some thoughts on (be)longing

Ireland, North East England, what we mean by 'home'

“Almost every boy in my class wants to be a footballer, although they’re split down the middle in allegiance, half-Mackem, half-Geordie, mirroring the same identity crisis of a town where Newcastle sets the postcodes but Sunderland empties the bins. On Tyne and Wear derby day, Washington pubs have a strict no team shirts policy; the landlords know how quickly friendly rivalry can curdle into broken glass and teeth.” - from Commonplace, my memoir

There were pit villages once. But after the pits were closed and tarmaced over, they built smart 1960s semis with neat lawns and a grey pebble-dashed shopping centre called The Galleries. The newspapers hailed the arrival of a new “ultra-modern age”; a concrete haven where shoppers could find their bread, their meat, their two veg and their pudding all under one roof! Princess Anne arrived to cut the ribbon in a wing-collared blouse and a natty hat. She smiled at the clumsy curtsies and the impenetrable accents.

I like to think it’s at this moment - a Princess photographed at the foot of a gleaming escalator - that Washington New Town was truly born.

Washington has a number of dubious claims to fame. Bryan Ferry went to the former grammar school, now one of several comprehensives. Heather Mills-McCartney - Paul McCartney’s most terrible wife - grew up here. Then there’s the rags-to-riches folklore of several footballers issuing forth from Washy’s terraced streets and housing estates.

There is a proper legend - the folktale-cum-ballad of The Lambton Worm - but it pales in the glamour stakes against Roxy Music, Auf Wiedersehn, Pet and football. In Washington, it always seems to come back to football.

For a long time, I felt belonging was a binary issue. Like football, you had to swear an allegiance. Be one thing or another.

Geordie or Mackem?

Northern or Southern?

English or Irish?

Spit it out. What are you?

David Ginola! Be still my beating heart.

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“The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories.” So writes Hua Hsu, born in America to Taiwanese parents, in his 2022 memoir Stay True. I fold the corner of the page so I can come back to this sentence again. I find it comforting.

My dad came to London aged 16 from the rural West of Ireland. He was the youngest of nine siblings - “the scrapings of the barrel”, so went my grandfather’s joke - and the last to leave. There was nothing - literally nothing - for him at home. His years of physical graft still make me feel guilty about my soft hands and idle hours.

He met my mum - who was born in Britain to Irish parents, and raised between Camden Town and County Mayo - and they married in London. Shortly afterwards, they moved to the North East where my Uncle Joe was contracting. “Get yourself up here, Michael,” he told Dad over the phone. “These Geordies are more like the Irish than the Irish.”

And so they did. My parents didn’t have a specific dream for themselves, other than food on the table and money in their pockets. When I ask Big Questions like ‘Who am I? Where do I belong?’ a little voice pipes up - not my parents’, but a scornful aunt, perhaps. “Will ye cop yourself on?”

Derek Zoolander pouting into a puddle and asking ‘Who am I?’

But it’s OK to ask these questions. “The children of recent immigrants feel discomfort at a molecular level,” Hsu writes later on in Stay True. Another folded corner.

I’m white and English-speaking. I have the (uncomfortable) option of assimilation. My sense of dislocation is often invisible. But, I remind myself, there are instances - more than you might think - where that ‘molecular discomfort’ rears its head. Note the choice of words. Not outrage, not fury, nothing as straightforward as that. Discomfort.

- When an English policeman pulls Dad over for indicating late, then claims he can smell alcohol on his breath.

“When did you last have a drink, sir?”

“Thirty years ago.”

After he breathalyses him - negative - he says it must have been the fumes from a nearby brewery.

- On holiday in Ireland in a pub with my brother. A group of teenagers are playing pool. Once they hear our accents, they start speaking to each other in Irish.

- When the coach at my rowing club, having met Dad once, says, “We could do with some fresh tarmac here - you must come across that in your line of work?”

- When my student landlord tells me that the family next door are noisy and their kids are badly behaved, adding “they’re Irish” by way of explanation.

- When one of my cousin’s friends starts to explain the Catholic mass to me at a family funeral: “Then there’s the Gospel, then the bidding prayers come after the homily…”

- When a paramedic asks the man sitting next to me in the hospital waiting room to manoeuvre himself in a certain way: “I know it might sound a bit Irish,” she says, “but it’s not as daft as it sounds.”

