Authors: Roddy Doyle
‘My closest friends at school were Aileen Cusack, who lived in Howth – she’s a Dominican nun now – and Brenda McDunphy, who lived in Clontarf. Her father was Douglas Hyde’s secretary.
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They were my best friends, along with Noeleen. Brenda and myself and Máire went to the Gealtacht,
†
to Ballinaskelligs, in Kerry. It was great – different. I think it was an old army barracks we stayed in. They called it a college. It was pretty basic, bare boards and miserable beds. But that was no problem. We used to have Irish lessons in the morning and, in the afternoon, we’d have trips, to places in Kerry. We went to Skellig Rocks, by boat, and Daniel O’Connell’s house, in Derrynane. And we had a
céili
‡
every night, and that was grand. We had picnics, and a sports. I remember coming second in a race and getting half a crown.
‘I read an awful lot – for two reasons. I loved reading; the house was full of books. But, secondly, when I got a bit older I was never allowed out in the evening, but a library opened in Terenure and it was a blessing to us
all, because it was the excuse we needed to get out. If there were no evening devotions on in the church, there was always the library. You met your friends
en route
, you went to the library, you picked your books. You couldn’t delay too long – you might be timed – but you had a chat with your friends as you all walked home together, and you had the new book. You read it as quickly as you could, so you could have another night out. When the Miraculous Medal Novena started every Monday night, we were in our seventh heaven. We all got a great devotion to the Virgin Mary. We felt the Holy Mother was on our side. She had given us a copper-fastened excuse to meet.
‘Nearly all of my father’s books were of Irish interest. I remember going along the quays with him, the second-hand bookshops. He’d root through the books, and he always ended up buying one or two of them. I read all of Annie M.P. Smithson’s books.
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I thought they were lovely. I couldn’t read them now; terrible things. And I loved Maurice Walsh.
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The Key Above the Door, The Small Dark Man, Blackcock’s Feather
– I thought they were wonderful. Again, I couldn’t read them now, but they were great stories in their day. And, of course, we had all the
P.G. Wodehouse books. My father loved poetry. And I did too. And he also had – you don’t get them any more – things called broad-sheets, with the words and music of Irish songs. I think they sold them outside Croke Park. They were only a few pence each, published on paper like newspaper, a rough kind of paper. They were different colours, not very bright pink and orange, yellow and pale blue. I still have them.’
She was fourteen in September 1939. ‘I was in Coolnaboy the day war was declared. And I can still remember – whether it was that day or a few days after, I don’t know – but I was being brought to Oilgate, to get the bus home, and myself and Katie were talking about refugees and children in England being sent down the country. And I asked, if I was a refugee could I come down to Coolnaboy. And I remember, Katie laughed and said, of course I could.’
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Part of the Eucharistic Congress celebrations, June 1932.
†
Dominican College, Eccles Street, north of the city centre.
*
Nelson’s Pillar, on O’Connell Street; blown up by the IRA in 1966.
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Suburb of Dublin, two miles north of the city centre.
†
Ita: ‘Many, many years later, a daughter of his managed to get in touch with Pearl. She was in her fifties by then, this woman, and her name was also Pearl. And she told Pearl Sr. that her father, John, and his next-door neighbour had both cleared off one day, deserting both wives and families.’
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In County Wicklow, south of Dublin.
†
Also in County Wicklow.
‡
Ita: ‘I didn’t see the place until a couple of years ago. Myself and Rory went into the pub for a sandwich and I was sitting there, and I remembered her giving out about the people who’d bought the place, as if they hadn’t paid for it, as if they’d no right to it. But when her father died, they were bankrupt – that I know – and the place had to be sold. But she was quite venomous towards the people who’d bought it. And I was sitting there, and I was waiting for a claw to come out and grab me for even paying them for the price of the sandwich. I had this awful feeling, that somehow she’d appear and say, “What are you doing?”’
§
Ita: ‘Years later, a friend referred to ankle-strapped shoes as “hoorin’ boots”.’
¶
Ita: ‘She came out to us one Sunday, and she hadn’t touched a piano in years and years, and she sat at our piano and played jigs and reels, and I couldn’t believe it.’
