Rory & Ita (17 page)

‘There was one time, my Uncle Bob Brennan was home from Washington – I can’t remember whether it was during or after the War – and he took Daddy to Jammett’s restaurant for lunch. It was
the
restaurant in Dublin at that time. We were all agog, because none of us had ever darkened the door of Jammett’s restaurant, and we never expected to. So, of course, we were all dying to know what the food was like, when he got home. But we were met with a hum and a ha. “Did you get soup?” “Oh yes; I had soup.” “And what did you have after that?” He couldn’t remember. “It was nice,” was all he said. The only thing he remembered, and he spoke about it for years, was when the waiter handed him the bill, Bob glanced at it and paid in dollars. The waiter never batted an eyelid.

‘My cousin, Maeve Brennan, was living in Washington, and she bought a yearly subscription to the
Saturday
Evening Post
for my Aunt Bessie. And Bessie used to keep them all for me. I can remember sitting on the steps, at the barn, and going through the
Saturday Evening Post;
these marvellous, healthy-looking American kids with white teeth, teeth you’d die for. And slip-ons and white socks, and loving parents and beautiful motor cars, with two or three kids sitting in the back, with wide grins on their faces. The best-cared-for kids in the world, and I thought America must be an absolutely marvellous place. And all the stories about the wonderful things that happened in America. And the covers were by Norman Rockwell; they were absolutely wonderful. Between the
Saturday Evening Post
and the people we saw in the films, I thought America was the place to be.
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‘I can remember the bombing of the North Strand;
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the school was very close to the North Strand. I was at home that night, but I heard it, even though it was a good distance from us. Some of the boarders in school had to be sent home; they were shattered with nerves and they were home for a few weeks. It was very bad. The bomb on the South Circular Road was much nearer. I could hear it very clearly. The South Circular Road, and nearby Clanbrazil Street, were very much Jewish areas at that time. They’d started off there, when they came to Ireland, and, as they started to do a bit better for themselves, a lot of the Jewish people moved out to a place called Rathdown Park, in Terenure, with very nice houses. When the bombs fell on the South Circular
Road, many of the people were convinced that the Germans knew that the Jews lived there, so anyone with relatives in Rathdown Park moved there. And, lo and behold, didn’t a bomb drop on Rathdown Park and, God help them, they were convinced they were being followed. That bomb would have been very close to us, but I can’t remember ever thinking or worrying that we were going to be invaded. And, of course, we’d see the newsreels in the cinema, all made from the British perspective; they were our nearest neighbours and they were winning the War – so what problems could we have? From the newsreels, the British were winning hands-down, and when the Americans joined in, sure, between them, Hitler was going to end up in Kingdom Come. We believed that – I did, anyway. I believed that we were quite safe. I slept at night.

‘We had blackout curtains; actually, they were blinds. They were roller blinds, black on one side, canvas on the other, not as heavy as tarpaulin, but like it. And there were ration books, for tea, sugar, butter and clothing. They were little booklets, for all the world like ticket books. No matter where you went, you had to have your ration books.
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I remember, it was a very big bonus for the men who worked on my uncle’s farm: Aunt Bessie never took their ration books. They were what
was called “dieted;” they came to work before breakfast and left after supper – they were fed, as part of their payment. On other farms, they had to hand over their ration books, but my Uncle Mike knew the right people, and there was a big chest of tea upstairs, on the landing. I remember it, a big box, lined with silver paper, a strong foil, and it lasted the whole of the War. And Bessie was a very generous person; if she heard of someone being short of tea, they’d get tea out of the chest. Mike had served his time in the grocery trade,
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in a shop in Wexford. So, while he’d left the shop years previously, he’d continued contact with them. He still knew people who owned shops, all very straight, good men, and they all managed to get black-market tea. And he also had a big sack of sugar, up on the landing. It was easily reached; it was just up there for storage – it wasn’t hidden. Certain things were short, and you’d never see bananas or oranges, or anything like that. We’d always had fruit when we were small children, in what we used to call the good old days.’
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‘I was aware that I was growing up, but things didn’t change that much for me. There was no such thing as teenagers, so it was up to yourself how you got on between the ages of thirteen and twenty. We grew up a lot slower; we were, I suppose, more innocent. We were quite well on in our teens and still playing with dolls. You had a coat and you might be fortunate enough to get another before the first one fell off, so then you had a good coat and an everyday coat – but there was no
such thing as the latest trend. But I do remember, when I was young and clothes were bought for me, and later, when I was working and bought my own clothes, if any of my friends bought, say, a red coat, there was no way in the world I’d be seen in a red coat. Or, if they bought a green coat, there was no way I’d be seen in a green coat. So, in a way, while young people might be much more independent today, to me they’re more like sheep – I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense, but they do copy each other, whereas we tried to be more distinctive. We had our own styles, and while the hairstyles might have been more or less the same – such as a wretched-looking thing called ‘the shingle’
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– we tried to make it our own style.

‘There was one great hairstyle, when I was younger – the imitation of Shirley Temple, a mass of little ringlets all over the head. My friend Noeleen actually looked like Shirley Temple and had beautiful curly hair; her mother used to do it. People remarked on how like Shirley Temple she was. But then they had a Shirley Temple look-alike competition in the
Herald;
there were rows of photographs of girls every night – they all had the hair in curls but very few of them looked like Shirley Temple. Noeleen didn’t enter; her mother had more sense. One girl arrived into school with the Shirley Temple perm – she’d had very straight hair. Oh, consternation – the nuns didn’t like it one bit. Terrible show of pride; so the mother was sent for, and she arrived in the next day with the hair all frizzy, because
it had been permed, but no longer quite like Shirley Temple’s.

