Rory & Ita (2 page)

Immediately inside, there was a hallstand. It was tall, with a mirror set into its backing. It had hooks, for coats, high on its sides, and a shelf, for gloves; there was
also a rack for umbrellas, and a tin pot at its base, to catch the water. There was brown lino in the hall. There were two prints,
The Laughing Cavalier
on one side, and
The Toast
on the other. Both had been acquired in exchange for cigarette coupons. ‘I always loved them.’ There were also two pictures in the front room, but she hated these ones. The first was called
First Love
. ‘There was a man in robes that you’d usually see on a Roman, and a lady with her eyes cast down, and he had his hand on her arm and they were leaning on a kind of a marble pillar, and that was
First Love
. There was no picture of the row they must have had, but
Reconciliation
showed them actually smiling at each other, so I presume they must have had one. But I always hated them. They were eventually stolen when my father moved to a newer house. There were a few other things taken too but I was so pleased with whoever took those horrible pictures; I always thought how welcome they were to them.

‘The room at the front of the house was very seldom used. Christmas Day and very odd days in between. Some people called this room the parlour and others even called it the Jewman’s room; people never used it but if the moneylender came looking for his money he was brought in there. But we always called it the sitting-room. There was a suite in the sitting-room, a sofa and two chairs, upholstered in brown leather, and very cold on the behind. There was a black marble fireplace, with colourful tiles running down both sides. There was a humidor on the mantelpiece, an ornate wooden box with shelves for pipes and a china jar for tobacco. My father smoked twenty Sweet Afton a week, and a two-ounce tin of Mick McQuaid Cut.’ There was a large oval mirror in a mahogany frame hung above the
fireplace. There was a mahogany book press against one of the walls, packed with sets of Francis McManus, Lynn Doyle, W.W. Jacobs, Maurice Walsh and books on Irish history and literature. There were two drawers under the press, containing accounts, receipts, letters, all held by rubber bands. There was also a rosewood sideboard. The doors were beautifully carved, in a rose design. The chiffonier, on top of the sideboard, its exact width, was a mass of small shelves backed with mirrors. These shelves held small ornaments. ‘I remember a glass jam or marmalade pot, in a silver holder, with silver lid and spoon. It was never used.’ On the sideboard itself there was always a glass bowl, full of fruit – apples, oranges, ‘nothing exotic, and refilled each week from Miss Gibney’s fruit and vegetable shop in Terenure’. There was a fawn carpet with an ornate border. The floorboards along the walls were varnished.

Behind the sitting-room was the kitchen. ‘Now, that was where we lived, in the kitchen. There was a table that folded up and went against the wall. There were the chairs that came with the table; they were around the walls – that’s what we sat on. The one comfortable chair was my father’s. If he wasn’t there whoever liked could live in it, but there was always a row over it.’ There was another book press. There was a big black range for cooking and heating the water. ‘And then we got more refined and the range was taken out and there was an open fire, with a nice red, wooden surround, with dark red tiles and a back boiler, and the fire heated up the water.’ The boiler was in the hot press, also in the kitchen, where the clothes were stored and aired. ‘There was a big fender which was to keep people from falling into the fire, but it used to be draped with clothes. The lino
had a red and fawn square design.’ There were flowers in the pattern but they were hard to discern in each tiny square. ‘It was a thick lino but nearly like mosaic, all these tiny little squares it broke into.

‘Down a step, and into the scullery. There was no room for a table in there. There was a gas cooker, and a porcelain sink beside it. On the other wall there was a big cupboard. There was a hinged board that could be pulled down, you could lean on it, for cutting bread, meat and vegetables. The floor covering was stuff called congoleum.
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That would have been the cheapest. You could cut it with a scissors. It had lovely bright colours until they were walked off.’ Up one flight of stairs, carpet held in place by brass stair-rods, and there was the first of the bedrooms, Joe’s. There was a bed, a dark-wood dressing table and a wash-stand. She remembers no pictures on this boy’s bedroom walls. ‘People didn’t put things on the bedroom walls, except they were holy pictures.’ Beside
Joe’s room, on the landing, was the bathroom. There was the bath and ‘then there was a kind of a board that went across the bath that held the wash-basin. There was room on that as well for a little dish with soap and a face cloth.’ The hot water came from the boiler, below in the kitchen hot press. The toilet was outside, ‘out the back, and I was always kind of nervous going out there at night.’ Later, an inside toilet was installed, ‘a giant step for the Bolgers’.

‘And then up another flight of stairs and there were two bedrooms with a good-sized landing, that took a fine big chest of drawers for linen and towels and that kind of thing’, and two pairs of old swimming togs, male and female, sleeves to the elbows, legs to the knees. Her bedroom, which she shared with Máire, was the one on the right. The sisters shared a double bed, although she thinks she slept in a cot until she was six. The bed had brass knobs which could be screwed off and on, a favourite game. There was a light-coloured, hardwood dressing table with three drawers and a good big mirror, and there was a nice centre-doored wardrobe to match it. ‘And there was a small fireplace, one of those small steel fireplaces that are much sought-after these days.’ It was never lit. ‘It must have been cold because I remember trying to get dressed under the bedclothes, and in those days we wore things called combinations, which was a combination of vest and knickers, and trying to get dressed under the bedclothes could be very awkward because you often stuck your leg through the wrong hole and you had to keep manipulating, but we did it, nevertheless.’ There was lino on the floor – ‘I can’t remember it but I’m sure there were flowers on it, and a carpet strip where you got out of bed, and you made
sure you stood right on it, I can tell you.’ The bedroom wallpaper was ‘always flowers; even when it was changed it was flowers.’ There were net curtains on the sash windows. There was a chamber pot under the bed, ‘a very elegant one too, with all kinds of flowers and furbelows’.

