Rory & Ita
‡ Rory: ‘He was later the boss of the Sugar Company, but at that time he was OC of the Southern Command of the Irish Army.’
* Rory: ‘A bag of chips and a piece of fish, usually ray.’
† Rory: ‘I never saw a clothing ration coupon until the week I was married and my mother handed over my ration books.’
* Electricity Supply Board.
* Rory: ‘A few years ago, I tried to smoke some plug tobacco – a fit of nostalgia – and it nearly blew my lungs asunder.’
* A theatrical costumier.
* A future Taoiseach, and gourmet.
Chapter Nine – Ita
‘We didn’t look on the War as hardship. I suppose we were insulated against it. I’m sure there were awful shortages, but I have no memory of them; so I can’t have been too deprived. The kitchen was always heated, because there was a back boiler. There was no coal, but we always had turf. It was usually wet but it seemed to work alright. And the next-door neighbours, the Sullivans – Mr Sullivan was a Guard; he was the sergeant up in Terenure – he used to cut turf* and every load that came back, there was turf put over the back wall for us. People helped each other.
‘And, of course, there was the black market. I don’t remember ever being short of tea or sugar or butter, or any of those other things that people seemed to be short of. I didn’t know how the black market worked, but I do know that bags of sugar and tea managed to come into the house. My stepmother wasn’t a great organiser, and she seldom went out the door; I did a fair bit of the shopping, as did Máire. So I think it was the neighbours who managed to get the sugar and tea, and she just paid for them.
‘And I remember this awful thing that people still talk about, this brown bread; I remember when it came in – maybe I’m a bit peculiar, but I thought it was alright. Denis Hingerty was working up in Belfast, and he’d come home every now and again, and bring white bread. And Mrs Hingerty always gave us some of this white bread, and it was absolutely beautiful – it was better than cake. But the famous brown bread* – people complained that they’d had problems with diarrhoea, but I can’t remember anything bad about it.
‘I think the fact that he was drinking black-market tea went right over my father’s head. He handed out money every week for groceries, and they materialised in the kitchen; a little pixie could have arrived and brought them, for all he knew about it.† He knew nothing about prices. The tea was put in front of him and he, literally, didn’t know where it had come from. And he loved Irel coffee.‡ He had it every day, after his dinner.§ But he wouldn’t have known where that came from either. Things were put on the table, and as long as they were paid for, he was happy. I remember coming home with a new coat, and saying, “Do you like it, Daddy?” and his answer: “Does it fit you?” My answer was, “Yes.” “Then it’ll do,” says he. And toeless shoes – I arrived home with toeless shoes; I thought I was the bee’s knees. And he looked, and said: “How very nice. If I went around with the toe out of my boots, they’d be talking about me.”
‘I didn’t really feel anything about the War at all,* except this awful fear of the glimmer man. You weren’t supposed to cook by gas, between the hours of this, that and the other – some time in the evening. But I remember the gas being lit to heat the kettle, and it was all very surreptitiously done; we were put to the front door, on sentry duty, to make sure the glimmer man wasn’t coming. He was from the Gas Company, and if you were caught with your gas on, it was fearful – terrible retribution, altogether. And, of course, if the gas had been used, you had to be very quick in cooling the ring. Because the glimmer man would come in and put his hand on the ring and, if it was the least bit warm, you were in trouble. Everybody was afraid of this glimmer man but, actually, it turned out – we found out years later – there were only two or three glimmer men for the whole of Dublin.
