In rural Ireland in the mid 1950s, cottages had no electricity or running water, many roads were still dirt tracks, a passing motor vehicle was an occasion for great speculation, families were large and I was born. The cottage where I first entered the world was built during the war by Kildare County Council. It consisted of four rooms and a hallway. There were too small outhouses, one was used as the toilet or closet as we called it and the other was for storing firewood. Three of the four rooms were bedrooms, one for the xgirls, one for the boys and one for our parents. The other room was kitchen, dining room, sitting room and a general workplace for my mother. There were seven children, three boys and four girls. I was the youngest of the boys and second youngest of the family. I don't have any memories of my grandparents and I have never even seen a photograph of my grandmothers. My mother's father was a stonemason and my father's father was a wheelwright and carpenter. One was Lar Murphy and the other was John Murphy. My mother and father had the same surname, a fact that my schoolteachers didn't at first believe, so I was instructed to enquire as to my mother's maiden name again. My mother had three brothers, Patrick, John and Jim and one sister Anne. Her brother Patrick drowned in Wales when he was still quite young and she grieved for him all her life and was calling his name just before she died, some 50 years after his death. John and Jim both emigrated to England during the war and worked on the construction of aerodromes and roads throughout the war. Jim joined the British Army in 1945 and went to Korea and Malaysia. John married and stayed in London producing kids. He didn't return to Ireland for a visit for some 30 years. Jim never married. The woman that he loved didn't wait for him to return from the army and he didn't even try to find anyone else. He was interested in motorbikes, photography, gardening and construction. He worked in factories until his retirement, Reliant cars in Banbury and Wiggins Teape paper in Bristol were his last two jobs covering a period of nearly 40 years. My aunt Anne also emigrated to England and settled in Melton Mowbray, married to a neighbour from back home. Her husband died relatively young. She lived to the age of 86 and was known as an eccentric old lady who took in stray cats. She was vegetarian and loved animals. She never had any children. My father's family also had five children, two boys Jim and John and three girls, Bridie, Anne and Kate. John, or Uncle Jack to me, was a bachelor. He lived in the nearby town of Carlow all his life. By the time I knew him he was retired. Kate was married with no children and Bridie was also married with no children. They both lived nearby also. Anne was a spinster. She lived alone in what had been the family home, about 500 yards from our house. Jim was my father and our family of seven, although large by the standards of our own family history was only average by the standards of the local community. There were many families of ten or even fifteen children and occasionally twenty or more. The road outside our house was a dirt track when I was a small child. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on a rock in the middle of the road. I remember my excitement when the first tarmacadam surface was laid. My father was part of the road gang. At that time there were only about two cars in the neighbourhood and everybody else travelled by bicycle or horse and cart. If a motor car passed our house it would be an occasion for much speculation, who was it, where were they going, and that could lead on to a much wider discussion about the whole life and antecedents of the car driver. Occasionally we were visited by itinerant tinkers. My mother would give them any saucepans or buckets with holes and they would mend them. I remember one old man and his wife who pitched their canvas tent on the roadside and mended pots and pans. Other itinerant tinkers would ask for scrap metal. It was common for people passing by on their bicycles to stop and ask my mother if she wanted anything from the town. Or they would just stop for a chat and tea, or tay as we said. Jimmy Nolan, whose nickname was Snag, was a bachelor farmer who farmed over 200 acres without any machinery. He went everywhere by bicycle and was a regular visitor to our house. We got paid to help him with the haymaking. He used to shoot rabbits and bring one for my mother to cook. Paddy Flood was considered to be something of an innocent. He would sometimes turn up at midnight on his way home from the pub. My mother would give him tea and a sandwich before sending him on his way. He was still going to dances when I was a teenager and he was in his seventies. Tom Shaughnessy was a favourite with us kids, because he could skilfully fold and tear newspaper to form a chain of little men holding hands, or create some beautiful pattern. He had a special prayer to stop bleeding, which he gave to my father, when I suffered from excessive nosebleeds, which happened fairly regularly when I was young. Johnny Moran, called 'Fuss', was another bachelor farmer. He gave us eggs and my mother darned his socks. He lived in a little house and owned a mule and about 30 acres. He usually turned up at our house just in time for the midday meal. We had no television; indeed we had no electricity until 1966. We did have a radio, which was called a wireless, even though it did have wires