Rory & Ita

  The landlord was Dublin County Council. The house was brand new.* ‘I didn’t like it. It lacked that homeliness, or the inclusiveness, of the old house, where everything was so familiar. This place was bare, and I didn’t like it at all. I never did like it. I tolerated it.

  ‘In summer, I often spent the holidays with my Aunt Lizzie, my father’s eldest sister. She lived in a very large house down in Balrothery.* And I was walking home from Mass in Balbriggan, which was a mile and a half away, and I heard the wireless; I came in the door and Aunt Lizzie said, “Do you know, there’s going to be a war.” Then Chamberlain came on and made that famous speech, that our ambassador has informed Herr Hitler. I felt a certain excitement but, the funny thing is, nothing exceptional happened for the rest of the year. A lot of things were being done and decided that nobody knew about, like a realisation that there’d have to be rationing – we didn’t know that. And a realisation that we weren’t going to get all that wheat from Manitoba. All of these things lay ahead, but only really began to happen around the middle of 1940.’

  ‘My mother brought me to a tailor at the end of George’s Street, a man called Newman, and a suit was made for me. And a new bicycle was bought, from McHugh Himself. And a raincoat. I also had a white apron, to keep the clothes clean. A white cotton one, like a shopkeeper’s. I had no particular feelings about leaving school. It was part of life. I’d got a job, a scarce commodity. And I liked the thought of what I would be doing; I’d found an old book and read about printing, and I liked the idea.

  ‘I went in the door of Juverna press at 8 am, on the 8th of July, 1940. The first person I saw inside the door was Frank Bowers; he was running his machine, which I found out later was a Cropper Platen.† Then, surrounding me, there was this huge deluge of deafening noise – the other machines. And then, up the wooden winding stairs. This was a funny, converted building, three-floored, in Proby’s Lane, off Liffey Street, down at Arnott’s back entrance. I went up the stairs, and into the heart of the printing works, the case room. The engine room of control and power. And all that noise. My uncle Jack O’Hagan was there, and he looked at me and said, “Go and learn the lay of the case.” I didn’t know what “the lay of the case” meant. But one of the fellows pointed out a frame, where the cases of type were mounted; “You learn each letter.”

  ‘Case, in printers’ terms, was a tray thirty-two and a half inches long, and fourteen and a half inches broad; it was divided up into tiny little compartments, each one and a half inches deep. Each compartment held a different character – capitals, lower-case, numerals, all the commercial signs. They all had a place and you had to learn where exactly they were because, when you were setting type, you didn’t look at what you were taking from the tray; it would have taken too long – you’d never have got the job set. You couldn’t operate as a compositor if you didn’t know the lay of the case.

  ‘So I started learning. And, behind my back, there was a big linotype, or inter-type, machine. It was going away there, and I was fascinated, looking at the matrices,* flowing across the bar and down the shoot, to produce metal slugs of type characters. And then, further down, there was a monotype caster – it cast single pieces of type – and it made a noise like a thousand guns, all the time, and, behind it, Jimmy Ward sitting at the keyboard. The caster was driven by a punched paper roll which was created by Jimmy, the keyboard operator. It was a multiple keyboard; it had an alphabet for every form of character you could use. Capital letters, small capitals, lower-case, capital letters with bold face, lower-case bold face, capital letters for italics, lower-case italics; then the numbers and other assorted characters for commercial use, like © and £, all on this one keyboard, which worked away and punched the paper. All very fascinating.

  ‘The first day, I also went into Millar’s, on Abbey Street, and bought myself a composing stick. It’s the compositor’s basic tool, for setting up type, and I bought a brand-new one, my pride and joy, my initials stamped on it by old Millar. I still have it. I also bought a type-scale, for measuring type on pages, and a tweezers, for picking up single type while doing corrections. So, now I was equipped.

