Spooks Week: Meeting Great Grandad?

 

My paviour great grandfather, wearing a waistcoat & moustache,
next to the bearded man with the tar barrel. 

One of my more recent projects was a book called A Proper Person to be Detained, about the murder of my grandmother's uncle, John Manley, on Christmas Day 1881. It describes the milieu in which these people lived and worked, but it also examines the way in which that single shocking act of violence changed the lives of those who witnessed it and those who came after. 'Like a pebble dropped in a still pool' a friend described it to me afterwards. 

Like my book about Jean Armour, it involved intensive immersion in a time and place and I thought about little else for almost two years. Just as now, when I'm writing about my Polish grandfather and wishing I had known him, I found myself wishing I could have met my Irish great grandfather, but he died before I was born. 

He was born in County Roscommon in Ireland, he had come to England as an adult, to work on the roads, he was a skilled paviour and a kindly man who loved children. He sang, making the traditional 'mouth music' and he had a fund of old songs and stories. 

He was also, in many ways, the saviour of the family. He was my great grandmother's second husband after her first one died tragically young, leaving her and her children in penury. He was a person who managed to haul the family out of the extreme poverty into which they had been born. Yet he was so generous that if he saw a beggar in the street and he was wearing a good coat, he was as likely as not to hand it over to the more needy man. 'He couldn't keep anything,' said my aunt Nora, who remembered him. 'He would give things away when the family could ill afford it.' 

So what's spooky about that, you may ask? 

None of it, except that I think I may have met him in Morrison's car park, one morning when I had just finished writing the book, but was still, somehow, immersed in it. 

It happened like this. I had parked my car, and was heading towards the store. It was a chilly, misty morning, but there was a low winter sun shining in my eyes, dazzling me. I lifted my head and was surprised to see a man standing in front of me. 'Excuse me, madam,' he said. I hadn't seen him coming at all and, surprised, I stopped on the lane between parked cars. 'Oh, be careful, madam!'  He reached out and very gently ushered me onto the pavement. 

He was dressed in working men's clothes, with an old wool coat over them,  and he was covered in mud or dust or some combination of both. 'You see I'm very hungry,' he said. 'But I have no money for breakfast. Do you think you could give me just a little money for my breakfast?' His voice was soft, his accent was unmistakeable. Not Dublin, not Cork, but the soft rural accent of Mayo or Roscommon. I should add that the sudden appearance of Irish labourers isn't particularly common here - or not nowadays anyway. The Belfast ferry is some miles down the coast, and we are more likely to meet summer visitors with Northern Irish accents. 

Even before Covid, I didn't carry much cash, but I took out my purse and gave him a £5 note which was all I had in there. 'Thank-you so much,' he said. 'And God bless you!' 

He walked away. The sunlight and mist seemed to swallow him. It was my own response that surprised me. My legs felt suddenly weak. I had to go into the supermarket cafe, sit down and drink coffee till reality resumed. I still remember the feeling - a weird combination of excitement, exultation, disbelief and the inevitable 'don't be daft' rationality that always intrudes sooner or later.

Still, it's one of those things that has stayed with me. I can see him still, emerging from a glorious combination of light and mist, can feel his gentle touch on my arm. 'God bless you!' he said. 

I hope he managed to get some breakfast. 

A Proper Person to be Detained - a Spooky Postscript.

James Flynn, paviour, seated, fourth from the right.

My new book, A Proper Person to be Detained, is highly factual. Although since it's also a very personal account of a family tragedy and its aftermath, it does contain a certain amount of reflection - and an attempt to bring the story into the twentieth century, at least. However, in the course of all the intensive research involved, something happened to me that spooked me a bit. Even though there's almost certainly a simple, rational explanation. But like not wanting to know how conjuring tricks are done, because then you destroy the magic, I don't want to know.

Here's what happened.