including an outdoor aerial. It also had two large batteries, a wet battery and a dry battery. The wet battery contained acid and had to be taken to the local village garage to be refilled. On the radio we listened to the news, a programme called Dear Sir or Madam which consisted of listener's letters on various topics, Ceilidh House on a Saturday night and the Clitheroe Kid on the BBC every Sunday. There were also various 15-minute programmes sponsored by commercial firms. We also had a wind up gramophone which played 78's. Sometimes my father's friends would come to our house for an evening. They would all turn up on their bicycles and give their various greetings and blessings as they entered the house. Jimmy Mack, who was a rather tall man, would take off his felt hat, bow his head and say in a loud voice "God Save all here". They would sit around the fireplace and tell stories, usually ghost stories, all of which were true. Tom Somers, a small red-faced man who lived alone, had an endless store of ghost stories. They would also gossip. Each man had his own area of specialised knowledge. My father's speciality was dates of death. If anybody wanted to remember when somebody had died they would be told to 'ask Jim Murphy'. Later in the evening the table would be cleared and the deck of cards would be brought out. This was called a card party and they would play until the early hours of the morning accompanied by much chat and the occasional bottle of Guinness. Because we had no electricity or running water my mother's life was very difficult. She cooked all our meals and baked bread over an open fire. She washed all the clothes by hand, having first of all heated large pots of water over the fire. To iron clothes she had to heat a special stone in the fire which was then put into a metal case with a wooden handle. There was a roadside hand pump about 300 yards away from our house where we went to fetch drinking water. Rainwater was collected and used for washing clothes and washing ourselves. Most winters the hand pump would freeze and we would have to go across the fields to a spring well to fetch drinking water. The local newspaper, The Nationalist, as well as being a source of news and information, provided a rather rough toilet paper. Our family was poor, but as a child I never experienced poverty. Almost all the other families around us were equally poor so that poverty was normality. Also we always had enough to eat and clothes to wear. Usually my clothes had already been worn by, one if not both, of my brothers. Although my father was a heavy smoker he was not a drinker and this made a big difference to our well-being. Families where the head of the family was a drinker suffered much more hardship. Our family was also fortunate in having a constant and free supply of firewood. The owner of the local big house and wooded estate allowed us to take all the firewood we needed. This involved a lot of hard work for my father, my brothers, our donkey and myself. It was this constant to-ing and fro-ing from the local woods with our donkey, which flashed into my mind the day after I became chairman of the London Buddhist Centre. My father was a labourer, working for the local county council. He also frequently spent his evenings working for some neighbouring farmer or in our large vegetable garden. We grew nearly all our own vegetables and this entailed a lot of work for all the family; digging, sowing, weeding, harvesting, and storing. Potatoes were the biggest crop, planted in drills and carefully tended. We also had carrots, parsnips, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, swede, onions, garlic, parsley, radishes, lettuce, rhubarb and sometimes marrow. Some farmers grew sugar beet and around August the beet plants had to be thinned out by hand. A family would take on so many drills, in parcels of a score. So you had either twenty-one or forty two or more drills of sugar beet plants to thin out. One person would go ahead with a hoe knocking out about 10 inches of earth and leaving a little bunch of beets for the thinner to deal with. We tied empty fertiliser sacks around our knees with binder twine and got to work. This was a way of earning some pocket money. It was very hard work. What with thinning beet and haymaking, fetching timber from the woods and working in the garden, there was a lot of physically demanding work in my childhood. As a teenager I sometimes resented it because I wanted to spend my time reading and worrying at the meaning of life. I guess it was just as well there was plenty to do. Although there had been a major upheaval in Europe due to the Second World War, in Ireland politics still harkened back to the struggle for independence and to the civil war that followed independence. The two major political parties Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, were linked to the two sides of the civil war and the two major national newspapers, The Press and The Independent had similar associations in the minds of many people. Eamon de Valera, was an iconic figure who had featured in the civil war and was now President of the Republic. His picture hung on the wall of our living room /kitchen. There were still men around who had been imprisoned by the British or during the civil war and that older generation still carried on the arguments of the 1920s. Often when Bill Kinsella cycled past our house, usually with a large branch of a tree balanced on his shoulder, it would be