Rory & Ita

  ‘The wedding meal was a great success. Daddy had a few old friends there: Pádraig O’Keefe,* and his wife, Peg; and James Carty,† another Wexford man, who was also Máire’s godfather. My going-away suit was made of fine grey wool, a plain tailored jacket and an accordion-pleated skirt. I bought it in Macey’s, in George’s Street.‡ My blouse was mauve silk, and my small, plain felt hat was also mauve. With black court shoes, black leather handbag and black kid gloves, I decided I was fit to go anywhere. And we both had new cases. Mine was grey. Suitcases were all made of cardboard then, except you decided to have a leather one, which would have been hugely expensive – and ridiculous, because we never foresaw the day when we’d be travelling.’ It was the 17th of September, 1951. ‘It also happened to be the day that the Irish Times burnt down – two historical events in the one day. And the problem was getting the taxi from the hotel to the railway station; we thought we were going to miss the train. The traffic was held up along O’Connell Street because of the fire. The taxi man was taking it very easy, until Rory had a go at him and explained to him, in a not too polite fashion, that there were other routes available. It must have been Amiens Street Station we were going to. We were quite sure we were going to miss the train.’

  * City Council.

  * County Tipperary.

  † Bloom’s Hotel, on Anglesea Street, is built on the site of Jury’s.

  * Rory: ‘I think it was twenty-seven shillings and sixpence, but I’m not sure.’

  † Ita: ‘It only closed down about a year ago.’

  * Ita: ‘The bride was on time in those days, by the way.’

  * He was the General Secretary of the GAA at that time. The GAA stadium in Cork is named after him.

  † The author of Carty’s History of Ireland.

  ‡ Ita: ‘Now long gone, but a wonderful shop for suits and coats at that time.’

  Chapter Sixteen – Rory

  ‘The taxi turned down, into Westmoreland Street,* and there were fire brigades all over the place. The Irish Times had gone on fire. And the taxi man just rested his hands and arms on the steering wheel and said, “We won’t be getting through here for a while.” So I said, “I don’t care if all of Dublin goes on fire, we’ve got to catch the train for Cork.” Then I said to him, “Turn around,† and go down Anglesea Street and on to the quays and you’ll get clear of this jam.” I was peremptory, and annoyed, and I felt like taking his life. He knew it: he looked at me in amazement, and said, “OK.” And off we went and made the train just on time. I firmly believe he was going to stay where we were and wait for the street to be cleared. I don’t know if I gave him a tip; probably not.’‡

  ‘The house was red-bricked, with a kind of paler colour, a yellow ochre pointing, between the bricks. That appealed to us; it had a warm, friendly look. And the inside was fabulous, because it was a bungalow; there was space – loads of space, as you’d expect in an empty bungalow, and we were both used to relatively small houses. Mine was particularly crowded. We were both in agreement about what we wanted, we both liked the look of it, and we decided that it was the one we’d go for. It was more expensive than we’d thought; the general price of a three-bedroom house was about £1,600 and ours was going to cost about £2,000. But it didn’t make any difference; we had our minds made up.

  ‘We paid the deposit, and I got a mortgage from Dublin Corporation. The Small Dwellings Act provided mortgages to people who had incomes between a minimum and maximum amount. It was pitched for a certain class of buyer; if you earned over the maximum, you weren’t eligible – you didn’t need it; if you earned below the minimum, it was considered that you wouldn’t be able to pay. There was always much manoeuvring to get employers to give you a favourable account of what you were earning, to get through. I had no problem in that regard, since my wages met the required criteria. The full price for the house was £2,154, to be exact, minus the grant which came from the Government because it was a new house, and the deposit, £200. I was granted a thirty-five-year mortgage, £ 1,700, at 4 per cent. I was rather aggrieved because, if I’d applied for it a month earlier, I’d have got it at 3.75 per cent.* We were saving money then, and the house was being built. We had to buy furniture – I didn’t even know that we had to buy our own light bulbs – and we got various presents; we had three statues of Our Lady of Lourdes and a couple of the Child of Prague. We had two magnificent kettles. But it was mainly a matter of saving. We had barely enough to get married, and make arrangements, taxis to the church and on to the hotel for the guests, particularly aunts and family.

