Go back where you came from

I didn't want to be travelling on a day like this. With the wind and
sea so bad, it's not a day for being on a boat at all. I'd rather be
sat in the armchair, reading the paper and drinking me tea. But it was
that feller back in London; "go home" he shouted. "Go back where you
came from". I'd heard the words before often enough. And worse. After
Birmingham, after Bradford, after Canary Wharf. But I never really
thought they meant me.

I've been in England since just after the war you see. Came over on the
boat from Dublin in forty-six, looking for work and a place to live. I
found my first lodgings in a big old house in Finsbury Park. The woman
who owned it was a widow who'd lost her husband in North Africa. She
treated us well enough, but it was hard for her, having to take in
lodgers to make ends meet. Hard for us too; young lads away from home
for the first time. Away from our families and friends. Away from the
fields and the village schools, and off in to the big city.

I got a job on the building sites, first on the diggers, then laying
bricks. Two Pounds five shillings a week in McAlpines Fusiliers. Irish,
Poles, Scots, lads from the East End; all of us rich on a Friday night,
and all poor the rest of the week. But we didn't feel poor you see. We
were young lads, all in the same boat. Enough money for food, a few
beers and no responsibilities. We wrote home once a month, and sent
money when we could. Then every summer we'd pack a bag, and hop on the
train to Liverpool for the night ferry. For two weeks we'd live like
the prodigal son; no fatted calf mind, but maybe a pig and a chicken or
two. We'd sit at home, round the hearth, with our parents and brothers
and sisters and neighbours, and talk the nights away into
morning.

I remember Jim Sheehan, a great story teller he was. He told us how ,
one halloween, him and his brothers decided to play a trick on a farmer
who lived close by. The old boy had a donkey and cart that he used to
take the hay in from the fields . They waited till he went to bed, then
took the cart to bits. They carried it piece by piece up the steps in
the barn to the hayloft, then led the donkey up as well. They put the
cart back together, got the donkey into his harness, and tethered him
up to the cart. The next morning when the old farmer went into the barn
and looked up, he nearly died at the sight of it. Ah those stories boy,
those stories. We'd take them back to England with us, a little piece
of home to hold close by.

That was the way of it for the first few years, and none of us had much
of a care for the future. But after a while the lads started to settle
down, get married and have families of their own. I stayed a bachelor,
though not through want of trying. And as we grew older, so did the
folks at home. Every so often you'd get a letter saying that this one
or that one had passed on, and it seemed that we went back more for
wakes than holidays. We never realised it then, but that was the time
when we really emigrated. Not the first time we got on the boat, but
when our parents were gone from Ireland, and the kids were being born
in Kilburn and Cricklewood.

So time went past as time does, the news from the old country was less
about family troubles than the troubles in the north. That's when it
started; the whisper in the shop, the loud voice in the pub. " Send 'em
all back." "Go home Paddy". And I bit my lip, and lowered my eyes, and
went out the door, pretending to myself that they really meant somebody
else. Until yesterday, when that feller shouted out down the street. He
wasn't even shouting at me, but at some Arab looking bloke with a
beard; " Go back where you came from". At first I thought "that's
right, boy, we don't want another bloody New York over here"; and I
turned to walk on. But something stopped me. I didn't know why , but
for the first time I thought "he means me too". I walked on again, and
it started to dawn on me. All it took was the dark skin and the beard
to start him shouting. And in those shops and pubs, in all those years,
all it took was the sound of the Irish brogue to start the whispers and
the talk. How I'd lived and how I'd worked didn't matter.

So here I am on the boat again. Going back where I came from. Back to
the quiet lanes and smell of the turf fires. Back to the little bars
full of brown flat caps and black creamy stout. My sisters youngest boy
says that I can stay with them, and that'll be grand. But you know I
can't help thinking, after all those years of digging and building and
city life, am I really going home?