The Personals Page 7

  Was that loss hard to get over? ‘’Twas, yeah. I was in hospital at the time, because something went wrong with my heart. And I was in there a few days and the dog was on his last legs – he only got really bad the final week. They wouldn’t leave me out of hospital. There were a few neighbours who looked after things. He died by the front door inside and he was dead when I came back.’

  ‘You didn’t get to say goodbye?’

  ‘You’re making me all emotional now,’ he says, fighting back the tears. ‘I took him down the ring road on a Sunday and I buried him near the fire station. I dug a hole for him down there.’

  ‘Did you say a prayer?’ I ask.

  ‘No, I drank a bottle of wine though. I’m not religious at all. I’m after paying for a pre-funeral cremation for myself whenever I go. I told them to take the cross off the coffin and there’d be no priest involved.’

  In any interview there are signposts to someone’s past, departure points through which if someone is open enough, you can enter. This was an obvious one. I ask Charlie some more about this, because I assume he was raised a Catholic, so why the deliberate efforts to ensure that his funeral will have no religious element?

  ‘I have three sisters and they are all married,’ he tells me. ‘They were all brought up in care. Just like me. Our mother was in a laundry, or county home as it was known then. And she was there till the day she died. And then I was sent to a convent in Cappoquin, and then when I was eight or nine I was sent to St Joseph’s Industrial School. That was one of the most notorious ones. I wasn’t assaulted. Well, physically, I was, but nothing else.’

  I’ve interviewed survivors of industrial schools a few times over the years, and some of them, particularly those who decided not to seek redress afterwards, downplay their experiences. Some can’t bear to face that painful aspect of their lives and therefore suppress what must have been a horrendous, loveless childhood. His mother remained a distant figure throughout his life.

  ‘We never knew her,’ he tells me. ‘She was in a home all her life and was institutionalised. You couldn’t really talk to her. I wanted to find out who my father was. On the birth certs there is no father’s name and for my three sisters, it’s the same.’

  He doesn’t know much about his family, except that they seemed to travel around a lot and never really had a place to call home. He remains in contact with his sisters and they have unearthed some information. He thinks his grandfather was killed during the Second World War, and his grandmother may also have spent time in a county home.

  On several occasions during his childhood he was taken to see his mother, or she would come and see him, accompanied by his grandmother. These were difficult and often uncomfortable visits. ‘We would be brought into a room in the convent,’ he says. ‘They would bring her down and we could talk to her for a while. She wouldn’t say anything. Again, I would be trying to ask her questions about the history of the family and she wouldn’t say a word. My mother was described as a domestic on my birth cert. Of course, I always wanted to know who fathered the four children, because I do know we weren’t all the same father. I was seven years old before the next child was born. And then there was another four to five years till the third one and the same with the final one. It couldn’t be the same person, as she was in a home all that time and had very little freedom, so we don’t know who it was. My sister said she was going to look on social media and try to make connections. I’m illiterate as regards computers so there isn’t much I can do.’

  When his mother died in the 1980s, the funeral was held on a Sunday and Charlie didn’t attend. He says he was only told she’d died the day before her funeral and it was midwinter and the roads were bad, but some of his sisters went as they were living near her. She was still living in the institution when she died and the religious order made all the arrangements for the funeral. He doesn’t visit the grave regularly.

  Charlie is 74 next month and is not sure now if he will ever learn the truth about his mother or his biological father. ‘There was never a mention of my family living anywhere. I never had a home. I know that the policy was to leave you with the mother for the first two years so I must have spent time with her then. After that I was put into care and that was it really until I got away in my late teens.’

  Some years ago, one of the first reports I remember working on with survivors of religious and industrial schools was about a group of men who had been in an industrial school in Baltimore, west Cork. They were nicknamed the ‘blue-legged boys’ by locals, because they were always underdressed and underfed. Many had never spoken of their experiences, and I remember after broadcasting the report from a studio in Cork, when the red light went off I cried alone in the studio, having carried their stories, experiences and abuses around in my head for less than a week.

