Brief 58: McGowan and the London Irish

More than anyone else, Shane McGowan wrote songs for and about the London Irish.

While watching the film 'Crock of Gold' about McGowan recently, I thought, for the first time in many years, of Denis, who lived on my road as I was growing up.

Denis was, I suppose, my phantom Irish drunk dad. I never spoke to Denis, avoided passing him on the pavement if I possibly could. He was a shambling street drunk in an ill-fitting dirty suit, a small, pathetic-looking man, who seemed far older than he must have been, since his children were younger than us.

They couldn't have looked more Irish, those kids, ginger and pale-skinned, taking after their long-suffering mother, who always looked tired and immaculate.

The road was a short row of terraced houses off Northfield Avenue - it dipped in the middle and Denis and his family were down in the dip, while we were near the top (we could hear the children of Little Ealing Primary School at break time, a subject I will get to in my next post). Those houses are probably worth £1m+ now, 2 up 2 down as they all were, yet Denis was a street drunk, a regular at Bramley Road Open Space, near the station.

He may have been about the same age as my own dad or even younger, though, at that stage, looked older. My dad was a tall, strong man, and, into his 50s, still capable of being light on his feet. He'd played rugby until he was 45 - indeed, I remember him telling me the year he died that one of his greatest regrets and sources of ruin was playing rugby a few years too long, which I thought, in context, preposterous at the time, but understand a bit better now. 

Also, my dad, Paddy, rarely looked angry and confused, as Denis often did.

And my dad was not, to my knowledge, a street drunk. He was a pub man, a convivial regular, a drinker of routine who, most days until he was older, managed the short walk home from either The Duke of York, The Windsor Castle or The Royal Exchange to his flat off the Edgware Road without an excess of drama.

Still, Denis always haunted me, made me think of a life that might have been lived daily in the shadow of that, but, for me, the youngest, was not.

McGowan's, I suppose, the most famous London Irish drunk, lionised, pitied and romanticised in equal measure. Through my life, and still now, that's exactly how I describe my own relationship with that archetypal figure, both real and imagined, known and unknown. Best never to tip too far to one extreme.