Too Long In Exile

Walk through London, you walk through tunnels, you travel on the tube but you never think about the men, mostly Irishmen, who built these places, says Timothy O Grady. You never think about the battered hands, the rheumatoid legs, the congested lungs. All this work done by these men is never acknowledged let alone celebrated. Most of these men didn t even use their own names because they were dodging tax. They passed through life without a trace. They re invisible in a lot of ways.
Camden, Kilburn and Kentish Town are teeming with these invisible wraiths, these men without a name or a home. Through a bizarre trick of the London light, they only become visible amid the shadows of pubs in the daytime, where they sit drinking in silence and defeat.
Technically, they are Irish emigrants, but they share nothing in common with the much-vaunted modern Diaspora, the young cubs of the Celtic Tiger who journey abroad, in a spirit of adventure, to make a name and a packet for themselves. In the 40s, 50s and 60s, Irish citizens went into exile for one simple reason, in order to survive.
But many of them didn t survive. They ve just taken a rather long time to die. They re like transplanted organs that can never be returned to the original donor but have also been rejected by the new host body. The easiest thing to do is to sweep them into the offal bin.
Oh sure, they return to Ireland once in a while, usually for funerals, but they barely recognise the place and realise that they ll never belong to this strange, unfamiliar society. Not that anyone over there really wants them back anyway. Viewed from the desolate perch of a barstool in The Crown in Cricklewood, that light in the Aras window can look very like a neon KEEP OUT sign.
Wounded by whiskey, ruptured with loneliness and long since too old to carry the hod that once kept beer and bread on the table, they re an uncouth embarrassment to both their native country and to the city they sweated bullets to construct.
Such are the characters that populate the pages of I Could Read The Sky, a unique collaboration, in the shape of a lyrical novel, between writer Timothy O Grady and photographer Steve Pyke. The book is unique because of the seamlessness of its weave of pictures and words. Pyke s mournfully elegant monochrome photographs put flesh on the bones and hair on the heads of the invisible men while O Grady s frugal, unsentimental prose puts a voice in their mouths.
I Could Read The Sky is all about memory. It opens with an old man lying on a bed in the darkness of a room in Kentish Town; he closes his eyes and sees an extremely vivid picture of himself as a four-year-old in the West of Ireland, painting a door with his hands. Once the mud-caked surface is broken, the memories and images gush forth in geysers. He is haunted by the faces of the family he left behind and the landscape now showing on endless reel-to-reel in brilliant Technicolor on the inside of his eyelids.
The man remembers in words and pictures, explains O Grady. I wanted to work with Steve s photographs but I didn t just want to write captions or write an essay that was decorated with his pictures but really had nothing to do with them. I looked at a lot of writer/photographer collaborations and almost every one of them were contrivances. There was no real reason for there to be words and pictures together.
We wanted to avoid illustrating the prose. We wanted to find a method where the pictures and words were part of the same process, where they came out of the same root, where they were the same act. So, I wrote the pieces of the novel like they were photographs, in the sense of each one being something intensely remembered. Photography is somehow like memory in that it preserves moments and allows them to be transported. The prose is written as though it was coming straight out of the guy s head. Immediate and intense.
Though born and raised in Chicago, Timothy O Grady is himself the descendant of Irish emigrants. Since 1973, he s lived in London and has had an enduring fascination with the Irish migrant labourer community in that city. Steve Pyke, meanwhile, was born in Leicester but has called the Camden/Kentish Town area home since he first arrived in the English capital in 1977. One of Britain s most widely admired portrait photographers, Pyke has worked closely with, among others, The Pogues and Shane MacGowan, a songwriter who continues to draw rich inspiration from the old main drags of London s Paddytown.
Pyke s photographic career began in Ireland, in 1980, when he travelled around the country pointing his camera at fairs and fairgrounds, circuses and carnivals, places where, he says, people are very alive . He has been photographing Irish philosophers and writers for almost two decades. Indeed, I Could Read The Sky features several portraits from this ongoing series, among them shots of Dermot Healy, Leland Bardwell and the late Bill Graham.
What I m really pleased about in this book is that it has the full range of what I shoot: still life, landscape, portrait, situations, reportage, it s all in there, Steve avers. It s all photography. You ve got your eye whether you re looking at a face or looking at a landscape. Often, they re very similar. It s been said before but it s really true, your face is the landscape of your life. What you think is what you look like.
Both O Grady and Pyke glow with pride when they speak about I Could Read The Sky which has been several years in the making. They are especially delighted that their novel tells the stories of the kind of people who don t normally appear in books.