  I can’t imagine what it must be like to have to carry those experiences around for a lifetime. Since I’ve become a father again and have small children running around the house, survivors’ testimonies have impacted on me more personally and profoundly than before. The one thing that always strikes me is that survivors talk about childhoods devoid of any compassion, humanity or kindness. Some of them never received a hug or a kind word until they got married.

  ‘Nobody ever showed me any affection,’ Charlie says. ‘I find I am not able to do that myself either. I am too embarrassed. That’s the way I was brought up. I keep to myself mostly.’ Looking back, he says he has had a tough life, but he’s not a person to talk about his feelings or emotions to anyone. He keeps all that bottled up inside.

  He takes half a dozen old photos out of his pocket. I was expecting them to be pictures of his family maybe or his early years in the army. Instead, he wanted to show me photos of his dogs through the years, each of them with their own personality. It’s easy to see how dogs became close companions for Charlie, having grown up not knowing who his father is, and not being able to communicate with an institutionalised mother.

  ‘I joined the army from school,’ he tells me. ‘After I left the industrial school without an education, they sent me to another boarding school, collecting cutlery mainly. This was in a place called Ballyfin, which is some fancy hotel now. I only lasted six months and I left. To be totally honest, I joined the army because I never had a home up to that point and there was no social welfare at the time. Like many of us, I joined because we got bed and board. If I look back, I didn’t really particularly like it, but I spent 17 years in it and it did offer me some security.’

  Since leaving the army, Charlie has lived within a few hundred metres of the barracks in Cork all his life, first in a bedsit and then renting a flat, before a landlord discovered he was keeping dogs and asked him to leave. He’s now in a small council house and has been living there for well over a decade. It has a small garden out the back and the dogs have been happy there. At various times over the years he has had up to five dogs. Now he is left with just one, a small Terrier that a woman on the south side of the city gave him after she saw his advertisement. It’s four years old, and he’d purposely looked for a dog that age.

  ‘I kept the ad in because I was going to get another one for company for this fellow but I’m not so sure now. I would always have them as puppies. But I am 74 now; there’s a possibility I could die first, before the dogs. That’s why I got a four-year-old and not a pup. I wouldn’t want to die before them. Most of them couldn’t be rehomed. They’re one-man dogs.’

  By taking such practical steps, Charlie is facing his mortality head-on. He has been in and out of hospital a lot, and recently fell and dislocated his shoulder, which has further limited his mobility. He cannot imagine a scenario in which his dogs would be put down after he is gone, and so he says he will take the ad down in a few days’ time and he and the Terrier will live out their days in his small cottage.

  Before I leave, I ask Charlie what his full name is, so I can put it in my records and
I’m surprised when he tells me his name isn’t Charlie at all. It’s Michael. But everyone calls him Charlie. Why is that?

  ‘When I came into the army the first time, I was skin and bones, having come from the industrial schools,’ he tells me. ‘There was a Mr World everyone knew at the time called Charles Atlas, who was a bodybuilder type man. So, as a form of bullying I suppose they all called me Charlie and the name stuck.’

  Darkness was falling and our conversation ended. We had gone from talking about wanting to adopt a medium-sized dog, to conflict in the Congo, to growing up in an industrial school and having a sense of place. I helped Charlie out of the car, and he unwound his long legs on to the footpath, picked up his plastic bag full of groceries and walked to his little cottage within a stone’s throw of the military barracks. It turns out that it was the one with the dog bowl outside that I’d spotted earlier. He lives there, alone, but content.

  He waved as a neighbour stopped him at his doorway for a chat. He seemed well placed in the area. The man who had had no place to call home for much of his life was now part of a community, had a front door key and was taken care of. This community were as much his family as his sisters, his institutionalised mother and the father he’d never known. To the right of his doorway on the wall of his home is a sign with the name of the house. The writing is a little faded and hard to read. The light was declining so I got closer to it and smiled as I made out the words.

