A hard Christmas it was in London in the 1960s

An Irish immigrant remembers and thinks of home

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London, 1960s

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I was wiping the mud from a twenty foot length of half inch steel reinforcing bar with a wire brush and cursing the frost from the night before that made it harder. I had, by then passed the “barra liobar” (frozen fingers) part and the blood was circulating well despite the freezing cold. Steel is about the coldest thing you can handle in freezing weather.

It just didn’t seem like Christmas at all. I received a card from home the day before and Mam said how they were looking forward to Christmas and going to Dingle for the day with Dad to bring it home. The lads were fine, she said and they were wondering why I wasn’t coming home and she told them work was tight in England and maybe I wanted to put a bit of money away. Poor Mam, she always thought the better of me.

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Today was payday; at least there was something good about it. Tomorrow, Friday was Christmas Eve so we had money for a good booze-up if nothing else for the weekend. There were six of us staying in a boarding house in Kentish Town and since we were all from the other side the mood, to say the least, was somber. There were two from Donegal and they worked in the tunnels and made tons of money. The work was hard but, I’ll tell you, they were harder. There were three of us from West Kerry and we worked straight construction - buildings, shuttering (concrete formwork) and the like. That was hard work too but not as tough as the tunnels with the compressed air. The other fellow was from Clare, a more respectable sort of chap and he worked for British Rail as a porter.

I tried the tunnels myself once. I persuaded one of the Donegal fellows to get me a start and to tell the truth it was the money that enticed me outright. But my venture was a disaster. I started and descended into the tunnel and while there the compressed air hit me like a shot after an hour and my ears screamed with pain. They were worse again when I entered the decompression chamber and I couldn’t wait to get out. I gained a great deal of respect for the Donegal fellows after that. They both wore a medal type apparatus around their necks that gave the address of the decompression chamber of their tunnel.
 
On Christmas Eve, we worked half a day. The foreman was a sly bastard. He was as Irish as we were but when the “big knobs” from the Contractor’s office appeared on site he effected such a cockney accent that you’d swear he was born as close to “Petty Coat Lane” as the hawkers plying their trade there on Sunday. Anyway, we all chipped in and gave him a pound each for Christmas. This gesture did not emanate from generosity but rather preservation. Our erstwhile foreman could be vindictive and on payday, he would come by and ask for a light and you would hand him the box of matches with a pound note tightly squeezed in there and all would be well with the world.  Not a bad day’s take as there were twenty in our gang. But the job paid well and no one complained.

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