mentioned that he had suffered imprisonment. Enmity against the English was still strong and bitter. My mother often told us the story of her father returning home late from work and the Black and Tan soldiers raining bullets down on the roof of the house because there was a curfew. This incident was lodged in her mind very vividly and became lodged in my mind too. That is how enmities are passed down the generations. My father and mother always supported the Fianna Fail party of de Valera and associated the Fine Gael party with the British and with fascism. Nationalism was a potent force and its necessary distortion of history led to much suffering. Religion was a matter of birth rather than conviction. Everybody was Christian, but we didn't think of ourselves as Christians. We were Catholics and then there were Protestants, who for some reason insisted on their totally erroneous beliefs. I was never quite clear what those beliefs were. It had something to do with the Virgin Mary or Our Lady as we called her. Discovering what Protestants believed was as hard as finding out about sex but there was less incentive. There was a Catholic school and a Protestant school. There was a Catholic Church and two Protestant churches. All Catholics went to Mass every Sunday and confession every month. The big occasions of the year were Easter and Christmas. Easter was preceded by Lent, which began with pancake Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. We ate pancakes and had our foreheads smeared with ash. Then we would give up sweets for Lent. This was made palatable by the thought of gorging ourselves on Easter Sunday. The week leading up to Easter was very solemn, with more time spent in the dimly-lit seriousness of the Church and then Good Friday had a feeling of foreboding about it and in my memory the sky always darkened around three o'clock, the time when Christ was crucified. Easter Sunday and Christmas both hold memories of midnight Mass, and the church lit by hundreds of candles. It was beautiful. Christmas was the time of the baby Jesus and stables and cribs. But even more than that it was the time of Santa Claus. On Christmas Eve, a candle was lit in every window of the house. My sister Bernadette, as the youngest, was lifted up to light the candles. This was to indicate a welcome to strangers; a rebuke to those ancient Israelites who said there was no room at the inn for Mary and Joseph. We listened to Santa Claus on the radio, reading out letters from children and then setting out from the North Pole to make his rounds. We hung up our stockings into which he would put gifts and we went to bed early and excited. Every evening throughout the year we knelt down with our elbows resting on the seat of a chair and recited the rosary. This was a litany of prayers done in a call-and-response ritual. Our father would lead the rosary and the rest of us would respond. The motto was " the family that prays together stays together". I was the second youngest of seven children. The others were May, Brigid, Lar, Kathleen, Sean and Bernadette. I was christened Bernard, a name I never liked. The four girls had the biggest room and the three boys were next door in a much smaller room. We all slept in one big bed. There was no heating. We just put lots of blankets and overcoats over us. The rooms were all damp. Because the toilet was outdoors we used a chamber pot or a po as we called it. Each morning the po would be put out on the windowsill and our mother would come round and collect them, empty them and wash them. I didn't start school until I was five because it was a three and a half mile walk to the village, which we called the town. That was a bit too far for my short legs. My sister Bernadette and I used to squat on the roadside playing games, such as building little farms using twigs or lollipop sticks to make fences, the empty boxes from Calvita and Galtee cheese were trailers and chestnuts or stones were animals. We also played hide-and-seek and tig (called tag elsewhere). I enjoyed looking at comics and was desperate to learn to read. I was really eager to go to school because I had been told that I would learn to read in school. The first day I walked to school with my brothers and the day was spent playing with wooden bricks and wooden thread spools, which had been painted different colours. We also had plasticine, which was called mawla. When I got home I told my mother that I didn't want to go to school any more because I still couldn't read! One of the things I found most strange in school was the toilets. I had never encountered anything like it before. All that white porcelain and water gurgling and hissing and flowing all over the place. It was quite awesome. Whether it was because of being overwhelmed by all that porcelain and water or whether it was because I wasn't properly toilet trained I used to wet myself and even shit myself in the classroom. I found this confusing rather than embarrassing but I don't remember being upset about it. In fact if anything I found it comforting in some way. Before too long I didn't have to walk to school any more because Mrs Kearney who lived about a mile away offered to take me in her car with her own kids and another neighbour's child. There were six or seven of us squashed into the little car. Kearney's house was full of interesting things. They kept hens and they had a grandfather and a butter making churn and a washboard. Their house was just as small as ours