About

MATTHEW PAUL BAILEY

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

 Beginning

Matt Bailey, under 1

28 years ago, I was born in, the now demolished, South London Hospital for Women. My mother was 22 years old when she had me, my father was 26. I was their first child, born one year after they were married in a church in Putney.

My formative years were spent in Tooting, a neighborhood in South West London. Most people on my street were Jamaican and Pakistani.

When I was 7, my family moved to Worthing, West Sussex, which is the place I would say (if forced) I’m from. Worthing is the place where I went to school, had my first girlfriend, played Rugby every weekend and met people who are still my close friends, to this day. I lived in Worthing until I left for University when I was 19.

From this point, I never really considered myself as having a home, until I came to Chicago.

Kathleen Burke & Leo Costello

Leo and Kathleen on their wedding day

My earliest memories are of my Irish grandfather potty training me. He used to say, “Go grab your piss pot.” He, like a lot of Irish people, moved to London, after World War II, when there were jobs and opportunities for immigrants to make a better life for themselves. But, of course, the reality was different to the marketing.

The England they arrived in was often hostile to Irish people, who were viewed as sub-human and puppets of the papacy. After World War II, there was a massive wave of immigration from Ireland and Jamaica. It was not uncommon for landlords to post signs that said, “No Blacks, No Irish,” during this time.

My grandfather settled in Tooting and got a job for a supermarket chain, delivering and bottling milk until five years before his death in, 1986, when he suddenly died in his sleep, aged 70. In Tooting, he met my grandmother, who had also emigrated from Ireland a few years after the Second World War to be a nurse.

My grandmother grew up on a farm and had eight siblings, four of whom she never met. Before she had memory, her four oldest brothers and sisters all left Ireland and moved to America. As far as I am aware, she never saw or heard from them again.

She grew up very poor. She told me once that she didn’t own shoes until she was five years old. Potatoes were (and remain to be) the food of the Irish and she would often eat raw potatoes or turnips three times a day.

My grandmother was an extremely pious and moral woman. She was strongly devoted to Catholicism and rarely drank, never smoked and always prayed the rosary before she went to bed. I was cared for by my maternal grandparents a lot of the time during my early years and my memories of being with them are extremely happy, albeit somewhat patchy.

Bernadette Moriarty & Peter Bailey

My only British grandparent was my father’s father, who was born in Lincolnshire, a county in the north of England. I do not know much about his upbringing, only that he grew up in Kent, which is an area in the South East of the country.

My grandfather was a plasterer for the majority of his life. Because of his work with these chemicals he contracted emphysema before I was born, which left him bed-ridden for the last fifteen years of his life.

He died in 1994, when I was 11 years old. This was my first experience of death and seeing his dead body was a strangely cathartic experience. When he was alive he was always coughing, always fidgeting and clearly sick. Seeing him still was seeing him somehow at peace.

He left me a gold watch that was bought some years earlier. This was his most valuable possession and even though I was surprised he left it to me, not one of his four children, I was honored.

Me, Bernadette Moriarty, Worthing Bailey and my uncle

My father’s mother also moved to England from Ireland shortly after World Ward II to be a nurse. She lived in Kent, which is where she met my Grandfather before they moved to London in the late 1950s.

She is my only living grandparent and I enjoy her company immensely. When I was a young man, I used to travel to London and her and I would visit various museums around the capital. The Victoria and Albert museum in the affluent Kensington neighborhood of London was our favorite. We would spend hours looking at the mannequins dressed in Georgian and Victorian era clothes.

My grandmother is probably the person most responsible for my love of history. She has nurtured my intellectual curiosity all my life and I still find her stories about her family and her upbringing fascinating, if a little longwinded.

 

Peter Bailey II 

My brother, my father and me

My father joined the British Army two weeks before his 16^th birthday. He dropped out High School in pursuit of adventure and in order to make a difference. He served in the Army for ten years, not returning home for years at a time, and he took part in three conflicts, which profoundly affect him to this day.