  It read: Shangri-La. An earthly paradise indeed.

  Making It Pig in Hollywood

  Four-year-old pair of Sandyspot pigs for sale. Very quiet and tame, been on film sets for last 3½ years. Quick sale due to space needed. €200 the pair ono. DoneDeal, October 2018

  I’m at an animal reserve of sorts in County Wicklow to interview two pigs that starred in the Game of Thrones series. Become a journalist – travel the world, they said ...

  The house is up a steep hill, and was clearly a farm at one point in time. Now it comprises two buildings spread across several hectares within a stone’s throw of a dual carriageway. I park at the bottom of the hill, beside a Ford Focus with half of one side of its body crumpled up like wastepaper. I had visions of a rogue pig having channelled its inner Conor McGregor, running amok and destroying the car. Less dramatically, I later learn that a van with a faulty handbrake had rolled down the hill and caused the damage.

  Let me set the somewhat surreal scene for you: a large, intimidating Alsatian is doing everything he can to break out of a cage and get to know me better as I walk through the yard. Given his eagerness to show me all his teeth at once, I doubt he wants to use me for licking practice. Next to him is an enormous raven in a cage, and next to the raven there are three monkeys. I can hear pigs in the distance, and there’s a constant din of bird noises coming from one of the buildings. Think Apocalypse Now.

  I’m early so I hang around admiring a cockatoo, then a jeep pulls into the yard and Eddie Drew gets out and offers me a friendly and firm handshake. ‘I’m just on a break from the film set so I have about half an hour,’ he tells me. ‘Do you want to see the star pigs?’

  How Eddie Drew came to own this prime property just off junction 8 in County Wicklow is a story in itself. This parcel of land with a farmhouse was originally owned by two elderly unmarried sisters, who had started an organic farm here decades before. ‘I inherited this farm 30 years ago from the two old ladies who were making natural yoghurt here – the Miss Bakers I called them – they had a herd of 50 goats and they were way ahead of their time. I worked for them since I was young. They were organic and homeopathic and both happened to be spinsters and they supplied all the shops with home-made yoghurt.’

  Eddie was left the farm of 30 acres, some of which he sold to pay inheritance tax. He says he knew after three or four years of working with the women that the property and land would be left to him and he is very grateful for that and feels a sense of responsibility for it.

  His experience with animals up to that point had mainly involved horse riding lessons, but when he took on the farm, he stopped the yoghurt production as it had become too hard to compete with industrial producers, and instead he opened an aviary and a small pet shop. Then he began supplying animals for films being made in Ireland, beginning with Braveheart and continuing to the present day. Often he’ll be asked to provide animals to dress a particular scene, such as a goat here or a raven there. And sometimes an animal is a more integral part of the film and has to be trained for the role.

  The ad that brought me here is for two large pigs bought six years ago, who are possibly the most famous pigs in Ireland. They’d just come off the set of Vikings, having also starred in two seasons of the US series Into the Badlands. I half-expected them to emerge from their own trailer, Hollywood-style, with a team of bodyguards and PR handlers fussing around weeding out the blue M&M’s, as requested. Instead, the 90kg male walked up to me, snorted into the microphone like a total pro, and went on his way again. And the reason Eddie is selling them now?

  ‘I just picked up a bunch of wild boar down in Macroom,’ he tells me. ‘The Vikings wanted North American animals because it’s moving location in terms of the script. So I now have a family of wild boars.’

  Eddie is the kind of guy who can make or break an animal’s showbiz career. Think of him as the Simon Cowell of the pig acting world. He tells me that the secret to having a happy pig on set is plenty of food and being nice to the animals. But good-tempered and professional as the pigs are, not all the actors they work with are good with animals.