  ‘I spent a few days learning the lay of the case, and Jack O’Hagan came up and asked me if I knew it. And I said, “I do.” So he said, “Where is –?” and he asked me where each particular character was. Capital I, lower case g, and, generally, he asked me to find the tricky ones around the perimeter of the case, the ones you might be inclined to slip over, like diphthongs and ligatures. To do it properly, you looked to where the box of letters was; then you put out your hand and picked up the character – you didn’t look at it. You picked it up and placed it in the composing stick. That was the real skill. So, I got through the test and I was given bits of things to set up – lines to fit into chapter headings in magazines and books. Then I graduated to setting up raffle tickets. The technical side to that job was, you had to put in a piece of perforated rule, a very thin band of metal, slightly higher than the type, to allow people to tear the tickets. And you had to put in a numbering box. Sometimes, numbering boxes got stuck and caused trouble, by being too tightly locked in the forme.* I was delighted with myself. I liked the job, and quickly mastered the simpler techniques.

  ‘I served a seven-year apprenticeship, working from eight o’clock in the morning until six o’clock in the evening. I was paid ten shillings a week. About seven or eight weeks after I started there was a general pay rise, and I got another shilling. So I had eleven shillings. And every year I got a rise of five shillings. Seven long years, but I didn’t feel that way; all life was spread out ahead of me. I was very pleased, because I got a shilling for myself out of the ten shillings. I did marvellous things with that shilling, including bringing my sister, Breda, to the Wolfe Tone Café, just around the corner from Clery’s, on Christmas Eve, where we had sausages and mashed potatoes. Breda was delighted and I felt very proud about the whole thing. To have any money at all was marvellous, because I’d never had money in my pocket before. Now I had a shilling to do what I liked with.

  ‘I learned to set type, arrange book and magazine pages, carry large formes of metal pages, mostly sixteen pages of crown quarto,* down the winding stairs to the printing department, then back up the stairs to be broken up. The used type metal was carried by zinc bucket – by me – down the stairs, down Proby’s Lane, on to Liffey Street, and down the stairs at the head office, to the basement, where there was a large metal pot, fired by gas. The type was melted at great heat and the dirt and impurities scraped off the molten top, and thrown into a box outside the door. This was called dross, and it hardened into a most colourful mass of peculiar matter. The clean metal was poured – again, by me – by ladle into moulds, to form ingots of metal, to feed the monotype and linotype machines. I had to carry these ingots back up the stairs, out on to Liffey Street, up Proby’s Lane, up the stairs, and stack them beside the composing machines. That work really belonged to the general worker, Paddy Keating, but, somehow, he was always importantly engaged elsewhere.

  ‘Juverna Press had originally been the Gaelic Press, which had printed much of the seditious literature for Arthur Griffith† and Sinn Féin. Griffith’s Scissors and Paste was printed there, and Nationality. And I once discovered a couple of anti-conscription pledges, from 1918. When I went there, they specialised in the printing of religious magazines: the Lourdes Messenger, the Redemptorist Record, the Cross, and others.

  ‘There were three floors, and about twenty-five people worked there. The ground floor housed the printing machines; a Cropper Platen, just inside the door; a German Quad crown self-feeder; two Wharfdale hand-fed machines; and a Heidelberg Automatic Feeder Platen.

  ‘The second floor was the case room, the intellectual heart of the printing works – home of the compositors. The compositor, in those days, was considered the crème de la crème of industrial society; no other trade and very few professions were comparable in status. When the type was set, we’d send out the proofs, and th
e editors would come in with the proofs and tell you how they wanted the pages arranged. It reached a stage where I could nearly read their minds and I’d have the pages arranged before they came back. These were eminent scholars, some of them, doctors of theology; they’d been seconded to do the magazine. Another man I met was Dónal O’Moráin, subsequently head of Gael-Linn. He was probably in his first job, as editor of the retail grocers’ magazine. He was very young and innocent, and some of the compositors gave him a terrible fright one time when he inadvertently lifted up four or five slugs. They immediately started a hullabaloo, saying that this man had broken all the rules, he had handled type, he wasn’t a compositor – it was sacrilegious. They went through the motions of demanding his removal – he nearly died of fright – and then they let him off. In fact, for some of them, it wasn’t a joke. They regarded it as almost sacrilegious, like picking the Blessed Sacrament up with their hands.