The most difficult time of his life was when he served in Ireland during the early and mid-1970s. This was a time of tremendous sectarian violence, in the long history of that country’s civil and religious wars. Being spat on and thought of as scum was very difficult for him.

I think the fact that he is half-Irish meant the abuse cut more deeply. He was injured when a petrol bomb was thrown on him during one of his tours. He was hospitalized for two weeks and the burn scars on his back are still noticeable.

During his time in the Army he saw a lot of gory things. He saw a face of humanity that civilization usually impedes. He left the army around the time that I was born and, like of lot of veterans, became a bricklayer.

Elizabeth Costello

My mother and me, the day I got married, ABQ

My mother was the youngest of three girls. Her mother was 39 years old when she was born. Four years after my auntie, Mary was born my grandmother had a still born child, which she named Bridget. After this loss she decided to adopt a child. My auntie, Bernadette kept the fact that she met her birth mother from my grandmother.

According to my mother she could not have had a better upbringing. She was raised with a lot of love and was always happy, despite being a little sheltered. She went to a girl’s Catholic school where she was strictly educated by nuns. She had elocution lessons and still speaks with a BBC accent.

Mum & Dad

My parents both lived in Tooting and frequented the same bars and nightclubs. My mother was dating one of father’s best friends. But, it was not until after my mother’s sister, Bernadette married my father’s brother, Paul that they became a couple.

After my mum and dad were married he went to Israel for six months on what would be his final task as a British soldier. My mother once told me that she was absolutely devastated when he left and that she cried for hours. When he returned from Israel, I was conceived and he left the army.

I see my mum and dad as “real” London people. What that means in the specific I can’t really say. In the abstract it means that they are strong people who persevere despite circumstances, they are somewhat fatalistic, they rarely complain and are emotionally reserved.

Me

I am the eldest of three, my brother Ben was born in 1986 and my sister Lucy, a year later. The first school that I attended was called St. Peter & Paul’s, which was located just outside of Tooting. It was important to my maternal Grandmother that I attend Catholic school so she and I used to walk the two miles every morning.  I vividly remember telling her that I could count to 1,000 and then proceeding to do so. My grandmother had a lot of patience.

She moved to Worthing because she was getting too old for city life and six months later my mum, who was always extremely close with her, decided that we would follow her lead and move to the south coast.

Nice teeth, mate. Me, aged 8.

We moved into a small three bedroom house, at 15 Tavy Close, where I would live for the next 12 years. I attended English Martyrs Primary School and remember being bullied for my London accent. It didn’t last long but I was a fairly shy and chubby kid with a weird accent.

When I was 13, I joined Worthing Rugby Club, which taught me a lot about people and how to be popular. I played Rugby until I broke my ankle when I was 18. Sunday was game day and my father and I used to drive to the Rugby Club or, if it was an away game, to different towns around the south of England.

Playing this rough team game was a lot of fun. I had many experiences that I wouldn’t have had without it. I traveled around the country playing Rugby and socializing with my team and the opposition. Going to Amsterdam on Rugby tour when I was 17, was the most memorable.

The High School Years 

My graduating High School class, 1999

From the ages of 11-16, I attended Chatsmore Catholic High School. Admittedly, I was a bit of bad boy for the first couple of years but when I turned 14, I really started to be interested in knowledge and excelled across all academic areas. One finishes high school in England at 16 and I got good grades in my final year, graduating with three A’s, one B and three C’s.

I went on to study Philosophy, Sociology and History at Worthing Sixth Form College. I worked a part time job at Tesco’s (England’s Walmart). Apart from providing me some money for social activities on the weekend, this job taught me that I didn’t want to have an unfulfilling and uninteresting job ever again. 

 

Further Education

I wanted to meet people who weren’t from Worthing; I wanted to travel. Looking for adventure I applied to the University of East Anglia’s American History and Politics B.A. program. Somewhat to my surprise, I was accepted and left Worthing and moved to Norwich.

Living away from home and cooking, cleaning and caring for myself was difficult at first but ultimately liberating. I met people from all over the place. I met Americans for the first time and generally had an enjoyable time.