but with more people in it, so that the main room was used as a bedroom as well as kitchen and dining room. They had a settle-bed, which turned into a sort of wooden sofa by day. Old Tom Kearney, the grandfather, looked like a grandfather should in dark slightly stained jacket, waistcoat and trousers, wearing a felt hat and smoking a pipe. A bucket of water near his chair served as a spittoon. His son was Tommy Kearney who was father to an annually increasing bevy of kids but because of illness he couldn't work, and my friend was Thomas Kearney, the oldest of the children and the same age as me. We had fun every morning chasing the hens or playing cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians, our vivid imaginations turning the hen house into a jail or robbers hide out. I quickly learned to read and was often the best in the class at spelling although I was distinctly mediocre in every other area. The school was one large building, which was divided into two single-sex areas. The playground was also divided. When I started school the playground was divided by a rock placed between the girls and boys sections. Later this was replaced by a white line and later still by a wall. I think this heightening of border security had as much to do with the cold war between Mr Kilbride, the boys' school headmaster and Mrs McKenna, the headmistress of the girls' school, as it had to do with the incursions of the boys into the girls' playground in pursuit of fugitive footballs. My mother used to laugh scornfully at the schoolyard Berlin Wall. One of my first teachers was Miss Dagg who was well liked. Another teacher was George Nolan who taught the boys in second and third class. I recall being perplexed one-day when I saw him holding hands with Miss Dagg. I had never seen adults holding hands like that before. In the girls' school there was an elderly teacher called Miss Sheehan, whose name had the same sound as our pronunciation of 'machine'. I could never understand why she was called 'machine'. We didn't speak the Queen's English. Our language was a mixture of old English words, Gaelic words and flattened vowels and absent th's. This had some amusing consequences. When I learned about Grace in catechism class, it sounded to my ear exactly like 'grease' as we pronounced it. So I envisaged sanctifying grace as some kind of useful lubricant. The sacrament of extreme unction was 'extra munction' which made no sense to me at all because I didn't know what 'munction' was. I strongly suspected it was some other form of lubricant, especially since the sacrament involved anointing with oil. Punishment in school took various forms. A talkative infant might be taken to the front and seated next to the teacher facing the rest of the class. Or a frequent offender might be told to stand outside the door in the corridor. This meant running the risk of being seen by Mr Kilbride and the unknown dire consequences that could ensue from such an unwelcome encounter. Not doing homework or fighting might bring the retribution of a caning, usually six strokes on the palm. I can only remember being caned once. That happened quite early in my school life. I was laboriously filling in the gaps between the words in my book with a pen and this was considered as serious misdemeanour. I think this was because I was one of the kids who had free books because of poverty. I guess it was my cavalier treatment of books, which didn't belong to me, that was being punished. I didn't understand that at the time. Although I did understand that I was guilty of something very serious because I was marched off to the headmaster to receive my caning. This was being sent to the High Court rather than being brought up before the local magistrate. There were two of us being punished that day, 'Sus' Kelly and myself. On the way to the headmaster's room I was crying copiously and 'Sus' Kelly was maintaining a stoical silence. On the way back 'Sus' Kelly was bawling loudly and I was silent. We each received six strokes on the hand, in front of the sixth class, who were the big boys. This was an early incidence of a recurring theme for me: my ability to endure is greater than my fear anticipates. When I was in third class, aged about ten, we used to have singing competitions. I was useless at singing. I couldn't grasp what a tune was and my attempts to sing were tuneless. I remember George Nolan telling those of us who failed to make a musical impression that he would teach us to sing by the end of the year. He never did. I was also lacking in ability on the sports field. I was strong and well co-ordinated but I didn't like team sports. I was not a team player and this was recognised intuitively by my peers who left me until last when picking a football team. I only played in one game and retired from team sports before I was ten. I didn't get involved in fights and wasn't picked on because I was strong. I was good at arm-wrestling. The one occasion when an older boy picked on me, as a challenge to himself, I accidentally head-butted him under the chin causing him to bite his tongue. His response to this was one of admiration, thinking that it was a skilful move that I had perfected. He was ' Welders' Kilbride, the headmaster's son. He was called Welders because on one occasion he had broken a toffee bar and had taken it to Horan's garage to get the two pieces welded back together. He is now a fairly well-known folk singer. When I was twelve and in my final year