Rory & Ita (4 page)

He remembers the Centenary of Catholic Emancipation, in 1929. ‘The bunting and yellow and white papal flags all over the place, and that kind of a general air of excitement. And the badge. There were two kinds, two levels of badge. There was a bronze-coloured one, the
cheaper one, and then one with enamel. And it had a broken bell with
Saoirse Eireann
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on it.’

He remembers his Uncle Jem, his mother’s brother, Jem Mullally, visiting the house. ‘He worked in Boland’s bakery and he’d arrive now and again with a little sack of bread. And my memory is that there was always a caraway seed cake in that load of bread. The caraway seeds had a special taste.’ He remembers eating bread and jam and eating Post Toasties for breakfast. ‘They were an American cereal thing, in a packet, like the kids eat now.’ He got the
Tiger Tim
comic every week.

He travelled on his father’s steam tram to Tallaght, to visit his grandfather, his mother’s father, Johnny Mullally. ‘He was a big man with a hat, in the back yard, in the hay shed. I remember him pushing us into the hay and breaking his heart laughing. He had no teeth. He’d be laughing, a big man, and he’d take delight in knocking us down into the hay, and us getting back up again. That’s my vague memory of him.’ And he went further on his father’s tram, with his mother and Breda and, later, sisters Aileen and Nancy, all the way to the terminus at Poulaphouca. They’d have a picnic there. ‘There was a lady there who ran a tea rooms. We called her Aunty Pinchie. The place is still there but, I daresay, she’s not. But that was the highlight, the tea rooms.’

His first school was the Presentation Convent, on Terenure Road West. He doesn’t remember his first day and he doesn’t remember the teachers. ‘Just people walking in and out and green paint on the walls and drawings, on brown copybook covers, on the walls of the classroom.’

There are stories that he associates with that house in Terenure. He heard them years later, from his mother. ‘When I’d go to visit her, she’d start talking, and I learnt more in those hours than I did when I was living there. But she told me about how I’d come home and tell her about this bold boy and he was frightening the sheep and annoying the men and it was terrible. So, she said, “One day, I don’t know what put it into my head to go up and meet you coming from school. And there I saw you with your coat over your head and you making flapping noises and the sheep scattered all over Terenure.” Of course, there was little or no traffic then, you know, the odd electric tram. The sheep were all over the street and the drovers were using bad language and calling me all sorts of names. But I was the culprit and she found me out.’ And there was the story about his mother looking for turf. ‘There was a coal strike. You absolutely depended on coal, for heating, cooking, and there was
no coal available. Now, I don’t know why my grandfather in Tallaght, who was a coal merchant, couldn’t get coal, and the landlord was a coal merchant, so it must have been a general shortage of coal. And she said she’d have to get turf, and she knew there was a turf accountant up the street and she didn’t know what a turf accountant was, nothing about betting or bookies. She thought a turf accountant was some kind of a country turf merchant. So she went in and asked for a sack of turf, and cost, to great merriment among the locals who knew my father.’ His father loved horses and greyhounds. ‘He was an expert, a very shrewd operator. Small bets, and that was how he got into trouble over the Grand National. In 1929 it was, I think. My mother saw the name of the horse, Tipperary Tim, and because my father’s name was Tim she decided to go wild and she bet a shilling, and she gave it to my father and told him to put it on Tipperary Tim. Now, he knew all about horses and he knew that Tipperary Tim, at 100–1, wouldn’t be there. So he put it on another horse; he knew better. And the only horse that finished the Grand National that year was Tipperary Tim, at 100–1. And my mother was waiting for the five pounds. When my mother lamented her lamentations were loud. She called my father all the names.’

There is one more Terenure memory. He remembers dismantling, ‘very expertly, the alarm clock. Now, alarm clocks were a luxury item in those days. An awful lot of people depended on the neighbours to be banging on the window or the door, so you were high up on the ladder with an alarm clock of your own. My father had to be up to go to work, and there was a bit of noise generated when it was found dismantled, so all I said
was, I was mending it. All around me, I can still see the bits and pieces; I think I did it with a knife – I was able to undo all the screws.’

In 1929, his Grandfather Mullally died. ‘I remember his funeral. That was high drama. My older cousins were distraught. They made more noise, hullabalooing and screeching for my grandfather who had looked after them and they were very fond of.’ The Doyles moved from their house in Terenure to Tallaght, so that his mother could run the family coal business. ‘We were a self-contained family in Terenure. There was only my mother, my father, myself and my sisters. When we moved to the house in Tallaght there was the six of us, and more to come, and Aunt Lil, and Uncle Bob, and my cousins, the two Kellys, Jack and Hugh, and, eventually, four more cousins, the Poyntons. I don’t know where we all slept. I do know that only a couple of years ago I started laughing; I was in the bedroom here, and I suddenly realised that this was the first time I could point at the bed and say, “That’s my bed.”’

‘T
here was a lady at the corner of the street, a widow, and, now and again, she’d go mad and she’d throw statues, always religious statues, out through the window and they’d land at the path opposite and smash, and nobody paid any heed to this. She’d come out the next day and everyone would say “Good morning,” or “Good evening,” and nobody would say, “What happened to you that you threw the statues out?”’

