Rory & Ita
Authors: Roddy Doyle
Praise for Rory & Ita
“These glimpses [of memory] bring us firmly back to a time and place markedly different from the modern era. … It’s interesting (and sometimes absolutely hysterical) to hear [Rory and Ita’s] varying takes on the same events. The dual-voice dynamic is what makes the book work. … What you do get, and this is no small feat, is a sense of what it means to be an ordinary Irish citizen. … A charming read full of warmth.”—
Toronto Star
“Whether it was his instincts or his erudition that made
Rory & Ita
the book it is, I can only hope his intelligence and respect for his parents will set a new standard in the memoir and biography genres. His confidence, in letting his parents talk, in giving the book over to them—this is Doyle’s greatness here.”—
The Vancouver Sun
“Alive with acuity and spare, punchy prose. … Always readable, engaging and revealing. … A brave and tender piece of work.”—
The Irish Times
“Rory and Ita’s accounts are remarkably sweeping. … From a time when poor children went to school barefoot to the arrival of modern Dublin at their suburban gate, their memories have a lot to say about the how the whole world has changed.”—
National Post
“Rory and Ita’s story is not only the story of a nation, but the story of the lurch into modernity that the whole world underwent in the 20th century. There can be few readers anywhere who won’t find some echoes in their own family history.”—
Hamilton Spectator
By the same author
Novels
THE COMMITMENTS
THE SNAPPER
THE VAN
PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA
THE WOMAN WHO WALKED INTO DOORS
A STAR CALLED HENRY
Plays
BROWNBREAD
WAR
GUESS WHO’S COMING FOR THE DINNER
For Children
THE GIGGLER TREATMENT
ROVER SAVES CHRISTMAS
For my grandparents.
Roddy Doyle
For the next generation,
Elizabeth, Rory, Jack and Kate.
Ita Doyle and Rory Doyle
Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.
Luis Buñuel,
My Last Breath
The house is dark and silent.
The door has just closed behind me or soon will open.
What darkness! What silence!
Dermot Healy,
The Hallway
In all of my life I have lived in two houses, had two jobs, and one husband. I’m a very interesting person.
Ita Doyle
I
wanted to ask the questions before it was too late. And they wanted to answer them.
The book is about my parents, about the people they were before they became parents. But there’s very little about parenting. My sisters and brother are born and named, but I didn’t think I had the right to bring them into the book. Anyway, they’re too short in the tooth, and too cute to be cornered by a brother with a mission and a microphone.
As for the parenting, the teacher in me gives my mother and father eight out of ten, but is it too late to add, ‘Making good progress’?
Roddy Doyle, 16 May 2002
‘T
he first thing I remember is the gramophone arriving. I know I must have been less than three, because my mother was still alive. It was a lovely thing. I can still smell the wood of it. It was dark wood, with a press below the turntable for the records. Slats behind the turntable, six or eight of them, each the width of my hand, opened when a handle was turned, and released the sound. It was good sound. It was beautiful. I can still remember it, and the little needles and the little box, the dog of His Master’s Voice on the lid. And the needle had to be fitted in. I was able to do it myself later, and the handle turned and away we went.
‘The first record we had was John McCormack, and he sang “Macushla”. And there was McCormack singing “Adeste Fidelis,” and that used to be played every Christmas. And there was “The Old Refrain,” which is still in my mind, played by Fritz Kreisler. And a song that started, “Where are the boys of the Old Brigade?” I can remember marching around the room listening to it. And there was a record of somebody reading
The Selfish Giant
. I can remember one line: “In one corner of the garden it was always winter.”’
She remembers hands holding grease-proof paper, and lowering the paper on to the surface of a pot of soup, and the paper being lifted and bringing a film of fat with it. She remembers a tiny wooden swing, with a
little wooden girl swinging on it. She remembers a stuffed dog, a black and white terrier, called Dog, and a brown teddy bear. She remembers a doll with a bald china head. She remembers pale green notepaper with serrated edges.
‘I was born on the 20th of June, 1925. I think I was born at home, in 25 Brighton Gardens, Terenure, which is one of the two houses I have lived in, that house and the house I live in now. There were an awful lot of home births at that time and I feel that I was probably born there.’ She knows nothing about the birth. ‘Not a thing. I just came. I was named Ita Bridget. I have no idea where the Ita came from but Bridget, I gather, was my mother’s mother. I was the third child. The first, Mary Johanna (Máire), was three years older than me and the second, John Joseph (Joe), was a year older.’
She was Ita Bridget Bolger. Her father was James (Jim) Bolger, of Coolnaboy, Oilgate, in County Wexford. He was born in 1890. He grew up on a farm and was sent to St Peter’s College, in Wexford town, to become a priest. The eldest of five children, his father had died when he was very young. ‘His mother, my grandmother, was a tough old dame and if you were meant to be a priest, you became a priest, when all this money had been spent on you.’ But he had other ideas. He left St Peter’s when he was seventeen and didn’t go home.