You see these men walking up the Kilburn High Road with a slouch and a look of apology on their faces, affirms O Grady. You can actually see the West of Ireland in their eyes; the sense of freedom and the beautiful seascapes. But yet, here they are, with hair growing down over their faces and a newspaper from Donegal in the back pocket, heading back to their boarding house with a bundle of fish n chips in their arms. I ve always looked at those men and wondered what their story is.
Before he sat down to write the novel, O Grady spent prolonged periods interviewing elderly men and women at The Irish Centre in Camden Town and The Roger Casement Centre in Archway.
Most of those I spoke to were pensioners, he relates. They d all been born around the time of the birth of the Free State, and had emigrated in the 40s or 50s, because there was nothing else there for them.
They were asked to do an awful lot of things with their lives that were bad for them, and they all know that. They know the price they ve paid in self-loathing, in anonymity, in being forced to leave their nationality, social connections and way of life at the door to Britain. Some of them have done fine but a lot of them have been really hurt by all that.
I don t think they ve experienced so much overt, brutal racism as some might think, but Britain has certainly shown them a kind of, at best, patronising attitude and, at worst, a contempt and exclusion. Their lives have been a marginal, anonymous existence.
For many of these people, the sole sustaining forces have been bottles of liquor and their own bottled-up memories.
Drink was very much at the centre of their lives, asserts O Grady. The Irish were served by these battered, grim pubs and dancehalls, and they rarely ventured beyond that. I remember one man saying to me, It s very hard to kill a Sunday . They could think of nothing to do but sit listening to the radio, trying to pick up RTE, until the pubs open. But memory was, and is, their true form of rapture.
Their memory of childhood is, almost in all cases, the glory of their lives. That was where everything was free and wonderful. Life was populated, integrated and coherent to them. They make that period into a Garden of Eden in their lives. It s what stabilises them through an intolerable existence, through an existence without coherence.
The ephemeral conviviality of the bar-room aside, Timothy O Grady claims that one of the most marked characteristics of the Irish community in London is, contrary to popular opinion, its diffusion and lack of kinship. The Irish in London are nowhere near as tight as the Bengalis or the Pakistanis. They don t form such a coherent, social force. They re together but they don t make a whole complete world for themselves. A lot of them are very lonely. Loneliness is a big part of their lives.
I think it s a peculiarly London experience, this. If those people slouching down the Kilburn High Road had gone to New York, maybe they d be striding the avenues like kings. It comes down to acceptance. A lot of those people left because their brothers inherited the farm, or something like that, and there was no place for them at home. They had to go.
Their sense was to just go to the nearest place and make some money. It was a type of emigration that had no real expectation. When people went to the United States, they had higher expectations. Sure, some went to Britain with high expectations and built their empires, but a lot didn t. The men became labourers and the women became maids or nurses, if they were lucky and they d done a bit of training. They always dreamt of going back, assumed that s how their story would end. But if they try it, they don t fit. They can t find a point of entry anymore.
For all the hardship and despondency of their lives, however, Timothy O Grady was surprised to encounter very little self-pity among the aged Irish emigrants he interviewed.
I was in a pub in Portobello Road one day, he recalls. This guy came in. He was in his late 60s, with Brylcreemed hair, and a very tight-fitting suit. He was from Lettermuck. He came up to me with a big smile and said, To tell you the truth, I m looking for the price of a cuppa . I gave him a pound. He sat down and we got talking. He told me his story.
When he was 13, he was put up for sale at a hiring fair. It sounds like something out of the 17th century but this was in the late 1940s. He left home at 13 to work in farms around Galway. He could never get any money together or anything so he decided to go to England. He said, I landed down in Birmingham with #5 in my pocket and that s what I have now 50 years later . He held out his hand with the pound that I d given him.
That was literally all he had, after 50 years of back-breaking work in tunnels and muck, laying gas-lines and sewers, working for Murphy s, working for Summers , all these big Irish firms. He d drunk it all, of course. He wasn t whinging about it. That was just the way things were. He d lived with a woman from Derry for 15 years and, as soon as he was too old to work anymore, she threw him out. He was sleeping on a sofa in some guy s house and he had to pay rent for that. He was scrounging money around the place from the moment he woke up.
He had nothing. A whole life erased. But he told his story matter-of-factly. He was almost laughing at how badly things had turned out. He couldn t believe it himself. He was more dismayed than angry.

I Could Read The Sky is published by Harvill Press, at #14.99 Stg.