- When a newspaper reveals that Pontins, the budget holiday camp chain, keeps an internal list of ‘undesirable names’. There are 40 surnames on the list, all Irish. McDonagh is there. I receive the article from friends on WhatsApp, in DMs. NO PONTINS FOR ME I type back. I send crying emojis. But truthfully, it boils my piss. At the same time, it feels like a scalding.

- When the email arrives from Cubs inviting my children to take part in the Remembrance Day parade. I reply to say that they won’t be attending. I don’t say why.

You’re being touchy, I tell myself. But touchy suggests something superficial, and this runs deep.

Summer holidays in Ireland. I’m slap bang in the middle with the excellent fringe.

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“Where? Where feels like home? Nowhere in Ireland feels entirely like home, either. That time when I was twelve when we went to the Gaeltacht - our first time away from home - the other little girls sobbed for a day or two before they settled down. But I wasn’t any more homesick than usual. I think you can be born homesick. I think you can have a disclocated heart. No place will do.”

- Nuala O’Faolain, Almost There

My brother lives in America. He’s developed the breezy air of a Yank when talking about who he is and where he’s from. Having a handle on your identity is celebrated in the US (well, maybe it is if you’re white and English speaking). I’m Irish, he says. I grew up in England. No qualms, no stress. The simplest of elevator pitches.

I, on the other hand, have a tendency to work on things, to fret. My instagram profile bio reads sentimental fool. Maybe I should change it to born homesick.

I come across Timothy O’Grady book I Could Read The Sky - a fictionalised memoir of an Irishman working and living and dying in Kentish Town - and I devour it. I send a copy to Mike, another Irishman in England, a friend from my writing group. Magnificent, he writes. It helps to see this exists. I feel vindicated.

The title comes from a list of things the narrator could do: “I could mend nets. Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket of reeds. Splint the leg of a cow. Cut turf. Build a wall. Go three rounds with Joe in the ring Da put up in the barn. I could dance sets. Read the sky…” It goes on. Simple, rural activities, rich in cultural nuance.

Chapters later, there’s a list of what he couldn’t do. “Eat a meal lacking potatoes. Trust a bank. Wear a watch. Ask a woman to go for a walk…Speak with men wearing collars. Stay afloat in water. Understand their jokes. Face the dentist. Kill a Sunday. Stop remembering.” The list is similarly rich in cultural nuance. A culture that doesn’t belong to him, an emigrant, an immigrant, an outsider.

The book is about exile, really. “How many feet of tunnelling to buy a coffin?” he asks towards the end, reflecting on a life of hard work - and for what? To leave instructions, a key to a box with the money in, for the girl who lives in the downstairs flat to find. To be brought back home - home home, the emphasis always on the first word - to Ireland in a brown box. He looks at his battered hands; out over the roads and city he helped build. “What happens within the brick walls? Do the people there think of the men who built them?”

“Exile is not a word” writes Peter Woods. “It is a continuing atrocity. It is the purgatorial triumph of memory over topography.”

O’Faolain is being flippant; she knows ‘homesick’ isn’t an adequate word to describe the feeling that goes hand-in-hand with exile. ‘Atrocity’? ‘Purgatorial’? Yes, I think. They’re proper words to describe the emigrant in I Could Read the Sky and the thousands of others like him.

For them, songs about dark mountains and islands of green were more than nostalgia. They’re the songs of a generation who went to England or beyond and couldn’t travel back on a whim or a Ryanair flight. Many never returned home, swallowed up instead by drink or dysfunctional marriages or shame at finding themselves lost in a city with the odds stacked against them.

But even those who ‘made it’, who found work, who forged happy unions and had healthy children, who enjoyed the privilege of trips back home, paid a price. Their forfeit was waking up one morning and realising they didn’t know where home was anymore. That the place they remembered had vanished, morphed into something else. And worse still, they found that they had changed forever, too.

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When Mum died, all of Dad’s “maybe one day” dreams of going back to Ireland were ended. She died unexpectedly, and so we had to make a decision as to where to bury her. We settled on Mere Knolls Cemetery in Sunderland, overlooking the sea, where the wind blows light over the graves in dancing waves. On the back of her headstone is a John O’Donohue blessing: “May there come across the waters a path of yellow moonlight to lead you safely home.” He’s pragmatic about the fact his destiny lies in the same plot, under the same stone.

On 23 March 2020, three months after the funeral, we - me, my husband, our two (at the time) boys, Dad - lined up on our sofa to watch Boris Johnson’s televised announcement. He talked about disease, ventilators, intensive care beds, police, closing shops, compliance. His tidy hair, his soberly interlaced fingers, were an abhorrence. “This moment of national emergency,” he said, and it was as if the world had been struck with a tuning fork; everything humming with the powerful sense of history happening in real time. “Prick,” Dad muttered as the visual faded to black.