  ‘At home, there was much cutting-up of yards of material, sewing, making, deciding what hats to wear and, to tell you the truth, I skedaddled. I just had my meals and left, because I couldn’t understand what half of the fuss was about. I was getting married, and that was that. But there was a considerable amount of activity. My sisters were expert dressmakers – it came naturally – and they took these things very seriously. I bought a grey suit in Clery’s, and a white shirt, a covert cloth overcoat, a corduroy jacket and a grey flannel trousers, and a green velour broad-rimmed hat. I must have been the best-dressed pauper in Ireland. My brother Jackie was the best man; his suit was a lighter colour.

  ‘Ita and I went to see the parish priest of Terenure, to make the wedding arrangements, such as the date and the time of the ceremony. His reverence suggested that the matter of the expenses be settled as soon as possible in order to avoid unnecessary distraction on the day itself. He was naturally anxious to get his fee, which, I suspect, often went unpaid. He then mentioned the matter of the reading of the banns. At that time, people of a certain social status paid a fee of about £5, in order not to have the banns of matrimony read, as prescribed by the laws of the Church.* The Christian outlook in Ireland at the time was that the reading of the banns was the hallmark of the dregs of society. However, Ita and myself didn’t subscribe to that view, and we told his reverence that we’d be delighted to have the banns read. When I went home and casually mentioned the matter, my mother went ballistic. She described, in terms that would now be called politically incorrect, the type of people who had the banns read. Almost simultaneously, Ita was getting the same message from her stepmother. We were both definitely in the doghouse and decided, for the sake of family harmony, to return to his reverence and reverse our decision. He smiled quietly and held out his hand for the five-pound note.†

  ‘I had six aunts at the wedding, no uncles. My family was a country family, and the men weren’t involved in things like that, unless it was their own children. But the women were. So, that was six aunts and all my sisters and brothers, and the rest. There was a considerable amount. We had cars for them.

  ‘I slept alright the night before, but I’d caught a cold, making the final arrangements, booking taxis and informing my aunts about the times.* The cold didn’t manifest itself until later in the day – I was sneezing a bit, but it wasn’t bad. The wedding ceremony itself, in my memory, tends to go by like a dream – nothing substantially memorable. But there was quite a crowd outside, Ita’s neighbours and some of my innumerable relations. A photographer turned up – we hadn’t thought to engage one – and various groups were photographed, in one of which an elderly lady from Balrothery, Mag Carthy, insinuated herself conspicuously in the front of the grouping. Mag had a particular grᆠfor me, possibly because I was polite and civil to her when we met around Tallaght. She wasn’t used to such behaviour and so she travelled down for my wedding, uninvited. My friend Dick McGuirk and Gwen were there as well, to wish us luck; they’d been married a fortnight earlier.‡ And the wedding breakfast was quite pleasant; it was very, very good – a decent meal; everybody was quite happy about it – but, of course, it was very early. There was a short speech from Jackie, and I made a speech, thanking the bridesmaid and all who were at the wedding. That ended the speechifying.§ I don’t recall any telegrams; they weren’t a feature of weddings at the time, but my father spotted the piano and started a bit of a
sing-song. My father, incidentally, could knock a tune out of a zinc bucket. We left them to it. We had a train to catch.’

  * Rory: ‘We had to catch a train from Amiens Street (now Connolly) to Cork; the train ran from Belfast to Cork, and it stopped at Amiens Street. I think it went through a tunnel under the Phoenix Park in those days, under the Wellington Monument.’

  † Rory: ‘Westmoreland Street wasn’t a one-way street; there was no such thing.’

  ‡ Ita: ‘The train started to “puff puff” when we threw ourselves and our cases on to it.’

