FRANK McCOURTS CLAN BOMBED BBC TRANSMITTERS

For most of his life Frank McCourt wasn't a writer, he was a teacher. It was not until he was well into his 60s that as a writer, he became the author of the memoir Angela's Ashes. He has just died in New York of meningitis. He was 78 years of age.


Frank was born in Brooklyn in 1930 he later described the scene in his memoirs but he grew up in Ireland. His parents were both Irish and they moved back there, to Limerick. Malachy, Frank's father, worked intermittently as a laborer, but he drank constantly.

McCourt was the first of seven children whom their mother, Angela his mother took care of the family. She found life hard with the grinding poverty that Malachy's drinking brought upon the family, and for the cold and damp air of Limerick. They became so poor that three of their children, twin brothers and a baby girl all died of disease and malnutrition, which was common at that time in Ireland.

"It was, of course, a miserable childhood," McCourt wrote in Angela's Ashes, "The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years."


"In reality, our life was worse than Frank wrote," said McCourt's brother Malachy. "Insane outbreaks of laughter saved us." McCourt once said that as a child he dreamed of being a prison inmate in the United States, for the food and the warmth. Instead he became a hospital inmate: he caught typhoid at age 10 and spent three months well-fed in a well-heated hospital.

Malachy McCourt Snr., was a tender father at times, and a great storyteller but he was dominated by alcohol and eventually all but abandoned the family. At 11, McCourt became their principal source of income, stealing and working odd jobs. Although he quit school he continued to read whenever he could. At 19, he returned to the United States served in the the Korean War and earned a degree at New York University under the G.I. Bill.

He dabbled in journalism and the theater, McCourt spent most of the next 30 years teaching English in New York City schools for a modest salary. He had a natural flair for it. On his very first day in the classroom, one of his young charges threw a sandwich at another kid. McCourt picked it up and ate it in front of the class, while the students watched, stunned. He had taught his first lesson in what it means to survive starvation.

For many years McCourt tried and failed to write about his childhood. The family talent for storytelling kept him alive in the classroom, but he couldn't get the words down on paper. He kept company in bars with writers like Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, but his own voice stubbornly refused to emerge.


"I was so angry for so long, I could hardly have a conversation without getting into an argument," he said. "It was only when I felt I could finally distance myself from my past that I began to write about what happened."

While he was babysitting his granddaughter he had the idea of writing like a child, detached keeping it simple, in the present tense. "I had this extraordinary illumination, or epiphany," he said, "Children are almost deadly in their detachment from the world. They are absolutely pragmatic, and they tell the truth, and somehow that lodged in my subconscious when I started writing the book."

The result was his memoir Angela's Ashes, which appeared in 1996, when McCourt was 66. The book told the story of his early years in a non angry way, without bitterness or self-pity. In a forgiving way he wrote about his father with humor and compassion. Angela's Ashes was published as the personal memoir of an Irish childhood. "My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalogue number, that's all," McCourt said. But it became immediately a critical sensation, then a bestseller. In 1997 McCourt won the Pulitzer Prize.


McCourt followed Angela's Ashes with two more volumes of memoirs. 'Tis picked up where his first book left off, on his arrival in New York City; it sold spectacularly but received mixed reviews. Teacher Man was both a critical and a commercial success recounting his years teaching English and creative writing, 18 of them spent at New York's famous magnet school Stuyvesant, where he was a legend as a compelling teacher.

"George Bernard Shaw said those that can do, and those that can't teach," McCourt was fond of observing. "Just goes to show that Shaw didn't know his arse from his elbow about teaching." Although he often spoke of a novel in progress, it has never been published.


There is now an Angela's Ashes walking tour in Limerick, and the university there awarded him a doctorate. By all accounts McCourt was in no way transformed by his success. Though that doesn't mean he didn't enjoy it immensely. "I wrote a book about growing up miserable, and the next thing I know I'm here," he said. "It's absurd, isn't it? It's extraordinary."

Two of his cousins bombed BBC transmitters and served 5 years in Crumlin Road jail. Frank along with his brother Malachy are two Irish voices that the BBC failed to censor. Frank's brother Malachy called after his father wrote a history of Ireland which is normally now written with M15 and BBC spin and revisionism involved.

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