Remembering Birdie Sheridan

If I ever did a chore for her, or helped her out in the house, she'd say, 'Brian, you're as handy as a pocket in a shirt!'

Brigid 'Birdie' Sheridan, came from Loughrea, Co. Galway, but like so many others emigrated and worked in England during WW2 and came back to Ireland in the mid-50's, just when I was born, (I was #5 out of 7 kids and my mother ran a ladies fashion shop and needed extra help at home), so Birdie became our 'House-keeper' in 1956 and really, she half-reared us all, bandaged our knees and fed us fabulous food, hugged us and plied us with words of comfort and wisdom. She never raised her voice, not even when I knocked her laundry off the line or refused to eat her 'Bubble and Squeak'.

A great woman for the Grand National, she taught me how to surgically pick a winner with a sewing needle while wearing a blind-fold! Really! And droll, Birdie had a great way with words! When she would be having her morning cuppa, she'd open up the 'death notices' page in the Irish Independent newspaper and sigh, 'Right Brian, let's see who's just given up smoking'! Or, if something was really tasty or enjoyable, she'd say, 'Now that was the goat's toe' or 'that was the cat's pajamas'. If dad was coming in her signature warning was 'Whisth', I suppose from the gaelic 'Eist' for 'Listen up'.

Her father, a local man, (last name Kiernan, cannot remember ever hearing his first name), fought with the British Army, serving in the Connaught Rangers in the Boer war in S. Africa and after all that, he returned to Loughrea as a Peeler, a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. He must have had a hard time in Loughrea, a town where the 'Black and Tans' ran rough-shod over the people after the 1916 Rising and  after they'd left the town in ruins in their Crossley tenders, no one was left to defend the Crown, 'cept the RIC, all Irish men, yet tainted by their uniform, not British themselves, worse, they were working for the British. No Poppy Day parades for those brave men then, just suspicion and prejudice. No wonder Birdie left Ireland as soon as she was a teenager, heading to England, where she found that she was not accepted there either, because in England she was Irish, not British in their eyes.

She married Paddy Sheridan after she returned from England and they lived in a lovely cottage in Cosmona, surrounded by neighbors who appreciated them for their character and their charm and wit. Paddy managed the town's sewage plant! Well someone had to. He'd tell me of tomatoes as big as oranges that grew there, though I never saw one in his house. He always reminded me of Norton in 'The Honeymooners', playing opposite Birdie, a male version of Jackie Gleason. 'To the Moon Birdie, to the moon'!

Paddy Sheridan was a dapper man, stylish and soft spoken, he wore his hat at a rakish angle and each evening after tea, he fished for little trout in the Dunkellin river below the mill, upstream from the sewage works and many's a lovely fish supper we had at her house, with their dog under the table, waiting for scraps. Each Stephens Day we would walk to Cosmona to bring Birdie a present from Mum and as if by accident, each year, share their Goose dinner with them, (we had Turkey, but I loved her Stanley range slow-cooked Goose), I can still taste it. I would bring a 'sciathan' home afterwards, a goose wing, feathers attached, to sweep our hearth just like Birdie did, the closest a goose got to Main street!

Birdie loved Bingo, and when Tommy Kilduff, or Tommy Bingo as he was known universally, would pull out the ball for 88, he would look down at Birdie and her mate from Cosmona and announce 'Two Fat Ladies, eighty eight' and the whole hall would cackle, and nod to Birdie, always festooned with wisps of cigarette smoke from her beloved Sweet Aftons. The Sheridans didn't have a car, so Birdie rode a Raleigh Bike, a huge black machine on which I learned to cycle. On Sundays you would see her pedal to mass in the Abbey, decked out in a lovely coat she'd gotten in my Mums shop and always a turban hat, the whole outfit fit for a Queen.

She'd tell me tales of the posh Boarding school in England, where she was 'Cook' in. She worked in England in the forties and fifties and she remembered the Toffs with their Oxford accents and their big feet (yep, that's what she said) and yet they were only little boys really, locked in a Harry Potter school, ghosts and draughts and rules, crying at night for their mums and their families at home, and only Birdie to mother them and make them 'goody'. I often wondered whether any of them ever remembered the wonderfully warm lady from Loughrea, who no doubt was crying inside for her family back in Loughrea. Her 'Bread Pudding and Custard' was legendary in our house, a dish she mastered cooking for hundreds of Eton Boys, but which she perfected on our AGA.