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Ita: ‘Frank got married years later, to Chrissie. The mother died and Frank finally got married, and my father and stepmother travelled down to the wedding. I was married myself by then. And the next time I went over to visit them, I said, “Well, what did the bride wear?” and my father said, “A scowl from beginning to end.”’
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Ita: ‘We met a sister of her mother’s years later. She was the image of the mother. Her married name was Kavanagh. And she was a great character. She went out to Montana; she actually went in one of those covered wagons. It was during the Gold Rush days. And I met her great-great-granddaughter years and years later, Kathy, and she told me that this lady had set up a bakery, making pastry for the miners. She told me that the pastry was diabolical but that it was better than no pastry. And she opened a little shop and she sold everything and anything – a dry goods store. And she really flourished, and opened more shops. If any of the miners misbehaved she’d get them by the scruff of the neck and throw them out. She ended up with a whole row of shops called Kavanagh Groceries, in Butte. She was known locally as Bow-Legged Biddie. Her name was Bridget alright, but whether she was bow-legged or not, I don’t know because she was very old by the time I met her and her skirts covered her knees. She was also very fond of the drink.’
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Seaside resort, south of Dublin.
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Ita: ‘When he died, he left lots of papers. They were all very well-organised, and held together with elastic bands. But among these papers was a memory card to a Bernard Ryan, and it said: “… who died for Ireland, on the 14 of March, 1921, interred in Mountjoy Jail.” Myself and Rory put it in the glass case in the front room and it was there for well over thirty-five years; why I kept it in the first place, I don’t know – the fact that it was historical, I suppose – I didn’t want to tear it up. Anyway, last week [end of October 2000] I read an article in the
Irish Times
about the removal of the remains of Kevin Barry and others who had been executed in Mountjoy Jail in 1921. And, lo and behold, there was the name, Bernard Ryan. Rory remembered the name and went in and took out the memory card. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t know why my father had it. I don’t know whether there was a family relationship – he had Ryan second-cousins – or whether he was a Wexford man or a GAA man; they would have been his connections.’
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The Abbey Theatre; the national theatre.
‡
Released in 1936. ‘The loves and career problems of a Barbary Coast saloon proprietor climax in the 1906 earthquake. Incisive, star-packed, superbly-handled melodrama which weaves in every kind of appeal and for a finale has some of the best special effects ever conceived’
(Halliwell’s Film Guide)
.
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Released in 1934; also called
The March of the Wooden Soldiers
. ‘Santa Claus’s incompetent assistants accidently make some giant wooden soldiers, which come in handy when a villain tries to take over Toyland. Comedy operetta in which the stars have pleasant but not outstanding material; the style and decor are however sufficient to preserve the film as an eccentric minor classic
(Halliwell’s Film Guide)
.
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Released in 1941. ‘Three generations of complications follow when a Victorian lady is accidentally killed by a jealous lover on her wedding day. Flat but adequate remake of the 1932 original’
(Halliwell’s Film Guide)
.
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The depot of the Dublin and Blessington, where Rory’s father had worked.
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‘The Old Woman of the Roads’ by Padraic Colum (1881–1972): born in Longford; author of poetry and plays;
The Saxon Shillin’
(1902);
Broken Soil
(1903);
The Land
(1905);
Thomas Muskerry
(1910);
Collected Poems
(1953).
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By J.M. Barrie; gentle satire on the British class system, first staged in 1902.
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It was a favourite of Eugene O’Neill’s. ‘When the mood struck him, in Jimmy the Priest’s or in the Hell Hole, he was given to reciting Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven,” a lachrymose and somewhat hysterical account of God’s remorseless pursuit of a soul strayed from grace. It was the hypnotic versification and giddy imagery that drew him, though, and not any possible resemblance to his own circumstances’ (from ‘Master of the Misbegotten’ by Barbara Gelb and Thomas Flannagan,
New York Review of Books, 5
October 2000).
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Douglas Hyde (1860–1947): co-founded the Irish Literary Society, 1891; co-founded the Gaelic League, 1893; first President of Ireland, 1938.