Over the subsequent weeks and months, it became clear that Dad was struggling with being cut off from Ireland. After Mam died, it would have made sense for him to go back - home home, that phrase again - for an extended break. With just about all travel banned, it’s like going back in time to when he was a young man with no money for the boat.

He rings his two surviving sisters daily, the conversations dominated by deaths and the dying. Meanwhile, Irish funeral directors mobilise to livestream requiem Masses by Facebook. Dad watches them on his new iPad, shaking his head at the empty pews and masked priests. Wouldn’t a dog deserve better than that? he asks.

It’s not all bleak. For a lockdown birthday, I buy him some singing lessons with a teacher who, like the funeral directors, has moved into a remote offering. He looks mystified when I tell him. Then, from nowhere, he offers up a story from when he was 12 or so and his father, Paddy-the-Singer, had friends round for a session. They would play in Quarryfield’s ‘good room’ - the one on the left as you look at the long, low-browed chalk-coloured building from the road - in that easy, collaborative Irish way. When it came to Dad’s turn, he had to go out of the room and stand on the stairs. It was only there, in the dark, that he could attempt a tune. I didn’t want anyone looking at me, he says.

After his first lesson with Maggi, he’s audibly excited. It’s all about the muscles, he says. And the breathing. Then a pause. Give her a text now and ask her how I got on. Don’t let on you’ve been speaking to me. He preens when the word comes back from Maggi that he has a “lovely voice’” He practises with YouTube karaoke versions of folky and country songs: The Fields of Athenry, When You Were Sweet Sixteen, The Mountains of Mourne. Familiar airs and nostalgic words bleed through the walls.

And there’s another sound, something new: laughter.

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At the weekend, we go up to the North East - me, my husband, the boys - looking for houses we’ve seen on RightMove listings. We drive through countryside, coastal towns, urban fringe. After twenty years of being elsewhere, the scenery is simultaneously strange and familiar. What kind of person lives here? I wonder, trying to conjure up a version of me who lives in a 1930s semi, or a beachside villa, or an old farmhouse. But glimpses gleaned from a car window aren’t enough to feed my imagination. None of the versions feel real.

We walk over the sands from Cullercoats to Tynemouth along with dozens of other families and dog-walkers. We keep the three-year-old going by pointing out the lighthouse in the distance: Let’s go and see who lives there! Later, the Metro back to our parked car shuttles past streets and houses, fences, trampolines, sheds, windows flashing yellow in the late afternoon sun. I close my eyes, hold onto the overhead bar, feel the shuddering rhythm of the carriage, catch my breath.

Is going back somewhere going backwards? Is it even possible to ‘go back’ when everything - including you - has changed? What if the thing I’m trying to recreate no longer exists? Why here? Why not Ireland? Why not anywhere else? Sometimes it feels as if there’s no end to the questions I could ask.

On the way back to York, I connect my phone to the car stereo system and put on a Jimmy Nail song. I sing along loudly, overdoing it to hide the real sentiment I feel:

'Cause this is a mighty town
Built upon a solid ground
And everything they've tried so hard to kill
We will rebuild.

For this was a big river…

Mortifyingly, I feel my eyes prickle with tears. Sentimental fool. We’re still north of Washington, both sides of the A1 marked by industrial estates and retail parks. I’ve done this journey hundreds of times. In less than an hour, I know they’ll fall away way to rolling fields and farmland.

Half-term’s coming up, my husband says. We could book an Airbnb. Have a proper look around.

Yeah, I say, we could do that. Let’s.

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This newsletter was inspired by two things: firstly, an upcoming online event which I’m doing THIS Friday 24 January. Join me and artists Alaa Alsaraji and Sila Sen in conversation with Daniel Regan on the theme of migration and home 12-1:30pm. I’ll be talking about All This Stuff as well as doing a short reading from Commonplace. Tickets are free - get them here.

And secondly, this wonderful personal essay by Annie MacManus on home, on Irishness, and on living in the seams. Annie’s writing always makes me think, but this piece is particularly mind-blowing. READ IT!

Thanks for being here x

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I’m Laura McDonagh and I’m a second-generation Irish writer from the north-east of England.

My work explores memory, grief, social class, how place and identity intersect, being Irish in Britain, the 90s (💖) and more.

Subscribe to my Substack ‘Guess what? Me’ and I will love you forever IDEMT.xxx