Rory & Ita (9 page)

‘Through the left, from the kitchen, there was a small dining-room and, beside that, there was another room which had no window. It was very dark but there was an oil-fired stove in there, and my aunt used to bake on it.
She’d make griddle bread, done on the fire, and scones and tarts. And then you went down a few steps, to the dairy. The dairy had the churns and the separator, which always fascinated me. You put milk in one end, and you turned the handle and the skim milk came out one spout and the cream came out another. It was fascinating; I just couldn’t understand how it worked. The separating was done every morning, and the cream was put into pots. And then, once a week, the cream was churned and butter was made. Bessie had a name for being a great butter maker. She had a set of customers and I used to deliver for her. One lady in particular – I used to have to go along the bog road to deliver the butter to her. She was very old. She always gave me biscuits; she’d have these two-penny packets of Jacob’s biscuits, and she’d give me a penny. But she had a beard that fascinated me, and a bit of a moustache.

‘There was the yard and then there were outhouses, to the left and right. There was a barn and a very big milking shed. In the barn – one thing I remember from my very first visit there – they had a greyhound called Coolnaboy Lass. They had pups in there as well. There was a shed to the right, with a cart and the trap. And straight across the yard, before you got to the haggard, there was a pigsty. To the left of the house, there was a small gate into the garden – the kitchen garden. There were nice flowers there but it was mostly vegetables, and a big monkey-puzzle tree. They told me that Daddy had planted that when he was a young boy. They had apple trees too, “Lady Fingers” and “Beauty of Bath”. The apples were never quite ripe when I was there but that didn’t put me off.

‘I used to go roaming over the farm. And, of course,
it never rained – I can’t remember it raining. One particular day, Katie was making jam – I think it was blackcurrant – and she let me scrape the pot, and I scraped and scraped and ate and ate, and I was sick after it, and tucked up in bed. It was all one year merging into another year and, as I said, it never rained and everything seemed marvellous. I’d go across the fields to Parkers’. They had different names on the fields and the Park, as I remember it, was the name of the field I crossed to get to Parkers’. There was a field called the Haggard Field. There was another one, nearer Oilgate, called the Racecourse, and at the back of the house there was one called the Bog Field. There was a bog hole at the end of it; they had fish in that – roach. My father used to go there with Joe. They both had fishing rods. Mere females were never allowed to go fishing, but I wasn’t particularly interested, anyway. I remember, a cow got stuck, near the bog hole. There were a lot of men around, trying to pull the cow out. There was one extremely fat boy, fifteen or sixteen years of age, and he got to the front of the rope, pulling and pulling. Then the cow slipped a bit and the rope went forward. And I remember someone saying, “Don’t let Pat fall in or we’ll have twice the job getting
him
out.” It raised a laugh, and it didn’t seem to bother Pat.

‘And I’d sit with Mrs Parker. She’d make scones and no one ever made scones the way she made them. She used to use currants, which was unusual, and she rolled them out flat, cut them in squares and they were cooked on the griddle pan. And I used to sit in the corner and read the religious papers,
Far East
, the
Madonna
, and little religious magazines. Work would be going on all around me but, again, I was accepted as part of it.

‘I hated the thought of going back home again in September. I remember once, I was brought up to Oilgate by Katie, to catch the bus for home. And the bus was full; there was only room for one and I think there were two or three others there. I was ever so polite and let the girl before me get on the bus. I was delighted; I had to go back to Coolnaboy for another day. And Katie remembered that day, up to the very end; she spoke about that day, when she brought me back to Coolnaboy, and how delighted I was.’

‘M
y mother set off with my Aunt Lil for the Eucharistic Congress, in her high-heeled shoes, most elegant, and she came home with her shoes in her hand; she couldn’t walk any further. I wasn’t allowed go because I wasn’t old enough. But Sergeant Nyhan just up the road had a wireless. He turned it on and opened the window, and that was how I heard John McCormack.
^*
It was marvellous. I had never heard the wireless before. McCormack was one of the very few singers we ever heard. Very few people had a gramophone, and the result was that when you heard music, it was local, almost accidental, a passing band. So, to hear that voice coming out, it was like a miracle; it was such a beautiful voice.’

The Eucharistic Congress was held in Dublin in June 1932, to celebrate the 1,500th anniversary of Saint Patrick’s return to Ireland. ‘It was decided to have this great display of faith, a coming together, after ten years of statehood, a big celebration of what was the Catholic Church and Ireland. There were men’s nights, and women’s nights, and the children’s. It lasted the best part of a week but it seemed to go on for ever. There were banners put across the street, all the way down the town.
Some of them were supposed to have been blessed by the Pope and one of them, I remember, said “Cod Save The Pope”. There was an old tramp called Jack the Rant. He had a stoop. He famously tried to straighten up, to read the banners, and toppled over backwards in the middle of the street. There was bunting everywhere. But we had special bunting put up on our house, and my mother got butter boxes. They were square boxes, about eighteen inches square, and the same height, and they were very useful. You could buy the butter boxes and they made stools, seats, presses. My mother and my aunt painted them green, and shrubs were put into them, to decorate the place, outside the door.’