  * Rory: ‘Years after, people were looking at me as if I was living off their tax. Because mortgages went way up, after we got married, but our rate was fixed. I paid back almost twice the amount, over the whole thirty-five years. One of my amusements was working out how much it would all work out at. Towards the end of the thirty-five years I could have cleared it off, without any great difficulty. But the earlier years had been heavy, interest-laden amounts, so I decided I wouldn’t gratify them, and I paid it off at £7.11s a week. The last payment was £7.60, about 10 in today’s terms. We had lunch in the Glenview Hotel, in Wicklow, to celebrate.’

  * Ita: ‘He told us that the money was to cover clerical expenses, writing to parishes, to confirm that neither of us had been married already.’

  † Rory: ‘We got our revenge when our first child was born, and certain people raised the subject of churching for Ita. It was looked upon as a kind of purification ceremony. It was really meant to be a form of thanksgiving for the baby, but the original idea had been given a warped meaning by the usual zealots who infest every religion. So, we disagreed and refused to play ball.’

  * Ita: ‘There were no phones.’

  † Liking.

  ‡ Rory: ‘Dick had met Gwen when we’d walked, along with Des Sullivan and Kevin Borbridge, from Cork City to Bantry in 1947. Dick was smitten and, luckily, he worked for CIE [train and bus company], and his travelling to Kinsale cost him very little. Around the same time, Des and Betty Casey married, and went off to Canada. Kevin went to South Africa, and then to California, but never found a suitable mate.’

  § Ita: ‘My father smiled amiably but made no speech. It wasn’t expected of him. He’d paid for everything, so that was his job done for the day.’

  Chapter Seventeen – Ita

  ‘We got the train back from Cork to Amiens Street, and from Amiens Street to Howth Junction.* We’d no money left, and taxis were a great luxury, so we lugged our cases up the road. He didn’t carry me over the threshold. He was romantic enough in his own way, but he had enough to do with lugging the cases without humping me up on his back as well.

  ‘When we arrived at the house, Rory’s sister Breda was here. She had a fire lit, and she had the cupboards full of food donated by Rory’s mother; everything you could think of, tea, sugar, bread, meat, sausages, rashers – she kept us fed for a week. We’d hardly any money and, of course, Rory had to work a week before he’d get any money.†

  ‘The house was pretty sparse, but I suppose we had as much as most people. We had the bedroom suite which Rory had bought, and the floor in the bedroom was stained. I’d made a rug, and that ran beside the bed, and I’d made net curtains for the front windows; they were flimsy but they were OK. I’d made heavier curtains, also for the front windows. We had no problem with street lights, because we had no street. We had no curtains on the back windows; we were surrounded by fields. In the sitting-room, we had the chesterfield suite which Rory’s three oldest sisters had bought us between them, and his father and mother had given us money and we’d bought a carpet square for the sitting-room and lino for the dining-room. We called it the dining-room but it was actually the living-room, and used more than any other room. And we had the dining-room suite, which I’d bought. It was a nice light oak; I was very pleased with it. We got it in Roche’s Stores; it was actually their Spring Show display piece that year. The other two bedrooms were empty, not a thing in them. And the hall had bare boards. That was it really, and the little ornaments we got for wedding presents.* The kitchen was bare, except that the cupboards were fitted. We’d no kitchen table, not for a few months. And I’d no ironing board; I spread a blanket on the floor and ironed on the floor. All those things were kind of extras; we got them as we went along. We had a cooker – we had to have a cooker; we got that on the never-never, from the ESB. We didn’t have a fridge, and not for years afterwards.

  ‘It was very exciting. The house had been empty; no one had lived in it. We used to come out and look at it, before we got married, but to arrive and to fix up your things in your own house and to know it was yours – and the weather was fine for quite a while, and everything seemed to be falling into place. It was wildly exciting.*

  ‘The house actually went up in a field, built in a row of bungalows, and there was no road. There was a driveway and a front wall, but no road. I remember, Rory’s sisters called, and they walked along the tops of the walls, to avoid walking in all the mud. It never cost them a thought – they laughed at it; they were delighted that we were fixed up. In fact, I was well pregnant before they started the road. It was very muddy at one stage, and there was a foreman who went up and down on a motorbike, and he instructed the men to put boards, planks, across the mud, so I wouldn’t slip.† It never bothered me.‡ The whole thing was so exciting. Everything was new, and I got to know the neighbours.