She loved the street. ‘I don’t think the winter kept me in. We just wrapped up and went out; the weather meant nothing to us.’ Her great friends were Doris and Marie Sullivan, who lived next door, in No.
26
, and her best friend was Noeleen Hingerty, who lived opposite, in No.
4
. There were other children from up and down the street, the Kerrigans and the Fays and the Murphys. They all grew up together. They played with wooden hoops, and sticks. They could beat the hoops up and down the street with no traffic to get in their way, only the odd milk float or coal cart. And there was hopscotch. ‘We drew what we used to call a piggy bed on the path and made numbers in the boxes. Then you had a piggy. It was usually a stone but we
devised a thing; you put a stone in a shoe polish tin and it slid better. And I can remember once, there was a girl who lived in the street parallel to us, Oaklands Terrace, and she was forever whining. And my brother, Joe – who, I must admit, was a bit of a brat – he took the stone from her, and she set off away, “Joe Bolger took my piggy! He took my little piggy!” She ran home screaming, so somebody ran after her with the piggy because we didn’t want to get into trouble. And, of course, we had skipping ropes which we could stretch right across the street. Some could barely jump but others had dazzling performances. I was a good skipper.’

The milkman came around on a horse-drawn float. ‘In those days you got your milk into a jug. You’d bring out your jug or he’d come in and fill it, whatever it was, a pint, two pints, and he’d always put in an extra bit which was known as the tilly,
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and sometimes the tilly varied. But the churns were beautifully polished – everything was beautifully polished, absolutely spotless.

‘And then there was the coalman, Mr Nolan.
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The Nolans lived in Terenure. Quite a big house they had, beside the police barracks. They actually had a ballroom in their house and we used to go up there for dancing lessons; Lillie Comerford was the dancing teacher.’ The Tontine Society also met in the ballroom, every Sunday morning. ‘The Tontine was, really, to bury people. You’d see men going in there every Sunday and paying into the Tontine, and then, when anyone died – people didn’t have spare cash and it was very important to have money to bury people and it would be a matter of pride to
bury them properly. So, it was its own form of insurance.

‘Mr Nolan was a great big man and he was black, black and he always had a sack around his shoulders, and I don’t know why or what it was there to preserve, because underneath it was black too. Our house had no back entrance, so he used to carry the coal right through the house and on the coal day they used to put newspaper for him to step on. I don’t know what it cost; they’d pay him there and then. The milkman would be paid once a week.’

She remembers the neighbours with great affection. ‘Such a mixture of people, all types, all religions and, I suppose, all social classes. There were two Garda sergeants, one right opposite, and one beside us, Mr Sullivan. There were Church of Ireland people, the Wilkinsons, on the other side of us, in No.
24
, and every Sunday morning their window was open wide and hymns came soaring out. They had a loganberry which used to grow beside the wall and Mr Wilkinson used to put a branch over the wall, for us to take the berries, but sometimes his wife would come out and take it back. She was a very nice lady but she obviously didn’t want to share the loganberries. Mr Wilkinson’s sister was married to a man whose parents lived opposite, and they were Presbyterians. Carmichael was their name, and then further down the road there was the Holmes family and Mrs Holmes was Mr Wilkinson’s sister as well, and they were Church of Ireland. He was in Guinness. And then there was a Jewish couple past him, a Mr and Mrs Matofsky, and they had some kind of a furniture factory. And two doors from them there was another Jewish family, Mr and Mrs Morris, and then
back down the road, Mrs Morris’s sister lived and she was Mrs Silverman.’ The vegetable man called once to the Silvermans and young Sammy Silverman was sent out to get the vegetables and fruit, including a pound of plums. ‘So the vegetable man weighed the plums and he gave them to Sammy and Sammy went in, and Mrs Silverman weighed them and they were light-weight, and she ran after the vegetable man and she told him that she’d weighed them and they were light-weight, and he just kept going and he shouted back, “Weigh Sammy.” Mrs Silverman used to seek refuge in Mrs Morris, her sister’s house, and I don’t know whether Mr Silverman went and got violent, or whether he just went peculiar, but they always said that it was the full moon that affected him. It could have been anything, but the moon was blamed. He came down to Mrs Morris’s house, shouting that he wanted his wife back. She always went back but, whether there was violence in it or not, I never did know. He always seemed an exceptionally quiet man to me.

‘There were a mother and daughter who lived down the road. They were lovely people and they were always beautifully dressed and they always appeared to have plenty of money, and there was an elegance about them. But they just disappeared overnight. Nobody knew why, and then it was discovered that they owed rent. They owed everybody, and where they went, nobody knew. They just disappeared.

‘And there was a lady opposite called Miss McGuirk and she had a maid, and the maid was in full regalia, and a cap with lace. Mary – I never knew her surname – was the “little maid”. Maids were often referred to as “little maids,” even when they were quite hefty lassies.
Mary was small and thin. Miss McGuirk was a really nice woman, a gentle lady. Ladies did not keep lodgers; ladies had “friends,” who visited for a few days, a week, or longer. Hence the need for Mary to help out. Then Mary decided that she was going to Australia, to live with relatives who were already settled there, and Miss McGuirk decided to give a little tea party, to say goodbye to Mary. Tea parties were invariably “little”. Myself and my sister were invited. We enjoyed our tea, and handed over some small gifts and Mary told us about her proposed journey. She was very young, she was only fifteen or sixteen, and she told us that it would take her six months to get there – she was going by boat, to England and then on to Australia. And then, when Mary went, no new maid appeared.’ After Mary’s departure, there were no more lodgers. ‘But what I didn’t know was that when Miss McGuirk died, she actually died from malnutrition.