His father was a member of Fianna Fáil.
^*
‘He had a song that he sang quite often, almost like a mantra, particularly at election times.
De Valera bowled them over, As they marched along Mount Street, De Valera bowled them over, And the Sherwood Foresters were no more. De Valera bowled them over, De Valera and his gallant little band, De Valera bowled them over, And he was transported to a foreign land
. I worked in the 1932 election. I was only nine. Seán McEntee and Miss Pearse
^†
were the candidates for Fianna Fáil. I addressed envelopes and I made paste, for the posters. The Guards
^‡
had a very low opinion of Fianna Fáil, as being dissident, little better than the IRA. When some of the posters were torn down, the Guards just wouldn’t see it happening. So a complaint was made to Seán McEntee, and I was very young but I still remember
this
[imitating McEntee’s accent]:
“Let ye get a sack and some bottles and jam jars and a loan of a hammer from the blacksmith over opposite.” In other words, you put the bottles in a sack, broke them into smithereens and you mixed them in with the paste. I broke the bottles – I was involved in politics from an early age. And the first time anybody tried to tear the posters down, they got the fingers cut off them. The paste was so good that, years later, in the 50s, I went out to visit my mother, and I saw a 1932 election poster, faded but still there, under the arch of a bridge.’

Fianna Fáil won the election and McEntee and Miss Pearse were elected. ‘There was a torchlight procession. You got a stick, and you nailed a B.B. Toffees
^*
can to it. Then you got two sods of turf and put them into the can, and poured in paraffin. When you lit it, you had a good torch; it burned fiercely and for a good long time. Anybody who had a horse marched it through Tallaght that night, the riders dressed in the Thomas Davis jerseys, green and an orange sash – very patriotic jerseys. I don’t know where the Fine Gael
^†
people were. They certainly didn’t arrive to object. Some of them may even have marched.

‘My mother took us into Dublin one day. I don’t know what the occasion was; she must have fallen into some money. We had our dinner in Woolworth’s on Henry Street, and it was wonderful. And then, she brought us to the pictures, the Metropole. I don’t know what the name of the film was but there were a lot of these French
officers with pillboxes hopping around, gesticulating and talking. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but I remember the theme music. And I remember, quite graphically, on the Pathé News, the assassination of Alexander of Yugoslavia and the French Foreign Minister, in Marseille.
^*
That was the first time I ever saw a film. The next time I went to the pictures was to see
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, some years later.
^†
In actual fact, we never went to the pictures, because that would have meant the wasteful spending of money. Money was for food
^‡
and clothes; anything else was frivolous. So we didn’t go, although some went who had a damn sight less than we had. Regular goers would tell me about Buck Jones and all those characters and I remember someone describing
Hell’s Angels
^§
to us. I thought I’d never grow up till I got to see
Hell’s Angels
. I never did get to see it but it was a great story.’

*   *   *

He changed schools when he was twelve. ‘I went to live with my Aunt Bridge, in Inchicore.
^*
Tirconnell Park; it was a newly built housing estate. They called them utility houses; I don’t know why. I think, first of all, my mother wanted me to go to the Christian Brothers, and Bridge’s house was near the school, but I also think that there might have been a question of crowding. The house was very packed and she was expecting again, although I didn’t know that at the time. She was expecting Rosaleen – the twins.
^†
Bridge had plenty of room – so few people in the house; it took me a while to get my head around that – and there was always the prospect that I would be fixed up with a trade. Her husband was works manager of a printing place and had already got an apprenticeship for my cousin, Tom Poynton.

‘Bridge was married to a North of Ireland man, Jack O’Hagan, from Tandragee, who started life as Jack Hagan, a Protestant, and then converted. He met my Aunt Bridge. She was a very good-looking woman, as are all my female relatives. And, in spite of his great belief in King Billy and all that background, he wanted to marry her. So, he turned around and changed his name to O’Hagan. And he became more Catholic than the Catholics themselves, very dogmatic. When they met, he was a good-looking man; he had black curly hair and a full set of teeth. When I knew him he had neither. He
had lost his hair through enteric fever and he lost his teeth through pyorrhoea.

‘Living there was persecution; it was terrible. They didn’t know how to handle young people at all. They were terribly dogmatic and I think they were dedicated to the belief that, no matter what you did, you were doing something wrong. It was a most horrific time. Child abuse was what it was – nothing physical at all but constant, constant carping; you couldn’t do anything right. If I came home and said, “I got a first prize in school,” that achievement would be degraded – that kind of thing. I had come from a house full of people, where nobody ever rowed
^*
in any real sense. But in the O’Hagan household there was a constant bickering that never rose to anything like violence, but constant sharp interchange. If one said, “That’s a fine day,” the other said, “Not as fine as all that,” just for the sake of making a disagreement. But they were made that way; they knew no better.