I was in the middle of edits and writes, checking all kinds of dates and relationships to make sure everything hung together properly, and deep into the story of what had happened to poor John Manley, who was murdered in 1881, in Leeds, and what happened afterwards to his surviving sisters - and what became of his eldest sister, my great grandmother Mary, who had eventually married a good man called James Flynn. He was remembered as a kindly, gentle, generous man by those who had known him, and he certainly helped to change for the better the fortunes of at least one member of my family, blighted by terrible events.

It was a very chilly, sunny morning and I was walking through - of all places - Morrison's car park, on my way to the store. The low sun was dazzling me, and the car park was faintly misty as the early frost dissipated. I was preoccupied, thinking about the book, as I was pretty much thinking about the book all the time back then, when I felt a touch on my arm, and raised my head to find myself confronted by a middle aged man. I stepped back off the kerb in surprise, and he very gently assisted me onto the pavement between cars. He called me 'Madam'. He told me, in a quiet, but unmistakably southern Irish voice - a soft, rural voice - that he was very hungry, that he had had no breakfast that morning, and nobody outside the store would help him. The sun was still dazzling my eyes, but he was dressed in working clothes and boots and he looked - as I described it to my husband afterwards - 'dusty'. He was dusty from head to toe. Not dirty, but dusty like a working man is dusty.

And he had a kind face.

I took my purse out and gave him the only note I had in there - a £5 note. If I'd had a tenner, I'd have given him that instead but it was probably enough to get him some breakfast. He shook my hand, and he said 'God bless you, God bless you, madam,' and then he headed off through the car park.

When I turned around to see which way he had gone, there was nobody in sight at all.

It's hard to describe how this meeting affected me - and let's face it, I make things up for a living! I could feel a lump in my throat and tears starting in my eyes. I felt shaken. I had to go and sit down in the cafe to pull myself together. I wanted to tell somebody about the encounter but there was nobody around that I knew, and besides, it would have sounded daft beyond belief, because I'd have said, 'I think I just met my great grandfather.'

But even now, many months later, I still think I did.

A Little Pre-Christmas Ghost Story

Last month, I wrote a short post about my new book: A Proper Person to be Detained. After that, I plunged back into more revisions and time consuming fact checking. A genealogist friend has given me more help than I deserve - bless her - and I don't think I could have undertaken this project without her. The book is the true story of a murder and its aftermath, as well as a complicated tapestry of a part of my own family history, the Irish part, about which - before I embarked on this book - I confess I knew very little.

Now I know a lot more. Sometimes, over the past year, it has struck me that I know rather more than is good for me, because it has turned out to be a harrowing tale. But then every family has a harrowing tale or two, somewhere in its past.

The last couple of months have been taken up by ordering yet more PDF birth and death certificates from the General Register Office (I might as well have mortgaged my house to them when I add up how much I've spent there) and browsing Ancestry, trying to solve mysteries, some of which have remained tantalisingly insoluble to this day. In November and early December, and with the book written and more or less edited, but with questions still remaining, I spent some time surrounded by dozens of bits of paper, trying to piece together the final jigsaw puzzle of fact, error and speculation. The mark of a great editor is not that they try to change your style or rewrite  - it's that they have the knack of asking exactly the right difficult questions! I have a great editor.

One thing you learn very quickly when undertaking research of this kind is just how many of the online details are wrong. You learn to take nothing for granted. People make assumptions based on what they think they know about the past. Once you realise that they have made wrong assumptions about people whose details you know well from memory and acquaintance, you learn to treat a great many other supposed 'facts' with a certain amount of scepticism. Often the simplest explanation will be the true one - but not always. There is as much misinformation as information out there.

But I promised you a little pre-Christmas ghost story, didn't I?

So here it is. When you're writing something as immersive, as personal as this book turned out to be, you become so absorbed in the world you're exploring that it can be hard to escape. And just occasionally, something strange happens, something seems to intrude from that world into your everyday life, rather as though you had conjured it. Just as a few weeks ago, something like this happened to me.

