older than me, and had memories of him that she always cherished – we always knew there was more to this story. It would take almost 40 years for me to start looking for the rest.
The next part of this story leaps forward to the early 1990’s. We had been invited to a friends house in Blackburn, Lancashire and I was sitting in her book-lined living room whilst she finished cooking. Idly, I picked up the telephone directory and flicked to the G section to see if there were any Goans listed – something that I had often done before, with no previous success – it is an unusual name, after all. This time however, there they were- four or five telephone numbers, with addresses, each a different Goan household.
(Incidentally, the name Goan has nothing to do with Goa. Our best guess is that it is a derivitive of Gowan, or McGowan, meaning Smith or son of Smith. Somewhere way back in my ancestry, they were working with metal. But back to the story….)
Seeing these names in the Blackburn telephone directory triggered a distant memory. As a child, we used to recieve gifts from an uncle and aunt in a place called… Blackburn.
I did nothing with this information for a while, as I was not sure what to do with the knowledge. I spoke to my sister, who was tantalised and immobilised in equal measure. I said nothing to my mother. Eventually the pressure was too great, and I wrote to Mr J Goan, asking if he might be who I thought he was. Mr John Goan wrote back, and he was indeed my Uncle. I remember the nervous drive over – little Emily was sick en route, forcing a detour to buy new clothes. I remember kindness, but awkward conversations, a sense of profoundly disconnected lives and the impossibility of questions or answers. I remember meat sandwiches, which I ate despite being a vegetarian. I remember not knowing what to do next, so asking my Uncle and Aunt not to let my father know I had been in touch – a request that they graciously honoured, as it turned out, for many years.
The years passed because of my own uncertaintly, but also I did not think I could take the next step alone, because even if I could keep a secret from my mother, I could not from my sister, and it was hard to draw her out into the adventure. We had both lived with the absence, but for her it had been invested with the possibility that one day our father would return and ‘rescue’ her from the difficulties of our childhood. When this never happened, meeting him as an adult was the end to her childhood escape fantasy.
The story then moves forward another ten years or so, during which (largely unknown to me) Michaela had stayed in touch with my Aunt Betty in Blackburn, quietly keeping the channel open for future connection. By then we had moved to Scotland and life was different. It seemed important to keep pushing outwards, to let the expansion continue. I can’t remember exactly what made me finally take the plunge, except that I hit the age of 40, and it seemed like now or never, with sister or not. I had no real expectations or hopes, just the feeling that there was an integrity in reconnection, even if this might lead to unknown difficulties.
I sent a letter to an address in Strabane, Ireland and three days later, my father called on the telephone. His accent was so thick I struggled to understand, but it was clear he was very glad to be speaking. More than this, he told me that my brother Stephen and his wife Kate were also living in Scotland, only about an hour from us.
In the end it was Steve and Kate (and their son Jamie) whom we met first. We greeted them from the ferry, little Emily standing back in suspicion, the two boys instantly playing together, the rest of us starting to map things we shared and would always be different.
My first meeting with my father was part of a trip to Ireland, during which we spent a couple of days in their tiny flat. We drove together to the Giant’s Causway, and spoke at tangents.
It was obvious from the start that I was my father’s son. We looked alike. Our temperaments were similar- a certain shy reticence. Introversion. In other ways we were very different. My life had been about seeking respectability and safety. His had been an excercise in staying one step ahead of what he had left behind, at least at first. He used different names- even to the end of his life. He spent time in prison. My mother’s bitter condemnations (of both of us) rang out loud.
On that trip to the Giant’s Causeway, the conversation was sparse, and consisted of my asking lots of neutral questions, followed by short answers and long slightly uncomfortable silences. When we arrived at our destination, I took the kids off to scramble over the hexagonal stones whilst Michaela walked along the upper shoreline with my father and his partner Peggy. In that journey, he spoke much more freely to Michaela – it seemed easier for him to talk to women. She was unable to understand most of what he was saying, but there is only a limited number of times you can ask for repetition. At the end of one long monologue, my father said “So can you pass that on to Chris for me please.” He had been unburdening himself and making some kind of explanation, and she had heard very little of it. I never managed to find out exactly what he had to say in that conversation.
Inevitably, over the next 18 years or so, I began to piece together the story of his life, mostly not from him, but from conversations with Steve and other relatives. Here is what I know – it is not the whole truth and some might be not true at all, but it is the story I can tell.
Seamus Goan was born in Sion Mills, just outside Strabane, County Tyrone, in the province known as Northern Ireland, to Margaret and John, who worked at the flax mill that gave the town its name. He was one of five children who survived to adulthood – Michael, Molly, Gay, John and Seamus.
Flax Mills meant short lives for workers, who often contracted ‘brown lung disease’, and my grandmother died in 1947 when my father was eight years old, so he was brought up mostly by his older sisters Gay and Molly. My Grandfather died twelve years later, and somehow it seems that my father barely attended school and back then was unable to read or write.
As a young adult, he followed the exodus of Irish men and boys – and his brothers – over the Irish sea to England in order to find work – remember all those ‘no blacks, no Irish, no dogs’ signs that were placed outside ‘respectable’ guest houses? He found work on the construction of the new motorway system, and whilst working on the M1 being forced up through Nottinghamshire, he met my mother and they married.