  ‘One of the best actors I ever worked with was Brendan Gleeson on a film called Calvary, where he played a priest,’ Eddie tells me. ‘He had a Golden Retriever in the film. We were down in Sligo and he really enjoyed working with the dog. Some of the Americans have never been around animals and are not hands-on. Brendan was a really hands-on guy. There was a scene where the dog had to lie in the bed and Brendan curled up beside the dog and was tickling his belly and they bonded brilliantly.’

  The animals he provides aren’t always as cuddly though. Eddie tells me of a scene two years ago for which he had to provide a pit of 75 snakes for a character who was killed off. ‘We were up in the Sally Gap and had to dig this pit and put the snakes in and the actor was lowered into it in a cage. Another time we had 150 rats out on the set of Penny Dreadful and we also had to teach a character how to skin a dead rabbit.’

  Eddie even ended up in Vikings himself, playing the Norse god Odin in seasons one and three. He says that the movie business is very tedious work, with actors having to do take after take until a director is happy. Many of the animals on his farm are either for sale or rent and most have acting experience. A pig will cost a film €100 a day, for example. He keeps three squirrel monkeys as pets, and has had them and their parents for over 20 years, and he also has pet rats, magpies, snakes and ravens.

  The ad has been up a week and so far he’s had only one call, from a neighbour, it turns out. ‘He wanted them for meat and I told him where to go,’ Eddie says. ‘If someone buys them for that, fair enough, but I’m not going to sell them if I know that’s where they’re going to go.’

  And the hardest animals that he has worked with so far? ‘Humans, all day long,’ he says.

  Part Four

  ARTICLES OF WAR

  Married to the Past

  For sale: genuine Nazi flag and First World War helmet. DoneDeal, November 2016

  There’s quite a lot of historical memorabilia for sale on sites such as DoneDeal and you see the odd item in the classified sections of newspapers too. Mainly they’re posted because a relative has died and a family member is clearing the house or settling the estate and finds they have to sell war medals or memorabilia.

  This ad in November 2016 was fairly unusual, in that a person was selling a Second World War Nazi flag, which I hadn’t seen before, and a First World War helmet, which is somewhat rarer. The flag wa
s branded and marked as a genuine flag and complete with large swastika. There’s a debate to be had about whether these kinds of items should be sold at all, and whether allowing a secondary market to exist risks romanticising one of the most efficient murdering machines in history. And there’s always the chance that these items might fall into the wrong hands.

  I went to meet the seller and as often happens, I found myself parked in a garage forecourt beside a car wash, trying to spot a stranger among the customers going in and out. He was very clear that he didn’t want me going to his home, for reasons that would later emerge. He was in his late thirties, a working man with a young family and into fitness – mostly cycling. Once he was sitting in the car, I decided to jump straight in and began by asking him how someone comes to own a genuine Nazi flag.

  ‘A few years back I was working in Holland and there was an auction,’ he told me. ‘I picked it up there and brought it home. It supposedly came from a house clearance, same as it would do in Ireland. It’s part of their complicated history and I think at the time I paid around €120 for it.’

  I had hoped to see the flag, but he told me that wasn’t possible because he had sold it the previous day. He’d had it up online for a few weeks and there had been sporadic interest, but the person who’d bought it was a collector. What’s interesting is that for the most part these items can be sold in Ireland, but you probably couldn’t put this up on eBay, or sell it in many parts of Europe because of legislation banning the sale of Nazi-themed items. Does he think that through allowing a secondary market to develop for these items some level of glorification and justification will follow?

  He disagrees, and the way he sees it is that he’d had a chance to buy a slice of history and he took it. As we sat in the car he opened a plastic bag and handed me the helmet, which had once sat on the head of a German soldier during the First World War. ‘You don’t see too many of these any more,’ he told me, as he tossed the great hulk of steel to me. The weight of it took me by surprise, as I held several kilos of heavy German engineering in my lap. ‘The Germans were known for their great steel, and this helmet was way ahead of the helmets at the time,’ he said.