Birdie died in Merlin Hospital on the 13th of April, 1974, of pneumonia, no doubt spurred on by her Afton habit. I saw her the day before, struggling to smile at me from under her oxygen mask in her hospital bed. I was a first year student in University then, all sophisticated, but not a clue really and I was not able to appreciate her love and her loss, as I do now. She was young at heart, always with a ready smile and an apron hug, I miss her. Though she had no children herself, she left an indelible mother's mark on all of us Nolan kids and on many others besides.

Every time I think of her now, I conjure up that most unique of taste-smells, which I thought only I knew of, but Brian Friel outed me in  his wonderful play 'Dancing at Lughnasa', when his narrator, as a young boy described the taste of a bulls-eye sweet his sister had given him, which she'd had stashed for days in her apron pocket, with a half-dozen, half-smoked Afton butts. Aaargh, now there's a flavour you will never forget!

Birdie taught me my first real poem, from off of the front of her yellow cigarette pack, I still remember it. Sweet Afton, by Robert Burns.
'Flow gently sweet Afton among they green braes.
Flow gently I'll sing thee a song in thy praise'.

Life was never dull around Birdie...she enriched my life, and cherished my smile. Maybe she can add a smile to your life today too! Here is my song of praise for Birdie. Air dheis De go raibh a h-Anam dilis!

* A footnote; I showed this story to Christina Baker Kline in August 2011 when she visited Ireland researching her new book. She loved Birdie's character and 'gave her a role' in her book, 'Orphan Train' which was published in 1913 and has been on the 'Best-seller' lists in the USA since then. She also credits Birdie and I in the notes to the book and for that I am truly grateful. Birdie would have gotten a great laugh out of being remembered in such a manner.

The Grand National

My dad raced Greyhounds, so I was introduced to the concept of racing and betting from early on. Then my grandfather, Boss Brody, at 85 years old, took me, some of my sisters and brothers and my mum racing to the Galway Plate day in the Galway Races summer meeting in 1966, and from then on, the racing bug was well and truly rooted in me. He showed me how to compare the odds on the Totalisator (Tote, Paramutual) and those being offered by the Bookies in the ring, the first true supply and demand market I ever encountered. In fact I would say that the very best bookies would put actuaries in the shade when it comes to computing and predicting probability. gambling on horses is not at all unlike gambling on the stock-market. Winners and losers all add up to a collective market, one where the Bookies hold the advantage, but where every individual investor/gambler has as good a chance of winning any race. Why else is the Daily Numbers game (racket) in New York predicated on the last 3 digits of the Dow Jones? Intertwined inextricably!

The Grand National race was a standard in our house (and dare I say, in almost every house in Ireland and Britain), being marked on the new year's calendar before even our birthdays were.

It was the common man's race, where long-odds horses had every chance, given the random nature of fallers over 30 fences, where favourites and outsiders alike fell foul to the daunting array of ditches and fences over the fabled 41/2 miles circuit of Aintree. Unlike their behaviour when setting starting prices and odds for regular racing, the book-makers (bookies) take Aintree's randomness into account when setting the odds and freely profer favourites at as much as 8/1, while outsiders are relatively uncapped in their potential being freely offered at 100 and 200/1. There was a silver lining too for the amateur wagererers, in that the bookies paid out 1/4 of the odds on the horse that places 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and even on the 5th place horse, if there were more than 40 horses starting the race. In one year there were 66 declared starters. It resembled the charge of the Light Brigade more than you can imagine. In another year, only 2 horses finished!

Little old ladies and parsimonious priests, savvy bankers and penny-pinching pensioners all would have had the same newspapers spread open at the racing page on the breakfast table. In our house, about as far removed a house from racehorses as you'd be likely to get in Ireland, the favoured method of choosing the 3 or 4 horses our family would back, was the darning needle on a thread, divining the winners while wearing blinkers. 'Birdie' Sheridan who had worked in England during the war years, and now was our housekeeper, was particularly adept at tea-leaf reading in order to come up with her selection, and my dad, the conservative and sagacious school-master, while eschewing the less scientific methods of handicapping, would suddenly announce a horse's name, as if by divine intervention he had had the winner's name revealed to him. His selection was always mysterious and we were wont to follow his morning with particular attention, hoping to see the source of his Oracle. Others looked at the horses name and went on that.

