The story of the first twenty-one years of my life came to me when I attended a twenty first birthday party several years ago. Everyone looked so young that even the not so young made me feel a little old. More important it was all so..................normal, and as it should be. The transition from childhood to manhood was complete and the rest would be up to the boy who was now a man. I glanced over at his beaming parents looking with pride on their son and was happy for them and all under this roof tonight. After a while, the beer took me down memory lane, and maybe too far down, for I saw myself at my own twenty first birthday party and the journey that I had taken to get there. The fact that I did get there at all lies an incredible story and the one I have come to tell. It might also have been the one that might never have been for most of my nine lives were used quicker than any cat in the surviving of it all. It started in London for me in 1956, born to parents who did not want me or my brother born the year before.

They brought us to Ireland six months later and left us to the care of our grandparents in County Kerry. Aside from a three month reunion five years after that, they then abandoned us to a reformatory school in the west of the country. We would end up in a place where even devil feared to thread, trapped in a world surrounded by children that were just like anyone else. We would go on to make the best of it.

These children were all victims of circumstance with most of it thought to have been a crime. Illegitimacy and single mothers topped the list that ran all the way down to fallen women and forbidden fruit, that included stealing apples from trees. There were also the orphans without parents and those like me that had them. None of it could have happened at all in a democracy but Ireland of yesteryear did not have one.

Back then, it was a country ruled by old men and Rome, with a constitution to prove it. England ruled what was left. Because of it, many children's rights got lost in translation that were like me and the many thousands of others who were not. It is partly their story of course and the search for my parents who did not want to be found. In the end it all had more laughter than tears if only because it was me, and my enemies make for a great story. Time and circumstance had changed everything that would mean I would never call my father Daddy and he would never call me son, for we both had not earned that right. But it would have been a beginning, and for me thats what it was always about.

In the retracing of those twenty-one years I found my own story so incredible it felt at times that it was about someone else. I could feel the and relinan pumping again in the writing of it, and then relief........ I have little regret that it happened at all for I rarely get bored remembering those years and of the memories of the many good people that I met along the way. My family was the one that never was and could never have been and reality was all that I had. It was the moulding and reshaping of that reality that would determine my survival. So for a little while you might want to sit back and enjoy an old story that happens to be true.

Barry Clifford 


Twenty-one years