In the picture above, to the right of the man with the beard and the tar barrel, sits my great grandfather, James Flynn, sometimes known as Michael. He's the one with the moustache. He was born in Ballinlough in County Roscommon. One census record says he was born in Liverpool, but as soon as he is allowed to write his own details onto the form, he is very precise about his place of birth, as were the rest of the family, who spoke of his strong Irish accent, and the fact that he had come over to Leeds as a road builder. In fact, he was a paviour, quite a skilled job.

I never knew him, but everyone who had known and loved him described him as a kind and generous man. He had his faults, but he was certainly a good man. I wrote about him, and about the role he played in my great grandmother's life. And as I wrote about him, he became very real indeed to me.

I was, of all places, in a supermarket car park. It was a fine day for once, and the low winter sun was shining full in my eyes and dazzling me as I headed towards the shop, when I felt somebody tugging gently at my arm.
'Madam, madam,' he said, 'Can I trouble you for a moment?' and the soft Irish accent was unmistakable. I peered at him through the halo of light, and a thin, kindly face, smiled at me. Surprised, I had stopped in the roadway, and again very gently, he ushered me onto the pavement. 'I was wondering,' he said. 'If you might be able to give me a little money to buy some breakfast. I really am very hungry, and nobody back there ...' he glanced towards the shop front 'will help me.'
He looked quite hungry. And he looked - well, he looked dusty. Dusty all over. Not dirty or unclean, just muddy. A working man in working boots. 'You see,' he said, as though it explained everything, 'I've come from Ireland.'
'Yes,' I said. 'Yes, I can hear that.'
I gave him a fiver for his breakfast - it was all I had in my purse at the time - and he said 'God bless you, madam, God bless you,' and raised a hand to me and walked off across the car park.

When I looked back, he had gone.

Coincidence, of course. All coincidence, the more prosaic among you will think. And so do I, in a way. But it shook me. I walked into the shop, feeling the tears starting behind my eyes. I kept wanting to tell somebody about it. I did my shopping in a dream and for all kinds of inexplicable reasons felt both sad and happy about the encounter all the way home.

Long Silence = New Project

Me with the BIG bow in New Wortley, Leeds in the 1950s

I must apologise for the long silence, but my excuse is that I've been working on a new book, and it has proved to be so tricky, so time consuming, so all encompassing, that I haven't been able to think, let alone write about anything else for a long time. Now, my editor has said that she likes it very much and my publisher has started to speak about publication dates next year, even though I know that there is more work to do. But it means that I can begin to speak about it, and to wonder exactly what it is that I have created.

It will be called, I think, A Proper Person to be Detained, and it began with a murder that happened in my family, in Leeds, in 1881. I had always known about it, but only in the most general terms: a family story. 'Your great great Uncle John was stabbed in the street, in Leeds, at Christmas.' That was where I started, but not at all where I finished, because John's story led to a great many other revelations about the plight of 19th century Irish migrants in the industrial North of England, and elsewhere. It also involved the tragic story of what happened to John's younger sister, Elizabeth. 

It was a little like trying to do a vast jigsaw puzzle, without benefit of any picture to guide me, and - as it turned out - no edge pieces at all. Then when the picture emerged, it was heartrending and sad beyond belief. This is the most difficult, most harrowing, most alarming piece of writing I have ever done. But it was also oddly heartening. I began to admire that side of my family, especially the women of my family, more than ever. We survived. 

There will be more about all this as soon as I'm on top of edits and tweaks and all the other bits and pieces involved in publishing a book, especially a piece of non-fiction like this, which is still a long process. 

Quite apart from the sadness involved - and sometimes the story felt just plain unbearable - it made me angry.  Although it's good to be angry, if it prompts you to recognise rank injustice where you find it; if it leads you to you try to tell untold stories like this one. 

More about all this in due course.