  ‘We all met down in the grocer’s, Peter Butler’s shop.§ That was the meeting place. Peter served at the counter. He was a very friendly, big Mayo man, and everybody liked going into the shop. I got to know a lot of people that way. I remember, the first woman who spoke to me was Aileen Turley. She had her eldest son with her, in his pram. She had been an Aer Lingus hostess. At that time there were a lot of ex-Aer Lingus hostesses living here; they were all very pretty women. And I met a Mrs Thompson that first day – I’ve forgotten her first name. She was a beautiful woman. Again, she’d been an air hostess; her husband was a pilot. Then Drugan’s, the chemist, opened. I was their first customer. And, again, it became a meeting place.*

  ‘And I got to know Maura Coghlan, two doors down, very quickly. And there was Sheila Mulvaney, and Leo. And then there were the Mays, Ena and Barney. We were walking past one day and we saw a man standing in their doorway, and Rory recognised him as a man he’d known in the College of Art, Harry Burton. He was a very nice, quiet type of a man and he introduced us to the Mays. They were lovable characters. Barney was by way of being a Walter Mitty; he read an awful lot of detective stories, and he lived in a little world of his own.† He was also an alcoholic. I remember coming home one day – I think it was a Sunday morning – walking past the Mays’. They had a rockery in the middle of the front garden, and Barney’s car was up on top of it – like a decoration, a cherry on a cake.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Winks, Dave and Eva, were our next-door neighbours. They were from Scotland. Dave was quite a prim and proper man, a gentlemanly man. Eva told us she was from the Gorbals, in Glasgow, and she was Jewish. She was a terrible gambler – she told me herself she was, and that her father had been a professional gambler. I wasn’t quite able for her. She’d borrow money from me, money I couldn’t afford, and I was nearly afraid to ask for it back. She was tougher than I was – put it that way. I didn’t dislike her at all, but I was a bit wary of her. Her mother-in-law used to come from time to time, from Scotland; she used to bake cakes to beat the band and they’d often end up on our table.

  ‘I settled in very quickly. At first, I was feeling around and getting to know people, but I can’t say I ever felt lonely. I went off walking and moseying around the place. I didn’t miss work. I kept myself busy. I was wrapped up in my own affairs and my own life, and my own house. When we told people where we were going to live, they’d say, “Why are you going so far away?” And my answer was always, “Away from what?” I loved Terenure, as a place, but I was happy enough to leave the atmosphere, and everything else at home, and to get away on my o
wn.* On Wednesday, I’d go over to Terenure and have my dinner with my father and stepmother. I cycled over, at first, and cycled back, to cook Rory’s dinner when he came home.

  ‘I wasn’t very long before realising I was pregnant. I just began to feel sick; I didn’t know what it was all about, and it was actually Mrs Winks who told me. I said, one day, in all my innocence, “I don’t feel well. I felt awful sick this morning.” And she said, in her best Scottish accent, “Ach, you must be pregnant.” So, she was right.

  ‘It had its ups and downs – same as they all had. It stopped me doing a lot of what I’d normally have done, but – I was a funny kind of person – I accepted whatever hit me and just got on with it. Every morning, for about three months, I was sick – dreadful vomiting – and an hour later I felt fine for the day. I remember, we had our Christmas dinner and, within twenty minutes, I got rid of the lot. I just thought, what a waste. But I was excited, especially when I began to show and started to feel well. I made all the baby clothes. Money was really scarce, so you had to make as many clothes as you could. At that time, babies wore long flannelette night dresses, little belts around them, and a shawl. You dressed the baby in nightdresses for two or three months after it was born; you’d tuck the flannelette, it went down over the feet and toes. I made five or six nightdresses.