Welcome to the Website of Mrs R Carr

I was born in what was then the village of Tollcross on the outskirts of Glasgow, in one of a line of very humble dwelling houses called 'The Clyde Rows', single-storeyed basic dwellings like thousands of others which the owners of 19th-century mines and ironworks built and rented to their hands, convenient to the workplaces which provided their wealth. Those cramped little houses with their low windows and primitive sanitation were part of the landscape of my childhood, but I have no real memory of living there, since we moved while I was very small to live in a newly- built two-storey block called 'Greenview'. This move was a social step-up, and the rent must have been a big drain on the wages of a furnaceman in the Clyde Ironworks - which was my father's living - but it was typical of my mother to insist on it. There is a snap taken ten years later, with three or four of us ranged steps-and-stairs before the house in our pinafore dresses, which makes 'Greenview' with its central 'close' look grim enough. But it was a good dwellinghouse by the standards of the place, and we formed a friendly little community with the Kyles and McLaffertys and others who shared the block with us at different times.

My parents were immigrants from Donegal, both from the parish of Fanad, which is the peninsula lying between Mulroy Bay and Lough Swilly. I shall be saying plenty later on about Fanad and about the two of them, though their life-stories could be duplicated tens of thousands of times among those who followed the short sea- route from Derry to Glasgow to find there the living that was difficult to dig out of the rocky soil of the Donegal smallholdings on which they had been reared. Three brothers of my father's had preceded him to Glasgow and to the heavy toil of the Clyde Ironworks. There was a kind of pride in being a furnaceman, doing a job in searing heat and sometimes real danger which took much muscle and skill. My father had to give it up for reasons of health while still in his fifties, but I remember that he had by that time moved up the ranks to become what I think was called a 'filler', who controlled the mix going into the furnace and assessed the red molten mass of metal through a dark smoked glass. We children knew little enough about that world of work, though I can remember going down with a friend to deliver my father's lunchtime 'piece', and a panicky race through clouds of steam which billowed across our path and must have had something to do with the cooling process.

There will be time to talk of that when I bring together some special memories of the hardworking and loving man who was the breadwinner of our family. I am not one of those remarkable people who have cradle memories of the people and world around them, but among the earliest sounds echoing down the years must be the weary steps of my father's heavy boots in the passageway at the end of his twelve-hour shift, and the voices of my mother and him, quiet not to disturb the wee ones, as often as not talking the Donegal Gaelic which was their natural tongue.

The outside world of those first years was the broad London Road where we and neighbours' children played the traditional games of childhood, rushing to the roadside when a cart or horse-lorry appeared. There are no motor-cars in my mind's eye, though the first of them must have been rattling their way through Tollcross when I was very small. Sunday meant a morning walk, in company of many neighbouring families, to St Joseph's church, which occupied the upper floor of a building which also contained the local Catholic Primary school. No doubt I was carried along as a toddler to the original church, destroyed by fire when I was about two years old. Certainly the destruction of the Church was still a lively topic of conversation when I was old enough to listen-in: an enquiry attributed the blaze to sparks from an engine on the nearby railway-track, but of course there were plenty of people who had their own ideas about what had happened. The voice of a neighbour comes back to me: ' That was nae spark frae an engine, for oor Susanna was a wean in ma airms, and I mind seein' the flames rising, and it was nae spark from an engine!'

The combined church- and school-building was an economic solution adopted by many parishes a generation earlier, but most were supplanted around the turn of the century by Pugin-designed churches, leaving the old building for completely educational purposes. The ten-year-old parish of St Joseph's apparently committed all its resources to the large new structure, and it was not until long after the second World War that it built a freestanding church.

It is not too easy to pick out significant moments from one's recollections of childhood, or make sure they are in the right order. The events and movements that are the stuff of history-books made little impression on me, though I remember my father helping to carry some candidate shoulder-high after a Liberal victory, and my mother (rather perversely for an Irish immigrant) collecting magazine-pictures of Royal princesses, whom she seemed to know as much about as her own family.

In this as in other matters my mother took her own line, as you shall hear later on. She positively enjoyed the wrangles she had with a Donegal fellow called Pat McAteer - actually an uncle of my future husband - who was a carter on the roads from Glasgow into Lanarkshire and who would come by for a cup of tea and a chat. The chat always turned into an argument about Irish politics. The name of a long- dead leader called Parnell kept coming in, and somebody called Redmond, whom my mother seemed to approve of, came under heavy condemnation as a Traitor to the Cause. We found all this a bit frightening, especially when Pat, after a rather stiff farewell, would jump down again from his horse-lorry and come back in to make a clinching point. I'm sure now that they both loved it and that my mother gave as good as she got.

An historical event which does stick out in my mind was the outbreak of the Great War. It chanced that on that particular day my mother was taking my sister Susan and me to visit cousins in Dumbarton with whom we were to stay for a few days at the end of the school summer holidays. Killing two birds with one stone - a habit of hers - my mother had allowed time between the tram-run into the city centre and the one west to Dumbarton to make a social call on a lady from home - meaning Fanad - who kept a lodging-house at Gorbals Cross. I can even remember the big woman in her apron taking us to her window and asking us if we could think of a finer sight than the thronging city streets below. How she could could prefer that noisy, dusty scene to the heather hills and blue lochs of Donegal Susan and I could hardly imagine, but I suppose we answered politely enough before being sent out to play with some child of the place.

That was nearly the end of our expedition on that day of history, for we followed an excited crowd attracted by a building on fire in one of the streets nearby, and came back to an angry and impatient Mamma who would have a problem getting back from Dumbarton to Tollcross for nightfall. I do not remember whether she managed it or not, because our relatives' home in Dumbarton was in a considerable turmoil when we arrived. Apparently a teen-age son had been seized with patriotic fervour when the news that war had been declared circulated in the town, and had gone off there and then to enlist. When the reason for his absence from home reached the family it naturally caused the utmost dismay, and by the time we came in his father had gone to try and do something about the situation. Late in the evening amid sighs of relief he returned with a crestfallen youth who had of course lied about his true age and was easily enough reclaimed.

So the start of our wee holiday was also the start of the big war, though the news in the papers affected us little enough as we played with our cousins and met their next- door neighbours the Wards. Our relatives were rather well-off by our standards. Their father had come from the same area and background as our own, and it seemed there was great merriment among the Fanad furnacemen about his fond mother seeing him away for the Scottish boat with the injunction - 'Don't go into the Big Forge, son', and himself starting off in the despised trade of a shilling-a-week insurance agent. But he had worked hard and made good, and I don't think Susan and I were old enough to have been infected with the inverted snobbery which can be a cloak for envy. The Wards I remembered later on because one of the boys became a well-known opera-singer and the baby in the pram when we visited Dumbarton was James, a future bishop. My mind goes forward to 1959, my Silver Wedding year,and a group pilgrimage to Lourdes which was the first venture abroad for my husband and myself. One day in our hotel my priest brother-in-law introduced me to Bishop James Ward and insisted I repeat the story of pushing him in his pram. Mgr John did it out of devilment, as my father would have said: I was awarded a very gracious smile but I felt the Bishop would really have been quite happy without my reminiscences.

But it will never do to go wandering back and forth through ninety years, so I had better get the bits of my life in some sort of order. For all the first part of my life - and after all I was over thirty when I married - the main guiding influence on me was my mother, and it will do no harm to tell something of her story before talking about schooldays and growing up. To read more about my mother click HereTo return to the top click here.