‘I have a photograph of myself in my school uniform, and my hair was fair and I had a clip holding it back on one side. I always wanted to grow it long but it was never thick enough. It would grow so far, and you could see daylight through it, so it was better a bit short. Then there was a style where you let it grow a bit and then turned it in. That was the style for my last few years in school; I can’t remember what we called it. I put in rollers at night in the hope that I could turn my hair in, in a thick roll around my head. Again, that style was good for people with thick hair; it used to bounce – it was gorgeous. Mine wasn’t quite there; it held fairly well, but nothing like the girls with the thick hair. I always had a bit of a curl in it. It had the same texture as my father’s.

‘Mother Enda taught us Irish in my last years at school. She was known as the Bull. When things didn’t go her way, she’d just sit at the top of the class and you knew
when she was going to roar, because the red would start from the bottom of her neck and spread slowly up to her face and when it hit her temple, she’d roar. So the name suited her. But she was harmless; she was actually quite nice and pleasant. The rumour was that she had been the girlfriend of Patrick Pearse, and that was why she’d taken the religious name of Mother Enda.
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But, checking the dates, there was no way she was Patrick Pearse’s girlfriend, or, if she was, there must have been something wrong with his eyesight, because she was no beauty. There was a Mother Madeleine; she taught us English. She was lovely – she was tall and slim and very gentle. We had a Miss Fitzpatrick, for French. She was a very pretty woman, blonde, but she was very stern. She lived in Terenure, but I didn’t take to her. And there was a Miss Tierney, who used to teach us, I suppose you’d call it gym – exercises with skipping ropes and all that kind of thing. She was good, she was fine, she was mannish in her way, which, I suppose, was called for. There wasn’t much to it. I was a good skipper, and I had a top-grade skipping rope, with ball bearings in it. We had teams of skippers, and we had a Parents’ Day, once a year. And dumbbells; it was very strenuous – you put your arms to the front and back, and to the side. That was about the whole of it. You just kept it up for about five minutes, in unison, of course; there was no grace to it. Then, of course, we marched to music and did a few formations – Irish marches. It was nothing very professional but we thought it was great. We wore a gym dress and a white blouse. When we were small, ankle socks; when we were older, long woollen stockings.
There was no display of knickers or bare bottoms; we were well-covered-up. Those black woollen stockings were the bane of my existence. I hated them. They were warm, but you had to wear them until school ended in June, and the itch of them in the summer was dreadful. And, every now and again, I’d get a hole in them. They had to be darned, and I had to do the darning myself, so I kept putting it off. If the hole was small, it didn’t show if you put ink on your leg, under the hole; you just made sure the ink was fairly well-spread. That was great, until you had a bath and had to wash the ink off, or there were so many holes that you had to darn them. Then lisle stockings came in. They were pure cotton, more refined than the woollen stockings, and they kept their shape. And, once they were black, you were allowed to wear lisle stockings; they were much finer, much more comfortable, cool and smooth on the leg, and they didn’t tear as quickly. But they were more expensive, so you had to wait your turn to get them.

‘I left school in June 1943, after I did my Leaving Cert. I was eighteen. I’ve a vague memory of the last day. We all brought in cakes, or sweets, or lemonade. We had our party, and the nuns came in and we treated them to cakes. I remember saying goodbye to my own close friends, promising we’d see each other again.
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But most of them lived on the northside and I lived on the southside, so there was that big distance between us. Some went to college, some went into nursing, a lot of them became nuns, some served their time in the
drapery business.
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Sometimes I’d read about somebody in the paper: she’d qualified for this or that, or a wedding announcement, and the writer Val Mulkerns
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was in my class, and I’d read about her now and again. But that was it.

‘When Joe left school, my father was keen that he go to university; he certainly was bright enough. But he went off one day and joined the Army. He just went off and we didn’t know where he’d gone, and he arrived back in an Army uniform. He wasn’t a tall man, and I thought he’d never lift those boots, but he did. He sat the cadetship exams and passed, with flying colours. But he was an inch too short, and he didn’t get the cadetship. He was told that they might relax the height rule later, so he sat the exam again, and he got it again, but he hadn’t grown any – and that was it. But he seemed to be very happy. He certainly made a lot of friends. And, of course, he was out of the house, which suited him down to the ground, because he was away from our stepmother. He came home every week and he’d be polishing his buttons and his boots. I still remember the oxblood polish for the boots.
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I think he was in Portobello Barracks. He was a private at first, and I don’t think he rose much higher than that. He was in the Commandos, a wireless operator. He was in the Army right through the War, and it was only afterwards that I
heard about some of the hardships. There was one story; they were camped somewhere, and the camp was flooded out and they slept on sodden mattresses, which can’t have helped his arthritis in later years – but he’d have been the last man to blame the War for anything. He was quite happy. When he left, after the War, he got a commendation. I still have it, and it ends, “Bolger was always clean and neat in his habits.” I thought it was the funniest thing. It’s there, typed out: “Bolger was always clean and neat in his habits.”