The front bedroom, her parents’, had a black marble wash-stand, with a delph
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basin and matching jug for the water which was brought up from the bathroom. There was a dressing table in one corner, and wardrobe and double bed. They all matched and were, she thinks, rosewood and probably intended for a bigger room. There was a polished wood crucifix above the bed, perhaps a foot high, with a silver-coloured Christ figure. There was a carpet. ‘I can still see it, pale green with pink roses.’

Downstairs again. Outside the scullery door, there was a passage. ‘I have a vague memory that there were two windows, two sash windows, nearly together. I may be wrong in that but it was certainly a wide-ish window and the passage was the width of that window. There was a meat safe in the passage – I can’t remember what the covering was made of but it kept the weather off it – and a great big mangle for the clothes. And then there was quite a nice little garden, good high walls. They must have been about eight feet high around, and little beds, garden beds, right around and a little grass bit in the middle. My father took care of that, and I was sorry for the grass because everything he did was very methodical.’

The house was lit by gas. The gas mantle, made of asbestos gauze, was attached, locked to the pipe-end; each mantle had to be lit by match. The mantles were
very fragile; they crumbled if touched, even with a match. The gas provided good, uniform light. ‘But what happened every now and again was, it would suddenly start going down and there was a rush to the meter to stick the shilling in. And if you weren’t wise and had your shillings piled up you were in big trouble because you had to go searching. It was originally a penny meter which was dreadful but then they changed it to a shilling meter. The gas man used to come every month and collect the money and there used sometimes be a payback; they’d decide how much you’d used, and a lot of women were delighted when the gas man came because he would give you back a few shillings and there would often be enough for a dinner or so out of it.’

The children weren’t allowed to use the gas upstairs. ‘It was supposed to be very dangerous but we were given candles which I always considered quite as dangerous, if not more so.’ She remembers Joe once setting fire to the curtains in the girls’ bedroom, and Máire shouting, ‘Look what you did!’ The top of the dressing table was burnt black but was later restored.

She remembers the landlord calling for the rent. His name was Mr Pearse, a Wicklow man. He owned most of the houses on both sides of the road. ‘He was very friendly; he used to bring us sweets. Maybe if you didn’t have your rent he wouldn’t bring any, but he always had sweets in his pockets for us.’

She liked the house. ‘I don’t know whether childhood has that effect on you or not, but I never saw anything wrong with it. I’m sure the sitting-room must have been freezing, but I never thought it freezing.’ She remembers bits of plaster falling off the walls, and her father getting dado rail to secure them. She thinks now that
the walls were rarely papered because her father was afraid that the whole walls would come down if the old paper was stripped from them. And then there was the time the bedroom ceiling fell on her. ‘We were in bed and we heard a kind of rumbling. We were very quick actually, and we pulled the sheets up over us. There was no weight in the plaster. It all came tumbling down on us, and we looked up and all we could see was these little narrow laths, and the plaster gone – in a big hole, like. It just happened to come down over the bed. And I can’t remember how it was repaired but it was repaired very quickly, if I remember rightly.’ But she liked the house. ‘I thought it was grand. And I loved everything about that locality. I was very happy with it.’

Her father wore a felt hat and he always wore black boots with toecaps, which he polished himself. ‘He wore brown suits with a very fine white line; you’d hardly see the line.’ When the suit became a bit shabby he’d get a new one, exactly like the old, and the old one was worn at the weekends. He always bought the suit in Kevin & Howlin, on Nassau Street. Tom Howlin was a Wexford man, an old school friend. Years later, she went with her father to buy a suit for her wedding day. ‘I remember him saying, “I want a suit for my daughter’s wedding,” and it was the very same suit as the first one I remember him in. When he went on holidays he took off his tie, he took off his collar – and he was on holidays.’

She can’t remember her mother. ‘I can only remember her hands. I can’t remember her face. I have no memory of her attire whatsoever. I can’t remember what she wore on her feet. The only memory I have is her hands, doing things.’

She was three months short of her fourth birthday when her mother died in March 1929. ‘I was told that we all had some kind of a flu, and she stayed up to look after us, and she got pneumonia and she died. I remember being carried in to see her and I remember her hands were white and I remember saying, “Mammy has new gloves.”’

She remembers the priest coming to the house, with two altar boys. ‘I was in the cot, in my bedroom, and, whatever way the coffin was fixed, I could see it through the door. And I thought it was wonderful, the priest coming up the stairs – he had a kind of regalia on him, and these two little boys ringing bells and going into her room. I thought it was a holiday. The priest and the two little boys and the bells ringing, and then off they went.’

She watched from her parents’ bedroom window. ‘I must have been still sick because I was taken out of the cot and I can remember the horses had black plumes, and there was a hearse and my father had a black hard hat. Neighbours were there, I can remember that. I can’t remember relations but I remember my father had a black armband and a black tie, and all the blinds were pulled on the road. The men walked off behind the hearse, only the men.