My sister Katharine was born in 1966, then I came along in 1967. By then the wedding was already over. My mother raised me with stories of much of the bad that happened around that time. Gambling addiction and the stolen items to fund the betting from neighbours. The house empty of food or warmth and the bailifs at the door for unpaid bills. The fear and shame of this time never left her, unlike my father, who left and never came back – except that is not quite true, he knocked on the door some time in the mid 1980’s, but was given no welcome, so left before my sister or I knew who he was. I later found out that he sometimes drove his car to our street in order to catch glimpses of us, but we never met again as
He lived a life away from mine which I can only wonder at.
I know that at some point a few years after he left my life, he met Peggy and fell in love again. She was from a Protestant family, born out in the sticks outside Strabane so they made a mixed couple – something difficult to do in Ireland back when the troubles were still raging in the wild west border country of County Tyrone. (Strabane lost the greatest percentage of citizens to the violence of anywhere in the country) so they made a life for themselves in Cambridge.
Seamus was still working on various contruction projects – for a long time he was running gangs installing cables for cable TV. It seems he was always held back by illiteracy, leaving a job whenever this might be found out, mostly managing to cover it up and stay one step ahead of the shame. Later Seamus and Peggy ran a pub, working long hours.
During all of this they had two children- Stephen, then Sarah. Sarah was born with profound learning difficulties and it was her care than dominated family life for the next decades. From being an absent father, Seamus became as hands-on as it is possible to imagine.
If I am going to tell this story here, do I tell everything? There are dark sides to this story, which I was tempted to gloss over, but this does not feel honest, to the story we made together. My father was always ‘on the run’ in some way. He used the names of his brothers rather than his for many interactions with officialdom right up to the end of his life, for example. He went to prison for failing to pay maintenance. He never stopped the betting on horses and was most at home in a bar. At some point his new family was disrupted because he was jailed for faling to pay maintenance (not directly to us, but rather to offset the state benefits which my mother, sister and I existed on.) Money was always tight, always an issue. Steve and I have this in common, despte our different beginnings.
A man is never just one thing – we are many. We are capable of both good and bad. We are all redeemable. We can all grow and change. Steve told me that for most of his adult life, he had never passed his driving test (remember the interchangable name thing mentioned above) but then, as an older adult, he took it and passed it. Quite what they made of him turning up for the test I don’t know.
It seems he changed jobs frequently to avoid being shamed as illiterate, but around the time that we met, the same shame drove him to learn to read. He developed a taste for novels about cowboys.
By the time I met my father, he had moved back to Strabane, a place which had always been home to him – full of a network of family and friends that anchored his whole life. He was a regular attender at Mass and became that man who could always be relied upon to drive someone to hospital or go round to unblock a gutter, or deliver newspapers to those who were less mobile.
Meanwhile, he stayed in touch with friends and family in England too, often turning up wiht little or no warning in Scotland or England, having driven long distances seemingly on a whim, but always to see Sarah who was then living in supported accommodation in Cambridge.
My sister Katharine died.
May half sister Sarah died.
My mother died.
Peggy developed dementia, with Seamus as her carer. It was difficult at times, but he remained faithful. Once, after a difficult exchange, he created some panic as he left the house and booked himself in a hotel without telling anyone. Margaret, a family friend, found him and gave he a dressing down.
Then he developed dementia himself – revealed in irrational anger towards his landlord and some quite dramatic acts of confusion.
He left Peggy at one point and got on the ferry to come to England, but then disappeared. We had to report him missing, leading to police searches of all known addresses (including ours. There was a very funny moment when they opened our hoover cupboard and we imagined him standing there…) Eventully his numberplate was picked up by the cameras on the motorway system near Manchester, and Steve went over to bring him back. After this, his licence was revoked, but this did not stop the old pirate from buying another car – leading to Steve and I going over to Ireland to make some interventions…
First Peggy was persuaded to move into a nursing home in Strabane. Seamus was lonely, so eventually he followed. Steve, Kate, Michaela and I cleared out their home. They had very little and most things went ot charity shops. I constantly found myself comparing this process to that of clearing my mothers house, who had accumulated so very much. It felt unbearably sad at times, but perhaps this was another gift from my father- to learn that life is not measured by weight of posessions.
I said none of this at the funeral, partly because of the religious ego that silenced any non-priestly voice, but also because it would have all been too much. I would have said something like this;
When I was a child, I was jealous of people who had ‘normal’ families. Mine was a mess.
When I got older, I realised that there was no such thing as a normal family.
Families form and fracture, like mine did, even before I could form memories of it.
It was perhaps harder for Seamus, losing his parents so young. It set him on a road that led to me.
It was hard too for Stephen and Sarah, learning to make their family work.
We know this – Despite the scars, fractures can mend.
I believe that this happens if we choose a path of love. It will always take us home.
I want to read a poem that was read at both my mother’s and my sister’s funerals that talks about love as a deliberate decision, and the consequences that it might have.
It is also a prayer for my father.
Cupped
Practice the wound of love
Let it devastate
Let it scrape your soul
For blessed are the gentled
Blessed are the meek
Blessed are those whose fullness
Is now found empty
Practice the wound of love
Rest now in that broken place
Where grief is never silent
And ragged roots of love
Tap the trampled earth
Blessed are you as you reach for love
Because it reaches out for you
Practice the wound of love
Let it devastate
For nothing ever came from nothing
(Apart from love)
At the end of everything
We are just cups
Who are cupped.
We are held.
this fragile tent 