There seemed little to do now around Galway, or it was just a restlessness that hung around when no one else would. Life meandered a bit, stuck in neutral gear of drinking and messing about, and not much to report except for one night when I met Sammy and told him I was leaving. The drink flowed in the pub with Sammy getting quite upset at my news. I did not notice much at first with both of us swirling in the emotions of Arthur Guinness. We staggered off to Seapoint, the local dance hall, to make the usual fool of ourselves in front of women, hoping the dance floor would lead to someone's bedroom. An attractive girl took me up on my awkward invitation to dance, with Sammy sulking that I got one. As I swirled around with her to the music of Joe dolan, another guy pushed hard against me who must have felt the same way as Sammy did. Turns out it was jealous by association for he had been rejected by her just before I came along and was now dancing with a girl uglier than he was.

Trying to be tactful, I ignored him until he did it again. The usual pride and honour had to be defended as we lashed into each other. He went down on one knee ready to be knighted with a clenched fist suspended and waiting over his head. At that moment his buddy jumped on me piggy back style, getting a free ride while throwing punches from all sides. Sammy saw enough and was on him in a flash, berating him as he pulled him to the floor telling him in an eerie loud whisper to let it be a fair fight. The man did not need to be told twice as he saw the maniacal look of Sammy with flaring nostrils staring back at him. A small crowd gathered round and the fight was back on, well, kind of. The other guy was still on one knee caught in freeze frame and I just waited. Not a good idea. That's when he bit hard just above my wrist and held there like a pitbull, his heavy breathing giving away the desperation of all that he had left. It was a new move to me and I could do only one thing, beat his head with my right hand. I let rip until my arm got tired but he still held, and then I followed up with several kicks to his chest. It was then he blinked and rolled over. Sammy grabbed me and we both ran to an exit door as a parade of bouncers headed in our direction. We crashed through the exit, down a flight of stairs and into the street leaving them staring after us. We eventually found a park bench a good distance away and collapsed laughing. Going over the event in glorious detail, our laughter at last fell off into a comfortable silence. I thought it a good time to remind Sammy again that I was leaving for England. Sammy listened quietly and then to my great surprise, started crying. In between sobs he asked, "who will he have now" and announced that I was his best friend. He then gathered himself together a few minutes later, became quiet again and simply walked off into the night. I walked home alone with bewilderment and could not shake it off for several days. Sammy did not call around again and I just presumed he was either embarrassed or angry or both. What I did not know was that Sammy was not just volatile but got over things just as quickly, so fast in fact he was in england before I knew he had even left.

By that monday my arm swelled badly from the bite and had to stop work. As the week passed during my recovery, it gave me time to pause. By the following Sunday my mind was almost made up that it was time to leave. I was now eighteen years old with enough skill behind me to lay a few bricks and not be called a 'chancer or cowboy,' and Mum and Dad were becoming an itch for they were still a mystery and I felt it was time we met.

The only relation I had in Galway was gone, friends I had few, and felt more of an outsider than ever before in this place. The gaps of my life had to be filled in as best I knew how. So far it had been someone else's version, and the truth lay out there somewhere. That in itself was a little ambitious. My decision was made, England, here I come.

I quit my job and to my surprise they said they would miss me. There was enough money in my pocket to get me the boat across, and enough left over for at least a week. I had progressed to a ruck sack by now for my clothes, and a canvas sack for my tools, and carried with them an insatiable appetite for what to- morrow might bring. Arriving in Dublin, the sense of excitement stayed with me and would carry itself all the way to London and then some. When the boat landed at Holyhead, I knew that this was another country even if I woke up in it after being in a coma. It looked, felt, and smelled different, and they all talked funny too. It was after all, the land of my birth. I arrived exhausted twelve hours later in Euston station in London, and from there I went straight to Piccadilly Circus, a place I just had to see. Surrounded by over fifteen million people living under twenty square miles, there was not one around to lend a helping hand.

This was a road I knew well, though the sheer size of the place had me rattled. People came in all different shapes, sizes, colours and opinions. Some opinions were louder than others by the way they dressed, or the version of whatever bible they carried, and nobody cared. I was amazed at the sight of it all. I called the only phone number I had, a friend of a friend of a friend called Paddy. He told me to stay at the subway station in Piccadilly and wait. My great adventure in England had begun.

Paddy had a nice little flat in Kilburn one of the many suburbs of inner city London.

