Rory & Ita (6 page)

‘He knew the words of every Irish song and he had books and books of Irish songs, but he couldn’t sing them. He hadn’t a note in his head, but we got “The Boys of Wexford,” “Boulavogue,” all those marvellous songs. But the only time he sang was in the bathroom.

‘He used to catch the tram at the end of Brighton Road, in Terenure. He went on it every morning and came home every evening. I happened to be with him one day; we must have been going to town for something. There was quite a few people waiting, and the tram arrived, and they were all extremely mannerly; one would stand back to let the other on, and there was no rushing. The conductor was saying, “Hurry up, come on, get on quickly.” And I still see my father: he wore black toecap boots and the memory I have is of the toecap boots standing still and the voice saying, “Do you know what? If you didn’t stop to let people on, you would get there much quicker.” Then he proceeded along. He was much cheered by those behind him, but I was mortified.

‘He always wore toecapped boots. I can still remember, one pair replaced the other – they were replicas of each other. He had a short leg, which I was told happened when he fell off a horse as a child. He always had to get a raised heel on one boot. But you would never notice it; he never limped or anything like that.
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‘He won a junior championship medal for hurling, in 1910. And that has a story too. When he reported for the
Enniscorthy Echo
, he used to attend County Council meetings. And there was one member of the County Council who sat at the top table, probably chairing the meetings, and he had a gold chain. A lot of men wore them then, a watch at the side, and the chain attached to the buttonhole on the waistcoat. This particular man had a row of medals on his chain. And before the meeting one day, one of the other young reporters borrowed all the medals he could find and fitted them on to his own chain. And towards the end of the meeting he stood up, displaying these medals to the councillors. He looked at his own watch but pretended it wasn’t working, and said, “Excuse me, sir, could you tell me the time by your watch – and chain – and medals.” My father had given him his medal for the chain. And then – I was about
eight or nine – and a box came to the house, addressed to me, no note, and wrapped in cotton wool was the 1910 medal. It came from Daddy’s friend, Teddy Redmond, who ran a printing place in Enniscorthy. He had come across the medal and, instead of sending it to Daddy, he sent it to me.

‘In the evenings, if the weather was fine, he’d look out the kitchen window, and say, “I think I’ll go for a walk on the headland.” He’d go out the back door, into the very small garden and he’d do the whole thing in, I suppose, one second flat. But he’d walk up and down and up and down, and every day he’d say the same thing: “I’ll go for a walk on the headland.” I think he lived and died a countryman in spite of living in the city for so long.
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Sunday was her father’s big day, when he travelled around the country to report on GAA games for the
Irish Independent
. St Patrick’s Day was another important day, the Railway Cup Final, at Croke Park. ‘I remember him going to a match down the country, I think it was Thurles, one Sunday. And he arrived back that night with a grandfather clock he’d won in a raffle. It wasn’t a great big one but he was delighted with himself bringing it home.

‘He wasn’t a drinker. He liked a whiskey but he never
went drinking. I only once in my life saw him drunk. He had been at a match down the country and he was delivered home. I didn’t know what was wrong. I must have been very young because I’d never seen a drunk man before.

‘He was a very, very quiet man but, sure, he must have been dead lonely.’

‘I
remember my grandfather’s funeral, and the wake. Shortly after that, we were living in Tallaght. But I’ve no memory of getting there.’

The house
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was rented from the Dominicans. ‘It had two big gates to the yard and a couple of stables, sheds for holding the hay and coal, and a big sty. It was a long, single-storey house. The front door also had a half-door, outside; when the front door was open, the half-door kept hens out and children in. The kitchen was the living space, a very large kitchen, and the rafters were open. The stove for cooking was at one end, a big dresser at the other end. And a very, very large kitchen table. There was no electricity and no such thing as running water, no flush toilet. The only luxury would have been the oilcloth on the table, and then linoleum was bought for the floor. At a later stage, my mother put her hand on some money and the rafters were timbered and closed in. The back door led to a kind of store, coal in bags for delivery, up on shelves.’

The bedrooms were off the kitchen, ‘in both directions, various bits and pieces added to the house. A double bed carried four children, two at the top, two at the bottom; a double bed on each side of the room, so there would have been eight in the one bedroom. I
remember, we had a beautiful statue of the Virgin Mary done up for the May altar – a beautiful lace veil put on it, and flowers and all, and a candle, carefully burning. And Aileen it was, came along and messed with the thing and the veil caught fire. The lace was ablaze, and the screeching and roaring. My Aunt Lil came down and she had a bucket of water and she just lashed the contents into the room and put out the fire and drenched the whole lot of us.’

When he’d lived in Terenure his mother had bought him
Tiger Tim
every week. That stopped when they moved to Tallaght. ‘One, it wouldn’t have been available and, two, there were too many other calls, too many other voices.’ There were his sisters, and more sisters and brothers on the way; there were his six cousins, the Kellys and the Poyntons; there were Aunt Lil and Uncle Bob. But he remembers no resentment at the sudden expansion of the family, ‘no loss. You accepted it. You were just part of the whole thing – and it included horses and pigs.’

