The Harvey story
March 1944
County Donegal, Ireland
As my mother described it, it was a cold, pitch-black, moonless night with a stiff breeze blowing in off the Atlantic when her contractions began. Luckily, the rain that had streamed down all day had cleared. She alerted my father that the baby she was carrying was ready to see the light of day. That would be me, eager to announce my presence to the world.
Although they lived at the time in Lettermore, they were visiting my father’s mother’s house north of Ardaghey Chapel (in which they had been married in 1938) with their first three children, my brother, Ted, five years old, and my sisters Rosemary, nearly four, and Kathleen at three. While each of those three had been delivered at home, for some inexplicable reason the doctor insisted my mother go to the hospital in Donegal town for my delivery.
You could count the number of cars in that area of Donegal at the time on the fingers of a single hand. There was no taxi stand to turn to. No Uber to call. Even if there had been, there were no telephones. For that matter, there was no electricity. The transportation options for a farmer’s wife going into labor in those days were generally restricted to the big, rough farm carts of the time—carts used to carry everything from turf to hay, wheat, and manure—their boxy bodies without springs sitting on an unforgiving cast-iron axle and large 4-foot-high wooden wheels, shod in steel.
My father laid some hay on the bed of this cart to protect my mother as well as he could from the dust, seeds, and remnants of manure embedded in the wood and helped her up onto the
cart, where he covered her with a flour bag against the chilly wind. Off they set on a ten-mile trek to Donegal Hospital, a trip that would take two or three hours as the horse plodded along on Donegal’s rough macadam roads. The unforgiving cart’s suspension transmitted the jolt of every stone and pothole it encountered to my mother lying in the straw as her contractions quickened.
Down past Ardaghey chapel they proceeded. Across the old Inver Bridge at Cranny that swept in a magnificent curve over the Eany River. Up the “Doorin Line” paralleling the Donegal Railroad, the narrow-gauge line that ran from Killybegs in Donegal to Strabane on the border with the Six Counties. After about an hour, they reached “Cassidy’s Crossroads,” where Cassidy’s store marked a narrow road that ran about half a mile down to Doorin Point. My mother worried that the contractions were coming so close together that she would never make it another hour or two to the hospital. And she knew that this narrow road would shortly lead her directly to her mother’s home in the townland of Gortward. Many years later, as she told me the story several times, she cried out to my father, “I’m not going to make it, Eddie. Take me down to Mammy.”
So it developed. Almost before she knew it, she was being ushered into the little thatched cottage in which she herself had been born and raised. My grandmother, Rose Blaney, got busy preparing to deliver the baby.
In due course, I arrived. There was a crib in the cottage, and I was placed in it close to the turf fire for warmth. As my grandmother waited for the placenta to make an appearance, she made a startling discovery that explained why the doctor had wanted me delivered at the hospital. “There’s another one in there,” she declared to my mother’s shock. Before they knew it, my twin brother Frank made his appearance. I was apparently strong and robust from the word go. Frank, however, was thought to be sickly. With only one crib available, he needed the warmth of the fire more than I did. I was scooped out of the crib and unceremoniously dumped into a kitchen drawer.
While I took after the Harvey side of the family, Frank was a Blaney from head to toe. I had hair so blond that my mother’s brother, Jim (after whom I was named), nicknamed me the “White Man.” Frank had the coal-black hair of the Blaneys. I had a reasonably sturdy frame; Frank was built on a slighter model. But although we were clearly fraternal, not identical twins, as small boys we were the talk of Doorin, as there was not another pair of twins anywhere to be seen, nor had there been in living memory.
While our delivery was very rough by today’s standards, in Europe of the time, with the exception of the uncomfortable and potentially dangerous ride in the horse-drawn cart, it really wasn’t that unusual. Similar stories could be told around the arrival of Ted, Rosemary, and Kathleen.
Ted’s birth was particularly problematic according to family lore. Ted had been born in London, where my father worked as a laborer in 1938 and 1939. When it came time for Ted’s birth, Granny Blaney, who five years later would deliver Frank and me, traveled to London to help deliver the child. She wanted to greet the first grandchild she could hold in her arms. Her other grandchildren at the time were born in the United States to my mother’s oldest sisters, Mary McGovern and Margaret Gallagher.
As Ted’s arrival approached, a midwife and a physician appeared in the flat my parents occupied. Granny and the midwife went to work in a bedroom while my father and the doctor reclined in the living room smoking and knocking down whisky. After half an hour, Granny appeared in the living room. “We’ve got a problem,” she announced to the doctor. “You’d better get in here.”