This was shared by another guy called Sheamus and both were from Galway and about five years older than me. For now, I was grateful for their charity but needed a job quickly to pay my way. It was friday, so at least there was a chance to relax a bit and temper my excitement a little. This was the seventies and you knew it. On the walls of the flat hung photos of Rod Stewart and Gary Glitter, and the lads were parading around in shirts with outsize collars, while Pink Floyd were rocking the aisles. Elvis hair locks was in and teenage girls preferred David essex. But to be Irish was not hip or cool for the IRA was an omnipresence that cooled the atmosphere between Irish and English. Paddy warned me to be careful what I said to strangers pubs, in particular ones with english accents even though this was england. In this he need not have worried for I had not a political point of view just yet.

Paddy was a strange one. Big, blond, showy, and carried a John Wayne swagger. He liked the fact he was big and had a fan in Sheamus who was quite his opposite, being slight of build and mousy. Paddy also liked the idea he was helping me because the role might bring more plaudits from yet another fan, me. I was just glad for the help. That monday I set off alone with an A to Z book map of London, and began searching the building sites for a job.

With each step of the day I became enthralled more with London and all it's life. It did not bother me that I did not get a job. One foreman told me to get lost for he thought I looked about sixteen. At eighteen years old, I fell into that philosophy of when you are too young you want to look old and when you are old you want to look young. {Writing this, I'm in the latter category now.} Another guy told me to 'fuck off you Irish bastard'. Yet another kindly face with a deep cockney accent told me to try again in a couple of days. I did and got the only vacancy left.

This site was a huge area and on it a school was to be built. This job had an array of characters that I would never see in lily white catholic Ireland. There was indians, jamaicans, polish, germans, spanish and more that I did not get to meet. My naivety was a blessing as I listened to their stories and the circumstance of their lives. One german stood out.

His name was Hans and had come to england as a prisoner of the second world war.

Realizing quickly that he was not going to be tortured or murdered, he settled out the next three years of the war in a happy camp tempered by occasional boredom. When peace came at last it did not come to him. He found out his entire family had been killed in an air raid over his town. He was on his own now, and at twenty two years old his future lay out in front of him and he decided it would be in England. He applied for asylum, married a welch girl, sister of a guard at his concentration camp and settled in Wales. That guard, Henry, was a bricklayer, and showed hans how to be one. Hans had been a tiler in Germany and had an eye for the bricks and took to it easily. In time, these best friends and in- laws moved to London and were now working side by side with me. Hans had a peculior welsh / german accent and I could understand him, and strangely his buddy, Henry, less so. And then there was Godfrey, the Jamaican.

Godfrey saw everything in black and white with conspiracies everywhere against the black man and every other man that was not white, and in him I found a good man. In short time I helped him see beyond all that and made him and me a little more colour blind and both of us learned from each other. Then there was Lesley, an embittered Londoner that resented all foreigners black or white, and any shade in between with the Irishman at the top of that list.

Lesley's real prejudice was what he had become, and had lost his once happier life, at least in his head. His ex - wife was a bitch and his children not much better and he never seemed to think that he might have something to do with it all. He was my partner for the next couple of weeks and it was all down hill.

One day, we were both building a brick wall about twenty five feet long and nine feet high.

At both ends, separately, we built up the corners first and then started to fill in the middle after putting up a line to keep them straight. The problem was we arrived at the same height in coursing but not the same amount of bricks, thirty six. Lesly had thirty five. Four courses from the top he realized his mistake. At mid monday morning and several beers behind him, it was an easy one to make. In my mischievous way I hid behind the wall and started to grunt like a pig loudly. A time honoured tradition for this inattention to detail and normally taken in good humour except Leslie lacked the humour bit. It had long since departed him too with all the other people in his life. As I grunted some more I never saw or heard Leslie on the scaffold behind the wall swinging a level with all his force towards my head aiming to put me in a very horizontal position. His anger was on auto pilot and the only thing that saved him from a murder charge and me from the morgue was the foreman who smelled trouble three courses of bricks earlier. He was a big man who pulled Leslie back from the point of no return like a rag doll and grabbed the level from his hand. Leslie was fired on the spot and I came a away with a completely different point of view of the foreman and Englishman in general.

