Rory & Ita (21 page)

‘Another time, I happened to be in the laboratory, and the pathologists were all sitting around at their microscopes. They were examining prostate glands, for cancer. And Professor O’Kelly – I don’t remember how many he’d examined that morning – said, “Do you know what? There won’t be a prostate left in the country.” In my youthfulness, I scurried out; we were a sheltered generation.

‘But I loved it there. There was myself and Chris Lynch, and our boss, Miss O’Toole. When I was there a few years, extra staff were needed, and Muriel Long came in. We hit it off very well. She was very gentle. I often went cycling with her on Saturdays, and the odd time, we went to a dance together. I was the youngest of the office staff, before Muriel arrived, and every morning it was my job to make the coffee and tea. I was quite happy to do it; I didn’t feel in any way servile. And it gave me the chance to get out for a few minutes, because I had to go across the road, to Leeson Street, to get a bottle of milk. The doctors, but not the two professors, used to come into our office and have tea and coffee with us. It was great. It was nearly like
Upstairs Downstairs
because – they were in no way rude to us – but, as far as their conversations were concerned, we just didn’t exist. We sat there with our ears flapping and we got more information, about their romances, and about
people who shouldn’t have been with other people. And we took it all in. We never blackmailed any of them but we could have. I remember, one of them was going on a great date one night; she was a lovely girl – he was all excited. Stephen Breen was his name, from Waterford, a very funny man. And the next day, he was asked all about it. And he said, “A dead loss. You might as well have been dancing with a lamppost. She was that well corseted, you couldn’t get near her.” And we were sitting there; we weren’t supposed to hear. Then, they were discussing another doctor. He was very well-known. He was doing a line with a lady who was also a doctor, who had a sister who was yet another doctor. But the steady line was with the older sister. He had one of the earliest soft-top cars; you could roll the top down. And he was driving somewhere with the younger sister, and he spotted the older sister. He pretended not to see her but, because of his distinctive car, she’d have known who it was. So he got the younger one by the head and pushed her in under the seat, until he was well past the older sister. The doctors were standing there, drinking coffee and laughing; we knew the doctor mentioned in the story – he came in and out of the laboratory on occasion, a really nice man. We also knew the two sisters, who came in occasionally. We could have caused awful trouble, but we didn’t. Anyway, he married the older one.

‘The room where we worked was beside one of the lecture theatres. A lot of the students going in and out of the lectures would stick their heads in and say, “Hello.” That made life very exciting for us, all those handsome and not-so-handsome men. I remember one day, there was great screaming and roaring along the corridor, really
mad screaming. We didn’t venture out, but we were told afterwards that it was this Polish student; it was immediately after the War. He was studying medicine, but he drank absolute alcohol; he found the bottle and drank it and went completely out of his head, screaming up and down the corridor. I don’t know how they tackled him, but he went off in an ambulance. I remember seeing him coming and going before that, a harmless-looking guy.

‘I loved it there. It was my first job and it was great to have a few bob in my pocket. I liked the whole atmosphere and the place; it was kind of alive.

‘Miss O’Toole was a highly organised, highly intelligent woman; she ran the office very, very well. She dressed beautifully and she had a lovely figure; she was rather plain because she had rather big teeth, but she dressed so well and held herself so well and she was so slim that she still looked kind of attractive. She was, I always thought, a very lonely lady. The only relations she seemed to have were a sister and brother-in-law; I don’t know if there were nieces or nephews. She used to come in after the weekends, and she’d tell us about various romantic assignations she’d been on, and I remember hearing about one man who had a car with an open-top roof. They drove up to Killiney Hill and they sat looking at the moon, and it was so beautiful – much to the titters of the laddoes who wouldn’t have dreamt of wasting time looking at the moon. Then she met a man, and he was a farmer; she really thought that this was the one. This farmer came and showered her with gifts; she came in with jewellery, and I remember a little white fur jacket. In fact, she lent it to me once, when I was going to a dance. But she discovered that he was married. She
seemed to have no problem attracting men but they just didn’t last. She had a flat on her own, on Waterloo Road, and she had a romance with a son of the owner of the house. But that filtered out, and she moved to a very nice bedsit on Orwell Road, in Rathgar; I used to cycle over and call in to see her. She was always very sincere about these men, and hugely romantic, but she never did marry.’
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‘I can remember girls who’d go out on Saturday morning; they’d buy material, and be wearing dresses made from that material that night.
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And I remember being in a shop one time, and two girls were standing at the counter and they bought two lots of material each. And one said to the other, “Which one will I wear tonight?” But it was just material on the counter at that stage.