Fortunately, the doctor was at hand. And he was apparently sober enough to know what he was doing. Ted was successfully delivered.
Alcohol also made an appearance in the arrival of Rosemary and Kathleen. Granny Harvey, my father’s mother, herself the mother of 13 children, served as midwife for Rosemary and Kathleen. My mother loved Granny Harvey, who lived as a widow in Cashelogary. My mother and father and Ted had taken refuge from World War II in Lettermore. When it came time for my mother to deliver her two daughters, Granny Harvey would show up to assist at the births, with the only anesthetic available to her, a bottle of gin. Liberally dosed with the contents of the bottle, my mother was able to relax into delivering my two sisters.
So here we were in March 1944, a family of seven living in a rural society scarcely touched by the 20th century. And the very next day, Frank and I were baptized at Ardaghey Chapel.
Why baptized within 24 hours? It may have been because Frank was thought sickly. Infant mortality at the time in Ireland was quite high. According to Catholic dogma, an unbaptized child could not enter the Kingdom of Heaven but would languish throughout eternity in Limbo, stuck sort of halfway between Heaven and Hell until the Day of Judgment. Without baptism, the infant’s soul still carried the stain of Original Sin, the shameful proclivity for evil behavior that all of us inherited after Adam and Eve ate the Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden.
Getting infants baptized immediately was a sort of insurance policy against their winding up in Limbo, ignorant of the rapture of being reunited with their savior in heaven. Was Limbo painful, a sort of lesser version of the fires of Purgatory? Who knew? Would their souls rise with the dead on the Day of Judgment? Unclear. Would God figure out what to do with them at some point in the future? Perhaps. Better safe than sorry. Get children baptized right away, and those questions took care of themselves.
Many sociologists believe that the order of birth in a family goes a long way to determining how each child will develop. There seemed to be some truth to that in the five of us, although there was an unusual kink in our development. We didn’t all encounter the same developmental experiences. Indeed, for significant periods throughout our childhood, we were raised separately from each other by different adults. That is to say, when our nuclear family fell apart, Ted and I were sent to live for two years with Granny Blaney and her son, Uncle Jim. Kathleen was sent to Glasgow for about three years to live with my mother’s sister, Cassie, and her husband, Mick Driscoll. Rosemary and Frank remained with my mother, depending on the sympathy of friends as they moved from apartment to apartment in a desperate search for a roof over their heads amid the housing shortage of postwar London.
Ted, the first-born, looked like a Harvey, with a round face and hooded blue eyes. He fitted the archetype of the first child to a “T.” In a patriarchal society such as Ireland’s, the first-born son is given pride of place, destined to inherit the parents’ property, particularly the parents’ land. It’s a very special position, with the child often doted upon by adoring parents. And my mother certainly doted on Ted, spurred on in part by his being diagnosed at about the age of three with rheumatic heart fever. In recalling her fear for her son as she struggled with this new reality, my mother’s eyes would glisten as she recalled putting Ted in a wheelchair to take him out of the house to get some fresh air.
The risk a first-born son runs is that he will be dethroned with the arrival of child number two, in this case Rosemary. She took after the Blaney side of the family, although it might be more accurate to say she took after the McHughs, Granny Blaney’s family. Rosemary had dark hair and blue eyes, and a picture of her taken 20 years later in her Eastern Airlines flight attendant’s uniform shows a woman with a penetrating gaze, strikingly similar to an earlier portrait of Granny Blaney.
But there was almost no chance of Rosemary dethroning Ted. He was, to begin with, the apple of my mother’s eye. And then, compared to a boy, a girl in those days, no matter how welcome, didn’t amount to much in the great scheme of things in an Irish Catholic family. They could be useful in taking care of household chores and watching younger brothers and sisters. But at some point, the inherited tradition, changing slowly, was that the parents would need to find a dowry for the girl to make marriageable material. Until then she was an extra mouth to feed.
Kathleen as a middle child wasn’t about to change the “middle-child syndrome” in any significant way. Kathleen, unlike Rosemary, was a Harvey. In later years, we realized she took after my father’s sister, Margaret Ellen, known as Magellen. Middle children are caught in a bit of a trap—neither the oldest nor the youngest. Of course, you’re not aware of being the middle child until all your siblings have made an appearance, but there’s a general sense that, arriving in the middle of the pecking order, the middle child receives less attention that those who preceded or followed. Kathleen, an excellent student, eager to excel in school, set herself up in the game of sibling rivalry as different from Rosemary.