  ‘The third floor was occupied by the bindery, where magazines were folded and stitched, and trimmed by the cutter, Peadar Murphy, a veteran of the 1916 Rising. One of the ladies of the bindery, Bessie Gorman, who lived on Dominick Street, declared one day that her mother was broken-hearted because Bessie’s brother had left the Holy Name Sodality and joined the British Army. Most of the women worked in the bindery, but there were two more on the printing floor; they were machine feeders – they fed the sheets of paper into the printing machines. They could be grumpy. They did their jobs and, when the machine wasn’t working, they sat at the back of it, knitting. There was another apprentice, Michael Doggett, the same age as myself but with two years’ seniority. He was a nice, decent lad. And there were various men, mostly from Dublin, with all that that entails – the teams they supported, the cynicism about political life, and suchlike. It was an eye-opener for me, like being in a different country. The philosophy was profoundly anti-Republican, anti-Gaelic, almost anti-Irish. As far as they were concerned, they were Dublin men, not Irish. They bought and read English newspapers, while I read the Irish Press.* They spoke of nothing but soccer, all the Dublin and English teams, and they jeered at Croke Park,† called them all culchies. And there were other characters. There was Paul Hughes, who was the monotype caster and an ex-Dublin Fusilier; he’d been out with the British Army in 1916; a very taciturn, grumpy old fellow. Then we had Paddy McBrinn, who was a Republican from Belfast. And every now and again, there’d be a shortage of ingots and a row over who had to go and get them. They were always ripe for a row, if they got the chance.

  ‘Occasionally, a traveller would call to the works door. Ostensibly, he’d be looking for work. He’d be carrying a composing stick wrapped up in an apron. These itinerant printers rarely got work. All they’d have was a grimy and creased union card, and they’d be helped by a donation from the chapel fund,* held by the father of the chapel for that purpose. One regular caller was dressed in a dilapidated frock coat, a battered tall hat and a ragged trousers, a proofreader who had fallen on hard times. His accent was quite cultured and he was known as “the Knight” or “the Knight of the Shattered Arse”.

  ‘One day my guardian angel took his eye off the ball and the devil whispered an idea into my ear. It was a day when the directors had their meeting in the front office. I was toiling in the bowels of the basement, as befitted a printer’s devil.† When I’d lit the boiler, I took a large piece of rain-sodden dross and placed it on top of the metal, and went to attend to my other duties. I think I was making the point that I was fed up with what I was doing; and I knew that if I complained, I’d just be told off. So, half an hour later, the whole office building was filled with a lung-corroding, poisonous black smoke. The directors staggered into the street, coughing and yelling. The fire brigade was called and the whole of Liffey Street came to a standstill. Jack O’Hagan‡ located the cause of the smoke and, when all was cleared, I was escorted into the august presence of the general manager, Mr Hennebery. It was pointed out, heatedly, that I was, not alone incompetent, but stupid as well, and I was sacked.

  ‘I went down the lane to the works and told Jimmy Ward, the father of the chapel, and I reminded him that I was an apprentice and should not have been doing labourer’s work. Jimmy hated any hassle but felt obliged to point out to the management the error of their ways. I was reinstated but my mother was sent for and had to endure a lecture from Jack O’Hagan on my shortcomings. When she got home I had to endure a re-run, but my father said nothing and just winked at me. Later, I heard him refer to Jack O’Hagan as a “right get” – strong words from my quiet-spoken father.

  ‘Every man walked in dread of Jacko, who tyrannised the staff worse than any Russian commissar. To say that I was persecuted would be an understatement. You’d never, ever be told, “That’s a good job;” it would always be wrong. Anything at all, no effort was made to dodge a chance to belittle you. But it all rolled off me, and my work was always accepted by the customers.* I won the William Rooney Shield for best apprentice at the School of Printing, which I attended every day for two years; a half-day in the works and a half-day at Bolton Street Technical Institute. Each year the firm whose apprentice won the award would display it in the public office. I brought the shield into work and Jacko told me not to bring things in, as they went missing from time to time. The staff were horrified, but they were afraid of him – with good reason. If they lost their jobs, it was the boat to England.’