‘I wasn’t particularly interested in what was happening. But the News was on every night, on the radio. Radio Eireann. My father would have thought that the BBC was biased. It was on a par with rugby and other foreign games, so you didn’t listen to it. Radio Eireann, though, was like the GAA. We did listen to some English programmes, a few comedy programmes. There was ITMA – It’s That Man Again – he loved that. “Can I do you now, sir?” this charwoman used to say; I think she was called Mrs Mop. But, for news, it was Radio Eireann. We talked about the “War,” not the “Emergency”. And I never heard my father say the Emergency; it was always the War. But he was the kind of man, no matter how strong his opinions, he’d never voice them. He was a very secretive kind of man. If he heard you saying something that he didn’t approve of, he’d check you, but he never would have said something like, I side with the Germans or the British. That would be kept to himself, maybe discussed with friends his own age, but he never discussed such things with us.’ He worked at the Department of External Affairs but, ‘there again, he kept his mouth shut. His brother-in-law, Robert Brennan – my Uncle Bob – was the Ambassador to Washington during the War. And he came home, certainly once, maybe twice. I can remember one occasion, he came with little wooden ornaments, brightly painted, “A Present from Washington” written on them. We thought they were the last word; they were lovely. One was in the shape of a little clog, and one was a clock; I got the clock. I was in Kilmuckridge, and Uncle Bob came down to visit Bessie and Mike. He came down in an army lorry, and, I remember, we went up to the village in the lorry, to Boggin’s, the grocery and pub. Walter Boggin, the owner, was a second cousin of my father’s. There was great excitement, having a well-known visitor down there, and a Wexford man to boot – that made it better still. I don’t know what they spoke about; it really went over my head. I’m sure they were momentous things he was talking about, but I was more interested in sitting in the back of the lorry, and being treated to lemonade and biscuits. He was an extremely polite man; he would never ignore you just because you were a child. He spoke to me, even in the midst of all these adults. Another time he came home, he had his daughter Emer with him. She was a lovely person, very gracious, tall and slim. I still remember her magnificent coat. It was beautiful, tweed, completely lined in fur, real fur. It was absolutely beautiful, and she was so slim – it was gorgeous.
‘I remember being down in Wexford, in Kilmuckridge, and my Uncle Mike had the only radio in the district – he was an extremely forward-looking man – and lots of the neighbours used to come at night to hear the news about the War – which always amused me, because I didn’t think it had an awful lot of effect on people down in Kilmuckridge. But every night, the kitchen was packed, and all listened intently. There was this old man called Andy Byrne, and he had been a seaman, but he had a farm up the road. He used to come over every night, and I only heard afterwards that he actually had money invested in Australia and his great worry was that the Japs were going to invade Australia and his money would be gone. Andy smoked a pipe with no shank. Now and again, he’d take the pipe out of his mouth and put it in his dog’s mouth. The dog always held the pipe firmly for a minute or two. Andy, and all around, would laugh heartily, and then Andy would retrieve the pipe and put it straight back into his own mouth.* I also remember, when I was in Kilmuckridge and my father was with me, he went down to the creamery in the village with Uncle Mike. He was standing around, chatting to the men and listening to them, and this one particular man said, “It’s going on too long. Why don’t they just sit around the table and lay down their specifications?” And my father came back chuckling; it was the greatest cure for a war. I remember, we were at Mass one day and everything was dead silent. And a man was walking up the centre of the church, walking slowly; he was fairly elderly, and his shoes were creaking very badly. I remember looking at my father, and he looked down and said, very quietly: “They’ll stop creaking when they’re paid for.”
‘There was one time, my Uncle Bob Brennan was home from Washington – I can’t remember whether it was during or after the War – and he took Daddy to Jammett’s restaurant for lunch. It
was the restaurant in Dublin at that time. We were all agog, because none of us had ever darkened the door of Jammett’s restaurant, and we never expected to. So, of course, we were all dying to know what the food was like, when he got home. But we were met with a hum and a ha. “Did you get soup?” “Oh yes; I had soup.” “And what did you have after that?” He couldn’t remember. “It was nice,” was all he said. The only thing he remembered, and he spoke about it for years, was when the waiter handed him the bill, Bob glanced at it and paid in dollars. The waiter never batted an eyelid.