And then there were the twins, Frank and myself. We were fraternal and not identical twins, with Frank taking after the Blaneys and me taking after the Harveys. Youngest children are often pampered. They’re the baby of the family, almost the family pet, protected by parents and older siblings. Frank and I enjoyed that status in spades as infants and very young boys. We were aware while still toddlers of being the object of a lot of attention from adults around Doorin. They would stop in Granny Blaney’s house on the way past to see what was happening with us. We were constantly on display.
My maternal grandfather, Grangy Blaney, was particularly attached to us. When neighbors showed up, if we were around, he would take one of us on each knee and have us treat the guests to a rendition of “I’m a Little Teapot.” One day when I was about three, Packy Higginbottom from the Point (Doorin Point) was on his way up past our house when he stopped in to see what was happening with the twins. Higginbottom was a typical local farmer with a very unfortunate facial deformity. He was a heavy pipe smoker and a prior bout with lip cancer required an operation, the results of which meant that one half of his mouth was sewn completely shut. As children, we couldn’t stop staring at this unusual sight. And, odd as it may be to report, his disastrous experience with the pipe didn’t have any effect on his smoking. No sooner would he take his seat than out would come the pipe and tobacco, the unlit pipe would be clenched in the teeth on the open side of his mouth, and within seconds he’d have it fired up and be smoking away.
But, since he had come in to see Frank and me, he needed to be entertained. So, Grangy pulled the two of us up on his lap—one on each knee. “Now,” he said, “give us ‘I’m a little teapot.’ ” And, like the little prima donnas we had become, Frank and I piped up with a song my mother had taught us: “I’m a little teapot, short and stout/Here’s my handle, here’s my spout/ When I get my steam up, hear me shout/Tip me up and pour me out!”
On delivering the last line, we’d both leaned back and then tipped forward to mimic a teapot being poured. Typically, the dazzled audiences would overwhelm us with applause. Naturally, we accepted it as our due.
Gales of laughter would also greet another of our favorite performances. “Give me a hand,” Grangy would say, holding out his palm so that we could shake it. Each of us then was expected to mimic a farmer coming to agreement with a potential buyer on the price of a horse or cow. The two farmers would spit on their hands, before shaking to seal the agreement. I have no idea where this tradition came from, but regardless of the source, Frank and I were expected to spit on our right hand, rub the two hands together, and then shake with Grangy. Delighted roars of approval would also greet this performance.
Getting all that attention was fabulous. A twin, of course, receives a strange sort of attention. Twins are focused on, but in a sense each of them gets only half the attention. A twin’s identity is fractured between what each receives individually and what each shares with the other. Rarely recognized is the reality that the attention paid to twins can be unhealthy. This was a problem that was apparent from the word go and progressed over time. Twins can be compared to each other in very destructive ways. I find it painful to think about Frank. From the outset, he suffered badly in comparison with me. He was smaller. He was slighter. He was more sickly. I was coddled. Worse, as we grew older, I was held up to him as someone he should emulate.
Even as a child, I was aware of how unfair all of this was without knowing what I could do about it. He deserved compassion from my mother, greater understanding, and more support. She was undoubtedly too busy trying to hold things together amidst the disaster her life had become to provide as much as she should have. Although Rosemary provided a lot of that support for him, Frank only rarely received it from his mother. In place of compassion, he was criticized. In place of support, he was sometimes scorned. And in place of understanding he was too frequently undermined with unfair comparisons with what his twin brother was capable of.
But I, alert even as a child to the signals of what my mother wanted, seized the opportunity to be the child who delivered on her expectations, who caused no trouble, who went out of his way as he grew older to help around the house, and who bent his mind to being an outstanding student.
Once Frank and I arrived, there we were in March of 1944 as a family unit of seven. What fate lay in store for us all? What kind of future would we create out of the raw materials we had at hand?
And I leave for America
October 1958
London, England
And now we enter one of the saddest periods of my childhood—the entire experience of leaving Ireland and emigrating to the United States. It began with a summer of delights; it ended with days of tears cascading down my cheeks and those of most of the people around me.
One of the great delights occurred on my final day of the school year earlier that summer at Cardinal Vaughan Grammar School. My mother had told me to make sure I told Monsignor Kenefeck, the headmaster, that I would not be back in September. I ran the gauntlet past the palace guard to get in to see him.
“Father, I won’t be returning to school in September. We are leaving London.” I thought that was enough for him.
He peered at me and moved his partial plate around in the back of his mouth.
“Your entire family?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Where are you going?”
“We are going to America.”
“Really?” he frowned. “I thought you people went to Canada.”
“No Father, America.”
“I see. So, you won’t be back. Thank you.”