  In early 1940, the Government announced the formation of a civil defence force, the LDF.* ‘My father and myself walked up the road and joined up. We had no arms or equipment at first. We drilled with pick-axe handles and shovels. Then my father said, “I know where there’s a gun.” The next day, he took me off, with a spade and shovel, to a place he knew, near the bottom of my granny’s garden, and he walked up and down, then pointed: “There. Commence digging.” And what we dug up was an old sack and, in it, a heap of rusted metal and the butt end of a rifle. He’d buried it when de Valera had given the order to dump arms in 1923.

  ‘We were eventually issued with brown overall uniforms, consisting of trousers, short leggings, blouse and forage cap, web equipment and a terrible pair of boots. The cap was the inverted V-shape, the same as worn by Franco’s lot in the Spanish Civil War. The boots were very hard in dry weather; they’d cut the feet off you. And they were completely porous in wet weather. We paraded for drill one evening a week and on Sunday mornings. Our parade ground was the old aerodrome in Tallaght. The district leader was Tom Watkins, a veteran of the Civil War, and he arrived at our first parade armed with a parabellum. The gun was a large pistol which was housed in a scabbard which also acted as a rifle butt. He looked most impressive and warlike.

  ‘Eventually, we were supplied with American Springfield rifles. They were at least as old as the Great War,* or even the American Civil War. They were very long and heavy. But I remember holding the rifle and experiencing an extraordinary feeling of power; if anybody came near me, I could take care of myself. We were now required to patrol the mountains around Killenarden, and also guard Tallaght Garda barracks, where the arms were housed. My companion-in-arms on these occasions was always Gerry O’Neill, a very decent, sincere and conscientious man. He was always on the qui vive, always on the lookout. He constantly imagined IRA or British or German attacks and would attempt to debate the likely outcome of any such attack. I never got a minute’s sleep, and had a day’s work to do the next day. The mountain patrol was harrowing. Gerry saw danger every step of the way. Every bush housed a likely enemy, and many a poor devil strolling home from John Clarke’s pub was petrified when Gerry shouted, “Halt! Who goes there?” The language was unedifying and frequently cast doubt on our parentage. I later found out that everybody else had been leery of Gerry’s enthusiasm, and that was why I was stuck with him.

  ‘We were lectured on the making of explosives and booby traps by a Professor Bailey Butler; the most lethal and horrible booby traps for any invader who came along, including an ingenious one – considering there were
n’t any flush toilets in the country – where, if you pressed the handle, the whole bloody lot blew up. He even demonstrated it, and it was very spectacular. He also instructed us on the manufacture of Molotov cocktails. These were, basically, a mix of petrol and creosote in a bottle, and a rag and bung put into it. You struck the match, set the rag on fire, and threw the bottle. We were eventually issued with new, green Army-type uniforms and short leggings, and a Glengarry cap or beret. And, after several alerts, weekend training camps and other activities, I eventually reached the exalted rank of Company Adjutant.

  ‘I was interested in the progress of the War and, usually, when I started doing something, I took more of an interest. I discovered, in a bookshop down the quays, On War by Count von Clausewitz, translated into English. I bought it and read all about it – how to arrange manoeuvres. And I also found an old British Army training manual, and I read that too. We had no wireless at home in the early days. And the funny thing was that, even when we got one, we weren’t really conscious of it in the house. It was either barely audible because my mother couldn’t stand the noise, or else there was something going on that precluded listening to it. So, the news came mostly from the Irish Press. My father wouldn’t buy any other paper. They were loyalist or unsuitable for an Irish household. But the Irish Press carried the stories, and the slant on them, that he liked. It was our Bible. The outlook was, the British were getting a flaking from the Germans, and we thought that was great; they deserved to be taken down a peg. Probably, at the back of our minds, we were hoping the Germans wouldn’t be too successful. Because, while we really knew nothing about what was happening, we had our doubts about the Germans. We didn’t really hate the British, just the establishment. But the average English person, we had no bad feelings about. And we’d heard the story about Mickey O’Leary, the great veteran and holder of the Victoria Cross; he was brought around on a recruiting drive, and he said, “You’ve got to join the British Army, or the Germans will come here and they’ll be worse than the British ever were.”