For a while, a routine passed around my life with the usual mix of drinking and fighting that passed for entertainment on a weekend. One week-end it could not get any crazier or weirder even if it were fiction. It all started when I bought a Sunday buss pass to take in more of the sights of London but would see a lot more than I bargained for.

The bus pulled up at Victoria station, a very busy train area full of passengers, transients, and prostitutes among the lost and found. For no particular reason I stepped off the bus here. Curiosity driven, I waded into the hustle and bustle of this crossroads of life. Looking round, my eyes fixed on a corner cafe, and I blinked hard, twice.

Then I pinched myself, twice. In this city where millions of people lived, on a bench outside that cafe no more than a couple of hundred away was Michael, my brother, and Sammy, dressed between the image of skinheads and hippies sipping tea like only an Englishman could. Our eyes had locked together at the same time and our shock could only be measured by our joy.

Several hours later, as the excitement leveled off, the stories of our lives had caught up with each other again. Sammy had met Michael at these same crossroads a few months before, brought here by the underground network of lost souls who whispered that this was a good place to find one. Sammy hung out in this place for several weeks before Michael joined him. There were now squatting in a house nearby in one of the several thousands of homes that were abandoned all round London by mortgage de faulters, landlords and others that were just left to the elements and the growing bands of homeless people. With the normal luxuries of leaky roof, dodgy plumbing, and spirits in the night, they were not complaining. Michael and Sammy made a living from the usual reliable sources. Phone boxes, coins on the street, an unpaid meal, and sometimes lead sashes from abandoned buildings. All supplemented with a little dole money, and they were not complaining. They got lucky in trash cans, fighting off the competition from hale and hearty rats, and were not complaining. Only I was. Filling with an inner rage because of their circumstance and knowing there was nothing I could do while not knowing enough at eighteen years old. I just held it all in as usual and kept on going. Over the coming months I would go visit them weekly and gently tease from Michael the things he did not want to talk about and asked about that meeting between him and our parents shortly after he arrived in England.

"There are nothing to me, and you are wasting your time meeting them", Michael said tensely.

"They are my parents too Michael, please let me be the judge of that", I said with as much wounded indignation as I could muster, and after a long pause he gave me the address of a pub that was supposed to be our father's haunt called the Hoop Bar in an area called Notting Hill Gate. Michael had contacted our half brother, Brian, and got the address from him. I put the info into my pocket and was excited though careful not to let him know it, and before I did anything about it at all, I moved house myself a couple of weeks later.

This new place was different and I was now with new faces. The rent was cheaper and you got breakfast in the morning. The landlord was polish with an English wife, and the lodgers were two Irishmen and one Englishman. The latter was boring, while the Irish fellows were at the very least, different. The younger of the two had a beautiful jamaican ex wife that would come to visit him with their two children every Sunday out of a sense of duty and pity for he struggled hard with drink and the usual problems that came with it.

The other middle aged one had lost his fingers off two hands to a mixer on a building site and thought he had done well when he got twelve thousand pound compensation out of it. The price of a not too shabby apartment at the time. He drank all of it away and now was struggling with the rest of his fingers, whiskey, the rent, depression and every day being 'Deja Vu'.

The Englishman thought he knew everything while having nothing to show for his knowledge with a life thus far marked X while not yet forty years old. He had an x wife, mother in law, house, dog, bank account, and in his profile where the box marked bitterness, it was there too. The landlord had seen it all before and life seemed an everyday stress to him. This would be home for the next several months.

I went to work six days a week, drank two nights a week, and started to save a little money. Bought a beat up car that really was a rust bucket held together with band aids and a few nuts without quite knowing how to drive it. I became a very fast learner after almost crashing on the way out of the used car dealership, and had just gone nineteen years old. I was ready to meet Daddy On a bright summer Sunday morning I set out with the old banger, a ford anglia, and drove across the other side of London hoping to meet the man who shared my DNA and little else. I had been with him for a total of nine months of my now nineteen years in this world, spoken to him on the phone once for less than a minute in that time, felt every emotion of knowing that, and yet I was more excited than an expectant father in a maternity ward. And this particular one might not even show up. In the transient world of the homeless habits were hard to pin down and people harder to find. All my hopes were on a car that was ready to break down and a silent prayer that seemed to hold everything together. The old banger kept protesting loudly as I gently eased it into a parking spot near the Hoop Pub and shortened the distance of those nineteen years yet again by several yards with only feet to go.

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