And he dismissed me. “You people.” What gall. Little did he know that I’d had only two truly happy days around Vaughan. The first was the day I received the letter accepting me. And the second was the day I told him I’d never see him again.
On top of that, I had an extended holiday at Granny’s in Donegal. We weren’t leaving for the United States until late in October. Rather than having to return to Paddington late in August for school, I got an additional six weeks in Donegal.
That summer I saw the fox on the cliff overlooking Donegal Bay on our farm. I took a goat home from Andy McGroarty. My neighbor Tom Holmes and I went fishing in Donegal Bay and climbed to the top of the Gray Mare’s Tale, the waterfall that was the source of the Eany River. And I had the satisfaction of driving around on Uncle Jim’s old Triumph motorcycle.
But as the weeks dragged on and October approached, those happy days were coming to an end. The first sign was early in September when my mother arrived to bid farewell to Granny. They were both quite stoic about it. My mother, of course, had left Donegal decades before for London. It wasn’t as though her absence would be that much greater in the United States. Still, it brought back memories to Granny, I’m sure, of daughters Mary and Margaret leaving in the 1920s. It wasn’t news to her that we were going to the United States. This was simply the official farewell. “You have to go,” she acknowledged.
But my final day loomed inexorably closer. On the day before I was to leave for Belfast on the Donegal Railroad, Uncle Jim pulled me aside. “Now don’t be upsetting the old woman tomorrow. She’s going to be in a very bad mood.” I wanted to keep him happy and took seriously that terrible advice.
The next morning, Granny came up from the bedroom a bit early to make sure she saw me off. Thump! Thump! Went her sticks. Slide. Slide. The sticks reached out again, and the feet followed till she got to her wheelchair, where she sat down, grim and alone. She started combing out her hair. She hadn’t said a word. I was already packed. Then Jim insisted we would miss the train if we didn’t get moving. Cognizant of his advice the day before, I held out my hand in about as formal a manner as possible to bid her goodbye. Granny looked surprised but shook my hand and we left it at that.
Outside, I glanced into the window as Jim and I passed it and saw Granny, her shoulders heaving, leaning over from the wheelchair in front of the fireplace in tears. I tossed down my bag and rushed into the room to give her a hug. She looked up surprised as I threw myself into her arms and the two of us hugged and smeared each other’s faces with tears as we embraced. It seemed to go on forever. “Oh, Granny. I hate to leave!” “God bless you a stór, I hate to see you go.” I never think of that day without tears coming to my eyes. It was one of the most painful few minutes of my life. For her, of course, it doubtless was equally painful, not only losing me, but reliving the curse of emigration that had blighted her life for decades.
Jim and I made the train. But as it made its painfully slow trip up through Barnesmore Gap, I couldn’t stop the flood of tears. There’s an excitement among children in emigrating to a new land. It’s a new life. The possibilities are endless. You can quite literally recreate yourself and leave your old self behind. Even so, you abandon the neighborhood you are familiar with. You lose the world you know. Even worse, you lose the people you love. It's a great blow to the heart. Granny, this toothless, crippled old woman, had been the safe harbor into which life’s storm had blown me after my parents’ marriage ended in divorce. I knew I’d never see her again. And I never did.
The next great emotional trauma was pulling out of Belfast Lough on the ferry later that evening. I am, of course, taking up residence as normal on the deck. Seated on the bulwark, with one leg propped up on it and the other hanging down to the deck, is an immediately recognizable figure from the Irish world. A handsome man with a fine tenor voice, a voice that has yet to give in to the destruction that is already apparent in his face from whisky and Guinness.
A face slightly blotched, mildly bloodshot, watery eyes, 30 going on 50. Booze was undoubtedly the “immediate” culprit, but behind it lay the real tragedy, a tenor voice that could charm larks out of the trees. And the more he sang, the more pints of appreciative stout were piled up in front of him. He’s in his early 30’s, I guess. A good-looking man, well-dressed in a dark blue suit and red tie, with his face flushed from drink and blue eyes still blood-shot from last night’s party. He is in fine voice and has an endless supply of the latest songs lamenting the leaving of Ireland. After each song, a pint of black stout miraculously appears from a member of the audience eager to keep him going. “The Leaving of Liverpool,” “The Mountains of Mourne,” “The Boys from the County Armagh,” and “The Homes of Donegal,” issue effortlessly from him. He turns to “The Hills of Glenswilly,” and throats on deck tighten: “Attention pay, my countrymen, and hear my native news, Although my song is sorrowful, I hope you'll me excuse, I left my native residence, a foreign land to see, And I bid farewell to Donegal, likewise to Glenswilly.”
