No Coloureds No Irish No DogsYes, I remember how could I forget?seventeen years old, product of Norn Irn Prod to the core but Anglican paper wall between them and Rome tramping round Finsbury Park and up the Grays Inn Road fresh memories of Harry Heather banging his piano while we sang lustily of the British Grenadiers with a tow-row-tow-row-row-row-row and my granda at The Somme and Sam and Jack bleeding their fucking lives away in the Churchill madness of Gallipoli and Da in the airforce all through the Hitler war and Noel in Korea and cousin Jack in Zanzibar and all the bleeding my people did for King and Empire and the better way and Tom Mears doing his pastiche of Yeats and the old priest Peter Gilligan only it was the old force called the RUC were weary night and day for half their flock were at their posts or under green sods lay and I'd been a little Brit who waved a Union Jack in school on Empire day and it really pissed me off those fag-lipped landladies who didn't want my Irish arse inside their English dosses 'cos I was Darwinian-down. But we built their canals railways motorways and fought their wars and bred them generals like Wellington Gough Montgomery and eventually a Persian took me in and looking back he'd always had the same only they wanted his oil and not his bloody soul. And Harry's coffin stuck in the frost and they couldn't shift it and we remembered singing British war songs and massa's in de cold, cold ground and always before school on Radio Eireann there was Whelehan's of Finglas and The Walton Programme the songs our fathers loved and Donnelly's sausages for you and I didn't know what I was Irish or Brit. Then that day in London in nineteen sixty three it burst into my head in the presence of Cindy Tucker of Deerfield Mass that I was just a Paddy. I ask you - just?
URL: www.mourne.net/paddy.htm |
Searching for a place to stay in London in 1963 I was astonished (and not a little enraged) to find that most of the lodging-houses had neat white cards hanging in their windows which said: No Coloureds, No Irish, No Dogs. Hard-line Unionists, please note ....