What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
A powerful story of sexual abuse, eviction and fighting in the Congo, by Irishman Christy Fleming has just won the Best Newcomer honours at the UK’s People’s Book Prize awards. The author spoke to Barry Egan C
HRISTY Fleming never told his wife about the sexual abuse he suffered as a young boy in Greenmount Industrial School in Cork. “I just... couldn’t... tell her,” he says.
In 1999, he gave a statement to a panel about the abuse, and “once it started coming out, it got to me. I just got depressed. I went to counselling for four years. The panel paid me compensation. But it was horrible because I felt like I was on trial. My knees were shaking. They were questioning me about stuff.
“And the only reason in the end they believed me was there was a second guy who was with me — there was three of us, in fact... we were taken away in a van to a farm and were given drink. Next thing I know I woke up in a bed totally naked. They must have doped me or something. I started to kick off and they brought me in and put me sitting on a chair. And then they made me bend over the chair. I was raped. Two of the [Christian] brothers raped me. There was a priest there and he was taking photographs. It was horrible. I was 13. I was also very small for my age and I looked younger.”
Christy has written the inspiring You OK, Christy? Memoirs of a Survivor which won Best Newcomer award at the People’s Book Prize in London recently. One of four kids, he grew up in Markievicz House on Townsend Street, Dublin, with his widowed mother. He ended up in the industrial school after a court carted him off after a spate of truancy and the like from school in Dublin.
“It was tough going back to those times,” he says. “But I really needed to write the story. And I think it needed to be heard.” Writing the book helped him with his recovery after so many decades of inner pain. Christy had always tried to push all the horrific memories of sexual and physical abuse to the back of his mind. “That never really worked. I had nightmares, flashbacks, post-traumatic stress. Since I wrote the book, the nightmares just stopped.”
The recurrent nightmares were about running away on railway tracks. This was based on his experiences “in the industrial school and trying to escape from what was going on there. I was on the run for four days. I spent a lot of that time on tracks. I was trying to get to Dublin.”
When Christy finally left the school at 16, he joined the army (he told them he was 17 to get in) and “ended up after some training in the Congo. We had a lot of experiences similar to Jadotville,” Christy says, referring to the siege of Jadotville in late 1961 during the Congo Crisis when 157 Irish soldiers held out against a force of 3,000. “Where we were, the mercenaries were trying to take over the air base. We held them off for 11 days.”
So, Christy went to a war in Africa to escape the war in his head?
“That’s it,” he laughs. “I don’t know how I am still alive. I made so many mistakes out there. Joining the army was a big thing for me. It is a very family-friendly place to be. That’s the first time in my life I felt secure and confident.”
When he left the army at 21, he went to the UK, where he has lived ever since. He couldn’t get a job in Ireland because he had been discharged on medical grounds. He had epileptic fits as a result of smashing his head badly when an army truck crashed in the Congo during a patrol.
For someone who has been through so much, Christy Fleming seems like a happy man. “My family see a difference in me,” he says referring to his four children: twin boys Robert and Christopher, daughter Elysia and younger son Brian.
Christy’s father died when he was 13 months old. How does it make him feel to be a father, given he never knew his own father? “Because of what happened to me, when I started having children, one of the worst things I worried about was to make sure they always had a dad, because I didn’t have one. I thought it was very important that no matter how rough things got, I had to stick it out and always be there for them. I also wanted to give them a good education. It was hard but I managed it.”
Christy’s brother Jimmy taught him how to write his name, because he couldn’t read or write. Christy met his wife Mary, who was from Tipperary, in Finglas by chance.
“A friend of mine who left the army was lodging in her uncle’s house and that’s when we first talked.” Mary lived in a flat in Dorset Street. Christy asked Mary could he walk her home because he lived nearby in Townsend Street.
“That’s where it started,” he says of his beloved wife. “I came over to England first, then I sent for Mary. She stuck by me through everything.” Even in late 1969 when he and Mary ended up homeless and the authorities wanted to take the kids , “we always stuck together. When you looked for somewhere to rent when you had children, it was very difficult. The landlords didn’t like it. Also, being Irish didn’t help, because back then in England there was a lot of hostility with the Irish.”
A woman in Hackney helped them find an empty property that was facing demolition in five years’ time. They were violently evicted by bailiffs one morning, with Christy being effectively beaten up in front of twins, who were three at the time.
“They broke the windows. There was about 20 of them. They were real thugs. They pulled me out of the bed and dragged us out of the house. It was awful. They were acting illegally.”
Mary sadly passed away in January. Christy says that because of the Covid-19 lockdown, “I haven’t had the chance to grieve. I think about
Mary all the time.”
‘They were real thugs. They pulled me out of the bed and dragged us out of the house’
You OK, Christy? Memoirs of a Survivor is out now