In my program you were allowed to pick five American schools for the study abroad component. I, not having a lot of money and not really doing any research, picked the five cheapest schools I could find.

My first choice was Occidental College in Pasadena because I had lived with an Asian-American exchange student from the area during my freshman year. My second choice was Kansas, which was one of the cheapest and my third choice was the University of New Mexico. All I knew about that state was that an Alien aircraft had apparently crashed there, in Roswell in 1947.

The Land of Enchantment 

My father and I flew to New York in June, 2004. We stayed in Staten Island with a man who knew my Grandmother from the “old country.” His son was a fireman who died in the September, 11, 2001 attacks and he had an entire room in his house, turned into a shrine to his dead son. He was a sturdy and entertaining man, who had a strange half-Irish, half-American vernacular. In hindsight, I think he was a foretaste of my future.

My father and I did the tourist thing around New York City for a few days before I boarded the Amtrak train, bound for Albuquerque, at Penn Station. I’m pretty sure I saw my father wipe away a tear as the train pulled out.

After three dirty days on the train I arrived in Albuquerque, a strange Martian-like place, where I didn’t know anyone or anything. I eventually found the dorm room where I would be staying. I went outside to smoke a cigarette with my new roommate and met Chelsea Armstrong who was looking for her brother.

The South West, 2005

The nine months I spent in Albuquerque are some of the fondest memories I have. I made a lot of friends and experienced things and places that I didn’t know existed before. And, for the first time in my life I spent a lot of time with a girl (Chelsea).

I had a real girlfriend for the first time in my adult life. However, I was forced into spending a lot of time with her.

My roommate in the dorms was terribly mentally ill. He would follow me to the bathroom, he’d watch me sleep, and he constantly drooled and sincerely believed that he was going to be a pop star. To escape him and my own fear, I would stay at Chelsea’s house every night.

I talked about nonsense and she listened. I knew everything about the world (all 23 year olds do) and told her about it. I had never experienced or understood the “girlfriend thing.” I mocked my friends who stopped hanging out with my group because they had a girlfriend. I didn’t really get it. After about two weeks of staying with her every night, I got it.

Old World (again) 

My final year at University, back in Norwich, was not a particularly pleasant one. I lived with people that I didn’t like. Most of the time, I was lonely. I worked out and studied a lot. Doing the long distance thing was not fun. A few months before I graduated, Chelsea and I decided to get married with the intent of joining the Peace Corps.

Ultimately she found out that I would need to be an American citizen to be in the Peace Corps. We decided to get married anyway. My year in New Mexico had ignited an audacious fire in me. I was ready for the biggest journey that anyone can undertake, to leave everything and everyone and move to a different country, forever.

While waiting for the slothful US immigration bureaucracy to catch up with my desire to get on with a new life, I briefly lived with my grandmother and worked a bar job in South London. The bar was near Tooting and it gave me a glimpse of what my life would probably have been like, had my family stayed in London.

Permanent Resident

Chelsea and me got married

I left England and moved to Chicago on January 1, 2007. Chelsea met me at the airport and we took the Blue Line to our grimy little one bedroom, in Humboldt Park. The first nine months were tough, to say the least. I was married, at 24 (something I never thought I would do), I had no real friends, no job, no money, a pregnant wife and no purpose.

I interned for an Alderman and slowly but surely recovered from my useless melancholy. I interned all day, everyday for about nine months before I received my green card. When I became a permanent resident, they offered me a job, which I enthusiastically accepted.

Around this same time, Chelsea gave birth to Worthing Armstrong Bailey. My father always used to tell me that I saved his life. I didn’t understand this until she came along. Nothing would ever be about me anymore. Being subjugated to the will and desire of another was a life-altering and positive thing for me.

End

Two and half years later, we still live in Humboldt Park (but in a much nicer place). We both work, a lot. I’m close to finishing an M.A. in Journalism and relishing most of the time that I spend with the little character that Worthing has become.

In the long scheme of things 28 is considered young. I don’t feel young but, I think for the first time ever, I’m content.