*
Armed with a reference, he went to Enniscorthy: ‘I beg
to say that James Bolger has received a very good education in St Peter’s College, has always shown great aptitude, and is a very good boy. I am quite sure he is thoroughly fitted for the position he seeks in the
Echo
Office.’ He got the job, at the
Enniscorthy Echo
, the local newspaper.
‘He got caught up in the nationalist movement and he was found sleeping in a bed with guns under it. Now, they weren’t his guns but he wouldn’t tell whose they were, so he was banished from Enniscorthy.’ This happened just after the outbreak of the War, in 1914. What the police found in the house of Larry DeLacey, where Jim Bolger lodged, were home-made grenades – cocoa tins filled with gelignite and scraps of iron – as well as yards of fuse and hundreds of detonators. They also found stacks of Roger Casement’s pamphlet
Ireland, Germany and the Freedom of the Seas
, which had been secretly printed at the
Echo
offices. He was arrested, along with Jack Hegarty, another lodger, and taken to Arbour Hill
barracks, in Dublin. A defence fund was quickly organised, and a campaign to have the men tried by jury.
Here is the account by Robert Brennan,
*
Jim Bolger’s brother-in-law:
… after two trials in which Tim Healy and Charlie Wyse Power appeared for the defence, the two were acquitted on all charges of treason, sedition, creating disaffection etc. They had been charged, amongst other things, with knowing that the seditious literature and the explosives were in the house and with not informing the authorities. The jury found they were not guilty, though neither of the two men could get in or out of bed without climbing over stacks of the literature, and they could hardly move anywhere in the house without knocking over one of the pernicious cocoa tins. DeLacey’s old housekeeper, shown the yards of fuse, said of course she had seen it. She had cut yards off a length of it to tie the little dog to the bed-post.
Tim Healy was largely responsible for the acquittal. He made it appear that Hegarty was being persecuted, not for his political activities, but for his religion. His plea was based on the fact that one of the witnesses for the prosecution, who testified that pro-German notices were in Hegarty’s handwriting, was a Belfast man who had himself, as he was forced to admit in cross-examination, preached in the streets of Cork with a Sankey and Moody band. Hegarty, said Tim, had been hounded
out of his employment and out of his native city by the bigots who had come down from Belfast to insult the people of Cork by preaching against their religion.
*
Barred from Enniscorthy, Jim Bolger ‘lived in New Ross for some years but he was able to send his writings back to Enniscorthy, so he was still working for the
Echo
.’ From New Ross, he moved to Dublin. He followed Robert Brennan, to work on the
Irish Bulletin
, a Sinn Féin propaganda sheet which was produced daily and delivered by hand to the Dublin newspapers and to all the foreign correspondents in the city. Production and distribution of the
Bulletin
were difficult but the authorities in Dublin Castle never managed to stop a single issue. It was published every day, from November 1919 until the Treaty was ratified two years later. ‘He never fought, as such. He was more an intellectual than a fighter.’
On the inception of the new State, Jim Bolger became a civil servant, at the Department of External Affairs. ‘He never lost the idea of what he had fought for, but he wasn’t a diehard.’ His first task was to sit outside a room with a gun while the new Minister, Gavin Duffy, was inside the room. By the time she was born, three years later, he was sitting at a desk, in the Accounts section of External Affairs, and studying accountancy at night, at the College of Commerce, in Rathmines. He was also a freelance journalist, calling himself The Recorder, writing GAA
†
match reports for the
Irish
Independent
. He also wrote for
Ireland’s Own
, ‘about ordinary life and things that go on. One article I found was about cutting the front grass. He also wrote a series of articles about the Young Irelanders for the
Independent
.
‘My mother’s name was Ellen O’Brien. She was born, I think, in 1895, in the townland of Ballydonegan, near Ferns, in County Wexford. She is a bit of a mystery to me. My father never spoke of her. Maybe it upset him too much, or maybe he thought it would upset us.’
She doesn’t know how her parents met, or where. They were married in 1921, in Liverpool. What a Sinn Féin activist was doing in Liverpool during the War of Independence, she doesn’t know. ‘He never spoke about being out of the country. He was a terribly secretive man, you know. His right hand did not know what his left hand was doing and that is the truth of it.’
Home was 25 Brighton Gardens, in Terenure, a suburb three miles south of Dublin’s centre. It was one in a terrace of small redbrick houses. ‘There were thousands of them around the place.’ The front door was painted brown, with two stained-glass windows and a brass knocker, letter box and, later, when the electricity had been installed, a brass bell.