It is not just Sure, it wouldn’t do any harm. It is not just I could tell he could barely stand up in his shoes. It is not just The poor wasted face of my father.
The entire last verse gets me in floods of tears every time the Liam Reilly-written Streets of New York-invariably-Wolfe Tones-version is played on radio.
I was really young when I was emigrated – from England to Ireland – in the opposite direction to most then. No goodbye to schoolfriends. The move was sudden and for a long time we thought we were going back to Birmingham (home of the band The Streets if you don’t get my blog title!). And it turned out Ireland just there was split and we were on the edge of it in so many ways.
I thought for a long time I would go back until I realised it would just be equal, but (kind of) opposite heartbreak.
She would make a lovely therapy dog, but she is untrained. They bring them into hospitals and nursing homes. She was named for a shop in the North where my mother used to go on holiday. Ruffles, a black and white collie-springer cross. She has a loving soul. She is twelve. When she was eleven she nearly died. She suddenly started throwing up all over the house. Mom rang the vets, who told her to bring her in straightaway. She was to be kept in overnight.
I found out about it
remotely, from where I was in my flat. I prayed the Rosary. I made up
a little song and communicated it to her telepathically. I would not
see her until the morrow. It was a refrain, “I love you,”
repeated over and over. Just three notes. I prayed, again. There had
been slight blue casts in her eyes for a couple of years, since she
had started to get older. I could see them when they caught the sun.
Next day I accompanied my mother to the vet. Acute kidney failure. Suspect Lepto. Nothing could be done, but the kind lady vet flushed her kidneys. With readings like that, they do not recover. Do you see how the whites of her eyes are red? The dog panted hard. Take her home for the weekend, spoil her. I expect to see her on Monday. But if you should need to bring her in sooner, I am on the telephone.
A friend sent Reiki healing. This little dog touched several people. She lay on the sofa with her red eyes, and panting. She would not eat or drink. We felt that she may expire before morning. However next morning she wanted a drink of water, and then she wanted to come on a little walk. Then we tried her with a few nuts. Within a week or two she was as bright as a button. We took her to the vet then for a verdict: a surprise recovery.
Well we prayed, said mom. I flushed out her kidneys, said the vet.
The medical trials of Ruffles Part Two:
In her first year Ruffles had her first brush. She was hit by a van on Christmas Eve. Mom saw it happen. The young man was apologetic. She had just run out. Mom brought her to the vets in town. Her pelvis was broken in three places. She had a few days in animal hospital. We went to visit her on St Stephen’s Day. When she saw us, in her efforts to reach for us she fell out of the opened cage. We caressed her and told her we loved her. She came home with a big wire cage rented from the vet. She lived in it in the utility room for a few weeks. Initially she had a plastic collar. It reminded me of the Famous Five adventure where Timmy had a big collar. We made a wheelbarrow of her and a towel to get her outside when needed. The towel held up her back legs and she could still use her front ones.
We knew she was
better the first day she launched herself at the settee and managed
to get on. Now that she is twelve she does not always manage it first
time. One two three we say. Onetwothree. They said that she would get
arthritis eventually as a result of the breaks in her chassis.
I have blogged about my Irish grandparents so for balance, a few words inspired by my English ones, Alice and Len Foulger.
I recently attended Mass with my mother, on Zoom, at St Alban the Martyr, in the ecclesiastical parish of St. Alban and St. Patrick, Highgate, Birmingham. This meant a lot to me as my grandparents are buried there, under the church. Len was in their church choir for sixty years. His brother Ralph was also in the choir, as was my uncle Steve. My grandparents were remembered at the Mass, for All Souls Day, as well as Ralph and his wife, Maud.
St Alban’s was founded by (my inverted commas) “a pair of Pollocks” in the 19th Century – James and Thomas Pollock, brothers of Irish extraction. It is a Grade II* listed Parish Church of St. Alban the Martyr (listed building ID 1290539), a Victorian Gothic masterpiece of architect John Loughborough Pearson.
Happily, I was present in person, with my family at the 150th anniversary Mass of the foundation of the church in 2016. It was also the anniversary of St Alban, England’s protomartyr.
Alice Bosworth and Leonard Foulger on their wedding day.
A recent visit to the Titanic Experience in Belfast offered food for thought. My grandparents Anne and Johnny moved from Liverpool to Belfast during the Second World War to escape the bombs! The move was prompted because, on their way to the air-raid shelter, my toddler Aunt Mary was blown out of my grandfather’s arms.
Johnny got a job in Harland and Wolff. He must have made a convincing Protestant, because he worked there for five years. One day his friend spotted that he had a white cross, drawn in chalk, on the back of his coat. So the family relocated again, to County Louth, and his homeplace between Hackballscross and Inniskeen.
The Titanic showed that during the 1940s H & W specialised in building warships. We do not actually know what job Johnny had there.
My father was born in Belfast. At one point my grandmother was making two trips a day on the train to Éire, with tea secreted about the person of her infant child. Rationing was in place. This was just the start of his smuggling career. As a child he graduated to bringing across butter from South Armagh on a bicycle. But that is for another story.
This is a series of paintings by my grandmother, Alice Foulger, in the Birmingham and Worcester areas in 1956. My mother Lorna is shown in a blue dress in some of them.
