My father had joined the great mass of immigrants that left for England in the 1950s, fleeing poverty, and social repression with little hint for change. In the Irish districts of London he fell in with a disenfranchised and largely uneducated minority of others like him.

The passport to this world was backbreaking work, drinking, and fighting. Every monday they would start the cycle all over again. By Friday, these same women and men would gather in the dance halls that dotted Kilburn, New Cross. They were there to party and looking for love. Some found it.

In that climate and among them went my yet to be nineteen-year old father and thirty-four year old mother. She already had two children from a previous relationship who were hidden from the world, and to my dad. On a Saturday night in 1955 they would at last meet, hoping to find in each other that special person to start a new life with but created two lives instead. One son, Michael Jr., would soon follow, while another son named Barry, who happened to be me, would join later.

Almost forty years on in December of 1995, my fathers own life ended in London. I arrived there from New York a day too late chasing his voice at the end of his last phone call, He had taken the bus home and must have passed me in the air for I didn't know he had died until the plane touched down at Heathrow. He left behind a few souvenirs. On his worn-out body hung a well-worn suit, and in his apartment lay several empty bottles of wine. There were also his eyeglasses and a fifty-pence piece. These he willed to me without malice or intended humour. At the crematorium here was nothing left to do now except bend over his head and kiss his forehead. Then I whispered into his ear, "Michael you are at peace at last, your pain is over." I sat back on a chair beside him, alone with him and my thoughts. Soon those thoughts drifted towards my mother and settled on a troubled memory of her all those years ago.

On an evening in November of 1975, in London, I went to visit my mother at her latest address. It was a homeless women's hostel housed in a an old workhouse. The Victorian ages screamed from its walls as rows of beds lay before me, each separated by tattered hanging curtains acting as a thin veil of privacy afforded each woman from the other.

Voices bounced off tiled walls and tired floors where old and young women converged. Some stood around lost in thought while some lay in their beds, dribbling in saliva with vacant stares. Most of the women wore drab and old clothing, uniformed only by their poverty and despair. A people set adrift in a "Promised Land." Their eyes were without hope or dignity, left only with a distant and uncertain memory.

For me, at age nineteen, this was only the third time in my life to have met my mother and it was a hell of a fright to find her in this place. The second time I met her, was two weeks previously when she borrowed money from me, and before that I had not seen her since I was five years old.

She had been chatting away to an elderly lady just as I came in and both were fighting to get a word in edgeways. Looking at them I felt they had a lot in common, listening to them I knew they had. This old dear once may have been titled but had since fallen from grace and was living on aristocratic musings of days gone by and little else. As I watched her talking to my mother, she reminded me of the song, Like a Rolling Stone, by Bob Dylan. "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose; You're invisible now..." Her face still showed evidence of a long since faded youth and beauty. Neither of them now had "secrets to conceal." This lady still spoke in a clipped posh accent and still carried herself with a certain refinement and a touch of class. I wondered to myself as to who put the old lady in this waiting room for hell. A faint sparkle of life came to my mother's eyes when she saw me before her. She tugged at the old lady's sleeve and said excitedly, "This is my son, Barry." She dropped the sentence proudly. "He is a policeman," she added, beaming from ear to ear. I just nodded pleasantly at the old lady, my mother was happy in her fantasy world; the fact that she was happy at all; mattered. Some days I got to be a doctor and the odd occasion I even turned up as myself. At times it was a make believe world for me too, trying to play happy families to a mother who never knew me or ever wanted too. She found solace in that make-believe world, and as her present state and surroundings would seem to indicate otherwise, I was happy for her.

Her blood continued to fight through her clogged arteries until 1992 when she suffered a massive and fatal heart attack in front of my father. She was seventy-two years old. From her middle years onward, she had continued to be an on/off homeless person, passing the time away sometimes with my father in the lonely embrace of the hopeless. She passed away from this world six weeks before I knew she was dead and lies somewhere in an unknown cemetery in a pauper's grave in London.

Back in the quiet of the funeral parlor as my mother's image left my thoughts, I looked at my Father's face for the last time. It had been a while since he looked this good.

Even in death appearances were deceiving for his worn-out liver gave him a tanned and healthy look, with a face that was unlined and hair that had no gray. In life too, he always looked a bit deceptive and a bit curious in that seven day suit he always wore. With his cleanest dirty shirt, collar to the wind, and secondhand shoes, he looked what he was, a man with no purpose on the road to nowhere. That life in its youth was so full of promise. A life that would be crushed out by his insecurities, guilt, and inherent loneliness. He would drown the lot of it in alcohol. His body and mind gladly gave up the fight at fifty-eight years of age when at last his release came.

My brother, Michael, had refused to enter the funeral home for fear of opening up old wounds and deep resentments. My thoughts then turned to him. He suffered a great deal in his life, not least from the fact that he was sensitive and easily slighted. He was also a pain in the arse and too damn serious for my liking. Our lives played to the same background, and by the time our teenage years had ended, as with all people, we had become very different men.

I always found him to be hard work and even harder to please, but I would always love him.

He was now waiting outside in the car with the engine running, which didn't help matters. At last, I kissed my Father's hand, stroked that fine head of hair of his and with a nod towards him, said to myself, "See you around, Dad." I felt a sense of closure as I stepped out of the funeral home. It was like the end of an adventure, or a misadventure of sorts. Its beginnings lay back somewhere when I was knee high to a large "Jack Russell" and wore a little boys clothes living in the village of Kilaglin in the kingdom they called Kerry, at a house we called home.

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