†
An area where Irish is the predominant language; most of the Gaeltachts are in the west of Ireland.
‡
A dance.
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Annie M.P. Smithson (1873–1948): born in Dublin; midwife and district nurse; converted to Catholicism; took part in the siege of Moran’s Hotel during the Civil War; secretary of the Irish Nurses’ Organisation, 1929. Works include
Her Irish Heritage
(1917);
Carmen Cavanagh
(1921);
The Walk of a Queen
(1922);
Nora Connor: A Romance of Yesteryear
(1924);
For God and Ireland
(1931).
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Maurice Walsh (1879–1964): born in Kerry. Works include
The Key Above the Door
(1926);
Blackcock’s Feather
(1932);
The Road to Nowhere
(1934), and many others. The rights to his story ‘The Green Rushes’, first published in the
Saturday Evening Post
in 1933, were bought by John Ford, and the story eventually became
The Quiet Man
(1952).
‘W
e left the old house, with a horse and cart loaded with furniture, and a hand-cart, and we walked down through the town, a short mile down the road to Newtown, and into No. 8. An empty house, bare floorboards. That was a novelty, after the hard cement floors in the old house, the wooden floors and the general air of space. We started lugging in the furniture, and decisions were made as to what was to go where, decisions on how to light up the new range, how to make sure we had enough water for washing. A water barrel had to be put under the down pipe from the roof. The pump had to be located, where’d we’d get our fresh water – it was just up the road. Then we surveyed this huge expanse of garden, nearly an acre. We’d had a yard before, walled in; this was open.’
The landlord was Dublin County Council. The house was brand new.
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‘I didn’t like it. It lacked that homeliness, or the inclusiveness, of the old house, where everything was so familiar. This place was bare, and I didn’t like it at all. I never did like it. I tolerated it.
‘In summer, I often spent the holidays with my Aunt Lizzie, my father’s eldest sister. She lived in a very large
house down in Balrothery.
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And I was walking home from Mass in Balbriggan, which was a mile and a half away, and I heard the wireless; I came in the door and Aunt Lizzie said, “Do you know, there’s going to be a war.” Then Chamberlain came on and made that famous speech, that our ambassador has informed Herr Hitler. I felt a certain excitement but, the funny thing is, nothing exceptional happened for the rest of the year. A lot of things were being done and decided that nobody knew about, like a realisation that there’d have to be rationing – we didn’t know that. And a realisation that we weren’t going to get all that wheat from Manitoba. All of these things lay ahead, but only really began to happen around the middle of 1940.’
‘My mother brought me to a tailor at the end of George’s Street, a man called Newman, and a suit was made for me. And a new bicycle was bought, from McHugh Himself. And a raincoat. I also had a white apron, to keep the clothes clean. A white cotton one, like a shopkeeper’s. I had no particular feelings about leaving school. It was part of life. I’d got a job, a scarce commodity. And I liked the thought of what I would be doing; I’d found an old book and read about printing, and I liked the idea.
‘I went in the door of Juverna press at 8 am, on the 8th of July, 1940. The first person I saw inside the door was Frank Bowers; he was running his machine, which I found out later was a Cropper Platen.
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Then, surrounding
me, there was this huge deluge of deafening noise – the other machines. And then, up the wooden winding stairs. This was a funny, converted building, three-floored, in Proby’s Lane, off Liffey Street, down at Arnott’s back entrance. I went up the stairs, and into the heart of the printing works, the case room. The engine room of control and power. And all that noise. My uncle Jack O’Hagan was there, and he looked at me and said, “Go and learn the lay of the case.” I didn’t know what “the lay of the case” meant. But one of the fellows pointed out a frame, where the cases of type were mounted; “You learn each letter.”
‘Case, in printers’ terms, was a tray thirty-two and a half inches long, and fourteen and a half inches broad; it was divided up into tiny little compartments, each one and a half inches deep. Each compartment held a different character – capitals, lower-case, numerals, all the commercial signs. They all had a place and you had to learn where exactly they were because, when you were setting type, you didn’t look at what you were taking from the tray; it would have taken too long – you’d never have got the job set. You couldn’t operate as a compositor if you didn’t know the lay of the case.