The sky begins to darken as we cast off from the dock, bilge water pumping out of the side of the boat. And, as we move away from the dock into the dim evening and the black water of the Irish Sea, the sparkling harbor lights stand out more brightly against the dark Mourne Mountains. He turns to The Platters: “I watched the harbor lights, They only told me we were parting.” I lost it. Tears began streaming down my face again.
Next stop is Heysham and then on to London. My mother has all kinds of errands to run with Frank and me. No way is she going to show up in Philadelphia in front of her sisters with two unkempt boys. First it was off to the barbers. Next stop, Marks & Spencer’s to find long pants and blazers that would fit us. Finally, a trip to the Porchester bathhouse to get us scrubbed up and fit for inspection. This was on the day after I left Donegal. That evening, unlike Ted, who had left Southampton on the Queen Elizabeth, we were leaving on an overnight flight from Heathrow to Idlewild Airport in New York, now known as John F. Kennedy Airport.
That afternoon, a sort of Irish Wake emerged organically at the flat in Paddington. A moveable feast transplanted itself from the Neeld Arms, where my mother served as a popular barmaid. Joe Maloney, our landlord from Roscommon, was there along with a selection of the regulars from the pub. The two O’Leary’s from Wexford, the Cockney, “Micky Mouse,” Cork’s Jack the Lodger and Tipperary’s Black Mike from Belgrave Gardens were on hand, along with others I didn’t know or recognize. Vi Lyons, our old neighbor might have been there too; I can’t recall. I’m pretty sure Kathleen’s boyfriend also made an appearance, but for some reason I think Kathleen might have absented herself to make her farewells to him.
A sort of forced artificial gaiety lay over an undercurrent of great loss and sadness in the flat. The O’Leary’s offered good wishes and toasts. The Cockney man I knew only as “Mickey Mouse” dithered around nervously. A former lodger of ours, Black Mike, retreated to a sofa and rendered his repertoire of Tipperary songs in sotto voce, almost as much to himself as to anyone else. Another that I knew of as Jack the Lodger held himself to himself. My mother alternated back and forth between serving as a hostess, plastering my hair and Frank’s down with Brylcreem, and making sure she had the tickets and passports in hand. Joe Maloney kept to himself, eying up the company and worrying about when we should leave to make sure we made the flight. We were scheduled on one of the last of the propeller-driven trans-Atlantic planes, a four-engine TWA “Jetstream.” An airplane championed apparently by TWA’s mercurial leader Howard Hughes, this plane was capable of non-stop crossings of the Atlantic. It would keep us aloft in the air for 14 hours.
Years later, my mother told me Joe Maloney was so upset that we were leaving that he had proposed marriage to her. And why not? He was facing the return to a cold flat in the winter, living alone after we had returned his generosity by giving him a family that he had become devoted to. Even at the cost of having to return to Vaughan, I would have been delighted if she had married Joe Maloney. He had become the father I didn’t have. I loved him. But she turned him down. Joe, the most stable man in our childhood, couldn’t be depended on, she told me. After all, he thought nothing of “jacking” a job (quitting without notice) if he disagreed with the foreman. That was simply a way to justify her decision. Forced to choose between the two most important men in her life, Joe didn’t stand a chance. Ted was always going to win that contest, hands down.
At last, it was time to leave. A caravan of cars escorted us to Heathrow. The O’Leary’s were in the lead in their Hillman. They were followed by a car driven by Kathleen’s boyfriend. His car? His father’s? A rented car? I have no idea. But he was definitely driving a car. My memory is of Frank and me being in the back of a taxi, but things are a bit vague. There were two or three more cars or taxis. The entire circus from the wake was transported safely to Heathrow, my first sight of the tunnel running under the runway before you arrive at the terminal.
And now this strange, frantic mixture of gaiety and sadness took on an hysterical character. Our leaving was no longer something in the future. It was at hand, right here and now. Our moveable feast found itself in an airport bar. My mother was in tears as she hugged the O’Leary’s. Kathleen was in tears as she hugged the boyfriend. I didn’t see the farewell between my mother and Joe, but as I looked for him, he finally came to me. We hugged, both of us crying, tears streaming down our faces. “God bless you, boy,” he said. “Take care of your mother. Write to me.” And we got on the plane.
***You can find 14 years of vivid memories of what life was like in the rural west of Ireland in James Harvey’s memoir, Grappling. With. Ghosts: Childhood Memories From Postwar Ireland London. Midwest Book Review describes the book as "a deftly crafted and inherently fascinating memoir . . . Exceptionally well written, and thoroughly 'reader-friendly.’" ***
You can order the book at this link: https://tinyurl.com/bdzrhbur