‘I made most of my own dresses, and jackets as well. It was a way of making the money stretch and, the thing is, you didn’t want to appear in the same dress all the time. We all made our dresses. Noeleen was lucky; her mother was a great dressmaker. She used to turn out the most beautiful dresses and skirts. But I made my own. It was easily done. I was young and fairly slim, so it was easy enough to cut out a round neck and no sleeves, and suchlike; a little tuck at the waist and you were away with it. Making them was an everyday affair; it was nothing unusual. I did make some with sleeves as well, but I’ve no memory of ever having a pattern – but I must have had. There was a Singer sewing machine at
home, which had belonged to my mother, and I used it all the time. I’d buy material during the week and I’d be able to wear the dress on Sunday. In summer we’d deck ourselves out in three or four dresses, and we’d wear them turn, turn-about. You could make them very cheaply. You could make a dress for half-a-crown, even less. I remember making a corduroy jacket. It was wine-coloured, and had a belt and pockets. And I bought what was all the rage then, a Goray skirt, which was quite expensive – Goray was a brand-name – and I had to save for a few weeks to afford it. It had the same wine colour as the jacket, and it toned very well. If I bought in a shop, I was inclined to buy things that were really more expensive than I could afford. So I saved for them, if I wanted a suit or something like that. I always liked quality. Máire said once, “You can’t afford that.” And I just said, “Well, I have it.”

‘We usually went to the dances together, myself and Noeleen; I don’t remember going with anyone else, except an odd time with Muriel Long. But we’d meet a crowd there; there was always a crowd. After going a few times, we got to know a few other people. Some of them we never knew by name; we just got friendly with them, sat and chatted, or just knew them by their first names.

‘The hops were held all over the place; they were marvellous. The halls were quite small, but we all fitted
in. It was band music, but very small bands, maybe three or four. You danced around the sides of the hall – one group going on the outside and another on the inside. The dances at that time were like that – you kept moving. There was the waltz – but that took up a lot of space. There was the quick-step, and the slow foxtrot – very romantic, so they’d have quite a few of those. Now and again, they’d throw in an Irish dance – the “Walls of Limerick,” the “Bridge of Athlone”. That could be hair-raising; you could be kicked in your shins. We cycled everywhere; there was no other way of going. But we’d walk to Templeogue. We were well able to walk home; it wasn’t far. Or, if you were lucky, you’d get a crossbar home. This was a great method of travel, except when there was a “three-gear” on the crossbar; that was a rather bruising experience.’

She didn’t often suffer the indignity of being a wallflower. ‘I got most of the dances. One time, however, myself and Noeleen went on a holiday to Arklow,
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and we were sitting around waiting to be asked. I mustn’t have looked my best because I was sitting there for the best part of the night, and Noeleen was up for every dance. I couldn’t understand it, but then one fellow asked me up to dance and, after that, I was away. And another time – they used to have
céilís
in the Mansion House on St Patrick’s night and, often, on Sundays throughout the year. One of the girls living beside me, Marie Sullivan, asked me to go with her. I wasn’t that keen, but I decided to go. So, off we set. We paid our way in, and sat there – and there we sat for the whole night. It turned out they all knew each other; they were really a clique and
not one of them asked us to dance the whole night. We ended up dancing with each other and more or less jeering and sneering at the Irish zealots around us. We could speak Irish too, but no one spoke to us. We were disgusted with them. We never went again.