‘My cousin, Maeve Brennan, was living in Washington, and she bought a yearly subscription to the Saturday Evening Post for my Aunt Bessie. And Bessie used to keep them all for me. I can remember sitting on the steps, at the barn, and going through the Saturday Evening Post; these marvellous, healthy-looking American kids with white teeth, teeth you’d die for. And slip-ons and white socks, and loving parents and beautiful motor cars, with two or three kids sitting in the back, with wide grins on their faces. The best-cared-for kids in the world, and I thought America must be an absolutely marvellous place. And all the stories about the wonderful things that happened in America. And the covers were by Norman Rockwell; they were absolutely wonderful. Between the Saturday Evening Post and the people we saw in the films, I thought America was the place to be.*
‘I can remember the bombing of the North Strand;† the school was very close to the North Strand. I was at home that night, but I heard it, even though it was a good distance from us. Some of the boarders in school had to be sent home; they were shattered with nerves and they were home for a few weeks. It was very bad. The bomb on the South Circular Road was much nearer. I could hear it very clearly. The South Circular Road, and nearby Clanbrazil Street, were very much Jewish areas at that time. They’d started off there, when they came to Ireland, and, as they started to do a bit better for themselves, a lot of the Jewish people moved out to a place called Rathdown Park, in Terenure, with very nice houses. When the bombs fell on the South Circular Road, many of the people were convinced that the Germans knew that the Jews lived there, so anyone with relatives in Rathdown Park moved there. And, lo and behold, didn’t a bomb drop on Rathdown Park and, God help them, they were convinced they were being followed. That bomb would have been very close to us, but I can’t remember ever thinking or worrying that we were going to be invaded. And, of course, we’d see the newsreels in the cinema, all made from the British perspective; they were our nearest neighbours and they were winning the War – so what problems could we have? From the newsreels, the British were winning hands-down, and when the Americans joined in, sure, between them, Hitler was going to end up in Kingdom Come. We believed that – I did, anyway. I believed that we were quite safe. I slept at night.
‘We had blackout curtains; actually, they were blinds. They were roller blinds, black on one side, canvas on the other, not as heavy as tarpaulin, but like it. And there were ration books, for tea, sugar, butter and clothing. They were little booklets, for all the world like ticket books. No matter where you went, you had to have your ration books.* I remember, it was a very big bonus for the men who worked on my uncle’s farm: Aunt Bessie never took their ration books. They were what was called “dieted;” they came to work before breakfast and left after supper – they were fed, as part of their payment. On other farms, they had to hand over their ration books, but my Uncle Mike knew the right people, and there was a big chest of tea upstairs, on the landing. I remember it, a big box, lined with silver paper, a strong foil, and it lasted the whole of the War. And Bessie was a very generous person; if she heard of someone being short of tea, they’d get tea out of the chest. Mike had served his time in the grocery trade,* in a shop in Wexford. So, while he’d left the shop years previously, he’d continued contact with them. He still knew people who owned shops, all very straight, good men, and they all managed to get black-market tea. And he also had a big sack of sugar, up on the landing. It was easily reached; it was just up there for storage – it wasn’t hidden. Certain things were short, and you’d never see bananas or oranges, or anything like that. We’d always had fruit when we were small children, in what we used to call the good old days.’†
‘I was aware that I was growing up, but things didn’t change that much for me. There was no such thing as teenagers, so it was up to yourself how you got on between the ages of thirteen and twenty. We grew up a lot slower; we were, I suppose, more innocent. We were quite well on in our teens and still playing with dolls. You had a coat and you might be fortunate enough to get another before the first one fell off, so then you had a good coat and an everyday coat – but there was no such thing as the latest trend. But I do remember, when I was young and clothes were bought for me, and later, when I was working and bought my own clothes, if any of my friends bought, say, a red coat, there was no way in the world I’d be seen in a red coat. Or, if they bought a green coat, there was no way I’d be seen in a green coat. So, in a way, while young people might be much more independent today, to me they’re more like sheep – I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense, but they do copy each other, whereas we tried to be more distinctive. We had our own styles, and while the hairstyles might have been more or less the same – such as a wretched-looking thing called ‘the shingle’* – we tried to make it our own style.