of primary school I liked to play a game that involved protecting the infants from attack. Two or three of us bigger boys would get an infant, four or five years old, to run all around the schoolyard and report back to us whether anyone had tried to obstruct him in any way. I can't remember what we did about it when he was obstructed. I think we issued warnings. Another game was called stew pot. A small team had to catch as many boys as possible and imprison them in a corner. This called for speed and strength which I had. Most of the boys in the schoolyard played football. They didn't actually have a football so the ball was made of paper and cloth tied into a ball with twine. The goal posts were jackets and the game didn't have a boundaried pitch. They just took up their space and the rest of us ran around or through them. Outside the school, during the evenings and summer holidays, I played hurling and football with neighbouring lads. On Sundays we often went for long walks with our dog Linn, she chased rabbits enthusiastically or we went up to Frocan Hill to chase goats. Sometimes we would pick mushrooms or rob orchards or go down to the stream to catch pinkeens, as we called minnows. In the evenings we would chase moths or daddy long legs or try to knock bats out of the sky with sticks. We lit fires and burned furze bushes, climbed trees, used catapults, made trolleys out of old pram and bicycle wheels, hung swings from tree branches and ran wild and free. My favourite trolley had two bicycle wheels on the rear and two pram wheels in front, a wooden base and sides and a rope for steering. Two or three of us could sit on it and let it roll downhill. To brake we simply steered into the hedgerow, which we called the ditch (we called a ditch 'dyke' or 'gripe'). In spite of this reversal of vocabulary it proved an effective braking system, if somewhat painful at times. Once I nearly lost my eye. One of the lads, Paddy Corrigan, got a job helping out on a building site and he brought back some small bullets, which were used in nail guns. They had gunpowder in them and made a fine bang when smashed between two rocks. We decided to find out what would happen if we put them in a fire. We lit a fire in the middle of a field, threw some bullets on it and squatted around waiting for a bang. The bang came and with it a bit of metal that struck my temple about half-an-inch from my eye. It left a little indentation that remained for years. We stopped playing with bullets after that. Reading was an important element in my life as far back as I can remember. First wanting to read and then reading. One of the first books that I owned was a large hard cover book called Merry Go Round, which consisted of lots of short stories and line drawings. I was completely captivated by it and read it over and over. I loved entering into the world of the story and getting completely immersed and leaving the world of school and home far behind. I still enjoy this feeling of total involvement in what I am reading. As I grew a little older I moved through Enid Blyton and the Famous Five on to Agatha Christie, Perry Mason, boys' classics like Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, and books about the world's geography. My mother had to cycle twelve miles to the nearest larger town, Athy, to do shopping every week or fortnight. I was always pestering her to buy me a book, which she usually did. She would complain that I read too quickly because as soon as I got a new book I would bury my head in it and normally finish it that same evening. I had to find out about sex through reading too. A pamphlet from the local church was my main source of information, supplemented by reading the problem pages of the newspaper. I also trawled through the Dictionary to catch whatever snippets of information I could. This, together with the speculations of the other boys and observation of animals, gradually helped me to piece together some picture of the procreative process. It still seemed a bit unlikely that our parents coupled just like the animals but it was the best I could come up it. As well as reading I took to writing from about aged fourteen. I used to write verses declaring my beliefs and philosophy. To begin with they were very Christian but gradually took on a more heretical and pantheistic tone. English was my favourite subject in school and I liked writing essays. On one occasion we were asked to write about ' My Favourite Television programme'. This posed a problem for me, since we didn't have a TV at home and I had only seen it once or twice when we went to a neighbour's house to watch a football match. What I had also seen on one of those occasions was a cartoon called Mr Magoo and I wrote about that. My essay was considered very imaginative and original. So much so that the teacher asked whether I'd been helped with it. Having had no access TV was the greatest help. The first time I went to the cinema was when I was 12 and our school went on a day trip to Dublin. We visited the museum at Kilmainham jail where the leaders of the 1916 Easter rebellion had been held and executed. We also visited the Garden of Remembrance, also harking back to 1916. But more exciting was going to see the Sound of Music. What a magical experience! I didn't understand the story but the spectacle was magnificent, astonishing. It was heaven! Some time later I was taken to see Mary Poppins and was equally enthralled by the splendour of the whole thing.