‘But the dances were great. They were mostly in the tennis clubs around the area. And the rugby clubs. There was one in Kenilworth Square; there was a tennis club there. There was one in Lansdowne Rugby Club. There was one in Templeogue Tennis Club. Templeogue always ended up with “Goodnight Sweetheart;” we knew it was all over then. There was only the piano and drums, but it filled the whole hall. The people who played the music were Thelma and Jack Kent. Thelma played the piano, Jack played the drums. Thelma had actually been to Eccles Street when I was there, and I knew her. I remember, she used to do cartwheels in the corridors. Needless to say, the nuns weren’t around when it happened, or they’d have been horrified. But Thelma was great fun. They did a good job, just the piano and drums; it was quite sufficient. We had great fun. Alcohol wasn’t served at the dances; there was never any drink, except it came in somebody’s stomach.

‘I was never in a pub; it was unheard-of to go into a pub. I wouldn’t have known what the inside of a Dublin pub looked like. I do remember going into one in Wexford; there’d been a hurling match and I was there with my father – I was a teenager. The man who owned the pub had been in St Peter’s College with Daddy. We went in, and I was immediately whipped away and taken out to the kitchen. It wasn’t fit that I stand in a pub, so I had nice tea and cakes out in the kitchen, which suited
me fine. On another occasion, I went with my Uncle Mike when he was a pig buyer, and we stopped in a village where he was buying pigs for Buttles. I sat in the car while he did that part of the job. Then we went into the pub, where Mike and the dealer shook hands on the deal and exchanged drinks. Again, I was immediately taken into the kitchen. I think that any women in those days who went into pubs were looked on as fallen women. I know from reading that there were pubs in Dublin where they had a snug for the women, a little private place. They had a little hatch to the counter where women were able to ask for drink, but they didn’t mix with the men.’

She still went to Wexford every year. ‘I always looked on it as my place to go on holidays, even when I started to work and could afford to go to other places around Ireland. I went down each summer, sometimes maybe only for a week, and a week then somewhere different, but I always went. I stayed with Aunt Bessie, in Kilmuckridge.

‘Card games, like twenty-five, were arranged in houses around, followed by supper. Aunt Bessie always started the ball rolling with a card night. We travelled to Carberry’s, a farm down the road, and to Miss Redmond, a teacher who lived in a thatched house opposite the church, and to others too, but the names I can’t recall. We were an all-female group and the cards were secondary to the chat and the supper. To me, those nights were magic. Sometimes, Mary Carberry’s holidays coincided with mine, and we cycled hither and yon. Once, we visited an elderly cousin of Mary’s, a Miss Parker, who lived with an elderly brother, near Blackwater. Mary’s sister, Maggie, lived with them. Miss
Parker was a really old-style martinet and she ruled the house with a rod of iron. Her list of things a young girl should not do included dressing with bare legs and bare arms. Fortunately, she was quite blind and quite immobile. Mary and myself arrived and put on our cardigans. When I was introduced, I stood well back, and reached my hand out to shake hers. The old bat ran her hand up and down my arm, and then shook hands with me. That was it – I was fit to eat in her house. After that, we took our cardigans off and had a pleasant afternoon.

‘I’d cycle over to Coolnaboy. The children were small but growing fast. There was Joan, then Johnny; Jim, I think, was next; then Paddy, Matt, Liam and Breda, and then Eilish was the youngest. It was a big family. Nobody could bake apple and rhubarb tarts like Aunt Katie. They were packed with fruit. The juice used to blend with the sugar and, in places, it seeped out and a lovely toffee formed on the sides. If there’d been an Oscar for tart-making, Katie would have won it. I can still taste them. One day, I remember I cycled back to Kilmuckridge from Coolnaboy, full to the gills with apple tart. When I was telling Bessie about the events of my day – I’d left Kilmuckridge early, to cycle the fourteen or so miles to Coolnaboy – I told her about the wonderful apple tart, the juice, and the toffee on the sides. Silence for a minute, then, “She mustn’t seal her tarts properly. Juice should not leak out of tarts if they are properly sealed.” That remark has gone down in family history. Ever the diplomat, I heaped praise on Bessie’s tarts and scones from then on.