Michael O'Callaghan: Togher, Emigration, Summer Holidays,

C OC: So, just to kick off there, you might tell me your name.

M OC Michael O’Callaghan. I’m from Togher. My mother, my father and myself left Cork in 1960. I was only three. To go to London. Big adventure. I have strong memories of sailing on the old black and white Inishfallen from the quays below because it seemed a very very sad thing. Not like today, travelling. As the ship was leaving all the people would start singing, and the song still haunts me. They sing the song ‘now is the hour when we must say goodbye’. So, you could have a couple of hundred people because a lot of people getting on that boat weren’t going away for a weekend. They might never come back. And there used to be people wailing and crying on the ship. And my mother and me father, me mother especially, would be crying a lot. But the ship would go slowly down, and you could drive down Low Road in both directions, and there’d be cars following it down all the way. And then you had a long sea journey to Fishguard. You’d leave. I’d memories of leaving Cork about six o’clock in the evening, arriving in Fishguard in the middle of the night. A long wait then in the cold, and the smell of fish in Fishguard and someone told me it’s dead mullet. I know now, and also Bovril. If you mention to a lot of people Bovril, it seemed it was all you could get there. And I still to this day can’t. If I smell Bovril I can’t take it. Then you’d have a five or six hour journey by train from Fishguard to Paddington. And the other way round then, we’d come home every summer. My Grandmother lived in Glenabbey Street, and she hadn’t electric light. This was in the sixties. She actually hadn’t electricity, and I can still remember the gas lamps, the lamps would be lit. She’d cook on the fire. And I can still remember the food, and at night they’d just sit there talking for hours. I’d have been seven, eight, nine or ten. But I used to love it. With my grandfather and my grandmother. The house is still in Glenabbey Street. Now it’s rented accommodation. There’s students in there. But that black Inisfallen. I bought a photograph of it from The Examiner. It was a memory I’ll never forget that song and the smell of Bovril.

C OC That’s so vivid. Do you remember how the song went.

M OC No. You can get it on the internet if you Google it. Now is the hour when we must say goodbye. Soon you will be sailing far across the sea. If you google it you’ll get the words. I don’t know. It’s an American/Irish singer but if you play that song I guarantee to anyone in their fifties and older, they’ll think of that. But then I can also remember we’d come home in the summer, the long train journey from Paddington to Fishguard, then you’d get on the ship but in the morning she’d pass Roche’s Point about seven o’clock in the morning, and I can remember coming up the river. I can remember passing the marina, in the morning, and people waving at the boat. That was a happy time. My mother would be up doing her make up, I can remember and all that. And the boat would come up to where the river splits there by, I don’t know the name of the quay there

C OC The Port of Cork.

M OC The Cork building. Just before that the boat would actually do a turn to be facing out to sea again. If I remember rightly we used to arrive on a Sunday morning but then she’d sail Sunday evening again. But it was a long slow journey. The boat stank as far as I was concerned. It was a floating pub. But they used to keep cattle underneath as well. And I’d be sick the day before we travelled with worry, and I’d be sick the day after we arrived having travelled. But the memories of that ship and that song. Get the song from Google, ‘Now is the hour when we have to say goodbye’. But it was like a coffin ship going off. And also arriving. When you arrived the Customs would go through your case. And a big lump of chalk would be plastered on the case, that was to get you through the security. If the chalk was on your case you were OK. So that’s me.

C OC Wow. Jeepers. Thanks for that. That’s really vivid.

M OC It was a long way away at that stage. We used to ring home, now me mother used to write letters to my grandfather. And he’d write back and the letters would come religiously every week from him. Maybe once a fortnight from my mother. Not as quick. Things got a bit better then, we’d ring from a phone box to a phone box on the North side to my aunt, via operators. We’d be shoving in two bob bits and all the rest of it. I can remember he’d ring on a Friday night. There could be a queue at the phone box, or there could be a queue at the phone box in Farranree. So they’d be waiting at both ends. You’d ring and someone else would pick up the phone. London was a long way away then.

C OC Can you remember the first time that you came back for the summer and your impressions of Cork then after having been in London?

M OC Yeah. I didn’t want to go back to London. Cause we were playing with relations in the North side and relations in Ballyphehane. In London it was a rather built up area where we lived. So we came back here. And I’d be gone in the morning and dragged in late at night, having been out playing football, kick the can, which I’d never heard of, and all those things. So I used to be depressed going back to London. It was just outdoor, always sunny. Red lemonade, I’d never seen. White vinegar I’d never seen. And Taytos. Rasa was a phrase. My Grandad used to take me to the pub. I didn’t realise he was getting it for nothing. You know, it was for half nothing that I’d be drinking Rasa. Also getting I’d be hanging my parents now [inaudible phrase], getting the bus to Crosshaven. We’d go to Crosshaven with my cousins. They’d go into the pub and myself and my cousins clung to the wall outside the pub, in the corner of Crosshaven for hours. We set our DNAs on that wall definitely. And then we’d come home in the evening and for years we used to talk about Crosshaven. And I’d say ‘sure there’s nothing there’. I didn’t think there was anything in Crosshaven. I just thought it was a square. Honestly. So in later years I brought my own children down there. I found Graball Bay [sounds like], and all those. But the bus to Crosshaven for the pub. Everyone did it. Stayed in the pub all day, and then got the bus back. That was the adventure. Also when I used to come I was the rich person from England. Choc Ices. My cousins still joke about Mick coming home with the Choc Ices. We’d go to the shop and I’d have money for Choc Ices, which they wouldn’t have got. We had some money but the lads here didn’t have as much. And two other things, I’ll bore you to tears. My aunts had televisions with slot machines in them. You’d put money in and that’s how they paid the rental on the television. The television shops in town. They couldn’t afford the rent on the telly. So there was a slot machine on the telly same as a ESB machine. So you’d be watching it, and the next thing the money would go and the telly would go. So someone would run looking for a shilling or two bob to put into it. You’d get an hour or two hours out of it. And the last one was they used to put blue plastic over the television trying to pretend it was colour. Honestly.

C OC Brilliant!

M OC I thought it was a wind up. But they did. But the slot machines for the television, I remember that now, just come back to me there. You might get an hour for a shilling or something. But in the middle of something it would go. I thought it was prehistoric. I’d colour telly in London at this stage. I thought it was totally prehistoric. And always one channel or two channels. But I loved it back here. I didn’t want to go home. We came home for good in ’74. Thank God. I was seventeen.

C OC What was that like now, arriving back from London at seventeen?

M OC That was a little bit of a shocker because I’d settled down in London. I’d lots of friends there, but I settled down very quickly. And I took my father, [pause], we’d a big birthday recently. My daughter was twenty. I was fifty and my dad was eighty and I took him back to London for the first time since ’74. And we stayed near where we lived. Where we lived now is in the Kensington area. At the time it was a little bit run down, now it’s all millionaires there. It was just amazing to see it. But I had it for a few days. And I took my children there a few years before that to see where I went to school. School in London. It was nice to see it. It was nice to come home. London is grand for a week. But, everywhere we went in London was Irish, Irish, Irish. We’d often have Cork people staying in our house for a night or two, that had come over. And the Irish clubs, the Irish pubs full of Cork people. Everywhere. They were everywhere. That’s my memories of London now.

C OC Well, thank you very much. Excellent.

End of Interview