This year Good Will attracted the attention of everyone called Bill, Will, Willie, Billy, William, some 500,000 in the UK alone. All lost! Others see salvation in the Racing Form, a paper printed by Bookies, sure to mislead and flatters to deceive! Hard to condemn it though! Finally, when all else fails my Grandfather swore by Old Moores Almanac, where amongst the crop recommendations, bull pedigrees and the weather forecast, there was always a cryptic prognostication on the National's future winner.

All around these islands, pauper and peer alike spent the morning hours in various conclaves, swapping tips and sowing doubts, recklessly declaring undying devotion to a given trainer, while secretly coveting another trainers horse. Jockeys I seem to remember featured large in this lottery too, those knavish mountbanks on whose skill and tenacity our 2/6 would ride. many favoured the one or two Greys who would be declared for the race. Greys seemingly are lucky, though I cannot remember a Grey winner of the Grand National since I first started watching it on TV in 1967. Red Rum, won it three times out of five attempts in the 70's, winning it in 1973, 1974 and 1977. (he was second in '75 and '76). Red Alligator won it in 1971. wasnt my favourite colour, but I saw a trend!

Other punters favoured the Queen's horses, given that common wisdom had it that the owner with the most money had the best horses. It wasn't the Queen actually owned the horses, but the Queen Mother, but as one of our jockeys, now turned racing commentator said when reviewing a horses form on live TV a few years back, 'I rode her and I rode her mother, both great rides'! Anyway, not so, the poor Queen Mother has never won the National, though she did own Devon Loch who was leading the race with a furlong to go when his legs gave out.

'Course, when an outsider horse does win there is a rush to the bookies for the pay-out as many times in the past, when an outsider has won, particularly with local connections, the punters arrived to find the bookie had taken flight overnight. One local Loughrea legend has several Turf Accountants (Irish pseudonym for Bookie) go to the wall overnight, having taken many bets on a horse called Foinavon in 1967, at starting odds of 100/1. There was some connection to Foinavon's racing stable living in our town at the time and many of our neighbors were on insider information about this 100/1 'Sure Cert'. At the Chair, the largest of the fences at the end of the second circuit, 2 loose horses upset the entire field and some 16 horses refused to jump the fence, many of them dislodging their hapless jockeys into the ditch. While many remounted and re-jumped the Chair, Foinavon was unperturbed from his position at the rear of the field. He went around the melee, jumped the Chair first time and finished a clear winner. No one got paid-out in Loughrea though as the local Bookie was on a plane to the US that night.

I knew him well in later life, a real gambler, still game for any sport, no matter the odds. He worked in B. Altman and never missed Saratoga. He was just playing with bookies money, not unlike our current crop of Bank executives. Didn'tt make him a bad guy I suppose, but it does bear out your statement, 'attending a horse race without placing a bet is an utter waste of time'.

At four-thirty on National Saturday the entire country stops. Ordinary folks had already downed tools, taking advantageous positions around TV's and radios in homes and businesses across Ireland and Britain. Bated breath punctuated by ooohs and aaahs as faller after faller spelled the end of another lottery hope. Then the final cheer after the Chair and the long run on to the finish line. 100/1 Mon Mome. What a winner!

I had looked through the field looking for a French connection, as my wife and a friend were in Paris last weekend. So I backed L'ami, over Mon Mome, he had better credentials, that friend did, but hey what do you know, Lami pulled up at the Chair! Mon Mome, with a female trainer who broke her neck riding in the National 10 years ago, and a female owner who is a professional Bridge player, won by a street with a jockey with bad teeth. Now who'd a thunk! How you gonna win?

My brother worked with GE in Schenectady and lived in Galway, NY, just south of Saratoga. he had us up to the Saratoga races twice in the 90's and we really loved it. It is the race meeting most akin to the one my grandfather took us to in Galway, Ireland and thus is my favourite New York track. Sorry Belmont just doesn't cut it, no class, no style, and no winners! There was however a consolation prize there in Cohan's Parting Glass Bar, and the songs of Maura O'Connell, but that story is for another day!

The Grand National - Mylesnag, April 30, 2009

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