The Kellys, Jack and Hugh and Patsy, were the sons of his mother’s sister, Nannie. ‘Their father had the forge in Tallaght and when the mother died my grandmother took them in, to look after them, because she thought the father wouldn’t be able to. She took two of them, Jack and Hugh. Patsy went to serve his time as a barman; he lived over the pub, Fleming’s, on Trinity Street. My grandmother died in 1916 and Jack and Hugh just lived on in the house. Then another sister of my mother’s died of cancer, Mary, and my mother took four of the five children into the house. The Poyntons. Tom, Frank and Seán were the boys, and the girls were Chick and Marie. Chick’s real name was Bridget but she was never known as anything else but Chick.

‘Aunt Lil was my mother’s sister. She was with us all of her life. She was a small, good-humoured woman. She never had a job. She just lived in the house and did anything that needed to be done, looked after the children and that sort of thing. She was, generally, part of the house; she was never regarded as a poor relation. She was unique; she had an old-world sense. Nothing bothered her. I remember once, my mother sent Lil into town to get her some china; she wanted a set of delph. And Lil came back with a cup and saucer. And my mother said, “What’s that?” And Lil said, “It’s china. But,” she added, “it’s hand-painted.” She’d bought it in Camden Street, hand-painted, and spent all the money on it.’

Uncle Bob was Bob Mullally, his mother’s brother. ‘A single brother. He worked at hitting and tipping – doing bits of jobs around the place, nothing permanent – knocking down hedges for farmers, that kind of thing. If you asked him to trim a hedge for you, he’d go at it with a slasher; he was a most unhandy man. In actual fact, he could only drive a horse and cart. But he didn’t work in the family coal business because there’d been a row between himself and my grandfather, a big falling out. But he still lived in the house. He had a box with his own food in it. He sat at the end of the long kitchen table, and he went to all the Dominican services and joined in the hymn-singing, with great enthusiasm. He was famous all over the world, wherever there were Irish Dominican missionaries. Later, when we moved to Newtown, we had to erect various outhouses to hold people, and Bob, who was part of the clan, was given an outhouse of his own, a lean-to where he lived. He did his cooking outside in the back yard, on a type of brazier. He used an old perforated bucket as a firebox and, to
get it lighting, he’d swing it around, and he’d be singing “Tantum Ergo” and “O Salutaris” and all sorts of hymns like that, to our irreverent amusement. Also, in later years, he discovered this amazing thing, that people threw out all sorts of treasures, threw them into the bins – the service having been recently introduced by the County Council – and he used to go through the bins, much to my mother’s mortification. But the point is this: Bob was there and she regarded it as her duty to look after him.

‘She kept a sow in the yard, and I remember a litter of little pigs. And then, one day, Joe the Jingler arrived. He had a sharp penknife and he performed a very painful operation on about half the pigs – neutered male pigs were less aggressive. He then poured iodine on the poor unfortunate pigs. The squeals were unforgettable. Joe the Jingler married a widow with a farm near Crooksling and set up a milk delivery service. He would juggle with the milk jug, to my mother’s great annoyance, flinging it into the air and catching it just inches from the ground.’
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A stream ran beside the house, to the River Tymon, on the other side of the Dominican College. ‘It came down from Whitestown – it’s up near Jobstown – and it came down the field opposite our house. It went underground, under the road, culverted. I crawled along the culvert once, under the road. It was a terribly dangerous thing to do; the water level could have changed at any time. The stream then went on, behind the wall that divided our house from the College. There was a
water-wheel in there, and you could hear it turning. The stream ran through the College grounds, and down into a big tank that was known as the College Pond. In Dublin, someone in dead trouble might have said, “Well, I’m going to throw myself into the Liffey,” or something like that, but in Tallaght the saying was, “Oh Jesus, here’s for the College Pond.”’

‘Tallaght was just a village, with County Council cottages down one side of the street and the walls of the Dominican College on the other. The cottages had been built at the turn of the century, and they’re beautifully built, granite, with Tudor fronts. And up the middle of the street were the tracks for the steam tram.’ His father drove the tram down the middle of Main Street, until the line closed on the 31st of December, 1932.
The Battle of Ypres was only a sham, Compared to the rush for the Blessington tram
. ‘There were a number of old chaps, tramps, who lived together in an old cottage. Nobody knew who they were; they weren’t related to anybody. One of them was known as Straw Legs. He was an old man and he had a habit, when he had a few drinks on him, of lying across the tramline, outside the pub. And people would see him and drag him off the line. But this particular night he got himself further up the road. There was no street lighting at the time, and the stream engine came and ran over him, and that was the end of him. We were woken by my father, shouting in the window, “I have to go up to the barracks.” He had to make a statement because he’d run over Straw Legs.

‘As you went up the street, going south, you came to the Green, and the pump. That was where the people at what we called “the top of the town” got their water.
At the Green the road divided. One road went left, towards Old Bawn, and the other went right, towards the Blessington Road. As you turned right, there was a pub on the corner, O’Neill’s.
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And beside that pub was our house.’