‘There was one great hairstyle, when I was younger – the imitation of Shirley Temple, a mass of little ringlets all over the head. My friend Noeleen actually looked like Shirley Temple and had beautiful curly hair; her mother used to do it. People remarked on how like Shirley Temple she was. But then they had a Shirley Temple look-alike competition in the Herald; there were rows of photographs of girls every night – they all had the hair in curls but very few of them looked like Shirley Temple. Noeleen didn’t enter; her mother had more sense. One girl arrived into school with the Shirley Temple perm – she’d had very straight hair. Oh, consternation – the nuns didn’t like it one bit. Terrible show of pride; so the mother was sent for, and she arrived in the next day with the hair all frizzy, because it had been permed, but no longer quite like Shirley Temple’s.
‘I have a photograph of myself in my school uniform, and my hair was fair and I had a clip holding it back on one side. I always wanted to grow it long but it was never thick enough. It would grow so far, and you could see daylight through it, so it was better a bit short. Then there was a style where you let it grow a bit and then turned it in. That was the style for my last few years in school; I can’t remember what we called it. I put in rollers at night in the hope that I could turn my hair in, in a thick roll around my head. Again, that style was good for people with thick hair; it used to bounce – it was gorgeous. Mine wasn’t quite there; it held fairly well, but nothing like the girls with the thick hair. I always had a bit of a curl in it. It had the same texture as my father’s.
‘Mother Enda taught us Irish in my last years at school. She was known as the Bull. When things didn’t go her way, she’d just sit at the top of the class and you knew when she was going to roar, because the red would start from the bottom of her neck and spread slowly up to her face and when it hit her temple, she’d roar. So the name suited her. But she was harmless; she was actually quite nice and pleasant. The rumour was that she had been the girlfriend of Patrick Pearse, and that was why she’d taken the religious name of Mother Enda.* But, checking the dates, there was no way she was Patrick Pearse’s girlfriend, or, if she was, there must have been something wrong with his eyesight, because she was no beauty. There was a Mother Madeleine; she taught us English. She was lovely – she was tall and slim and very gentle. We had a Miss Fitzpatrick, for French. She was a very pretty woman, blonde, but she was very stern. She lived in Terenure, but I didn’t take to her. And there was a Miss Tierney, who used to teach us, I suppose you’d call it gym – exercises with skipping ropes and all that kind of thing. She was good, she was fine, she was mannish in her way, which, I suppose, was called for. There wasn’t much to
it. I was a good skipper, and I had a top-grade skipping rope, with ball bearings in it. We had teams of skippers, and we had a Parents’ Day, once a year. And dumbbells; it was very strenuous – you put your arms to the front and back, and to the side. That was about the whole of it. You just kept it up for about five minutes, in unison, of course; there was no grace to it. Then, of course, we marched to music and did a few formations – Irish marches. It was nothing very professional but we thought it was great. We wore a gym dress and a white blouse. When we were small, ankle socks; when we were older, long woollen stockings. There was no display of knickers or bare bottoms; we were well-covered-up. Those black woollen stockings were the bane of my existence. I hated them. They were warm, but you had to wear them until school ended in June, and the itch of them in the summer was dreadful. And, every now and again, I’d get a hole in them. They had to be darned, and I had to do the darning myself, so I kept putting it off. If the hole was small, it didn’t show if you put ink on your leg, under the hole; you just made sure the ink was fairly well-spread. That was great, until you had a bath and had to wash the ink off, or there were so many holes that you had to darn them. Then lisle stockings came in. They were pure cotton, more refined than the woollen stockings, and they kept their shape. And, once they were black, you were allowed to wear lisle stockings; they were much finer, much more comfortable, cool and smooth on the leg, and they didn’t tear as quickly. But they were more expensive, so you had to wait your turn to get them.
‘I left school in June 1943, after I did my Leaving Cert. I was eighteen. I’ve a vague memory of the last day. We all brought in cakes, or sweets, or lemonade. We had our party, and the nuns came in and we treated them to cakes. I remember saying goodbye to my own close friends, promising we’d see each other again.* But most of them lived on the northside and I lived on the southside, so there was that big distance between us. Some went to college, some went into nursing, a lot of them became nuns, some served their time in the drapery business.* Sometimes I’d read about somebody in the paper: she’d qualified for this or that, or a wedding announcement, and the writer Val Mulkerns† was in my class, and I’d read about her now and again. But that was it.